Broken Heartland (24 page)

He sighed and slumped across the room to have a look and consider how to arrange them so they would all fit. There was more room in the converted meat locker than he'd expected. And not because it was bigger than his memory told him.

“Hey, Doc.” It was the youngest Klausen. “I hear you've been out drumming up business.”

Normally, Doc would have laughed. To survive in this business, or Klausen's, you had to develop a macabre sense of humor. But not today, not under these circumstances.

“Where's the boy?” Doc asked.

Klausen's brows furrowed. “What boy?”

“The kid who died in the accident this morning,” Doc said.

“Isn't he in there?”

He wasn't. Neither were the containers into which Doc had placed his vital organs, after careful removal, measurement, and recording. “No,” Doc said. “He's gone. Everything is gone.”

***

The blond guy in the suit was quick to back out of the cloud of pepper spray. “What did you want to go and do that for?” he coughed.

Deputy Heather considered a mad dash for safety, but he had already swept the sunglasses aside and centered his weapon on her chest. His watering eyes were in the open for her pepper spray now, but she'd never get the can close to his face again.

“Drop it,” he said, as if he were reading her mind. “I don't want to shoot you. I'm just supposed to bring you in for questioning.”

The pepper spray can rang as it hit the floor and rolled behind her.

“Why?” It seemed like a reasonable thing to ask. Your sister's car didn't get shot up in Benteen County every day, and guys with suits and guns and, damn it, sunglasses, didn't hunt you down. “What do you want with me?”

He shook his head. When he spoke, his voice was a little hoarse from the spray. “Hey, missy. I'm just hired muscle. You'll have to ask the boss. Or he'll have to ask you.”

“Who's the boss? This is Galen Siegrist's place. Galen doesn't hire armed security to patrol his farm. He's raising seed crops here, not cocaine.”

“Galen? That wimpy kid. He's not my boss. And this sure ain't about drugs. It's about maintaining security. You kept driving by, checking the place out. I'm guessing they want to know if you're just a nosey neighbor or if we've got a security breach.”

Driving by. Ah, he thought she was her sister. The good side of that was they wouldn't be looking for Two anymore. The bad side was they had her. And she didn't like the sound of that last part. Breached security? What, was the government holding secret prisoners here for questioning? Was some sort of terror cell in the county about to get busted? This was so over the top for Benteen County, and Galen Siegrist, that it boggled the mind.

Galen was a smart, ambitious, and obnoxious kid from a few classes ahead of hers. She'd pretty much known him all her life, and disliked but not despised him. He'd always been a religious fanatic and a bigot and he had a way of looking at girls that made her uncomfortable, no matter how often he preached about the evils of the flesh. He'd asked her out a couple of times, but she'd found excuses. So had her sister. They both agreed the human race would simply have to end if Galen should turn out to be the last man on earth.

But Galen was small-minded and greedy, not evil. And he'd rushed off and finished his agronomy degree in three years so he could take over this farm. He wasn't political, or no more so than any of the rest of the zealots in the neighborhood. She had to admit there were a few. She could picture Galen plotting to make abortions illegal, replace evolution with creationism, even working to install Christianity as America's official religion. But not getting involved with secret medical operations and a private army. Heather had always thought Galen would opt for profits over prophecy if he had to make a choice.

“Yeah, I got her,” the blond guy said. No one had joined them. He was talking into a little microphone attached to something in his ear that she hadn't noticed before.

He gestured with his weapon toward a door across from the office. “Come on, girly. They want you at the house.”

She was pretty sure she didn't want to go there with him, but like, what were her choices?

“Is this some kind of government thing?” She started backing away, going slow, delaying the inevitable. “Are you Homeland Security?”

That brought a smile to his face. “Oh yeah,” he said. “We're anxious to talk to you about your liberal outlook. Unless the CIA has decided to pull a rendition and ship you to a black site for questioning.”

He was teasing her, and he thought she was a dweeb. But that could be useful.

