by Ninie Hammon
Wanna know what courage was? That was courage. Judd’d never seen anything like it. E.J. Stephenson was the bravest man Judd Perkins had ever met. Judd had wondered at the time how he could ever repay E.J. for what he had done. Well, maybe this was how.
Maybe this was the big, awful, scary thing the good Lord had given Judd Perkins to do. Pete hadn’t said so — because he didn’t have to say it — but Viola and her boys wasn’t just gonna sit there like ducks in a pond and let him blow them away. When him and whoever else Pete’d gathered up started shooting at the Tacketts, the Tacketts was gonna shoot back.
Judd Perkins hadn’t never been shot at in his life. He could get killed here today. But if he didn’t man up and do the hard thing, a whole lot of other innocent people was gonna die. Could he shoot somebody, kill somebody?
Judd squared his big shoulders and looked Pete Rutherford dead in the eye.
“Yeah, I can do it, kill somebody if it comes to that.” His voice was strong and firm. “I wouldn’t a’ come if I wasn’t sure you could count on me. I won’t let you down.”
Chapter Sixteen
Skeeter Burkett was the one spotted the map on the wall. He’d shown up early at the West Liberty Middle School auditorium for the meeting his neighbor had called him about last night. But he hadn’t come early because he was so anxious to get his hands on Viola Tackett’s free gasoline. He didn’t put much stock in that offer, hadn’t never in his life seen Viola Tackett give away something she could make a buck selling. He was sure she planned to get everybody gathered up with her offer of free gasoline, and then tell them, oh by the way, it wasn’t exactly free. They was gonna have to pay for it in some way — she’d give out gasoline in exchange for food or moonshine or weed or ammunition. Something. Wasn’t in the nature of Viola Tackett to walk away from a transaction with her pockets empty.
Skeeter’d come early because he was curious, wanted to see what the old girl was up to this time. And because he didn’t have nothing better to do. Didn’t have nothing to do at all, if the truth be known, and it didn’t take much to catch the interest of a man who’d opened up his eyes this morning and seen the whole of a day stretch out there in front of him, hours stacked up one on the other, and not a single task he had to do to fill them up with.
He coulda gone fishing, but that didn’t appeal to him no more after he found the dead body of that preacher’s girl in the river. Might not never go fishing again. Guess you could say Skeeter was just coasting, like a jon boat when you kill the engine with the bow pointed at the shore and it just glides across the glassy water without making a sound. That was Skeeter … guiding across the final days of his life all smooth, not making a sound.
He’d parked his truck out back in the parking lot and come in the back door so he was facing the back wall of the auditorium soon’s he walked out that little door beside the stage. And on that back wall was … a wonder. The closer he got to it, the more of a wonder it appeared to him to be.
It was a map of Nowhere County. A huge map of Nowhere County, bigger’n any map he’d ever seen, as a matter of fact. It was drawn on canvas, like artists used to paint paintings, musta been at least ten feet across and maybe eight feet tall.
Every step he took toward it revealed greater detail, until he was just standing in front of the thing, looking up, wondering who in the world could possibly have drawn something like this.
“You make that thing, Skeeter?” said a voice behind him. It was Bud Crockett, who lived out on Blandford Lane in Little McGuire Hollow. Him and Skeeter had been on a bowling team so many years ago he couldn’t have put a year to it if you’d held a gun to his head. Long time, though.
“No, I didn’t make this,” Skeeter said. “Obviously, you didn’t neither. Who did?”
Bud had come to stand next to Skeeter, staring up at the map.
“You got me, but whoever it was done it musta spent months—”
“Months?”
“Okay, years putting it together. Look at that little print. Why, this map’s got every little creek—”
“Lookit that,” said a woman’s voice, and Skeeter cringed. It was Wilma Thacker and she had a voice like a rooster. “You draw that, Skeeter? That’s amazing.”
“Folks keep trying to give me credit for it, I’m gonna start taking it,” he said. “But it weren’t me. I was just lookin’—”
“That there’s Burnt Stump Road,” said a laughing man behind the three of them and they turned to see Burt Donaldson from Poorfolk. He had come in with Clyde Biggerstaff, Jeb Pruitt and Milt Watson from Killarney. “I ain’t never seen a map had Burnt Stump Road on it. I didn’t know anybody knew it was there ‘cept me and my daddy.”
