A Small Town

by Thomas Perry

  Leah was up in a second, and was at her dresser stepping into some underpants and hooking a bra in front of her, spinning the clasps around to her back and putting her arms under the straps, and then pulling on a black long-sleeve pullover. She tugged up a pair of jeans, stepped into some black running shoes, then knelt and tied them. She put on her utility belt with the police equipment, took two extra loaded magazines from her dresser, and only then looked in the direction of the bed.

  She expected to see him still lying there naked with only his feet under the sheet, and the blissful look he often had when he had fallen asleep after sex. He wasn’t there. He was up, buttoning his dress shirt with his sport coat already over it and his belt buckled. Then he was at the side of the bed with the drawer of the nightstand open, taking out her spare Glock 17.

  “Hold on,” she said. “I’m just going out to see what it is.”

  “You know what it is.” He stuck the pistol into his belt at the small of his back. “I’ll just borrow this and go along for the ride. That’s all.”

  “Mark—”

  “You know I can shoot and I can see behind you.”

  It was true that she had taken him out to the police range a few times because she had to find time to get in her own practice, so she had let him come and shoot too. She had been prepared to tell anyone who asked that she was doing it because he was a city official, but nobody had asked. This was different. It wasn’t paper targets.

  As she tried to force her distracted mind to formulate a refusal that wouldn’t permit a rebuttal, there was a volley of gunfire—three pistol shots, then a series of louder reports that must have come from a rifle. The shots were very close.

  She ran to the front of the house and looked out. Two uniformed police officers she recognized as Willenz and Gutierrez were sheltering behind their police car with their pistols drawn. They were under fire from three men, two carrying what looked to her like military-issue rifles and the other armed with a semiautomatic pistol. The shooters had taken a position behind the concrete steps of the bandstand in the park about fifty yards away. In the seconds while she was watching, the three men opened fire on the police car, a barrage that exploded windows, pounded holes through the sheet metal of the doors and roof, and flattened two tires.

  She opened the gun cabinet in the den, took out the M4 rifle that she carried in her car trunk at work, inserted a magazine, pulled the charging handle, and went to the corner window at the front of the house. She slid it open and took aim.

  The first man rose slightly so his rifle was no longer resting on the bottom concrete step. He held the foregrip in his left hand and rested his elbow on the third step. Her shot went through his head and he collapsed. She adjusted her aim to the second prone rifleman and fired. Her shot was low, but she saw it spark on the surface of the concrete and ricochet upward into the man’s face. He went down.

  The man with the pistol had scrambled away and been crouching with his back to the bandstand. When the second man fell, he sprinted across the park, trying to keep his back among the trees. Leah had no shot, so she shut the window and went out the front door. “Willenz! Gutierrez! It’s Hawkins. Are you all right?”

  They both waved in her direction, staying low. She ran to their car and crouched by the front wheel. “What happened?”

  Gutierrez said, “We were responding to a ‘shots fired’ call. We came around the park, and they opened up on us.”

  More gunfire was coming from the east side of town. It had not yet occurred to Leah that one of the things on the east side of town was the road to the prison. She said, “We’d better go get those rifles from the bandstand. And any ammo lying around. Are you up to it?”

  Gutierrez said, “I’ll go.” He moved to the rear of the police car, looked and listened for a moment, and then ran toward the bandstand. Leah rested her M4 on the hood of the police cruiser to cover him, but she saw no targets.

  Willenz reached into the broken car window and took out the microphone. “This is Three Zebra One. We’ve been under rifle fire at the city park. Lieutenant Hawkins shot two of the suspects, but a third is running up Calloway Street to the north. He is armed with a semiautomatic pistol. He’s wearing dark clothing, probably blue jeans and a work shirt. Average height and weight, dark hair.”

  Instead of the soft reassuring voice of Emma Giles, the night dispatcher, the voice of Chief Roberts came over the speaker. “Is the lieutenant still with you?”

  She took the microphone. “Yes, Chief. I’m here.”

