A Casual Weekend Thing

by A. J. Thomas

  “Chris, right?” the young deputy asked.

  Christopher cringed. “No. It’s Christopher. But Hayes is fine. The FBI guys?”

  “One of them just came in. He’s back in dispatch with Daniels.”

  “The same Sergeant Daniels whose wife runs family services? Shoot, I really need to talk to both of them. Could you let them know I’m here?”

  “Uh… yes….” The young man picked up the phone and bent down to look at a laminated piece of paper taped to the desk. He dialed three numbers and jumped as the phone beeped in his hand. He dropped the phone, picked it up again, and then set it back in the cradle. “That happened last time too. How ’bout I walk you back?”

  “That would be great. Is everybody out looking for that Donovan kid?”

  “Yes. I got stuck watching the desk. Again.”

  “Somebody’s got to be here in case the world falls apart,” said Christopher, with true sympathy.

  He followed the young man through a series of teal-colored doors, down a long hallway, and through a locked door with the word “DISPATCH/DETENTION” painted in stenciled white letters. Through that door, they came out into an open platform with several desks and workstations arranged in a square. Two holding cells sat to the right of the platform along the far wall, and a small glass-walled office was set off from the workstations. The door was open, though, and inside two men were arguing.

  “I told you we can’t get a signal to them until they’re down out of the mountains. The forest service is your only option, but even they’ve got to find them first.”

  “I understand that” came the annoyed voice of Special Agent Belkamp. “I’m just not quite clear on why it’s taking so long. You said the campground is less than ten miles away.”

  “Ten miles as the crow flies. To get there by road, you have to go up and down switchbacks, on single-lane dirt roads. It takes an hour to drive up there, and nearly four hours to reach some of the more remote campgrounds. There are some deeper in that can only be accessed on foot or on horseback.”

  “Can you tell me how long it’s going to take?”

  “I sure can. It’ll take anywhere from one to twelve hours.”

  “Sergeant Daniels.” The young deputy poked his head through the door, as if both men inside couldn’t see him through the glass, “Detective Hayes is here to see you and Agent Belkamp.”

  “Thank you, Jackson,” said a very large man sitting at a cramped, tiny desk. “Come on in, Mr. Hayes, if you can fit.”

  Christopher made it through the door, but that was as far as he could go without touching Belkamp. “This is cozy.” The glass-walled office was packed with filing cabinets, another desk was tucked in the corner, and computers were set up on both desks. There wasn’t enough room between the two desks for a single office chair to move around, but someone had stuck a second office chair in the far corner anyway. “We haven’t met yet. I’m Christopher Hayes. I’m….”

  “You’re the runner with Heavy Runner,” the old sergeant said with a smirk.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You got to admit, it’s funny. Am I wrong? The way he talked, I got the impression that you’re rather partial to running.”

  “I…. Yes, I am.”

  The sergeant regarded him with a closed-lip smile for a moment. “Not all of us are as oblivious or as blind as Heavy Runner likes to believe, Detective Hayes. What can I do for you today?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me why Elkin kids go to foster homes in other towns.”

  “What?” The large man narrowed his eyes. He spun in his chair and folded his arms. “What the hell has that got to do with anything?”

  “Well, I was talking to people earlier, trying to get a feel for whether Micah Donovan was a victim in this case or an accomplice. That led to talking to people about local kids who fit the pattern the subject in this investigation followed when selecting and grooming victims. I’ve got a list of ten likely kids. Most are male, each one born about two to three years after the other, and school officials say eight of them were sent to foster homes in other counties around age thirteen, right when Peter Hayes would have lost interest in them. Micah Donovan is one of the few on the list who didn’t leave Elkin by being sent to foster homes in other towns, but he’s on the list. I’m not from around here, so I don’t know if you have a shortage of foster placements or something. It struck me as strange enough that it was worth asking about.”

  “You put together a list of possible victims over the weekend,” Belkamp translated, taking the list from Christopher.

  “No, just this morning.”

