“Ten-four, Three. One says to keep them there until backup gets to you.”
Well, that wasn’t going to be too hard. It was them keeping us pinned down, not vice versa.
“I think we can do that, Comm,” I said.
“The dumb one’s coming back out,” said George.
The “dumb one” was one of the group who was shooting at us off and on. This particular idiot wore a New York Yankees baseball cap and a gray sweatshirt. He’d step out of the old machine shed, half crouched, point his AK-47 either at our barn or the old chicken coop, and just blow out about thirty rounds in a couple of seconds. The first time he’d done it, George had said, “Look at that dumb son of a bitch!” It stuck.
So far, shooting from the hip the way he was, he’d not come very close to hitting the barn itself, let alone any of us inside. It wasn’t for lack of trying, though. I thought it was pretty obvious he was trying to draw fire, and that was the other reason for “dumb one.” There was something about the jumpy way he did it that told me it wasn’t really his idea. The comfort was that it let us know they weren’t sure exactly where we were.
“Back in a minute, Hester,” I said. I crawled back toward my vantage point and pointed my AR-15 through a hole between the old foundation and the rotting boards of the barn wall. The elevated front sight just cleared the hole, but I had him dead to rights almost instantly. He was only about fifty yards away, and the upper two-thirds of him was in plain view. He’d be hard to miss. I squinted as I aimed at the white “NY” on his blue cap.
“Whadda ya think? Take him out?” I asked George. So far, we hadn’t returned fire since the first exchange about ten minutes back. We hadn’t because they had pretty much been shooting at the upper floor of the barn and into the loft, and we were down at the stone foundation. They were far enough off target; we’d been reluctant to reveal our actual position by shooting back. They had a lot more firepower than we did. But now Hester had been hurt. They were getting closer.
“Not yet, I think,” said George. “Wait and see what he does.”
The dumb one started waiving his assault rifle in the air and screaming something at us.
“Gotta be stoned,” I said. “Gotta be.”
“Any idea what he’s saying?” asked George.
“No,” I said. “Don’t even know what language. But I don’t think he’s trying to surrender.”
Suddenly, the dumb one lowered the assault rifle to hip level and pointed it right at us.
“Down!” yelled George.
CHAPTER 01
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2001 15:34
My name is Carl Houseman, and I’m a deputy sheriff in Nation County, Iowa. I’m also the department’s senior investigator, which is a title that probably has as much to do with my being fifty-five as it does with my investigative abilities. It’s also a title that can get me involved in some really neat stuff, even in a rural county with only twenty thousand residents. That’s why I like it.
On that pleasant, twenty-degree December day, we were just beginning one of the mildest winters on record, the one that we’d later call “the winter that wasn’t.” I had some of my Christmas shopping done, was nearly caught up on my case files, and intended to take a few days off over Christmas for the first time in twenty-some years. On the down side, it was beginning to look as if it wouldn’t be a White Christmas. Snow or not, I was already about halfway through my usual noon to eight shift, and it looked like I’d be able to coast through the rest of it. Hester Gorse, my favorite Iowa DCI agent, and I had just finished interviewing Clyde and Dirk Osterhaus-brothers, antiques burglars, and new jail inmates-regarding seventeen residential burglaries that had been committed in Nation County over the previous two months. The interviews had been conducted in the presence of their respective attorneys, who were both in their late twenties. The young brothers had thrown us a curve when they’d readily confessed to only fourteen of the break-ins. Why just those fourteen, when we all knew they’d done the whole seventeen? Some sort of strategy? A bargaining chip? It beat both Hester and me. Maybe it was just the principle of the thing.
Anyway, the attorneys had left and the brothers were back in the jail cells, arguing with the other prisoners over whether or not they were all going to watch Antiques Roadshow at 7:00 P.M. We only had one TV in the cell block. I was pretty sure the Osterhaus boys were going to win. Research comes first.
Hester and I were in Dispatch, having a leisurely cup of coffee. We were talking to the duty dispatcher, Sally Wells, about whether she should take her niece to see Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings when she got off duty. The phone rang, and our conversation stopped.
Sally answered with a simple “Nation County Sheriff’s Department,” which told me it wasn’t a 911 call. They answer those with “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency? “I relaxed a bit, and had just brought my coffee cup to my lips when she reached over and snapped on the speakerphone.
“…Best get the Sheriff down here… there’s this dead man in the road just down from our mailbox… “came crackling from the speaker.
“And your name and location, please?”
“I’m Jacob, Jacob Heinman,” replied the brittle voice. “Me and my brother live down here in Frog Hollow… you know, just over from the Dodd place about a mile.”
“I’ll be paging the ambulance now,” said Sally, very calmly, “but keep talking because I can hear you at the same time.”
“We don’t think he needs a ambulance, ma’am,” said Jacob, also very calmly. “I saw ‘em shoot him just about right smack in front of me. We went back up there. He’s still laying there just like they left him. He’s awful dead, we’re pretty sure.”
I suspect that even in departments where they have two or three hundred homicides a year, the adrenaline still flows with a call like that. In our case, with maybe one or two a year, the rush is remarkable. Hester and I headed out the door.
As we left, I said, “On the way. Backup, please.”
Sally waved absently. She knew her job, and would have everything she could drum up out to help as soon as possible. But you like to remind even the best dispatchers, just in case something slips their mind.
The Heinman brothers were known throughout the area as the “Heinman boys.” Confirmed bachelors, neither of the so-called “boys” were a day under eighty, and you couldn’t excite either of them if you set his foot on fire. Or, apparently, if you shot somebody right in front of them. As I got into my unmarked patrol car, started the engine, and strapped on the seatbelt, I could hear Sally over the radio, telling a state trooper that she was looking the directions up in her plat book. Frog Hollow was an old name for a very remote stretch of road, about two miles long, that wound down through a deep, milelong valley where there were just two farms. I don’t think anybody except the rural mail carrier and the milk truck went there in the daytime, and only kids parking and drinking beer ended up there at night. Sally probably had a general idea where it was, but considering there were more than two thousand farms in Nation County, this would be no time to guess and end up giving the trooper bad directions. Hester, behind me in her own unmarked car, couldn’t possibly know where we were going and was going to have to follow me to the scene. Her call sign was I 388, so I waited until the radio traffic between Sally and the trooper paused, and picked up my mike.
“Three and I 388 are ten-seventy-six,” I said. That meant we were heading to the scene, and was meant as much for the case record as anything else. You always need times. “Which trooper you sending?”
“Two sixteen is south of you. I’m working on the directions…” There was no stress in Sally’s voice, but I could tell she was really concentrating. “Be aware I’ve confirmed there are at least two suspects. Repeating, at least two suspects.”
Two for sure. That always meant, to my mildly paranoid mind, that we were talking a minimum of two. Okay. Well, there was Hester, 216, and me. Fair odds, as 216 was new state trooper sergeant named Gary Beckman, who’d transferred into our area about six months ago. He was about forty and really knew his stuff.
“I’ll direct him,” I said, so she could forget the directions for him and concentrate on getting an ambulance and notifying our sheriff. “Two sixteen from Nation County Three, what’s your ten-twenty?” I needed to know his location before I could give him directions. I also needed to find out where he was because we were both going to be in a hurry, and it would be extremely embarrassing if we were to find ourselves trying to occupy the same piece
