Home of the Brave (Raine Stockton Dog Mysteries Book 9)

by Donna Ball

  Jolene said simply, “Can you think of a better way to negotiate for something big?”

  I felt the sharp jab of steel in my shoulder and I stiffened. What does it say about me that I know too well what the barrel of a gun pressed into my skin feels like? The soldier said harshly, “You! Make those dogs shut up!”

  I got slowly to my feet. Kathy stopped fussing with the first aid kit and watched me. Jolene watched me too. I turned to face him. “They’re dogs,” I said. I couldn’t believe how steady my voice was. “They’re going to bark. If the kids weren’t so upset, the dogs would quiet down.”

  “Do something!” he insisted. “You did it before.”

  I went over to the crating area, still clutching the roll of adhesive tape in my hand. The soldier followed a few steps behind. I unzipped my pack, dropped the roll of tape inside and took out my clicker and treats. I stopped in front of the first row of cages, bellowed again, “Dogs! Quiet!” And in the first breath of silence I clicked, dug into my bag of treats and tossed one into the first cage. The sheltie inside gobbled up the treat and sat, waiting for more. I moved quickly to the next cage, and the next, clicking and treating as dogs sat in anticipation down the line. When I got to Mischief, I gave her an extra treat and a kiss on the nose, whispering thickly, “Some vacation, huh, girl?” Pretty soon the only sound that could be heard was the sound of my clicker and the happy snuffling of treats. When I came to Nike’s cage, I could practically hear the soldier’s finger tighten on the trigger. I dropped a treat into her cage and moved on. She ignored it.

  I had used that technique before to calm the kennel dogs, and it usually worked. Contentment among dogs is contagious, and as long as there is the expectation of something good coming their way, most dogs will wait for it. When the dogs were mostly calm, I turned to the soldier and said, “It won’t last long. Why don’t you let the kids sit beside their dogs? They all have clickers and treats. They can keep them quiet a lot longer than I can.”

  He jerked his head back toward the opposite wall where the adults were huddled. I swallowed hard but did not return to my place. Instead I took a step toward him. “Come on,” I said, pleading, “they’re kids and they’re scared to death. Can’t you …”

  I heard Melanie cry shrilly, “Cisco!” and I whirled to see my dog trotting toward me, trailing his leash, wagging his tail and smiling his sweet smile, wondering why all those other dogs had gotten treats and he hadn’t.

  Before I could draw a breath for a command, the soldier swung around and leveled his rifle on my dog. I screamed something inarticulate and lunged at him while at the same moment Melanie surged forward, grabbing for Cisco’s leash and stumbling hard. She fell, and someone grabbed my shoulder and spun me backward so hard I almost landed on my rear. He faced off against the other soldier and I heard him rasp through the mask, “Soldier! This is not our mission!”

  I stumbled across the slippery cement floor to Cisco and Melanie, and only when I had one arm around my dog’s neck and the other arm around Melanie did I cry angrily, “Is this what you do, then? You shoot children and innocent dogs? Is this what you trained for? Is this what you’re so damn proud of?”

  One of the soldiers—I couldn’t tell them apart now—turned to me. His words were distinct even through the muffling mask. “Lady, you have no idea who we are. We’re your saviors. We’re the ones that’re going to protect you when your government goes up in flames! We’re the ones you’ll be calling out to! One day you’ll be thanking us.”

  I wanted to scream a profanity at him, but the children were watching me. Everyone was watching me. The dogs were barking again. I took Cisco’s leash and Melanie’s hand and hurried back to the wall with the other adults. I told Cisco to sit and reached into the treat bag with trembling fingers, feeding him treats one after the other until my heart stopped pounding.

  Melanie sat close to me, her eyes big and terrified. “Raine,” she whispered, “I think I did something bad.”

