by D L Barbur
There were wheelchairs lined up waiting for us at the emergency room entrance. Part of me wanted to John Wayne it and try to walk in under my own power. I could tell Alex knew what I was thinking. She shot me a look that said she’d pull an Aikido move on me if I didn’t go with the program, so I acquiesced to being wheeled shirtless and singed into the ER.
There was a minor kerfuffle when the triage nurse discovered I still had a pistol strapped to my belt. Alex solved the problem by taking it off me and threading the holster onto her belt on her left side, cross-draw style. She looked a little funny walking around with two guns like that, but nobody seemed to be in a mood to argue with her. When the nurse turned her head, I surreptitiously slipped Alex the little .38 out of my pocket and a knife or two.
“You’re gonna clank when you walk,” I said.
“That’s ok. One of us needs to be armed. I’m sticking close to you.”
Up until now, my usual paranoia had taken a back seat to other events. I was in a wheelchair in the hallway shirtless, unarmed and concussed. If somebody wanted to make a play for me, now would be the time to do it.
I was glad Alex was there.
Over the next couple of hours, I was poked, prodded, and had my head stuck in some kind of scanner. I never could keep CAT scans and MRI machines straight. Finally, a fresh-faced young doctor who was probably hoping to get his student loan debt forgiven by working in a rural area, told me I had a mild concussion and I should take it easy for a few days. I managed not to laugh at him.
By then Dale had shown up, looking pissed. He tossed a fresh shirt at me.
“How’s Robert?” I said as I pulled the shirt over my head.
“He’ll live. Boy’s face ain’t ever gonna be the same again though.”
“What’s going on back at the ranch?” I asked, then tried standing up. The room wobbled a little bit, but I was ok. I was trying very hard to ignore the ice pick headache. Everything still sounded muffled and I was nauseous.
Fuck it. Drive on.
“It’s a madhouse,” Dale said. “The FBI, ATF, DHS, hell a bunch of agencies I’ve never heard of are crawling all over the place. They all but kicked us out, so we hopped in the truck and came over here.”
“Is Rudder ok?” The doctor had left the room, so Alex un-threaded my holster from her belt and handed it to me. It felt good to be armed again.
“Yup,” Dale said. “He’s trying to round up some of his stock that got scared off by the explosion. I figure we’ll help him with that when we get back. The question I have for you all is, where’s Casey? We ain’t seen her here in the hospital.”
I shook my head, then regretted it. I held on to the edge of a counter and eyed the trash can, calculating whether I could get to it in case I threw up.
“She stayed at the ranch,” Alex said.
“Huh,” Dale said. “We didn’t see her.”
I felt a twinge of worry, but my thinking was fuzzy and I was having trouble processing all of it. Alex pulled out her phone.
“I’ll text her,” she said.
The door to my room banged open and Henry walked in. He had bandages all over his face but looked otherwise ok. Burke walked in right behind him, followed by two guys in suits that looked so much alike they could be twins. One scanned us, the other turned so he could see the door. It was getting awfully crowded in here.
“You’re shut down,” she said without preamble. “I don’t know what you were thinking, or what Bolle was thinking, trying to get Lyle to come to that ranch. Even if he hadn’t been wired with explosives, that was a dumb move.”
She looked pale, and to be honest, frightened.
“I’m supposed to take everyone’s credentials,” she said. “As of right now you’re all suspended with pay pending an investigation.”
Wordlessly, I pulled my leather credential holder out of my pocket and flipped it onto the bed. Everybody else followed. She hadn’t asked for my gun, so I left it where it was.
“There’s a block of hotel rooms in Ontario. You’re authorized to stay there tonight, then leave Eastern Oregon immediately. Go home to Portland and be available for questioning.”
“My boy’s in the hospital here, and we ain’t from Portland,” Dale said.
“We’re arranging for his transfer to a hospital in Portland,” Burke said.