  “How the hell did our recruiters miss you after college?” asked Belkamp.

  “I thought you guys all had to be lawyers. The FBI doesn’t invite many education majors to apply. Here’s the list. What did your guys find out?”

  Belkamp shook his head. “There are too many prints on the discs that match police employment records. Our lab guys need a fresh set of prints from everyone in the chain of custody. I need to take the prints from Heavy Runner myself. The database scans of his prints are crap and they’ve only got a badge number next to whoever took them. No certification of anything that they’re even his. If they match, I need to get him to change his report so it explains why the hell he didn’t have gloves on, otherwise nothing we take off of those discs will be admissible as evidence.”

  “He had gloves on.”

  “Did you see him with gloves on?” Belkamp asked cynically.

  “You know I didn’t.” Christopher didn’t like what Belkamp was implying. “I saw him pull a stretched pair of gloves out of his bag, though.”

  “Let me see that list.” Sergeant Daniels plucked the sheet of paper from Belkamp’s hands. He read the names, his eyebrows rising a little more with each one. Staring at the paper, he picked up the phone, cradled it between his ear and shoulder, and dialed a number from memory. “Hey, babe,” he said, after a moment. “When you have a spare minute today, would you mind coming down here? The FBI would like to interview some of your kids, but we’re going to need help tracking them down.”

  He listened for a moment, and then he smiled. “No, I don't think they're current cases. In fact, even the two who are still minors look like they’ve gone to foster homes in other parts of the state.” The woman’s voice on the other end of the phone got a bit louder. Daniels read off the two most recent names, listened for another moment, and then shook his head. “Are you sure? Because I remember these kids—they were in and out of here all the time—but I never arranged DOC transfers, and I don’t remember anybody else doing it, either.” After another moment, Daniels sighed. “All right, I’ll check our files. Thanks, babe.”

  When he hung up the phone, he shrugged his massive shoulders. “Looks like someone in the school wanted to sugarcoat things for their staff. These kids didn’t go to out-of-town foster homes. Maggie says they’re in the custody of the Department of Corrections. Apparently these two went to a boy’s penal camp in Darby, and this one went to the state mental hospital down in Deer Lodge.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Daniels nodded. “Maggie said she’d double-check,” he said with a soft grin. “But she’s usually right. And this one was just a couple months ago,” he said, pointing to the last name on the list. “Still, I can check faster.” He rolled his chair over to the tiny computer in the corner and pulled up the records of both boys with the Montana Department of Corrections. After a moment of stabbing at the keyboard, he sat back and glared at the monitor. “I’m going to have to pull the hard copies to track them down,” he complained. “Our records say they were released to family services caseworkers. I must have hit the wrong value when I was updating their status.” He scrolled down and then snorted. “Never mind. Greg hit the wrong values when updating their status.”

  “The sheriff?” Belkamp asked.

  “Yeah. He’s better with computers than he wants to admit, but if it isn’t point and click, he tends to s
crew it up.”

  “Would you mind pulling the hard copies for me?” Belkamp asked.

  “I will, but I can’t right now. I can’t go down to the basement until I’ve got another officer here who can take over Dispatch.”

  “No one has so much as radioed in a traffic stop,” Belkamp pointed out. “And you said most of them are out of radio range anyway. I’m sure Hayes, here, can watch the radio.”

  “Agent Belkamp.” Daniels sat back and rolled back to the radio. “I don’t think you understand quite what digging those files out entails. They’re in boxes, not filing cabinets. The boxes are stacked, floor to ceiling, in an unlit room in the basement. I have to find eight files spread out over twelve years. It’s a bit more than a ten-minute job. While I’m sure Detective Hayes is a perfectly respectable officer, he doesn’t work here and he’s still the subject of an ongoing arson investigation. Seriously think about what you just suggested.”

  “Besides,” Christopher interjected, “it’ll be days before you can get a current address on any of these kids. You know Micah Donovan is out there right now.”

  Belkamp opened his mouth, but shut it again when the radio cackled to life.

