by Stuart Woods
The earplugs were not enough, and simultaneously, Ham and Holly clapped their hands over their ears. The firing continued for a full five minutes, then, apparently at another signal, abruptly stopped. The shooters all lowered their weapons, and all turned to look at the Humvee. A man climbed up onto the vehicle’s roof and shoved a large clip into his weapon, then sat down cross-legged and sighted on the school bus. The crowd grew quiet.
The shooter took his time, then squeezed off a round. Holly was amazed at how much noise the gun made. Then the projectile hit the front of the school bus and two things happened almost at once. First, the bus’s hood flew into the air, then it was followed by the engine, which popped up out of its bay a good three feet high.
Then the shooter sighted again and put three rounds into the bus, along its length. Abruptly, the bus exploded into a huge ball of flame.
Ham reached over and pulled one of Holly’s earplugs out. “That’s your phosphorus-tipped round.”
“But why the big explosion?” Holly asked.
“I guess they must have put a few gas cans in the bus.”
The crowd erupted in cheering, and the man on the Humvee roof stood up and took several bows.
“Well,” Holly said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like that.”
“I have,” Ham said.
With the show over, the crowd began to drift away from the pit, back toward the tent, revealing picnic tables spread along the grass on the lakeward side of the tent. Holly had not noticed until now that they were on a rise, and that the lake could be seen a couple of hundred yards away.
“I don’t think I feel like staying for lunch,” Holly said.
“Let’s take a hike, then,” Ham replied. “But we’re supposed to check with that Peck Rawlings guy first.”
“There he is,” Holly said, pointing.
Ham led the way, and they approached the man who was, apparently, their host. “Mr. Rawlings?” Ham said.
Rawlings turned. “Call me Peck,” he said.
“Well, Peck, we’re going to be on our way. You said to check with you first.”
“What did you think of our little demonstration?” the man asked.
Holly tried to muster some enthusiasm. “That was really something,” she said.
“Yeah, boy,” Ham echoed. “I haven’t seen that much firepower all at once since Desert Storm.”
“We do that at every show,” Rawlings said.
“How often do you have them?” Ham asked.
“Oh, every now and then.”
“Why don’t you put us on your mailing list?” Holly asked.
“We don’t have a mailing list,” Rawlings said.
“Well, whatever,” Holly replied.
“Ham, you want to give me your number?”
“I’m in the book,” Ham said. “C’mon, Holly, let’s hit the road.”
“Right,” Holly said.
Rawlings pulled a small walkie-talkie from his shirt pocket. “Hey, Charlie,” he said.
“Yeah, Peck?”
“Our guests are departing in a Ford pickup with a boat in the back.”
“Got it.”
Rawlings put the radio away and stuck out his hand. “We’ll see you again sometime, Ham.”
“Maybe so,” Ham said.
“You never know.” He offered his hand to Holly. “See you, little . . . uh, excuse me, Miss Barker.”
“It’s Holly,” she said, shaking the man’s hand.
“Bye-bye.” Rawlings turned and walked toward the picnic tables.
Back in the truck, Holly called Hurd again and checked in.
“What’s going on out there?” Hurd asked.
“I’ll fill you in later,” she said, and punched off.
“What’d you think of our morning?” Ham asked.
“Funny what Americans do for recreation, isn’t it?”
Sixteen
HAM DROVE BACK TO HOLLY’S HOUSE, AND, once Daisy had been properly greeted and apologized to for her lonely morning, they had some lunch.
“I like a ham sandwich,” Ham said, munching away.
“I believe I knew that about you,” Holly said. “Hence, the ham in the fridge.”
“I knew a woman once who said she liked a Ham sandwich, with a big H.”
“You don’t have to spell it out for me, Ham. It’s more than I want to know about your life.”
“You mean, a father shouldn’t have a sex life?”
“No, just not one that his daughter knows about.”
“Oh. I didn’t know you were so sensitive.”
“Funny, you never asked any questions about my sex life,” she said. “I mean, when I had one. See what I mean?”
“Point taken,” Ham said.
“And anyway, how did this woman make a Ham sandwich, without another woman to help?”
“I wasn’t going to bring that up,” Ham said, washing his sandwich down with a beer.
“Ham, are you telling me you had a threesome?”
Ham took another swig of the beer. “You said that, I didn’t.”
“That is appalling,” she said.
“What’s appalling about it?”
“Not the idea of a threesome; just the idea of you in one.”
“You don’t find the idea of a threesome appalling?”
“Not if I got to pick the guys.”
“Now you’re telling me more than I want to know.”
“Truce on sex lives?”
“Truce,” Ham said, raising both hands as if to ward off ideas of his daughter in a threesome.
“Okay, then.” Holly turned her attention to her own sandwich.
“So,” Ham said, “were you ever in a threesome?”
“Ham! I thought we had a truce!”
“I was just curious.”
“Well, put away your curiosity.”
“I just never thought you were the type, that’s all.”
“The type? What type?”