Dale crossed his arms across his chest and gave her a flat stare, but didn’t object.
“What’s going to happen with Marshall?” I asked.
Burke gave me a haunted look that I didn’t quite know how to read. Her eyes jerked toward one of the suits, and I started wondering if they were here to protect her or watch her.
“The justice department is going to appoint a special prosecutor from DC to take over the case,” she said.
“Who?” Dale asked.
“I don’t know yet. I suspect the announcement is going to be made in the next few hours,” she said.
I felt that old familiar feeling of the rug being pulled out from under my feet. Burke had been our ace in the hole. She wanted Marshall in prison, and more. She was willing to keep climbing the ladder as high as it went beyond Marshall, and she had the guts and brains to make it stick. But right now she looked defeated and scared.
“I’m supposed to order you to stay away from Freedom Ranch, the Rudder Ranch, the command post here in town, and any other location associated with the ongoing investigation. Since all of you are here at the hospital, I’d suggest you just get in your vehicles and drive to the hotel we have booked for you in Ontario right now.”
Again, that twitching of the eye toward the guy standing in the doorway. I didn’t recognize him, which didn’t mean anything. He was so blandly generic that it was almost comical. Light 30’s, short hair, blue eyes, average height, athletic build. He wore a sports coat, jeans, and button-down shirt. He wasn’t displaying any credentials, but I could have picked him out of a crowd as a cop or military guy in a heartbeat.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alex open her mouth to say something, then shut it. Good. Either Burke hadn’t noticed or had pretended not to notice that Casey wasn’t there. Nobody else in the room seemed inclined to bring her up.
“Well, that’s it then,” I said. “You can’t win them all. Let’s get out of town. I could use a shower and a decent night’s sleep.”
Henry looked at me like I’d suggested something obscene and rude, but everybody else stayed impassive. The two suits turned towards the door and Burke followed. As they crossed the threshold of the door, one suit looked right, the other one followed and looked left. It was clear they’d done this before.
Burke suddenly turned towards me and reached for Alex’s shoulder. I had to take an awkward little step to avoid her and bumped into one of her handlers.
“Oh Alex,” Burke said. “I wanted to thank you for the consulting work on that case last month. I don’t think we’ve ever gotten your fees straightened out.”
“Uh. You’re welcome?”
I turned and saw Burke brush Alex’s chest as she pulled her hand away, almost like she was groping her. Alex had a horrible poker face, which I normally found endearing. Now, I gritted my teeth and willed her to play along.
The guard in the doorway looked over his shoulder with his eyes narrowed. Burke squeezed past me.
“Let’s go,” Burke said to the guard. “I need to get back to the command post before the briefing. You’re going to have to hurry.”
Whoever he was, the guard apparently wasn’t going to argue with his principal in public. They took off down the hallway, leaving us in their wake. Alex reached up and patted the breast pocket of her flannel shirt.
“Later,” I said. “In the car.”
Robert, Dalton, and Jack were waiting with Dale’s truck and my Charger. Dalton looked a little glassy-eyed, and his limp was worse. I figured his little escapade earlier had hurt his leg more than a little, and I couldn’t blame the man for taking a pain pill or two.
Nobod
y seemed to be watching us. There were surveillance cameras in the parking lot, but I figured enough time had passed since we’d left Burke. I nodded at Alex and she fished a scrap of paper out of her pocket. She read it and handed it to me.
I read the note.
NOT SAFE. Going to kill me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
We caravaned to the boat ramp on the Meuller River, about eight miles outside of Lehigh Valley. Robert drove me and Alex in the Charger. Everybody else piled into Dale’s crew cab. On the ride over we were silent. My head hurt and I still felt woozy. I just wanted a few minutes to sit in quiet, holding my girlfriend’s hand in the back seat of the car like somebody was driving us on a date.
When we got out at the boat ramp, I looked over at the spot where Alex and I had been parked. It felt like a lifetime ago since we’d been sitting there making out like a couple of teenagers.
