by P. J. Tracy
He'd written up only two tickets in eight hours-one for a burned-out taillight on a '56 pickup, and another for a rusted-out Grand Prix pushing forty in Gill Lake's twenty-mile-per-hour zone. Lord, no wonder Wisconsin cops had a reputation for nuisance tickets. Unless you were highway patrol on the interstate, there wasn't a whole hell of a lot else to do. Thank God.
He eased back when he felt the lap belt press against his stomach. Never used to do that, he thought, patting the belly that had been rising like a loaf of Paula's bread ever since he married her last year. He was going to have to start the nightly sit-ups again, get himself back in some kind of shape before he had to endure the humiliation of moving up to a larger uniform size.
He yawned and rubbed at the black stubble sprouting from his chin, wondering what Paula had waiting for their late supper tonight. Who knew that a Phi Beta Kappa with about a million med schools vying for her favor would turn into a gourmet chef? For that matter, who would expect that a drop-dead looker with that kind of future would choose to put everything on hold while she took a year or two to be the stay-at-home wife of some bumpkin cop with a size-forty-eight shirt and a size-six hat? Lee figured he was about the luckiest man in the world, and then some.
He slowed the cruiser at the intersection of Double-P, then, at the last minute, decided to turn south. He automatically looked up and down the black crossroads, even though traffic on this stretch was as scarce as hen's teeth. It weaved in and out of the edge of the state forest, and basically, you could go nowhere in either direction. With only four cars per shift and hundreds of miles of roads to cover, trouble-free roads like this one rarely saw a patrol. But a trouble-free road was exactly what Lee was looking for tonight. Officially off duty for the last seven minutes, the last thing he wanted was to come across anything that would interrupt a straight run home.
Twenty miles to Paula's arms, he thought, smiling. He had to concentrate to keep his foot light on the accelerator and his eyes busy on the far edge of the headlight beams. The deer were everywhere this far north, and they thought they owned the roads.
Too bad he hadn't spotted the Range Rover. It hadn't been an official call, really-just nosy Dorothy at dispatch, eavesdropping earlier this evening on the highway patrol frequency, passing along some poor bastard's worry about a car full of rich women-surely rich, because the Rover was out of Minneapolis, pretty new and pretty pricey. Lee liked stopping Minnesotans, with their tough cars and city attitudes. He might be a county deputy living in the sticks, but he had theticket book and the authority, and in a way he knew wasn't healthy, that made him feel better about himself.
He eased up on the accelerator and frowned. Yellow lights were flashing through the trees up ahead on the left, and there was no reason in the world for them to be there.
His headlights caught the black cross on a yellow intersection sign, and his frown deepened as he drew close enough to see the barrier blocking the narrow strip of asphalt on his left.
It was rare enough to see highway-maintenance crews up in this neck of the woods-the most wear these roads ever got came from deer crossing from one side to the other-but to see a road closed overnight was damn near unbelievable, especially a narrow little country road like the one that passed through Four Corners. Hell, he could probably repave the full length of it in a single day all by himself-with a teaspoon and a tar bucket.
He slowed to a crawl as he neared the intersection and squinted out his window, puzzled. There should have been some kind of a detour sign on the highway, and the boys at County Highway knew that. He shook his head and clucked his tongue, then cranked the wheel left. The headlights glared on the barrier's reflective paint and nearly blinded him as he braked a few feet back from the blinking yellow lights.
He shoved the gearshift into park and let the car idle while he tried to squint past the light. No highway equipment that he could see, no signs explaining the barrier. And now that he thought about it, it wasn't one of those fence-like barriers the county always used; it was just painted sawhorses stretched across the road, battery-operated lights jury-rigged to the tops, and no room on either side for local traffic.
He sagged back in the seat to puzzle it out, wrists draped over the top of the steering wheel. Finally, he reached for the clipboard to make a note to call Dorothy when he got home and ask if she knew what the hell was going on. . . .
"Sir?"
