by Louise Penny
“I’ll answer for him and me both,” Roy said.
“Shit, you listening to this bush-league tin badge?” Little Eddie asked him. “He’s going to sell us out.”
“That’s as may be,” Roy said. “Just remember,” he said to Hector. “You cross me, you put the law wise and they try to take me down, you’ll have your guts in your lap before I hit the ground.”
“I knew I could count on you,” Hector said.
They set the helicopters down on a patch of open dirt behind the creek, near the field hospital unit. Child climbed out.
“You have enough fuel?” he asked the pilot.
“Two hours reserve.”
“Better get some coffee,” Child told the SWAT guys. “Mount up again in five.”
He went into the medical tent.
“Hi,” Katie said.
“Dr. Faraday.”
“You look ridden hard and put away wet.”
“No joy,” he told her, without ceremony. “We saw his truck but we didn’t find Hector.”
“Your bedside manner needs a little work,” she said.
He smiled. “Least said, soonest mended.”
“What about your bad guys?”
“Apples and oranges,” Child said.
“You sure?”
“Somebody spent the night at a dude ranch on the Boulder, maybe ten miles west of here. Might have been Hector, might be our fugitives. Either way, they’d head in this direction. It’s their only safe way out of the fire.”
“How much time do they have?”
“Depends. If the wind shifts—” He stopped.
“What?”
“He’s alive, Katie. I’d bet money on it. Hector could walk away from a plane wreck and give you frequent-flier miles. Thing is, he’s not the only guy with a ticket.”
“You think they might be with him, and he’s a hostage.”
“It’s one possibility,” Child told her. “I’m just covering my ass.”
“That makes two of us,” she said.
Crossing the fire line turned out to be easy. Joey Raven even detailed one of his men to take them back to the aid station, the three guys stumbling out of the burning woods, smudged with soot and bruised by what was a very close call. They were lucky to be alive, the crew chief figured.
As they made their way down the hillside toward the creek, the choppers were lifting off again from the beaten earth behind the field hospital.
Roy glanced at Hector.
Hector shrugged. Who knew?
When they got to the banks of the creek, Joey’s guy left them there and trudged back upslope to the smouldering firebreak on the ridge.
The three of them waded across the shallow streambed.
“Home free,” Roy said, grinning.
Don’t count your chickens, Hector thought.
“Not firefighters,” the SWAT commander said, checking them out through his field glasses, the recon second nature. “Guy in the middle’s a uniformed LEO.”
Child raised his own binoculars, turning back to look just as the helicopter overflew the top of the ridge. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Put this bird down and do it now,” he said to the pilot.
“Aid station’s the nearest LZ,” the pilot said.
“No,” Child said. “It’s got to be up here. They’re a hundred yards from the field hospital. They see us coming back, we’ll have civilian collateral damage, big-time.”
“I can’t land in the trees.”
Child glanced at the SWAT guy. “How close to the ground do we have to be?” he asked him.
“Thirty feet or less.”
“Can you hover that low?” Child asked the pilot.
“We’ve got a lot of updraft. The rising air’s hot. Tricky trim problem. You’re looking at an unstable jump platform.”
“Time to cowboy,” the SWAT commander said.
“I’m good with it,” Child said.
The state cop took them down to treetop level. The SWAT team opened the cargo bay doors, hooked up, and began the rappel to the ground. Frank Child had never done this before in his life. The chopper was bucking like a rodeo horse, veering and yawing, sliding in the currents of hot air. Child was nauseous, and frozen with vertigo.
“I don’t care if you puke,” the SWAT commander said. “Just go out the damn door or get out of my way.”
Child’s feet were stuck to the lurching cargo deck.
The guy behind him put both hands in the small of Child’s back and put all his weight into it. Child’s feet slithered on the deck plates, and he found himself treading empty air.
“I’m thinking this is where we part company, Deputy,” Roy said to Hector. “Time to trade up to a newer model year, no offense. Something modest, low-profile.”
Parked in back of the field hospital were a couple of vehicles, two pickups and a silver Isuzu Trooper, a little the worse for wear, rust spots covered with primer. Hector knew the Trooper belonged to Katie Faraday.
“So far we’ve been lucky,” he said. “You think your luck’s going to hold?”
“Maybe that’s up to you.”
“Okay,” Hector said. “We take one of the trucks. I’ll go in, I’ll get the keys. No secret handshake, no Captain Midnight decoder ring, straight and simple. Police business.”
“You talk good game,” Roy said.
“Let’s do it easy. No reason to do it hard.”
“They’ve got roadblocks as far east as Billings.”
“I can evade the checkpoints, or alibi my way past them. I’m wearing the star, right? Once you get past Billings, it’s a straight shot into the Dakotas. You’d have a head start.”
“And you think I’d let you go?”
“No,” Hector said. “But it’s a fair trade. Keep it clean. Don’t complicate things. Nobody’s dead yet.”
“Well, you’re wrong about that,” Roy said. “Sorry to say.”
“Something happened.”
“Yeah. Call it an unhappy accident. Little Eddie got kind of a hair across his ass.”
