Code 61 (51 page)

Donald Harstad
is the author of
Eleven Days, Known Dead
, and
The Big Thaw
. A former deputy sheriff and twenty-six-year veteran of the Clayton County Sheriff's Department, he lives in Elkader, Iowa.

If you enjoyed Donald Harstad's
Code 61
, you won't want to miss any of his exciting police thrillers starring Carl Houseman.

Look for the latest,
The Heartland Experiment
, coming soon in hardcover from Double-day.

And turn the page for an exciting preview….

THE
HEARTLAND
EXPERIMENT
By
Donald Harstad

ONE

NOW

Slugs came ripping through the old boards of the barn, showering us with dust and debris. I got even lower than I had been before, pressing my face against the old, dusty limestone foundation. I could see George hunkering down against the thick support beam he'd found, and I heard Hester, who was off to my right in the gloom, say “Shit.” At first, I thought it was just a comment, but then she kept talking.

“Shit, oh shit, shit, shit … ”

I turned, and saw that she'd rolled away from her vantage point near the rotted boards, and was half sitting with her back against the foundation wall.

“What? You okay?”

“My face,” she said. She held the right side of her face with one hand, while she struggled to re-holster her sidearm with the other, and I saw blood oozing between her fingers. “Shit, shit … ”

George and I both got over to her as fast as we could crawl. “Let me see … ”

She reluctantly moved her hand from the right side of her face, and I saw some blood and torn flesh. Not too much. It was hard to see in the shadows. I unsnapped my windbreaker, and daubed her face as gently as I could with the fleecy lining. It was all I had.

“Ahhh!” and she pushed my hand away.

“Sorry, sorry, just a sec, just let me look … ” I said.

“Don't press … ”

“Yeah. Yeah,” I said, as I fumbled in my shirt pocket for my reading glasses, and then looked more closely. Sticking out of her right cheek was a half-inch stub of an old, rusty square nail, flattened but about half as big around as a pencil, embedded back toward the corner of her jaw. “I see it … it's a nail. Part of one. There's a chunk of nail stuck in your cheek,” I said.

“Don't touch it!”

“No, no … ”

“I can feel it,” she said, after a second, “with my tongue.” As she spoke, a rivulet of blood dripped over her lower lip, and onto her sleeve. “It's gonna hurt,” she said, and shivered, violently. “It's inside my mouth. Oh, shit.”

“It doesn't seem to be bleeding very much,” I told her. “But spit, don't swallow it … ”

“I just had a first-aid class,” came Sally's voice from over behind the rusty milking stanchions. “Somebody get over here, and let me come take a look.”

George reached out and patted Hester on the arm. “It'll be all right,” he said. “Okay,” he told Sally. “Be right there. I'll get my stuff.”

Hester nodded, but said nothing as George crawled away.

“It's not a bullet,” I said. She was shivering pretty hard, and I wanted to reassure her. “It's just a piece of old nail, must have been hit by a slug. It's not life-threatening, okay? It's not a bullet. There's no damage other than a little hole.” It had occurred to me that she might be worried about disfigurement. And it really wasn't a very big hole.

She nodded. “It'll hurt,” she said, with a quaver in her voice. “Hit my teeth. Numb now … but it'll hurt … oh boy.” She didn't look at any of us, just stared at the floor, concentrating and breathing slowly and deeply.

If she was right about her teeth, it really was going to hurt like hell.

Sally came scuttling over on all fours. “Hi, Hester. Let me see what I can do here, okay? You're gonna be all right … ”

“Sure,” said Hester. Her words were less distinct. Swelling inside her mouth?

Sally briefly examined the wound. “We need some sort of compress,” she said. “Just to protect it, if we can. Some water to irrigate it, maybe? Later, later, we better let the doc remove it, okay?”

As soon as I heard “irrigate,” I reached into my pocket and pulled out one of my bottles of water and handed it to Sally. As far as I knew, all our first-aid equipment was kept in our cars, and they were effectively out of reach. I thought for a second. “My tee shirt? It's clean today … ”

“It'll have to do,” said Sally. She, too, reached out and patted Hester on the shoulder. “You're gonna have the world's biggest compress,” she said.

Hester made a muffled noise, and I think she wanted to sound like she was laughing. I took off my jacket and started pulling my sweater over my head.

“It starting to hurt yet?” asked Sally.

Hester shook her head, gingerly. “Mumm.” She tried again, making a real effort to be distinct. “Numb.” It was swelling, all right.

“Here, put your sweater back on,” said George, and I heard the distinctive sound of Velcro ripping open. “This stuff is part of my kit.” He tossed over a blue nylon bag, with a red cross in a white square stitched on the front.

“All right!” said Sally, and opened it up. There were several individual packets inside, each labeled for a different medical problem. “Fracture. Burns. Drowning … Ah, Wounds and Bleeding … ” Inside the packet there was a large compress, gauze, disinfectant ointment, and a scissors. “Shit, this is great … ”

“I'll get an ambulance coming,” I said. For all the good it would do. There was no way we could get Hester to it until we got lots of backup. I keyed the mike on my walkie-talkie. “Comm, Three … 10-33.”

Of course it was 10-33. This had been an emergency since the first shot was ffred. But I had to say something to convey the extra urgency, and there's no code for “more urgent than before.”