"Jee-zuz!"Lee gasped, dropping the clipboard and spinning his head toward his open window. His heart rate doubled within the space of a second. A man was standing there, right next to the car, and Lee hadn't heard so much as the scuff of a boot on asphalt.
"Sorry, sir. Didn't mean to startle you. Deputy ... ?"
"Lee, goddamnit! And where the hell did you come from?" he bellowed furiously. Damn. He hadn't been surprised like this since his older brother had popped out of his black closet and scared the shit out of him when he was eleven.
"Glad you're here, Deputy Lee. We were beginning to wonder if anyone was ever going to respond to our call...."
"What call? What the hell are you talking about? I didn't get any call." Then Lee colored a little, remembering that he'd been in one of the county's infamous dead zones since he'd left Gill Lake, twisting around the roads that dipped through the northern hills that played havoc with straight radio transmissions. "Shit," he muttered, then squinted up at the man's face, trying to make out his features in the reflected glow of the dashboard lights. He'd already seen the camouflage fatigues, the familiar shape of a field cap . ..Jesus Christ. Was that an M16? What the hell?
"I don't understand, sir. Your dispatch didn't send you?"
Lee moved his hand to unsnap his seat belt slowly. "Dispatch didn't send me anywhere. I'm off duty, on my way home, just stopped to see what the roadblock was for. Now what the hell is going on here, and who the hell are you?"
The man's brow furrowed. "I don't understand. We called the highway patrol some time ago.. .."
"Sheriff's Office and the patrol don't always automatically share calls up here. Besides, I've been off the air for the past half hour."
"Well, that explains it, I guess." The man nodded. "But I'm still glad you're here. We're on a blackout weekend maneuver up here___"
"Who's 'we'?"
"National Guard, sir."
Deputy Lee took a breath and relaxed a little.
"And about forty minutes ago, a dark blue Dodge Ram blasted through our roadblock doing about eighty, and when one of our men fired a warning shot, the passenger fired back. Shotgun, we think."
Lee closed his eyes and shook his head. Some out-of-season deer-shiner with too many beers in his belly and too many shells in the chamber taking on the U.S. National Guard. "You get a plate?"
"No, sir. He was moving too fast, and to tell you the truth, he had us pretty shook up. We have to assume he was shooting live ammo."
Lee eyed the man's weapon. "Shotgun or no, I'll bet he wasn't as armed as you are."
The man looked down at his rifle with a rueful shake of his head. "Blank cartridges, sir. They don't issue live ammo for weekend maneuvers."
Lee released a sigh of relief. "I suppose not."
"But he went straight out of here and down that way." He pointed south, the direction Lee had been headed anyway. "The Colonel would sure like to see a man who shoots at U.S, troops in custody."
Lee grabbed his clipboard, unsnapped his holster as he did whenever he left the car, and opened the door with a jerk, oddly pleased when the young soldier had to scramble back out of the way. He took another step back when Lee climbed out and stood upright, facing him. Six-foot-four and built like a linebacker, he towered over most men, this one included. He rested his hand on the grip of his nine, just for effect, and kept it there.
"Uh .. , aren't you going to go after him, sir?"
"In a minute. You know how it is. Seems I'm back on the clock, and I'm going to need a little information before I call this in. You saw the truck?"
"I did.
"
"Good. In the meantime, call whoever's in charge of this little show-Colonel, you said?"
"That's affirmative."
"Well, call him on up here so I can get some kind of confirmation."
The soldier stared at him for a moment. He was young, Lee noticed, and he looked scared to death. Probably some accountant from Wausau who never in a million years had actually expected to get shot at. "We appreciate that, sir."
Lee turned his back and reached through the open window of the car to turn off the ignition. When he tipped his head inside the car, he swore he could smell the stick of peppermint gum in the glove box and the oil on the muzzle of the shotgun on the rack above the cage. He heard the irregular breathing of the young soldier behind him. . ..
Just as his fingers brushed the key, he saw . . , something. A reflection in the closed passenger window, moving too slowly, too purposefully, and suddenly he remembered things that had seemed silly at the time. Academy runs, slinking through the darkened training house where cardboard gunmen popped out of every doorway or dropped from the ceiling and your heart beat so hard that your chest wall ached for days afterward. . . .
