by James Tarr
Aaron straightened up like a shot. “Dave,” he said, and took off at a run.
Dave? Whatever that had been, it hadn’t even sounded human. Ringo took off after Abruzzo, running up the driveway with his gun up. Abruzzo flew past the cop car but Ringo skidded to a stop before the body. The deputy in the brown uniform was on his back behind the open driver’s door. There was blood on his hands, and a lot of it had soaked into the ground under him. Ringo knelt down, and saw the man’s eyes were closed, but he was breathing raggedly. “Hang on buddy, help’s coming,” Ringo told him, reaching for the radio.
Aaron flew down the slope past the police cruiser. The house was engulfed in flames, the heat huge. If anybody had been inside, they were dead and cooked. Dammit, dammit. There was a mini-van parked in front of the house, and past it was Dave’s Cherokee. Shit, had he been inside?
Aaron slowed his pace, held a hand up to protect his face from the heat, and jogged toward the vehicles. What the hell had happened? The mini-van looked like it had been in a demolition derby, and lost. Then he saw the first body, a big guy in a tac vest, blood everywhere. He moved around the vehicles and there was another body, so close to the house that the air around it was shimmering with heat. Peering past his raised arm, Aaron suddenly realized who it was.
“Dave!” he yelled. Moving forward against the heat was insane, but he did it, bending down. The flames were above and behind him, the house starting to collapse, when he reached Dave’s feet. Moving his blocking arm down to grab Dave’s ankle with two hands allowed the full intensity of the fire to batter his face, and Aaron’s eyes teared up and clamped shut involuntarily. Blindly he dragged Dave back, back, until the heat was no longer malevolent, then back farther, until he tripped on something and fell down. Aaron opened his eyes to see he’d dragged his friend up against the facing slope, into a hole, fifty feet from the front of the inferno that had been a house, and still he could feel the heat.
“Fuck, dude!” he said, dropping to one knee. Dave’s clothes were smoking, and half his hair had frizzled away from the heat. There was blood all over him, and he looked dead. Aaron put his fingers on Dave’s neck to check for a pulse, and it was like touching a turkey in the oven. “Dave! Dave!” he yelled in his face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Sheriff John Osterman woke up as he always did, instantly. It never took him more than a few seconds to become completely alert. He blinked his bleary eyes and through his glasses beheld the waiting room. It looked like a bomb had gone off, there were bodies everywhere, tipped this way and that on the chairs and curled up on the floor.
He righted himself and felt the sharp pain of a crick in his neck. He was too damn old to be sleeping in chairs, but he’d be damned if he was going to beg for a spare bed when there were sick and injured people who might need them. Never ask anybody to lift a hundred pounds if you aren’t willing to lift a hundred and twenty-five first. His father had taught him that, and he’d lived by it his entire life.
In the dim light he checked his watch, but he didn’t need to; he always woke within five minutes of 6 a.m. whether he had an alarm set or not. The glowing hands showed him it was 5:53. Okay, maybe within ten minutes of six a.m. There were two windows in the waiting room, and he could see the sun was thinking about coming up, but hadn’t quite committed.
Standing up, gun belt creaking, he made his way out into the white corridor which seemed as bright as a runway. Ginny found him coming out of the bathroom two minutes later, her nurse’s uniform nearly as bright as the corridor lights.
“Don’t you know better’n to get in out of the rain, Sheriff?” she asked him. “We’ve got beds all over this hospital.”
“One night sleeping in a chair won’t kill me,” he told her. Ginny was now the hospital’s head nurse, and had more gray on her head than he did. “How long you known me, Ginny? Twenty years? You should know by now I’m too bullheaded to do things the smart way.”
“Closer to thirty, John. Met you back before you were Sheriff. Do you want some coffee? I’ve got some brewing at the nurse’s station.”
Osterman checked his watch. “I’ll let you know in two minutes,” he told her. He looked around the floor, which was quiet and empty in both directions. “Anything since last night?”
