A Long December

by Donald Harstad

  “What’s that?” I asked, beating Sally by an instant.

  “What? Oh, this tube? This is what they call a ‘hydration pack.’ Carries lots of stuff, and has a water bag attached at the bottom.”

  “Okay,” said Hester. “So what’s with the pickax there?”

  There really was a strange looking tool dangling from a loop on the side of the pack.

  “That’s an ice ax,” said George.

  “There’s no ice,” I said. “There’s not even snow.”

  “That’s okay,” said Hester. “He can use it to break up the ice in the pack when his hydration system freezes up.”

  “Ah, but look,” said George. “Voilà!” He reached into the backseat of Hester’s car and produced a black box, about a foot square and about half that thick. “Meet Mr. Heater,” he said, grinning. Sure enough, that’s what the label said. Mr. Heater.

  “Runs on a one-pound bottle, puts out 9,000 BTUs for six hours on one. I’ve even got a spare bottle in my pack.”

  “What the hell,” said Sally. “I’m sticking with George tonight.”

  “Me, too,” said Hester. “Carl, you can stay in the shed if you want.”

  “Where,” I asked George, “do you get that stuff?”

  “I shop around,” he said. “This was only a hundred bucks. Want to see what all I’ve got in my pack?”

  “There’s gonna be plenty of time after we get there,” I said. “We’ve got a way to go.”

  Hester produced her own duffel bag. “I don’t have a shotgun. Department’s a little short right now, and we keep ‘em in the office and draw one out when we think we’re going to need one.”

  “I don’t, either,” said George.

  “I’m disappointed, George,” I said. “I was sorta hoping you’d have a small cannon with wheels.”

  We set off down the road, with George and me carrying most of the packs and blankets, and Hester and Sally toting the rest along with the cooler between them. When we got back up onto the roadway, Sally said, “Is that dark spot…?”

  “Yep. That was where the body was,” I said.

  “Boy,” said George. “This is sure a lonely spot to die.”

  “Well,” I said, “Rudy really didn’t have much time to think about that.”

  “Do you and Hester think you’ve got the right man?”

  “If you mean Skripkin,” I said, “yeah, I think so. But I really want that Hassan or that Alvarez, or whoever he is. That sonofabitch is the trigger man.” I adjusted my load, nearly dropping the shotgun off my shoulder. “Skripkin’s only a co-conspirator. That, and a lying sonofabitch, to boot. We’d really like some solid physical evidence.”

  The law says that you cannot convict an individual based solely on the testimony of a co-conspirator. It’s a very good rule, when you think about it. But it also means that you have to have something else linking the suspect to the act. Like a large amount of physical evidence, for example. I didn’t think other testimonial evidence, such as that available from Jacob Heinman, would be enough in a strongly contested case.

  Along with that, Skripkin’s lying continued to haunt me. I knew he was telling mostly the truth about the murder, but there were little holes in his account that a decent defense attorney would be able to drive a truck through.

  “Like what kind of evidence?” George asked, more to make conversation than out of real interest.

  “I’d be happy with the murder weapon,” I said. “It’s a twelve-gauge shotgun, and we have that plastic wadding. It will have some marks, so I think we can maybe do a match. His fingerprints all over the gun would help, too.”

  We rounded the curve, and Sally said, “Shit, Houseman, how much further?”

  “Way down around the next curve,” I said. “It’s all downhill.”

  “Way down there?”

  “Yep.” I turned around and walked backwards for a few steps. “Gettin’ tired?”

  She stuck out her tongue.

  Another hundred yards down the road, and Sally spoke up again. “You mind tellin’ me why you didn’t just drop us off down here, and then go park the car?”

  “Too many tracks. People make lots of tracks, especially when they stand around waiting for somebody. It’s best this way.”

  “Be sure to tell me that on the way back up,” she said.

  “Wait till you see the farmyard,” said Hester. “It gets worse.”

