by Rose Beecham
He had thought everything would be different if he moved to a place where no one knew him and no one would ever hear about his humiliations in high school. He didn’t stutter anymore; he’d spent a year curing himself of that before he went to the police academy. Yet he wondered if people still heard some trace of his speech defect. He spoke slowly and sang any complicated sentences in his head first, but sometimes he caught them staring at him all weird or smirking when they thought he couldn’t see. He never knew if it was his imagination or not.
He felt his hand pulled away from his ribs and Jude poured some medical-smelling fluid into his wound, then taped gauze over it front and back. She sat him up and wrapped a bandage around his middle, saying, “I want your abs, pal.”
Tulley laughed then winced, and Jude ran a gentle hand over his hair, moving it back off his face with the absent-minded tenderness of a mom like the ones on TV. The gesture took him by surprise.
“I’m real sorry to have put you in harm’s way, Detective. You shouldn’t have rescued me like that.”
She said, “Jesus, Tulley, I was rescuing myself. I just happened to haul your ass out of there at the same time.”
He looked at her damaged neck again. It was even more purple. “What happened in the barn?”
“I met Hyrum.”
“Mr. Snaggletooth?” Tulley wished he could go see.
“Otherwise known as the deceased.” She looked at his leg wound but let it be, then took his pulse.
“You took him out?”
“He got up close and personal. I don’t appreciate that in any man, let alone one who stank like him.”
Tulley wanted to say something about the attempted strangulation that wasn’t insulting. Obviously she was sensitive about what had happened and was playing it down. Her pride was at stake, he thought. Best thing he could do was make like it was no big deal.
Cheerfully, he said, “Guess the dust was the last thing that mutant’ll be biting.”
This drew one of her rare smiles. “Think you can walk to the truck?”
*
“Sounded like gunshots,” Adeline said.
They both hung out of the cave mouth and stared around the valley. The figures they’d seen drawing closer that morning had retreated to the ranch a few hours back. Daniel said maybe they’d given up, but Adeline wasn’t so sure. In the distance she could make out the same cluster of vehicles parked in the Epperson’s yard. No one had gone home. Maybe they were just resting up in the heat of the day.
“You want to get going?” Daniel asked.
Adeline had been trying to decide whether this was the time to make their move. They couldn’t stay in the cave forever with Daniel’s leg the way it was. But it would be crazy to leave if the searchers were going to come back at any moment.
“If they don’t come back, we’ll leave tomorrow morning,” she said.
“Where will we go?”
“We have to find a road. Then we’ll follow it north and when we’re clear of this place, we’ll hitch a ride.”
Daniel looked uncertain. “Everyone’s looking for us.”
“Everyone’s looking for me. A girl. Two boys trying to get a ride out of this place—you think they’ll try and stop us? I doubt it.”
Several more of the distinctive cracks sounded in the distance and Daniel said, “I reckon they’re coming from the ranch. Look, there’s lights flashing.” He pointed slightly away from the house.
“They’ve called the cops.” Adeline said, shocked.
“Go!” Daniel urged. “I’ll stay here and when they find me I’ll tell them we split up and you went the other way.”
She tried to decide. Without Daniel slowing her down she could probably hike ten miles by nightfall. She had no idea how far they were from the road she’d traveled along a week ago, but it couldn’t be more than a couple of days’ walk. But what if the police didn’t find Daniel? What if he waited another day, then tried to make it out of here alone?
“Let’s wait and see what happens.” She shielded her eyes against the light. If old man Epperson had called in the cops to look for her, why weren’t they out here already? Why were they parked away from the house with their lights flashing? Who was shooting?
She had an idea. “I think there’s something going on down there. Maybe I’ll go see.”
“Are you crazy?”
She fidgeted with the pocketknife. He was right. It was a dumb idea. “I had my own cell phone when I lived with Aunt Chastity,” she said, knowing he’d be impressed. Women and kids weren’t allowed to use phones in any plyg family she knew. “My daddy took it off me when they brought me back here. Wish I had it now.”
She slid back down into the cave and worked open a can of beans with the attachment on Daniel’s knife. She was about to discard the lid when a shaft of light hit the metal and beamed onto the rear wall of the cave. Adeline stared at the illuminated spot, then wiped the lid clean and placed it on the cloth bundle that held her most important possessions. Once she and Daniel started their long hike, they would need a way to signal one another if they got separated for any reason. That was something else she’d learned from Aunt Chastity. A tin can lid could act like a mirror. She scavenged the litter pile in the corner of their hideaway and located another one.
As she cleaned it off, Daniel moved gingerly down from the lip of the cave and settled on the cool rock next to her. They shared the can of beans in silence.
Adeline couldn’t stop thinking about her phone. It was the obvious answer to their problems. How come she hadn’t thought about it sooner? Irritated, she mumbled, “I am so dumb.”
Daniel said, “What?”
“We don’t have to hitch rides all the way to Salt Lake City. All we have to do is find a phone and call Aunt Chastity, and she’ll come pick us up!”
Daniel’s forehead crumpled into a puzzled frown like this was a really bizarre idea. “Where can we find one?”
