A Long December

by Donald Harstad

  The light from the setting sun was streaming through the barn board cracks and was making it difficult to see when I looked to the left of the shed. The sunlight was also illuminating every dust mote in the place, and was beginning to make it equally difficult to see within the barn itself. If there was ever a worst time for us to have them make a move, it was about now.

  “Sally…”

  “Yeah?”

  “See if you can contact George. Our visibility here is going to be crap until the sun goes behind that hill. Maybe he can see better.”

  The sunlight also meant that it was clear. Clear at night meant colder. Crap. This was probably the warmest part of the day in the barn, and I thought it was probably about twenty degrees. I could see my breath in the shafts of sunlight.

  “Hang on,” said Sally. “Lamar’s here.” Again, she handed me the mike.

  “You there, Three? “It was good to hear his voice.

  “Ten-four, One. Alive and kickin’.”

  “Is everybody all right?”

  “Ah, negative. I 388 has been hit with a fragment.”

  “Is it ten-thirty-three? Do we have to get in to you now?”

  “Ah, negative, One. Negative.” I looked over at Hester. “How you feeling?”

  I could just make out her answer. “No problem.”

  I thought for a second. “We need to get her out, but not urgently. I don’t recommend anybody coming down the drive or across the yard. Not in daylight.”

  “Ten-four,” said Lamar. “I got about a dozen state troopers ten-seventy-six. Should be here in less than ten minutes.”

  That was reassuring. “Glad to hear it. TAC team?” I was hoping. The TAC unit would be equipped with M -16s.

  “Negative, not yet. They’ve been notified.”

  That was too bad. A standard issue state trooper would have a shotgun and a handgun. Shotguns, especially over several hundred yards of open ground, would be hopelessly outranged by the AK-47s our opponents seemed to have.

  “Ah, ten-four. One, these guys have AKs. You ten-four on that?”

  “Ten-four.” He was. Lamar wasn’t a ballistics expert, but he knew enough about 7.62mm rounds. He’d been hit just above the ankle with one fired by a barricaded suspect in 1996. He hadn’t been able to walk well since, and hadn’t had a single day without pain. He was lucky he still had a foot.

  “Where you at, Three?”

  Now there was the question. I felt the chances of the opposition listening in on our radio traffic were probably not too good. Nonetheless, I wasn’t certain I wanted to reveal our exact position. I looked up at Sally, at the other end of the mike cord.

  “What do you think? Should we just go ahead and tell?”

  “I’d really like to get out of here.”

  That wasn’t what I’d asked. But there was no rescue possible if they went to the wrong building.

  “We’re in the barn, One. The basement.”

  “Ten-four.”

  “Except George—he’s in the loft. He’s lookout.”

  “Ten-four,” said Lamar, and as he spoke, I heard a siren over his mike. The troopers were beginning to arrive.

  “We think most of the suspects are in the shed. The one on the other side of the barn from you.”

  “The one with the metal roof?”

  “That’s it. As far as I can tell. We haven’t seen any movement in the last few minutes.”

  “Okay, Carl. I’ll be back up on the radio in about five minutes.”

  “Ten-four, One. Glad to have you here.”

  Sally called George. He was fine, and hadn’t seen any movement for several minutes. He thought he might be able to see fairly well to our front, as soon as he could finish up moving moldy hay bales away from the walls. He’d been unable to get even close to the front wall because they’d been stacked almost to the ceiling.

  Sally and I both gave our full attention to peering out through the gaps in the boards and trying to see if there was anybody moving around the tin shed. Nothing.

  “You ‘spose they left?” she asked.

  “Might have,” I said. I didn’t think so, though. “I think there’s a better chance they’re just gettin’ reorganized.”

  We waited. About ten minutes after he’d said he’d be back in five, Lamar called.

  “Go ahead,” said Sally. She started to move closer to me, to hand over the mike again.

  “You relay,” I said. “I think I see something moving.”