  When we turned into the farm lane of the old Dodd place, Sally let out a groan. It was quite a distance to the abandoned barn, all uphill and over rutted, frozen tracks. A gust of ice-cold air whipped down the little valley, right into our faces. It was going to be chilly tonight.

  CHAPTER 22

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2001 15:23

  WE PAUSED AT THE END OF THE LANE and set most of the stuff down to give ourselves a break.

  “Anybody know anybody else who’s crazy enough to go on a winter picnic? “asked Sally.

  “It won’t be so bad,” said George, “once we’re out of the wind.”

  Sally shivered. “Yeah. But it’s a long way to that barn. I just hate it when it blows right in your face. Makes it ten times colder.”

  George turned his back to her. “The zipper pocket on the upper right,” he said. “There’s a muffler in there. Go ahead and use it.”

  Sally pulled out a maroon and gold muffler, complete with fringed ends. “Wow, thanks,” she said, wrapping it around her face.

  Hester lifted one end of the cloth. “Hogwarts?”

  “USC,” said George. “Same thing.”

  Rested and wrapped, we loaded up again and started up the lane.

  “Where’s the house? “asked George.

  1 pointed to the top edge of the stone foundation ahead on our right. “Used to be over there. When the original owner leaves, if another farmer who lives fairly close buys the place, they don’t have much use for the residence. They only spend the money and the time to maintain the useful buildings.”

  George chuckled. “I’ve got to tell my little sister that I’ve found the fixer-upper she wants.”

  We piled everything in the barn. It was built on a slope, with the big doors on the main floor facing the uphill side, away from the driveway. There was a door on the second story that faced the driveway, designed for loading the hayloft, but it didn’t permit much observation unless it was wide open. The basement, which grew out of the slope at main floor level, had windows and a walk-in door, as well as a large Dutch door for animals. The basement walls that extended out from the slope were limestone, which meant that the wind wasn’t going to be blowing through the basement. Better yet, the basement door faced the driveway.

  “Well, we might as well do the lower barn level,” I said.

  “Looks good to me,” said George.

  “Fine,” said Sally. “I’m not about lug all this stuff up into the hayloft.”

  That pretty much decided it.

  After we got our gear comfortably set in the barn, we decided take a look around outside to get a good idea of the whole layout of the place. We’d already been inside long enough to notice how much colder it was when we went back outside.

  As the four of us stood in the middle of the barnyard, Hester and I pointed out the features we were familiar with. Facing upslope, the barn was on our immediate left. About fifty yards upslope from us, and a little more to the right, was an old shed. Another shed was across the yard, and also about fifty yards upslope. A large, concrete-block silo was on the right, about twenty-five yards from the barn, and had a small shed adjacent to its base. Between the barn and the silo was the wooden telephone pole that mounted the yard light. There was some old wooden fencing that ran on three sides of the silo and butted into the rising hillside on the right.

  The foundation of the old house was behind us and to our right.

  “How far up this little valley does this lane go?” asked George. From our vantage point, it made a bend to the left and went out of sight around the h
illside.

  “About a hundred yards,” said Hester. “It ends at the gate to a field up there.”

  “And that one?” asked Sally, pointing over toward the right, behind the silo.

  “That goes up along the little creek bed,” I said. “I didn’t see anything up there, and it kind of stops being a lane and starts being a cow path.”

  There were faint markings on that lane, two parallel lines, that looked like they could be tire tracks.

  “Were those tracks there when we were here? “I asked Hester.

  “I don’t remember,” she said, “but it was pretty dark.”

  The problem with tracks in the winter, especially when there’s no snow on the ground, is that any grasses or other small vegetation don’t spring back up after a while. You can’t tell if it’s recent or not. I did look, but there weren’t any tire impressions at all, just the two parallel lines of depressed vegetation.

  “Farm wagon?” asked George.

  “Probably. Either that,” I said, “or the lab van backed in there, maybe to turn around?”

