Off the Grid (23 page)

50

G
ino and Magozzi had been lying motionless on their bellies for almost two hours. The sun had almost set, and the serious chill of nightfall was settling around them.

Gino was thinking this gig was almost as boring as a stakeout; worse, actually, because it was frigging freezing, and there was no food. He was obsessing over thoughts of a sausage pizza, mozzarella oozing over the sides, when Magozzi tapped his shoulder and jerked his thumb upward. Sit up, the thumb said, and Gino got it. On your belly, the body absorbed more cold. They needed to sit up to put their legs between the icy plank floor and their internal organs.

Gino had just forced himself into a sitting position when they heard the first shots crack through the forest, and suddenly, this horror story of a situation became real.

He was no stranger to fear. Anyone who thought cops got used to danger was flat-out crazy. Every time you got an armed suspect call, your heart rate skyrocketed and you tried to remember where you’d put your will. That was fear. This was different. This was the kind of sheer terror that paralyzed you, tied your stomach into knots, and drenched you with sweat. He glanced quickly at Magozzi and wondered if his own eyes were showing that much white.

You could wave the flag and support the troops until the cows came home, but not for one second could you ever understand what they lived through until you had a real taste. And this hadn’t even been a taste, just a glimmer, because soldiers lived it every single day.

Neither he nor Magozzi had ever served in a war, and their time on the street hadn’t prepared them for this. This was no juiced-up druggie out there waving a .22, this was a goddamned army of goddamned terrorists who had come here for one reason only—to kill.

They both inched to opposite ends and looked over the edge of the tree stand, weapons at the ready.

Can you tell the difference between a Native American and a Middle Eastern terrorist?
The Chief’s words came back to Magozzi, who thought, God, I hope so.

Gino was frozen on his side of the stand, shotgun in his hands. He held that position for a solid half hour, and he was starting to feel like part of the forest around him. There had been a lot of scattered gunfire, and there was no way to know what was happening out there. And then suddenly, there was silence. Absolute. Seemingly endless.

Fifteen minutes of shallow breaths and sweat beading on foreheads in spite of the cold. They heard the footsteps approaching long before they saw the man. Magozzi squinted through the trees, spotted the shape coming closer in the near dark, then looked through the sights while his finger trembled on the trigger.

“Don’t shoot,” Harley’s voice called out a millisecond before Magozzi pulled the trigger.

Magozzi dropped his head and his gun and began trembling violently. “Jesus Christ, Harley. Jesus Christ, I almost shot you.” His voice shook like an aspen leaf in a high wind.

“Come on down. It’s over.”

Magozzi moved down the ladder first, legs still shaking. Gino followed much more slowly, trying to manage his fear of heights. “Where are Claude and the Chief?”

“They’re okay. They’re out searching the woods.” His voice sounded faint and deeply diminished.

Magozzi jumped to the ground, felt it jar his legs, and wished he hadn’t. It was hard to make out Harley’s face in the shadows, but there was no mistaking the blood spatters on his cheeks.

“Jesus, Harley, are you okay? Were you hit?”

Harley shook his head in a slow, wooden movement, then swiped at his face. “This isn’t my blood.”

51

R
oadrunner and Annie were in the cabin’s living room, still manning their posts at the front windows, when they saw Magozzi, Gino, and Harley approaching from the woods.

“Oh, thank God,” Annie whispered, rushing to unlock the front door. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw the blood smears on Harley’s face, thinking you never knew how you really felt about someone until they were hurt. “Oh Lord in heaven, Harley, are you all right?”

He swallowed and nodded. “Fine.”

She took his arms gently, in case the big lug was lying, and tugged him inside. “Get in here and sit down. Roadrunner, get a cloth and some disinfectant . . .”

“I’m not hurt, Annie, relax.”

He was telling the truth. She could see it in his eyes. But her heart was still pumping hard, because she understood instantly that if he wasn’t hurt, someone else was. And life for Harley was going to be a lot different from now on. She took a breath and stood aside as Gino and Magozzi filed in. “Is it over?” she asked them.

“It’s over,” Magozzi said. “Where’s Grace?”

Roadrunner propped his shotgun against the wall. “She and John are in the kitchen, watching the back.”

“No need to watch anymore.” Magozzi led the way to the kitchen to pass on the good news and then froze in his tracks. The room was empty.

Roadrunner and Annie started calling out for John and Grace until Magozzi said sharply, “Wait. Be quiet.”

His eyes were closed as he listened, and then they all caught their breath, finally identifying the scratching sound that had caught Magozzi’s attention.

A closed door led to a mudroom that opened onto the back of the cabin. Behind it, Magozzi found Charlie, scratching frantically at the door that led outside. “Oh Jesus.” He looked out the window in the door and saw two pairs of tracks in the snow. “They went outside.”

The second he opened the back door, Charlie shot outside like a rocket. All of them raced after him, unable to keep up with the dog’s pace, but easily followed the scattered snow he left in his wake.

When they came upon drops of blood mingled in the mess of tracks ahead of them, Magozzi ran even faster, his heart pounding.

He stopped at the top of a small rise in the forest floor and looked down, breathless.

