Rockfall

by William Allen

  “I concur,” I replied sharply to Mike’s earlier declaration as I crouched down behind the door and chambered a round, then snugged the rifle to my shoulder. Despite the increasing dosage of adrenaline coursing through my body, my hands remained rock steady. “Can’t see much of the one in the middle riding bitch. Might be they got a hostage already. You have the experience, so you call out the targets.”

  At this point, the truck remained beyond effective pistol range. By my calculations, the truck was approaching us at a quartering angle, the nose still pointed at the front of the building, but I saw the one with the AR shout something and gesture in our direction. Then the rifleman tried to steady his balance in the back of the bouncing truck, eager to bring his weapon to bear. On me, most likely. I made the distance at a tad over one hundred yards.

  “AR guy first,” Mike cited dispassionately, “then the guy with the street sweeper.”

  Mike was a better shot than I was with a rifle. We were pretty close with pistols, but my brother had better training, and obviously more real-world experience than me when it came to hitting targets at a distance. Especially targets that were shooting back.

  However, this was my rifle, and I was not only accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of the Remington, a notoriously touchy beast, but the telescopic sights were set for me. Not that I needed glass at this range, but I would take any advantage.

  Squared up, I exhaled slowly, gradually releasing the air from my lungs as I eased up over the protective shield of my open door, using the window sill as a rest, and placed the crosshairs on the bouncing man’s torso. The truck slowed as it approached, oily smoke all but obscuring the front windshield, but the rough shimmy must have felt like riding in a cement mixer.

  I paused, trying to parse out what the hell I was doing. This wasn’t my job, and those people in the store were not my responsibility. Unlike my brother Mike, I was not a possessor of that hero gene that made firefighters run into burning building. Was it peer pressure? Was Mike’s bleeding heart starting to infect me? If so, I needed to find some kind of antibiotic treatment, stat. With what looked like a killer hurricane bearing down on the coast, a global cooling period kicking off, and the natives getting restless in the streets, the last thing I needed to do was get myself wrapped up in another shooting incident. I could already imagine the ass-reaming I was going to get from Butch in the aftermath.

  Surprisingly, none of my hesitations came from my innate respect for the sanctity of human life. I wasn’t thinking of their grieving mothers, or their mourning children. Like in that alley behind my office, I felt no compassion for my fellow man or really, any emotion at all as I prepared to snuff out another human life. No, what made me hesitate was the thought of how this whole furball was going to mess up my carefully-laid plans.

  Maybe that made me a monster, or perhaps it just meant I was more in tune with this new world.

  Then I heard the crash of renewed gunfire, and my mind registered the flicker of orange fire licking in my direction.

  Already picking a spot on the AR wielder’s Raiders jacket, half unzipped as he leaned forward against the back of the cab, his rifle extended, and remembering the mantra of aim small, miss small, I took up the slack in the gritty old trigger.

  The shot came as a surprise, and I didn’t waste time as I slid the barrel over and centered on the next target. This time I picked out the head of the fuzzy animal emblazoned on the skinny man’s t-shirt, an animated weasel of all things, and then I squeezed the trigger a second time. The weasel’s fuzzy head rested directly in the center of the man’s chest, so he might as well have been wearing a bullseye. Only after I fired that second bullet did I register the sound of return fire whipping past my head like angry bees.

  This time, I paused for a moment to scan what I could see of the truck bed, but I found no more business. Sliding the barrel along the window’s edge one more time, I had to estimate the location of the driver’s head as I cranked the last two rounds through the windshield.

  Someone in the passenger seat had a hand stuck out the window, pistol extended, and from the flashes, shooting in my direction. However, my shots into the driver’s side must have at least panicked the driver, as the range dropped to approximately fifty yards, the smoking pickup slewing abruptly sideways, nearly tipping on the grinding axle.

  Hunkering back down behind the metal door, I thumbed the magazine release and caught the empty in my left hand, switching it for the full one. To my left, I noted Mike was hunched over the driver’s side door in a parody of the old Weaver shooting stance, both arms extended and head peeking out as he methodically emptied a magazine into the now-stopped truck. The range might have been extreme for his pistol, but Mike was at least laying down cover fire for me as I reloaded.