“Doc Brennan’s been doing the rounds tonight. Toby’s still in intensive care. Too early to tell with him, but they tell me he’s a fighter. The Anderson boy’s in serious condition, and off the record the doc says he thinks he’ll pull through fine, but he’ll never tell you that. Nothing’s changed since yesterday. The only thing he’s really worried about are the burns, because of the chance of infection. Burns are just nasty things.”
“Don’t I know it.” They heard the elevator ping, and looked toward it. “Ah, see?” he said to her. Sam Wheaton stepped off holding two tall cups of coffee and ambled toward them in his lazy cowboy walk. Between the walk and the bushy moustache liberally shot through with gray he looked like a cowboy in the wrong uniform, even though Wheaton hated horses.
“Mornin’,” Wheaton said to Ginny, touching the brim of his hat with one of the cups before handing it to the Sheriff. Osterman took a long pull at the strong black coffee and sighed. Ginny headed back to the nurse’s station.
“The older I get, the more I enjoy the one vice I have,” Osterman observed. He looked at his second-in-command. “How’s your girlie drink?” Wheaton dared to put both cream and sugar in his coffee, which as far as the Sheriff was concerned showed questionable moral character.
Sam Wheaton smiled behind his moustache and took a sip of his own coffee through the slotted lid. The two men stood in the middle of the corridor silently, just sipping their coffees and enjoying the silence. They’d known each other far too long to have to fill the air with conversation.
“Any change?” Wheaton asked.
The Sheriff shook his head. “Toby’s still in ICU, and the kid’s the same.” He looked behind him toward the end of the hallway, at the door of Anderson’s room. One of his deputies sat in a chair outside the door, awake but looking terminally bored. Osterman was glad to see he wasn’t reading or texting on his phone. “Ginny said she had some coffee brewing, you want to get that man a cup?” he asked Sam.
“Yeah. Where’s everybody else?”
“Passed out in the waiting room. Looks like a plague went through and dropped ‘em where they stood.” The Sheriff stood and sipped his coffee as his Captain brought a cup to the man pulling guard duty. They exchanged a few sentences, then Sam ambled back to his side. While his four Division Commanders technically outranked Wheaton, they all knew the Captain was the number two man in the department, flow charts be damned.
Osterman glanced back at the kid’s closed hospital room door. “How long has he been in here now? A day?”
“Almost twenty-four hours. Brought him in yesterday morning by ten, I think. Why?”
The Sheriff pursed his lips. “I’m thinking if the feds do send somebody to snag him, there’s a good chance they’re going to come today. And if I was them, I’d come early, before everybody’s awake and paying attention. Before the news crews show up for the day. Better chance of getting in and out quickly with him, with no fuss.”
“Me, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the why of it all.”
“Don’t you know better at your age than to ask why?” He glanced back at the hospital room again. “I want some more men up here. Some solid guys.”
“All you’ve got is solid guys. I do the hiring, remember? How many do you want?”
“How many can you get?” he asked his Captain with a raised eyebrow, almost in challenge. He caught a glimpse of a smile under the hedgerow of a moustache. Wheaton took two long strides toward the elevators when the Sheriff called out to him. “And Sam? Bring me my shotgun.”
The plague victims in the waiting room were looking more like the walking wounded half an hour later as the sun peeked in through the windows and started waking them up. “Can I
get a refill?” the Sheriff asked Ginny, hoisting his empty cup.
“Sure.” She filled it up for him then replaced the lid, then walked out from behind the counter. She watched him look back and forth down the hall. “What is it, John?”
He’d had the boy placed at the end of the hallway. The nurse’s station was in the middle of the floor. The stairwell was nearly at the nurse’s station, and the elevators were just beyond. “How many rooms are there from here to the end of the hall?” he asked her, nodding his head in that direction.
“Patient rooms? Um, eight, plus a storage room and a visitor/family bathroom.”
“How many of them are occupied? Apart from the boy’s room at the end.”
“Just two. Why?”
He inclined his head toward her, and she followed him down the corridor most of the way to the boy’s room and the bored deputy in the chair. The Sheriff stopped, and then looked back down the direction they’d walked. The hospital corridor was a study in whites—white floor, white ceiling, white walls, with only a few lines of color and small prints on the walls to break up the monotone.
