"In a word, nowhere yet, but that's about par for the course. I always need to sweet-talk the good ones, and I'm working on that. I may have to go buy some flashier clothes."
"Last time I checked, you looked pretty good in what you've got, Ms. Carol."
"Well, thank you, kind sir. Let's do this: I'll put a key for that gate lock under a rock close by. You'll see it. As soon as you close, then we can write contracts."
"Got it," I said. "I'll let you know when I'm 'in residence' at Laurel Grove."
"No need, Lieutenant. I'll know, probably before you know."
"Jungle drums?"
"You have no idea. How were the crab cakes at the purple house today?"
The next morning I got up with the shepherds and went for a ramble. For some reason the dozers weren't annihilating the old farm this morning, and I wanted to walk the ground where my would-be assassin had set up on my living room. It was a typical subdivision-in-the-making: a moonscape of red dirt, lots of pink-flagged stakes, piles of drainage pipes and concrete forms, and a small mountain of dozer-mangled tree stumps from what used to be a pretty apple orchard. The old farmhouse was long gone, hauled off in dump trucks to fill in someone's blighted suburban ravine.
With all the trees gone, the field of fire from up on that hill was just about unlimited. I could clearly make out the piece of plywood where the window had been and could imagine the trajectory through the study and into my kitchen. It was about a two-hundred-yard shot, which was a piece of cake for a thirty-aught rifle. I found the pile of straw bales they were using for erosion barriers, and there was the bale he'd pulled out to use as a rifle rest. There were footprints in the mud around the bale, but also dozer tracks, loose gravel, and tire prints from a dozen construction vehicles. As a crime scene it was not exactly pristine. I had the shepherds go over the straw bale and then try to do some tracking, but there was just too much other scent up there. Like the cops had said, other than the single cartridge, there was no trail.
I wondered where he might set up if he came back to try it again. There were dense groves of Leyland cypress trees on either side of my property. I had originally bought three lots and forested the ones on either side of my house site. One stand faced the garage; the other, the bedroom side of the house. I took the dogs across the cratered landscape and eased into the bedroom-side grove. I'd planted this grove years ago for privacy, and now the thirty-foot-tall trees meshed their branches in a tight screen. The dogs went scooting under the lower branches, but I had to push my way through the aromatic thicket. Then the dogs stopped and began to sniff around a tiny clearing in the Leyland jungle. One of the trees must have expired long ago, because there was a dent in the ground and space enough for a single human to sit down in the ground cover. The shepherds were telling me that someone had done just that, and as I turned toward my house, I could see another perfect sight line into my bedroom window.
"Find him," I said, and Frick, old supernose, turned into the trees away from my house and started working a scent line. Kitty and I followed her until she led us out to the street, where she went one block and then lost the scent at the curb.
Okay, I thought. He set up two locations, and he's used one. I took the dogs back to the house and placed a call to Billie Ray's parole officer.
Two nights later the shepherds and I waited underneath my back deck. Kitty and Frick were curled up on carpet remnants, and I was sitting in one of those truncated beach chairs. Resting on the wooden latticework that ran along the base of the deck was the twenty-four-inch barrel of my rifle of choice, a Weatherby. 270 Winchester stainless model, equipped with a Specter IR SP 50B Thermal Weapon Sight.
We'd been down there since 8:00 P.M. There was a carefully staged bedroom tableau in the house. I had pulled down the shades on the bedroom window facing the Leyland cypress grove and turned on the television. I'd positioned an easy chair with its back to the window and used the light from the television to silhouette a head-sized helium-filled balloon whose string was safety-pinned to the seat of the chair. Then I'd turned the overhead fan on low. The resulting air movement caused the balloon to move occasionally. From the outside, I hoped, it would look like someone sitting in the chair and watching the tube. I'd dropped the venetian blinds, just to obscure things a bit more, and put a ball cap high and tilted back on the balloon in case he wanted to play warning shot again. I'd obscured the windows into my living room with closed blinds, making any further shooting from the construction site impossible.