  “Calling 386, 427” came over the radio. Christopher recognized the voice of Sheriff Brubaker. He sounded excited, almost giddy, over the radio.

  “Go ahead, 427,” Daniels said into the transmitter.

  “Located the white Toyota Tacoma. You wanna guess our 20?”

  Daniels rolled his eyes. “No, 427.” He turned off the transmitter. “Days like this, I wish he would just stay in the damn office.” He pushed the button again. “What is your 20, 427?”

  “The parking lot at Lone Pine State Park,” the sheriff hooted.

  “Ten-four, 427. You are in service at Lone Pine State Park.”

  “Subject is in the truck,” Brubaker responded. “We’re 10-6,” he added, telling Daniels they would be busy. Christopher knew he really couldn’t say more. They weren’t sure if they were going to talk to Micah, chase him, or arrest him—which course of action they settled on depended entirely on the kid’s response.

  Daniels sighed. “Ten-four, 427.” He hit the space bar of the computer near the radio and typed a quick note in a long activity log. “This whole time the little shit was still close to town….”

  Christopher was about to remind him that the kid probably didn’t even know they were trying to find him, especially if he had been out camping. Before he could say a word, static crackled from the radio again. This time Brubaker sounded frantic, desperate. “Shit, shit, shit! We need two EMT units! Two ambulances! 10-100, I repeat, 10-100! Do you copy, 386?”

  Christopher felt the world fading again, as though the part of his brain that was always spinning had heard and interpreted that transmission faster than his conscious thoughts could, and had slowed everything else down to lessen the blow. A 10-100 meant there was an officer down. Since Brubaker was the one who had called it in, that meant the officer he was riding with had been shot or stabbed. Connecting the dots fast, he realized that Micah Donovan must have been armed. He had opened fire on Doug and Brubaker rather than talk to them. A second ambulance meant that either Doug or Brubaker had shot Micah Donovan.

  Christopher shook his head, trying to focus, but he couldn’t. A stabbing pain was ricocheting around his chest. It hurt so much he felt like he couldn’t breathe. He was vaguely aware that the old sergeant at the desk was shouting into the telephone and talking into the radio at the same time, but whatever he might have been saying was muted and distant, as if he were trying to listen to it from underwater. Belkamp’s severe expression hovered in his vision for a moment, and then he was being dragged out of the tiny office and into the sunshine. He was dragged a few feet and shoved into the passenger seat of a dark-blue sedan.

  “Get ahold of yourself,” said Belkamp, starting the car.

  “Doug…,” Christopher gasped.

  “Hayes!” Belkamp snapped. “Take a fucking breath!”

  Christopher did. He focused on just breathing, on pulling one lungful of air after another. As the air filled his lungs, the tunnel vision clouding his thoughts receded and he began to notice the sounds and sensations around him once again. The engine was running. The car was moving. The police radio in the car was buzzing with frantic traffic. Local police and fire crews responding, EMTs responding, a helicopter responding. Christopher tried to process all of the information coming over the radio, tried to piece together call signs and emergency codes that were different from the ones lodged in his head by years on the job.

  “Just keep breathing,” Belkamp said quietly.

  With emergency lights flashing, they reached the parking lot and found it already filled with vehicles. Christopher was out of the car before it even came to a stop, scanning the crowd of people among the vehicles. He stopped when he saw Doug. He was on a stretcher, but awake, and being loaded into the back of an ambulance. Doug looked dazed, his dark eyes not focusing on anything. Blood covered the left side of his jacket, and his arm was in a splint. Doug was conscious, though, and as Christopher watched him disappear into the back of the ambulance, he found that he could breathe again.

  The relief that washed over him made him feel light-headed. He couldn’t lose Doug, not like that. How had he gotten so damn attached to someone he was just fucking? Maybe it was because Doug had the same dark hair and dark skin as his partner. The same build too.

