I Shall Not Want

  “Hell, I’m going in for a tetanus shot soon as we’re done here. I want P.J. to impound that woman for ten days to make sure she doesn’t have rabies.”

  “And we were worried about the dogs.”

  Hadley Knox came in from the squad room. She looked at them like a mom checking out two kids who’ve fallen suspiciously silent. “Children and Family Services are sending a caseworker to the Christie farm.”

  “Good,” Russ said.

  “Ms. Adams called in. The German shepherds are in the shelter for the time being.” She raised her voice for the benefit of Kevin, who had drifted in to see what was up. “She says they’re really sweet dogs.”

  Lyle snickered. “Maybe it’s just you, Kevin.”

  Russ swigged his coffee, wishing there were some way to add a couple shots of espresso and double the caffeine content. He had gotten four hours of sleep on one of the old cell cots downstairs, waiting for the warrant to come through. He had sent Lyle home from the Muster Field, but there was no way he had gotten more than five. By comparison, Knox and Kevin glowed with vim and vigor. He had been that age once. A long time ago.

  “I want Noble to take the guns to the ballistics lab.” They had seized four sidearms that might match the caliber that had killed Amado.

  Lyle nodded. “Didja see the twenty-twos?”

  “Yep.” The Christies had an arsenal worthy of a militia.

  “I wish to hell we could get those to ballistics.”

  “Take it up with Judge Ryswick.” The judge had a horror of general warrants. When he wrote large caliber, he meant it, and the fact they had three unsolved killings by .22s didn’t impress him.

  Eric came in and took in the crowd. “What? We finally got good coffee?”

  “Not a chance,” Lyle said.

  “Eric,” Russ said, “You’ve been working the Christies all along. I want you to question Bruce and Donald.”

  Eric nodded. “What about Neil and the girlfriend?”

  “They can go on the back burner while they’re getting booked and waiting for a bond hearing. I’m going to my mom’s for a shower and a change.” He checked his watch. “I’ll be back before noon.” He caught Eric’s sleeve before he left. “Find a wedge. Maybe the cheating fiancée thing, maybe imply one of ’em’s cutting a deal to roll on the others. The Christies are tight; if you can split ’em apart, you’ll have ’em.”

  Eric nodded, then left for the interrogation room. Russ took another drink of coffee. “Lyle, go to the hospital and get that bite looked at. Then head home and get some sleep.” Lyle opened his mouth to protest. “Just go,” Russ said. “I’m getting some, too.”

  Lyle shrugged. Slouched toward the squad-room door. “That’s not what I heard.”

  Russ ignored the remark. “Knox, I want you to head over to the Christies’. Check in with the social worker and see if you can get anything useful from the sister or the kids. Kevin—” His youngest officer straightened, his expression bright and eager. Good God, it was no wonder the Christies’ dogs went after him. The boy was a human Irish setter. “You’re on patrol.”

  Kevin’s face dimmed. Knox frowned.

  Russ sighed. “What?”

  “No offense, Chief, but are you sending me to talk with the kids because I’m a woman?”

  “I’m sending you because I think you’re the best officer for the job. Just like I’m putting Kevin on patrol because Lyle and I are beat up and sleep-deprived and not much good to anyone right now. Look.” He gathered them both in with his voice, focusing their attention. “This case has been one horror after another. It’s been long hours and frustration and leads going nowhere. And you two have performed admirably through it all. I’m proud of you both. I’m proud to serve with you. And I know whatever I need you to do, you’re going to do it. Competently and professionally.” He drained his mug and set it down. “Now let’s go do what we gotta do.”

  XII

  The gate to the Christies’ farm had been left open. Hadley jounced her cruiser up the rutted dirt drive. On one side, golden hayfields rolled away to the distant forest’s edge. On the other, past an ancient stone wall, sheep drifted over the green grass like dusty clouds. It looked like a picture out of Genny’s children’s Bible. All that was missing was the Good Shepherd.

  She parked on the grass at the other side of the house, beneath a spreading maple that also shaded a junky little trailer. She should stay on the drive, but she knew if she left the cruiser in the sun it would be an oven by the time she got back in, and the AC didn’t work so well in this unit.