  “The whole prison is out. I’m not sure how it happened yet, but there are at least hundreds on foot coming toward town. A lot of them have been seen with guns.”

  “I can verify that, Chief,” she said. “Gutierrez is recovering two rifles from the men I shot.”

  “They’re coming into town from the east, from the prison highway. We’re going to try to set up a barrier at Main Street. I think we can hold them at Main and keep them from getting to the west side of town.”

  “We’re on our way, Chief,” she said. “Out.”

  Gutierrez returned from the park carrying two M4 rifles just like Leah’s. He had stuck eight loaded magazines in his jacket, his belt, and his pockets.

  Mark Ballard came around the corner of the street, where he must have gotten by cutting through Leah’s neighbors’ yards. When he appeared, the two uniformed cops raised their pistols. “Hold your fire,” he said. “It’s only me, Mark Ballard. I thought I heard shots.” He was walking toward them, but his hands were in the air.

  Leah’s jaw clenched, but she ignored him for the moment and talked to the two uniformed cops. “You two get these rifles and your Glocks reloaded while I get the car. Come with me, Mr. Ballard.”

  The two cops released the magazines and inserted full ones while Leah ran to her driveway to get her unmarked black police car. Ballard got into the passenger seat. She saw him and said, “You’re really being stupid. You’re not paid or trained for this, and you’re going to leave Marcia a widow.”

  “I can’t watch these guys take over the town.”

  She backed up quickly and spun the car around to pick up Gutierrez and Willenz. She saw them step toward her car and called, “Don’t leave the shotgun.”

  Ballard got out of the car, stepped to the disabled police cruiser, and took the shotgun out of its vertical holder. He returned with it and sat down. She glared at him. “Thank you.”

  Leah drove fast with the windows open, and they heard more distant gunfire. It sounded like it was coming from the northeast. She drove faster but slowed nearly to a stop at each intersection, looking up and down the streets to see if she could spot any escaped prisoners. The quiet night streets still looked empty and benign, not much different from the way they had looked when she was a teenager walking home late from a party, slowly if she liked the boy she was with, or fast if she didn’t, using her long legs to stay a step away from him.

  She reached the broad intersection with Main Street in a few minutes. She looked to the north along the wide street. It was marked for diagonal parking on both sides and had two more lanes for traffic, but the only cars there now were a row of police cruisers facing outward from the curb on the west side with their doors open. Cops—some in uniform and others in various kinds of civilian clothes that they’d thrown on—walked up and down the sidewalk behind the cars, some of them just hearing what had happened and others settling into firing positions.

  Leah pulled the black car into line with the others, and she and her passengers got out and walked to the spot where Chief Roberts was giving his men and women their orders. “We’ll try to stop them right here,” he said. “Use the cars as well as you can. The engine block is the best barrier. Always stay low. And if you use the door as a shield, open it only halfway so rounds will ricochet past you instead of piercing it and hitting you. When they arrive across the street, turn your high beams on. Any order to fire will come from me.”

  As Leah approached the c
hief, she appraised the situation. There were only eight cars, all in the line with fifteen or twenty feet between them. The small town’s whole fleet didn’t constitute a barricade, just a few firing positions along a two-hundred-foot stretch of Main Street.

  “We’re here, Chief,” she said.

  “Who else?”

  “Gutierrez and Willenz. And we picked up Mark Ballard on the way. He was coming home from meetings in Denver and heard shots. I gave him my spare Glock and the shotgun from the wrecked unit on Calloway Street.”

  Chief Roberts pointed at Gutierrez and Willenz. “Where did they get M4s?”

  “From the bodies of the two shooters. They’ve got to be from the prison.”

  “And you have the one from your car. I’ve got the one from mine too. So we’ve got four. That’s quite a bit of firepower if we need it.”

  “Should we station the rifles at both ends of the line so the escapees can’t outflank us?” she asked.

  He raised his voice. “Gutierrez, take a spot at the end car up there. Willenz, take a spot at the other end. Don’t let any of them get around us.” He turned back to Leah. “I want you near the middle, so you can help me take the heart out of them if they come at us hard.” He saw Mark Ballard a few feet away with the shotgun resting on his forearm and pointing down at the pavement, like a pheasant hunter.

