by Jon Jackson
He sat on the bed. It was nice and firm. Double mattress. A luxurious cell. The books in the book case were mysteries: one of them by an author he liked, Michael Connelly. He was tempted to make a cup of tea and settle down to read. A guy could pass a pleasant night here, he thought, if he were truly a guest. He drank a glass of water. Good water. He lit the cigar.
Nobody came for a long time and he spent a couple of hours pondering the situation. Luck had made a big mistake. Mulheisen hadn’t been idly complaining or blustering. It was a very serious thing to restrain a citizen by force of arms, then to lock him up. Of course, it was Mulheisen’s blundering about that had precipitated the issue. But it was an incredibly drastic response to simple trespassing. Mulheisen reproached himself. What had he been thinking? Nothing, he had to admit, just poking around. But Luck, who obviously had something important going on, wouldn’t believe that.
What the hell was Luck up to? Meeting terrorists? Something like that, he supposed. Someone Mulheisen couldn’t be allowed to see, and who shouldn’t be aware of him. Mulheisen considered that one reason he had leaped to that conclusion was the presence of this Hook. Who was he? An Arab? Mulheisen suspected as much, but he told himself that the evidence wasn’t much. Just some foreigner, apparently, perhaps a Greek, even some fellow who had fallen in with Luck’s patriot screed. Still . . .
More important, he thought, what could be the consequence of this stupid turn of events? Luck was in trouble. He’d have to do something about Mulheisen now, something drastic. Mulheisen didn’t like the prospects. This wasn’t something, he was sure, that could be legally excused. There wouldn’t be any sheriff coming to arrest him for trespassing. Mulheisen had never, in his long police career, been in a jam like this.
The mind, he realized, resisted the obvious: these guys would have to dispose of him or face some serious consequences. And he felt helpless to do anything about it, to help them make a less than drastic decision. He’d tried, but Hook wasn’t having it. Hook was the crux of the situation, he decided, a man out of his element, perhaps, who had overreacted.
Mulheisen was sure that Luck regarded him as an official, an officer of some kind of police or investigative function, despite his denials of the night before. There could be no other reason for him being here. Whatever he might have done earlier, before Hook’s precipitate action, now Luck couldn’t just turn him loose. He had to disappear.
He cautioned himself about sinking into desperate or depressed thinking. He had, many times, tossed a suspect into a cell to stew and fret, knowing that it would make the suspect that much easier to interrogate. The longer the wait, up to a point, the more he softened up, unless he was a hardened criminal. It was a reliable tactic. But he didn’t think that was Luck’s intention. Still, it didn’t do to get too speculative. Something would have to happen, something that would provide him with more information. He’d have to wait for Luck. Everything would turn on how that little interview went.
He was thinking about this when Darryl brought him supper. A tray with a plate of excellent venison roast with gravy, mashed potatoes, even a bottle of wine. All Darryl said was, “Enjoy,” and left. Mulheisen found that he was hungry. He ate. The bread was home-baked. Very tasty, as were the green beans with carrots. The wine was Luck’s favorite, an Oregon pinot noir.
Mulheisen wondered, What kind of man serves the doomed prisoner a meal like this? Presumably, Luck wasn’t planning anything immediately, else why bother with the meal? But who knew? Maybe the guy was just a nut.
Mulheisen had one last cigar. He decided to save it, for no good reason. He lay back on the bed and considered the notion of a fire, as mentioned by Hook. It might be a plan, after all. It would precipitate confusion. Anything might happen then, including escape. He eyed the ceiling. It had been paneled. That would keep the dust from the loft trickling down, but, more important, it would be extremely hard to get through. He noticed, now, that there were fire alarms installed, though no sprinklers. He sighed. Without warning, he dozed off.
10
Dog Watch
Mulheisen awoke to darkness. Someone had turned out the lights in the room while he slept. Only the diffused glow from the yard lights illuminated the room through the window. He felt groggy, at first, but his head quickly cleared. Had he been drugged? He couldn’t remember falling asleep. A mild sedative might have been added to the meal. But something had roused him.