“You know what this reminds me of?” he asked her, gesturing with his coffee down the white hall.
She shook her head. “No.”
“The opening scene of Star Wars,” he told her. “The rebel ship. After it’s captured by the big…whaddayacallit. Star Destroyer. They’re hunkering down in a corridor just like this, all aiming their guns in one direction. They know the stormtroopers are coming, and they know they’re probably going to die, that all they’re doing is making a futile gesture. The Empire’s going to win, the Empire always wins, but they’re doing it anyway.”
She tilted her head and squinted. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“You remember what the corridor of that ship looked like after the stormtroopers showed up?” Ginny looked at him, and he waved a finger around. “Those two patients on this end? I think you should move them. I think you should move them now.”
The head nurse looked at him for a second, looked him straight in the eye as they were almost the same height, then nodded. “I’ll call my girls up here. Shouldn’t take us more than ten, fifteen minutes.”
By a little after seven a.m. the other two patients at that end of the floor had been moved, and the groggiest waiting room occupant had been enlivened with coffee or donuts or both. For a hospital floor with only one patient there were a lot of people standing around.
Coffee in hand, wearing the same suit he’d had on for now the third day in a row, Ringo approached the Sheriff. “How much of your work are you ignoring to be here?” he asked.
Osterman shrugged. “Got nothing more important to do than this.” He glanced at his watch. “The doc is supposed to do his morning rounds at seven thirty. Then we’ll see if he thinks it’s okay to wake up Mr. Anderson.” He glanced at the Detroit detective. “Anything else pop into your head last night about this live grenade you tossed into my lap?”
A Detroit mobster buying off an FBI agent or two to get at the person he thought killed his only son was completely believable. Half a dozen armed men in full raid gear—with no IDs—assaulting that person’s house, however, was not the work of the mob, Detroit or anywhere else. Something else was going on. Something big, and the Sheriff agreed. Ringo had been at the scene for all of forty-five minutes when the Sheriff had shown up, exuding quiet confidence and barking orders to get his people moving in the right directions.
Twenty minutes after the Sheriff arrived, Ringo had been uncuffed and was standing next to him. They watched the ambulance scream off, loaded with Anderson and the severely wounded deputy. “Follow me,” Osterman had said. He walked back to his Suburban with Ringo in tow, and they’d sat in the front seat. Very calmly he asked, “Would you care to explain to me that butcher’s bill I’ve got sitting out there?” Osterman gestured out the windshield. He still had men combing the area, looking for more bodies. They were scattered around the property like confetti.
Osterman looked exactly like he did on TV, but by then Ringo had observed that he wasn’t all show, the man actually knew what he was doing, and cared about his people. Add that to what Ringo knew of his politics, and guts…..”Let me play you a recording,” Ringo told him. He didn’t regret the decision.
Standing in the hospital corridor, Ringo just looked at him, took a sip of his coffee, and shook his head. “You know everything I do.” Anderson’s partner Abruzzo was sleepily eating a donut in the waiting room, but otherwise all the bodies were deputies. A lot of deputies. He looked around and counted them. Eight, not including the one posted by Anderson’s door, or the Sheriff, most armed with shotguns or AR-15s.
They all looked rather intense for this early in the morning, but then John Osterman seemed to attract the intense types, whether they loved him or hated him. Man his age, his reputation, he could wear whatever he wanted to work each day, suit and tie or a polo and khakis, but he insisted on wearing a full uniform including gun belt, radio, and Kevlar vest. That said something about him, as did the shotgun he was carrying with him, an old wood-stocked Remington semi-auto. With a buttstock shell carrier stuffed with Hornady buckshot. Ringo wouldn’t have been surprised if there were notches carved into the stock somewhere. He wasn’t called “Shotgun John” for nothing.
“Anything back yet on the prints?” Ringo asked the Sheriff.
