The cruiser blasted up past the edge of the dam and then headed straight for the cabin. We could only see one person inside the car, and, at the last moment, he swerved to the right and drove the vehicle up onto the lawn in front of the cabin, tearing huge ruts into the soft ground as he got it stopped.
It was definitely Mingo, and the expression on his red face was murderous. Before we had a chance to react, he reached to his right and produced a Bush-master M4. He stuck it out the window and opened fire on the cabin. We all spent the next few seconds getting flat while a hail of gunfire blew out all the windows and reduced the front door to splinters. I yelled at the deputies to get to the back of the cabin, and they made a high-speed crawl through all the racket and flying debris back into the kitchen area and out the door. The shepherds fled into the kitchen with them.
Carrie, like me, was down on the floor taking shelter behind the largest base logs while bullets blew hunks of chinking into white dust all over the room. I glanced behind me and saw Hayes, also on the floor, starting to inch toward the front wall with the shotgun cradled in his arms like an infantryman. An instant later, the shooting stopped, and I chanced a look through one of the bullet holes in the chinking. Mingo was reloading a new magazine, so I took the opportunity to poke the rifle into the hole and take a single snap-shot at the cruiser. I think I hit a nearby tree, but Mingo wasn’t impressed. He brought the Bushmaster back up and we all went back to imitating pancakes. The noise was incredible, and the chinking was filling the room with a choking cloud of white dust. Framed pictures were being blasted off the back walls, and even the dining room chandelier was blown off its ceiling hook. Whatever else happened, this place wouldn’t be waterproof for years.
By the time Mingo got through his second magazine, Hayes had reached one of the front windows. He didn’t hesitate but rose up into a sitting position and let go both barrels at the cop car outside. He rolled away from the window, got two more shells into the gun, and rolled to the remains of the front door, where he stuck the gun through the thoroughly splintered wood and fired two more loads in the general direction of the cruiser. Then he flattened himself behind a two-foot-thick base log just as Mingo opened up again.
I was beginning to wonder just how much damn ammo that crazy bastard had out there, but then realized he’d shifted his aim to that big stone fireplace, because now there were rounds ricocheting all over the interior and there was truly no place to hide. All we could do was to stay down and hope. Then I heard three booming gunshots from the side porch, and the hail of automatic weapons fire stopped suddenly. One of the Big brothers had apparently crawled around the porch and momentarily put Mingo’s head down.
The silence was a pleasant respite. Carrie’s face was dead white, with fear, I thought, until I realized it was chinking plaster. She had her nine in her right hand, but no way to shoot without exposing herself to that Bushmaster. Hayes, on the other hand, was crawling through the crunchy white dust on the floor toward the front door again. Then we heard Mingo yelling something from out front. I was still a little bit deaf from all the shooting, but he was using the loudspeaker from the cruiser.
“Hayes, you weak bastard, this is between you’n me. Tell them other assholes to stay down and get your yella ass out here.”
Hayes kept crawling toward the front door. He held two ready shells in the splayed fingers of his left hand, and for the first time I saw that his head was bleeding. The blood running down his white-dusted face made him look like he’d put on war paint.
Mingo kept yelling more taunts. I tried to figure out where exactly he was. My best guess was that he was down behind his cruiser. Hayes kept crawling.
“What’re you doing?” I asked him.
“You people get out the back,” he said quietly. “I’ll take care of this problem. Keep your eyes peeled-he never goes anywhere alone.”
“You can’t go up against a Bushmaster,” I said, but even as I said it, I knew he could and would. The look on his face said as much, and I realized then that what he had in mind was unofficially called suicide by cop. That worked for me, considering what he’d been party to. I signaled Carrie to start backing away from the front-wall logs toward the kitchen and the back door.
“If you’ve got another shotgun in here, I can cover you,” I offered.
He shook his head. “This is my problem. You go get those kids away from that witch.”
