A truck backed wildly down the driveway, and another followed it, and men were screaming. He was directly at the back of the house now, couldn’t see anybody in either direction—heard another short burst from Jenkins, now firing down the far side of the house—and dashed across the open space to the back door.
He kicked it once, as hard as he’d ever kicked a door in his life, felt it sag, kicked it a second time and the lock and latch blew open, and he was inside, at the bottom of a four-step set of stairs. He climbed the stairs, leading with the muzzle of the M16, did a quick peek, saw that he was coming into the back of the kitchen. The kitchen floor was smeared with blood. Light from heavy flames, and a boiling black smoke, poured from the living room beyond.
There were no more bullets going through the house. He heard another burst from Jenkins’s rifle, and thought that the farmers around the place were probably more worried about being attacked by a guy with a machine gun than continuing their attack.
Whatever.
He looked both ways, and dashed across the kitchen. The living room had apparently been splashed with gasoline, and the fire was large and growing quickly, the furniture fully involved. He could see a body stretched in the flames, already badly burned, unrecognizable. Nothing to do about that. He turned up the stairs, shouting, “Virgil, Virgil,” turned the corner at the landing, saw a dead man lying on the stairs. He hopped over him, shouted, “Virgil,” turned the corner at the top and saw Coakley standing in the open bathroom doorway.
He went that way, saw Dunn sitting behind the bathtub, and a young girl inside it. He shouted, “Come on,” and Dunn said, “My foot’s gone,” and Virgil said, “Push yourself up the wall.”
He handed the rifle to Coakley, who was holding the cardboard photo box, said, “Give the box to the kid. C’mon, you lead.”
Virgil half squatted, told Dunn to drape himself over his shoulders, got one arm between the other man’s legs, and lifted him in a fireman’s carry.
They went down the hall, Coakley leading with the rifle muzzle, the girl following, and then the girl darted into a side room, and Coakley screamed at her, and she came back out, carrying a coat. Virgil and Dunn last; Dunn probably weighed two hundred pounds, but wasn’t so much heavy as awkward.
Nobody on the stairs, the fire growing wilder, and down they went, into the kitchen, to the top of the stairs by the back door, and Coakley said, “Oh, shit,” and turned and gave the rifle to Virgil and said, “I’ll be right back. Ten seconds.”
“Where the hell . . .”
But she was gone, and a minute later, over the sounds of shouting outside, and the sounds of cars, and more gunfire, there was a sudden crash of glass, and then Coakley was back, took the rifle and they were out and Virgil was shouting, “Right into the trees, right into the trees.”
He ran as best he could, with Dunn on his shoulders, and when they got into the tree line, they stopped, crouching behind the thick-trunked box elders, and Virgil put Dunn down. Dunn groaned as he did it, and then said, “Man, thanks. Thank you.”
Virgil took the gun from Coakley and said, “You guys stay here. There’s another guy with me, he’ll be coming round the back of the house, probably, don’t shoot him. His name is Jenkins.”
“Where’re you going?” Coakley asked.
“I’m going to shoot some more people,” he said.
HE DIDN’T. There’d probably been a dozen of them, or even twenty, but they’d taken casualties and had finally broken, running for it, piling into their trucks and cars as Jenkins gave them a send-off. One truck was nose-down in the driveway ditch, with its headlights still burning. There were two bodies on the ground in front of the house.
And it was silent, finally, and then somebody moaned. Virgil, moving slow again, walked down the side of a shed and found a man on the ground, his face and neck a mass of blood; he’d been hit in the face with a shotgun, Virgil thought, and if he didn’t die, he’d be blind.
The man had been firing a hunting rifle into the house, and the rifle lay on the ground next to him. Virgil kicked it away, and the man heard him and tried to say something, but was so badly hurt that he mostly swallowed blood: but he might have said, “Help me.”
Virgil got down behind a tractor wheel on an old John Deere parked next to the shed, and called, loud as he could, “Jenkins!”
