Murder on the Horizon

by M. L. Rowland

  Deciding her pack would be too cumbersome, she opted for carrying only her water bottle sling, clipping it on over her jacket.

  Then she leaned back inside the truck again, slid her hand beneath the driver’s seat, and withdrew Allen’s revolver.

  Weighing the heavy weapon in her hand, she pondered the wisdom of bringing it along with her, the odds of her being able to shoot her way out of anything or perhaps getting shot herself because of her inexperience.

  Deciding that having it if she needed it was better than not having it if she needed it, she pulled her webbed belt free of her pants loops, threaded the belt through the holster, then back through the loops again, and clipped it closed, pulling the back of her jacket down low over the weapon.

  She eased the door of the truck closed and showed Baxter where she was putting the keys atop the front right tire in case he should return to the truck before her. Then she followed the boy down the driveway and off into the woods on the right.

  For several minutes they walked through the trees, intermittently using the light from Gracie’s LED flashlight, the only sounds the drip-drip-dripping from tree branches and the scrunching of boots on soggy pine needles.

  For no reason that Gracie could discern, Baxter stopped and said, “It’s electric, so don’t touch it.”

  Gracie aimed her flashlight at the ground and turned it on. Two feet in front of her, a wire fence stretched from tree to tree to tree. She switched the flashlight off. “Wouldn’t dream of touching it.”

  They walked parallel to the fence until they reached the green metal gate barring the entrance of the compound driveway. They crunched onto the gravel and stopped. Baxter pointed to two tall pines on either side of the gate. “Motion detectors,” he said in a low voice. “With spotlights. They’ll turn on if you try to walk around the gate. And there are cameras all over the place.”

  “Terrific,” Gracie said, keeping her own voice low.

  “Stay close to me,” he said. “We can go a lot of the way on the driveway. Then we have to go through the woods so they can’t see us from the house.”

  “Terrific,” she said again.

  The boy punched a five-digit code into the keypad. With a faint squeak, the wheeled gate slid open. Gracie and Baxter walked through. With another push of a button, the gate slid closed.

  The two walked up the long driveway. Where it made a sharp right-hand bend, Baxter stopped, whispering, “We go through the woods here. But we can’t use the flashlight very much because we’re getting close.”

  “Okay.”

  “But don’t worry, Gracie. I know the way. Want me to hold your hand?”

  She smiled in the darkness. “My eyes will adjust. Thanks anyway.”

  Baxter left the driveway, cutting into the woods with Gracie right behind.

  “Where are all these so-called booby traps?” she whispered.

  “The first one’s right up there.”

  “I can’t see anything.”

  “There’s a wire between those two trees. A little way off the ground.”

  “What would happen if I tripped over it?”

  Baxter made the sound of an explosion.

  “Got it.”

  Baxter walked up to the wire, invisible to Gracie, and blithely stepped over it.

  Gracie walked up and stopped. Spreading her fingers over the end of the flashlight, she turned it on and focused the diminished light on a wire three inches off the ground, trying not to imagine what would happen to her body if she touched it. She turned the flashlight off.

  “Hurry up, Gracie,” Baxter whispered. “Or we’ll never get there. We have a lot more to go.”

  When still she hesitated, Baxter said, “You can do it, Gracie. Trust me.”

  Gracie looked over at the boy, a small black figure against the deeper dark of the woods. He was asking her to act counter to every instinct, to relinquish all control to a boy less than a third her age. “Tall order, Bax,” she said, then took in a deep breath, lifted her right foot as high as she could, stepped over the wire, and planted her foot on the other side.

  With a foot on either side of the wire, she froze.

  “Don’t stop, Gracie! Keep going!”

  Gritting her teeth, she lifted up her left foot and brought it over the wire, hopped sideways on her right foot, windmilled her arms, twisted her body, and fell backward onto the ground. With an “oof,” she landed on her back in the wet duff, the toe of her right boot an inch from the wire.

  She slid her foot up close to her body.