Osterman looked at him, and a vertical line appeared between his eyebrows. “I’ve got seven dead and two wounded, including one of my deputies. Two of the dead are burned so bad the only way we’re going to ID them is through dental records. That’s the biggest crime scene I’ve seen in years, people burned, blown up, and shot. Our entire forensics unit is working in shifts at the scene, tracking footprints and photographing shell casings and trying to figure out just what the hell happened out there. We had to stop for six hours and call in the bomb squad because of all the unexploded bombs we found laying around like Easter eggs. So no. I don’t even know if the prints have been submitted yet.”
“Serial numbers on the weapons?” Ringo asked. And got a flat stare in response.
Just then Osterman’s radio crackled. “Sheriff, I’ve got some guys heading up to you. This might be who you’re expecting.”
The Sheriff grabbed his mike handset attached to his epaulet. “’Guys’?”
“One guy in a suit, with a briefcase, and four trigger pullers, guys fully tricked out in tactical gear. Slung M4s. Feds. They see me. I’m coming up with them.”
The Sheriff’s men instinctively lined both sides of the corridor, standing near doorways. Wheaton stood next to him in the center of the corridor, not far from the nurse’s station where Ginny and one of her young nurses waited nervously. Ringo stood at the entrance to the waiting room, Aaron coming to stand at his elbow. After a second, Ringo walked over to the Sheriff, and stood behind him. He’d started the party, after all, by calling the Sheriff’s department, asking them to check on Anderson.
The elevator dinged, and off stepped a neat bureaucratic type in a gray suit accompanied by four large men in full kit—tan military-style body armor with rifle magazine pouches across their chests, multi-pocketed pants, and rifles slung diagonally across their chests. The Sheriff observed the DHS patches on their tactical vests.
“Ah, I recognize you from Fox News!” said the bureaucrat. “What did 60 Minutes call you? ‘America’s Sheriff’? Agent Colman, Department of Homeland Security,” he announced himself, and dug out credentials from an inside pocket of his suitcoat. If he was surprised to see so many deputies in the hospital he didn’t show it, and radiated cheerfulness, but the tactical team members sure seemed unprepared to be outnumbered. They were looking all around, but Agent Colman had eyes only for the Sheriff. He glanced down at the shotgun in the Sheriff’s hands.
“Shotgun John, if I remember correctly. Unless you don’t like the nickname?” He glanced at the older deputy standing next to John who looked like a retired cowboy, and then at the pale t
ired man in a wrinkled suit right behind them. Detective? He looked like a cop. The Sheriff in person looked pretty much like he did on TV. Colman was surprised to see that his hair wasn’t dyed, it was just surprisingly dark for a man his age—but this close, he could see the gray hairs running through it, like pieces of steel wire.
The Sheriff took the proffered credentials and glanced at them. They looked authentic, and probably were, for whatever that mattered. “I earned it,” he replied noncommittally. He handed Colman his credentials. “Can I help you?”
“Yes! We’re here for David Anderson. To take him into custody. I have a federal warrant, here, signed last night by the AUSA in—” As he was speaking, Colman set his briefcase on the counter at the nurse’s station and popped the locks.
“You can’t have him,” the Sheriff told him quietly.
“Yes, well, I’m sure you have a lot of investigating to still do. I hear the scene was a bit of a mess, but Mr. Anderson was involved in something a little bit more important, and—”
“I don’t care.”
The Sheriff’s immediate and blunt reply put Colman off his rhythm. “I’m sorry?”
“You can’t have him.”
“Sheriff Osterman, I understand there is a whole local law enforcement versus federal animosity in many areas of this country, but I assure you we are not doing this because of any perceived lack of effectiveness on your part. There are just other things in play, which is why—”
“You’re doing an awful lot of talking, but not much listening,” the Sheriff said to him. “I am not going to release him into your custody. You can’t have him.”
Colman stopped and looked down at the Sheriff—amazing how much smaller people were in person than they seemed on TV—then withdrew some papers from his briefcase. “Um, I’m sorry Sheriff, I don’t want to upset you, but it’s really not up to you. The Assistant U.S. Attorney—”