Home of the Brave (Raine Stockton Dog Mysteries Book 9) (22 page)

“What’s this?” he said.

She pretended nonchalance, fluttering her fingers casually.  “Just giving it a test run,” she said.  “You know.  Seeing how it affects my speed and accuracy, that sort of thing.”

“And?”

“So far, so good.”

He could see her fighting with a grin, a battle she quickly won when her eyes focused on something over his shoulder.  She said, “I’m on it, Sheriff.”  She walked away.  He turned to meet Agent Manahan.

“We’ll need everything your office has on this Henry Middleton,” Manahan said.  “We’ve got agents staked out at his house but so far he’s a no-show. We tracked down some links to some moderate subversive groups, nothing to raise a flag until now, but he may be our best lead.”

Buck said, “Hell, as far as I knew the most subversive group he was ever a member of was the Saturday Night Bible Study.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the way it goes.  We’re running down Reggie Connor.  Nothing yet.”

Buck nodded.  “Neighbors say he was last seen here at seven last night, closing up the store.  If you want my opinion, it might not be a bad idea to do a search of the area, given what happened to Willie and all.”

Manahan nodded.  “You’ll want to call in your K-9 team.  I’ve got search dogs on the way but it’ll take them two, three hours to get here.  Do you have anybody closer?”

Buck said, “Yeah.  I’ll give them a call.”  It wouldn’t be the first time he ruined Raine’s weekend.

For a moment Manahan just stood there, looking out over the terrain.  The mountain vistas, the tall wildflower fields, the undulating valleys in the distance.  “God’s country,” he said.  “Doesn’t seem right, does it?”

Buck knew the agent was referring to the bigger plot of terrorism, a pickup truck full of explosives, the ticking time-bomb of a subversive plan none of them could decipher.  Buck was thinking about a man he used to know with a bullet through his head.  He said, “It never does.”  And he went back to work.

I felt all the breath rush out of my lungs and I stared at Melanie.  I almost blurted my astonishment out loud, then swiveled a quick glance over my shoulder toward the soldiers behind us.  I whispered to Melanie, “You have a panic button?”

She nodded, her eyes as big and frightened as they had been the moment she’d first realized the guns were real.  “It’s on a necklace under my shirt.  Dad makes me wear it all the time.  He said it was for in case I was ever in big trouble.  He said if I pushed it he’d come, no matter where he was, he’d come and save me.”  She darted her eyes around the room from soldier to soldier.  “I didn’t want the soldiers to shoot him.  So I didn’t push it.  Until now.  They won’t shoot my dad, will they?”

My breath was coming quick and light.  I said, “It doesn’t work that way, Mel.  The security people call the police, and then they call your dad.  He’s not in any danger.  They’ll call the police.”  They’d call the police, and the police would come … wouldn’t they?

I looked across the room at the children.  It had not occurred to me before, but a lot of them had wealthy parents.  Maybe not as wealthy as Miles, but their parents had traveled across the Southeast and paid several thousand dollars to allow them to attend a weekend camp with
their purebred dogs.  How many of them might also have panic buttons?

I looked at Margie, who was looking back at me with a kind of stunned understanding in her eyes. “Angela Bowers has a medical alert button,” she said softly, quickly, “because of her allergies.”  She glanced at the soldiers, but they couldn’t hear us over the barking of the dogs.  “Josh Trenton, Ivy Winters, Bonnie Clayton.  That’s one of the questions we ask on the registration form.”

One call from a security company would send a squad car to investigate.  But multiple calls from different sources would signal a mass emergency and generate an appropriate response.  Without access to telephones, it was as close as we could hope to come to letting Buck know what was happening here.  I glanced over at Jolene, hoping she had been able to follow the conversation.  She gave a small, almost imperceptible nod of acknowledgement.

“Make sure they’re silent,” she advised quietly.  Her swollen lips barely moved.  Since I had to strain to hear what she was saying, I knew the soldier closest to us could not.

