Broken Heartland (12 page)

“Is the lieutenant dead?” Neuhauser asked.

“Not yet,” the sheriff said. “But we could still get lucky.”

***

It was cool in the grain bin. Not cold, because it must be getting close to noon and the sun was beating down on the bare metal and conducting a little heat. It would probably be pretty comfortable by mid-afternoon. But tonight….

“What are you doing?” Pam was standing against the wall on the sunny side, absorbing the warmth. Mad Dog was busy checking seams on the opposite wall, trying to do anything to keep his mind off the young woman in the minuscule underwear on the other side of the bin.

Not that he was a prude. Back when he was part of that commune down in Oklahoma, he'd spent most of a summer running around bare-assed in the company of seriously attractive and equally unclothed young women. But he was older now. Old enough to know better. Old enough to be this girl's father….

Still, it wouldn't have been a problem, but shortly after Galen took their clothes and left them alone together, Mad Dog noticed a certain part of his anatomy didn't care whether Pam was too young. He felt preliminary stirrings that had been a lot more common back in the decades before Pam was even born.

He told himself their situation was difficult enough without him parading around with an erection and started a detailed inspection of the bin's construction. It occupied his mind and turned the offending member from her view. And his search even stood a chance in a billion of getting them out of here.

“Looking for a weak point,” he said, recalling how wispy her underwear was. The memory diverted blood flow in an unfortunate direction.

“Like this,” he said, forcing himself to focus on a flawed rivet he'd just discovered. If he only had a really good pry bar, he might be able to pop it, then start working on the seam. Given a few uninterrupted months to work on the spot, he might get them out of there.

“Like what?” Her voice came from just over his shoulder and he was suddenly sure he could detect her body heat radiating along his right flank. Damned blood flow.

“Uh, here,” he said, pointing out the rivet and trying to make sure she only noticed the cold metal instead of….

“You really think you can do something with that?”

She was right beside him, now. He couldn't turn away. That would be too obvious. He let his right arm fall to his side in a masking position.

She wasn't just too young. He was Cheyenne. Cheyenne were not promiscuous. They didn't have casual sexual relationships. Not that she would be interested in an old man like him, anyway. But if she noticed how interested part of him was… well, it would be humiliating. And that very thought should have been enough to reverse the blood flow process, but she was leaning in close to examine the rivet and something very soft and hardly contained by lace and gauze brushed his arm. More blood left his brain.

She turned and looked at him. At least she was looking at his face. “Mad Dog, do you think you could do something with that?”

He'd forgotten her question. He took a deep breath and tried to lock his eyes on hers, and not that cleavage only inches away. “Yeah.” His voice sounded husky even to him. He tried again. “If I had my knife or some piece of metal to work on it with.”

“There's a metal hook in my bra,” she said. She reached up and undid it and he lost control of his eyes. She handed the translucent garment to him and he took it. There wasn't much more to the hook and eye arrangement than there was to the bra itself. Just some thin wire that would bend before it even scratched the rivet.

“I don't think this is hard enough,” he said, voice even huskier.

“But that sure is,” she said. He managed to get his eyes back on her face and discovered her own had traveled elsewhere. When he'd taken her bra, he'd uncovered himself.

She smiled. “Thanks,” she said. “I was beginning to think I wasn't your type.”

He dropped his hands and tried to hide himself.

“Hey, don't be embarrassed. I'm flattered.” She put her arms around his neck and slid up against him.

In spite of all his will power, his arms reached out to welcome her. Her mouth opened and found his and then she stepped back a little and dropped her hands to her waist.

“Let me get out of these,” she said. A last filmy cloth slid from her hips to her ankles. And then she was back in his arms and nothing separated them. There was only one way they could get closer and she rose up on her tiptoes as she nibbled at his mouth, hips doing a subtle bump and grind to guide him and make it happen.

Mad Dog didn't want it to happen. But his hands found her hips and pulled her to him and he knew there was no way to stop it. What his intellect wanted didn't matter. Sometimes the body has a will of its own. Nothing on earth would keep them from….