His head and his hand remembered those days like they were five minutes ago, which surprised him a little. He spun sideways, flinging his back against the door frame just as the report of the M16 exploded in his ears. His nine-millimeter was in his hand long before his brain would have thought to initiate the gesture, and then he had a split-second image of the young soldier standing there with the muzzle of the rifle leveled at Lee's head, and then there was another gunshot, so close on the heels of the first that they blurred together.
For a moment that seemed to stretch into eternity, Deputy Lee and the young soldier stared at each other in disbelief. Then Lee gaped down in horror as the soldier sank slowly to the pavement, a black-red circle spreading on his chest. The M16 clattered uselessly to the asphalt.
"Jesus," Lee muttered stupidly, unable to tear his eyes away. "Jesus." The muzzle of his nine dropped toward the ground.
"Becker!"
The hiss came from the trees on the left side of the road, and as instinctively as Lee had spun and drawn his weapon and fired his first shot into the young soldier's chest, he sprinted around to the other side of the car. A bullet kicked up stones from the road just behind him, then another zinged by his left ear with a whining whistle. He ducked down next to the car and reached for the door handle as a volley of shots hit the pavement just behind him. Lee didn't believe for one minute that they were blanks.
He dashed down the berm into the forest, blood streaming from where the young soldier's first shot had grazed the side of his head.
BONAR WALKED into the Hunter's Inn, spied Halloran hunched over in a back booth, and made a beeline for him, he slid into the cracked vinyl seat with a heavy sigh. He looked every minute of the long day they'd put in so far. "Okay. I sent the prints for our bodies off to that Roadrunner character and moved all the stuff you wanted into my ride, but why you want to drive all over the north woods in a 'sixty-nine Camaro is beyond me."
Halloran tapped the eraser of a stubby pencil on the map he'd been studying. "We're going to meet up with Magozzi and the rest of them at Hamilton, right?"
"Right. I figured we'd pop down to the state highway and make some good time, but you know darn well the Camaro's Smokey bait. They wouldn't stop us in the county SUV. If we kept the lights going, we'd have clear sailing."
Halloran leaned back and rubbed at his eyes. "We've got about a half an hour on Magozzi's crew. Thought we'd take the northern route."
Bonar worked his thick eyebrows halfway up his forehead. "Through Missaqua County?"
"Might as well take a look-see on our way. If the Feds are hot enough to pull Ed Pitala's patrols off the road, I'm guessing they'll have some blocks set up to stop any other cops that might wander in. Civilian traffic is another thing. No way they can stop that. And a 'sixty-nine Camaro's about as civilian as you can get."
Bonar puffed his cheeks in a miserable exhale and signaled to Joe over at the bar. "If we get stopped at the Missaqua border by a few hundred gentlemen in really nice suits, I think the uniforms might give us away anyhow. Unless, of course, you're planning on just mowing them down with the shotgun and riot gun you had me stash in the backseat."
Halloran slurped a sip of the best coffee in Kingsford County. "After the way they've jerked us around today, I'm beginning to think that might be a pleasant way to spend a Saturday night."
Bonar rolled troubled eyes up to the stuffed jackalope mounted to the wall over the booth and grimaced. "Man, what're we doing here? You know I hate this place."
"Best food around, and you wanted to eat before we took off. The diner's closed, and there's nothing on the road where we're headed. Cheeseburger rare, heavy on the onions, and every side old Joe's got back there on the grill."
Bonar smiled a little. "You got me onions when we're riding together?"
"I figured you'd be real polite and hold your breath the whole way."
"At least you didn't pick the booth with the stuffed cat."
"Even I can't stand that one. Used to pat that cat every time I came in here."
Bonar took a quick look around the dark interior, then wrinkled his nose and pretended he hadn't seen a thing. The place was made from hand-hewn pine logs pulled down by Joe's grandfather a hundred years ago, and every few feet, the glass eyes of some dead animal or other stared down at you. It gave Bonar the creeps.
