Cam - 04 - Nightwalkers (7 page)

"This all suits me just fine," I said. "I'll be spending most of my time across the road, and these days, the nighttime seems best suited for sleeping. It's okay to have the shepherds?"

"Oh, certainly, Mr. Richter. We have two ancient dogs up at the house, and they keep us excellent company. A loyal dog is better company than many humans, in my experience."

I was suddenly curious. "Do you have significant experience of humans, Valeria? Out there in the big bad world?"

"It's Ms. Valeria, at least for now, if you please," she said, "and being
both a Lee and a Marion, my family history is replete with experiences of all manner, past and present. Shall we go back now?"

Suitably chastised, I decided once again to be quiet. We walked back to my Suburban and I put the dogs on board. She said she and her mother would instruct Mr. Oatley to draw up a lease. She nodded graciously, looked forward to seeing me again, and then went up the stairs and back into the nineteenth century in a swish of voluminous skirts. I got into my ride and withdrew to the real world, wondering what the hell I'd gotten myself into this time. I had visions of the carriage man clopping into town with the draft lease, a piece of rolled parchment sealed in red wax that was still warm. Maybe that was why so many of the older buildings in town still had hitching posts out front.

Just for the heck of it, I pulled across the main road into the driveway of Glory's End--and got a surprise. There were now two tall iron gates suspended on those stone pillars, and a big bright lock and chain securing them.

Not knowing what else to do, I called Carol Pollard.

"Hey, there," she said. "Seen your surprise yet?"

"I believe I have--I'm parked outside the gates and was wondering how to get in."

"Come by and I'll get you the keys. Believe it or not, those are the original gates. I did some snooping in town and found this old boy who had them, and got them for three hundred bucks. They're wrought iron, and they're worth more than that, but he thought they should go home."

"Well, I'm delighted, Carol," I said. "Great job. FYI, I've rented the stone cottage across the way at Laurel Grove. Something's come up over in Summerfield, and I need to escape to the country. That seemed the perfect place."

"Well done yourself, Lieutenant. Those two won't let that place to just anybody."

"I had Sheriff Walker make a call," I said, "and I'd already met Valeria. Excuse me, Ms. Valeria."

"Don't you forget it, either," she said with a laugh.

"As she pointedly reminded me," I said. "How are we coming with contractors and other undesirables?"

"In a word, nowhere yet, but that's about par for the course. I always need to sweet-talk the good ones, and I'm working on that. I may have to go buy some flashier clothes."

"Last time I checked, you looked pretty good in what you've got, Ms. Carol."

"Well, thank you, kind sir. Let's do this: I'll put a key for that gate lock under a rock close by. You'll see it. As soon as you close, then we can write contracts."

"Got it," I said. "I'll let you know when I'm 'in residence' at Laurel Grove."

"No need, Lieutenant. I'll know, probably before you know."

"Jungle drums?"

"You have no idea. How were the crab cakes at the purple house today?"

The next morning I got up with the shepherds and went for a ramble. For some reason the dozers weren't annihilating the old farm this morning, and I wanted to walk the ground where my would-be assassin had set up on my living room. It was a typical subdivision-in-the-making: a moonscape of red dirt, lots of pink-flagged stakes, piles of drainage pipes and concrete forms, and a small mountain of dozer-mangled tree stumps from what used to be a pretty apple orchard. The old farmhouse was long gone, hauled off in dump trucks to fill in someone's blighted suburban ravine.

With all the trees gone, the field of fire from up on that hill was just about unlimited. I could clearly make out the piece of plywood where the window had been and could imagine the trajectory through the study and into my kitchen. It was about a two-hundred-yard shot, which was a piece of cake for a thirty-aught rifle. I found the pile of straw bales they were using for erosion barriers, and there was the bale he'd pulled out to use as a rifle rest. There were footprints in the mud around the bale, but also dozer tracks, loose gravel, and tire prints from a dozen construction vehicles. As a crime scene it was not exactly pristine. I had the shepherds go over the straw bale and then try to do some tracking, but there was just too much other scent up there. Like the cops had said, other than the single cartridge, there was no trail.