  I reached for her hand and gave it a quick reassuring squeeze. “It’s okay, it’s not your fault. Cisco gets away from me all the time …”

  “No, it’s not that.” She shot a quick frightened glance toward the soldiers, who were too far away to hear us now beneath the renewed cacophony of barking dogs. “I didn’t want to, but when I thought he was going to shoot Cisco, and I fell down, I didn’t know what else to do.” She looked up at me, the fright in her eyes magnified behind the glasses. She whispered, “I pushed my panic button.”

  There were ten or twelve vehicles now crowding the parking lot and lining the road in front of Banks General Store; Buck had stopped counting when the state ME’s van arrived to process the body. There were crime scene photographers, evidence analysts, munitions experts. And far too many federal agents for him to even make an attempt to remember their names.

  One such agent took a long look beneath the tarp that covered Willie’s truck bed and remarked, “There’s enough C4 and blasting caps here to blow up a small city.” Then he glanced at Buck and added, “Sorry, Sheriff.”

  Buck said, “Yeah. Looks like that’s what somebody had in mind, huh?”

  “Could be,” agreed the agent. “Could be they were planning on trading for something bigger.”

  Buck did not ask what the “something bigger” might be. He had a lot of guesses, and none of them were good.

  The agent said, “We’ve got a truck on the way to transport this stuff to the command center. Can you spare us a couple of deputies to load it?”

  “Yeah, sure.” He glanced around for Manahan and didn’t see him, but Wyn caught his eye. He excused himself to the nameless agent and made his way through the throng of lawmen and women—some looking busy, some looking lost—to Wyn.

  She turned her shoulder to the crowd, indicating he should follow, and lowered her voice to keep the conversation private. Maybe it was paranoid, but it was something local officers had learned to do when federal authorities took over a case. She said, “So we may have some info on what Reggie’s jeep is doing here. I made a few calls, and it looks like he’d been working part time at the store the last few days, keeping it open while Willie was helping out at the camp.”

  Buck frowned. “Was he still taking care of that place? I’d’ve thought he was too old ten years ago.”

  She shrugged. “Apparently the people who rented the place for the weekend thought he was still capable of mowing the grass and running errands. Anyway, neighbors say Reggie opened up the store at seven a.m. yesterday and closed it at seven p.m. last night. We’ve got a report that the parking lot was empty at nine p.m. so I’m guessing he came back here this morning to open up and never did. Or maybe he did and closed again. I haven’t been able to track down anything after nine last night.”

  “Good work,” Buck said. “Stay on it, will you? Let me know what you find out about Reggie’s whereabouts after seven this morning.”

  She nodded and started to turn away.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She looked back at him. His expression was surprised and pleased, and he was looking at her hand. Specifically, he was looking at the ring on the third finger of her left hand.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  She pretended nonchalance, fluttering her fingers casually. “Just giving it a test run,” she said. “You know. Seeing how it affects my speed and accuracy, that sort of thing.”

  “And?”

  “So far, so good.”

  He could see her fighting with a grin, a battle she quickly won when her eyes focused on something over his shoulder. She said, “I’m on it, Sheriff.” She walked away. He turned to meet Agent Manahan.

  “We’ll need everything your office has on this Henry Middleton,” Manahan said. “We’ve got agents staked out at his house but so far he’s a no-show. We tracked down some links to some moderate subversive groups, nothing to raise a flag until now, but he may be our best lead.”

  Buck said, “Hell, as far as I knew the most subver
sive group he was ever a member of was the Saturday Night Bible Study.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the way it goes. We’re running down Reggie Connor. Nothing yet.”

  Buck nodded. “Neighbors say he was last seen here at seven last night, closing up the store. If you want my opinion, it might not be a bad idea to do a search of the area, given what happened to Willie and all.”

  Manahan nodded. “You’ll want to call in your K-9 team. I’ve got search dogs on the way but it’ll take them two, three hours to get here. Do you have anybody closer?”

  Buck said, “Yeah. I’ll give them a call.” It wouldn’t be the first time he ruined Raine’s weekend.

  For a moment Manahan just stood there, looking out over the terrain. The mountain vistas, the tall wildflower fields, the undulating valleys in the distance. “God’s country,” he said. “Doesn’t seem right, does it?”

