A Small Town

by Thomas Perry

  Leah was aware that the other captives all occasionally glanced in her direction, or tried to appear to stare into space while keeping her in the periphery of their vision. She kept her mind off them and on the six captors, and thought about the opportunity to do something. She had been in this building many times in the past few years, usually for trials in the courtroom near the back of the building. She was hoping the members of the council would know much more about the building than she did.

  She was watchful, making calculations. She was six feet two inches tall, so her reach was probably about three feet with either arm, but if she stretched or half-turned and bent toward an object, it might be four feet, or even five. She knew she could deliver a punch that way or grasp something in a half second or so. If she stood on the balls of her feet and pushed off, she could add nearly another foot. She had been a natural athlete who had trained hard and worked at it, and after she became a cop, she had stayed in shape. Even after she was promoted from the street to a desk, she kept at it because she liked gyms better than hospitals and health better than weakness. But the odds against her were terrible.

  Lee Wolf didn’t want to let the hostages calm down or do any thinking, so he kept on talking. “What we need at this point is gasoline, gentlemen. There’s no need to keep these good people marinating in their own sweat any longer. That means we’ve got to get the five-gallon cans we bought on the way here, and the siphon. There are cars out in the back parking lot, and these people won’t be driving home tonight, so they should be able to spare the gas. Joe and Jim and I will stay here and have a talk with the council while the rest of you bring what we need.”

  Leah noted that the others simply set off without comment. These were dangerous, angry, vicious men at best. Some had been described in the files as psychotic, yet they all seemed to have agreed in advance to let Lee Wolf be their leader and spokesman. She had hoped that when the six of them were together, there might be dissention, even old irritations that might flare up, but her hope that it would happen soon enough vanished. For now they were in perfect agreement.

  With the vanishing of that hope came a new one. There had been six in the building, and because they were being agreeable, there were now only three. She studied the men left in the room. All three were of average size, slightly shorter than she was. She was relieved that McKinney had been one of the three to leave, because grappling with him would be impossible. He could overpower her instantly.

  She kept looking, and watched Joe Lambert walk slowly along the arc of desks. After three steps he abruptly spun to look behind him at the people he had just passed, bringing the barrel of his rifle around with him as though he might shoot them if he caught them moving. He paused there, glaring as though he could read their minds.

  Leah had played thousands of games, and she had a feel for other players’ movements, fakes, and feints. When Lambert resumed his walk, she knew that he was going to look again, just like a pitcher holding a runner on first base. She knew that this time he would take fewer steps before he did the surprise spin, probably two steps. She held the other captors in her vision for a second. Lee Wolf was looking toward the back of the audience section of the room, where an unobtrusive door seemed to interest him. James Holliman was sitting on the conference table with his left hand holding his rifle straight up, the butt resting on the table top. She returned her eyes to Joe Lambert. One step, two steps, and there was the turn.

  As he pivoted toward the captives behind the arc of desks, Leah launched herself over the mayor’s desk behind him, her long arms snaking around him and squeezing him in a rough embrace. Her left arm hooked around his neck, and the right brought the letter opener around to stab it into Lambert’s chest. She felt the point pierce his shirt, but it stopped there because there was something under it. His torso hadn’t had the squared look of body armor, but something impermeable was under the cloth.

  Jim Holliman fired a wild shot into the ceiling with his left hand, and while the shot only dislodged plaster dust onto his head and the floor, it seemed to energize Joe Lambert. He dashed forward away from the desks, dragging Leah behind him over the top of the desk. She still had the letter opener clutched in her fist, so she plunged the pointed blade into the side of his neck.

  Holliman’s next shots hit one of the desks and the wall above it, but Lambert was on his hands and knees, struggling to raise himself to his feet with Leah on his back. She grasped his rifle, but his hands were too strong for her to wrench it away. Leah managed to reach the trigger guard and fire a shot in the general direction of Lee Wolf, who dove to the end of one row of built-in wooden seats and out of Leah’s view.