“I don’t know, but I need to go see.”
Daniel’s expression grew nervous. “You want me to wait here?”
She took his hand. “I promise I’ll come back for you. Okay?”
“Take the knife.”
“No. You need it to open cans.” Adeline assessed their dwindling water supply. “You remember how to get water from the dew?”
He nodded, and she took their last full bottle, leaving him with one that had enough in it to get him through the night. She packed the water in her cloth kit along with a few eggs she’d left out in the sun to cook inside their shells the day before. Then she started back up to the cave mouth.
“Good luck,” Daniel called after her.
He sounded so worried, she stopped and turned around. He was crying, his hands over his face. Adeline put her kit down and went back over to kneel next to him.
It was forbidden to hug a boy, but she held him tight anyway and said, “When all this is over, we’ll have as much food as we can eat and we’ll get to sleep in beds with soft pillows made of feathers.”
He drooped against her, making her shoulder moist. “I’ll pray for you.”
Adeline wished she could feel comforted by that, but she knew it wasn’t God who was going to save her. She had to do that for herself.
Chapter Thirteen
After Gonzales drove off with Tulley, Jude stowed the evidence in a cooler in the back of Gossett’s truck, climbed into the passenger seat and retrieved the spare MP5 from behind it. She and the sergeant shut their doors, hit the aircon, and sat in silence as the adrenaline tide washed out.
“You better get those bites seen to,” Gossett said after a time. “They give you a rabies shot when the biter’s human?”
“Right now, I’m more interested in morphine.” Jude studied the painful dentition on her shoulder. It looked like a pretty good match for the marks on Darlene’s swollen body. “Could you take a photograph of this, Gossett?”
Not that it mattered anymore. Hyrum wouldn’t be standing trial. Even if he
had lived, he would have been found mentally incompetent; she was certain of that. But he could have led them to the murder scene and given his version of events. He could have testified against Nathaniel Epperson, and any jury would have been able to draw some conclusions about a man who had never sought medical help for his disturbed son and had instead used him as an attack dog.
Again Jude berated herself for failing to take appropriate precautions. What in hell was wrong with her? It was not like she hadn’t added two and two the moment she set eyes on the drooling hunchback. He was obviously the man who had semi-cannibalized Darlene. Did she think he was going to behave rationally and allow her to cuff him without putting up a fight? Had she lost her edge living in the slow lane—playing the part of a small-town sheriff’s detective, was she now thinking like one?
No, Jude realized. She had pitied Hyrum. She had seen a tortured soul and for a lethal split second she had thought: what if it were Ben? Angry with herself, she located her viscera-coated shirt and fished around in the breast pocket, retrieving the small Olympus camera she kept there. Gossett aimed it at her shoulder. Incredibly, it still took photos after its baptism in blood.
He said, “Want the one on your leg, too?”
“Sure. Why not.” Jude ripped her pants away a little more and held her leg where he could get an angle on the wound.
“Make sure they test for HIV,” he advised after handing the camera back. “You look like you partied with a vampire.”
“Sure feels like it.” She opened her cell phone and bleakly reviewed her options. It was time to call Sheriff Pratt and fill him in on the good news that the case was pretty well solved. Admittedly, she had killed one of the lead suspects, almost lost a deputy, and was now involved in an armed standoff, but hey!
Jude winced as she pulled her T-shirt sleeve back over her shoulder. Maybe she should put off talking to Pratt until after they’d notified the FBI.
Gossett read her mind. “What do you reckon? Time to bring in the big guns?”
She nodded. “Want to make the call?”
They would need to follow protocol and go through Kingman. She could just imagine how that was going to play out. A couple of Colorado cops show up and cause all kinds of trouble then head home, squeaky clean, leaving the Mohave County Sheriff to take the media heat and explain himself to the Utah cadre after calling in the FBI. This was exactly the kind of potential career-destroyer no cop in his right mind wanted to deal with.
Reading Gossett’s faint hesitation, she said, “We can’t delay until the TOU gets here. These people aren’t going to play by the rulebook.”
Gossett picked up the radio. “One thing I don’t understand. What the heck is it about religion that makes people pull this crazy shit?”
“Answer that, and they’ll give you the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Jude wondered how long it would take Gonzalez to get to the hospital. She wished she could have gone, but Tulley’s wounds were not critical and she could not leave Gossett here to deal with a problem that was largely of her making. She had to call Pratt. But first, she would need to speak with her FBI handler.
“I need to make a call,” she told Gossett and cautiously got out of the truck, heading for the deep shadows behind the barn. A few yards from the vehicle, she crouched down with her back to the wall of the building and rehearsed a calm statement as she dialed.
Her contact said, “What’s happening?”
“It’s coming down.”
“Utah?”
“Yeah. It’s a standoff. Subjects barricaded in a domestic dwelling. Maybe twenty armed adults plus an unknown number of civilian women and children.”
“Who’s dealing?”
“We’re calling in federal support now.”
A faint pause. “Get your ass out of there.”
“Sir, I can’t leave until support arrives. We only have five officers present.”
