The Blood of Patriots

by William W. Johnstone

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ward pulled into the driveway, not sure at first that he had the right place. There were no exterior lights and the shades were drawn dimming what illumination there was inside. It was almost as though the house itself had vanished. Either he wasn’t expected or he wasn’t welcome.

  He didn’t bother turning off the engine. He wanted his getaway car ready. Whichever way this went, he wouldn’t be long.

  It was shorter than that.

  He punched the bell with a knuckle, heard footsteps—a long slow stride, not Megan’s—and Joanne was at the door. Her open face was expressionless.

  “What, John?”

  “The man needed help,” he said flatly.

  “People always need help,” she said. Her voice was tense but soft. She obviously didn’t want Megan to hear. “That’s why we’re no longer together, remember?”

  “You won’t let me forget.”

  “Oh, right. This is my fault.”

  “It’s nobody’s ‘fault.’ It’s just the way things are. But Megan doesn’t have to suffer because of what went on between us—”

  “No,” Joanne agreed. “And she’s not going to suffer for what you do now, promising to take her somewhere, then running off.”

  “This is her community—”

  “And you were trying to fix it, I know. God, I’m so sick of that. Would anything have turned out differently up there if you’d skipped the testosterone rush and taken your daughter out when you said you would?”

  There was no point trying to explain to Joanne what had transpired, how it had made him feel. And even if he could communicate that, she wasn’t wrong; he had done this at Megan’s expense.

  “Is she coming?”

  “She’s doing her homework,” Joanne said.

  Ward pressed his lips together and glared at Joanne and stood there waiting for her to come up with something less ridiculous. She yielded somewhat.

  “Are you staying over long enough to have breakfast with her?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Ward said. “What time does school start?”

  “Eight.”

  “I’ll be here at seven,” he said. “Little picnic, then I’ll get her to school.”

  “Fine.”

  Joanne started to close the door. Ward stopped it with the heel of his hand.

  “You make me feel like a bad man,” he said. “I’m not.”

  “No, you’re not,” she agreed. “But that’s not the same as being a good father. Or husband.”

  Joanne leaned into the door and Ward removed his hand. It shut with a gentle click. Ward stood on the small wooden patio, surrounded by loneliness, the soft vanilla scent of wisteria hanging from the pergola, and the feeling that despite all that supposed testosterone, he was somehow half a man. He was pissed that his former wife still had the power to make him feel that way.

  That’s why athletes and movie stars get trophy wives, he thought as he stalked back to the car. After you agree to an allowance there’s nothing left to debate.

  Ward drove back to the Basalt Regency Inn and ate at the small coffee shop in the back. He considered going to Papa Vito’s but decided he was too tired to listen to tales of the town. Besides, he didn’t know if he wanted to be that close to the Al Huda Center. Not just now. Most important, he wanted to think. Since the confrontation in Battery Park he hadn’t stopped moving—from Muslim accusers, from cops who were for-or-against him, from reporters. He had walked, flown, driven almost nonstop with no real idea where he was going, only what he was leaving.

  Now he was still. And in those first moments of calm, waiting for his dinner in the nearly deserted café, he realized several things. For the second time in his life, a chapter had closed. The first was his divorce; now, for the first time in his adult life, he had no job, no career. He was one of the vast unemployed of the ailing nation. He wasn’t simply a visitor in Basalt, someone just passing through a quaint Midwestern community. They were, all of them, hurting, floundering Americans—

  Don’t do this, he thought suddenly. Don’t wallow. Despair was counterproductive. Just get some sleep, see your daughter, and think about what you’ll do when you get back. Either fight the charges or put the NYPD in your rear view mirror and get a job in security somewhere. Or do what you joked about not doing, blogging or becoming the voice of sanity on FM radio somewhere.

  His cheeseburger and french fries arrived. The meat was plentiful and the trans-fat ban obviously hadn’t reached Basalt. Half of what was on the plate took care of him. Paying, he found out the diner opened at six in the morning. Ward put in his order now so he could grab it and run up to collect Megan.