I took a breath, trying to calm myself, and looked again at the row of children against the wall.  How long before one of them, like Melanie, remembered the panic button and pushed it, silent or not?  What would happen if they triggered a personal alarm, or if they got caught?  I took another breath.  I smiled, a little unsteadily, at Melanie.

“Hey,” I said, “remember when we found that meth lab on the Christmas tree farm last year?  And last month when Cisco got dognapped?”  I kept my voice very low, and spoke close to her ear.  To the soldiers I hoped it looked as though I was still just comforting her.

She nodded slowly.

“I couldn’t have gotten out of any of those messes without you,” I said.
“You’re the coolest kid I ever met.  And the bravest.”  I leaned back and held her gaze.  “I need you to go talk to the kids with panic buttons.  Don’t let the soldiers find out what you’re doing.  Tell them to make sure they’re on silent alarm, and to push their buttons without letting anybody see them do it, just like you did.  Can you do that?” 

She nodded, slowly, and started to stand up.  “I can do it,” she said.

I caught her hand, wanting to pull her back beside me again.  “Make sure their buttons are on silent alarm,” I repeated in a whisper.  “And—don’t get caught, okay?”

She nodded and stood up.

“Melanie.”

She looked back at me. 

“I love you.”

She smiled. “I love you too,” she said.

So easy for her.  But it cost me my heart.

I clenched a fist in Cisco’s fur as I watched her walk up to one of the soldiers and say, “I want to go sit with my friends.”

He didn’t try to stop her.  I didn’t think he would.

She walked over and sat down beside Angela Bowers, who was crying.  She patted her hand, as though she were comforting her, and then said something to her.  After a moment, Angela stopped crying.  She looked at the soldier, then back at Melanie.  She nodded, very slightly.  I released a breath and couldn’t watch anymore.

I was surprised to look down and see a dark hand next to mine on Cisco’s back.  Jolene had slipped into Melanie’s place, sliding closer to me on the pretense of petting my dog.  When I looked up at her, she said, “What I said before—it was out of line.”

I tried to search back over the many uncalled-for things she’d said since we met.  I said, “You’re right.  It was.  I can’t help being white.”

She actually chuckled—or tried to.  The effort clearly caused her pain and she winced.  Nonetheless, she replied, “And I can’t help being a bitch.”

She looked at me, and I managed a smile.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said.  She looked down at Cisco, and her voice was strained as she spoke.  “What I said about this being your fault …  I couldn’t have gotten to my sidearm in time. Couldn’t have fired it with this hand.  He would have shot the dog, and then me, and probably you too.”

I said, “I know.”  And then I had to add, very quietly, “I’ve spent my whole life, practically, teaching people that it’s their job to take care of their dogs, to protect them.  I know what you said is true, that Nike is a different kind of working dog than I’m used to.  But I’ll never understand how anyone could send her own dog to her death.”

She was silent for a moment, petting Cisco with her one good hand.  Then she said in a voice that was rough with emotion, “Nike isn’t my dog.”  She didn’t look at me.  “My dog’s name was Hawk, and he was killed fifty feet in front of me when he triggered an IED in Afghanistan.  He saved my life, and the lives of everyone on that patrol.  That was what he was trained for.  We’d been together three years.  He was my dog.”

I felt my gut twist with remembered pain.  My first SAR dog Cassidy had died a hero in my arms after completing her final mission.  I still wasn’t over it.  I didn’t think I ever would be.

Jolene went on quietly, “After that … I guess I had some kind of breakdown or something.  They called it PTSD, and I spent the last six months of my tour in a VA hospital.  When I got out, I heard about this program with Homeland Security.  They pay for your training, your dog, your first year’s salary, and they place you in a job.  They give preference to vets.  What else was I going to do?  I asked to be assigned to one of the rural communities. God knows I wasn’t ready for NYC, or even an international airport.  Your ex was nice enough, but it was harder to get back into the swing of things than I thought.  I was always afraid of screwing up, so I kept trying harder to prove myself … anyway, the sheriff got pissed when he found out I was reporting to somebody other than him and I saw my career going down the drain and I guess I took it out on you when I got here.  But it was out of line.”