  Buck knew the agent was referring to the bigger plot of terrorism, a pickup truck full of explosives, the ticking time-bomb of a subversive plan none of them could decipher. Buck was thinking about a man he used to know with a bullet through his head. He said, “It never does.” And he went back to work.

  I felt all the breath rush out of my lungs and I stared at Melanie. I almost blurted my astonishment out loud, then swiveled a quick glance over my shoulder toward the soldiers behind us. I whispered to Melanie, “You have a panic button?”

  She nodded, her eyes as big and frightened as they had been the moment she’d first realized the guns were real. “It’s on a necklace under my shirt. Dad makes me wear it all the time. He said it was for in case I was ever in big trouble. He said if I pushed it he’d come, no matter where he was, he’d come and save me.” She darted her eyes around the room from soldier to soldier. “I didn’t want the soldiers to shoot him. So I didn’t push it. Until now. They won’t shoot my dad, will they?”

  My breath was coming quick and light. I said, “It doesn’t work that way, Mel. The security people call the police, and then they call your dad. He’s not in any danger. They’ll call the police.” They’d call the police, and the police would come … wouldn’t they?

  I looked across the room at the children. It had not occurred to me before, but a lot of them had wealthy parents. Maybe not as wealthy as Miles, but their parents had traveled across the Southeast and paid several thousand dollars to allow them to attend a weekend camp with their purebred dogs. How many of them might also have panic buttons?

  I looked at Margie, who was looking back at me with a kind of stunned understanding in her eyes. “Angela Bowers has a medical alert button,” she said softly, quickly, “because of her allergies.” She glanced at the soldiers, but they couldn’t hear us over the barking of the dogs. “Josh Trenton, Ivy Winters, Bonnie Clayton. That’s one of the questions we ask on the registration form.”

  One call from a security company would send a squad car to investigate. But multiple calls from different sources would signal a mass emergency and generate an appropriate response. Without access to telephones, it was as close as we could hope to come to letting Buck know what was happening here. I glanced over at Jolene, hoping she had been able to follow the conversation. She gave a small, almost imperceptible nod of acknowledgement.

  “Make sure they’re silent,” she advised quietly. Her swollen lips barely moved. Since I had to strain to hear what she was saying, I knew the soldier closest to us could not.

  I took a breath, trying to calm myself, and looked again at the row of children against the wall. How long before one of them, like Melanie, remembered the panic button and pushed it, silent or not? What would happen if they triggered a personal alarm, or if they got caught? I took another breath. I smiled, a little unsteadily, at Melanie.

  “Hey,” I said, “remember when we found that meth lab on the Christmas tree farm last year? And last month when Cisco got dognapped?” I kept my voice very low, and spoke close to her ear. To the soldiers I hoped it looked as though I was still just comforting her.

  She nodded slowly.

  “I couldn’t have gotten out of any of those messes without you,” I said. “You’re the coolest kid I ever met. And the bravest.” I leaned back and held her gaze. “I need you to go talk to the kids with panic buttons. Don’t let the soldiers find out what you’re doing. Tell them to make sure they’re on silent alarm, and to push their buttons without letting anybody see them do it, just like you did. Can you do that?”

  She nodded, slowly, and started to stand up. “I can do it,” she said.

  I caught her hand, wanting to pull her back beside me again. “Make sure their buttons are on silent alarm,” I repeated in a whisper. “And—don’t get caught, okay?”

  She nodded and stood up.

  “Melanie.”

  She looked back at me.

  “I love you.”

  She smiled. “I love you too,” she said.

  So easy for her. But it cost me my heart.

  I clenched a fist in Cisco’s fur as I watched her walk up to one of the soldiers and say, “I want to go sit with my friends.”

  He didn’t try to stop her. I didn’t think he would.

  She walked over and sat down beside Angela Bowers, who was crying. She patted her hand, as though she were comforting her, and then said something to her. After a moment, Angela stopped crying. She looked at the soldier, then back at Melanie. She nodded, very slightly. I released a breath and couldn’t watch anymore.