  As I chambered a fresh round, I became aware of another sound in the background. Sirens, again.

  “Hear that, Mike? Maybe the sheriff’s coming to save us,” I joked, rejoining my brother on the firing line as I took aim at the quarter of a head sticking out the side of the passenger window, the guy still busy firing on us. Except now, with the truck stopped and the angle changed, he was having to extend his arm at a forty-five degree to take us under fire. I couldn’t make out the brand of pistol he was shooting, but from the higher-pitched snap, I was guessing it was a 9mm. That didn’t matter when I made the head shot, and the firing abruptly stopped. At least, I thought so. My ears were steadily ringing from the gunfire at this point.

  “Mike, you okay?” I asked, realizing only after the fact that my brother hadn’t replied with one of his patented smart-assed responses.

  I risked taking my eyes off the truck, front-end now fully engulfed in flame, and glanced to the side. To my relief, I saw Mike was still standing, well, really just leaning into the door. He kept his pistol extended, though I noticed the barrel wavering just a bit.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Mike finally said, his voice strained. “I’ll be okay. Just caught a little bit of one of those bullets they were flinging our way. To quote the Black Knight, ‘Tis merely a flesh wound.”

  Well. Fuck. I could hear the sirens approaching now and I hoped there was an ambulance in the mix.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  “Wow, man, you sure fucked those boys up,” Buddy exclaimed, once he had me away from the paramedics who were busy patching up my brother. There was an ambulance trailing the lone police car, but the chief of police and one of his officers had preceded the EMTs by a good two minutes.

  Buddy and Officer Sam Shelton roared up in their Chevy Yukon to find me trying to staunch the flow of blood coming from Mike’s gashed left arm. The bullet had struck Mike just an inch past the elbow, plowed through the flesh for a good six inches before exiting just shy of the shoulder joint. The definition of a flesh wound after all, but it still bled like a stuck hog and I worried Mike might have been going into shock. He didn’t collapse or anything like that. He just seemed too calm for someone losing that much blood. I didn’t let go until the paramedic tapped me on the shoulder, telling me, “I got this.”

  With a nod, I let the chief of police lead me away. I’d already fished out my phone amidst the chaos, dialing my lawyer’s number from stored memory, one-handed, while keeping pressure on Mike’s wound with a patch of gauze retrieved from the truck’s first aid kit.

  Buddy and I were now standing next to the white cinder block wall of the feed store, my back pressed against the textured surface as I stood watching the aftermath of the shootout in the parking lot. After the gunplay ended, the customers and workers in the store had all piled out to watch, and frankly, Chief Cromwell lacked the manpower to disburse them. In fact, Buddy mentioned tersely, the city’s entire police force was down to just Buddy and Sam. The third officer, Bill Torgensen, was in the hospital already being treated for gunshot wounds sustained at the beginning of this rolling furball of a gun battle.

  “Jeez, Bryan, what the fuck did you shoot them with?”

  “On the advice
of counsel, I’m invoking my…”

  “Oh, screw that,” Buddy barked, rubbing his face with the back of his hand. I noticed the tracery of scratches and random drops of blood that marred the officer’s blue uniform sleeve. “I don’t want to put you in a cage, and you know the drill-sheriff’s department will be investigating.”

  “All the more reason to keep my mouth shut,” I grumbled, then decided I better keep my mouth shut.

  “I took a look at the cartridge casing,” Buddy continued. “Don’t often see 30-06 used for personal defense anymore.”

  “Hog gun,” I supplied helpfully. Buddy might be looking to trick me, but no reason to aggravate the man, and figuring out this kind of detail would be something he could do easily enough.

  “Hog gun? What does that mean?”

  I gave the chief of police an incredulous look before answering.

  “Means that rifle rides around in the truck, unloaded I might add,” I fudged, “until I run across a sounder tearing up one of my fields. Then I use the rifle to dissuade them.”