  Lambert’s breaths were making a terrible rasping noise as he tried to suck in air past the blade in his throat. He rolled to use the weight of his body to keep Leah’s hands away from the trigger, but she fired off three more shots that went to Holliman’s part of the room before Lambert’s shoulder pressed her wrist to the floor and she couldn’t reach the trigger.

  Her body seemed to know what the only possible move was. While Lambert was down, Wolf was lying between seats, and Holliman had dropped to the floor beyond the conference table, she withdrew her hand, leapt up, and charged. Her life depended on reaching Holliman before he could train his rifle on her and fire. She dashed toward him, her long legs taking yards at a stride. Holliman clutched the foregrip of the rifle, fumbled with the receiver to get his finger into the trigger guard, and raised the barrel. Leah’s time was gone.

  She grasped the edge of the conference table as she reached it, and pulled it upward as hard as she could. The table tipped, the near side rising and the far side falling down hard between her and Holliman.

  He fired four rounds through the tabletop, but she was moving fast, and he couldn’t actually see her because of the table, and he couldn’t adjust his aim any faster than he did. He kept firing even after she was past him, his shots pounding into the walls on the other side of the council chamber.

  Now there were other shots coming from the direction where Lee Wolf lay, but none of them hit flesh. As Leah dashed toward the door, she sensed another body close to her right side, running with her. Once she was through the door, she turned her head and saw Phil Haymes beside her.

  She said, “Lock the back door. Buy us time.”

  He turned and ran along the hall toward the back door.

  Leah knew that her destination had to be different. She ran toward the front of the building, where Sergeant Tim Munson lay dead. She knelt in the blood by his body and worked the handle to open the gun safe, but it wouldn’t budge. The city tradition of keeping guns out of the council chamber was going to kill them all.

  She heard the sound of glass breaking near the back of the building and looked in that direction. But the back door was solid, without glass to break, so she had no idea what the noise was. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but what was happening here. She ran her hand along Munson’s belt to the holster where his sidearm had been, but the holster was empty. They had taken the gun off his body when they’d come into the building.

  She heard heavy footsteps coming from the direction of the council chamber, but she couldn’t stop to look, because she had one more hope. Munson had been a street cop in Denver for nearly his whole career. Those guys carried backup weapons. She reached for Munson’s ankles and encircled them with her hands, but there was no ankle holster.

  Maybe a knife, she thought, one of those big ones like she used to carry as a state cop to slice through a seat belt to free somebody from a car wreck. She reached into Munson’s left-side thigh-level pocket and felt the grips of the backup gun. It was a compact .380 automatic. Thank you, thank you, she thought as she took it, pulled the slide, and whirled her body into a sitting position with her knees up, facing the sound of footsteps.

  James Holliman was running hard toward her. She rested her right elbow on her right knee with the gun in both hands and fired. A hole like a big pockmark appeared in the midd
le of Holliman’s forehead. He seemed to take a full step forward, but his other foot did not come up to take his weight, and he fell facedown, slid to a stop, and lay still.

  Leah got to her feet, snatched up the rifle he had dropped, and ran toward the door to the council chamber. Lambert was lying on the floor on his belly. As he turned toward her, she shot him with Tim Munson’s pistol and then stepped into the chamber with the rifle at her shoulder, looking for Lee Wolf.

  “Where is the other one?” she called out.

  Donaldson said, “He ducked out the fire exit to the street.”

  She turned and ran along the hall toward the rear entrance to the building. As she ran, she could see that Phil Haymes had locked the bolt on the big bronze back door. He was standing beside it, holding the long-handled fire ax he’d taken from the glass case in the hallway by the mayor’s office, where there was also an old reel of flat canvas fire hose. There was a loud sound of something hitting the door. It shook and showed a bit of warping, but it held.