The door to the bin swung open on creaking hinges.

***

“Heather,” Heather English said. “Would you move your car back over and block the road into the camp where it goes between those two trees? And then stay with it?”

“What,” Heather Lane said, “you're going in alone?”

“I may flush somebody. If I do, you'll have them trapped. I'll call if I need help. Is your cell on and charged?” Her sister showed her that it was. “If I need you, I'll call. If I'm not there when you answer, sneak in and maybe bring a tire iron, just in case.”

“You're scaring me,” Two said.

“Nah, I'm being dramatic. Something weird is going on, and somebody died in that accident this morning, but it's not like anything dangerous is happening. Not in Benteen County.”

The other Heather smiled. “Well, be careful,” she said. She got in her car and backed toward the gap in the trees.

Deputy Heather fumbled her cell phone and pepper spray out of her fanny pack, then slid between cars and melted into the grove that surrounded the camp. The deeper she went, the more the trees thinned and individual buildings became visible. She slipped from trunk to trunk, pausing at each to search for any sign of movement and to examine the cabins for broken windows.

She would have missed it but for the breeze. A curtain fluttered in the window of a candy-cane striped cabin near the center of the camp.

Heather hadn't done much hunting growing up. Hunting wasn't a girl thing in Benteen County, and after Vietnam her dad hadn't been interested in killing for sport. But she'd played her share of cops and robbers and hide and seek and seen thousands of movies. She had a pretty good idea of how a cop should approach a probable breaking and entering. She continued slipping from cover to cover, even more carefully now, as if someone might stick a gun out that window and begin sniping at her at any moment. And she checked around her as she advanced, in case there were other people in here or whoever broke that window had moved somewhere else.

When she got to the adjacent cabin, a robin's egg blue SAMARITANS, the curtain that had caught her attention stirred in a way the wind couldn't be responsible for. A foot stepped through, and then another. The body they were attached to twisted and a butt, a big one, followed slowly, feet reaching for a porch that was inconveniently low.

Now, Heather thought. She pivoted once, reassuring herself that she and the burglar were alone, and then she sprinted toward the candy-cane cabin. The burglar's feet found the porch and the rest of him came through the window, the curtain mussing his thick gray hair. The rest of him was as big as his tush, and she was disturbed to note that he had a pistol on his belt. At least it wasn't in his hands. Those were holding a stack of notebooks.

Heather threw herself the last few yards. He must have heard her coming because he started to turn as she joined him on the porch. She shoved the narrow end of the tube of pepper spray into the small of his back—not exactly the way it was intended to be used—and spoke with her most authoritative voice.

“Hands up or I'll blow your spine right through your belly button.”

***

“Jesus! What's happened here?” It was Doc Jones. The sheriff hadn't heard him drive up again, though Doc's Buick was only a few yards away.

Dust from the grenades was still settling. The sheriff's ears rang and turned Doc's voice distant and tinny.

“It's Greer,” the sheriff said. “He just tried a frontal assault that didn't work out real well.”

“Doctor, you've got to help him,” Neuhauser pleaded. He seemed on the verge of hysterics, so the sheriff reached over and took the gun out of his hand.

“I came over here as an MD, not a coroner, son.” Doc didn't like to have his responsibilities explained to him. “Where's he hit?”

“God, man. Can't you see? Right there,” Neuhauser pointed at Greer's bloody forehead.

“That's no bullet wound,” Doc said. “He banged his head on something. Probably, whatever knocked him out.” Doc joined the sheriff, who was already kneeling beside the lieutenant. “Bullet holes,” Doc said, “that's my first concern.”

“None on his torso,” the sheriff said, unfastening and removing the bandolier with its collection of grenades. None of them were quite like what he'd used in Vietnam, and they weren't labeled in ways that meant anything to him.

“I don't see any bullet wounds at all,” Doc said. “Just a gash on the tip of this steel-toed boot where it got grazed, maybe. And it looks like the heel got shot off, too, but no wounds.”