She let her eyes get wide. “Oh yeah. Really. 'Cause I'm no liberal.” Actually, she supposed she was, though mostly because it was liberals who so outraged the neoconservatives she thought were madly rushing about destroying the world. “You're in Kansas, after all.”

“As if I hadn't noticed.” So,
he
was the dweeb, too feeble to realize there were Democrats and liberals and even the occasional pacifist among the white Christians right here in the heartland's heart.

“I mean, like, I'd vote for Mr. Bush today if I were old enough.” She was old enough, but this was a mid-term election and the younger Mr. Bush would be constitutionally ineligible to run again. But a little Kansas hayseed wouldn't know that.

She sidestepped a little and gave him a big smile. “So are you like CIA?”

The pepper spray can was just off to the side a little, just short of a stack of seed bags. She edged toward it.

“Licensed to kill. Double-Oh number and all.” That was James Bond and a fictional British secret service. He must think the turnip truck had dumped its load right here. She felt for the spray can with her foot, found it, stepped on it and went over backward into the bags of grain. He reached for her and she rebounded off the sacks and put all her weight into the kick she aimed at his groin.

His face turned pasty and she grabbed his gun with one hand and ripped his communications device out of his ear with the other. She put a hand over the mouthpiece and kicked the less than efficient pepper spray across the building. He slowly folded onto the floor, holding himself more tenderly than Elvis had suggested in that song her mother used to love.

She pointed the gun at him, though she had not the slightest clue whether it had a safety or if it was on, and said, “I'm licensed to kill, too. But I'm just Benteen County Deputy Heather English. Now, I expect you know this part. You have the right to remain silent….”

***

The sheriff answered his cell, “English.” He'd been surprised, but hardly disappointed, that his phone remained quiet while he investigated the Williams place, then drove across the county. He'd been hoping to hear that the state troopers had rounded up Chucky, though he wasn't surprised they hadn't. And he'd been expecting updates from his daughters and his office, or maybe from Doc.

“That you, Sheriff?” It was Mrs. Kraus. No one else had such a whiskey-and-cigarettes voice. It didn't matter that she only had a little wine on special occasions these days, or that she'd given up her multi-pack-a-day habit nearly a decade ago. She sounded more like she should be welcoming you to a New Orleans bordello than a central Kansas sheriff's office.

“How are things at the courthouse, Mrs. Kraus?”

“Damned if I know,” she said.

Her answer shocked him. Mrs. Kraus was not someone who would abandon her post.

“Things are insane over there, what with parents picking up kids and confiscating my phones and those troopers treating everybody like terror suspects. Then my damn car got stole. By your murderer, no less, Chucky Williams himself.”

“Chucky stole your car? You know where he is?”

“Nah. He was long gone by the time I got over to where I'd parked. That's when I ran into Chairman Wynn. He and Heather, that would be Two if you're keeping score, were scouting out Galen Siegrist's place, where, by the way, they think Mad Dog might have got taken hostage.”

“So, Heather and the chairman, they're with you now? Where are you, Mrs. Kraus? Is my other daughter keeping an eye on the office for you?”

“I'm at Klausen's. The chairman, he left Two to watch the farm while he followed a car to town. Then lost the car when it left the church. We were driving around, trying to find it, when we saw Doc pacing up and down on the sidewalk in front of the funeral parlor like he misplaced something. Which, it turns out, he has. In a manner of speaking. That boy. The one who died in the accident this morning. Doc says someone stole his body.”

“You're kidding.” The sheriff knew she wasn't, but this thing was getting weirder by the minute. Still, the missing body made a kind of terrible sense if what he'd learned from that video at the Williams place was for real. Maybe there really was an organ transplant waiting to happen. And, with Chucky on the rampage, maybe someone had decided to go back for the original donor. Unreal. This was like some bad horror movie. Where would you do an organ transplant? The county didn't even have a hospital.

“Doc with you?”

“He's here.”

“Ask him if that boy's organs would still be good to transplant.”

A whitetail deer came bounding out of one pasture, crossed the road, and leaped the fence into another. Hell of a time to look for greener grass, the sheriff thought. He barely managed to keep his truck out of a ditch. Doc's voice was on the phone when he got it back to his ear. “…not my area of expertise,” he was saying.