He had no idea what time it was. He had no watch, of course, and there was no clock in the room. He’d heard some kind of sound. There! He heard it again. A very slight sound. Scratching or gnawing. A mouse? He listened intently, not moving, his breath held.
Again. Scratching. From the ceiling, of all places. He stared upward, still lying on his back as he had fallen asleep. There it was again, over by the light fixture in the ceiling. Something was up there. He wondered if someone could be up there, spying on him. But that didn’t make sense. If his jailers wanted to look at him, all they had to do was open the door or look in from the window.
No, it was the ceiling, all right. He stared. Then he heard a different sound, a faint, sustained creaking noise, of something in the ceiling being pried . . . like a nail. He watched and listened with great interest as this ceiling activity went on, so quietly that it was difficult to believe he was actually hearing it. Was he just imagining some miraculous rescue attempt? It was absurd. Yet from time to time the sound was just loud enough that he could be sure it was, in fact, some kind of concerted effort up there. For what purpose was another question.
This whole effort must have taken twenty minutes, but at last it stopped. Then, to his surprise, he saw the glass light fixture move, first to one side, slightly, then to the other. Suddenly, it slipped free of its metal retaining ring and he sat upright reflexively, stretching out his hands to prevent the thing from falling to the floor and noisily breaking. But it didn’t fall. A hand was sticking through the ceiling, holding on to it with just fingertips.
Whoever was holding the light fixture had heard his movement. The hand did not move. Then a narrow beam of light shone down. It moved about the room, briefly, then fell on his face. It held there, for a moment, then switched off.
Then a voice called softly, so softly that he thought it must be his imagination: “Mul?”
Mulheisen couldn’t imagine who that might be. The last friendly face he’d seen had been the kid’s, Travis’s. For a foolish second he thought it was him. Ridiculous!
He cleared his throat and said, softly, in reply, “Yeah?”
“Take the glass.”
Mulheisen got to his feet on the bed and reached up. He took the glass from the hand and set it on the bed. The arm withdrew. There was just a dark hole in the ceiling. The person up there must have methodically disassembled the apparatus from above and removed most of it through the access—the junction box, the bulb, the wires. A portion of a face appeared, a pale blur.
“You all right?” the voice inquired.
“Uh, yeah,” Mulheisen replied. He felt ridiculous, talking to this hole in the ceiling. “Who are you?”
“Be right with you,” the voice said softly. The pale blur vanished.
Mulheisen continued to look up for a moment, then quietly got down from the bed. He stood and looked around foolishly. Now what? He could hear faint sounds of movement, then nothing. After about a minute there was a sound of a key at the door and it quietly opened.
In the dim available light from the passageway there stood Joe Service. He carried a rifle in his hand, which he leaned against the wall. The last time Mulheisen had seen Service he had been in a hospital bed in Denver, in a semicoma, draped with tubes and bandages. He recognized him immediately.
“Here, give me a hand,” Service said, opening the door wider and beckoning Mulheisen toward the open bay of the drive-thru. Mulheisen stepped after him. Service hoisted a slumped guard to his feet with some difficulty. Mulheisen took an arm of the unconscious man. They dragged him into the room
and flopped him on the bed. Mulheisen managed to brush the light fixture out of the way to accommodate the man. Service lifted the man’s booted feet and swung them onto the bed.
“I don’t suppose they left you any rope?” Service asked. “Wait here.” He darted out and a moment later returned with a fistful of slender but tough-looking strands of orange plastic baling twine. He rolled the unconscious guard onto his face and swiftly bound his hands together behind his back, then did the same with his ankles. Then he rolled the man back faceup.
“A gag would be good,” he said thoughtfully, looking down at his handiwork. “Well, what the hell.” He yanked the man’s shirt tails out of his belt and ripped his shirt up the front. With a length of this he made a dandy gag, which he bound around the man’s mouth and tied behind his head. “Hope he gags,” he said.
When all this was accomplished he stood up and looked at Mulheisen with a self-satisfied grin. “All right,” he said. “So they caught you.”
