“Good. We’re here all by ourselves. I’ve got two people tearing up the house while I talk to Kristy. But everything is right here. All the photos.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” Virgil said. “I’m peeling off these other guys right now.”
“Fifteen,” Coakley said. And, “Virgil, however bad you think this is—it’s worse.”
COAKLEY CARRIED the first box of photos down the stairs, and she and Kristy sat at the kitchen table and started going through the photos—many were Polaroids, but more were recent digital-printed shots—Kristy giving her names as they went, Coakley writing them in her notebook.
Five minutes in, Kristy told her that there were lots more that her father had never printed, that were on the computer. They went into what had been a first-floor bedroom, now converted to a workroom.
A wide-screen iMac sat in the middle of a worktable, and Kristy brought it up and went to a Lightroom program and rolled out the Lightroom database as pages of thumbnail photos. Not all the photos were sexual, but hundreds of them were: in the library module, Kristy tapped an “All photographs” number: there were 8,421 photos in the collection.
Coakley was sitting, transfixed, at the desk, when headlights swept up the hill, and she said, “Virgil. He’s gonna be freaked out.”
Dunn went to look and came back and said, “I don’t think it’s Virgil. There’s a whole line of cars coming in.” He went to the stairway and shouted, “Bob. Bob, get down here.”
Hart came running down the stairs, and they all went to the side entrance, and Dunn, looking out the window, said, “They’ve got guns, some guys are running around to the front,” and Coakley snapped at Hart, “Watch the front door. Don’t let anybody in.”
Hart pulled his gun, his eyes wide and his Adam’s apple bobbing in what might have been fear, and Coakley heard glass breaking at the front, and heard Hart shout, “Stay out of here—stay out of here. We’re the police—”
BANG!
A gunshot, right there, in the front room, and Coakley ran that way and saw a man’s arm smashing through the glass of the front door, and Hart lying on the floor with a huge wound in his neck, looking very dead, and Coakley, without thinking, gun already in her hand, fired two fast shots through the door window and heard a man scream. . . .
A half-dozen shots poured through the door, straight in, going over Hart’s supine body, and she fired twice more through the wall and heard men yelling, Kristy screaming, lying on the kitchen linoleum with her hands over her ears, and then came another shot, close by, and Dunn was screaming something at her, and she looked that way and saw him crouching by the side door, wild-eyed, gun in his hand, and he fired twice and looked back at her and shouted something, which she didn’t pick up, and then more shots came ripping through the house, shots from high-powered hunting rifles, the way they went through, spraying plaster and wood splinters.
Dunn scrambled across the floor to where she was now lying, with Kristy, and he said, “We’ve got to get upstairs. We’ve got to get higher. If we can get up the stairs to the bathroom, we can get in that old tub and have a close shot at anybody who comes up the stairs. . . . Where’s Bob?”
“Bob’s dead,” she blurted. He looked at her, uncertain, then scrambled past and looked in the front room, then crawled back and said, “We gotta run for it.” He grabbed Kristy and pulled the girl’s hands down, and said, “Kristy, we’ve got to run up the stairs—”
Coakley shouted, “Wait, wait,” and she slid across the kitchen and grabbed the box of photographs and crawled back, her gun rapping on the floor like a horseshoe. A bullet smashed through a wall a foot in front of her face, spraying her with plaster, and she spat and kept going. The house was being torn apart by gunfire, and they all half-crawled, half-ran across the kitchen floor and around the corner and up the stairs, and Dunn pointed down the hall and said, “You guys get in the tub. Lee, you gotta keep the stairway clear. If anybody comes up the stairs, you gotta keep it clear. You understand? You gotta kill ’em.”
“Yeah. Where are you going?”
“Up by the side window. Most of them are in the side yard; I’m gonna try to knock a couple of them down, then I’ll be back here right on top of you.”
“I’ll call Virgil,” Coakley shouted after him as he ran down the hall. “He’s gotta be close.”
