A Long December (40 page)

I could see lights in the kitchen and in the living room, and saw that the TV was on. I knocked again. No response. They were probably asleep in front of the TV. I turned and walked down the steps, and across the yard to my car. The amber sodium-vapor yard light gave the falling snow a gold tint. I thought we just might have our white Christmas after all.

“I guess they’re asleep, Hector,” I said. “We can go.”

I fumbled around for a second for my car keys, and unlocked my car door. I didn’t hear a sound as the lock worked, but just assumed it was still my temporary hearing loss. I reached across the car as I got in and unlocked the passenger door for Hector. Being a cop car, the switch that automatically turns on the interior lights when the door opens had been disconnected, so I was sitting in the dark as I tried to insert my key into the ignition. My hand encountered a sharp edge, and a bunch of what felt like exposed wiring. I looked down, and saw that the plastic cover of the steering column was beat to hell, and some of the wiring was hanging down.

Somebody had tried to bypass the steering wheel lock. Somebody had gotten into my car. Somebody had tired to steal it.

“Get out of the car!” I said to Hector.

I got out of that thing as fast as I’ve ever moved and ran for the shadow cast by the barn. “Over here, this way!”

Hector slipped once, and then was right with me.

I stopped there, drew my gun, and looked back toward the house, catching my breath. I took in the quiet scene. There was no movement, no sound, nothing. Our foot tracks in the quarter inch of snow were the only ones in the yard.

It had been snowing for a good half hour, I thought, as I slowly scanned the area around the house. It might take ten or fifteen minutes for enough to accumulate to show decent tracks. That meant that there hadn’t been anybody but me around the two cars since the snow had covered the ground. At least. I pulled out my walkie-talkie, and tried to call the sheriff’s department. No luck. Way too far down in the hollow, and I already knew my cell phone wouldn’t do the job from here.

I changed channels. “One, Three?” I spoke in a low voice and hoped I was clear at the other end.

It took him a second, but then Lamar answered. “Three?”

“One, I’m here in the Heinman’s yard, and it looks like somebody tried to steal my car. Could be our suspects. You want to send somebody up this way? “I tried very hard not to whisper, because whispers are very difficult to copy over a radio. But I was talking so low with my damaged hearing that I found it difficult to hear myself.

“Ten-four, Three. Are they there now?”

“Unable to advise, One. I’m gonna try to wake up the Heinman boys and see if they saw anything. I’ll be at the house.”

“Ten-four. We’ll get somebody right up.”

“Be advised I have a Hispanic subject with me, in a”—I looked at Hector— “a blue jacket and a blue baseball cap. Repeat, he’s a Hispanic male, and he’s with me.”

“Ten-four.”

“Thank you,” said Hector.

“Stay here. Don’t move, and put your hands up every time you see a cop,” I said.

“You got that right, man.”

I put my gun away and walked back up to the Heinmans’ porch. This time, I knocked harder. Nothing. I sighed, opened the outer door, and walked onto the porch proper. I knocked at the kitchen door hard enough to rattle the glass pane. I tried to see into the living room area to my right, but the refrigerator stuck out too far from the wall for me to see through the interior door. There was a wall rack between the fridge and me, and there were two coats on it. They were definitely home. After a second, I thought I heard somebody moving around, but couldn’t tell for sure.

“Jacob! Jacob, it’s me, Deputy Houseman.” I knocked again. Silence. “Hey, Jacob! Wake up!”

I tried the door. Unlocked, of course. I turned the knob and pushed, and I was in the kitchen. “It’s Deputy Houseman! I gotta talk to you for a second!”

This time, there was a “yes, coming” from the direction of the living room. It didn’t sound like either Jacob or Norris, but they’d been asleep… no. No. That was a rationalization. My gun came out again, and I held it down at my side.

“That you, Phil?” I asked.

“Yes,” came the reply. It sounded closer.

Phil, my ass. Nobody named Phil lived in this house. My gun came up, and I pressed my back against the wall, with the refrigerator now between the doorway and me.

“Where are you,” said the voice, sounding like it was just about in the kitchen.