Mulheisen stared at him, marveling. “What the hell—” he started to say.
Service interrupted. “No time, Mul. This guy will be missed before too long. He won’t be hollering for help, but they’ll find him. Where’s your car? I didn’t see it in the yard. It’s a Checker, right?”
“I left it back in the woods,” Mulheisen said.
“How far? Well, tell me while we walk.” Service snatched the guard’s pistol, a Llama 9mm, out of the holster on the man’s hip and took a couple of loaded clips out of a pouch on the gunbelt. “Man, these guys are ready for action,” he said, approvingly. “Okay, let’s roll.”
Mulheisen went to the closet and removed his coat, pulling it on. Joe stood by the open door. “C’mon,” he urged.
Mulheisen followed as Service flitted across to the open back door of the barn and into the darkness. When Mulheisen caught up to him they were well into the woods. It was remarkable how good it felt to be free, out in the woods. The night was cool, even chilly, and it seemed to be overcast, extremely dark. They walked rapidly, hardly a quiet progress. Sticks snapped, leaves rustled. Service was obviously not concerned. He kept moving.
“It’s way the hell over there,” Mulheisen pointed ahead. “Probably a quarter mile. Where’s your car?”
“Clear out on the county road,” Joe said. “Too far. We’d better get to your car first.”
“If they haven’t moved it,” Mulheisen said.
Joe said, “I didn’t see any sign of it Maybe they didn’t get around to it yet.” He set off again, then beckoned for Mulheisen to lead the way.
Mulheisen found the road. That seemed the best way to proceed. At least, in this near pitch-darkness, they were conscious of it underfoot and it was relatively smooth and much quieter. They walked quickly. Within ten minutes they reached the hill where Mulheisen had been apprehended. The road, from this approach, branched, which Mulheisen hadn’t noticed when he’d been driven away earlier. One lane went to the right, around the hill, the other was the lane on which he’d been, he was sure. He stopped.
“Someone out there,” he whispered.
“A guard,” Joe said. They drew back. It was obvious that they couldn’t slip by the guard and stay on the road, while if they tried to walk around through the woods they’d make too much noise.
“We either take him,” Joe said, “or we go back a good ways.”
Mulheisen turned back, Joe following. When they had gone a hundred yards, Joe cut off through the woods and Mulheisen trailed after. It took another ten minutes of careful walking before they felt that they had successfully skirted the hill. Now Mulheisen took over again and led Joe to the fence. They found the spot where the deer had gotten over, but when they arrived at the Sigmiller road there was no sign of the car.
“Uh-oh,” Mulheisen said. “They’ve taken it. They must have a place to stash it. Well, that leaves your vehicle. We can get out to the county road along this old road.”
They set off again, still not taking the time to discuss the situation. There didn’t seem time for it, despite the questions bubbling in each man’s mind. It was a good twenty-minute hike to the county road. By now they both felt, without discussing it, the guard was likely to have been found.
Once they reached the county road Joe set off at a jog, headed back in the direction of Luck’s drive. They had not gone far, however, before Joe stopped.
“Somewhere around here,” he said, not very confidently. They paced on. Shortly, he turned off the road, bounding through the shallow ditch and ducking through some brush. His Toyota pickup was sitting there, not twenty feet from the road, but invisible from it.
The little truck nimbly made it through the brush and the ditch. Within a minute or two they were passing the entry to Luck’s drive, a critical point. There was no sign of activity and a short distance beyond they turned onto the paved road that led back toward Queensleap. At last, bowling along at a brisk pace, the car heater going, the two men could converse.
“What’s your involvement in all this?” Mulheisen wanted to know.
“I was in the area,” Service said. “I heard you were out of the cop business, so thought I’d look you up. Maybe we could have a little heart-to-heart.”
“That was friendly,” Mulheisen said. “But what brought you to this neck of the woods?”
“Lot of odd things going on lately,” Service said. “Like rumors that I was involved in a bombing in Detroit.”
“Rumors, eh? No truth to them, I suppose?”