There was the two-headed calf one of Barkley Widen's prize Guernseys had dropped back in the 70s, a loose-lipped moose with a giant, moldy rack, and every other woodland animal you could think of, including a family of chipmunks fastened to a wall plaque with fake moss falling off. To the best of Bonar's knowledge, Joe hadn't killed a single one. The man couldn't bear the thought of taking the life of any creature, but the animals had been hanging since his grandfather's day and, as he put it, taking them down would be a pure waste of good taxidermy.
And then there was the cat-the one and only dead thing Joe himself had contributed to the grisly decor. Lord, how he had loved that cat, every one of the twenty-three years the tabby stray had prowled around the bar, taking the occasional swipe at a paying customer with his long, untrimmed claws, relenting only when he licked enough suds from where the beer tap dripped to put him to sleep. Seemed a strange way to honor the memory of a companion, Bonar thought- stuffing it and having it mounted on a wall.
"I don't think I can eat here," he said unhappily.
Halloran gave him a tired grin. "You'll eat in your coffin."
"This is like eating in someone else's coffin."
His discomfort slowed him down, and it took him a full ten minutes to put away the cheeseburger, and another five to polish off the french fries, onion rings, and coleslaw.
Halloran watched him eat, sipping a fresh cup of coffee to keep him awake on the road. When Bonar pushed his plate away, he threw down a handful of bills and slid out of the booth. "We need to go."
Bonar nodded, reluctant to move. "Man, I'm tired. You want to check with Green Bay again before we take off?"
"Called them before you got here. Sharon and the others still haven't shown up. The detective I talked to earlier went home an hour ago, but the patrols up there are running a watch-and-stop on the Rover."
Bonar held his gun tightly in the holster as he got up. "Not so long ago, I was thinking we were like a couple of old ladies, worrying about a woman who won't even give you the time of day just because she's a few hours late. But I started counting those hours while I was loading the car, and there's just too many of them."
Halloran gave him a steady look and nodded.
"Damn, Mike, this is scaring me to death."
THE GOOD THING about Bonar's Camaro-aside from the 427 big-block Chevy-was that he'd put in one of the county's new radio units just last year.
There was the usual weekend chatter coming out of Kingsford County-a couple of d
runk-and-disorderlies, a bar fight with minor injuries, and poor old Ron Rohner, who saw aliens landing in his back forty almost every Saturday night-but when Bonar switched over to Missaqua's frequency, there was nothing but dead air.
"Ah," Bonar sighed. "The soothing sounds of the FBI."
"Why don't you put out a prank radio call to that jackass Well-spring up at the lime quarry? They'll never catch us in this car."
"Not with you driving."
"I'm not even going forty-five, which is just about impossible in this thing."
"Seems like you're going faster."
Halloran reined back the Camaro's 450 horses even further as they hit the Missaqua County line, which was a cruel irony, since this was the one place in the state they knew for sure didn't have a single patrol on the road. They both kept a close watch for Gretchen Vanderwhite's car, Grace's Range Rover, and anything else out of sorts, but the roads across the county were as quiet as the radio.
Exactly two minutes on the other side of Missaqua County and still twenty miles from Hamilton, Bonar fell sound asleep, and judging by the depth and volume of his snoring, he would probably stay that way for a while. He didn't even stir when Halloran pulled into the gas station where they were meeting Magozzi, got out and slammed the door. By the time Halloran finished his calls in the station and came back out, there was a shiny silver thing big enough to be its own tourist attraction pulled up in the truck lot. Bonar was walking around it with his hands in his pockets, his head tipped back and his mouth open. Harley Davidson, bearded, tattooed, and leathered, looking like a biker version of the gigantic Paul Bunyan statue in Bemidji, walked next to him. Magozzi and his partner, Gino, were stretching their legs in the lot, heads close together as they talked, and Roadrunner was bent in half under one of the big station lights, a collection of sticks hanging on to his ankles for some reason Halloran didn't even want to think about.