Mingo was shouting some more trash out front, and I was beginning to wonder if he had any more ammo for that M4. Just then one of the Big brothers popped off three more rounds at the cruiser from the other side porch and received an impressive blast of automatic fire in response. It sounded like the rounds were chain-sawing the corner-overlap logs out on the front porch. And the answer is-why, yes, he does. The world’s supply, apparently.
Hayes had stopped crawling across the floor and was pulling the edges of the front-hall rug back, revealing a trapdoor in the floor. He looked over at me and jerked his head toward the kitchen. Carrie was already halfway there, so I cradled my rifle and started moving back. I had to leave the spotting scope. Hayes was disappearing down into the crawl space below the cabin as Carrie and I made it to the back door. Mingo fired another burst at the front of the cabin and yelled more obscenities. By the time the rounds reached the kitchen area they were flying high, but the air was still pretty thick with bullets. They’re not big bullets-. 223 Remington-but they are propelled by a powder cartridge that’s about a half mile long, so when they come, they come seriously energized.
Carrie and the shepherds slipped out the back door and down the back steps, putting as much of the stone foundation between them and the nutcase out front as they could. I went sideways along the back porch until I could signal the deputies, who backed away from their positions at the porch corners. I was really glad they were along for this little adventure, both as witnesses and shooters. We gathered at the back steps, staying down at the level of the foundation, trying to keep the stone steps between us and the hillside where Mingo had put shooters earlier.
Using the rifle scope, I began to scan the tree lines behind us, looking for his backup, although I didn’t think he’d brought any this time. His little posse of assassins might still be waiting down on the dirt road for the gunfight at the OK Corral to be done with. We could hear Mingo still ranting away on the loudspeaker, but nothing from Sheriff Hayes. I told the Bigs that Hayes had gone down a hole into the crawl space.
“What’s the plan, Stan?” Carrie asked me, taking her own nervous look around at the surrounding hills. This cabin had not exactly been situated in a defensive position. The woods came down to within a hundred feet of the steps, directly behind us, and that was the obvious way out.
“I’ve got the rifle,” I said. “You guys and the dogs make a run for that tree line. If there’s a black hat up there, I’ll deal with him. Keep the cabin between you and Mingo’s sight line.”
Then we heard the cruiser’s engine crank up. It sounded like he was backing up. “Change one,” I said, and the four of us bolted around to the left side of the cabin as we heard Mingo put it in drive and gun the cruiser around to the right side of the cabin, where he proceeded to let go a blast of enfilading automatic weapons fire through the side windows this time. We gathered at the left front corner of the cabin, still trying to keep as much of the structure as possible between us and that Bushmaster. Then he gunned the cruiser again, swerving it around to the back of the cabin.
“The dam!” I yelled, and we took off on a dead run down the front yard, tripping over all the tire ruts in the lawn, until we made it to the dam and slid down the grassy face. We could hear Mingo yelling over that damned loudspeaker and then firing some more into the house as he drove around it like an enraged Apache. I felt naked out there on that exposed face of the dam, especially if Mingo’s guys were down there in the trees below us, but at the moment there was nowhere else to hide. As long as Mingo stayed focused on the cabin, we’d be relatively safe.
I glanced at the deputies, who were calmly reloading their clips. Big Luke saw me looking and grinned; the big galoot was enjoying all this. Then we finally heard Hayes yell something from inside the cabin. I crawled back up to the top edge of the embankment.
Mingo had somehow managed to turn the cruiser around so that it was facing the backyard on what from our current position was the right side of the cabin. He had the Bushmaster stuck out the window, and I could hear him slam another magazine into it as I watched. He yelled back at Hayes, and then I saw, down low on the ground and behind some shrubbery, the double barrels of Hayes’s shotgun sliding slowly out a hole in the foundation, pointing up at about a ten-degree angle. Mingo couldn’t see it because he was busy leaning out the driver’s window and firing another burst into the side windows of the cabin. Those black barrels kept emerging, now pushing through the bush itself. Mingo stopped firing and was reaching for the speaker mike when the shotgun let go.