The distance between the shooter's hide and my bedroom window was about a hundred yards, maybe a little less. With the help of a milk crate, I could focus my sights on the exact position of the hide without having to hold the rifle, and I scanned it from time to time to see if we had a visitor. I expected one because of a little Kabuki I'd arranged with Arlanda Cole. With Billie Ray sitting in her office, she had faked a phone call that supposedly had me on the other end. The gist of the conversation was such that our suspect would know that I'd be in the house tonight, and then not for some time. If Billie was my shooter, I might get a chance to prove it, assuming he took the bait. She'd had him step outside the office during the phone call but had left the door open so he could hear. I still didn't think it was Breen, but it could well be someone he'd paid to do the deed. I had a thermos of coffee, a trucker's friend, and I was going to play the game until midnight.
He came just after eleven. When I took one of my periodic looks through the scope, there was an IR blob in the tiny clearing that hadn't been there before. I let my eyes relax and then concentrated. I should have been able to see his human form with that night-sight, but I couldn't. That meant he was wearing something thick enough to reduce his heat signature. Still, there was definitely someone there. I unlocked the safety on the rifle, pulled the stock into my shoulder, and settled my finger on the trigger. I thought about calling the cops, but I couldn't be absolutely sure that I, or my scope, wasn't imagining things. The dogs, alerted by my sudden attention to the rifle, woke up and watched me from their beds.
I heard a car coming down the street beyond the trees. It sounded like one of my neighbors pulling into his driveway, confirmed when I heard a garage door rattling up. A passenger jet whispered overhead in the night sky as it descended into TriBoro's airport. I took a deep breath and forced my back and shoulder muscles to relax. I kept looking at that blob of color, then away to clear the image and blink. I looked back, and now there was a change. A beam of green light, no thicker than a pencil lead, was suddenly visible in the center of the shapeless blob. Then there was a bright flash as he fired.
I didn't hesitate. I squeezed the stock harder into my shoulder and fired one back, right below the middle of that green blob, which suddenly disappeared. The shepherds had jumped up with the first shot and got really excited when I fired. I made myself stay on the scope as I jacked another round into the chamber, suddenly conscious of the fact that I was taking shelter behind a flimsy wooden lattice wall. I was getting ready to put a second round up there when I heard a different car start up and accelerate out beyond the trees. My shooter could not have covered the distance between his hide and the street that quickly, which meant he'd had some help. Said help had apparently heard his boy's shot and then mine, no more than a second apart. The shooter's rifle and mine made two distinctly different sounds. The helper had correctly assumed that it might be time to vacate the scene of the crime.
I waited some more, watching the clearing. The blob was still visible in my scope, but it had subtly changed shape, or at least I thought it had. Trouble was, that didn't tell me much. Was he up there, scanning the house for my hiding place with his own night-sight? I moved the rifle back from the lattice about one inch. My night-sight was entirely passive, so, with the lattice, my own heat signature ought to be minimal.
If I'd hit him, nothing more would happen. If he was waiting for me to move and show myself, I wasn't going to accommodate him. Then I remembered my cell phone. I put the rifle b
ack on the milk crate and called the internal operations number at the Manceford County Sheriff's Office, told them who I was, and that I had shots fired at my house. I asked them to come with sound and lights, hoping to make my attacker move, assuming he still could. If he did, I'd set the shepherds loose to take him into custody.
He couldn't move, as it turned out. My single round had hung what was left of his heart on the branches of the tree behind him. The new mystery was that it absolutely wasn't Billie Ray Breen.
I met downtown with the detectives assigned to the case the next morning. They had identified the shooter as a guy who'd been long suspected of being a contract killer over in Charlotte. He was a Guatemalan illegal who'd been in the country for six years. He'd been arrested and turned over to the federal immigration authorities on no less than three different occasions, and yet there he was. His rifle was a plain vanilla hunting gun with all identifying marks long since ground off. When I showed the investigating officers my little balloon rig, with the balloon deflated, by the way, we all made the obvious conclusion. This one hadn't been a warning shot.