If I’d been really, really lucky, the refrigerator door would have been hinged on the left, and I could have just reached out and thrown it open to startle whoever it was. I found myself, however, staring at the right-hand hinge just below my chin. Shit. I heard the floor creak, and thought somebody had crossed the threshold to the kitchen. I was absolutely convinced that if I stuck my head around to see, it would be the last thing I ever did.

I lowered my shoulder and pushed that refrigerator harder than I’d ever pushed anything in my life. It shot across the doorway so much faster than I thought it would, I lost my footing and went down on one knee. The big white box tipped away from me, and I heard a startled yell from the doorway, just as the refrigerator crashed over onto the floor. It shook the whole room.

I brought my gun up and pointed it in the face of a man on his knees who was trying to pull his AK-47 out from between the fallen refrigerator and the doorframe. We were eye to eye.

“Don’t!”

He didn’t.

“Put your hands over your head. Now!”

As he started to comply, a second man suddenly appeared in the doorway, pointing the business end of an old shotgun at me.

“Drop the gun.”

“Well, shit,” I said. I don’t know about me, sometimes. But that’s just exactly what I said. I did not, however, drop my gun.

“Drop the gun!”

“Can’t do that.” I didn’t look at him, concentrating on the forehead of his partner. “You just better give up right now.”

“Arrogant American Zionist pig!”

The one I’d got with the refrigerator kept glancing up at the one with the shotgun. It struck me that the man on his knees was the subordinate, and the man with the shotgun was the leader.

“You must be Mustafa Abdullah Odeh,” I said. Odeh, or whoever the guy with the shotgun actually was, sucked in his breath, and I figured I had the right guy. “Just give up now. You’re done.” I was still concentrating on the forehead of the kneeling man, and saw his eyes widen. He wasn’t making the decisions. The “up” man must be Odeh, all right. Good.

“I must kill you.” Odeh said it very coldly.

“Why on earth do you think that?” I asked, stalling. Make ‘em talk. Always get ‘em to talk.

“You have seen me.”

I was very much aware that it was going to take a second or two for the kneeling man to retrieve his AK-47 from where it was wedged beneath the refrigerator. Therefore, he really wasn’t the immediate threat. Odeh, on the other hand, had just announced his intentions. I merely flicked my gun about six inches to my right, and pulled the trigger as I fell to my left.

There was a scream, and the shotgun went off, and the man in the doorway disappeared. The other man on his knees jumped back, and he, too, left my field of view. He had heaved on the stock of his AK-47 and it came free, causing him to sort of fly backwards into the living room and out of my line of sight.

As I tried to maintain my balance and get to my feet, it was pretty obvious I had a choice to make. Either go charging into the living room, where there were two pissed-off armed men I couldn’t currently see, or get the hell out of that place and regroup outside.

I’m not that fast, but I was on my feet and out onto the porch in two seconds, onto the steps, and heading for the shelter of the barn.

Call it instinct, call it a reaction to recent events, but I changed course halfway to the barn and went thundering down into the tall, frozen weeds between the barn and the driveway. “Come on!” I yelled toward Hector. “This way!”

I continued toward cover, moving as fast as I could. Hector caught up, and I think the only reason he didn’t pass me was that he wasn’t sure where we were going. I wasn’t all that sure myself, but I knew one thing: No more barns for this deputy. As soon as I got into shadow, I knelt down behind a skinny crab apple tree, shoved my keys into my pocket, and grabbed my walkie-talkie. Hector slid in the fresh snow and came to a stop about ten feet past me.

“Three to anybody! Ten-thirty-three, I repeat, ten-thirty-three!”

Sally, who was apparently still at the Lemonade Stand, answered in an instant.

“Three, go!”

“Up here… at the Heinmans’,” I said, breathing hard. “They’re here.”

“Who’s there?”

“Two suspects from the farm. The one’s we’re looking for.” I needed to catch my breath. I slowed my speech as much as possible and tried to sound matter-of-fact and calm as hell. “Somebody broke into my car and tried to hot-wire it.”

“Ten-four.”

“It sure as hell wasn’t the Heinman boys,” I said.

“Ten-four. They’re on the way.”

“Hustle it up,” I said, and released the mike button. It occurred to me that I had heard Sally very clearly. Given the present condition of my hearing, that meant that I must have the volume turned up way too high to be able to hide. I fumbled around, found the little dial, and turned the volume on my walkie-talkie way down. Since I’d never be able to hear somebody sneaking up, I sure didn’t want them to be able to hear me.