  “Hey, Mark,” he said. “Nice to have you with us. I hereby deputize you with a rank of field marshal.”

  “Thanks, Chief. Anything special I should know?”

  “Just stick with the lieutenant. If you do what she does, you’ll be fine.”

  It was only a moment later that Leah saw the dark mass of men moving up Constitution Street toward Main. They were still a block away, but they were a long, shadowy, moving thing, like a monstrous animal crawling along the street. They stretched from one sidewalk, filling the street, to the other. They must have come from the prison on foot, trotting or walking the three or four miles of alfalfa fields. She strained her eyes and estimated that there must be at least five hundred men. As the throng streamed along Constitution Street, some of them would climb or be lifted by others to the level of the old-fashioned streetlamps. The top man would lift off the glass cover of the lamp, leaving the big bulb bare. Then he would smash the bulb, leaving that section of the street in darkness. When they were still a hundred yards from Main Street, they looked like they were emerging from a tunnel.

  The first three or four ranks of escapees were armed with what Leah later confirmed were weapons from the prison arsenal. The next ranks carried looted weapons from houses that had been hastily abandoned by their owners or stormed by the mob. There were hunting rifles, shotguns, a number of revolvers, and compact semiautomatic pistols. There were even three men carrying compound bows and quivers full of steel-tipped deer hunting arrows. Behind them the crowd was still in deeper shadow.

  Chief Roberts stood beside his command car and used the built-in loudspeaker. “This is the chief of police of the city of Weldonville. We don’t want any unnecessary violence. If you will stop and place any firearms or other weapons on the pavement, raise your hands, and walk up Main Street to your left, you will be permitted to surrender peacefully without having anything to be afraid of. You will be kept comfortable and safe while we arrange for your transport back to the prison.”

  Joseph R. Roberts was a brave man, and his bravery was one of the tools he had used to exert power during a thirty-five-year career in law enforcement. He stood in the open beside his command car with the microphone in his right hand, his feet planted apart, and his left arm resting comfortably across his chest. His voice held no hint of fear, no uncertainty or hesitation.

  His approach should have worked. But there was a growing murmur, like a hum, coming from the escapees. It moved forward from the rear to the front, the impatient crowd wanting to know why their progress had stopped. Then, like a wave subsiding, the sound went from the vanguard to the back as the men who could see ahead passed the word of what was happening. One of the men in the second rank who had made it almost to Main Street raised an M4 to his shoulder and fired.

  The chief dropped to the pavement, the microphone he had been holding swinging freely against his car on its curly cord. Every chest inhaled once while it was silent, and then the police officers on the west side of the street opened fire. They cut down the shooter and the five or six men nearest to him in a wave. The murmur from the column of escapees on Constitution Street rose to a roar of rage and ferocity.

  By then there was no certainty, not even about what had happened. The police officers had fired at the man who had shot their chief, but it was probable that the other men were hit by rapid and poorly aimed shots, or by rounds that had gone through the culprit’s body. The escapees back on the darkened street and sidewalks of Constitution Avenue knew that people had been shot, but they could not possibly know who or why.

  The escapees at the front of the column who had firearms from the prison crouched, knelt, or lay prone and fired on the police officers across the street. The escapees immediately behind them were armed with whatever weapons they could find or improvise. The ones who had taken guns from homes fired them. Others lit the rag fuses of Molotov cocktails—the bottles scavenged from garbage cans and the gasoline siphoned from parked cars—and threw them at the police cars. Some threw stones or bricks.

  Leah reached into the chief’s car to hit the high-beam headlights and put the escapees into the glare. When she had done that, so did many of the other officers, but it was less effective because some of the police vehicles were now enveloped in fire from the flaming bottles.