  She just paused for a moment, and then said, “Go ahead for Three. He can hear you.”

  “We got people on the road on the other side of the valley, and in the bottom, and up on the hill past the farm,” said Lamar. “More comin’ all the time.”

  “Good,” I said. That meant that the area was being surrounded, to cut off the escape of just whoever was shooting at us. But as I looked, I was certain something was moving, to our left, behind a screen formed by an old woven wire fence and a bunch of scrub that had grown up entangled through it.

  “Three advises ‘good,’ One,” said Sally.

  “Tell him to stand by,” I said, and brought my rifle up to my shoulder.

  “Stand by,” said Sally. I heard her move away to my right.

  “Left,” I said. “Behind the old wire fence. Really down low…”

  As I spoke, a figure rose up, threw something, and disappeared back into the scrub.

  There was a loud thump, as though a heavy rock had struck the barn above our heads.

  “He throw a rock? “asked Sally.

  Then the “rock” exploded.

  CHAPTER 03

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2001 18:11

  JUST AS SOON AS LAMAR WAS ABLE TO round up enough deputies and reserves to secure the crime scene, Hester and I headed for Battenberg. We took the scenic route, because we had to go back the way we’d come to avoid driving through the area where the lab crew was working. Or, as Lamar put it succinctly, “Don’t go traipsin’ through the scene.”

  The six miles to Battenberg, therefore, turned into fourteen. It gave me time to think, and I needed it. Our primary objective was an interview with our rural mail carrier, one Hank Granger. The tire track, which was being cast in plaster even as we drove, might allow us to ID the getaway car. The emphasis was on “might.” Regardless, it was one thing to identify a car, and another thing altogether to identify the people in it. I was counting on Granger for at least a number of occupants. Assuming that the car had caught his eye, of course.

  Great.

  Then we were going to have to talk with Norm, the Battenberg chief. He had my sympathy, but it would have been really nice if he’d gotten out soon enough to give us at least an idea of some of the cars that might have come into town from the north.

  He might, though, have some ideas regarding suspects.

  Battenberg, in the late 1980s, had been a town of about fifteen hundred people—pretty much minding its own business, and trying to go gracefully through the decline that was hitting most of the rural areas. Then they got lucky. A meatpacking plant in town had changed hands and really started taking off. The plant was bought by a Jewish family, who started producing kosher meat products and shipping them to the East Coast. It was an excellent move on their part. Not having to build a plant from the ground up, they were able to produce for less, transport for less since they did their own shipping, and maintain complete quality control over the entire operation. Smart. And when asked why they’d chosen Iowa, one of the corporate officers had replied, “There wasn’t a plant available over in Jersey.”

  After the plant got refurbished and up and running full tilt, things began to change in Battenberg, and mostly for the best. And due to the no-union, low-wage situation at the plant, it had suddenly become one of the most culturally diverse communities in the United States. Originally, Hispanics came in as inexpensive labor. That was a first in our area, and suddenly Spanish could be heard in stores all over town. With the large number of rabbis required
for the kosher end of things, Yiddish could also be heard just about everywhere. In fact, it was rumored that, per capita, Battenberg had a higher ratio of rabbis than any other U.S. city.

  Within fifteen years, the population had more than doubled. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian Jews began to arrive, along with Georgians, Ukrainians, and several other Eastern European ethnic groups. As the word got out, Guatemalans, Colombians, and several other South and Central American countries were also represented. There were a few Israelis, to boot. At last count, in fact, there were eighteen languages spoken within the Battenberg city limits.

  Adjustments were not easy, and for a while things got sort of strained. They’d begun shaking themselves out, but they still had a way to go. The first drive-by shooting had caused quite a stir, for instance. That was when we were first truly aware that many of the Hispanics were illegal aliens. When we’d gone around trying to interview witnesses, there was nobody there. They’d fled or gone into hiding because they were afraid they’d be deported. Even the plant had to shut down for a couple of days, until it became evident that the Immigration and Naturalization Services wasn’t going to be directly involved. Interviews went better as time passed, and the shooting turned out to be gang-related, involving some dope dispute. The perpetrator had been identified, arrested, tried, and sent to prison. All without ever saying why he’d done it.

