Gridlock

by Byron L. Dorgan

  Whitney glared at him, but she nodded.

  “Do as you’re told and the chances that you’ll come out of this alive are very good.”

  * * *

  IN THE barn Makarov set up another pair of hay bales just inside the hayloft door. He mounted the scope on the Weatherby and loaded the two-shot magazine and chambered one round.

  Coming out here for the assassination he’d figured to find the sheriff asleep in his bedroom and take him out with an easy headshot with the Glock. But the deputy waiting in the barn and Whitney Lipton asleep in the house had complicated the situation.

  Grafton’s cell phone rang again, and Makarov answered it, his finger partially covering the mic. “Yes.”

  “If you can hear me get on your police radio,” Osborne said.

  Makarov pressed the end button, then took the battery out and tossed it aside.

  He hurried down to the deputy’s pickup truck next to his Camry, backed it out of the barn and drove a hundred yards up the driveway, and parked it at an angle across the road. He switched on the headlights, jumped out, and leaving the door open, raced back to the barn and up into the hayloft.

  Two scenarios were likely. Either the sheriff would come up the driveway, see the deputy’s truck parked in the middle of the road and get out to investigate, in which case the shot from the hayloft would be easy. Or the sheriff would suspect that he was running into a trap, and would circle around and come in from the west side of the property and across the creek. If that were the case, Makarov would go back to the house and use Whitney as a hostage.

  Either way he would leave no witnesses and with any luck he’d be back out on the interstate heading west into the blackouts and disappear in the confusion.

  From the Dickinson airport it was about twenty miles. Osborne would be showing up within a few minutes. If he came all the way up the driveway his headlights would be visible for a long ways off.

  Makarov checked his watch. In ten minutes if there were no headlights, he would go back to the house to wait.

  47

  JUST OFF THE interstate, Osborne tried the radio in Grafton’s police unit again with no response. Bracketing the mic he slowed down and switched off the headlights.

  “What’s the matter?” Ashley asked.

  “Maybe nothing, but Dave’s phone was cutting out and he hasn’t answered the radio in his pickup.”

  “Do you want to call for backup? Nettles could have a chopper out here in ten minutes.”

  “Not yet,” Osborne said absently. He didn’t want the cavalry swooping down without knowing the exact situation. In the distance he spotted a light or lights. But they weren’t from the ranch.

  Ashley saw them, too. “Headlights?”

  “Maybe,” Osborne said.

  The dirt road dipped down into a low valley then started back up to the crest of the last hill before his property began. Just before the top Osborne stopped. “I’m going to take a look, I want you to stay here,” he said, and before Ashley could object he grabbed a pair of binoculars from the glove compartment, jumped out of his car, and trotted the rest of the way to the top.

  Just at the crest he dropped to all fours and cautiously made his way just to a spot where, lying flat, he could see Grafton’s truck parked at an angle across the road, its headlights on, the driver’s side door open.

  Resting on his elbows he glassed the truck and the field toward the east for any sign of his deputy. Something had happened out here to lure Grafton from the barn, drive to this spot, and then, leaving his headlights on, get out and head away from the road.

  But nothing moved now in any direction as far as Osborne could see, and the night was very quiet and, except for the stars under a partly cloudy sky, very dark.

  He followed the dirt track the rest of the way to his house where Whitney’s government-issued Taurus was parked in front next to Ashley’s pickup. No lights shone from any of the windows, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

  Turning his attention to the barn, he studied the open hayloft door for any sign that Grafton had for some reason abandoned his truck on the road and had gone back on foot. But nothing moved up there, either, though he thought he was seeing a couple of hay bales stacked just inside, something Grafton would have set up to use as a firing stand.

  But the situation wasn’t right. It didn’t smell legitimate to him.

  He rose up on one knee for just a moment to get a better snapshot angle on the open hayloft door, and then dropped back. If this was a trap he’d given a shooter up there an invitation. But nothing happened.