VIRGIL CAME UP and Coakley shouted at him, and he said, “Stop yelling, I can’t understand,” and she reined herself in and said, “We’re in the Rouse house. There’re guys outside with guns, lots of them. They’re shooting the place to pieces. There are some of them inside now. We’re upstairs in the bathtub. . . . Bob Hart is dead. . . .”
Kristy was lying under her, weeping, and a rifle bullet, coming at a shallow angle, upward, clanged off the side of the tub, and they both screamed, and Virgil said, “Hold on, five minutes . . . five minutes. Listen for your phone.”
Three shots from the front, Dunn, followed by a volley through the front wall, and Dunn crawled into the hallway and shouted, “How much ammo you got?” and Coakley shouted, “The clip in the gun and one more.”
“Be careful with it,” Dunn shouted, and a slug crashed through a wall above his head and he put a hand over his head and pressed himself to the floor. A man poked his head around the corner of the stairs and saw Dunn on the floor and twisted toward him, with a shotgun, and before he could fire, Coakley shot him in the back and then in the head, and Dunn screamed, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus . . .” and looked down the hall at her, and at the long gun that the man had dropped. He scrambled down the hall and grabbed it, and rolled over and checked the safety, then did another peek down the stairs. All Coakley could see was the dead man’s hand, and Dunn pushed it down the stairs and called, “Good,” and at that moment, a gunshot came through the floor and hit him in the ankle and he screamed, and came flailing down the hall toward Coakley, and dropped beside the bathtub and groaned, “I’m hit . . .”
“Get behind the back of the tub. Nothing’s coming from the back but there’s been some from the front,” Coakley told him.
Dunn obeyed, leaving a trail of blood, and Coakley pulled a bath towel off a shower stall hanger. “You got a knife? We got to get some pressure on the wound.”
She looked over the edge of the tub, and Dunn’s face was bright red and sweating, contorted with pain, but he was controlled, the captured shotgun aimed down the hall, and he dug a switchblade out of his pocket and flicked it open. Coakley used it to cut a long strip out of the towel and said, “Wrap it tight as you can . . .”
She could hear men shouting down the stairs, but couldn’t hear what they were saying. She said to Dunn, “Wrap that, give me the shotgun,” and she slipped out of the tub, took the shotgun, the safety was showing red, and she padded as quietly as she could down the hall. The shooting had slowed, but gunshots were still coming through, blowing plaster and wood, and she did a quick peek at the stairway, saw nobody but the dead man. She stepped across the stairway quickly, went in the first bedroom, did a peek at the window, saw nobody in the yard, checked the stairway again, and slugs started ripping methodically down the hallway, straight up, coming through the floor.
She went to the window in the second bedroom, did a peek, saw a man, or part of a man, squatting by the corner of the shed across the side yard. She didn’t hesitate, but fired two fast shotgun shots through the glass, then dashed back down the hallway.
Whoever was down below was still firing through the floor. He was the most dangerous one, she thought; the bathtub had nearly been penetrated by the glancing shot, and if he shot up straight through the bottom of the tub, he’d kill both Kristy and her; but as she watched the shots coming through, she realized that the shots were so vertical—coming up through the floor and into the ceiling—that he must be right under them. She waited for the next shot, fifteen feet away, ran back to it, and emptied the pistol magazine through the floor.
She heard no screaming, but wanted to believe that she’d at
least scared the shit out of him.
Back in the bathroom, she reloaded and said, to Kristy, as her cell phone rang, “We’re doing fine, honey. We’ll be okay.”
She answered the phone, and Virgil was there: “There are too many of them, we can’t come straight in. There are a dozen shooters around the place. . . . We’re coming across the field in the back. If you see people coming in the back, don’t fire at us.”
“Hurry,” she said. “We’ve only got a minute or two before they get us. You gotta hurry, Virgil.”
“We’re running in,” he said. “We’re running.”
20
Virgil had sent the two highway patrolmen and the two local cops on their way north to watch the meeting at Einstadt’s, and turned south off the highway to go on down to the Rouse place.