A moment later, “Here.”
“You okay?”
“Okay. I’ll meet you back where we started.”
VIRGIL MOVED SLOWLY to the back of the house. He got to Coakley, Dunn, and the girl just before Jenkins came in. Virgil was on the phone, calling the highway patrol guys and the local cops off the watch at the Einstadt meeting, and to warn them about men with guns.
“We need you here, but stay clear of any big bunch of cars—they may be coming your way. We’ve got one dead cop and one wounded. We’re gonna need a fast run into town. . . . We need a fire truck. . . .”
“We’re coming.”
Coakley asked, “Are we clear?”
“I think so,” Jenkins said. “There may be some wounded who still want to fight. Gotta be careful.”
“Bob’s dead,” Coakley said. “Ah, God, what am I gonna tell Jenny? Ah, God . . .”
Virgil ignored that and asked Dunn, “How bad’s the bleeding?”
“I tied a couple strips of towel around it,” he groaned. “They’re soaked, but I don’t think I’ll die from it. My foot’s a mess. . . . I can feel the bones moving around. Man, it hurts. It really hurts.”
“You warm?” Virgil asked.
“Huh? Yeah, warm enough.”
The fire was really blowing up now, had climbed the stairs as though it were a chimney and was spreading into the second floor. Coakley stood up and said, “I’ve got to run around to the other side. Right now. Somebody needs to cover me.”
She started moving and Virgil said, “I’ll take it,” and followed as she dashed around the back of the house, and then down the far side. Virgil kept the rifle up, now on its third magazine, looking for movement. Heavy black smoke was boiling out of the house now, and glass was beginning to break, and Virgil could smell burning meat.
Two bodies, at least. Could have been Coakley and Dunn and the girl, as well.
Coakley went to the side of the house, knelt, then stood, staggering a little, carrying a computer. She got back to Virgil and said, “I threw it out the window. Eight thousand pictures. I couldn’t let it burn. I hope the hard drive’s okay.”
Jenkins said, “Our guys are coming in,” and Virgil looked out of the woodlot down the road and saw a car coming fast, light bar on the roof, and, at right angles to it, on another road, another car with a light bar. The highway patrolmen. The first car pulled into the driveway and Virgil’s phone rang: “Everything clear?”
“I don’t know. We’ve got at least two wounded, one of us and one of them. I don’t think anybody’s holding out to ambush us, but take it easy. Wait for your other guy, check the truck across the road, and we’ll start clearing out the buildings here. Watch your gun, careful not to shoot each other—”
“Okay. Every ambulance in three counties is on the way. It looks like a fuckin’ war, man.”
“It was a fuckin’ war,” Virgil said, and clicked off.
He said to Jenkins, “Let’s clear the outbuildings, and the trucks.”
Four trucks were sitting empty in front of the house and along the sides, all pocked with bullet holes. Jenkins said, “I was doing everything I could to scare the shit out of them, get them running. Nothing scares a shitkicker like somebody shooting up his truck.”
Virgil might have laughed but Jenkins sounded so intent that he didn’t; instead he said, “Let’s clear them.”
They went off together, using Coakley’s flashlight, cleared the first, small shed, a repair shop smelling of gasoline; and in the second, large shed, which was full of farm machinery, they moved the light around and a man’s voice said, “Don’t kill me.”
“Come
out of there,” Virgil said. He came out with his hands over his head, a tall, rawboned man maybe twenty years old, with long hair, in a camo jacket. In the dark, and in the military jacket, he looked like a surrendering German in old World War II books that Virgil had seen.
“Move out into the light,” Virgil said. And, “I can’t fool around here. If you do anything quick, I’m gonna shoot you. Get down on the ground, flat on your face.”
The man got down, and Jenkins came up and cuffed him, and then patted him down. The man said, “They left me. Ran like chickens.”
“Don’t worry,” Virgil said, “You’re gonna have a lot of time to talk to them about it.”