“His jacket caught on the fence,” the sheriff said, putting the grenades on the ground well out of Greer or Neuhauser's reach. English opened the cylinder and dropped the bullets out of Neuhauser's gun. “The steel bar that supported the top of the fence, that's probably what hit him, and then he didn't fall far. Not far enough for Chucky to have an angle on him from the back of the room.”

“Lucky man.” Doc peeled Greer's eyelids up and shone a flashlight into the lieutenant's pupils. “Mild concussion, probably, though I suppose I'd better get some x-rays and monitor him for brain swelling. But that can wait. I brought you a couple of volunteers, Englishman. And I brought my own gun, too.”

The sheriff noticed two old farmers, one with a deer rifle, the other a shotgun, standing back by Doc's Buick.

“How can we help?” one of them asked.

The sheriff shook his head. “I don't know.”

Doc had told the sheriff he owned a gun, but English hadn't seen the Luger before. He didn't think Doc had fired the thing since he'd moved to Benteen County. And those old men. One of them, the one with the deer rifle, wore a billed cap pulled down low enough to scrunch his ears. That was to hide his hairless head because he was undergoing chemotherapy. If Doc had brought him from the clinic, it was probably because this was one of his bad days. The guy with the shotgun was a lot stronger, but they'd had to take his driver's license away last year because his macular degeneration had gotten too bad. The man could probably still see well enough to point a shotgun at somebody, but he might not know who it was. And Neuhauser…. Greer's buddy had put a gun to the back of the sheriff's head. The sheriff needed help, but this was the stuff of desperation.

The sheriff went to the edge of the building. Preceded by his .38, he peered around the mangled fence at the shattered windows down in the stairwell.

“Chucky?”

No answer.

“Chucky. It's me, Sheriff English. Answer me, son.”

Nothing.

“Anybody? Talk to me.”

The silence was overwhelming.

“Shit,” the sheriff said. “I think Greer flushed him. If he's got a key to that door, he can get anywhere in the building. Or out of it.”

“You two,” he said to the elderly farmers. “You know where the inside door to this basement is?”

They nodded.

“It was locked when I last checked. Go make sure it still is. If Chucky tries to come through after you're there, dissuade him. But remember, he's got hostages. Don't do anything foolish.”

“We understand,” the chemo patient said.

“And let me know anything that happens.”

The two turned and headed for the front of the building.

“Doc,” the sheriff said. “Neuhauser pulled a gun on me before. That's how Greer managed all this mayhem.” Doc swung and covered the man with his old Luger. “Neuhauser might still be of some help if things go bad for me, but keep him in front of you.” He gave Neuhauser his bullets back, but handed the oversized pistol to Doc.

“What are you planning?” Doc asked.

“I can't see that I have any choice but to go down there.”

“Chucky could be waiting for that. You could be dead before you hit the bottom of those stairs.”

“Then you'll know where he is and you can tell the professionals when they get here.” He glanced at the parking lot, hoping to see a Kansas Highway Patrol car pulling in off of Main. Or a National Guard battalion might be nice—except they would all be in Iraq, or off patrolling the Mexican border.

“Chucky was talking to me. So was one of his hostages. Now nothing. And he hasn't fired any shots since Greer tried to take him single-handed. I think he's moving. And I'm afraid he knows there's more than one way out.”

“But you've covered that.” Doc was paying attention, but he was keeping an eye, and the Luger, on Neuhauser.

“There's another. The old furnace is down there. And a spider web of ducts with pipes that lead all through the building.”

Including over the former girl's locker room, or so English had been told by a classmate who claimed to know. The boy had also said Michelle Nelson wasn't a natural blond and Becky Prichard had a tattoo on her right hip. The sheriff had thought the boy was bragging, his stories the stuff of adolescent fantasy. Then Becky Prichard overfilled a tractor tire down at the Texaco a few years later and got blown over into the Buffalo Burger Drive-In parking lot. The explosion killed her instantly, and tore most of her clothes off. The tattoo was right where it was supposed to be. That meant those heating ducts really were navigable.