  As Leah approached, the door was hit again and opened. She could see that the men outside had hotwired a car in the lot and driven it against the door. The first one to slide in over the hood of the car was Tim McKinney.

  Phil Haymes swung the ax with a level swing, and the blade caught McKinney just below the Adam’s apple. He was knocked backward, and then went to his knees, both hands clutching his neck. Leah could see there was blood. She fired Sergeant Tim Munson’s pistol once into his forehead, and he fell.

  She edged past him to see outside, but the others were gone. She heard the scream of sirens coming from the direction of the Public Safety Building. “Take this.” She handed Phil Haymes the rifle. She ran back to the council chamber and stopped in front of the council members.

  “What about the other three?” Dave Hall asked.

  “I just heard sirens. We only had four men on duty tonight. Either they’ll catch the others, or they won’t.”

  29

  The four police officers who had been dispatched to pursue the three fleeing men had not found them. No description of the two cars was passed on to other law enforcement agencies.

  Leah did not finish her supervision of the aftermath until 6:00 a.m. The coroner’s men removed the three escapees’ bodies and the body of Sergeant Tim Munson from city hall. A pickup fire crew helped mop the blood from the marble floors, scrubbed the spatter from several walls, spackled bullet holes, sanded them, and repainted or revarnished the surfaces. The rear door of the building had to be boarded up temporarily.

  Mayor Donaldson told the cleanup crews that the six escapees had come to seek revenge for the deaths of prisoners during the battle of Main Street two years ago and that Sergeant Munson had shot three of them before succumbing to his wounds. The role of Lieutenant Hawkins in the fighting was barely mentioned.

  The groundskeepers at Mount Olivet Cemetery dug a deeper grave than usual with a backhoe and buried the bodies of Timothy McKinney, James Holliman, and Joseph Lambert in a stack and placed a bronze plaque over it with the name PAULA FOSSELMAN, 1871–1939. The plaque had been hanging in the cemetery’s garage as a souvenir. It was once used as a sample to sell grave markers by a long-defunct company in Ohio that used to sell mail-order work to communities in the West.

  For two weeks Leah and the police force remained on alert, watching for signs that the three escapees might make a second attempt on some part of Weldonville. Observers from the fire department were placed near the major roads into the city.

  Near the end of that time, Leah composed a letter to be held in the personnel file of Sergeant Tim Munson in case any unknown relatives ever turned up. It gave him credit for the shooting of the three escaped convicts who attacked city hall. It also gave the true location of the criminals’ bodies in case it was necessary to verify that they’d been shot in their heads by Munson’s .380 backup weapon after he had been gravely wounded. His .380 pistol was placed in the safe room of the Public Safety Building as evidence.

  A few days later Leah was on a flight from Denver to Little Rock, Arkansas. She had left late at night, so she’d bought a sandwich to take on the plane, eaten it while waiting for her boarding group to be called, and then fallen asleep during the flight. She woke when the air pressure changed as the plane descended for landing.

  Leah spent a night and a day in Little Rock in room 502 at the Capital Hotel on Markham Street studying and getting ready. The upper floors offered a nonscenic view, and were not especially luxurious, so she had predicted they would be quiet and not have much casual traffic.

  She had reviewed the emails from the FBI while she was in Weldonville. The reason she had chosen Little Rock was an intelligence report that said they’d been picking up podcasts on the dark web that claimed to be from the Swift Sword of the Savior, which seemed to be making some kind of comeback. The FBI was not sure if the attribution was true, but there had been a suggestion based on a comparison of ideas, expressions, vocabulary, and so on, that they might be. The FBI didn’t have a location, because, like a lot of things on the dark web, it was coming from several hosts in places like Moldova. They believed that the original signal could be coming from northern Arkansas or southern Missouri, in Ozark country, because a number of the original members were from that region.