  He glassed Grafton’s pickup again then followed a probable path out into the field, looking for something, anything lying on the ground. Grafton’s body. Again there was nothing.

  Lowering the binoculars he eased back ten feet then got up and went back to his car where Ashley was waiting at the side of the road with the shotgun. She was spooked.

  “Well?” she demanded.

  “Its Dave Grafton’s truck, parked in the middle of the road, lights on, door open.”

  “No sign of him?”

  “No.”

  “Could be a trap?”

  “I think so, and I think Dave is probably already dead.”

  Ashley was alarmed. “We need to get some help out here right now, Nate. If Makarov is here Whitney could be next.”

  “He came for me. And if he has taken Dave out, it means he’s monitored my calls and knew where to look. Calling for help now won’t do us any good. He’ll know they’re coming.”

  “We can use my cell phone.”

  “No telling if he can monitor yours as well. Maybe he can monitor everything coming out of the local tower.”

  “So what if he does? If he hears us calling for backup maybe he’ll just run.”

  “He has Whitney as a hostage. Unless I show up he’ll just take her with him and kill her once he’s clear.”

  Ashley wanted to argue, but she just shook her head in frustration. “Okay, you sneak in, flush him out, and if he comes my way I’ll take him down.” She raised the Ithaca 12-bore.

  “Not a chance,” Osborne said, though it was about what he thought she would say.

  She started to object, but he cut her off.

  “You’re going to take my car and drive back to Tiger Discount in Dickinson and make a landline call to the project, and tell Nettles and Rausch what the situation out here probably is.”

  “Goddamnit, Nate, that’s just going to take too long.”

  Osborne glanced back toward the crest of the hill and the headlights stabbing the night sky. “I need the time, Ash,” he said. “This is personal.”

  “Yeah, I know, your county.”

  “My house,” Osborne said. He got his Kevlar vest from the back of the SUV, and put it on under his jacket. “Get going. And don’t turn on the headlights until just before the interstate.”

  Ashley hesitated, but finally she nodded. “I’m not used to taking orders.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  Ashley got back in the car, re-racked the shotgun, made a Y-turn, and headed south.

  When she was finally out of sight, Osborne stepped off the dirt road and headed west toward the creek from where he could reach the rear of his house, out of sight from the barn. Probably the same way Makarov had come.

  * * *

  ASHLEY HAD never run away from a fight in her life, and just before she reached the interstate she stopped Nate’s SUV and glanced at the shotgun. Ever since she was a teenager, and convinced that instead of a military career like her dad’s she was going to be a newspaper reporter she’d modeled herself after the gutsy Nellie Bly—whose real name was Liz Cochran.

  Nellie, who worked for the New York World, had taken a trip around the world just like Jules Verne’s character Phileas Fogg—but this was in the late 1800s when things like that weren’t done by women. She’d also gotten herself declared insane so that she could be committed to an asylum to gather material for an arti
cle.

  The girl had guts, plain and simple.

  Ashley looked in her rearview mirror. The man she loved was humping his way across the prairie, in the dark, with one prosthetic leg and armed only with a pistol to take on a professional killer who knew that he was coming.

  She touched the barrel of the shotgun.

  But the bastard didn’t know about her.

  She made another Y-turn and headed back to the base of the hill where’d she’d left Nate.

  48

  STANDING IN THE shadows a few feet back from the hayloft door Makarov continued to watch the crest of the hill through the Weatherby’s scope for a full five minutes. But Osborne had suspected the deputy’s car on the road was a trap. Right now he was coming overland on foot. Probably from the west across the creek.

  Only four calls had been relayed from the Medora cell tower in the past twenty minutes, none of them from Osborne. Nor had his iPad program picked up anything from the Billings or Stark County police and sheriff’s radio channels.

  Shoving the tablet in his jacket pocket he shouldered the rifle by its strap, climbed down the ladder, and held up just inside the rear service door, from where he looked outside. Nothing moved.