  As Christopher thought about both men, he realized that they looked a lot alike. Aside from the crooked angle of Doug’s nose and the sad downward curve of his eyebrows, anyway. But Doug was everything Christopher knew his partner would never be, and everything he wanted. And Doug was just as alone as he was. Doug had made it very clear that he felt like he was too white to fit in on the reservation, and too brown to be accepted in Elkin. It was natural to want to reach out to him. None of that, though, explained how Doug had gotten so far under Christopher’s skin.

  Belkamp grabbed Christopher by the elbow and dragged him through the mess of vehicles and personnel toward a wide circle of emergency personnel. The ambulance crew was crowded around a stretcher, frantically trying to stop the boy’s bleeding, but they weren’t making any move to load their patient into the ambulance

  “Where are they taking them both? What hospital?” Belkamp demanded, flashing his FBI badge quickly.

  “The deputy is going to the ER in Elkin,” said the EMT. “We’re waiting for an airlift from Kalispell Regional for him.”

  The blond boy Christopher had seen driving Peter's truck was on the lowered stretcher, his clothes soaked with blood. The blood was darkest over his right leg and in two spots on his chest. He had lost a lot of blood. An oxygen mask was over his nose and mouth, and several pairs of hands were applying pressure over the wounds in his chest.

  Christopher was ready to step back, to give the ambulance crew the space they needed and to let them work without more of an audience, but the boy looked straight at him. He managed to lift his hand up and reached out toward Christopher.

  “Do you know him?” the EMT asked.

  He didn’t know how he was supposed to answer that. He was too overwhelmed to make up something tactful. He just nodded.

  “Go on.” The man shoved him into a gap near the head of the stretcher.

  Christopher knelt down and took the boy’s hand. He saw the boy’s lips move, then leaned close because the mask smothered whatever sound escaped from his lips.

  “You look like him,” Micah whispered again. “Sorry I couldn’t do it. He said you could, though. Not your problem. But he said you could do it….”

  “Can do what?”

  “Stop him. That Indian got in the way….” The boy convulsed. He arched his shoulders up, coughing violently. Drops of blood speckled the mask over his mouth. “Pete wanted to. That’s got to count for something, right?”

  Another round of coughing left the mask covered in blood. It bubbled up out of the boy’s mouth
and pooled between his cheek and the seal of the mask. He let out a painful gasp, and then fell still. Christopher felt the fingers clutching at his hand go limp. He checked the boy’s wrist for a pulse but didn’t find one. He scooted back as one of the EMTs began to perform chest compressions frantically. He stood up slowly, resisting the urge to wipe his hand on his pants. The sticky blood coating his fingers wasn’t going to feel any better on his pants.

  Greg Brubaker appeared at Christopher’s side and stared down at the dead young man. “What a fucked-up day,” he said coolly. “I thought he was gone before the paramedics even got here. A shot of adrenaline or something, and he was awake. What did he say?”

  Christopher shook his head and shrugged. “He said Pete tried, and that should count for something.”

  “Tried what?”

  This wasn’t the time or place to talk about that. Christopher just shrugged again.

  Doug winced as the surgeon pulled and prodded at the exposed muscle of his left bicep with a surgical needle. An IV was supposed to be dripping a small dose of morphine into his right arm, but Doug was beginning to suspect that the nurse had just loaded it up with saline and forgotten the drug itself. As the doctor tugged the thread tight, pain vibrated through his entire arm and into his chest. He hissed and panted, just to keep himself from making noise. “Are you sure it didn’t hit the bone?” he asked again. He tried to sit up to peek inside the open flesh and into his arm.

  “Yes.” The surgeon tightened another stitch in the muscle itself. “Soft-tissue injuries hurt. Without knocking you out, all we can really do is dull the pain.”

  “I’m beginning to wish I had let you knock me out.”

  “Too late now. You’re lucky the bullet didn’t fragment or explode. Hollow-point rounds are designed to break apart as soon as they hit something soft, so they can’t go straight through you. All of that kinetic energy coming to a stop in your arm would have made a shockwave that would have shattered the bone and crushed all of the tissue around it. I’d be doing a lot more than realigning your muscle and stitching the wound closed if it had.”