John was lying facedown in the snow, motionless. When Magozzi saw Grace sitting next to him, holding his hand, his heart started to slow. Charlie sat next to her, his nose reaching for her face, but never touching her, perhaps understanding the way that dogs sometimes did, that this was a time for restraint.

“God in heaven, no,” Annie murmured, following Magozzi as he moved quickly down the hill toward the terrible tableau. Like Charlie, he collared all the emotions that wanted to break free and simply slipped off his parka and laid it over Grace’s shoulders.

“Thank you,” she said softly, looking at Magozzi, not John. “I had to follow him.”

Magozzi swallowed hard. “I’m sorry, Grace. Really sorry.”

Gino was on his haunches, automatically checking for John’s pulse. There was too much blood in the snow and not enough in John’s gray hand to indicate life, but it was something you did on the job. You had to make sure.

Roadrunner, Annie, and Harley closed the circle around Grace and John, and then all of them watched as Charlie left Grace’s side and walked slowly, cautiously, around John’s head to the other side, claiming the space. He sniffed at John, jerked back, sniffed again, then laid down next to the body and put his head on John’s back.

He snuggled close, then released a great sigh.

52

T
here were a lot of somber faces at the cabin’s dining room table that night. For a time, no one spoke about what had happened in the woods: not the stunning death of John Smith, or the terrible loss of Eugene Thunderhawk, a brave man who would still be alive if they hadn’t come up here. Grace wondered how many more bodies she would leave in her wake in this lifetime, innocent people who had died simply because of an association with her.

It was all too much, too big, too crushing to even acknowledge openly, and at least for now, trying to put words to it seemed diminishing and utterly pointless.

And maybe none of them would ever talk about it, Magozzi thought, stealing glances at Grace, who sipped a cup of tea with downcast eyes. Individual terrors and heartbreaks were sometimes better left to settle to the bottom of the psyche, like toxic sediment in a polluted pond.

Chief’s wife, Noya, had arrived after sunset and fed them all a rich soup, wild rice salad, and stacks of Indian fry bread. They ate in silence, exhausted, sad, trying to process the events of this day.

“Thank you for the meal, Old Woman.” Chief wrapped his arm around her waist in a rare display of public affection that made everyone else feel alone. He looked around at the others, at the guilt on every single face. Apparently none of them believed that things happened for a reason or that there was another life after this one. He thought that must be a terrible way to live.

Noya stood and put her hand on Chief’s shoulder. “We have to go,” she told him.

The Chief pushed himself to his feet and looked at the solemn faces around the table. “We have respects to pay to Eugene Thunderhawk’s family,” he said. “I’ll be back in the morning.” He hesitated, pressed his lips together, and frowned. “One more thing. We need to know where to send John’s body. Where is his family?”

“Right here,” Grace said quietly, and the others at the table nodded. “There’s no one else. We’ll take him back to Minneapolis and bury him there.”

Before he left the room, Chief took the chair John Smith had sat in earlier that day and turned it backward.

He wasn’t there anymore, Grace thought, and part of her life was gone.

• • •

The helicopters awakened
them all shortly after sunrise. They heard the steady thumping of the rotors as the choppers were setting down at the clearing near the lodge. Chief brought Agent Dahl to the cabin door an hour later, a cadre of his agents fanning out behind him, and behind them, at an enforced distance, dozens of journalists and photographers.

Dahl greeted Gino and Magozzi, who introduced him to the others. He tipped his head back toward the media in apology. “This is big news, worldwide. The powers that be thought it would be wise to let them cover what happened up here.” He looked at the people gathered in a ragged semicircle around him, at their red eyes and long faces, and thought they looked shattered. “I am so sorry for your losses. I want you to know the Bureau considers Special Agent John Smith and Eugene Thunderhawk heroes in this war against terror, and they will not be forgotten.” He looked at Magozzi. “Is there a place where you, Detective Rolseth, Chief Bellanger, and I could speak privately?”

After the four men were settled in the den, Agent Dahl inched forward in his chair and braced his forearms on his thighs. “I don’t think I’m talking out of school when I give you a summary of what the Bureau has learned so far.”

Gino reached for a butterscotch hard candy in a dish on the coffee table, then remembered getting one of those evil things caught in his throat at the fourth-grade Halloween party. “Just relax and let it melt,” the stupid school nurse had told him as he was choking to death. He put the candy back in the bowl and looked at Agent Dahl. “We looped the Chief in on everything we knew.”

“I’m guessing you’ve all been a little too busy to catch the news, but the fact is, everybody in the country has been looped in,” Dahl replied. “The Director himself held a prime-time press conference last night detailing the terror plot and the target cities.”

“Whoa,” Gino whistled. “That doesn’t sound like the Bureau.”

Dahl shrugged. “New Director. He has this crazy idea that keeping the public fully informed of the dangers might help our image. I figure he’ll be gone within the week.”

“Too bad,” Chief said.

“That’s what I think.” Dahl looked at Magozzi. “After we saw the plot detailed on that computer, I called all the target cities personally and got a little surprise. When the locals went with warrants to the addresses on John Smith’s list, they found the occupants dead. All recent kills, no guns, no suspects. At this point, it looks like a lot of people had access to that list, including Joe Hardy. We’re theorizing some kind of network, pretty well organized, but right now it’s only a theory. We have absolutely no evidence to support it.”