“I only shot the first one,” Eddie said. “The guy went for his gun. You did the others.”
“You left me no play, kid,” Roy said. “Fortunes of war.”
“Capital murder,” Hector said.
“Something you might keep in mind,” Roy said.
“I’ll remember,” Hector told him.
“Let’s go talk to these people inside the tent,” Roy said.
The choice Hector had been trying to steer him away from.
“You know what your problem is?” Roy asked. “You wear your heart on your sleeve. It shows on your face.”
“All right,” Hector said. “Let’s go talk to them.”
“Short and sweet,” Roy said.
They’d bellied up to the ridge, where they were overlooking the creek. The estimated range was about five hundred yards, the declination some ten degrees. You had to compensate for the shot. Uphill you aimed high, downhill you aimed low, which was counterintuitive. The team carried M4s, in 5.56, the barrels chopped down for work in close quarters, with muzzle suppressors and high-cap mags, two of them duct-taped end to end, but the designated shooter was posting a Winchester model 70 with a Leupold infrared scope, a .308 bolt gun, still the Marine sniper rifle of choice, even in this day and age. The guy behind the sights had been a force recon Marine for twelve years before the FBI recruited him. Now his name and rank were classified.
“I don’t like the way this is shaping up,” Child said.
“We’ve got good position,” the SWAT commander said. “We’re on top of it. It’s not Waco.”
Your lips to God’s ears, Child thought.
Katie was enormously relieved to see him, but something about his body English warned her off. Hector was avoiding direct eye contact. She didn’t step forward right away. The two men with him. They spelled trouble, or even danger. She remembered what Frank Child had told her, killers with nothing to lose.
“We need
to commandeer a vehicle,” Hector said, addressing the group at large. His eyes grazed past Katie, but he didn’t focus on her. “Get us as far as Limestone, I’ll leave it at the sheriff’s substation, take a car from the motor pool.”
Katie looked at the three nurses who’d come with her from the clinic. They all knew Hector was bluffing. There was no motor pool in Limestone. He drove his own truck, and the county reimbursed him for mileage and maintenance.
“Who owns the Trooper?” Hector asked them.
Now they knew for a fact that something was very wrong, but nobody gave him away.
“I do,” Katie said. She fished the keys out of her jacket pocket and handed them to him. “Gas tank’s half full. Just pay me back for what you use.”
Hector nodded and thanked her.
There was a loaded Beretta M9 under the front seat too. She carried it for emergencies, and Hector knew that. Which was why he’d asked to borrow her truck.
“Wait a minute, little lady,” the bigger of the two men with Hector said. “Whyn’t you come along for the ride, keep the deputy company.”
“I’m sorry?” Katie asked him, frowning and pretending to be puzzled, although she knew why. “I’m the only doctor here.”
“All to the good,” the guy told her. “We might need one.”
“This isn’t a smart move at all,” Hector said to him.
“You let me be the judge of that,” Roy said.
Little Eddie grinned. He was liking this better now.
It was shaping up worse, Child saw, watching them through the binoculars. They had two hostages instead of one, and the four of them were bunched too close to take the shot.
“Your guy think on his feet?” the SWAT commander asked.
“Hector can think on his hands and knees,” Child said. Not that Child wanted it to come to that.
“Let ’em get clear of the background,” the team leader said to the rifleman. He meant away from anybody in the tent.
The shooter nodded. He dialed in the range.
“On my mark,” the team leader told him. “Condition Zero.”
The shooter put his targets in the crosshairs.
“Keep it tight,” Roy said. He had Katie’s arm pinned painfully behind her back. Hector was a step in front and Little Eddie a step behind.
Hector caught something in his peripheral vision, a flicker of reflected sunlight up on the ridge, and then it was gone.
They got to the Trooper. Hector shook out Katie’s keys to find the right one. He unlocked the driver’s door and tugged it open, but he dropped the keys in the dirt.
“Quit dicking around,” Roy said.
Hector crouched down to pick up the keys and slid his hand under the driver’s seat.
Roy looked at Eddie. “There’s always some wetbrain has to douche the cat,” Roy said, tired of coddling morons.
Straightening up, Hector uncoiled like a spring, pivoting off the balls of his feet, and hit Katie so hard in a body block it knocked the wind right out of her lungs.
“You stinking prick,” Roy shouted at him, the three of them going down in a tangle of armpits and elbows.
The sniper round was a jacketed hollowpoint, a 180-grain rebated Silvertip boattail moving at a velocity approaching twenty-one hundred feet per second, without buffeting or deflection. It hit Eddie at the base of the skull, on a downward trajectory, and blew his spine through his throat like a wet rope.
Hector rolled clear of Katie and ground the muzzle of the Beretta into the socket of Roy’s left eye. “Your call,” he said to him. “Doesn’t matter to me one way or the other.”
Roy’s shoulders sagged.
Katie sat up and coughed. It hurt to catch her breath.
“Damn,” Child said, putting the glasses down. He glanced over at the shooter. The ex-Marine ejected his spent round and policed up the brass, force of habit. “I never saw anybody take a shot like that, cold-bore,” Child said.