  “Ha ha! Way to go, Grace,” Baxter said. “Do you get it? Grace? Gracie?”

  “Got it, Bax,” Gracie said as she pushed herself to her feet again and brushed herself off. “Hardy har.”

  Baxter touched her elbow. “That’s okay. You’ll get the hang of it. We have a lot more to go.”

  “Terrific.”

  In all, there were twenty-two trip wires.

  One by one, Gracie and Baxter approached each wire and stopped. Baxter stepped right over it. Gracie lit it up with her flashlight for a split second, stepped over the wire with deliberate care, and moved on.

  Finally, when Gracie had been worn to a frazzle from the effort of trying not to end up a tossed salad, Baxter stopped behind a ponderosa tree trunk two feet in diameter and whispered, “We’re here.”

  Gracie crept up behind him. “Thank God!” she breathed into the boy’s ear and peered out from behind the tree.

  Across a wide, large dirt clearing stood two buildings.

  Pointing at the building on the right, Baxter said into Gracie’s ear, “That’s the house. Looks like everyone except Grandpop Martin is asleep.”

  The house was an unusually large, two-story brick house with a metal roof and attached triple garage. Pickup trucks and cars were parked in a neat line facing outward. A single window on the second floor glowed yellow like a Cyclops’s eye.

  “Big day tomorrow maybe,” Gracie whispered back.

  Baxter’s finger moved left to a large metal industrial building with three large bay doors and one smaller one. “That’s the garage. That’s where the bunker is. Underneath it. And the Inner Sanctum.” He pointed even farther to the left. “We’ll go around to over there so we end up at that end. That way no one should be able to see us.”

  “No one should?” Gracie whispered, irritated that Baxter’s voice was animated, breathless, as if he was having the time of his life. Which most likely he was. “I’m not liking this at all, Bax,” she hissed. “This is a bad idea.”

  “We’ll be on the cameras for a little while, but no one will see us. I promise. Come on.” At a crouch, the boy ran to the next tree. A flash of a hand told Gracie he was waving her on.

  Slipping from tree to tree, Baxter and Gracie circled the yard until they stood opposite the long end of the garage.

  Then Baxter said suddenly, “Okay, go!” and, without a sound, sprinted across the yard to the garage.

  Shit.

  Gracie ran.

  CHAPTER

  30

  GRACIE stepped into the garage, black as pitch, and waited as Baxter closed the door behind them.

  He flipped on a switch on the wall. Bright white light from fluorescent ceiling fixtures flooded the room.

  Gracie spun around. “Bax! They’ll see the light!”

  “No, they won’t. No windows in here. See?”

  Gracie did see, but standing in the room with all the lights on made her feel like a flea in the glare of a circus spotlight. “Turn them off anyway,” she said. “We’ll use my flashlight.”

  Baxter flipped off the switch, plunging them back into complete darkness.

  Gracie turned her flashlight on and ran the stark, white beam across the near end of the room. The light slid past row after row of brown padded-seat folding chairs, a long m
etal conference table in front, stopping at a line of white teddy bears, all wearing blue shorts and red suspenders, with one paw held up as if in salute.

  “Bizarre,” Gracie whispered.

  The circle of light lifted and stopped again, illuminating an enormous flag hung at the front of the room—a white circle on a field of bright red. At its center—a black swastika.

  Gracie slid the beam left, hovering it over a Confederate flag, then moved it right again, past the Nazi flag to another, white and black on red, the flag of the Ku Klux Klan. The beam glided around the room to the back wall papered floor to ceiling with flyers and leaflets spewing intolerance and hatred toward every race and religion imaginable, toward law enforcement, advocates for animal rights, pro-choice, gun control, environmentalists.

  The hair on the back of Gracie’s neck prickled as if a wraith had glided by in the darkness, running skinless fingers along the top of her head. “They hate anyone who isn’t just like them,” she whispered. Her eyes moved across the wall. “Or maybe they just hate. Period.” She felt Baxter standing next to her. “You’ve seen all this before?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said, matter-of-factly. “We have meetings here every Monday afternoon. Everybody comes. Even the little kids.”