  Unslinging the rifle he trotted across to the rear of the house, and at the west corner took a long look across the field toward the line of willows and the creek at the same moment a dark figure, hunched over and moving fast, dropped down behind a heavy clump of prairie grass.

  It had to be Osborne.

  Makarov switched the Weatherby’s safety catch off, braced the rifle against the corner of the house, and studied the open field between here and the creek. But after several minutes nothing moved, and he got the feeling that the sheriff remembered his lessons from Afghanistan. If you reconnoitered from one direction today, you changed tactics the next day. Never do the obvious. And, if you seemed to be making progress you were probably heading into a trap.

  He scoped the line of trees along the creek to the northwest where it blurred to a low smudge against the horizon a couple of miles out. Osborne was out there, circling, biding his time, maybe even until morning. And going out there to try to find the sheriff would be suicide. This was Osborne’s land. He knew the place intimately.

  The odds were the sheriff’s. For now.

  Makarov went back to the root cellar and hurried upstairs to the bedroom where Dr. Lipton had managed to tear the duct tape connecting her bound ankles with her bound wrists by rubbing against the doorframe.

  She looked up, her eyes wide and tried to back away.

  “Don’t worry, Doctor, I’m not going to kill you just yet,” he said.

  He set the rifle aside, pulled the skinning knife out of his belt, and cut her ankles free so that she could walk.

  “Sheriff Osborne has shown up to rescue you,” he said, and he cut the tape from her wrists and pulled the tape from her mouth.

  Whitney backed up a pace, unsteady on her feet. She was dressed for bed in an old sweatshirt, her legs bare. She rubbed her wrists to get the circulation back.

  “You and I are going outside, and I’m going to offer him a deal he won’t be able to refuse,” Makarov said. He turned to pick up the rifle where he’d propped it against the wall, and Whitney rushed him.

  She was several inches taller than him, and for just a moment she had him pinned against the doorframe, but he easily shoved her aside, and backhanded her so hard she was slammed against the wall, momentarily dazed.

  “Let’s not disappoint the sheriff,” Makarov said. “I wouldn’t want to offer damaged goods to him.”

  He grabbed her arm and hustled her out of the bedroom and down the hall to the back door off the kitchen, which he unlocked and opened, holding Whitney in front of him.

  There was no sign of Osborne yet, but Makarov was certain that the sheriff had moved closer in the last minute or so.

  “Nate, as you undoubtedly can see from your concealed position, I have Dr. Lipton here with me.”

  “He wants to kill you,” Whitney shouted. “Call Nettles.”

  “This is just between you and me,” Makarov said. “Teammates just like at the FOBs in Afghanistan.”

  “Leave the woman alone, or have you turned into a total pussy?” Osborne said from somewhere to the right, toward the barn, and very close.

  “Do you want to trade? You for the doctor?”

  “It’ll be morning soon,” Osborne said. “Maybe I’ll just wait a bit.”

  “Maybe I’ll kill her in the next ninety seconds.”

  “Don’t,” Whitney shouted. “He’ll kill us both.”

  “There’s no need to kill the good doctor. My contract is for you.”

  “Let her free and I’ll step out,” Osborne said.

  He was in the barn, just inside the service door. “As you wish,” Makarov said. He shoved Whitney the rest of the way outside, and fired the Weatherby from the hip at a spot in the barn’s wall just to the right of the open door and about four and a half feet above the ground, at what he figured was Osborne’s center mass. Immediately he bolted another round into the firing chamber.

  A woman screaming something came rushing at him across the kitchen from the front hall, and he turned just as she was two feet away, a short-barreled shotgun pointed at his head, her finger on the trigger. She was Ashley Borden, the sheriff’s girlfriend.

  He stepped into her, grabbed the barrel with his free hand, deflecting the muzzle into the ceiling the moment she fired, and yanked the weapon from her hands. He tossed it aside and brought the Weatherby to bear as she tried to scramble away from him.