“
Three, go ahead.
”

“Okay, we have an officer down now. Get me a 1052 down here at the old Dodd place. Fast … but tell 'em to hold until we clear 'em in.”

“
10-4, Three. Copy officer down?
” She repeated it that way so everybody who was listening knew what we had, without her having to inform them separately.

“10-4, need as much 10-78 as you can get, and the ambulance. We are still pinned down. Repeating, still pinned down. How close is backup?”

“
10-4 the 10-52
,” she replied, and I could imagine her hitting the page button for the Maitland ambulance service. “
And … uh … backup is en route.
”

I was glad she acknowledged the ambulance request, but just telling me that the backup units were on the way, without giving me their current location, meant that it was going to take a while. There was obviously a problem with backup. It was so damned typical of the complex kind of plan that we were working under. I was angry, but there was nothing Dispatch could do about it. I was just sorry she hadn't been able to give me an estimate, though. That was bad.

“10-4. Look, tell the responding units that we are still taking automatic weapons ffre, from two or three locations. Repeat that, will you. Auto weapons fire from multiple locations.”

“
10-4, Three
.” She repeated the message, and as she did so she sounded about ready to cry. Being completely powerless in a tense situation will make you sound that way. “
Can you be more specific regarding the location of the automatic weapons ffre?
”

“I'm giving you the best I've got,” I said, as calmly as possible. “They were already here.” The calm was mostly for Hester's benefit. The last thing she needed to hear was me getting all worried. “Just make sure you don't send the EMS people in until we clear them.”

“10-4, Three. One says to keep them there until backup gets to you.”

Well, that wasn't going to be too hard. It was them keeping us pinned down, not vice versa.

“I think we can do that, Comm,” I said.

“The dumb one's coming back out,” said George.

The “dumb one” referred to one of the group who was shooting at us, off and on. This particular idiot wore a New York Yankees baseball cap and a gray sweatshirt. He'd step out of the old machine shed, half crouched, point his AK-47 either at our barn or the old chicken coop, and just blow out about thirty rounds in a couple of seconds. The first time he'd done it, George had said, “Look at that dumb son of a bitch!” It stuck. So far, shooting from the hip the way he was, he'd not come close to even hitting the barn, let alone anybody inside. It wasn't for lack of trying, though. I thought it was pretty obvious he was trying to draw ffre, and that was the other reason for “dumb one.” There was something about the jumpy way he did it that told me that this wasn't really his idea. The comfort was, it let us know they weren't sure exactly where we were.

“Back in a minute, Hester,” I said. I crawled toward my vantage point, and pointed my AR-15 through the hole between the old foundation and the rotting boards of the barn wall. The elevated, black front sight just cleared the hole, but I had him dead to rights almost instantly. He was only about fifty yards away, and the upper two-thirds of him was in plain view. He'd be hard to miss. I squinted as I aimed at the white NY on his blue cap.

“Whadda ya think? Take him out?” I asked George. So far, we hadn't returned fire since the first exchange about ten minutes back. We hadn't because they had pretty much been shooting the upper floor of the barn, and into the loft, and were down in the stone foundations. They were far enough off-target, we'd been reluctant to reveal our actual position by shooting back. They had a lot more firepower than we did. But now Hester had been hurt. They were getting closer.

“Not yet, I think,” said George. “Wait and see what he does.”

The dumb one started waving his assault rifle in the air, screaming something at us.

“Gotta be stoned,” I said. “Gotta be.”

“Any idea what he's saying?” asked George.

“No,” I said. “Don't even know what fucking language. But I don't think he's trying to surrender.”

The dumb one took the hint, I guess. He lowered the assault rifle to hip level, and pointed it right at us.

“Down!” yelled George.

Tuesday, December 18, 2001
16:21 hours

My name is Carl Houseman, and I'm a Deputy Sheriff in Nation County, Iowa. I'm also the Department's Senior Investigator, which is a title that probably has about as much to do with my being fifty-five as it does with my investigative abilities. It's also a title that can get me involved in some really neat stuff, even in a rural county with only 20,000 residents. That's why I like it.

I was about halfway through my usual noon-to-eight shift. Hester Gorse, my favorite Iowa DCI agent, and I had just finished interviewing Clyde and Dirk Osterhaus, brothers, antiques burglars, and new jail inmates, regarding seventeen residential burglaries that had been committed in Nation County over the last two months. The interviews had been conducted in the presence of their respective attorneys, who were both in their late twenties. The brothers, both also under thirty, had thrown us a curve when they'd readily confessed to only fourteen of the breakins. Why just those fourteen, when we all knew they'd done the whole seventeen? Some sort of strategy? A bargaining chip? It beat both Hester and me.

Anyway, the attorneys had left and the brothers were back in the jail cells, arguing with the other prisoners over whether or not they were all going to watch
Antiques Road Show
at 7:00 p.m. We only had one TV in the cell block. I was pretty sure the Osterhaus boys were going to win. Research comes first.

Hester and I were in Dispatch, having a leisurely cup of coffee. We were talking to the duty Dispatcher, Sally Wells, about whether she should take her niece to see
Harry Potter
or
Lord of the Rings
when she got off duty. The phone rang, and our conversation stopped.