We all huddled in a big circle. I looked everybody over. Henry clearly was hurting. His face was covered in bandages and he leaned against the truck. Dalton looked pale and sweaty. I hoped he hadn’t popped something loose in his leg in the process of trying to block Lyle’s approach to the ranch. Robert and Dale both looked pissed. Alex stood next to me, with smears of other people’s blood on her, and smelling of explosive residue and burnt plastic.
I felt the absence of Eddie and Bolle keenly. Eddie and I had never been close. I had been close with only a handful of people in my life, but I still considered him a friend.
I missed Bolle too. I never liked him, but I always wanted to believe he had some insight into the murky world of spooks and criminals we swam in. He’d always known more than he told me, which had irritated me to no end, but at least he’d known it. Now whatever was in his head was all gone.
I realized everybody was looking at me. I would have given anything to look over my shoulder and find Al, Alex’s dead father standing there, ready to step up and take charge. But there was nobody there. It was my turn.
I took a deep breath.
“What next?” I asked. “Do we all just walk away?”
“I ain’t inclined to quit now,” Dale said. “These assholes have hurt two of my children.”
I looked around the circle and saw heads nodding, including Alex. If she’d bowed out, I probably would have gotten in the car with her and just kept driving.
“Ok. Looks like we’re in,” I said. “What have we got for gear?”
“Whatever we’re carrying, and whatever is in the vehicles,” Dalton said. “The FBI made it real clear that if we tried to get back into Rudder’s Ranch, they’d throw us in jail. Wouldn’t let us take anything.”
I looked at Jack.
“The Little Bird is still there?”
He nodded. “Gassed and ready to go. Unless they have somebody who can fly the damn thing, there it sits.”
“We’ve got a couple of rifles and some camping gear in the back of the truck,” Dale said. “Other than that, most of our gear was in the trailer.”
I remembered that we’d left my shotgun and Alex’s rifle in the gravel at Rudder’s. My .308 was still in the trunk of the Charger, along with two sets of body armor, so that was something.
“We need a place to stay,” I said.
“You mean other than the accommodations the Federal government have so thoughtfully provided?” Dale asked.
“Yeah. The ones with the listening devices and surveillance,” I said.
“We’re gonna need money,” Dalton said. “Cash. Not plastic.”
“And vehicles,” Robert said. “They know these plates.”
“And we need to ditch our phones,” Henry said.
“We need Casey,” Dalton and I said at the same time.
As if on cue, Alex’s phone buzzed. She pulled it out of her pocket.
“She says to check the vehicles for GPS trackers, dump our phones, and pick her up at these coordinates. She says to bring a truck or van.”
She showed me the screen, which had a latitude and longitude on it.
“Where the hell is that?”
Robert took the phone and punched the numbers into the GPS unit in the truck.
“That’s about a tenth mile off a lonely ass gravel road about fifteen miles north of Rudder’s.”
“Huh,” I said.
We pulled a GPS tracker off the pickup and the Charger. I wanted to do something clever with them, but in my mental fog I couldn’t come up with anything. Henry pulled a cooler out of the back of Dale’s truck, put our phones and the trackers inside, and duct taped it securely. Then he walked over to the boat ramp and chucked it all in the river with a splash.
“It might take them a while to figure that one out,” Henry said. He looked at Dale. “I assume the roadside assistance and satellite tracking in your truck is turned off?”
Dale looked like he’d been asked something rude. “Son, I cut all that shit out before I even hung the fuzzy dice from the mirror and put on my nekkid lady mudflaps.”
“Ok,” Henry said. “We should be as dark as we can get.”
“Let’s go get Casey,” I said. “I’ll feel better when the band is all together again.”