  She got out. The heat pressed against her, dry and windless. She plucked her blouse away from her body. If it felt like this at midmorning, it was going to be a breathlessly hot day.

  She crossed the drive and mounted the porch steps. The windows were closed against the heat. She rang the bell. She heard a murmur of voices. She squinted, trying to see through the shirred curtains in the door. She knocked. “Hello!” she said, loud enough to be heard inside. “Millers Kill Police.”

  The door cracked open. A young woman peeked out. She had strawberry-blond hair pulled back into a ponytail and ghost-ridden eyes.

  “Hi,” Hadley said. “I’m Officer Knox of the Millers Kill Police. Can I—”

  “It’s not a good time,” the woman said. “I have guests.”

  “I know about the caseworker from Children and Family. I’m the—uh, liaison with the department.” Hadley smiled reassuringly. “Are you—”

  The door shut in her face. She thought of Hudson’s favorite Elmer Fudd line: How wude! She banged on the door, insistent this time. “Ma’am,” she said.

  The door jerked open. A short, broad, weasel-faced man stood in front of her. His protruding eyes made him look like Peter Lorre, updated with jailhouse chic clothing and tattoos, visible on his fingers, which were braced against the jamb to bar her way. “Look,” he said, in a barely accented voice. “She doesn’t want to talk to you right now—”

  She saw it, the moment when he recognized her, and realized she recognized him. She hurtled off the porch as he was yelling something in Spanish. She half landed in the straggly bush below, fought her way free, and sprinted toward her unit. She heard glass shatter, glanced over her shoulder, and saw the barrel of an enormous revolver tracking her from the upper half of one of the windows. She dove behind her squad car as the thing went off. A bullet smacked into the maple, showering her with wet splinters. She wrenched the door open and clawed at the mic. “Dispatch!” she yelled. “Harlene? This bastard’s shooting at me!”

  XIII

  Russ had just pulled into his mother’s drive when his cell phone rang. Hell. He checked the number. The ant-sized hope that Clare might be calling was squashed when he saw it was the station. He flipped the phone open. “Van Alstyne here.”

  “Chief.” The usually unflappable Harlene sounded stressed. “We have an officer under fire.”

  His heart stopped. “Who?” Images of Kevin, a robbery, Paul, a traffic stop gone south.

  “Hadley Knox.”

  Oh, Christ, no. The rawest person on the force. He threw the truck in reverse and rolled down the window. “Where?”

  “The Christie place.”

  What? He pushed the crowd of questions away. Reached up and clamped the light to the top of the truck. “Give me a sitrep.”

  “Gunfire from a three-fifty-seven Magnum. Other weapons unknown. There may be another man inside, she couldn’t say for sure.”

  He rolled the window back up. Flicked on the light and siren. Tromped on the gas. “Unknown number of women and children inside as hostages.” Harlene raised her voice to be heard over the siren’s whoop. “Kevin and Lyle are on their way. Eric’s coming from the jail, SWAT team’s scrambling.”

  “I’ll be there soonest.” He thought of Hadley Knox, with her threadbare tote filled with criminal law texts. Her panicky voice: I haven’t practiced with a shoulder holster! “Harlene,” he said. “Send an ambulance.”
br />   XIV

  He didn’t know you could get speeds like that out of a Ford 250. He went airborne on the Christies’ drive, bounced, ground against the dirt and gravel, and there was the house, and there was Knox’s unit, and there was Knox, sprinting across the side yard—no vest on, for chrissakes—and there, in the broken and whole glass, an outline, and a hand, and a gun.

  He slewed the truck to a stop and tumbled out the door, his gun already in hand, and fired at the porch roof. It was a wild shot, unaimed, but the guy inside ducked out of sight and Knox rolled safely to a stop against the house’s foundation. He took a better stance behind the hood, figuring his engine block would stop even a .357.

  “Millers Kill Police,” he said loudly. “Put your weapon down and walk out with your hands on top of your head.” This suggestion was greeted with a torrent of obscenities. From the corner of his eye, he could see Knox flopping around. “You okay, Knox?”

  “Yeah. I mean, yes, sir.”