“Hector?

“Why we running, man?”

“The bad ones are in the house. Listen, get a little closer here, and if you hear this walkie-talkie, let me know. My ears are all screwed up from the bomb at the barn; I can’t hear all that well.”

“Sure.” He shifted closer.

“I shot one of ‘em. I don’t know how many more there are. I hope just one.”

I started scanning the area. From where I was, I couldn’t see a single light in the house. They’d turned them off. Great.

I wondered where the Heinman boys parked their car. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember. I dimly recollected being able to see into their garage, and that the little building was chock-full of tools and shop things. No room for a car there. Had I ever really seen their car? I had an image from years ago, of the Dodge Dart they’d been driving when it had been hit by the bus. It was the only car I’d ever associated with them. Well, whatever kind it was, there wasn’t any car visible but the two cars we’d driven into the place. Regardless of the reason for its absence, that was why Odeh had tried to steal my car.

My eyes were becoming better adjusted to the dark. From my new perspective in the shadows, the front half of the house was between the yard light and me. In the golden glow, I could see through the thinly curtained front windows on the upper floor, and into what I guessed would be the kitchen on the ground floor. There was no movement there, and the back half of the building was pitch black.

We’d left some pretty clear tracks leading right to where we were. Great. Nothing to be done about it, but I was beginning to feel that a white Christmas was a little overrated.

It always becomes quieter when the snow starts to fall, but the deadening effect of the snow-filled air was emphasizing the shriek in my ears caused by the nearness of the shotgun blast. It was a little distracting.

The crab apple tree that had become our little bastion wasn’t nearly as thick as I was. I seemed to remember reading somewhere that an AK-47 round could easily penetrate ten inches of wood. Not good, but it was definitely time to stop moving around. In the dark, movement is the tattletale.

A staccato clang behind me just about scared me to death.

“What…?” escaped from Hector.

I twisted around and caught a silvery shape in the darkness. The hog feeders. We were almost at the wooden fence that separated the hogs from the yard. There apparently was a hungry hog behind us. “Hog feeder,” I said, with a long breath I hadn’t realized I’d sucked in, and turned back toward the house. Just in time to catch a flicker of movement in the upper window. It was one of those things that happens in the dark, where you just aren’t sure you’ve actually seen anything. I looked back at the hog feeder, and then brought my gaze back to the house. I did that three times, and never once caught a hint of movement. That pretty well satisfied me that I’d actually seen something.

But what had I seen? Whatever or whoever it was, it wasn’t there now.

I was beginning to wonder where the cavalry had gotten to. I placed my ear as close to the mike-receiver as I could, and called Sally.

“Three to Mobile Comm?” I heard something like a response, but it was too faint. I pressed the little speaker right to my ear and adjusted the volume upward.

“Three to Mobile Comm?”

This time, I heard Sally say, “Three, go ahead!”

Hector punched me in the arm, apparently to let me know the walkie-talkie was receiving. Just like I’d asked him to do. “Okay, uh, where’s everybody at?”

“Some of them are there already,” she said. “Where have you been? We’ve been calling…give me your exact ten-twenty.”

My exact location. I did the best I could. “We’re kind of southeast of the residence. About a hundred feet.”

“Stand by.”

Like I had a choice.

“Three,” said Sally, after about five seconds, “would you be near a small tree?”

That was a surprise. “Ten-four, I am.”

“Stand by.”

I did. The “some of them” she’d referred to must have night-vision equipment.

“Three?”

“Go.”

“Three, a team member has you in sight. Remain where you are if at all possible. And who’s this ‘we’?”

“The Hispanic male subject is with me. We’ll sit tight, ten-four on that.” That’d be pretty easy. “Be sure they know there’s two of us.”

There was a pause, and then, “They know.”

I looked around me. Nothing moved. No indication of where the team member might be. I was hoping I didn’t have to “remain” all that long, as the cold was starting to seep through my clothes.

“Stand by one moment, Three…” and it got quiet again. Then she was back. “Uh, and, Three, be advised that there’s an unidentified subject just entering the yard from the east side of the residence, apparently armed, and about twenty-five yards from you.”