  “Starting the indoctrination early. Let’s get out of here. I can’t breathe.”

  “The bunker’s this way,” Baxter said, gesturing across the room. “Through the garage.”

  By flashlight, they crossed the cement floor, footsteps echoing. “Right here,” Baxter said and pulled a door in the metal partition open.

  Standing in the doorway, Gracie swept her flashlight beam around the large garage, over ATVs on trailers, gigantic tanks of fuel, three shiny, bright red generators, a green and yellow tractor with a shovel on one end, backhoe on the other. Along the wall on the right was a stainless steel, deep-basin sink and a long wooden workbench with every kind of power tool imaginable: drills, batteries, chargers, saws—band, reciprocal, circular. Above, neatly arrayed on pegboard hooks, were hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, saws, tape measures, levels.

  “C’mon,” Baxter whispered. He led Gracie along the back wall to a wide door at the far end and pulled it open.

  The flashlight lit up a wooden landing with a ramp leading belowground.

  “A ramp?”

  “Grandpop Martin’s in a wheelchair.”

  “I forgot.”

  Closing the door behind them, Baxter led the way down the ramp, circling around and down to another heavy steel security door at the bottom. Feeling as if she were an archaeologist exploring an ancient Egyptian tomb, Gracie followed Baxter into the first of a series of long, narrow rooms with low ceilings and cement-block walls painted white.

  The first room was a living area with a comfortable-looking sectional couch in cocoa-brown velour. On the wall above a long row of cupboards holding puzzles and board games and an impressive library of DVDs, a flat-screen television had been mounted. In the next room, Gracie’s flashlight scanned a full kitchen with two refrigerators, six-burner stove, two-basin sink, and an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling cabinets. Down one side of the room ran a long wooden table with bench seats.

  The adjoining room held shelf after built-in shelf of canned goods, some store-bought, some home-canned. On the floor sat plastic tubs labeled RICE and WHEAT FLOUR. Freezers lined the far wall. Gracie opened the lid of the first one and shined her light inside. Plastic packages with neatly hand-printed labels. “Meat,” she whispered.

  She opened one freezer after the other and looked inside. “This one’s all . . . vegetables. This one . . . more vegetables. This one is fruit, I guess. Looks like cherries. Peaches. This is a big operation. Huge.”

  “There’s supposed to be enough for all of us to live here for three years.”

  I wouldn’t last three days down here, Gracie thought.

  They crossed into the next room containing sleeping bunks, neatly made up with sheets and blankets and pillows with starched, white cases. Next along was a bathroom with stainless steel sinks and toilets and showers.

  The following room was half the size of the others—a medical dispensary with a short examining table and glass-door cabinets filled with medical supplies.

  “Like a mini–MASH unit,” Gracie whispered.

  “What’s that?”

  “Mobile Army Surgical Hospital.”

  “I don’t think we need to whisper anymore, Gracie,” Baxter said in a normal voice. “No one can hear us. The ceilings are soundproof and reinforced.” He pulled open the next door. Gracie shined the beam of her flashlight around the room and gasped.

  The room was an arsenal, walls loaded with assault weapons, shotguns, handguns, knives, hand grenades. Shelves on the opposite wall were filled with box upon box of ammunition.

  “Holy . . .” Gracie said, turning a complete circle in the middle of the room. “There must be thousands of rounds. Looks like they’re getting ready for World War Three.”

  “I told you.”

  Gracie tried the handle of the door leading to the next room. “Why’s this one locked?”

  “That’s the Inner Sanctum,” Baxter said. “Only Uncle Win and Grandpop Martin have a key.”

  “What the heck, Bax. We came all this way and now . . .

  Something dangled in front of Gracie’s eyes. She swung the flashlight beam up. “What’s that?”

  “The key.” Baxter’s grin looked ghoulish in the glow of the flashlight.

  “Do I dare ask how you got that?”

  “Uncle Win takes it off. I snuck in and took it while he was sleeping.”