“I haven’t been near Detroit in months,” Service said. “I certainly had nothing to do with any bombing. It’s some kind of setup. That’s what it feels like, anyway. I also stumbled on some mention of this guy Luck. He seemed to be one source of these rumors. So I had to check it out. I thought I’d come out to Detroit and talk to you, only you aren’t home. When I talk to your mother, she says you’re up in Queensleap, visiting the very guy who’s been spreading weird rumors about me. So I drove up here.”
“My mother!”
“Relax,” Joe said, “it wasn’t as if we went out on a date. I just bumped into her on her daily walk and chatted her up. She told me all about a hawk we saw. And a few things about her absent son. Very nice lady, but a little out of my class. I didn’t even ask if I could walk her home. Anyway, I zipped up here, checked around town, and didn’t see any sign of you. It’s not a big place, you know. So I found out where Luck lived, went out there, and being a cautious guy I didn’t feel like just walking up and knocking on the door. Besides, it’s kind of late.
“But when I got within eyeball range, I saw something was going on. Cars in the yard, a couple of guys standing around, armed . . . you could almost swear they were sentries. Another guy comes out from the barn, changes with one of the yard bulls, who goes back to the barn. Something to be guarded in a barn? It looks a little weird, you know? I mean, it’s two in the A.M., a little late for a quilting bee.
“So I take a little sniff around the premises. Pretty long-winded jaw jam, it looks like, some kind of camo Kiwanis meeting, guys coming out to get fresh air, discreetly discharge some methane.”
“Camo? A militia meeting? How many were there?”
“Oh, I exaggerate. Probably no more than six or eight guys, the principals. With some auxiliaries, the ones packing the iron. Maybe it was more like a focus meeting, or whatever they call these things. They didn’t exactly sit around beating drums and chanting, and only a few were actually in paramilitary drag, but you must have caught some of the to-do.”
“I was sleeping,” Mulheisen said.
“Sleeping! Whoa! That’s coolness.”
Mulheisen tried to explain that it wasn’t like that. “My woodcraft isn’t up to yours,” he said. He told about being scooped up, the fact that he’d evidently been given some kind of sedative in his meal.
“Popped you in the pantry, eh? With a nice bowl of warm porridge.” Joe tried to soften his amusement. “They slipped you a mickey. Crashing Luck’s party had to be a jol
t for him. He had some interesting visitors. I’m surprised he didn’t call it off. I wonder if any of them knew you were out in the shed.”
“The only guys I saw were Luck’s pals,” Mulheisen said. “One of them was kind of interesting, though. They called him Hook.”
“Hook? What’d he look like?”
Mulheisen described him.
“Al-Huq!” Joe said. “Maybe.”
“Who’s he?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe it wasn’t him. I’ll have to look into it. But the guys at the party were interesting. Looked mostly like local clowns, businessmen dressing up to play soldier. What was interesting, though, was the guest of honor. The name Tucker mean anything to you?”
“Colonel Tucker!” Mulheisen whistled. “How did you know him?”
“An old friend,” Joe said.
Mulheisen was stunned. “What is Tucker doing here? Talking to Luck?”
“Got me,” Joe said, “but it doesn’t look good. I don’t suppose you’re aware, but I’m supposed to be working for Tucker.”
Mulheisen couldn’t take this in. Service said he’d explain later. The point he wanted to make, he said, was that for various reasons he’d more or less decided that he wasn’t working for Tucker anymore.
Mulheisen was dazed. “What time is it?”
Service said it was pushing four A.M.
Mulheisen felt alert and rested. If he’d been drugged, it had worn off, but this confusing information made his mind whirl.
“Let’s go by the motel,” he suggested. “I’ve got some gear there. It’s possible they aren’t aware I was staying there.”
When they got to the motel, they noticed two prominent vehicles—a sheriff’s car and Mulheisen’s Checker. The sheriff’s car was sitting off to one side; it could be perceived as being parked at the adjacent Queen’s Table restaurant, which had already opened to serve the locals, farmers and hunters, presumably.