THEY CLEARED the trucks, found another wounded man, an older man, face wet with pain-sweat, going into shock, shot through both legs. He said, “Help me,” and they threw his gun into the snow and then hastily cut strips of cloth out of the back of his coat and put pressure pads on the leg wounds.
They cuffed him to the steering wheel when they were done, and moved on, but found nobody else. Virgil said, “Jesus, Jenkins, you went through here like Mad Dog McGurk.”
“I was feeling uncharitable,” Jenkins said. “And hell, I didn’t even see most of these guys. Once they got in the trucks, I just started unloading on the vehicles, to mark them.”
Another car came steaming down the highway and up the drive: Brown and Schickel.
Virgil met them at the top of the hill: the house was now fully aflame, and he could feel the heat on his back, and water from melting snow was starting to run down the driveway.
“We need to get Dunn to the hospital like right now: can you take him?”
Brown took him, and five minutes later the first of the ambulances arrived. They put the blind man in first, and then the man shot through the legs. The second ambulance arrived, and the highway patrol cops loaded a man from the ditched truck; he’d been hit in the back. One of the ambulance people said he thought that one of the men lying in front of the house was still alive. But maybe not.
They took him.
More cops started coming in, everybody from Warren, Martin, and Jackson counties, cars parking up and down the road, searchlights and flashlights looking behind trees, following tracks out across the fields.
Coakley said to Virgil, “We need to get Kristy to town while she can still talk. We need a batch of warrants, and we need to get all these cops in there. We can leave three or four out here to watch the place until morning, but there’s not much left....”
“You do it,” Virgil said. “You’re the sheriff. I just want to sit down for a couple of minutes.”
So she did it, and he sat, looking at the shambles.
Jenkins said, at one point, “Fifteen.”
Virgil asked, “What?” and, “Oh, yeah.” The weird-shit-o-meter.
Jenkins asked, “How you doing?”
“Sorta freaked, ’cause you know what? I feel pretty fuckin’ good, like I could do it again,” Virgil said. “Man: what a fuckin’ rush.”
Jenkins grinned at him in the firelight and said, “Shhh. We don’t tell anybody that.”
21
Coakley was good at organization, and the shoot-out—with one of their own among the dead—galvanized what Virgil thought of as a “community reaction” among the arriving cops. He’d seen it often enough in small towns, usually after a tornado, where there wasn’t the infrastructure to deal with a major emergency, and so everybody pitched in simply because there wasn’t anybody else to do it.
Warren County was twice the area of all of New York City, and Coakley had twelve deputies to cover all but the city of Homestead, and had to have at least one patrolman on, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. She also had two sergeants and an investigator, two part-time deputies, and fifteen corrections officers; plus twenty or so officers from adjoining counties.
She rounded up all of them, matched cops who knew the county with those who didn’t, and sent a dozen teams to round up families whose children had been identified by Kristy in the photos from the closet. The rest she sent into the sheriff’s department in Homestead, where they’d meet in a courtroom and produce warrants for the next day, while the corrections officers would be processing those arrested into the jail. The other four would remain at the Rouse place overnight, guarding the scene.
Kristy was sent to the sheriff’s department with a county child welfare worker, who was told to give her a bed in a jail cell, with the door unlocked. They wanted her secure, but not frightened.
Two fire trucks had arrived from the local volunteer fire department, plus two more from the Homestead fire department, but they were doing nothing except to make sure that the fire went nowhere, because there wasn’t anything to be done. The house was mostly down, and letting the rest of it burn, at least until the standing walls and overhead beams were down, was considered the safest solution, even though there were bodies inside.
Virgil and Jenkins were standing with the firemen, close enough to get the warmth of the house fire without toasting themselves, and Coakley came up and said, “We’re going. We need to get your computer guy down here tonight. Did you get a chance . . . ?”
“They’re coming, and they’ve got an iMac just like the one you saved,” Virgil said. “If the hard drive works, we should be able to look at it in three or four hours.”