At a range of no more than twenty feet, I could see the loads punch two big, dimpled, dinner-plate-sized holes in the door. Mingo was knocked sideways back into the car, taking the carbine with him. The shotgun barrels tipped momentarily, leveled, and then Hayes fired again, lower this time, punching two more lethal-looking, multiple-holed indentations into the door panel. I actually saw upholstery explode inside the cruiser. Something dark sprayed all over the inside of the windshield.
The other three had poked their heads up when they heard the shotgun. Hayes pulled the shotgun back into the crawl space, and the sudden silence made me nervous. We could smell the gunsmoke drifting down across the front lawn. Mingo still had that Bushmaster in there, even if he was probably wounded. I became aware that we were clustered very close together. The last light of evening was dwindling fast, but our little band made much too good a target.
“Spread out,” I said. “In fact, why don’t you guys move across the dam and into those trees in case he’s got a rifleman down there behind us.” The deputies moved immediately, probably glad to head for some cover.
Carrie stayed put. “What are you going to do?” she asked. Damned woman just couldn’t take orders.
“I’m going to keep this rifle on the car until Hayes shows himself,” I said. “Mingo may be playing possum.”
“Why?” she asked. “A little while ago you were ready to help Hayes kill himself.”
“Still am,” I said, watching carefully for any signs of Hayes. It was getting hard to see anything up by the cabin. “But I think he wants to take his ex-partner there with him, and I’m in favor of that.”
“Cam,” she began, but I cut her off.
“Hey, Carrie: What we need now is not to get surprised from behind-that’s where Mingo’s people went, remember? Let me work this situation, and you make sure no one is setting up on us.”
“You shoot either one of those duly elected sheriffs, it’ll be a whole new ball game,” she warned.
“I know that,” I said. “Now, please-get back under cover. Look: Hayes is coming out.”
She peeped over the rim of the dam and saw the sheriff crouching by the corner nearest the back porch, which put him in front of the cruiser. I couldn’t see anyone in the cruiser, and obviously neither could he. He carried the shotgun low and pointed at the car. Carrie slid back down to make sure she was out of the possible line of fire and duckwalked across the face of the dam to join the deputies. I moved left to the swale where the dam intersected the front lawn and then set myself down into the prone position. I made sure my rifle barrel went up into the air before settling in on the cruiser, so that Hayes would know I was out there. He stopped for a moment when I made the move, but then continued his creep toward Mingo’s cruiser. There was a long cone of shadow in front of the cabin.
I scanned the vehicle through my rifle scope. It was getting dark fast, but that definitely looked like blood on the windshield. There was no visible sign of Mingo. I assumed he was either down in the front seat or perhaps in the space between the seat and the dashboard.
You’d think I’d learn something about making assumptions, because what occurred next happened in a blur. Somehow Mingo had managed to get into the backseat of the cruiser. The moment Hayes arrived at the driver’s-side window, stood up, and looked in, Mingo rose up in the backseat and shot him three times in the chest with a black handgun that produced quite a muzzle flash. Hayes sat down on the ground with a painful grunt and a stunned expression on his face. Mingo popped the left rear door open and started out to finish the job. I settled my rifle on him, but that was when Hayes let go both barrels of the shotgun through said door and blew Mingo ten feet backward into the grass. Based on the angle of his neck as he lay motionless on the ground, he’d been dead before he landed. All my efforts to keep the fight even had been overtaken in about three seconds of gunfire.
I got up and trotted over to the cruiser, rifle at the ready, pausing only momentarily next to Mingo’s body to make sure he wasn’t acting like far too many snakes I thought I’d killed. When I saw the bloody crater in his lower abdomen, I stopped worrying about M. C. Mingo. Sheriff Hayes, on the other hand, was not dead when I got to him, but he was definitely preparing to depart this vale of tears. I knelt down beside him, trying not to put my knees in all the blood literally pouring out of him. He focused his eyes on me and blinked several times.