  He dragged himself down the long corridor to the lobby and then up the single flight of stairs to his room. As he did, he was only dimly aware of the low-beams rushing toward the foothills.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  For the first time in weeks, Scott Randolph didn’t feel alone.

  Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, Randolph reflected about John Ward and how he wasn’t like the men who sat at Papa Vito’s and grumbled about life and wrote things like aMEriCCA on the place mats. He also wasn’t like those people who had jobs and didn’t want to make waves. He wasn’t politically sensitive to the point of paralysis. Ward had smelled something wrong and came up to investigate and took up the cause of a man he didn’t know. That was rare these days. Randolph knew that pride and fellowship were simply dormant in his fellow townspeople, and he missed it.

  A hint of milky white light, like the first arc of moonrise, hit and then played swiftly across the ceiling above his bed. Randolph listened. The only lights he ever saw up here were police choppers looking for hikers who had failed to come home. He didn’t hear a rotor or an engine. If it was a vehicle, it was gone. Sometimes kids would come up to the field to make out, but the lights were followed by the distant sound of music or beer bottles being hoisted from a cooler. He heard none of that. He considered investigating but his eyes had other ideas. They shut slowly.

  A few minutes later the pigs began to snort. Randolph was instantly awake. It wasn’t their usual sound, when one of them wanted a corn cob another had taken or tried to nose into a spot where another was sitting. It wasn’t an aggressive sound, but, like this evening with the ATVs, they were grunts of annoyance. The farmer raised himself on an elbow. The barn was far enough from his room so that he couldn’t ordinarily hear them moving about, bumping against the wood of the stalls, flopping over in the soft earth, or moving through the hay. But he heard something that suggested movement—creaking, the sucking of muddy earth, faint, faint whispers of activity.

  Then Randolph heard a squeal that could only be one thing. A pig was hurt.

  He threw off the blanket and jammed his feet into the slippers beside his bed. In the same motion he grabbed the shotgun leaning against his night table. The gun was always loaded. As he hurried to the bedroom door that opened into the back of the property, he flicked off the safety with his thumb. The door squeaked as he opened it but anyone who was inside the barn wouldn’t hear it. There was no moon but he knew every inch of his land. He stepped from the small wooden stoop onto short grass made brittle by a parching summer. His eyes were on the barn, on the open door through which someone had entered.

  Which was why he didn’t see the man standing on the other side of the door. He only felt, for a moment, the tire iron as it came down on the base of his skull—

  It was still dark when Randolph woke. The back of his neck was cold; it was more than a cool night breeze washing over it. A sharp, throbbing ache stretched from ear to ear. When he tried to move, electricity fired through the back of his skull. He lay still, his eyes looking out at the barn. He struggled to remember. It was just the way he had last seen it, the door on the north end opened inward. Only now, there were no sounds coming from within.

  He put his palms on the ground, felt the shotgun still lying beside him. He moved his hand from it, pushed up very slowly while he ra
ised his head from the grass. He moved his head tenderly from side to side, as he would if encouraging a newborn piglet to breathe. He didn’t have a lot of mobility. There was a lump the size of a lemon. He was able to get to his knees without bringing back that searing pain. He waited there, breathing slowly, feeling moisture run down the collar of his pajamas. He closed his right hand around the gun barrel, felt for the safety, locked it and used the weapon like a cane to push himself up.

  The world turned round as though it had been swept up by a tornado. Randolph shut his eyes and let his body adjust to standing. His mind was already replaying what had happened. He had let himself get cold-cocked. Hopefully, that was all the intruders wanted. Anyone from around here knew he had nothing of value in the house. All he owned were two-dozen pigs of varying size, from newborn piglets to full grown 250 pounders.

  “Jennifer? Sharon?”

  Those were two of the four young sows he kept for breeding. They tended to be the most vocal.