The shooter looked at him. “No, you never did,” he said.
The SWAT commander got on the radio and called the choppers back in, requesting emergency evac.
Hector helped Katie get to her feet. She flinched with the pain.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m okay, but don’t hug me quite so hard,” she said. “You broke one of my ribs.”
Hector let go and gave her room to breathe.
“I was afraid you weren’t coming out,” she said.
“So was I,” he told her.
“Aw, you’re like a bad penny. You always turn up.”
“Heads or tails?” Hector asked, smiling.
“You know what’s the matter with you?”
“No, what?” he asked her.
“I wish I knew,” Katie said.
Charlaine Harris
Small Signs
from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
David Angola was leaning against Anne DeWitt’s car in the Travis High School parking lot. The bright early-fall sun shone on his newly shaved dark head. It was four-thirty on a Friday afternoon, and the lot was almost empty.
Anne did not get the surprise David had (perhaps) intended. She always looked out the window of her office after she’d collected her take-home paperwork.
Anne hadn’t stayed alive as long as she had by being careless.
After a few moments of inner debate, she decided to go home as usual. She might as well find out what David wanted. Anne was utterly alert as she walked toward him, her hand on the knife in her jacket pocket. She was very good with sharp instruments.
“I come in peace,” he called, smiling, holding out his hands to show they were empty. His white teeth flashed in a broad smile.
The last time Anne had seen David they’d been friends, or at least as close to friends as they could be. But that had been years ago. She stopped ten feet away. “Who’s minding Camp West while you’re gone?” she said.
“Chloe,” he said.
“Don’t remember her.”
“Chloe Montgomery,” he said. “Short blond hair? Six feet tall?”
“The one who went to Japan to study martial arts?”
David nodded.
“I didn’t like her, but you obviously have a different opinion.” Anne was only marking time with the conversation until she got a feel for the situation. She had no idea why David was here. Ignorance did not sit well with her.
“Not up to me,” David said.
Anne absorbed that. “How could she not be your choice? Last I knew, you were still calling the shots.”
For the past eight years David Angola had been the head of Camp West, a very clandestine California training facility specializing in survival under harsh conditions . . . and harsh interrogation.
Anne had been his opposite number at Camp East, located in the Allegheny Mountains. Since the training was so rigorous, at least every other year a student didn’t survive. This was the cost of doing business. However, a senator’s daughter had died at Camp East. Anne had been fired.
“I was calling the shots until there were some discrepancies in the accounts.” David looked away as he said that.
“You got fired over a decimal point?” Anne could scarcely believe it.
“Let’s call it a leave of absence while the situation’s being investigated,” he said easily. But his whole posture read “tense” to Anne, and that contrasted with his camouflage as an average citizen. David always blended in. Though Anne remembered his taste as leaning toward silk T-shirts and designer jeans, today he wore a golf shirt and khakis under a tan windbreaker. Half the men in North Carolina were wearing some version of the same costume.
Anne considered her next question. “So, you came here to do what?”
“I couldn’t be in town and not lay eyes on you, darlin’. I like the new nose, but the dark hair suited you better.”
Anne shrugged. Her hair was an unremarkable chestnut. Her nose was shorter and thinner. Her eyebrows had been reshaped. She looked attractive
enough. The point was that she did not look like Twyla Burnside. “You’ve seen me. Now what?”
“I mainly want to see my man,” David said easily. “I thought it was only good sense to check in with you first.”
Anne was not surprised that David had come to see his former second-in-command, Holt Halsey. David had sent Holt to keep an eye on Anne when she’d gotten some death threats . . . at least, that was the explanation Holt had given Anne. She’d taken it with a pinch of salt.
“So go see him.” Anne glanced down at her watch. “Holt should have locked up the gym by now. He’s probably on his way home. I’m sure you have his address.” Aside from that one quick glance, she’d kept her eyes on David. His hands were empty, but that meant nothing to someone as skilled as he was. They’d both been instructors before they’d gotten promoted.
David straightened up and took a step toward his car, a rental. “I hated to see you get the ax. Cassie’s not a patch on you.”
“Water under the bridge,” Anne said stiffly.
“Holt had a similar issue,” David said casually. Apparently he was fishing to find out if Anne knew why Holt had left Camp West.
Anne didn’t, and she’d never asked. “What is this really about, David?”
“I’m at loose ends. I haven’t taken a vacation in two years. I’m always at the camp. But until they find out who actually took the money, they don’t want me around. I didn’t have anything to do. So I came to see Greg. Holt.”
That wasn’t totally ridiculous. “I think he’ll be glad to see you,” Anne said. “When will you know the verdict?”
“Soon, I hope. There’s an independent audit going on. It’ll prove I’m innocent. You know me. I always had a lot of trouble with the budgeting part of my job. Holt did most of the work. Makes it more of a joke, that Oversight thinks I’m sophisticated enough to embezzle.”
“That’s Oversight’s job, to be suspicious.” Embezzling. No wonder David had taken a trip across country. You didn’t want to be in Oversight’s crosshairs if the news was bad.
“Okay, I’m on my way,” he said, slapping the hood of his white Nissan.