  We’d had a crash course in Spanish, but found that the Mexican Spanish we’d been exposed to (taught would be giving us too much credit) was unintelligible to the Hondurans and Guatemalans. Who’d a thunk, as we say. About all we could do was advise them of their rights in our brand of Spanish, and hand them a brochure. The Russians, the Central Europeans, and the Thai were on their own until we could arrange an interpreter. Yiddish wasn’t a problem, as all the Jewish residents were fluent in English.

  It really wasn’t that we weren’t willing to try to adapt. It was more to do with our budgets being very restricted. We were having a tough time replacing our tires, let alone budgeting for language courses. There was also a matter of instructing all three shifts. Our attempt at Spanish, for example, had the instructor trying to teach three classes of three or four officers each. One class at 07:00 for the night shift as they came off duty, one at 13:00 for the day crew, and one at 18:30 for the evening shift. It was pretty tough on the high school teacher who was doing it for some extra pay, it consumed our entire “continuing education” budget for the year, and at the end we were not much further ahead than before.

  All of which made it a very interesting place to be a cop. Hell, it made it downright fascinating at times. More than once the chief, Norm, had made references to resigning and turning his job over to the U.N. We got a lot of mileage out of that, and even went so far as to get him a pale blue beret. But I could understand his frustration.

  Which brings me right back to the current case. Jacob Heinman had said that one of the shooters had spoken Spanish. Wonderful. Or something that sounded to Jacob vaguely like Italian. Okay. The other had been “Norwegian”-looking. Ya. You betcha. Around here, that could be just about anybody.

  Not a lot to go on.

  The upshot was it was pretty damned hard to get informants, like I said. Hard, but not altogether impossible.

  As we were getting out of our cars at Mail Carrier Granger’s place, I stood outside for a minute, dialing the cell phone of one Hector Gonzalez, a twenty-two-year-old packing plant laborer whose acquaintance I’d made at a domestic call about a year ago.

  “Bueno?”

  “Hector, hey, this is Houseman.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. Really, it is.” I liked Hector. I made him nervous.

  “Not now, man. I cannot talk now…”

  When I’d gotten to that domestic call, I’d found a young Latino who turned out to be Hector defending his sister Selena from her boyfriend. The boyfriend was trying to beat Selena because she wouldn’t give him her savings that she kept in a jar in the kitchen cupboard. It turned out to be all of sixty dollars. Hector was winning, but it had been a near thing. Both young men had black eyes and multiple abrasions. So did Selena. The Battenberg cop and I had hauled all three of them in, since they were all yelling at us and each other in Spanish, and we couldn’t tell at the time just who had done what. Since none of them were speaking any English, even when addressed by us, we assumed they were illegal aliens. As we shook them down prior to putting them in the cars, I found a small bag of what we euphemistically call a “green, leafy substance” in Hector’s pocket. After we’d sorted things out at the police station, and everybody had calmed down enough to communicate, we found that Hector and his sister spoke English very well, indeed. It turned out that both of them had been born and raised in Los Angeles. The boyfriend spoke no English at all, and Hector and Selena offered to translate for him. Right. I thought something a bit more unbiased might be needed, but I have to admit it would have been fun to hear what Selena would have come up with. While we waited for an interpreter, I’d taken Hector aside and told him that we were both going to stand in the rest room and watch the “green, leafy substance” go down the toilet. We did. I told him I appreciated what he’d done for his sister, that all three of them were likely to be charged with a minimum of disturbing the peace, and that I didn’t think it was going to be in the interests of justice to hang an additional charge on him for the small bit of grass he had in his pocket. He’d asked why I was being so nice, and I told him that it wouldn’t be worth my time to charge him with such a small amount. I did make it clear that I could still do it, however, if he preferred it that way. He thanked me, and in a weak moment said that if I ever needed a favor…. That’s how informants are made.

