you landed on the jagged rocks that climbed the ridge wall. That had been the thrill of it, and with the sharp and fearful eye of maturity, Halloran thought it was pretty much a miracle that they had survived their own stupidity.
He glanced over at five teenagers tangled together in a distressed knot near one of the county cars. Their expressions cycled through the spectrum of human emotion-shock, horror, fear, fascination, and back again-as they tried to make sense of their gruesome discovery. He recognized Ricky Schwann, a full head taller and a few shades grayer than the rest of them.
Halloran and Bonar ignored the kids for the moment, got out of the car, and headed down the rock-strewn slope to the little beach below, where Doc Hanson's crouched form was partially blocking the view of what Halloran dearly hoped was an intact body. Initially, all he could see of it was a head and a pair of legs so white they looked like they belonged on a plaster statue. As they drew closer, the doc got up and took a step back, giving them their first look at the torso.
'Oh, man.' Halloran's cheeks went up and his mouth turned down when he saw the band of neat, pencil- sized black holes that stitched a perforated line across the white flesh of the dead man's chest. 'We just figured it for a drowning.'
Doc Hanson was holding his gloved hands away from his sides so he wouldn't forget and shove them in his pockets. 'So did I, until they pulled him out.' He stooped and moved a tangled clump of wet hair away from the open filmy eyes. 'You know him?'
Halloran and Bonar both took a long look at the frozen face, then shook their heads.
'Me either. And I figure I know just about everybody in this county. Hell, I delivered half of them. But I've never laid eyes on this boy.'
'Identifying marks?' Halloran asked.
Doc Hanson shook his head.'No freckles, no moles, no scars, no tattoos.He might have had something on his back, but there isn't much left of it anymore. You want me to roll him?'
'Lord, no,' Bonar said, already picturing what that many exit wounds might have done to the body. 'It looks like somebody tried to cut the poor guy in half.'
Doc nodded. 'Eight full penetrations, head-on, another one that scraped his left side, see?' He pointed to a raw strip where tissue had been burned instead of blown away. 'Mowed him down, is what they did. Looks like NATO rounds some fool fired on full automatic, which is flat-out overkill. That stuff fragments like crazy. One good chest hit like any one of these'-he gestured at the body-'and the job's done.'
Halloran looked curiously at the kindly, time-worn face of the doctor who'd delivered him, who'd given him lollipops with every childhood vaccination and mixed india ink with the plaster so he could have a 'manly-colored' cast when he'd broken his wrist in second grade-not the kind of man you'd think would know a whole lot about the end results of automatic rifle fire. 'NATO rounds, Doc?' he asked softly. 'You learn about those in med school?'
The softening jowls under the old doctor's jaw tightened a little. ''Nam,' he said in a way that made the single syllable sound heavy and dark and final.
Halloran and Bonar shot each other a look. You could know a man for all of your life, it seemed, and still know so little.
The sound of spilling water made them all look toward the ramp, where a diver was emerging, looking strange and shiny and alien in his scuba gear. Halloran thought of old monster matinees and wished he was at home watching one now.
The diver pulled off his mask as he waded toward them. 'You're going to need a couple more body bags down here.'
Within the hour, there were two more bodies lying on the tiny beach-one younger, one older, but both as nude as the first, with similar chest wounds. Doc Hanson had two unhappy deputies move the corpses until they were in the order he wanted.
'There,' he said, finally satisfied, gesturing Halloran and Bonar over to where he stood at the feet of the body in the center of the ghastly trio. 'Now look at the wounds, left to right. Looks like the bullet holes almost sew them together, doesn't it?'
Halloran squinted, narrowing his eyes to tighten his line of vision so he saw only the wounds, not the human bodies the bullets had punctured. 'This is the way they were standing when they were shot,' he said quietly, and Doc nodded.
'Just so. Right-handed shooter, sweeping left to right.'
Bonar's lips were pushed out, as if he'd just tasted something very bad. 'Why not a left-handed shooter, sweeping right to left?'
Doc Hanson hesitated before he responded, as if he were reluctant to confess that he knew the answer. 'There's a burst when you fire an automatic rifle, Bonar-the bullets come so fast when you pull the trigger that if you're not used to it, you get a heavy cluster before you start your sweep. See the man on the left, the one we pulled out first? Nine shots. He was the first in line. The one in the middle was hit five times, the one on the right only three. So this is what happened. Someone lined these men up and executed them all at once.'
There was a hollow sound to Doc's voice that kept Halloran from looking at him. He looked at the bodies instead. 'You've seen this kind of thing before?'
Doc Hanson shoved his hands in his pockets, then pulled them out and looked irritably at the latex gloves he'd just ruined. 'Not in this country.'
GRACEMACBRIDE was standing at one of the open mullioned windows on the third floor, resting her eyes on the greenery outside while several computers hummed behind her. She was finally growing used to the new office, to lush treetops outside the window instead of the Minneapolis skyline, to the relative quiet of the exclusive Summit Avenue neighborhood instead of the brash bustle of the warehouse district.
Moving the Monkeewrench office into Harley Davidson's mansion was supposed to have been temporary, but it was almost a year since they'd abandoned the bloodied loft that had been home to their company for ten years, and not one of them had even suggested looking for another space. It was comfortable here-Harley saw to that-and for a quartet of societal rejects that comprised all the family any of them had, a home seemed a proper environment.
Besides, Charlie liked it here. He was sitting perfectly upright in the ladder-hacked wooden chair next to her desk, haunches and four big feet crowded onto the small seat, what was left of his tail sticking through the back. His brown eyes followed every move she made. She laid a hand on the top of his wiry head and he closed his eyes. 'Two days,' she said, and the dog sighed.
Grace was dressed for travel, which meant she was wearing two guns instead of one-the Sig in the shoulder holster low under her left arm; the derringer tucked into one of the tall English riding boots she wore every time she left her house. Her jeans and T-shirt were lightweight in deference to the August heat, but they were still black. Something about the color made her feel safe and hidden and powerful, and she couldn't discard it any more than she could discard the boots and the guns. The one day in eleven years she had tried, a man with a gun of his own had come calling, reminding her that such a venture was pure folly. Life was dangerous, and facing it unarmed was simply too risky.
She turned away from the window when she heard the first muffled footfalls on the carpeted stairs two floors down, and then the strident hum of the small elevator that served this wing of the house. She knew it was Harley and Roadrunner on the stairs, and Annie on the elevator, but still, her stomach clenched and she automatically laid her hand on the Sig. She didn't lower it until she heard Harley bellow from the first landing, 'Coming up, Grade!' Harley knew she had her hand on the gun. She really loved him for that.
Roadrunner was first through the door, his six-foot-seven-inch, sapling-sized frame clad in his customary one-piece Lycra biking suit. Today's selection was navy blue with a red swoosh across the back. 'I don't care how rare it is or how much it cost,' he threw over his shoulder at Harley. 'It's still ugly.'
Harley stomped in behind him, a massive, bearded man with beefy, tattooed arms wrapped lovingly around a monstrous clay pot that presumably held the item in question-some sort of cactus bristling with three-inch quills. 'And that coming from a man who painted his friggin' kitchen pink.'
'It's not pink, it's cerise, and the guy at the paint store said it was one of their most popular interior colors.'
'It's baboon-butt pink, Roadrunner, and the guy at the paint store should be imprisoned for telling you any