“I wish I hadn’t had to throw it out the window, but I had to be able to use the gun. Anyway...” She trailed off, her eyes moving left, past Virgil’s ear, and she said, “What the heck is that?”
Far off in the distance, a golden-white light flared on the horizon, out of place, too large and too bright for something as distant as it must be. Virgil said, “It’s another house.”
The firemen were looking at it, and one of them said, “We better get over there . . . maybe it’s just a barn.” They began organizing to leave, yelling at each other, loading up. One would be left behind, the other three were backing out.
“I’ve got a really bad feeling about that,” Virgil said. “Let’s go see who it is.”
VIRGIL AND JENKINS led the way out, Coakley and Schickel following, all of them behind the lead fire truck, because the truck driver seemed to know where he was going; the fire was southeast of the Rouse farm, and they took a zigzag route over the irregular road grid. A mile out, the fire resolved itself into two separate blazes, a house and a separate shed, but not the barn.
A half-mile out, Coakley called and said, “It’s the Becker farm. They’re another WOS family.”
The fire truck went straight up the low slope off the road to the burning house. The rest of the caravan pulled into a semicircle behind it, but as was the case with the Rouse fire, there was nothing much to do: both the house and the smaller shed were fully involved. The galvanized roof on the shed had already caved as the support beams burned, and the interior of the house was collapsing.
Virgil and Jenkins got with Coakley, and Virgil asked, “What do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like it could be a coincidence.”
Virgil sniffed at the heat coming off the fire, turned to the other two, and asked, “Do you smell it?”
“What?”
“There’s somebody in there—I can smell the body burning.”
The blood drained from Coakley’s face. “Are they suiciding? Are they killing themselves? Is it like Waco?”
“Ah, man,” Virgil said. “I didn’t mean that . . . I didn’t think—”
A cop came hustling up and said, “There’s another one. Another fire. You can see it on the horizon from the other side of the house.”
They followed behind him, and he pointed: another spark, far south. A fireman came over and said, “Can you smell the body?”
They said yes, and the fireman added, “There’s a truck in that shed. It looks like they built a pyre around it, stacked it with lumber and firewood, and soaked it in gasoline and oil. It’s so goddamn hot it’s melting the ca
r.”
The thought came to Virgil and he blurted it out: “They’re destroying evidence. If the body in this house was a dead man, one of the men killed back at Rouse’s place, and we find nothing here but some teeth and wrist bones . . . if the car melts, if they tore out any bullet holes...”
“But why?” Coakley asked.
“No conviction. No evidence even for an insurance company lawsuit,” he said.
“I can’t believe that,” she said. “Where’s Becker’s wife and kids? Are they outside, or inside?”
“I bet we find them,” Virgil said. “I bet they’re at friends’ houses. I bet we find no more dead men, and we find no injured men. But I bet some men will be gone, disappear, and they’ll tell us they deserted their wives, or something, and those will be the wounded ones. The dead ones, the ones in these houses . . . I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised if they said we did it.”
FOUR HOUSES BURNED, and in all four of them, trucks were burned with the houses. Whether there’d be discoverable bullet holes in them couldn’t be determined until daylight, when the fires died.
VIRGIL, COAKLEY, and Jenkins got back to the sheriff’s department at two o’clock in the morning and found a chaotic scene of shouting men and women, children being separated from their families, some of them crying and screaming for help from their handcuffed parents.
A woman saw Coakley walk through the courthouse doors and began screaming, “Devil, devil, devil...” and other women took it up. Coakley kept walking.
The parents were being processed into the jail, while the children were sequestered in the two courtrooms on the second floor of the courthouse, under the supervision of child welfare workers from Warren and Jackson counties.
Schickel had come in earlier than Virgil and Coakley, and he walked over and said, “We’ve got fourteen families, thirty-one adults and forty-two children and teenagers. We’ve got no space. We’re going to have to start parceling them out.”