“Sorry, Doc. I missed that. Any part of that kid still useful for a transplant?”

“I said I don't know, Englishman. Some of him, probably. But I didn't harvest his organs the way they do for transplants. And it's been half a day now since he died. His heart won't restart. Lungs, kidneys, liver—hell, I can't imagine any of them would still be good.”

“Do you know who stole him? Or when?”

“He don't know jack shit.” Mrs. Kraus' rasping voice cut into his ear as gently as a chainsaw. “But the chairman and I, we think it was probably that car from Galen's farm. And them men from the church he picked up. Even Doc thinks he might of saw it when he pulled in with his load from the school.”

The sheriff was getting close to Galen's place. The kid had poured a lot of money into that farm since he came home from college. It was clear he had outside backing. Could he have built a transplant clinic into that new house of his?

“What kind of car?”

The sheriff took his foot off the accelerator and let the Chevy slow as it approached the last intersection where he could choose, unseen from Galen's farm, a different approach to the Siegrist homestead. It proved a lucky decision. A car plowed around the corner, throwing dirt and dust and narrowly avoiding the ditch as well as the sheriff's pickup.

“White Ford Fusion,” the sheriff said, in tandem with Mrs. Kraus.

“How'd you know that?” she said.

“All of a sudden, I'm right behind it.”

He got back on the throttle and stayed there, though he didn't close the gap. The Ford was producing rooster tails of dust. He thought about trying to catch it and force it off the road, see if the corpse Doc was missing might not be in there. And see who was doing the transporting. But he didn't have any backup. If he stopped them, what was he going to do with them while he went to see what was going on at Galen's?

“Call Heather Two. Tell her to stay where she's at. Not to get any nearer the Siegrist place, no matter what.”

“Ah, well….” He could tell Mrs. Kraus had bad news for him. “Chairman says he's tried calling her. She's stopped answering. And, you asked me if Heather One was covering the office for me. Well, she ain't. I've not seen her since she was trying to break Lieutenant Greer's finger this morning. And Chairman Wynn, he says he had the impression she planned to drive out and join her sister. We just tried her number and didn't get an answer from her either.”

“Shit. I told her to….”

“Course you did,” Mrs. Kraus said. “And of course she didn't. Girls that age, even with what happened to their mother, they think they're immortal.”

The sheriff disconnected. There was nothing more to say. And he wanted his .38 in his hand, not his cell phone.

Immortal, huh. They better be right.

***

Heather English felt her cell phone buzz, but she was a little busy. She had arrested the guy. That meant she couldn't just go off and leave him. She had to secure him somehow. And that was beginning to look like it might not be easy. He was still in a lot of pain, but he was getting angrier by the minute. It wasn't going to be long before he was willing to let go of the family jewels and start looking for a suitable way to kill her, even though she'd already slapped the handcuffs on him.

She needed to tie him up somehow. Secure his legs or attach him to something. Baling wire would be ideal, but nobody used it anymore. When she was growing up, old baling wire was still the fix-all for every emergency farm repair. These days, it was duct tape. But neither was handy in Galen's warehouse. Finally, she checked his office and found what she needed in his closet. Clothes hangers. Those, and the fencing pliers she'd seen hanging on a nearby wall.

He was mixing curses with moans, now. She stuck the barrel of the gun she didn't know how to shoot in his face and told him to lie down on his stomach. That meant he'd have to put pressure on a tender area. She had some trouble persuading him it would hurt less than getting shot. And then, securing his legs meant she had to put the gun down and use both hands.

She was twisting the wire around his left ankle when he lunged for her. Even handcuffed, he got hold of one of her arms and might have torn it out of its socket except the effort strained his groin. He let go of her and huddled on the floor again, retching. She finished trussing his feet and then tossed the pliers on the far side of the nearest tractor. He'd have to do a lot of squirming across the floor to get to it. She was guessing it would be a while before he felt up to that.