  “Bastard,” Whitney screamed and crashed into his back, shoving him to the left, the rifle going off, the heavy round plowing into the refrigerator door across the room.

  Before he could react she grabbed the rifle out of his hands.

  “Run,” she screeched, and she sprinted out the kitchen door.

  Makarov turned and started after her, but reared back. He got a snapshot of Osborne lying on his back half out of the open service door, apparently dead or dying.

  Whitney was fumbling with the rifle, and as he drew his pistol, Ashley was right behind him screaming like a madwoman and she clubbed the gun out of his hand with the stock of the shotgun’s barrel.

  Again he grabbed the shotgun from her, but she didn’t try to run.

  “The choppers are on the way from the project,” she screamed.

  “Nate is down,” Whitney shouted from outside. “You’ve killed him. You bastard, you bastard!”

  “My God,” Ashley said and she shoved past Makarov, who turned to let her go, and she raced outside.

  Whitney was still fumbling with the Weatherby when Makarov stepped outside as he racked a round into the Ithaca. It was obvious she wasn’t going to succeed, so he started toward where Ashley had reached the downed sheriff.

  She was on her knees by his side, and she suddenly turned, a big 9mm SIG-Sauer in her hand, and she fired, grazing Makarov in his left arm.

  He raised the shotgun but before he could fire, Whitney was behind him, clubbing him in the back with the Weatherby.

  Ashley got up and fired another shot, this one going wide because Whitney was so close.

  The sheriff was down, he’d accomplished his contract. There was no need to stay here any longer. And Osborne’s girlfriend just might get off a lucky shot.

  Ashley was circling around to the left, and Makarov shoved Whitney that way and then turned and sprinted to the corner of the house, firing one shot over his shoulder, and headed in a dead run toward the deputy’s car a hundred yards down the driveway.

  49

  ASHLEY AND WHITNEY propped Osborne up against the barn wall as color slowly began to return to his face, but his eyes were still out of focus, and his breath was fast and raspy. He was dazed and mostly out of it, but he could see Ashley’s face in front of him, and hear her voice as if from a long ways off.

  “You okay?” he managed to croak. His chest was
on fire from where the rifle bullet had slammed into his level IIIa Kevlar vest, and as his awareness began to return he could feel that he had at least a couple of ribs broken.

  “Yes,” Ashley said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “But I thought you were dead. He shot you with a deer rifle, right through the wall.”

  A shot of adrenaline pumped into his blood and he tried to sit up. “Where is he?”

  “Gone.”

  “I think I wounded him,” Whitney said. “He turned around and ran away.”

  Osborne reached for his pistol but the holster was empty. “My gun?”

  Ashley handed it to him. “He’s not coming back, Nate. He thinks that you’re dead.”

  The night was swimming back into focus and as it did Osborne’s pain increased. He gave the pistol back to Ashley. “Go around front and see if you can still see Dave Grafton’s lights.”

  “Okay.”

  “But be careful, Ash. This guy’s going to take out anyone who tries to get in his way.”

  She got to her feet. “Watch him,” she told Whitney and she headed around to the front of the house.

  Osborne managed to fish his cell phone out of his jacket pocket and he dialed Deb Rausch’s number. She answered on the second ring.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s been here,” Osborne said. “But he’s gone now. On the run.”

  “Shit. Are Ashley and Dr. Lipton okay?”

  “Shook up, but he didn’t get the chance to hurt them.”

  “How about you?”

  “I took a round in my vest. Knocked the wind out of me. But you have to get on this right now.”

  “Not many places he can get to in any kind of a hurry. I’ll get Nettles’s team on it, and call out mine in Minneapolis. We’ll put out a nationwide APB.”

  “I suspect that he’s in disguise, so your people are going to have to go on a general description. And he may be wounded.”

  “Left arm,” Whitney said.

  “Left arm,” Osborne repeated.

  “What’s he driving, or is he on foot?”