Chief leaned back in his chair and blew a silent sigh out through pursed lips.

Magozzi cleared his throat. “John ran a check on the people on his list and found the same thing. Up to that point, he didn’t know what was happening. He only sent that list to law enforcement. He had no idea it had gone farther than that. He was trying to do the right thing.”

Dahl nodded. “And he did do the right thing. He saved a lot of lives.”

“That’s what I told him,” Magozzi said.

“We’re hoping that Joe’s computer might give us something more to go on.”

“In his bedroom.” Chief jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “The computer’s in his duffel bag, but there could be some personal things in there his wife would like returned.”

“I’ll see to that personally,” Dahl promised.

Magozzi rubbed the back of his neck, still sore from his time in the tree stand. “So some kind of an organization is bumping off terrorists before they can kill American citizens. You sure you want to follow this trail?”

Dahl pushed himself to his feet. “Not really. But that’s a personal sentiment, not the Bureau’s.” He glanced at the Chief. “Great work taking so many of them alive, Chief Bellanger. We took them into custody when we arrived. They’re already on their way to the Cities for questioning. We’ll autopsy and ID the ten who didn’t make it and see what we can learn.” He hesitated, suddenly uncomfortable. “I didn’t want to say this in front of the others, but with John Smith dead, at least his friends will be safe. Toward that end, we’re going to see to it that his death gets heavy coverage in the media. The downside is that our source of information is gone. We’ve already put every address on the list under surveillance, but there will be more to take their place, and we still don’t have any idea how John was able to find so many that slipped through the cracks.”

Magozzi raised his eyebrows. “I think Monkeewrench might be able to help you with that.”

53

I
t hadn’t taken long to arrange John Smith’s funeral. There were no relatives to notify, no newspaper notices to post, just the core group of people who’d known him best and who would attend his burial.

Harley, oddly enough, had taken care of everything. “We’re going to bury him in Pattern Lake Cemetery. It’s right next to the golf course where we picked him up.”

“They still have available plots there?” Annie asked. The proximity of golf courses to cemeteries was a big attraction to the male Minneapolis population. Annie thought that was weird, and more than a little disturbing.

“I gave him my plot,” Harley replied.

Annie gaped at him. “You have a plot?”

“Of course. Doesn’t everybody?”

• • •

There was
a bitter crispness to the morning air the day of John’s burial that made you feel like the sky was about to crack overhead and spill fractured pieces of blue onto the ground.

Grace led the procession as Gino, Magozzi, and Monkeewrench followed her on a carefully shoveled path that curved through an older section of Pattern Lake Cemetery. She hadn’t said much to anyone since she’d found John facedown in the snow, and those who knew her well knew better than to question her. She’d done her mourning for John in private, and all that remained now was sorrow that had settled over her gently, like falling feathers.

Everyone thought she’d fall apart now; that she’d slip back into that horrible paranoid isolation that had defined her life for over a decade. What they failed to realize was that John had changed all that.

In the distance, Magozzi saw another service taking place with at least a hundred people gathered to pay their respects to someone who had obviously been well loved. It made him feel badly that John Smith had only their sad and small contingent of people who had cared about him.

Magozzi saw the mound of earth ahead, covered with a white tarp so they could all pretend there was no frozen dirt there waiting to be shoveled onto a box that held someone they knew. Standing beside the tarp was a minister Roadrunner had asked to speak at the internment. Funny. Roadrunner knew a minister. Life was full of surprises.

A little closer, and Magozzi saw a cluster of men and women in dark suits and coats, standing quietly beside the ready grave, waiting. He recognized Agent Dahl, and many of the agents who had come to Elbow Lake to clean up the mess of an unheralded war. The FBI was paying homage to one of their own, and yet still, the mourners were few.

When they had all gathered at the graveside, heads bowed and thoughts unspoken, the minister read a Bible verse Magozzi remembered from his grandfather’s funeral so many years ago. It echoed in this cold, empty place, and then he heard the drums—soft, muted thumps of cushioned drumsticks pounding in perfect synchronicity against deerskin drums, counting the cadence.

They all turned around and saw the procession coming behind them, led by Claude and Chief in full dress Marine uniforms, and then the other reservation veterans, wearing the uniforms of many branches of the service. These men were the standard-bearers, marching like West Point cadets in the perfect, rigid exactness of a drill team, bracing the flags of the United States of America and the bands of the Ojibwe Nation in the holders at their waists. John had never worn a uniform, he was not entitled to military honors at his burial, but in his own way he had fought for his country all his life. Apparently, these men who had traveled five hours to be here understood that.

Grace felt the drumbeats deep in her chest and swallowed hard as the number of people around John Smith’s grave multiplied.

He should have had a flag,
she thought, standing at rigid attention as John’s casket was lowered into the ground. It hurt her that he didn’t.

She looked around for Magozzi as they left the cemetery, and saw him kneeling to place an American flag in the mound of earth covering John.

It was the first time she had cried in a very long time.