“This goes to about eleven on the weird-shit-o-meter,” Jenkins said. He’d pushed his seat all the way back and had one foot up on the dash. “I gotta admit, Virgil, this country makes me a little uncomfortable. I’m not really that much of a country guy. I’ll take an alley.”
Virgil asked, “What happened to that bag of Cheetos?”
“Ah, I think they’re right behind your elbow. Let me see . . .” Jenkins fished the bag out, held it while Virgil took a handful of Cheetos, getting sticky orange cheese goop all over his fingers.
Virgil said, between chews, “As far as your weird-shit-o-meter goes . . . give me one of those little hand wipes, will you? . . . it would be very hard to find anything a lot weirder than that case you and Shrake had out in Lake Elmo. The mummy.”
Jenkins considered for a moment, put a finger in his ear to wiggle out an itch, then said, “Yeah, well. All right, that was probably a nine.”
“Nine, my ass,” Virgil said. “You’re giving child abuse an eleven—” His phone rang, and he one-handed it out of the equipment bin. “And you’re saying the mummy was only a nine? Lots of child abuse around. How many mummies have you run into?”
He put the phone to his ear, and Coakley was shouting at him, and when she slowed down enough to make herself understood, Virgil said, “Hold on, five minutes. Five minutes. Listen for your phone,” and she was gone.
They’d been ambling along on the back highway, and Virgil floored it and said, “Get the fuckin’ rifles loaded up, man. They’ve got some kind of lynch mob out there, shooting the place up. There’re a lot of guys, they’ve already got a dead cop. . . .”
“Told you it was weird out here.” Jenkins unsnapped his safety belt as they rocketed along the road and pulled up one of the rifles and slapped a magazine in it and jacked a shell into the chamber, put the rifle beside his leg, picked up the other one, did the same, then struggled into his vest and dragged Virgil’s vest out of the back. They went through a long sweeping curve and he asked, “What’re we doing? Are we going straight in?”
“I don’t think so. She said there were a lot of them. And they’re all farm guys and they’ll have hunting rifles.”
“These vests won’t stop a .30-06,” Jenkins said.
“Gotta try,” Virgil said. “They might blow up hollow point, I don’t know.”
“Lift your arm up.” Virgil lifted his arm, and Jenkins said, “I’m putting four mags in your pocket. We got five apiece, thirty rounds each.”
“There they are,” Virgil said. The house, bathed in car headlights, looked like a white lighthouse, sitting on a hill on the prairie. Virgil reached under the dash and threw a switch that killed his lights: the switch was normally used on surveillance operations, so a person being followed wouldn’t see a car pulling away from a curb.
The sudden darkness didn’t quite blind them—he could see the dark ribbon of road between the snow-mounded shoulders on either side, but he had to slow down. The last half-mile took a full minute, and he hoped it wasn’t too long; at the end of it, he took an even narrower lane that ran off the main road, parallel to the side of the Rouse place, and stopped.
They piled out, and Virgil pulled on his vest and put his coat back on, made sure the extra mags were safely snapped inside his pocket, took out his phone, and called Coakley.
“THERE ARE too many of them, we can’t come straight in,” he said. “There are a dozen shooters around the place. . . . We’re coming across the field in the back. If you see people coming in the back, don’t fire at us.”
“Hurry,” she said. “We’ve only got a minute or two before they get us. You gotta hurry, Virgil.”
“We’re running in,” he said, as he and Jenkins crossed the ditch to the first fence, snow up to their shins. “We’re running.”
“Oh, my God, listen to that,” Jenkins said. “It’s a war. They’re shooting the place to pieces.”
And it sounded like a war, like a battle, a spaced boom-boom-boom of heavier rifles, with a quicker crack-crack-crack of a semiauto, probably a .223 like their own. The field they were crossing was probably forty acres, a sixteenth of a square mile, some 440 yards across. It had been plowed in the fall, and the running was tough over the invisible, snow-covered hard-as-rock furrows.
“Easy,” Virgil said, when Jenkins nearly went down. “You don’t need a broken leg.”
