Читать книгу A Long December - Donald Harstad - Страница 7

THE DUMB ONE LET LOOSE WITH A BUNCH OF ROUNDS. They hit the dirt about ten yards from the barn, and then he squeezed off some more that smacked through the barn boards just above the limestone foundation line, filling the air with wood fragments and an amazing amount of dust. George’s admonition to get down had come a split second too late, but I managed to duck down an instant after the slugs started hitting the building. The rounds punched through the boards six feet to my left, but that was way too close for somebody as slow as I am. I stayed pressed up against the cold limestone for a few seconds after the firing stopped, my head down to protect my eyes from all the crud; then I very cautiously made my way to the holes to my left, took a deep breath, and looked through. The dumb one was gone, presumably back into the shed.

“Everybody all right?” asked George.

We all responded more or less affirmatively.

“Next time,” I said, trying to slow my breathing, “we shoot first.”

“You bet,” said George.

I was getting a very bad feeling and stated the obvious, voicing what the rest of them probably already thought. “Hey. We lose sight of’em every time.” I put my face a bit closer to a hole to widen my field of view. Any closer, and I’d lose the cover of the interior shadow, and I sure didn’t want that. “We just think they go to ground in the same place. They could be anywhere out there. And they could be getting closer.” We needed a better view of the surrounding area. Unfortunately, it was not to be had from our location in the basement.

“I could go up into the loft,” said Sally from behind George and me, where she was tending to Hester. “Great view from up there. I’m small. Harder to see me.”

“Not with that red hair,” said George. “I’ll go up.”

Being about six inches taller and seventy-five pounds heavier than George, I simply said, “I’ll cover you from the steps.” He was a lot faster than I was.

The open stairs from the basement came through the first floor about ten feet inside the open barn doors, on the side that faced our shooters. George was going to have to emerge from the basement, run across the main floor about thirty feet to the right, and climb a vertical wooden ladder that went to the hayloft.

“How’re you going to do that? Cover me, I mean.” George tends to get right to the point. With the main barn doors standing open, he’d be in full view from the shed for the entire distance.

I looked up toward the main floor. “Why don’t you let me get about halfway up the steps. Then you go by, and I go, too. Just stick my head out of the opening. I should be able to fire at floor level at the same time you get upstairs.”

He looked skeptical. “Sure.”

“Trust me,” I said with a grin. “And rules or not, I’m gonna fire as soon as I get a shot at somebody. And screw it. If I don’t see the shooter, I’ll aim for where I think he is.” We weren’t allowed to fire unless we could see our target. A target that we could “demonstrate and elucidate” as a threat. An old machine shed that I just thought was occupied certainly wouldn’t qualify. Well, not on a normal day.

“You got more than one magazine for that thing? “he asked, indicating my AR-15. He pointedly didn’t say anything about my intention to lay down some fire. His department’s rules were much stricter than mine.

“Three. Plus the one that’s in it. That’s about a hundred and eight rounds.” I always carry twenty-seven or twenty-eight rounds in the thirty-round-capacity magazines. Easier on their springs.

“Save some for later,” he advised. “Why does everybody always seem to leave those big barn doors open?” he asked. It was rhetorical. He took a deep breath, and as he exhaled I could see his breath against the sunlight upstairs. “Well, we might as well get started.”

“You got a walkie?”

“Not one you can hear me on,” he said. The feds use different frequencies than we do.

“Sally, you better give him yours,” I said.

“Sure,” she said, but I could tell she was reluctant. She was, after all, a dispatcher first and foremost.

“Okay, never mind, I’ll give him mine,” I said, unclipping it and handing it to him. “This way,” I said to George, “you’ll have Sally on the other end instead of me.”

“And it’s a good thing, too. Let me get to the wall,” said Sally. “I’ll look over left. Do I get to shoot, too?”

“Nope. Just me,” I said. “No shots from the basement until they know we’re really here.”

She nodded and ducked over to the broken window. She patted Hester as she left her.

“Ready, Carl?” asked George.

“Yep,” I said, and moved up the stairs. “Let me call it.”

“Okay.”

I eased into a position where I thought I could get through the opening in the floor above me without taking more than one full step, and could do it with my rifle just about leveled. I checked to make sure I’d left enough room for George to get by me. It looked about right.

“Okay, go,” I said.

As my head emerged at main floor level, I felt George scramble by me and head for the ladder. I brought my rifle up, and aimed at the old machine shed. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw George trip on a bad board, then hit the old ladder about three rungs off the floor and nearly fly up and into the loft. It was over so fast, I found myself covering somebody who wasn’t there anymore.

I ducked back down into the basement. There had been no movement anywhere in my field of view. Not a shot had been fired. Either they’d not seen him, or they hadn’t had time to react. Excellent.

Sally and Hester were both looking at me. “He’s up,” I told them. “He’s really fast.”

Sally immediately put her walkie-talkie to her mouth. “George, you hear me?”

Silence.

“George? “she said, a bit louder. “George, you got a copy?”

Nothing.

She and I exchanged a glance, and I shook my head. “I know it was turned on,” I said. “I just used it to talk to the S.O”

“Were you on Info or Ops?”

A good question. On the operations channel, or Ops, you could talk walkie to walkie, and walkie to car. On the information channel, or Info, you could only talk to the office, and no other walkie or car would hear you.

I looked at her. “I don’t remember… damn, but I’ll bet it was Info.” Shit.

I headed back up the stairs. “Keep a sharp lookout,” I said to Sally. “I can’t see a lot from up here.”

“Okay.”