I was confused.  “What do you mean, reporting to someone else?” I whispered.

She shifted her gaze briefly to the soldier guarding us.  “Carl Brunner was an undercover agent.  I was supposed to be his contact.”

I drew in a breath and let it out slowly.  “Cripes.”

We were silent for a time, as I tried to let the scope and the breadth of what was happening sink in.  This wasn’t a random event.  It was an operation.  And even Homeland Security had not been able to stop it.

She said, very quietly, “This is just the beginning, you know.  Even if the panic buttons work, once they get here … they won’t know what they’re up against.  They won’t have any way of finding us, or getting to us if they could.  Flash grenades, tear gas … they can’t use them because of the kids.  It’ll be a stand-off.”

That was the last thing I wanted to hear.  I looked around quickly to make sure no one else had heard.  Nerves were frazzled enough as it was.  “But … all these dogs, the children … there’s no food in here and only a few gallons of water for the dogs.  How long can they keep us here?  How long can it last?”

She replied bleakly, “Did you ever hear of Waco?”

Chapter
Twenty
-Three

B
uck had left two messages for Raine, but didn’t expect to hear back from her until she finished whatever class she was teaching and remembered to turn her phone back on.  That might be within the hour, it might not be until tonight.  She wasn’t on his payroll and had no obligation to keep her phone on during a holiday weekend.  But he was furious when he couldn’t raise Jolene, either by radio or cell phone.  She knew the situation.  He had told her to remain on high alert.  She might not be on duty but she was on call.  Had she just walked off the job?  If she hadn’t, he vowed bitterly to himself, she had just worked her last day under his command.  You don’t turn off your phone in the middle of a crisis, not ever, not for any reason.  Had she even gone to the damn camp?  He was about to call into the office to send a squad car after her when his radio crackled on his private channel.

“Unit One, this is Dispatch.”

He unclipped his radio and spoke into it.  “Go ahead, Dispatch.”

“Sheriff, have you been following the situation with the security alarm?”

The radio was on in his car but he had not been monitoring it.  “Kind of busy out here, Sue Anne.”

“Yes, sir.  We had a personal-alarm-activated report at 2:45.  I dispatched a unit to the GPS coordinates the security company gave me, but then I realized we already have three units in that vicinity.  Between 3:00 p.m. and 3:10, I got four more calls from different security companies with the same GPS.  Buck, it’s right up the road from your location.  Camp Bluebird.  I called the camp office, and no one answered.  Then I called the camp director’s private cell, but it went straight to voice mail. That’s a total of five panic buttons in less than half an hour and no way to confirm.  I thought you’d want to know.”

Raine.  Jolene.  Willie Banks with a bullet through his head.  A camp full of children pushing their panic buttons.  A truck bed filled with explosives and Camp Bluebird less than a mile away. 
Christ
, he thought. His throat went dry. 
Christ
.

He said, “Stand by, Dispatch.”

He clicked off the radio and found Manahan on the phone only a few feet away.  He walked over to him, his expression grim.  He did not wait for the other man to get off the phone.  “Agent Manahan,” he said, “if you’ve got a SWAT team standing by, you’d better call them in.  I think that big event you’ve been waiting for is here.”

It was hot inside the building.  The ceiling fans stirred the air and provided some relief, but with all the doors closed and so many bodies, canine and human, crowded inside during the muggiest part of the day, the temperature felt higher than it was.  Most of the dogs had tired of barking, and lay panting in their cages.  Some of the children were flushed and lethargic looking; others were just miserable and sweaty and restless.  Margie had passed around a gallon jug of water for the children; there wasn’t much left for the dogs.  Thunder rolled in the distance, signaling the approach of the daily rain that would begin the afternoon cooling.  A few dogs began to whine and paw restlessly at their crates.