I wondered where he might set up if he came back to try it again. There were dense groves of Leyland cypress trees on either side of my property. I had originally bought three lots and forested the ones on either side of my house site. One stand faced the garage; the other, the bedroom side of the house. I took the dogs across the cratered landscape and eased into the bedroom-side grove. I'd planted this grove years ago for privacy, and now the thirty-foot-tall trees meshed their branches in a tight screen. The dogs went scooting under the lower branches, but I had to push my way through the aromatic thicket. Then the dogs stopped and began to sniff around a tiny clearing in the Leyland jungle. One of the trees must have expired long ago, because there was a dent in the ground and space enough for a single human to sit down in the ground cover. The shepherds were telling me that someone had done just that, and as I turned toward my house, I could see another perfect sight line into my bedroom window.

"Find him," I said, and Frick, old supernose, turned into the trees away from my house and started working a scent line. Kitty and I followed her until she led us out to the street, where she went one block and then lost the scent at the curb.

Okay,
I thought.
He set up two locations, and he's used one.
I took the dogs back to the house and placed a call to Billie Ray's parole officer.

Two nights later the shepherds and I waited underneath my back deck. Kitty and Frick were curled up on carpet remnants, and I was sitting in one of those truncated beach chairs. Resting on the wooden latticework that ran along the base of the deck was the twenty-four-inch barrel of my rifle of choice, a Weatherby .270 Winchester stainless model, equipped with a Specter IR SP 50B Thermal Weapon Sight.

We'd been down there since 8:00
P.M.
There was a carefully staged bedroom tableau in the house. I had pulled down the shades on the bedroom window facing the Leyland cypress grove and turned on the television. I'd positioned an easy chair with its back to the window and used the light from the television to silhouette a head-sized helium-filled balloon whose string was safety-pinned to the seat of the chair. Then I'd turned the overhead fan on low. The resulting air movement caused the balloon to move occasionally. From the outside, I hoped, it would look like someone sitting in the chair and watching the tube. I'd dropped the venetian blinds, just to obscure things a bit more, and put a ball cap high and tilted back on the balloon in case he wanted to play warning shot again. I'd obscured the windows into my living room with closed blinds, making any further shooting from the construction site impossible.

The distance between the shooter's hide and my bedroom window was about a hundred yards, maybe a little less. With the help of a milk crate, I could focus my sights on the exact position of the hide without having to hold the rifle, and I scanned it from time to time to see if we had a visitor. I expected one because of a little Kabuki I'd arranged with Arlanda Cole. With Billie Ray sitting in her office, she had faked a phone call that supposedly had me on the other end.
The gist of the conversation was such that our suspect would know that I'd be in the house tonight, and then not for some time. If Billie was my shooter, I might get a chance to prove it, assuming he took the bait. She'd had him step outside the office during the phone call but had left the door open so he could hear. I still didn't think it was Breen, but it could well be someone he'd paid to do the deed. I had a thermos of coffee, a trucker's friend, and I was going to play the game until midnight.

He came just after eleven. When I took one of my periodic looks through the scope, there was an IR blob in the tiny clearing that hadn't been there before. I let my eyes relax and then concentrated. I should have been able to see his human form with that night-sight, but I couldn't. That meant he was wearing something thick enough to reduce his heat signature. Still, there was definitely someone there. I unlocked the safety on the rifle, pulled the stock into my shoulder, and settled my finger on the trigger. I thought about calling the cops, but I couldn't be absolutely sure that I, or my scope, wasn't imagining things. The dogs, alerted by my sudden attention to the rifle, woke up and watched me from their beds.