  Leah kept thinking about the men who had just raided Weldonville. They had arrived expecting to meet no resistance. It was a sneak attack, and they were heavily armed, going against a bunch of civilians, but it hadn’t worked out well for them. The three who had not been killed had to run away to avoid getting caught.

  There was no easy way to know where they had headed after that. Maybe Lonny Mann had been taking cooking classes in Paris and had room in his atelier apartment for guests, or Edison Leonard had been living in a Nevada brothel and invited his two friends home with him. But within the next week or two, those three were going to want to feel safe. No matter where they were, no matter how sad or angry or reckless they were about their dead companions, their only priority was going to be their own well-being. They would head to the safest place they had among them. And she believed that the place they’d feel safest was with Lee Wolf and the rest of the sick, racist psychotics hiding in the woods somewhere preparing for the end of the world. They wouldn’t be in a place where there were a lot of tourists, because armed groups didn’t do well in crowds, or in a place where there were a lot of people of different races, because they hated everybody who wasn’t just like them.

  Leah had been reviewing the files from the period when Lee Wolf had been arrested. In Oklahoma, there were around a hundred who lived on the compound and about twice that many occasional members who came for meetings now and then. If they had moved all the way out to some remote place, their strength was probably half that. She predicted there would be fifty around Lee Wolf and a hundred somewhere on the periphery.

  Leah knew what to look for. Fifty people would need a lot of food, water, gasoline, and whatever else other people used. Somebody would have to drive into a town now and then to buy that stuff.

  30

  Lee Wolf had taken the car that Joe Lambert had brought with him from Oregon and then driven to Weldonville. Wolf had left his car in Arkansas in the Swift Sword settlement. It wasn’t registered to him, but to a fictitious woman named Maura Banks. The group had always been very generous about making sure Pastor Lee was supplied with the things he needed to get along—food, clothing, shelter, and a car were about all anybody needed, and he had them. All members of the group who were able to work at paying jobs did so, but of course, Lee Wolf couldn’t. He was a federal fugitive. A paycheck with his name and social security number on it might as well be radioactive. It would kill him quicker than cancer.

  Wednesday night, when Lee Wolf had been in the council chamber in Weldonville and had heard the unmistakable sounds of a two-sided gunfight going on out in the hallway, he had looked at the floor and seen Joe Lambert for a second, trying to crawl with what looked like a da
gger in his throat. Wolf and Lambert were the only former prisoners in the room. He knelt beside Lambert, his eyes flicking to the hostages and back to Lambert. He reached into Lambert’s pocket and took his car keys. He murmured, “You’re not going to be able to drive, Joe. Don’t worry, I’ll get you out of here.”

  He stood and glared at the hostages. Should he try to shoot them all? No, that would just make him the emergency and direct the hostile gunfire toward himself. He looked at Lambert again. Should he try to lift him and drag him out? That would leave the hostages alone. But what could Lambert do against them anyway? The questions came in rapid succession, but there were no answers. Wolf couldn’t let himself be paralyzed by indecision. He had to move. He stepped to the door in the back of the council chamber. He could see now that it had the chipped and faded word “FIRE” painted on the wood. He turned the knob and, as though in a dream, it opened. He expected to see another shiny floor, or at least a wall, but the door led directly outside.

  He reassured himself that he had not been running away. It was all that noise, the horror of seeing Lambert grotesquely wounded and crawling on the floor, the smell of gunfire. Outside it was cool and dark, the air was fresh, and the noises were far away and muted. It was as though Wolf had opened the door and fallen out.

  When he found himself out there, the fire door was already closing. There was no doorknob on the outside, so he couldn’t have gone back in if he had wanted to. He thought of the next best move, which was to run around to the front of the building and kill the woman from behind to protect the others. When he told the others about it, he said he had gone around and found it locked, but actually he hadn’t been able to make his feet move in that direction. He said the front doors were locked from the inside, that maybe the old cop had done it before he died, or maybe the big blond woman. Either way, he told them, there was no getting in that entrance.