“Why shore, I know where Burnt Stump Road is.” Jeb walked to the map and had to stand on tiptoe to reach the spot on it he was pointing to. “Right there. That’s where I killed my first buck.”
“We had a deer stand not half a mile from there on …” His eye traced along the map and the smile on his face grew bigger. “Look a’here. Now, who knew Little Bit Rock was right there in the creek. Used to fish there when I was a kid.”
A crowd had gathered around the map, growing bigger and bigger and folks crowded around the outside edges, trying to get a look at the wonder of detail that had been set down.
It was like somebody’d took the time and trouble to mark out the stones that lead across the creeks of their whole lives.
Skeeter found himself shoved a bit to the side, as others crowded around, pointing to one thing and another.
“Used to go parking there with Sue Ellen when we was …”
“That’s where that black bear come out of the woods, right there by …”
“Me and Buddy Doverspike was looking for ginseng in the woods there, come upon a hornet’s nest and …”
The conversation that hummed around him had a pleasant sound. Like an old sewing machine, purring along, making stitches, sewing one piece of cloth to another. He noticed stickpins on the map, groups of them — several crowded together in the same places. Couldn’t figure why that was because the stickpins wasn’t holding up nothing.
“Who done this?” Jimmy Dan Thacker called out. “How’d he know …? Look a’here.”
He pointed to a spot on the map marked in clear block letters: “Blarnaby Stone.”
“How in the world …?” Jimmy Dan was clearly flummoxed and Skeeter knew why. He’d heard about the Blarnaby Stone, but probably weren’t two dozen other people in the county knew it was there.
Skeeter’s daddy’d took him out to see it when he was knee high to a grasshopper, the big green rock sticking out of the ground, right at the top of Hollow Tree Ridge, like it was a chocolate chip some giant had stuck in a big cookie. The thing was bigger than a farm truck and almost round as a marble, least the part of it that was sticking out of the ground was. Of course, it was ‘cause it was green that made it something worth trekking all the way up the steep ridge to see. Appeared to be something growing on it, not moss, lichen of some sort. He’d seen the green stuff growing in other places in the woods, but didn’t know why — and neither did his daddy — it had growed solid all over this one rock and nothing else nearby. His daddy’d said his own daddy’d showed it to him, said it was the Blarnaby Stone, which was like some rock that was supposed to be sticking out of the ground somewhere in Ireland.
“Who drew this map?” somebody pushing through the crowd asked, but didn’t nobody standing there know. They was all looking at the places they’d seen all their lives, special things like the Blarnaby Stone, or not so special, just that spot where somebody used to go fishing, fell in and danged near drowned in three feet of water. But special places to the folks looking at ‘em — because just like the Blarnaby Stone, them places was their places, b’longed to them and their families. Never occurred to Skeeter Burkett they was so many of such places in Nowhere County.
Pete Rutherford had give it as much consideration as he’d had time to do, but in truth
it wasn’t a particularly quarrelsome logistical problem.
“Lester, you chime in as you see fit, make sure I didn’t miss nothing.” Lester nodded. For a fleeting moment Pete flashed back to his days in the army, with his platoon, about to go into enemy fire for the first time. He’d gone boots-down on Guadalcanal with the original squad of soldiers he’d gone through boot camp with. He knew them all and boot camp had a way of bonding men together like wasn’t nothing else in the world could do. Ralph Bartley, the Kansas farm boy with the most pathetic set of buck teeth Pete’d ever seen. Got tagged Bucky the first day, of course, and that boy could shoot — whew, doggies could he shoot! Enrique Martinez from El Paso — they called him Poncho — had confided in the other men that he wasn’t really a citizen, his parents had sneaked with him across the border when he was three years old. Pete didn’t know how he’d managed to get through the military’s paperwork, but he’d done it, was proud he could serve with his fellow Americans. There was Bonzai — the Californian who did everything full out — Hoosier from Oklahoma and the Jewish guy called The Nose from Massachusetts. The other soldiers took turns standing in the shade of The Nose on hot days. Pete knew without a doubt they would have his back as he would have theirs.