I crouched near the top of the steps, looking up toward the side of the loft where George had disappeared. It was a good fifteen feet above my head, and thoroughly covered with loose and baled hay. Insulation. He wasn’t going to be able to hear me.

“George,” I said in a loud voice. “George, you hear me?”

Silence.

Very cautiously, I stuck my head up past the floor level. I sure as hell didn’t want to be yelling if there was somebody with a gun standing near the door. I glanced around. Clear, as far as I could tell.

I figured that I could spend half an hour trying to get his attention without yelling, or just let out one good shout and get it over with.

“HEY GEORGE!”

About two seconds later, his face appeared at the edge of the loft.

“You’re on Info. The second button,” I said, holding up two fingers. “Turn it to channel one!” I held up my index finger. “One! For Ops!”

He nodded.

I glanced back toward the big door, just in time to see somebody run by, going to my left. “Look left!” I yelled, and ducked back down below floor level. I’d had such a brief glance, and he’d been going so fast, I couldn’t even tell what he was wearing.

Sally gave me a quizzical look.

“Tell him there’s a guy just outside, and he’s off to our left somewhere. Real close… maybe ten yards.”

She spoke softly into the walkie-talkie as I moved left toward the south wall of the basement.

“He’s over here somewhere,” I said as I passed Sally. I wished I’d gotten a better look, because it would have been nice to give George some sort of color to key on.

“He can’t see anybody,” she said to me, meaning George couldn’t make the guy from his position up in the loft. That figured. The guy was so close that George was probably going to have to lean out over the edge to see him.

“Okay…” I continued to the south wall. There were two small, quarter-framed windows at that end, probably only a foot or two above the outside ground level. There was very dirty glass in most of the frames, so it would be nearly impossible to see clearly into the gloomy basement from the outside. There were, however, two empty frames, both in the left-hand window. He’d have to go there if he was going to try to look in.

Either that, or go all the way to the back of the building, on the east side, where there was a walk-in door. The old door didn’t fit well, and I could see daylight around all four edges of the rickety thing. Maybe there. Maybe. But if it was me, I’d kind of like to get a glimpse of what was inside before I came through the door. I put my rifle to my shoulder and pointed it in the general direction of the left-hand window, trying to keep the edges of the door in my peripheral vision in case I was guessing wrong.

“You keep looking toward the shed,” I said to Sally. “I’ll take this one.”

“Okay.”

There was a noise from Hester. It was like she was trying to talk with a mouthful of Novocain. I glanced at her, and she was pointing her handgun at the door.

“Got it,” she managed to get out.

I just said, “Right.” There wasn’t time to tell her how impressed I was.

I slowly approached the window, half expecting to see a grenade or bomb or something come flying through. Instead, when I was about five feet away from it, the empty frames were suddenly filled by a New York Yankees baseball cap and a very wide-open mouth, which screamed something about “—die!!!!” Just like that, it was gone. I didn’t even have a chance to squeeze the trigger.

He had to have been on all fours and to the right of the frame, just to get his head that low and at that angle. Almost instinctively, I fired four rounds through the old wallboards, at what I hoped was the right level to blow him to hell.

Mistake. The overpressure from the muzzle blast of that AR-15 in the confined area of the barn brought down a shower of dust and bits of stuff from the rafters and between the floorboards above my head. The concussion made my ears ring. The only plus was a series of high-pitched screams from outside the barn, which seemed to get weaker and weaker, and then stopped altogether.

I looked back at Sally, who was brushing the debris from her hair even as she was talking on the walkie-talkie, and giving me a dirty look. Over at Hester, who had put up her shoulder to hold the compress in place while she too tried to brush the dust from her hair and keep her handgun pointed at the old door.

I was sure I’d killed whoever it was. It was a funny, sad kind of feeling.

“George,” said Sally, loudly, “says he can see him now.”

I looked quizzically at her.

“He says the guy is running. Back to the shed. It looks like you might have hit him.” She held the walkie-talkie closer to her ear. “In the hand, maybe…”

Damn. The funny, sad feeling left instantly, replaced by regret that I hadn’t killed him. I thought that was really interesting. So much for the humanitarian deputy.

Sally continued to listen. She smiled. “He says it was the dumb one, and that you made him lose his hat out in the yard.”

There was an upside yet. At least he’d left the immediate vicinity of the barn.

“Ask him,” I said, “if he can see any others out there moving around.”

“You don’t have to shout,” said Sally.

I hadn’t realized that I was. The effect of the noise of the rifle, of course.

“Luuggg!” said Hester.

I stepped toward her, pointing my rifle at the door.

“Nunh,” she said, and actually sounded happy. “Lugg.” She was looking at me and holding out her hand. “I gawdd id!”

In her palm was the nail fragment that had been lodged in her cheek. She’d apparently managed to push it back out somehow, despite what had to be some considerable pain. She appeared exceptionally pleased with herself.

She held the piece of iron up to show Sally.

“Hey,” said Sally into the walkie-talkie. “Hester got the fragment out of her cheek… yeah. Okay, ten-four, I’ll tell ‘em.” She pointed a finger upward, toward the general area where George was in the loft. “He says, ‘Good, now put gauze in your cheek,’ and that he can’t see anybody out there anywhere moving at all.”

“Okay.”

Sally looked me squarely in the eye. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she said. “I just can’t believe it.”

“Don’t feel bad. Neither can I, and I know a lot more about this case than you do.”

“So, we got a plan?”

I shrugged. “Wait for help. Best I can do.”

Back to square one. Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes that can be a very good thing.