Dale, Robert, Jack and I rode in the truck, while everybody else rode in the Charger. We left them behind when the road got so rough the Charger was in danger of bottoming out. I could tell Alex wasn’t happy about it, but I had no intention of subjecting Dalton’s leg to this ride. Henry didn’t look like he felt too hot either.
I could have applied the same reasoning to myself. I was continuously queasy, and the rocking of the truck didn’t help. I’d had my bell rung more times than I could count, but this one seemed worse than most. I wondered if it was because I was getting older.
“Should be right over there,” Robert said, pointing out his right window. I raised a night vision monocular to my eye and was rewarded with a faint flash. It was gone when I took the monocular away, and back when I looked through it again.
“She’s using an infrared light,” I said. “Stop here.”
We piled out, and now Casey was close enough I could see her picking her way through the sagebrush in the dark with a pair of night vision goggles strapped to her face.
“You ok Case?” I didn’t even think before I picked her up in a big hug. She was kinda weird about being touched, and I wondered if I’d made a mistake, but she hugged me back enthusiastically.
“I’m fine.”
I set her down and she grabbed my hand.
“Come on. This way. I’ve been busy while I’ve been waiting for you guys.”
She led us to a little swale, where one of Dale’s ATV’s was parked. It had plastic equipment cases strapped all over it. The ones in front were stacked so high I wasn’t sure how she’d seen over it to drive. A small satellite antenna on a tripod was pointed at the heavens, and her laptop was hooked up to it with the screen brightness turned almost all the way down.
“What’s all this?” I asked.
“I had some equipment stashed in a line shack on Rudder’s ranch in case something like this happened,” she said. “I’ve got some computer hardware, radios, that sort of thing. A couple of guns. Also some money,” she said.
“Wow,” I said.”How did you get out?”
“When the explosion happened, it blew me off the roof of the trailer. I busted my nose,” she said and fingered the bridge of her nose. She already had a pair of raccoon eyes started, and there was blood all over the front of her shirt.
“I knew with Bolle gone we’d be cut off. I’d always been worried about that, so I had a little contingency plan.”
“What do you mean cut off?” I asked.
“Did you ever stop to think where the money came from Dent?”
“The money? It came from Iraq. The reconstruction funds.”
She looked at me like I said something stupid.
“Not that money. Our money. Our operational budget. The money Bolle used to buy stuff like guns, cars, and helicopters?”
&nb
sp; “Uhh… No. I guess it came from the Department of Justice?”
“It doesn’t. Our salaries come from the DOJ. That’s it. All the operational money gets funneled through a series of blind trusts and corporations. None of it is federal money. If you follow the trail, it all leads back to Bolle.”
“You mean he’s been bankrolling this himself?”
She nodded, and in the weak glow of the red light on my headlamp, I realized she didn’t look good. Her eyes were sunken and her movements were quick and jittery. She pointed at the satellite dish.
“I managed to get connectivity two hours after the explosion. By then it was all gone. The funding channels are cut off. All of our access to law enforcement and intelligence databases like NCIC was severed. I’m not even sure we’re technically federal agents anymore. We were on contract, which can be severed at any time.
“We had to give Burke our badges. So we’ve got nothing,” I said.
“I’ve spent the last couple of months figuring all this out,” she said as she shook her head. “I put in some backdoors. We’ve got a bunch of cash, and I siphoned some operational funds through a series of corporations in the Seychelles. I also made separate access accounts into NCIC and the Homeland Security databases. Nobody shut those down, but they might not survive a routine audit.”
She pointed at the cases. “I’ve also got stuff to make fake identification and backstop it in DMV databases and stuff.”
“Casey, I could kiss you right now.”
“Don’t,” she said. “My nose hurts. I’ve spent the last hour booking a vacation home outside Ontario. We’ve got the rental for a week. Also, I got us some vehicles from a commercial leasing facility out of Boise. I got two trucks, a sedan, and a van. Since we did a bulk order they drove them to the house for us.”
This time I did pick her up and hug her. She was shivering.