  I was surprised to look down and see a dark hand next to mine on Cisco’s back. Jolene had slipped into Melanie’s place, sliding closer to me on the pretense of petting my dog. When I looked up at her, she said, “What I said before—it was out of line.”

  I tried to search back over the many uncalled-for things she’d said since we met. I said, “You’re right. It was. I can’t help being white.”

  She actually chuckled—or tried to. The effort clearly caused her pain and she winced. Nonetheless, she replied, “And I can’t help being a bitch.”

  She looked at me, and I managed a smile.

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said. She looked down at Cisco, and her voice was strained as she spoke. “What I said about this being your fault … I couldn’t have gotten to my sidearm in time. Couldn’t have fired it with this hand. He would have shot the dog, and then me, and probably you too.”

  I said, “I know.” And then I had to add, very quietly, “I’ve spent my whole life, practically, teaching people that it’s their job to take care of their dogs, to protect them. I know what you said is true, that Nike is a different kind of working dog than I’m used to. But I’ll never understand how anyone could send her own dog to her death.”

  She was silent for a moment, petting Cisco with her one good hand. Then she said in a voice that was rough with emotion, “Nike isn’t my dog.” She didn’t look at me. “My dog’s name was Hawk, and he was killed fifty feet in front of me when he triggered an IED in Afghanistan. He saved my life, and the lives of everyone on that patrol. That was what he was trained for. We’d been together three years. He was my dog.”

  I felt my gut twist with remembered pain. My first SAR dog Cassidy had died a hero in my arms after completing her final mission. I still wasn’t over it. I didn’t think I ever would be.

  Jolene went on quietly, “After that … I guess I had some kind of breakdown or something. They called it PTSD, and I spent the last six months of my tour in a VA hospital. When I got out, I heard about this program with Homeland Security. They pay for your training, your dog, your first year’s salary, and they place you in a job. They give preference to vets. What else was I going to do? I asked to be assigned to one of the rural communities. God knows I wasn’t ready for NYC, or even an international airport. Your ex was nice enough, but it was harder to get back into the swing of things than I thought. I was always afraid of screwing up, so I kept trying harder to prove myself … anyway, the sheriff got pissed when he found out I was reporting to somebody other than him and
I saw my career going down the drain and I guess I took it out on you when I got here. But it was out of line.”

  I was confused. “What do you mean, reporting to someone else?” I whispered.

  She shifted her gaze briefly to the soldier guarding us. “Carl Brunner was an undercover agent. I was supposed to be his contact.”

  I drew in a breath and let it out slowly. “Cripes.”

  We were silent for a time, as I tried to let the scope and the breadth of what was happening sink in. This wasn’t a random event. It was an operation. And even Homeland Security had not been able to stop it.

  She said, very quietly, “This is just the beginning, you know. Even if the panic buttons work, once they get here … they won’t know what they’re up against. They won’t have any way of finding us, or getting to us if they could. Flash grenades, tear gas … they can’t use them because of the kids. It’ll be a stand-off.”

  That was the last thing I wanted to hear. I looked around quickly to make sure no one else had heard. Nerves were frazzled enough as it was. “But … all these dogs, the children … there’s no food in here and only a few gallons of water for the dogs. How long can they keep us here? How long can it last?”

  She replied bleakly, “Did you ever hear of Waco?”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Buck had left two messages for Raine, but didn’t expect to hear back from her until she finished whatever class she was teaching and remembered to turn her phone back on. That might be within the hour, it might not be until tonight. She wasn’t on his payroll and had no obligation to keep her phone on during a holiday weekend. But he was furious when he couldn’t raise Jolene, either by radio or cell phone. She knew the situation. He had told her to remain on high alert. She might not be on duty but she was on call. Had she just walked off the job? If she hadn’t, he vowed bitterly to himself, she had just worked her last day under his command. You don’t turn off your phone in the middle of a crisis, not ever, not for any reason. Had she even gone to the damn camp? He was about to call into the office to send a squad car after her when his radio crackled on his private channel.