“The type to be in a threesome.”
“I don’t know whether to take that as praise or criticism.”
“Suit yourself.”
“You really want to know about my sex life, Ham?”
“Not really. I mean, not unless you want to tell me.”
“What kind of father-daughter conversation is this?”
“One we should have had a long time ago.”
“Well, we did have it, as I recall, when I was about nineteen.”
“You call that a conversation? You wouldn’t say a word. I figured you were working on becoming the world’s oldest virgin.”
“At nineteen?”
“But then that young lieutenant came along and fixed that.”
“Which young lieutenant was that?”
“Wasn’t but one,” Ham said smugly.
“Oh, yeah? There might have been a platoon of young lieutenants, for all you know.”
“You thought you could hide that stuff from your old man?”
“I did hide it from my old man.”
“Then how come I knew about the young lieutenant?”
“Okay, how’d you know about him?”
“It was easy.”
“How?”
“Well, you know when you came back from that weekend in the mountains when you lost your virtue?”
Holly turned pink. “You thought that, did you?”
“I didn’t think; I knew.”
“How, Ham?”
“I just walked up to him in the orderly room on Monday morning and stood about six inches from his nose; I looked him in the eye and said, ‘Good morning, Lieutenant. Have a nice weekend?’ And he turned purple.”
Holly put a hand to her brow. “Oh, God.”
“The same color you are right now.”
“I am not purple.”
“Close.”
“Not anywhere near close. A little red, maybe. Who wouldn’t be?”
“You didn’t see me turn purple when we were ta
lking about my threesome,” Ham said.
“My God, Ham, the lieutenant and I didn’t have a threesome.”
“Who said you did?”
“You implied it, just now.”
“You inferred it, maybe.”
“You are impossible. We’re not talking about sex lives anymore, is that clear?”
“Not even about my sex life?”
“Yours is the most off-limits—right after mine.”
“Well, if you want to hide stuff from your old man.”
“I’m not hiding anything.”
“You’re not talking about it.”
“That’s not the same thing as hiding it.”
“Sure, it is. If you’re not talking, you’re hiding.”
“Ham, what exactly is it you want to know?”
“Me? I don’t want to know anything. We’re only talking about this because you brought it up.”
“I didn’t bring it up; you did.”
“Whatever you say,” Ham said smugly.
“You did! I didn’t!”
“I’m not going to argue with you about this, Holly.”
Holly turned to where Daisy lay. “Daisy, bite Ham.”
Daisy got up, went over to where Ham sat at the table and took his ankle in her mouth.
“Harder,” Holly said.
“Ow!” Ham yelled.
“Now, Daisy, tear off his leg and hit him over the head with it.”
“No, no, Daisy!” Ham cried, prying her jaws from his ankle. “Don’t hurt your grandfather!”
“Is that how you think of yourself? As Daisy’s grandfather?”
“Well, she’s the closest thing to a grandchild I’ve had so far.”
“Daisy,” Holly said, “if he starts asking about your sex life, kill him.”
Somewhere in the house a small chime rang.
“What’s that?” Ham asked.
“It’s a car coming down the road,” Holly said. She looked at the umbrella stand by the door and confirmed that the barrel of Jackson’s shotgun still protruded from it.
“You worried?” Ham asked.
“I guess what we saw this morning spooked me a little,” she said. She got up. “I’ll see who it is.”
She walked toward the front door with some trepidation.
Seventeen
HOLLY CHECKED THE PEEPHOLE FIRST, BUT ALL she could see was the rear end of a black car parked outside. She couldn’t see anybody at the door. She hooked the beefy chain on and cracked the door.
“Expecting enemies?” a man’s voice asked.
“Harry?”
“One and the same.”
Holly opened the door and flung her arms around the man. “Come on in the house. Ham’s here.”
She led Harry into the living room. “Ham, it’s Harry Crisp, remember?”
Ham stood up. “Sure, you’re the Fed who worked with Holly on that Palmetto Gardens thing.”
“One and the same,” Harry replied, shaking Ham’s hand.
“Harry has risen in the world since then,” Holly said. “He’s now the agent in charge of the Miami FBI office.”
“Mostly thanks to you and Holly, Ham,” Harry said, dragging up a chair.
“Can I get you something to drink?”
“How about a pitcher of martinis? Just kidding. A Diet Coke will do, if you’ve got it.”
Holly turned to Daisy. “Daisy, bring Harry a Diet Coke.”
Daisy trotted to the refrigerator and, taking in her teeth a towel that had been tied to the handle, opened the door and gingerly fished out a Diet Coke, swung a hip against the door to close it, then trotted back to the living room and handed the Coke to an astonished Harry.
“You’re a very handy dog, Daisy,” Harry said, scratching her ears.
“She gets handier,” Ham said. “She’ll bring a beer, if you ask her politely.”
Harry popped the can top and took a swig.
“What brings you up here?” Holly asked.
“I came up to make sure my people were doing a good job on your bank robbery.”