  “Bax!”

  “Auntie Kimberly doesn’t like the chain hitting her in the face.”

  Gracie coughed to hide her laughter. “How’d you get it copied so fast?”

  “Oh, there’s a key maker in the garage. Didn’t you see? They have everything in there. Anyway, Uncle Win never woke up.”

  “Thank God. So let’s open the door already.”

  Baxter inserted the key, turned the knob, and pulled the heavy door open.

  “There are no windows in here, right?” she asked.

  “Right.”

  “Turn on the light.”

  Baxter snapped on the overhead fluorescents. Light filled the room.

  Gracie stepped into the Inner Sanctum.

  A waist-high shelf ran along the wall on the left.

  Gracie stepped over and looked down.

  She thought she might not be able to recognize a real bomb if she saw one.

  She was wrong.

  The table was covered with dozens of pipe bombs, arranged in a neat line. There was no mistaking what they were—multiple brown wires and a little black box attached to four steel cylinders clamped together and capped on both ends. Four identical black backpacks sat at the end of the shelf, unzipped, ready for packing and transport.

  Gracie blew out a breath. She had no idea whether or not the bombs were armed and ready to blow. With no wish to say hi to Saint Peter at the pearly gates this early in her life, she felt the sudden need to be silent and move very, very slowly. She leaned over and said in the barest breath of a whisper into Baxter’s ear, “Let’s get the hell out. I’ve seen enough.”

  She turned around, eyes catching on a metal clothing rack pushed against the opposite wall. Orange shirts hung next to woodland camouflage pants folded neatly over hangers. On a wire shelf above sat floppy-brimmed hats and pairs of leather gloves. Below, cotton ragg socks had been stuffed into neatly aligned pairs of hiking boots.

  But Gracie’s attention was riveted on the shirts. Orange. Search and Rescue orange. With orange and yellow Sheriff’s Department patches on the shoulders. Stuffed into the breast pocket of each shirt was a lanyard.

  She stepped over and drew one out.

  Clipped to the end
was a Search and Rescue ID. The name she didn’t recognize, but the person in the picture she did.

  It was Winston.

  Gracie pulled the lanyard from the pocket of the next shirt. And the next. And the next.

  Lee. Boojum. Jordan. And others, men and women, whose faces Gracie didn’t recognize.

  “Gracie—” Baxter began.

  She held up a hand. “Wait. I have to think.”

  She reconstructed the chronology in her head.

  Winston driving up to camp, ostensibly to apologize. The Ranger unlocked, parked in front of the Gatehouse. Gracie’s Search and Rescue uniform hanging behind the driver’s seat, clearly visible through the side window. The lanyard around the hanger, ID stuffed in the breast pocket. Gracie walking down to the maintenance shop for another paint roller, leaving Winston alone in the front yard, steps from her truck.

  Understanding hit her like a brick to the head.

  She hadn’t lost her Search and Rescue ID.

  Winston had taken it and used it to make exact replicas.

  “Fu—,” Gracie started.

  “Ha ha, Gracie!” Baxter said. “You almost used the F-word. You must be really, really mad.”

  “I never needed to use it before.”

  Sheriff’s Department IDs gave the Edwards/Ferguson clan access to the Sheriff’s Office substation.

  Gracie shook her head.

  No. Something larger, more deadly. Like . . .

  Her breath caught in her chest.

  Like a large-incident Command Post.

  The perfect target.

  Firefighters, Command personnel, law enforcement, Search and Rescue, more than a hundred people, all grouped closely together for the morning briefing at 6 a.m.

  Beside her, Baxter pulled a door open. “Hey! This is the tunnel! This is cool!”

  Stepping over, Gracie peered down the dark corridor, tall and narrow, walls built with cement block and lumber, floor hard packed dirt—rough, but reasonably flat. A cool breeze lifted her hair, slightly musty, not altogether unpleasant.

  “I’ve never seen the tunnel before,” Baxter was saying. “I’ve seen where it comes out on the other end.”