  There was still no sound save for ringing in his ears. He had to get over there and see why they were not responding. Even sleeping pigs made occasional sounds. Randolph took a tentative step. Flame shot from the base of his neck up his skull. He winced, took another step, then another. Whirlpools of brownish-red swirled in front of him. He felt his supper rise in his throat. He kept going.

  The farmer knew something was wrong when he was still twenty yards away. He couldn’t hear and he couldn’t see but he could smell and feel. The soil grew damp beneath his slippers. Each step released a faint metallic smell, like rusted iron.

  “Oh, no.”

  The farmer increased his pace despite the lancing pain. He reached the door and, breathing heavily from the exertion, he snaked a hand around the frame and tugged the string of the wall-mounted lamp.

  Covered with dust and spots of mud, the bulb threw a pale, murky light on the nearest of the pens. Everywhere Randolph’s eyes moved, it looked like one of Matthew Brady’s photos of the Civil War. Bodies were strewn here and there, each of them nestled in a puddle of blood. Boards had been ripped from the stalls and used to beat the pigs before they were slain; he could see the bruising, the places where nails had penetrated their flesh. There were ragged tracks leading from each point of impact. Struggling to get away, they had been ripped deeply by the rusty nails. But that was just for fun. The pigs died from having their throats slashed ear-to-ear. He could tell they had struggled for breath: there were deep indentations under their bodies. They had flailed up and down, unable to rise, unable to breathe, for the long seconds it took for them to fall unconscious.

  The pen doors had been opened so they could be chased and beaten. He could see the prints their flight had made in the earth. Now the pigs lay helter-skelter as far as the light could see. Flies flitted around them. As his hearing returned he could hear their buzzing. It occurred to him to look for human footprints. A flashlight hung from a nail on the wall under the light. He switched it on, cast it along the ground.

  There were large, vague impressions in the earth—not so much footprints as depressions. The attackers had probably worn plastic bags on their feet. This wasn’t a drunken assault. It was premeditated.

  Why?

  It was the only word, the only question he could think of. Randolph looked away. He began to sob. The tears were partly from the pain in his head, partly from the loss of his herd, but mostly for the unfathomable cruelty of the people who did this.

  He finished turning around, walked back to the house, and called the police.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Ward was tired but he couldn’t sleep. The reality of his situation had begun to take hold, and with nothing to do but think about it that’s what he did. Fear had never been a part of his world, even on the most dangerous undercover operations. Those had been marked by an adrenaline surge, hyper-alertness, hair-trigger reflexes—but he was never afraid. He could live with being wrong but he didn’t think he could live with being beaten.

  What if he had no choice? What if the system was just too strong, stacked too heavily against him? The NYPD brass wasn’t a gunrunning operation he could simply wait out, watching for a slip-up or encouraging them to take this bait or that. It was, like any government agency, a self-preserving monolith that didn’t take risks. It was a hive that protected itself from bears even if it cost a few stinging drones.

  Ward was turning over yet again when he heard the sirens. It took a moment for him to remember that it wasn’t just New York background noise and to realize they were heading into the mountains. That could mean absolutely nothing. Or it could mean the ATV riders he’d scared away had gone back to the field to bust Randolph’s hump. Randolph, the man with a shotgun. The riders, who might have their own drones to sacrifice for a cause.

  The detective pulled on his clothes, ran out the door, and peered out the inn’s side entrance. He saw the patrol car’s flashing lights as they made their way into the foothills. He jumped into the Prius and followed them.

  The red-and-blue light bar was just below the ridge, the glow visible from the road that ended at the field. The patrol car was definitely in the vicinity of Randolph’s farm. Ward gave himself a mental kick for leaving the man alone; it was a good fit with the rest of his down-on-John mood.