Billie Ray, of course, was the prime suspect as the hit man's employer. The detectives had picked him up and put him through a long interview but got nothing of value. I fingered him for the driver of the unseen vehicle, but he had an alibi, again from his current lady-love, and he vigorously denied any connection to the two shootings. They were going to look at his finances, assuming they could find anything recognizable as his finances, but the chances were slim we could pin this on him. The good news, as one of the detectives pointed out, was that, if he'd paid for the hit, he'd probably blown whatever money he did have on this Guatemalan, so unless he turned bank robber or professional sniper, I would probably have some peace and quiet for a while.
Arlanda Cole put him on daily reporting for an additional ninety days, just to complicate his life. She also made arrangements to have him attend the shooter's autopsy. She told him she wanted him to see how contract killings sometimes came out, especially when it came to prison ghosts going up against ex-cops. I ended up doing a morning's worth of paperwork and an interview downtown with an ADA, even though it was pretty clear that I'd been the intended victim in this incident. One of the detectives wanted to bet me that the Guatemalan's live-in girlfriend would be able to exhume a lawyer to bring a wrongful death suit. I wouldn't take that bet.
I got clear of the police bureaucracy at noon and drove up to meet with Carol. I hadn't told her about the two shooting incidents at my Summerfield home, not wanting to color our association with violence before we even got started. I'd seen the police beat reporter for the local city rag hanging out in the lobby when I'd gone in to talk to the ADA, but hopefully whatever he wrote would stay down in TriBoro.
Carol gave me a second key to the gates, along with my first bill-for the gates. I drove over to town and found a local bank so I could open a checking account for operations here in Rockwell County. Then I drove out to Glory's End. The two halves of the black wrought-iron gates fit perfectly on the hinge pins. The complete gate set was sixteen feet wide and about eight feet high in the middle. The padlock keys worked just fine, but I noted that the gates themselves didn't offer much actual security, as anyone could simply drive onto the edge of the open field on either side to get around them. I made a note to hire a backhoe to come out and make that harder. Leaving one half of the gate open, I drove up to the main house and turned the shepherds loose.
Nothing had changed, as best I could tell. A gentle spring breeze was stirring the trees around the house. I could see signs of bulbs sprouting in the garden beds among all the weeds. The view from the porches was very nice: rolling fields, dense greenery down in the river bottoms, and a few thousand trees beginning to swell their tops with a green haze. I heard a vehicle coming up the gravel drive. It turned out to be Sheriff Hodge Walker, rolling in his personal cruiser.
"Saw the gates open, thought I might find you here," he said, getting out of his vehicle. The shepherds greeted him, and he stopped to pet each one. "Heard you resolved your ghost problem the other night."
"After a fashion," I said. "I nailed a shooter, and the weapon was the same one that fired the warning round, but so far we can't tie him to an employer." I told him about the parole officer's little playacting with Billie Ray.
"I'll pulse the Manceford County system, see if we can find out what kind of ride your ghost is drivin' these days," he said. "Get that data up in our patrol division computers. One of my deputies sees your ghost, we'll get you some warning."
"I'd certainly appreciate that," I said. "I don't think he knows about this place, but there's no telling, these days. A deed gets recorded, and a Web search can find it."
"Maybe not quite yet, not in this county," he said with a grin. I remembered the old man down at the courthouse.
We chatted for a few minutes. I gave him my cell phone number and told him I'd be staying across the road in the stone cottage as soon as they got a lease drawn up. He took it all aboard, wished me luck with the restoration project, and left. I went inside the house to look around some more.
Some old houses are spooky by nature. This one wasn't. I think there were simply too many tall windows to give any self-respecting real ghost any privacy. I liked the way the floors had become a little wavy here and there, and I tried to visualize what it would look like with new paint and furnishings. I reminded myself to get all that weird wallpaper off the ceilings. The subground floor was a little more gloomy but smelled pleasantly of a hundred-plus years of fireplace smoke and old wood.