  “What kind of load?”

  “180 grain jacketed hollow point,” I explained.

  “Well, I guess that explains the missing skull,” Buddy muttered to himself. “Why the hell would you want to blow up pigs that way?”

  “Uh, Buddy, you ever go hog hunting?”

  “No,” he admitted, then proudly added, “but one of the guys at the hall took me turkey hunting once, though.”

  “All right, then try to imagine that turkey, but weighing five hundred pounds, with sharp tusks and a bad attitude. On the other hand, he is made out of bacon, so hogs aren’t all bad, I guess.”

  “All right, but that still doesn’t explain…”

  “Under the advice of counsel, I am going to…” I interrupted, only to be cut off in turn.

  “For my own peace of mind, Bryan, help me understand what happened here. I got two bystanders in the ER, and one of my own boys in there as well, and a shoot-out here that makes that gunfight at your office look like a schoolyard scuffle.”

  “They shot first,” I replied, certain it was true this time, but what else am I supposed to tell a cop when he’s questioning me about multiple homicides? I’d already done this song and dance once, after all.

  “I’m sure they did,” Buddy replied tersely, then forced a little grin that displayed no humor whatsoever. “What possessed you and Mike to take on that many shooters, Bryan? Haven’t you had enough shootouts to last you for a while?”

  “Chicken feed,” I responded quickly, and realized I sounded like I’d taken a blow to the head. Several, in fact.

  “You calling this chicken feed, Mr. Big City Lawyer?” Buddy ground out ominously, the words dangerous as poison knives as they hit the air. “I’ll bet Bill Torgensen doesn’t think so.”

  “No, sir,” I replied emphatically, again deciding to avoid antagonizing the local law. “You asked me why I was taking on those shooters, and truth is, we were just pulling into the parking lot when that truck showed up. Mike and I were just trying to pick up chicken feed before the hurricane hits, Chief. Seriously. That’s the only reason we were here.”

  “So what’s the big deal? You worried those suspicious youths were going to steal the last of the feed for your chickens? Mighty hard to load those fifty-pound bags when you’re trying to jack a car at the same time,” Buddy Cromwell observed.

  I cut my eyes from side to side, gauging what interest if any was directed our way.

  “If this storm is bad enough, it might be quite some time before we get any more mash in for our layers,” I said carefully.

  “I’m still not getting it. Why would a hurricane here affect corn and meal mash being prepared hundreds of miles away?”

  “If the store was gone, Chief. Blown away by these Cat Five winds I’ve been reading about,” I finally said, breaking down the situation. “Where do you think I’ll be able to get replacements? For the record, they blend up the brand I like best at a little mill over outside Shreveport. But if Wilson’s gets blown to smithereens by a tornado, where do I get more? Nobody else in the county carries it, and I suspect the travel ban will go back into effect after the storm passes.”

  “You really think…?” the older lawman paused, clearly not wanting to say the words.

  “Chief Cromwell, I don’t know what to think anymore,” I replied with exasperation. “I’m just a gentleman farmer who writes wills for my neighbors. This is not my plan, or my goal. The first forty-five years of my life, nobody shot at me with anything more dangerous than a paintball,” I replied honestly and with some force. “I would have never guessed I would be involved in the killing of seven desperados. Hell, Mike and I didn’t even play cops and robbers when we were kids. So do I think this hurricane is going to sweep the ground up in an Armageddon of wind and rain? Beats me.”

  I paused, taking a breath.

  “As to taking on that many bad guys, what would you have us do? Drive away and let them loose amongst all those people? What did they hit anyway? The bank?”

  Buddy looked away, and I couldn’t see his expression.

  “Yeah, they hit the branch bank in the Woodshire Brothers. Well, two of them did, but the other two seemed more focused on filling up a couple of carts with sodas and junk food. Not sure exactly what they had in mind, but they shot the clerk at the bank on the way out and the driver ran over somebody in the parking lot. Then they shot up Bill when he met them coming the other way, but looks like he got a few licks of his own in.”