“Copy that. But Hawke watches TV. As soon as the situation is under control, you’re back in Paradox.”
“Got you.”
There was no way Harrison Hawke would take her to his saggy bosom if he thought she was involved in an operation like this. At the first sniff of another Waco, he and his buddies would be wetting themselves in anticipation of a federal government screw-up. Surrounding the home of some white, Christian patriots who were merely exercising their constitutional right to bear arms and exercise religious freedom was an act of tyranny and treason as far as the Aryan nation was concerned.
She said, “I’ll lay low and keep you apprised of any developments. Can we run some interference?”
“Got it covered.”
Jude let go of the shallow breath she’d held too long. Her masters would see to it that her name never hit a newspaper. The sheriff at Kingman would receive some mysterious orders and instruct Gossett accordingly. So long as she didn’t get her face splattered across the TV screen, she could slide out from under this with her cover intact and her disheartened ex-fed story unblemished.
As she signed off, she realized this mattered to her. She didn’t want to leave Paradox. She’d invested a year in this surveillance op and things were getting interesting. The FBI could no longer check the names of gun purchasers against terror watch lists thanks to changes that pandered to the gun lobby—one of the major success stories in the white militia movement. Thanks to former Attorney General John Ashcroft, sales records for guns were not kept for ninety days anymore; they were now pegged at a laughable twenty-four hours. So much for national security.
Despite this hurdle, the team investigating Hawke had tied him, via Internet transactions, to the purchase of twenty semiautomatic 82A1 rifles. The Barrett .50 caliber battlefield weapon was in a class by itself. David Koresh had turned one on the FBI at Waco. The sucker had a 2,000 yard range and, even using standard ball ammo, it could take out a vehicle and destroy an aircraft with a single well-placed hit.
In their wisdom, the authorities treated these as hunting rifles, so Hawke’s purchase was not illegal, merely suspicious. What would anyone want with a stack of BMG armor-piercing sniper rifles? Hawke had never so much as hunted a chicken, unless you counted his midnight drives to the KFC in Montrose. There was nothing unusual about a neo-Nazi hoarding weapons. What had the Bureau interested was the nature and quantity of Hawke’s purchases, and how they were being funded. They were now almost certain Saudi money was involved, top-secret intelligence that could see their investigation shut down.
Disturbing whispers of links between extreme right militias and Islamic terrorists were growing louder. Since 9/11 several neo-Nazi websites had listed links to Islamic sites, and the American Front and a few other hate groups had lauded Osama bin Laden as an enemy of Zionism. To complicate matters, the dangerous Central American crime gang the Mara Salvatrucha was thought to be smuggling al Qaeda operatives into the U.S. from across the Mexican border. A few intelligence reports were suggesting neo-Nazi involvement in hiding these sleepers.
Over the past several months, Hawke had been trying to obtain illegal Raufoss high-explosive rounds, and Jude’s masters were now toying with the concept of a sting operation. First, they wanted to know what he was up to. If he had a target in mind and had started planning, there were probably other domestic terrorists involved. They could not risk shutting him down before they knew enough to thwart the attack.
Jude wanted to see this one out. She also wanted to put some roots down. Having cut herself adrift from her past, she felt strangely unanchored, yet out here, far from the world she had once inhabited, she could also breathe easier, and she wanted to stay awhile.
There was also Mercy. She rejected the thought instantly. Mercy was not a consideration. None of her casual encounters had ever figured into her thinking and Mercy Westmoreland was no exception. They were two adults who had engaged in a mutually gratifying physical transaction. Period. There was no relationship, and no pretense that the desire for one existed. They would never be more to each other than occas
ional sexual partners. Mercy had made that abundantly clear and Jude appreciated her honesty. In a situation like theirs it was important to be on the same page or someone could get hurt.
She swapped to her work cell phone and fortified herself with rationalizations in readiness for her next call. She had nothing to apologize for. They’d found Darlene’s killer and had evidence that would hopefully tie him to the crime. All she had to do now was bring him in. Admittedly that might require the National Guard, but in the end, Sheriff Pratt would be able to look Clem Huntsberger in the eye, just like he wanted.
She hit her speed dial and told herself to keep her cool. Pratt was not going to be happy about one of his deputies getting wounded and that was understandable. Jude wasn’t happy either. He was also going to hear from her boss and that would make him jumpy. Jude decided to give him a heads-up about that, so he wouldn’t be taken by surprise.
“Jude?” The voice was not Pratt’s.
“Mercy?” Jude lowered her phone and stared at the pad. She must have mis-keyed. “I’m sorry. I meant to call the sheriff.”
“He can wait. It’s good to hear from you. Are you still in Utah?”
“Yes.”
“Any progress?”
“One arrest. One dead. And Deputy Tulley is wounded.”
“Damn. Is he okay? Are you okay?”
“He’s going to be fine. He took one in the leg and one in the side. Both bullets exited.”
“You must be feeling like shit.”
Jude didn’t want to go down that track in case she burst into tears like a rookie. She glanced across at the truck. Gossett was still talking into his radio. “How are things with you?”