“Never knew,” he whispered.
I waited.
“Never knew she was selling them.”
“Yeah, that’s what we figured,” I told him, trying to give him some small comfort now that he was about to die.
“Took the money, though,” he said, and coughed. It made an ugly, wet sound in his throat. I heard Carrie coming up behind me. She stopped at Mingo’s inert form.
“Why?” I asked.
“In-surance ran out before Helen’s cancer did,” he said. “All for nothing. She isn’t going to make it.”
“We’ll tell her this was line of duty,” I said. “She doesn’t need to know the rest.”
He gave me a grateful look in the dim twilight and tried to reply, but then he coughed again and went slack. I stood up slowly. Once the SBI or even the FBI got into it, the whole horrible deal would come out, but maybe there was a way we could shield the widow, especially if she was terminal.
“He’s alive,” Carrie said, and I whirled around, pointing my rifle down at Mingo across the yard.
“No way,” I muttered, but she was kneeling down beside him, her back to me. Then, to my astonishment, she suddenly hauled back and slapped his face as hard as she could.
“Carrie!” I yelled, but she was fixed on Mingo’s pasty face. By the time I got there, he had one eye open and an evil sneer on his face. I stared down at him with disgust, trying not to look at what was uncoiling out of his abdomen.
“He admitted killing my father and taking my sister,” Carrie spat, her fists clenched.
“And now he sells little girls into a lifetime of slavery,” I said. “A true life of accomplishment.”
“Wrong,” Mingo croaked, revealing bloody teeth. “Better.”
“What!” Carrie shouted. But Mingo’s eyes rolled up and this time he was really gone. I pulled her away before she lost it again. There were tears in her eyes, and not for the first time I remembered the old rule about being careful what you go looking for.
“Let’s go,” I said. I wanted to hold her, but she was much too angry for consolation. “His people may come back now that the shooting’s stopped.”
I could see the Bigs standing up now at the other end of the dam. I pointed my finger at Hayes and then made a thumbs-down sign, and did the same thing with Mingo. I collected Hayes’s shotgun and some extra shells from his pocket and then signaled for the deputies to come back to the cabin. I went back inside and retrieved my scope, while Carrie got her coat.
The brothers stood there around Hayes and Mingo for a few minutes, surveying the carnage in the grass. Carrie had walked over to the edge of the pond and was staring at nothing.
John had retrieved the Bushmaster. It was a variant I hadn’t seen before, with a flat folding stock and, of course, the modification to make it go full auto. The muzzle brake still looked too hot to touch.
“Reckon we should call this in,” Luke said, indicating the two dead men. John looked over at me.
“If we do,” I said, “Grinny Creigh will get word and she’ll know someone’s coming for her. We’d have no chance of rescuing those kids.”
Carrie walked back, looking hopefully at the lighted panel of her cell phone, but then she put it away with a disgusted sound.
“Cain’t just leave ’em here like this,” Luke said. “Ain’t right. Meat birds’ll be on ’em directly the sun comes up. Them’n the night dogs.”
That was a lovely thought, and he was right: We couldn’t just leave them to the scavengers. I told the brothers that I thought they should make the report, but make it to their supervisors back in Carrigan County. Then they should stay there at Hayes’s place and await the first responders.
“You’re still both technically sworn officers in Carrigan County,” I told them. “This is your duty. Let your bosses call Robbins County, but this way, you’ll be at the scene so none of Mingo’s people can sneak back and screw things up here.”
“They may be out there now, just waiting for us to leave,” Carrie pointed out.
“Okay, so you and I will leave,” I said. “Once the brothers here get on their radio, the black hats will fade away into the woods, assuming they haven’t already done that.”
“Why wouldn’t they come back and check?”
“Because I told that one guy we had a squad of machine guns up here. That’s exactly what they heard.”
“Once someone calls Robbins County, Grinny Creigh’s going to know,” Carrie said. “Live kids are going to become a real liability to the Creighs.”
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