The two men who stood with him in Lester’s Hardware Store were good men. Pete’d known them all his life, a lot longer than he’d known his army buddies. But he didn’t know them the way you knew your fellow soldiers. When the guano connected with the air conditioning, would they …?
Well, he supposed he was about to find out.
“Way I see it, Viola’s gonna herd everybody together in front of the school.” West Liberty Middle School sat in the middle of the block directly across from the courthouse. The school mirrored the architecture of the courthouse with wide steps and tall white columns and big oversized double doors, inlaid on both sides by leaded glass windows.
“I don’t got no idea how many boys she’s gonna have along for this rodeo. Her own boys, that’s three, but I figure she’s called in reinforcements for a thing like this. So she could have a dozen, maybe more, maybe less. We ain’t gonna know the strength of the enemy until we see for ourselves.”
“You’re thinking up on the top of buildings on both sides of the courthouse,” Lester said, and Pete nodded.
“The crowd’ll be hemmed in front and back by the buildings, but she’ll have guns on both sides to keep them from scattering up and down the street. Judd will get up on the roof of the drug store, I’ll take the beauty parlor.” Willingham’s Drug Store was still open for business, as was the Hair Affair Beauty Parlor and Nail Salon. But there was a sad row of four closed businesses — two on either side of the courthouse — between them. “Judd can take down the men on the north side of the crowd. I’ll take the south.”
“You got it figured how we gonna cut down on civilian casualties?”
“That’s gonna be Fish’s job.”
Lester raised an eyebrow at the mention of Fish, but Judd never twitched, just stood there, stoic. It was clear Judd had set his mind to doing as he was told, exactly as he was told, and he didn’t presume to have any opinion on things one way or the other.
Pete hadn’t really intended to involve Fish. But the former English teacher had definitely demonstrated initiative — stole a car, for crying out loud — to get help. As far as Pete could tell, Fish was cold sober, and Pete hadn’t had time to recruit anybody else.
“Fish’s gonna be in the crowd. They’re gonna be boxed in by the buildings and the only place to run is north and south down the street. Can’t have that. Soon’s the shooting starts, Fish is gonna herd people forward — up toward the school — and then turn ‘em right, down the sidewalk toward the bank, around the fountain and out the back.”
Pete had told Fish he had to keep the crowd together. If they just scattered, bolted in every direction, they’d overrun Viola’s gunmen on the sides, get in his and Judd’s line of fire. The only opening off Main Street lay through the big courtyard next to the bank building where a spray of water once spouted out a mermaid’s mouth, though water had long ago been cut off to the empty building and vandals had stolen the statue’s head. On the back side, the bank’s courtyard opened through an ornate archway into the parking lot behind the building.
He looked at Judd when he spoke again. “But this here ain’t gonna be all neat and tidy.” He thought ‘bout telling Judd what his sergeant had told him all those years ago — “No plan survives after the first shot’s fired.” Instead, he said, “Folks is gonna panic. I hope Fish can get most of them out, but they ain’t all gonna listen to him. Maybe none of them will. No telling what they’ll do, where they’ll run. That’s why I didn’t try to round up an army of hotshots and line the rooftops with them. It’s just you and me and Lester because we got to hit what we aim at … and nothing else.”
Judd nodded and Pete turned back to Lester.
“I’m thinking a sniper-initiated ambush.”
That meant the ambush would begin after the first shot from the sniper. “Best spot for you’d be on the roof of the post office, don’t you think?” The post office was a block south, on the same side of the street as Judd and Pete’s positions. “There’s air conditioning units on the top there you can hunker down behind. I know ‘em well, probably cleaned a hundred birds’ nests out of the things. There’s an unobstructed line of sight to the front of the school.”
He and Judd would not have to search for cover to conceal their presence. All the buildings on both sides of the street had facades that rose up at least three feet above the roof line, each unique. Several buildings had built up higher facades — ten or fifteen feet tall, all ornate and fancy-like, which presented an uneven, jagged roofline to Main Street. Pete had always thought it’d look better if they was uniform, all the same height and shape, but hadn’t nobody asked his opinion on the subject. He’d selected the drug store and hair salon buildings that had facades perfect to his purpose, designed with the missing-teeth look of castle turrets, where you could hide from sight behind a yard-wide “tooth” and stick your rifle barrel out through the slot between them to fire.