  “Stay right there. Don’t move.” He could see something behind the window. It was hard to make out in the shadow of the porch. Then he saw an eye, the side of a face, the gunman scoping things out. Russ dropped an inch lower, sighting him.

  “You shoot one more time and I swear I’ll cap one of ’em here,” the man screamed. “I’ll blow one of these bitches’ heads off!”

  O-kay. He did his best work talking, anyway. He waved his empty hand in the air and ostentatiously laid his sidearm on the hood. He heard the rumble and whine of an engine, and Kevin’s unit popped over the horizon, coming in too fast, screeching to a stop in a cloud of dust next to the truck. Lyle shoved Kevin out the driver’s side and crawled over him. They were both, thank God, in their tac vests.

  Lyle scanned the barn, the house, the side yard, the trailer. “Just in the house?”

  “Looks like,” Russ said.

  Lyle glanced at his empty hands. “Forget your piece?”

  “He’s threatened to shoot hostages if we fire.”

  “What’s going on?” the gunman yelled.

  “Sounds Latino,” Lyle said.

  He hummed in agreement. Then spoke loudly. “My deputy here says the state SWAT team is on the way. They’re not interested in talking to you. But I am.”

  “Screw you!”

  “C’mon, man, talk to me.” He started his patter. The first thing was to get him talking. A guy who’s talking isn’t shooting. The second was to be his friend. I’m on your side. We’re in this together. “C’mon,” he said. “You put your gun down, I put my gun down, we’ll call it drunk and disorderly.” He tried to remember how many kids were there. Donald had five or six by a string of girlfriends, bouncing back and forth between homes. His oldest had a kid of her own, though, and she lived with him. Plus the foul-mouthed fiancée’s bunch.

  The gunman had moved away from the window. He—or was it another voice?—was yelling at someone in the interior of the house. He needed more info. He caught Knox’s eye, signaled her to check out the back. She nodded and rolled to the ground, belly-crawling away from them like a marine in an obstacle course.

  “Why doesn’t she just duck down and walk?” Lyle said. “They can’t see her if she sticks close to the house.”

  “Probably taught her that at Basic.”

  Lyle huffed. “We’ll be another year unlearnin’ her after she’s through there.”

  If she survived the afternoon. “Any way to get her a tac vest?”

  “Two in the trunk of her cruiser.”

  They both looked at her squad car, maybe ten yards from where they were parked and another fifteen from the house. Open ground. No cover.

  “Get Kevin to the tail of your unit. If I can distract this guy, he can sprint to her car, grab the vest, and meet her at the side of the house.”

  “And what about you?”

  He twitched the question away. The shooter reappeared in the window. “Hey!” Russ said. The third thing was to get him to say yes. Didn’t matter to what. One yes leads to another. “It’s hotter’n hell today, isn’t it?” The shadowy figure stared at him. “Hard to keep things cool when it’s ninety degrees.”

  “You think this is hot? This ain’t nothin’.”

  “For you, maybe. Me, I’m dying out here.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Kevin taking up position at the back of his unit. “I could use something cold and wet. What about you? You want a cold beer? I can bring a six-pack up to the porch, and we can talk.”

  The guy laughed. “You think I’m an idiot? Whadda you take me for?”

  Russ spread his hands. “Okay. You know what we want. We want everybody here to walk away unharmed. We want a win-win solution. You tell me what you want.”

  The shooter ducked away from the window for a moment. Russ glanced at Lyle. Lyle held up two fingers. Two guys. At least.

  “You know what I want? I want our property back. These rednecks stole something from us, and I want it back.”

  Russ got that sensation in his head, like bottle rockets popping off, one after the other. “The directory of dealer names,” he said, tossing out another wild guess.

  The man—the Punta Diablos foot soldier—hissed in surprise. A hit, a palpable hit. “What you say?” the shooter asked after a moment. He’d be a lousy poker player.

  “We arrested the Christie brothers this morning. You know how it goes. Any valuable information goes on the bargaining table.”

  “Son of a bitch monkey-balled mother—” Russ let the guy rave on. He’d be a good match for Donald’s latest fiancée. He almost smiled, until the last bottle rocket went off, and he realized it was the Punta Diablos, and not the large and thugly Christies, who had done those horrible things to Amado Esfuentes. These guys are junkyard-dog vicious, he’d told Clare. And now they had an unknown number of women and children at their mercy.

