to comprehend anything before I was down again. “Hester, you okay?”
There was a loud, mumbled “Yeah!” that would have been funny another time.
I took a chance and kept my head up for a longer look. Nothing… nothing. Then, so quickly that it made me jump, four or five figures rose in unison and began blazing away at the barn. It was quite a volume of fire, and we all hunkered down as wood chips and pieces of metal-jacketed rounds went whizzing through the boards. More fragments, more dust-almost enough to make me choke.
This time, though, I was back at my firing port as soon as the noise of the firing stopped. I was scared as hell, but I didn’t want to give ‘em a chance to advance toward us.
I saw them. I truly did, and for the first time I got a good look. There were four of them, all standing or kneeling and putting fresh magazines into their rifles. Now, as far as I was concerned, they were fair game.
I cranked off a full magazine as fast as I could pull the trigger. Probably just because I was firing, I heard Sally’s shotgun blast twice, and I thought I heard other shots as well. My twenty-eight rounds went out, and at least two found their mark, because the two men in the middle twisted and tumbled and went down like sacks of meal. The other two disappeared, but not in the uncoordinated fashion of the middle two. I thought I’d missed both of those two for sure.
I replaced my magazine by feel, not looking down, not taking my eyes away from my field of view.
“Damn,” said Sally. “You get anything?”
Her voice was strangely loud but faint at the same time. It took me a second, but then I realized the noise had screwed up my hearing.
“One or two, I’m pretty sure.” As the dust and debris began to settle, I was sure I could see a booted foot tangled in the fence line. It wasn’t moving. “One for certain. You?”
“I don’t know,” she said, with a tremor in her voice.
Then Sally’s radio went nuts.
“What the fuck’s going on up there, Three?.’“ Lamar’s voice was easy to recognize on the radio.
“Tell him it was a…” and then I held my hand out for the mike. “One, Three?”
“Three, go ahead!”
I paused for a second or two, to make sure my voice was calm and pitched low. The last thing I wanted to do was to generate more excitement among our people down on the road. “Okay, One, that was a grenade, and then four or five guys with AKs, and then me. I think we got one of’em.”
“How about you people?”
I turned and saw that Hester had moved into the stanchions closer to the limestone wall. She looked at me and nodded.
“I think we’re good. Hold your traffic, and I’ll check with George.”
Poor George, I believe he thought we’d forgotten about him. I reached him on the now-clear walkie-to-walkie frequency.
“You okay up there, George?”
It took a couple of seconds, and then he said, “Fine. Are you all right?
“We’re doin’ good. I think that was a grenade there. Did you see it?”
“I saw him throw it, but I didn’t get a good look. Probably. We got two of ‘em, Carl. I can see two bodies from up here. The others went back toward the shed.”
“Excellent,” I said. So the other shots had been George firing from the loft. “I thought I got one for sure.”
Two dead. I hadn’t been able to recognize either of them. And they had been reloading their rifles when I shot them, or at least as far as I could tell from my position. I took a deep breath. They weren’t shooting at me at the moment I fired. Somewhere out there was an attorney licking his lips.
“I think there’s somebody, maybe two or so, over by the silo,” said George. “They were moving over that way when the explosion went off. That’s why I couldn’t warn you; I wasn’t looking front all the time.”
Interesting. Those two, plus the four or five at the fence line I was beginning to wonder where everybody had come from.
“That’s fine. No problem. Hey, it’s gettin’ dark, George. Why don’t you come down here when it gets dark enough to hide you? “I was also afraid that they’d zero in on him, now that he’d revealed his position by shooting, but I thought better of saying that over the radio.
“Okay. Good idea.”
Chalk up a round for us.
CHAPTER 05
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2001 09:45
I’d gotten to bed well past midnight, but rolled out of bed at 06:30, just missing myself on TV. Sue was apologetic, figuring that since I hadn’t left her a note, I didn’t want to be gotten up. She said it was “nice,” but that I’d only been on the tube for about five seconds.
I saw her off to school at seven-thirty, which was pretty unusual since my normal shift started at noon, and I rarely awoke before ten. Being up, I’d figured on calling the office, seeing what was going on, and getting there by eight or so.
When I called, Lamar took the phone, said he was worried about my accumulating overtime, and ordered me not to be in before eleven. I said something about him never getting worried when I was tired, only when he thought I was getting rich. He thought that was funny.
I called Hester on her cell phone. She was already at the office, talking to the lab guys, who had finished late and stayed the night in Maitland to avoid a four-hour drive back to Des Moines with no sleep.
“Just a sec,” said Hester. She spoke to someone up at the office, probably Sally. “You want to tell him, or can I? Cool.” They must have said that she could. “Guess what they found in that ravine behind the outbuildings?”
“Four more bodies,” I said. I couldn’t imagine anything worse.
“No such luck,” she said, altogether too brightly. “But the ditch is full of empty containers. Ether cans. Probably anhydrous ammonia was once in some of the buckets and plastic barrels. A whole bunch of busted open lithium batteries. Rags, other debris.” She paused, and I could hear her grinning. “And empty shell casings, 7.62mm shell casings. Made in China, found just up the ditch from the ether cans. Many, many shell casings. How about that?”
A meth lab. Or, at least, the trash heap from one. And the shell casings were pretty typical, too. Lots of meth dealers liked to be armed, and Chinese SKS rifles, copies of Soviet ones, were easy to come by. “Meth. With guns, too, and target practice.”
“You betcha.”
“Son of a bitch.” I chuckled. “Is there a functional lab there, or did we miss it?”
“No functional lab,” said Hester, “but it was once. I’ve called DNE and they’ve called DEA, and we’re going to need a professional cleanup. They’ll be up as soon as possible.”
DNE was the Iowa Department of Narcotics Enforcement, and DEA was its federal equivalent, the Drug Enforcement Administration. They had to be notified, and they’d take care of calling the Environmental Quality people. Lots of the stuff used to make methamphetamine was highly toxic, not only at the point of contact, but because of groundwater pollution as well.
“Think this is our motive?” I asked. “Drug-related?”
“It’s very possible,” she said. “Related, anyway. Want to hear my next news?”
“Go ahead… you’re on a roll.”
It turned out that the lab guys had done the case prints off the dead body late last night, and they’d been turned over to a state trooper at 07:00. He’d relayed them to the AFIS terminal at the Cedar Rapids police department.
“They’re already being run, even as we speak,” said Hester.
“Excellent.”
“Next,” she said, “the milk hauler… uh… Elmo Hazlett?”
