“He took the frags!” I yelled, and suddenly Bunny and I were scrambling back, ducking down behind the SUV. Bullets still hammered the back and there was no cellar.
“Oh man,” whispered Bunny, and now there was no trace of humor on his face. After awhile even the black comedy of the battlefield burns away to leave the vulnerable human standing naked before the reality of ugly death. We were screwed. Totally screwed, and we knew it.
When the first grenade blew, Bunny closed his eyes and clutched his shotgun to his chest as if it was a talisman that would provide some measure of grace.
But the grenade didn’t detonate inside the house.
The blast was close, but definitely outside.
There was a second. A third. A fourth and fifth, and between each blast there were spaced shots. Not automatic gunfire. Spaced, careful pistol shots.
Men screamed out in the mist.
Men died in the mist.
I saw another shape move through the gloom. Not small. This one was big, but he was only a shadow within the fog. He turned toward me and I expected to see blue eyes.
The blood froze in my veins.
The eyes that looked at me through the fog were as red as blood and rimmed with gold.
And then they were gone.
I blinked. My eyes stung from the gunpowder and plaster dust. Had I seen what I thought I saw, or were my eyes playing tricks?
I didn’t want to answer that, but . . . . My eyes don’t play tricks.
We crouched down, weapons ready to make our last stand a damn bloody one.
But the battle raged around the house. Around us.
“Top!” I yelled. “Talk to me!”
“We got new players, Cap’n.”
“What can you see?”
“Not a damn thing. No, wait . . . oh, holy—”
Three more blasts rocked the side of the house and suddenly all the gunfire in the front ceased.
There was a moment of silence from the back, too, but then it started up again.
A voice called out of the mist. “In the house!” I said nothing and waved Bunny to silence.
After a pause the voice yelled again. “Hey . . . John Wayne . . . you got some injuns on your six. You in this fight, or are you waiting for Roy Rogers?” I looked at Bunny.
“Well . . . son of a bitch.”
And that fast we were on our feet and running back to the kitchen, firing as we went. The incoming assault was less fierce, and we made it to what was left of the brick wall. A bullet plucked my sleeve, then chips of brick dust.
We saw them. Three groups left, but only a few of each. Two burly Russians behind a stack of hay bales over to the left. Couple of Arabs right across the back lawn, using a toolshed as a shooting blind. And three Latinos off to the left, firing from behind a tractor.
The voice called out of the mist. “Game on?”
I grinned. “Dealer’s choice!” I yelled back.
I thought I heard a laugh. “You guys take scarecrow and Tim Allen. I got John Deere.”
Bunny frowned at me for a moment before he got it. Scarecrows are stuffed with hay.
Tim Allen’s comedy is all about tools. John Deere makes tractors.
Bunny said, “Yippie-ki-yay . . . ”
I swapped out for a fresh magazine. “Say it like you mean it.”
He took a breath and bellowed it into the fog.
They had the numbers. We had the talent.
I saw muzzle flashes coming from two points in the mist, catching the tractor in a crossfire. Bunny and I turned the toolshed into splinters. Top emptied four magazines into the straw.
The white hell outside became a red desolation.
The thunder of the gunfire echoed in the air for long seconds, and kept beating in my ears for hours.
The mist held its red tinge for a while, and then with a powerful blast of thunder, the rain began to fall.
When we went outside to count the living and the dead, we only found dead. Six teams. Thirty-two men.
There was no one else in the yard. No one else anywhere.
“Cap’n,” said Top as he came back from checking far into the cornfields, “that was Chief Crow and that Sweeney kid, wasn’t it?”
I said nothing.
The shapes had matched. One small figure, one big. The voice had matched Crow’s. Even the John Wayne reference.
But we never found footprints. Not a one. I blamed it on the rain.
The bullets that were dug out of the bodies of the shooters did not match any weapon found at the scene. When the service weapons of Chief of Police Malcolm Crow and Corporal Michael Sweeney were later subpoenaed for testing, the lands and grooves of their gun barrels did not match the retrieved rounds. Shell casings from a Glock similar to Sweeney’s and a Beretta 92F like the one Crow carried did not match the test firings performed by FBI ballistics. Witnesses put Crow and Sweeney elsewhere at the time of the incident.
“I’ve never seen a cover-up this good in a small town,” I said to Church ten days later.
Instead of answering me, he stared at me for a long three‐count and ate another vanilla wafer.
Then he opened his briefcase and removed a manila folder marked with an FBI seal. He set it on the table between us, removed a folded sheet, placed it atop the folder, and rested his hand over them both.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Still making no comment, he handed me the folded paper. It was a report from the National Weather Service for August 16. There was no report of a storm, no Doppler record of storm clouds or fog.
“So? Somebody missed it.”
“When the forensics team took possession of the crime scene,” he said, “their reports indicate that the ground was dry and hard. There had been no rainfall in Pine Deep for eleven days.”
“Then we need new forensics guys.”
Church said nothing. He handed me the FBI folder. I took it and opened it. Read it. Read it again. Read it a third time. Threw it down on the table.
“No,” I said.
Mr. Church said nothing.
I picked up the folder and opened it. Inside were several documents. The first was a report from a Forest Ranger who found a body in the woods. The second was a medical examiner’s report. It was very detailed and ran for several pages. The first two pages explained how a positive identification was made on the body. Fingerprints, dental records, retina patterns. A DNA scan was included. A perfect match.
Simon Burke.
He had been severely tortured. His wrists and ankles showed clear ligature marks, indicating that he had been tightly bound. There were also bite marks on his wrists consistent with his having chewed through the cords. His stomach contents revealed traces of fiber.
According to the autopsy, Burke had managed to free himself from bondage and escaped from a cabin where he was being held. He made his way into the forest and apparently became disoriented. He was seriously injured at the time and bleeding internally. Forensic analysis of the spot where he was found corroborated the coroner’s presumption that Burke had collapsed and succumbed to his wounds. He died, alone and lost, deep in the state forest that bordered Pine Deep.
That wasn’t the tough part.
I mean . . . I felt bad for the little guy. He’d become a character in one of his own books.
The intrepid underdog who outwits the bad guys and manages to escape. Except that this wasn’t a book. It was the real world, and the bad guys had already done him so much harm that it’s doubtful he could have been saved even if Echo Team had found him.
But . . . that’s wasn’t the reason Church sat there, staring at me with his dark eyes. It wasn’t the reason that my heartbeat hammered in my ears. It wasn’t the reason I threw the report down again.
The coroner was able to estimate the time of death based on the rate of decomposition. By the time he had been found on August 22, his body had passed through rigor mortis and was in active decay.