  “Now, I know you can listen, Hector. Just for a second.”

  “Okay,” he sighed.

  “There was a man just killed, out in the country, a couple of hours ago. Pretty close to Battenberg. Whoever did him blew his head off. He seems to be Hispanic. You with me so far?”

  There was a silence, and then a faint, “Yeah, man?”

  “We don’t know who it is, Hector. There wasn’t enough left of his face to even guess. Okay so far?”

  “Holy chit, man. I doan know nothing about this.” He tended to shift into an accent when he was getting stressed.

  “That’s gotta be a good thing. Look, Hector, all I want you to do is just give me a call if you hear who it was, okay?”

  A pause, then, “Sure, man. I will do that.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “No problem.”

  I caught up to Hester as she was knocking on Granger’s door.

  Most rural mail carriers know their districts like the back of their hands, and Granger was no exception. He hadn’t noticed anything unusual on the road back to Battenberg, though. Nope. Not a thing.

  It pays not to rush. He offered coffee, and I accepted. Hester looked a little anxious to get going, but I needed a cup.

  As we sat around the living room, coffee in hand, Granger said something that made it all worthwhile.

  “But, you know what? At the old Dodd place, just past the hollow? There was a cream-colored Subaru there earlier today. Parked by the barn. It was gone when I came back by, but I’d never seen that there before. If it helps…”

  “About what time?” I asked. I knew the old Dodd place. The house had been abandoned, but whoever farmed the land still used the sheds and other outbuildings. The fire department had burned the house in a controlled burn for practice about five years back.

  “Oh, it was after lunch… I always take my northern route after I grab a sandwich, so that would be about one-ten or so.”

  Punctuality is a trademark of the rural mail carriers. If he said 1:10, then he was within five minutes.

  “Anybody around it?”

  “Yes… couldn’t see who, but three, four people. They looked like they were headed to one of the sheds or for the barn. I was by before they got there, if that was whe
re they were going.”

  Cool. And there was still coffee left.

  “You might want to check with Elmo Hazlett,” he said. “The milk hauler. He drives route out that way.”

  “Thanks.”

  Granger chuckled. “He’s got his head up his butt most of the time, though, so if he didn’t run over ‘em, he probably didn’t notice.”

  When we got back in our cars, I checked in with the office on my radio. There was nothing new, the troops were still assisting the lab team at the crime scene, and Norm Vincent was waiting for us in his office.

  Norm Vincent was really apologetic. The Battenberg chief was a decent guy, and like I said, was under quite a bit of strain with all the hours he’d been putting in. He’d seen and heard nothing of any use at all. The word was out in Battenberg that there had been some sort of murder just north of them. That wasn’t unusual, since there were dozens of people in town with police scanners. But nothing had struck a chord, apparently, because none of his “informants” had contacted him. Well, he called them “informants.” To put it nicely, Norm wasn’t a really active sort of officer, and I don’t think he had more than three or four “informants,” total, and I suspected they were all high school kids who were lying to him about half the time. But he was trying, and I knew that he’d try even harder after having fallen back asleep on us that afternoon. Good enough. We gave him only one detail, and that was the nature of the wound. We wanted him to know the type of person he could be dealing with if he turned a suspect up.

  “Christ,” he said with some feeling.

  “We’ll have more for you, Chief,” said Hester, “as soon as we get our evidence all sorted out.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Until then,” I said, “just let us know if anything surfaces. Don’t try to take somebody yourself. Get backup.”

  “Sure. You bet.”

  “I’m really serious. Don’t take anybody alone, and I wouldn’t try it with just a couple of cops, either. Whoever did this isn’t gonna blink at the thought of killing somebody else.”