  The shooter was going on about how you couldn’t trust anyone. Russ wasn’t sure if the rant was directed at him or at the unknown accomplices inside, but he was getting worried. These guys were trapped. That’s when dangerous animals attacked. Where the hell was Knox? Had something happened to her?

  Then she appeared from the back of the house. He kept his face forward, fixed intently on the Punta Diablo point man, who was working himself up in a major way. He slipped one hand off the hood of his truck and signaled to Kevin. Nothing. He signaled again. No long tall streak of red loping toward Knox’s squad car.

  Then Kevin’s voice was behind him, in his ear. “There’s a dead woman out back,” he said quietly. “Shot in the chest.”

  Russ thought about hapless, knocked-around Isabel Christie, with her strawberry-blond hair and her sad eyes. What a goddamn waste. He suddenly felt twenty years older.

  “Chief?” Kevin kept his voice low.

  “Have Harlene patch you to the SWAT team. Brief ’em. Then get ready to run for that vest.”

  “Roger that.” Kevin sprinted for his cruiser, bent double. He flung open the door and lay on the seat, reaching for the mic.

  “What’s going on?” the Punta Diablo guy asked. “What’s he doing on the radio?”

  “I just told him to ask the state troopers to stay back a ways,” Russ said. “I want you and me to have the time we need to talk our way out of this thing.” He kept his face forward and rattled on, good faith, blah-blah-blah, listening as Kevin briefed the state assault team sergeant he’d been connected to. It was informative, detailed, and short. The kid was finally learning to get to the point.

  “You tell those bastards to stay away from us,” the shooter yelled. “Anybody tries to mess with us, they gotta go through one of these kids to do it!”

  Kevin hung up the mic. “Fifteen—twenty minutes.”

  Shit. Might as well be tomorrow, for all the good they were going to do.

  The guy disappeared from the window. Inside the house, a woman screamed. “Knox!” He grabbed his gun off the hood. “What’s he doing in there?”

  She jumped up like a jackrabbit and looked
in the window. Ran to the next one. He flapped at Kevin. “The vest! Go! Go!”

  “He’s holding a kid,” Knox yelled. “He’s—oh, shit, no!”

  This was going straight down the crapper. “Are there other shooters?”

  “I can’t tell!” she screamed. “Maybe in the front—”

  The window above Knox exploded. She dropped, and for one sickening moment he thought she’d been hit, but then he saw she was crouched, her hands over the back of her neck. Kevin had popped the trunk and was yanking a vest out. “Go through the back,” Russ yelled. “Go through the back!”

  Kevin waved acknowledgment and tore through the side yard. Knox rose and ran after him. They disappeared around the corner.

  “Don’t move,” Lyle said. “I’m getting you the other one.” He raced toward Knox’s unit.

  Up on the porch, the door flew open. A teenaged girl with a baby under her arm made a dash for it. The shooter lunged forward, long rope-muscled arm extended, and snagged her by her collar. She rebounded, gagged, and almost dropped the baby. Her captor dragged her backward by the neck.

  Russ broke cover and ran for the house. Lyle was shouting something at him, but he couldn’t hear it over the thudding of his feet, the rasp of his breath, the crying and yelling inside.

  He took the porch steps in two strides and slammed through the door with the side of his body, leaving him face-to-face with the open double doors and the wild-eyed shooter, tattooed fingers, just like Knox had said, backing away with a squirming, squalling teen and her baby as a shield.

  “Police! Drop your weapon,” Russ roared: habit, not hope.

  “Drop your weapon!” The Punta Diablo guy had a monster .357 Taurus pointed at the girl. Russ kept his Glock lined and sighted for a head shot. The gangbanger started to look scared. It was damn hard to keep your gun pointed away from a man when you could see his bore drilling you between the eyes.

  Then the girl lunged to the side, yanking her captor off balance. His instinct took over; he swung his .357 toward Russ, arms wide, chest unguarded. Russ dropped his Glock three inches and squeezed twice. He dove right as the Magnum went off, but the young man was already crumpling, the gun falling from his tattooed fingers.