I noticed that the floorboards on the lowest level did not feel as solid as I would have expected. Was there a basement? I went looking, and the shepherds followed me from room to room, sniffing everything. The main kitchen was on this half-underground floor. It was dominated by a huge, nineteenth-century-style walk-in stone fireplace built against the rear wall. Based on the layer of ashes in the grate, it was still operational. The floor was made of random-width pine boards, burnished to a mahogany color by years of use and kitchen spills. The fireplace stuck out into the kitchen a good five feet from back to hearth. It was flanked by pantries on either side. I found what I was looking for in the right-hand pantry-a trapdoor, which I assumed led down into a basement. What surprised me was the bits of fresh mud on the floor and the fact that the crack around the trapdoor was clear of any dust and debris. Someone had been down there, and recently, too. I wondered if it had been Ms. Valeria, on that day when I encountered her in the house.
I pulled up the trapdoor and latched it back against the empty shelves. A set of surprisingly wide wooden steps led down into complete darkness. I looked for a light switch, but there wasn't one. I searched around the kitchen for a flashlight, but the drawers were mostly empty except for some ancient cooking utensils. There was a single, well-used candle in a lead-colored holder in one corner, but no matches that I could find. Glory's End had electricity and relatively modern indoor plumbing, at least in the upstairs floors, but if Valeria had come over here to go into the basement, it was much more likely that she would have matches in her pocket, because candles were a way of life across the way. I fingered the wax at the base of the candle holder to see if it was freshly melted. It told me exactly nothing. The shepherds were looking at me as if to ask, We about through? We saw squirrels out there.
I went back upstairs and out the front door to get a flashlight from my Suburban. I turned the mutts loose to go chase squirrels and went back inside. When I got back downstairs to the kitchen, the candleholder was no longer there.
I stopped and looked around the room. I'd picked it up, felt the wax melted onto the base, and then put it back on the counter. Now it wasn't there.
Oka-a-a-y.
Was someone else in the house? The shepherds would have noticed another human lurking about. I looked around again. I hadn't been gone two minutes, but there was no getting around it-the damned candlestick was gone.
I went over
to the trapdoor, which was still upright, the way I'd left it. I pointed the flashlight down the steps, looking for tracks in the dust, but there weren't any, possibly because there wasn't any dust. That, too, was a bit strange. The steps were made of rough-cut planks, smoothed and even hollowed out slightly in the center by generations of foot traffic. I went down the steps, wondering if I should go back out and get my SIG.
The basement was large, with almost ten-foot ceilings, a hard-packed dirt floor, and heavy, mortared stone foundation walls. It smelled of dust, mildew, and old dirt in equal proportions. There was an expansive but unfortunately empty wine rack down one wall and floor-to-ceiling bare shelves on all the others. There was no plumbing or wiring in evidence, which made sense since the next floor up was itself partially underground. The basement seemed to match the footprint of the main house, and as I swung my light around, I saw what looked like an open grave in the floor, except that it was only three feet deep. I tried to think of what they might have used that for. The shelves would have contained provisions, perhaps, and possibly weapons. There were meat hooks hanging from some of the joists above, which might have accounted for the unusual height. The temperature was cool, and the place seemed to be perfectly dry. The shelves were empty except for a single item: my AWOL candleholder.
I stopped and stared. That candleholder. The one I'd left up in the kitchen when I went out to get a flashlight.
Curiouser and curiouser, I thought. This is about the point where the trapdoor goes bang up there at the top of the steps and I start to hear rattling chains and ghostly cackling. Except nothing happened. No cold vapors, no violins. Just the candlestick sitting there on that shelf, the one that apparently had grown legs.
Obviously someone had been watching me in the kitchen and had moved the candlestick down here while I was outside. The dogs hadn't sensed anyone in the house, which implied that he'd been down here the whole time I'd been in on the lower floor. So he'd been listening or watching from the top of the stairs, heard me go out, went into the kitchen, grabbed the candlestick, and then-what?
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