  Escapees charged forward between the shooters at the mouth of Constitution Street, sprinting to take the seventy feet as fast as they could to kill or disable police officers distracted by the fires that flared up and the fusillade from the shooters. They wielded hatchets, hammers, kitchen knives, crowbars, or baseball bats. Some threw broom handles that had been sharpened into spears.

  Leah rested her left elbow on the chief’s car and fired the M4 rifle into the charging men. She listened to the bangs of the rifles of Gutierrez and Willenz, the booms of the shotguns on both sides of her, the pop-pop-pop of the 9mm Glock pistols.

  In the first five seconds the police had shot down nearly all the armed men in the vanguard, but as they fell, the ones behind came up to take their places. They flopped onto the pavement beside the bodies to take up the weapons and keep firing.

  Four of the eight police cars had been hit by Molotov cocktails and were burning. In the light from the flames and the headlights Leah could see five police officers on the pavement severely wounded or dead. The loss on the other side was much worse, but escaped prisoners kept streaming to the mouth of Constitution Street to take up the fight. Leah looked to her right and left and wondered how much more ammunition the police officers still had.

  She ran to the nearest burning car, got in, felt the motor idling, straightened the wheels, and threw it into gear. It moved, slowly at first, but gained speed. When it was twenty feet out, she stepped harder on the gas and rolled out. As the flaming car glided into the mass of advancing men, she ran back in its wake toward the chief’s car.

  As she did, she saw Mark Ballard. He was standing one car over, firing the shotgun. She saw it kick against his shoulder as the muzzle flashed, and then his left hand pump the slide to eject the shell and bring a new one into the chamber, and then the kick and flash again. And then she saw the end, the prisoner’s bullet pound into his forehead and through it, the puff of red mist in the air behind him, and his tall, strong body falling backward, no longer occupied.

  She knew in the first instant that Mark was dead. She searched for the shooter, for any man on the east side of Main Street with a gun. She fired rapidly, moving efficiently from one to the next, putting a bullet in each one to hold him where he was until the twenty-round magazine was empty. She reloaded, aimed, and fired, but the energy of the attack had been exhausted.
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  The psychopaths and the desperate lifelong fighters and the suicidal fatalists had become scarce. The ones who had been content to take places in the main body of the throng, the ones who hoped to escape, were all starting to slip away to try it on their own. The ones who had stayed in the rear, far from the fight, were beginning to break and run away.

  At the north end of Main, she saw colored light from the roof bars of the state police vehicles as they flashed past. Two of them closed off this block of Main, but the others kept coming, speeding to get ahead of the retreating prisoners.

  As soon as the last of the prisoners had fallen back, she gathered the four intact police cars and drove slowly with them along Constitution Street, executing a sweep to be sure no stragglers stayed behind. When she and her officers reached the end of Constitution, she found that the state police had diverted the mob of escapees onto the baseball field, which was surrounded by high fences on all sides. At dawn they began the long process of transporting the prisoners back to their prison.

  At the funeral, Mark Ballard’s casket was closed to keep his wife and others from seeing what the rifle shot had done to his head.

  A week after the funeral, Marcia Ballard wrote a note to Leah Hawkins thanking her for being Mark’s beloved friend and saying that Leah had made his life a thousand times better. She had typed it on Mark’s computer, a task Leah knew had taken a huge effort for her. By then she could not have written a word by hand. After Leah had read the note a few times, pausing over the word “beloved,” she burned the paper. She knew she wouldn’t forget the words, and what the two women and the man had said to each other about their private life was not ever going to be anybody else’s business.

  About six weeks after that, the police department received a report from the FBI that the bullet that killed Mark Ballard had been found and identified by ballistics analysis and blood DNA found on and around the bullet. The bullet had gone through the victim’s head and lodged in a maple tree on Main Street. The bullet had been matched to a rifle stolen from the prison by an inmate named Earl Detweiler. His fingerprints and DNA were found on the foregrip and the lower receiver. Detweiler had been killed by a bullet from an M4 owned by the Weldonville, Colorado, Police Department and issued to Lieutenant Leah Anne Hawkins. Leah made a copy of the report and sent it to Marcia Ballard.