  Cromwell paused, then gave me a polite smile, no teeth, before adding, “So there were five in the truck. We’ll have to wait to see what the coroner rules, since Bill might have gotten one or two, but at this point I count eight bodies on you so far. And counting.”

  With that, I heard the chirp of a siren and looked up, expecting to see the ambulance pulling out of the parking lot. Instead, I saw it was the familiar ride of Lieutenant Bastrop, the sheriff’s investigator.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Much to my surprise, when I finally got Butch on the phone and gave him a rundown of the day’s events, he told me to go ahead and give Lieutenant Bastrop my statement.

  “What the fuck, Butch?”

  “Doesn’t matter much, my friend,” Butch replied, and I could hear the exhaustion over the shaky connection. “Way I heard it, half the town was in Woodshire’s when they robbed the place. I’m sure the mayor or the county commissioners want to pin a medal on you and your brother, not throw you to the wolves. Not much the sheriff or the district attorney can do about that.”

  Grumbling at the money I wasted on this guy, really just going through the motions at this point, I waited my turn as Mike finished up giving his statement to the lieutenant. This was his second go-around doing this, making a statement after the killing at the Tractor Supply, but Mike seemed more relaxed this time, making me wonder just what the paramedics had given him for the pain.

  Standing there, killing time while Mike finished, I saw a familiar SUV nestled into a parking spot near the road and had to fight a grin. Marta, unsatisfied with her husband’s explanation of a little scratch, was here to check up on her man. I knew Little Red was waiting in the wings, but I couldn’t spot her yet.

  “You always cause this much ruckus?”

  The words from behind caught me off-guard and I spun, hand going to my waist for a pistol that was no longer there. After I’d already committed to the motion, I recognized the voice and relaxed into a slouch, but she’d caught the move anyway.

  “Hi, Mrs. Dwyer,” I said, turning with exaggerated precision. I fought the response, but I knew my face was suffused with a blush.

  “Hey, Bryan. Glad to see you made it out okay. That was a very brave thing to do, and I’m selfishly glad you were here to do it.”

  Sally Dwyer was tall for a woman, nearly six feet, and spare of build. She reminded me of a picture I’d seen once of a Tennessee mountain woman from the 1860s. Even posing stiffly
with her husband in the faded, black and white image in her Sunday best, you could somehow tell this was a woman who could trap furs in the winter, skin a deer, birth a baby, and get the crops in the fields with or without her man.

  Sally was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved, baggy flannel shirt that I knew concealed her carry pistol, and though her clothes were clean, Sally looked hard-worn and a bit frazzled around the edges. With Edgar dead these last three years and having lost her job when the lawn furniture plant closed down, I knew money was tight. She got a small check from Social Security for Billy and he made a little over minimum wage working at Wilson’s. Coupled with her earnings as a waitress at the truck stop over on Highway 87, they were making do, but still, whenever there’s a disruption in the system, whether it’s a financial downturn or a natural disaster, the people like the Dwyers, the working poor, faced the worst of the crisis.

  “I must admit, I was more worried about my own survival than anything else,” I replied honestly. “Whatever noble intentions you might attribute to me or Mike, you can forget. Those idiots were aimed right at us, probably intent on scoring my truck as alternate transportation.”

  “Well, whatever the reason, you made sure none of those killers got near my boy, so I’m still grateful.”

  “I can accept that,” I retorted with a forced grin on my face. “And I was just planning on coming to see you in the next few days anyway, so I guess this works out for the best after all.”

  “I doubt they would agree,” Sally retorted tartly as she nodded at the members of the volunteer fire department extracting the bodies from the truck, but I could sense a touch of playfulness in her tone.

  “Yeah, well, from what Chief Cromwell told me, they had it coming,” I observed simply before moving on. I didn’t have time to mess around, and Mike looked to be wrapping up with the lieutenant. Plus, the tropical storm rolling in and all had me watching the sky, and my phone. “The reason I wanted to talk to you though, was I wanted to offer you a job.”