“That’s awfully nice of you, Harry. You didn’t have to come yourself.”
“I felt I should, owing you, and all.”
“That’s very kind.”
“I also liked Jackson a lot.”
“Me, too. Anything to report?”
“My people have done a first-rate job, just what I expect of them, except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“We don’t have a thing to go on. I’ve never seen a cleaner crime—not a print, not a fiber, not a smidgen of DNA.”
“Which crime are we talking about, the robbery or the murder?”
“Both. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a case so completely free of anything to go on.”
“I may have something,” Holly said.
Harry looked at her blankly. “And you didn’t tell my people?”
“I only got it this morning, Ham and I.”
“Tell me.”
“The robbers got unlucky just once, maybe.”
“How?”
“There was an ex-cop from New York named Stone Barrington in the bank at the time of the robbery, standing next to Jackson, talking to him.”
Harry screwed up his face. “Barrington? That’s a familiar name, somehow. I can’t remember, but it’ll come to me.”
“Anyway, when Jackson was shot, Stone tried to help him, and, later, when he came to the station to be questioned about the robbery, he mentioned something.”
“He recognize one of the robbers, I hope?”
“Nothing as good as that. He remembered something from his time on the New York force, a bank robbery in some little town up the Hudson somewhere.”
“Wait a minute. I’ve got it. Barrington was a homicide detective in the Nineteenth Precinct. This was—I don’t know—seven or eight years ago. You remember the Sasha Nijinsky case?”
“The TV anchorlady who took a dive off a tall building?”
“That’s the one. Stone Barrington and his partner—some Italian name, I can’t remember it—”
“Dino Bacchetti.”
“Yeah, that’s it. They were the lead detectives on the case, and there was some question for a while whether Nijinsky had survived the fall and had been kidnapped, which is what Barrington thought. In the end, he got bounced off the force because he wouldn’t go along with the official position on the case. I’m sorry, I’m getting you off track. Tell me about this robbery.”
“A small bank was hit in much the same way as this one—very clean and professional—but nobody got killed. They suspected a woman who worked in the bank, but after she was questioned, she disappeared, along with everybody in a little religious community of some sort that was based on a farm near the town.”
“How many people we talking about?”
“I don’t know, a dozen or two, maybe.”
“And they left town?”
“Not just left town, vanished into thin air. Nobody ever heard of them again.”
“I don’t know about this one, but I can check it out,” Harry said. “The Bureau would have been involved; I’ll put somebody on it.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“Is that it?”
“No, there’s more.”
“Tell me.”
“As a result of what Stone told me, and because it looked as though it might be an inside job—”
“That’s our view, too.”
“Did you question a woman named Harston?”
“Pregnant lady?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, but my man thought she was clean.”
“She’s one of only two employees hired in the last year; the other was transferred from another branch and seemed clean to me.”
“That would be the loan officer?”
“Yes.”
“We thought he was clean, too. What makes you think the Harston woman might not be?”
“She lives in a st
range little town called Lake Winachobee, half an hour west of here. It doesn’t appear on any map. This morning, Ham and I went out there, on the pretense of looking for some fishing in the lake of the same name, and we stumbled into a huge gun show.”
“Gun show?”
“A really big one, set up in a circus tent.”
“Well, there are lots of those all over the country.”
“Yes, but apparently, this one is by invitation only.”
“Invitation by whom?”
“I don’t know, but Ham and I were spotted immediately as not being on the party list, and three men came over and checked us out.”
“Give you a hard time?”
“In a polite way. When they heard that we, especially Ham, were ex-military, they relaxed a little. Ham dropped a few names—Vietnam, Desert Storm—and they seemed to like that.”
“You get their names?”
“One was named Peck Rawlings.”
Harry took out a notebook and wrote down the name.
“The other two we talked to were named Jim Cross and James Farrow.”
Harry wrote them down. “I’ll run them through the system and see if the computer likes them.”
“I’d appreciate that. They had one hell of a firepower demonstration, too.” Holly told him about the pit and the old cars.
“I’ve heard of that sort of thing. It’s how they get their jollies, I guess.”
“I guess.”
“And they had this weapon called a Barrett’s rifle.”
“That, I know about,” Harry said. “It was one of the reasons for the raid on that Branch Davidian place, out in Waco.”
“How so?”
“Our people got a report that they had one or more Barrett’s rifles; that’s why all that armor was brought in. There were rumors that a round from that thing would penetrate a Bradley fighting vehicle. Nobody knew for sure, and that made everybody very nervous.”
“I can see how it might,” Ham said. He told Harry about his experience with the Barrett’s rifle in Iraq.
“Very scary weapon,” Harry said, nodding.
“I find this little town scary,” Holly said. “It has really given me the willies. Can you check it out?”
Harry looked serious. “Well, if this is a tight little group, like the Branch Davidians, it takes a lot of time to penetrate one of those. I don’t think it would be good for me to just send a carload of agents out there and start questioning people. Better they don’t know we’re looking at them.”