The suppressor on Lester’s Ruger 10/22 would make it silent, just a little coughing sound you couldn’t hear six feet away. When a weapon was fired, there was two things made the gunshot sound. One was the explosion of the gun powder in the barrel and that’s what the suppressor would silence. The second was the sound of the bullet breaking the sound barrier, the familiar “crack” sound. A .308 with a suppressor was still so loud it’d make your ears ring because the bullet it fired was going something like 2,600 feet per second — and the crack would give away the direction the bullet was coming from. But Lester’s Ruger fired a bullet much smaller and slower. No sound. Of course, that required an even greater accuracy than a larger gun. A sniper had to land a good, solid center shot, headshot or middle of the chest or back — otherwise the shot would only wound, not kill.
“Soon’s Viola starts talking, everybody’ll be looking at her,” he told Judd. “That’s your signal to line up your shot.”
He looked from Judd to Lester. “Simple plan. Lester takes the first shot.” He looked at Lester and said just one word. “Viola.” Lester nodded. “Won’t nobody see nothing nor hear nothing, she’ll just drop.” He looked at Judd.
“We got to give them a chance to surrender. I’ll holler for them to drop their guns — and when they don’t, and they won’t — that’s our cue to open fire. Have a man in your sights so you can get at least one maybe two in the first couple of seconds while everybody’s still surprised.
Judd would be firing a Browning A-bolt .270 hunting rifle with a Diamondback HP 3-12x42 scope. Pete’s was an M1 carbine. Both of those weapons would blow a hole in a man big enough to stick your fist into. As opposed to Lester’s sneak attack, Pete and Judd would be loud — that was part of the plan, too. The men below could tell where their bullets were coming from, and they’d turn and fire back, shoot at the m
en on the rooftops while Fish led the crowd to safety.
Both men nodded. Pete went over it one more time anyway. “Lester opens fire, takes out his target. We pick off the men guarding the right and left flanks. Fish directs the crowd forward, then right to the bank and out the back.”
The men nodded again.
Pete looked at his watch. They had plenty of time to get into position before noon. He looked at Lester, then Judd, didn’t say nothing stupid like good luck. Just held their gaze for a moment, didn’t mess up the communication with words. The men turned without speaking then and went out the back door of the hardware store.
Chapter Seventeen
Judd had more trouble than he’d thought he’d have climbing up the rusty, rickety old ladder on the back side of the drug store. Wasn’t an easy thing to do cradling a rifle, and his knees cracked so loud it sounded like rifle shots when he bent to a crouch at the top of the ladder to duckwalk across the roof to the facade wall in front. He glanced to the right and could see Pete making his way up a ladder two roofs away. The Hair Affair building, where he was positioned, didn’t have a ladder on the outside anymore, so Pete had to climb up onto the roof of the insurance agency next door and step across. The State Farm Insurance building had a tall facade so he merely bent at the waist all the way to the front of the roof, hidden behind the tall facade, before he had to hunker down and cross onto the hair salon roof.
Judd glanced to the left at the Post Office a block away with its flat roof adorned with air-conditioning units in the center, but saw nothing, didn’t know if Lester was in place yet or not, suspected if he was, he was hidden so well Judd wouldn’t spot him.
Judd couldn’t be seen from Main Street standing at the top of the ladder on the back side of the roof, but from there to the facade, he’d be visible unless he crouched, even had to crawl the last few feet to remain hidden from view. The stone facade reminded Judd of a picket fence, ‘cept the pickets wasn’t pointed, and he slowly peeked out the space between them. He had a clear view of the crowd gathering in the street below, and the school’s broad steps and tall white columns. He could only see about two thirds of the crowd because the rest was too close to his side of the street. He checked his weapon, then leaned back against the facade wall, panting. Not from exertion. From fear. His hands were slick with sweat and he dried first one palm and then the other on his pants.