  “Sure,” said Hester.

  That was it.

  “Well,” I said, “if somebody comes here to hide out, they’ll come up the drive. Maybe check it out as they go, so they might come up pretty slow. I’d think they’d want to park behind the barn, here. Wouldn’t be seen from the road.”

  “So, what’s the plan if they do that? “asked Sally. “I mean, do we just step out and say hi or what?”

  “I’d say,” said Hester, “that two of us go up the stairs to the main floor, and one of us goes on each side of the barn. At the word ‘go,’ we all confront them at once. No place to hide. No place to run.”

  “Excellent,” said George.

  “It’ll probably be after dark, so just remember not to concentrate on the headlights. Really screw up your night vision.” I looked back down toward the roadway. “As long as we can hear ‘em driving, we really don’t need to look out much at all. And headlights will light up faces through the slats,” I said.

  “Yes, Mother,” said Hester.

  “Yeah, yeah. The important thing,” I said, “is that, once they’re in, they don’t get out. No matter where they stop, we have to have somebody between them and the roadway just as fast as we can.”

  “Well, then,” said Sally, “let’s get inside where it’s warmer.”

  As we all started walking to our right, back to the barn, with our backs to the sheds, there was a yell, then another. I think we all turned at the same instant to see what was going on.

  Three dark shapes emerged from behind the right-hand shed, near the path that wound up along the creek bed. All three were bobbing and weaving like crazy, and it took me about a second too long to figure out what they were doing. They were trying to confuse anybody who was shooting at them. Only nobody was. Then they opened fire.

  I swear to God, there must have been fifty slugs smacking into the dirt, the barn, fence posts, and the limestone foundation all at the same time.

  Hester, I think, reacted first. None of us did the proper move, which would have been to fall to the ground and crawl for cover. All four of us just took off for the barn as fast as we could go. And I mean fast. George, who was in front of me, spun around with his handgun drawn, and popped off three or four rounds as I passed him. I noticed him turning back toward the barn as I went by. That made me third through the door, as Sally and Hester were much faster than I was. George came thundering in right behind me.

  “Fuck!” That was me. I didn’t have enough breath to say anything more.

  “Who in the hell is that?” came from Hester.

  “Jesus Christ!” said Sally. “They’re shooting at us!”

  George said, “Three subjects. They all got down when I shot, but I don’t think I hit anybody.”

  Hester was breathing hard. “Where in hell,” she gasped, “did they come from?”

  I shook my head. “Those are automatic,” I said, referring to the rifles.

  I grabbed my own rifle off Sally’s pile of blankets and headed to the right side of the barn. As I got there, I saw movement in the middle distance, going to my left.

  “They’re going toward the biggest shed,” I said. “Heads up!”

  We took up positions against the long limestone foundation on the upslope side of the barn. That foundation was the only bulletproof feature in the whole barn.

  We were all able to find cracks or holes in the vertical boards of the siding, about four feet off the floor. We all looked out onto the long, brown grass of the slope that led to the big shed. We couldn’t see anything moving.

  After about ten seconds, when the shock began to wear off a bit, Hester said, “Maybe we should watch all four sides?”

  Hester went to the right, George to the left, and Sally took the side facing the roadway.

  “Call the office,” I said to Sally. “Get backup coming.”

  Sally picked up her walkie-talkie mike, and said “Comm, Three!” She used my number because she didn’t have one.

  No answer.

  She tried again, and again. Nothing. Before I could stop her, she was crouching near the top of the stair, holding the walkie-talkie up above the floor line with one hand, and talking into the mike at the end of the stretched pigtail cord.

  “Comm, Three, ten-thirty-three. I repeat, ten-thirty-three.”

  She got an answer. “Three, I’m ten-six. Hold your traffic unless ten-thirty-three.” Somebody wasn’t paying attention.