They were both breathing hard, running in heavy coats, vests, and boots. Jenkins said, “Listen, when we come up, I think, I dunno, it looks like they’ve got the place surrounded, but most of them are in the front. They’re probably trying to make sure that nobody can get out.”
“Look, there’s somebody inside, I think, on the ground floor. See, in the window . . . Coakley said they were upstairs. . . .”
“I say we hit them in the back, clear that out, get our people out a back door or a window . . . however—”
Virgil, gasping for air: “Okay. She said some of them are inside the house. When we clear the back, I’ll call her again, make sure they’re still upstairs, and then we both fire full mags right through the house . . . blow them out of there, pin them down, really chop the place up, scare the shit out of the, the ones who survive. . . . Watch for my burst.”
“Good, good. Slow down, slow down now, we’re making too much noise. . . . I’m going to move off to the right . . . watch for my bursts.”
They’d come at a back corner of the house, on the woodlot side, and the firing was continuing, which meant that maybe somebody was still alive inside. A hundred yards out, Jenkins dissolved in the dark, and Virgil closed in, to come up on the corner of the house, where he could see both the back and one side. He moved into the trees, stumbled over a downed wire fence, and then crept fifty yards through the trees, stalking now, slow hunting, aware that time was passing, listening to the shots pounding the house.
At the end of the woodlot, he saw a sudden flash off to his left, saw a shape, heard the metallic clatter of a shell being ejected and another being loaded, in a bolt-action rifle, and waited for another flash, moving toward it. He could see a lump, wasn’t sure that it was a man, saw another flash, decided it was, and shot the man in the back. The man half stood, then pitched forward. Virgil moved up and found a body, an indistinct gray mass, trembling and kicking, as the brain died.
Got on his phone, called Coakley: she came up and said, “Hurry.”
“Everybody still upstairs?”
“Yes, but I think . . . we can smell smoke . . . I think they’re gonna try to burn us out.”
“Stay there for a minute, stay on the phone, we’re about to hose the place down.”
He looked to his left, then moved that way, slowly, slowly . . . saw another lump moving and with no alternative, called, “Jenkins?”
In reply: “Yes. We clear that way?”
“We’re clear to the corner,” Virgil said.
“There were two guys here,” Jenkins said. “They’re gone.”
“Let’s clear out the bottom floor. Find a tree and get down. Are you ready?”
“Go ahead; I’ll follow.”
Virgil got half behind a thick tree, clicked his rifle over to full auto, stood and aimed at w
indowsill level and lashed out with a full-auto burst, blowing the whole magazine through the house, playing it across the clapboard siding, which shuddered with the impact. As the burst ended, Jenkins opened fire, the muzzle flashes suppressed but still visible, a stuttering flash that flickered across the snow.
Virgil had just slapped the second mag into the rifle when he saw movement to his right, turned and lashed at it, couldn’t tell if he’d hit it.
Jenkins shouted, “Going around right, get them out of the house.”
“If I have to go in, I’ll go in the back door,” Virgil called back. “Keep up the pressure.” He got on the phone, and Coakley was there. “Can you make it down to the bottom floor, to the back door?”
She said, “Dunn’s hurt; he’s hit in the foot. He’s bleeding pretty bad. He can’t walk.”
There was another long stuttering burst, Jenkins working around to the right. Virgil said, “I’m coming through the back door. I’ll be there in a minute or two. Don’t shoot me.”
“There’s a fire—”
“I’m coming.”
First he moved down to his right, where he’d seen the movement. Didn’t see more. Moved slowly up, still didn’t see anything. Had he imagined it? Possible. Had to make a decision, and made it.
SCARED OUT OF HIS MIND, Virgil ran down the tree line, banging through the underbrush and ricocheting off the smaller trees that he couldn’t see coming, until he was even with the back door, and then dropped on the ground, silent, listening for reaction. Somebody was shooting one of the semiautos, but most of the other guns were silent, and then there was a BOOM-BOOM on the far side, a shotgun, and he feared for Jenkins, but then got an answering burst. Jenkins wasn’t dead yet; other than that, there were no guarantees.