'I can't see shit,' I said, 'but I don't know where to look.'
Cletus started to make retching sounds.
'Not again…' said Lamar.
I bobbed my head up, referring to my little finger. Nothing. Down again. Cletus was still making the noise. 'You suppose it could be the jail food?'
'They say,' said Cletus, spitting, 'I got a nervous stomach.'
'No shit?'
I could hear a siren start up downtown. Couldn't be the ambulance yet. Cop car.
I saw a dark blue Ford slowly pull into the lot. Well, originally dark blue. This one was spattered with light tan mud, white road salt, and grungy as hell. Volont. Car might as well have had FBI plates. Although it was so covered with mud you wouldn't have been able to read them. They monitored a completely different set of frequencies, and obviously were unaware of our problem.
'Looks like the Spook's back,' I said. As the Ford turned into the parking slots, I saw it had a large dent in the right rear quarter. 'Dinged up, too.'
We watched Volont and Art get out of the car, and look at the dent. Both were in suits, with the same light tan mud speckled halfway to the knees.
I got into a crouch, gun still in my right hand. 'Get down!'
They both looked at me, startled. Volont comprehended first. Me. The gun. The holes in the nice cars. He nearly vaulted the car closest to him, drawing his gun at the same time.
'Come on!' he yelled at Art.
Art stood still for a split second, just long enough for another golf ball sound to make him turn his head. I dropped, just as Art dove between two cars.
Volont duckwalked toward us. 'Where is he?'
'Can't tell… I don't know where to look… rifle, I think…' Giving a hint that the shooter could be a long way off.
'Prisoner hit?'
'No,' said Lamar. 'Keep down.'
Art crawled out on our end of the cars. 'Who's doing the shooting?'
'Somebody who's a piss-poor shot,' said Lamar.
The sirens were a lot louder. I stuck my head up, and saw two brown state patrol cars nearly at the lot. I holstered my gun, grabbed my walkie-talkie, and switched to the mutual aid frequency.
'This is Three, we're down behind the cars. Shooter is in the direction of downtown, has a rifle. There are five of us here… keep low…'
They slid to a halt, and both exited their vehicles, getting down behind the fenders, handguns drawn. Just like in the movies.
We waited. It seemed like an hour, but it was closer to a minute. Finally, Lamar spoke up.
'I want to get him back inside,' he said. 'He'll be a lot safer there.'
'Fine.' Great. We have to drag Cletus, in his high-conspicuity orange suit, to boot. With a lousy sniper, who can't hit the broad side of a cow's ass, aiming at Cletus, and more likely to hit me by mistake. But I didn't say it, because Lamar was thinking the same thing. 'Might as well,' I said. 'I can't dance…'
'I ain't goin' with you, by God! They might shoot me by mistake!' Cletus spit again.
'You damn fool,' said Lamar. 'It's you they're after, not us!'
Cletus began retching again. Apparently, it hadn't occurred to him.
'Can't we wait until he's done? I don't want to haul somebody who's heaving all over me.'
'Yeah,' sighed Lamar.
We waited. I looked at the hole in the outside of the fender next to my head. I bent down, and looked back into the fender well until I saw daylight. Toward town, and in the top of the hood. Downward. Hard to do, since we were just about the highest point in town. Except for the grain elevator, about a half mile away. I peeked up over the fender. Sure. There was that huge concrete elevator, standing off in the middle distance, bigger than life. To hit us from there, the path would be downward.
'I think he's on the grain elevator,' I said. Nobody contradicted me. I glanced around, and as far as I could tell, none of us had anything but a pistol. We couldn't even shoot back;
Volont got over beside us, and we told him our little plan.
'The sooner the better,' he said. 'I'll help.'
The three of us grabbed Cletus, Lamar and Volont by an elbow, and me by his securing belt.
'On three… one, two…'
I was reminded of that movie, about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Where they counted before running into the guns of that South American army…
'… three!'
It should be an Olympic event. We hit the porch at full tilt, the three officers panting and straining, Cletus moving his feet very rapidly, but completely ineffectively. Judy, who was watching from behind her file cabinets, saw us coming, and opened the door just in the nick of time. We all let go of Cletus at about the same time, he tripped, and skidded across the linoleum floor for about ten feet.
We took a moment to congratulate ourselves. Then I realized we'd abandoned Art and the two troopers out in the lot.
It dawned on me that I hadn't been aware of any shots fired during our portage of Cletus.
'You think he's gone?' Lamar was puffing, and wincing. His leg was probably hurting him quite a bit. He'd moved awfully well, though.
'I don't know, Lamar. But I wouldn't… just stand around out there… for a while.' I was still breathing hard, too. And my back hurt like hell. But we'd gotten the first order of business done. Cletus was safe.
The next problem was how to get to our cars and get down to that grain elevator. There was just no place else the shooter could be.
I took a quick peek out the safety glass panel in the steel outer door. Then a longer one. Nothing. I was wondering how I was going to tell if he really had quit and left, when there was a sudden puff of packed snow and concrete dust in the middle of the parking lot. It was kind of hard to see, and I wasn't absolutely certain what it was. Two more puffs, each closer and about a half second apart, struck the parking lot. Then a solid plunking sound as something hit the wooden support for our porch roof.
I ducked. Late, but better than never.
'I know what his problem is,' I said.
'He's still there, then?' Volont was sitting on the floor, with his back to the pop machine, which was against the outside wall. Smart. I should be so smart.
'Yeah. He's there, all right. His problem is, he can't see where his shots are going… unless he hits something that throws up debris or something…'
'So he can't correct his aim,' said Volont.
'Yeah.'
'Probably alone, then,' he said, matter-of-factly. 'That's why snipers should always have a spotter.'
I filed that away. Like I would ever need it.
Lamar was on the phone to the people who ran the elevator, telling them they had a sniper on the roof, some 100 feet over their heads. It took him a minute to convince them. They couldn't hear the shots.
I was on my walkie-talkie, getting the Maitland squad car down to the elevator, to make sure there was nobody getting away. If the suspect hadn't gone up the interior elevator shaft, and then to the roof, he'd had to climb a long ladder.
'Want to try for a car?' asked Volont.
'Not just yet…'
I got on my walkie-talkie to the Maitland car again. 'Hey, Twenty-five, you see anything down there?'
'I can't see nothin' here…' came the stressed voice. 'But somebody just made a hole in my roof! I'm out of the car.'
Still there, all right. But now, having taken the time to shift his aim to the much closer Maitland squad car, I thought he'd have a tougher time readjusting and zeroing in on us.