  “Comm, Three needs ten-seventy-eight, this is very ten-thirty-three, multiple ten-thirty-two, shots fired. Repeating…” Ten-seventy-eight meant that we needed assistance, the 10-33 indicated an emergency, and multiple 10-32 meant more than one armed suspect. With all the rest, 10-33 might sound redundant, but it was an official declaration of an emergency and enabled certain authority to accrue to the dispatcher automatically.

  I heard the voice on the radio say, “Nation County has ten-thirty-three traffic.” That meant that everybody else had to shut up and only speak when spoken to.

  “Where’s backup at?” asked Sally, speaking to me from her perch on the stairs.

  “Lamar’s in Battenberg,” I said. There really wasn’t anybody else within fifty miles, at least not on duty.

  “He might want to stay there for a few minutes. If we’ve got some here,” said Hester, meaning the terrorists, “there might be some where he is, too.”

  All well and good, but we were dealing with very limited resources. “There won’t be more than two troopers within thirty miles of us,” I said. “Get our next-out duty officer, and local cops from Maitland and Battenberg. Call out the rest of the department after that.”

  “Where’s the cell phone tower from here?” asked Hester, as Sally began talking to Dispatch again.

  I pointed back toward the road. “That way.”

  “Good,” she said, and pulled her phone from her jacket pocket. “I’ll get the state TAC team headed up this way.”

  That was an excellent idea, and I said so. I looked back up the stairs, just in time to see Sally stick her head up past floor level to get a quick look through the big barn doors. I just started to tell her to get down, when a burst of fire ripped through the slats above her, and she ducked so fast she fell most of the way down the stairs. I thought she’d been hit.

  I was over to her in four steps. “You okay?!”

  “Yeah,” she said, uncertainly. “Shit. Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

  “Jesus, keep your head down.”

  She stood. “Yeah, just my knee hurts…skinned it, I think. Holy shit, did you see that!?”

  “I saw it all right,” I said. “That’s a good way to get killed.”

  “I saw one of em,” she said, her voice wavering slightly. “Looked right at him. He was in the big shed, looked right at me. No shit. Just like a neighbor. Somebody else shot. He didn’t. He just looked.”

  “Okay. Just don’t stick you head up like that again,
okay?”

  “No shit.” She brushed off her uniform pants. “I don’t know why you let me do things like that.”

  “And if you do it again, lose the scarf. You really stand out with that.”

  George and Hester were both on their cell phones, talking in muted tones and trying to get a view of whoever had been shooting at us. I did the same, but couldn’t see anybody along the whole upslope side of the barnyard. Belatedly, I remembered to pull the cocking handle of my rifle sharply to the rear. I never carried a round in the chamber and had nearly forgotten to load one in. That could have been embarrassing, to say the least. I searched my mind to see if there was anything else I should have done, or should be doing. Little mental lapses like that mean that you aren’t getting up to speed as quickly as you should, and are lagging behind events. Not permissible, if you want to survive a bad one.

  Hester was off her cell phone. “Anything?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Not from back here,” said Sally. It occurred to me that she was in the position that guarded the only fast entrance to the barn, the two doors that faced out to the lane.

  “Hester? Could you take this side for a sec? “I said. As she moved toward my position, I hustled over to Sally.

  “You got a round in the chamber?” I asked her, touching the barrel of her shotgun.

  “Oops. No.” She jacked a round in. “God, I feel dumb.”

  “Don’t. I asked because I forgot to do the same,” I said. “We got to get up to speed here.” Our training emphasized that long weapons such as shotguns and rifles should not have a round chambered until absolutely necessary. Just to avoid catastrophic accidents.

  “Yeah. No shit,” she muttered.

  “Okay, keep a good look, and sing out if you see something. You’ve got the only place they can get in in a hurry.”

  “Yeah. I thought about that. You think they’re gonna try that?”

  “Not really. They’re probably hustling their asses out over the hills already. Wouldn’t you?”

  She smiled. “No doubt.”