  Ward listened carefully over the silent motor. He did not hear an ambulance and hoped Randolph was all right. It also meant he probably hadn’t shot anyone. When he arrived Ward parked beside the police car. He strode over, rolling his shoulders like a fighter to generate some warmth in the cold night air. He watched the play of a flashlight beam across the inside of the barn. As Ward neared, he saw—and smelled—the carnage. It was like arriving at a homicide crime scene where voices were muted as investigators sought to preserve their own quiet dignity, a veneer of humanity as they sought purpose and clues in the face of bloodshed. Only a police officer and Randolph were inside.

  “... back to the car to get the camera, take pictures for our files,” the cop was saying. “You ought to take some for insurance, too. And you need to get that bump looked at.”

  “I will,” Randolph promised.

  “Need a ride to the hospital?” Ward asked.

  The men turned as Ward spoke.

  “John,” Randolph said. There was relief as well as pain in that one word.

  Ward only gave the dead animals a passing look. “They came back,” he said.

  “Who are you?” the officer asked. He stood about six-foot-five, a beanpole of a man who made up in height what he lacked in breadth.

  “John Ward. I’m here from New York to visit my daughter.” He added, “Joanne McCrea is my former wife.”

  The officer relaxed slightly at the mention of her name. He tucked his flashlight under his arm, jotted the name in a notepad he carried, and marked the time with his watch.

  “Who was it?” Ward asked Randolph.

  “We don’t know, Mr. Ward,” the officer said.

  “I know, Harry,” Randolph said.

  “You don’t,” the officer replied.

  Ward stopped beside Randolph. “Where were you attacked?”

  “By the bedroom door,” Randolph said, pointing.

  Ward studied the large wound in the dull lamplight. “We know this much, officer. The assailant was about five-foot nine or ten, left handed, and used a metal object, probably a tire iron or a crow bar.”

  “And you know that how, Sherlock?” the officer asked.

  “Because he’s a New York City detective,” Randolph said.

  Hawks—by his nametag—was in his late twenties, Ward guessed, now that he had a close look at him. He was more full of training than experience.

  “The upward angle of the swing is marked by a gash in the center of the lump,” Ward explained. “The bruise starts on the left side which was the point of impact—I don’t think the attacker reached around to hit his victim. And the cut itself is a tear. Baseball bat or blackjack doesn’t do that.” Ward borrowed Randolph’s flashligh
t and walked over to the door. “With a wooden club wound, the skin may pop from internal pressure but that’s not what happened here.” He squatted and cast the light across the ground by the door. He found the bloodstains, looked around. “There,” he said, shining the beam. “Narrow drag marks where the perpetrator wiped off the blood. Tire iron for sure.”

  A siren reached them and Ward rose. Moments later a Toyota Camry arrived with a red light spinning on top. A woman in civilian clothes got out. Ward saw the other officer straighten slightly. The woman was nearly two heads shorter than the officer but broad-shouldered and walked with a natural swagger. She looked to be in her early forties. Her long brown hair was held in place with a large plastic clip, done hurriedly when she received word of the attack, Ward surmised. Her eyes were alert.

  “Chief Brennan,” the officer said.

  “Officer Hawks,” she replied. “Why don’t I hear an ambulance siren?”

  “Mr. Randolph wouldn’t let me call one,” Hawks informed her.

  She faced Randolph. “Why not?”

  “When I leave here it’s gonna be upright, lest I’m dead,” he said. “Except for a tomato on the back of my neck I’m fine.” His voice caught as he spoke. He cleared his throat, wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “It’s my pigs, dammit. They all been throat-cut.”

  The police chief gave his upper arm a reassuring pat. She noted the mud on his shoulder and jawline. She looked at Ward. “Who’s our guest?”

  Ward introduced himself. He stood where he was, instinctively protecting his corner of the crime scene.

  “Right—I read about you,” Brennan remarked. There appeared to be caution in her tone. Ward couldn’t be sure; it was all she said to him. She spoke to Hawks over her shoulder. “You get photos?”

  “I was just about to take care of that, Chief,” Hawks said.