I heard a car coming down the street beyond the trees. It sounded like one of my neighbors pulling into his driveway, confirmed when I heard a garage door rattling up. A passenger jet whispered overhead in the night sky as it descended into TriBoro's airport. I took a deep breath and forced my back and shoulder muscles to relax. I kept looking at that blob of color, then away to clear the image and blink. I looked back, and now there was a change. A beam of green light, no thicker than a pencil lead, was suddenly visible in the center of the shapeless blob. Then there was a bright flash as he fired.

I didn't hesitate. I squeezed the stock harder into my shoulder and fired one back, right below the middle of that green blob, which suddenly disappeared. The shepherds had jumped up with the first shot and got really excited when I fired. I made myself stay on the scope as I jacked another round into the chamber, suddenly conscious of the
fact that I was taking shelter behind a flimsy wooden lattice wall. I was getting ready to put a second round up there when I heard a different car start up and accelerate out beyond the trees. My shooter could not have covered the distance between his hide and the street that quickly, which meant he'd had some help. Said help had apparently heard his boy's shot and then mine, no more than a second apart. The shooter's rifle and mine made two distinctly different sounds. The helper had correctly assumed that it might be time to vacate the scene of the crime.

I waited some more, watching the clearing. The blob was still visible in my scope, but it had subtly changed shape, or at least I thought it had. Trouble was, that didn't tell me much. Was he up there, scanning the house for my hiding place with his own night-sight? I moved the rifle back from the lattice about one inch. My night-sight was entirely passive, so, with the lattice, my own heat signature ought to be minimal.

If I'd hit him, nothing more would happen. If he was waiting for me to move and show myself, I wasn't going to accommodate him. Then I remembered my cell phone. I put the rifle back on the milk crate and called the internal operations number at the Manceford County Sheriff's Office, told them who I was, and that I had shots fired at my house. I asked them to come with sound and lights, hoping to make my attacker move, assuming he still could. If he did, I'd set the shepherds loose to take him into custody.

He couldn't move, as it turned out. My single round had hung what was left of his heart on the branches of the tree behind him. The new mystery was that it absolutely wasn't Billie Ray Breen.

I met downtown with the detectives assigned to the case the next morning. They had identified the shooter as a guy who'd been long suspected of being a contract killer over in Charlotte. He was a Guatemalan illegal who'd been in the country for six years. He'd
been arrested and turned over to the federal immigration authorities on no less than three different occasions, and yet there he was. His rifle was a plain vanilla hunting gun with all identifying marks long since ground off. When I showed the investigating officers my little balloon rig, with the balloon deflated, by the way, we all made the obvious conclusion. This one hadn't been a warning shot.

Billie Ray, of course, was the prime suspect as the hit man's employer. The detectives had picked him up and put him through a long interview but got nothing of value. I fingered him for the driver of the unseen vehicle, but he had an alibi, again from his current lady-love, and he vigorously denied any connection to the two shootings. They were going to look at his finances, assuming they could find anything recognizable as his finances, but the chances were slim we could pin this on him. The good news, as one of the detectives pointed out, was that, if he'd paid for the hit, he'd probably blown whatever money he did have on this Guatemalan, so unless he turned bank robber or professional sniper, I would probably have some peace and quiet for a while.

Arlanda Cole put him on daily reporting for an additional ninety days, just to complicate his life. She also made arrangements to have him attend the shooter's autopsy. She told him she wanted him to see how contract killings sometimes came out, especially when it came to prison ghosts going up against ex-cops. I ended up doing a morning's worth of paperwork and an interview downtown with an ADA, even though it was pretty clear that I'd been the intended victim in this incident. One of the detectives wanted to bet me that the Guatemalan's live-in girlfriend would be able to exhume a lawyer to bring a wrongful death suit. I wouldn't take that bet.

I got clear of the police bureaucracy at noon and drove up to meet with Carol. I hadn't told her about the two shooting incidents at my Summerfield home, not wanting to color our association with violence before we even got started. I'd seen the police beat reporter for the local city rag hanging out in the lobby when I'd gone in to talk to
the ADA, but hopefully whatever he wrote would stay down in TriBoro.