expected Ben to pick up the phone and ask his secretary. Instead, he looked very thoughtful.
“Rudy was not our most ambitious employee. But he was liked. No, I don’t know. So, do you know who killed him, or can’t you say?”
“No comment,” I said with a smile. “Union rules.”
16:51
“You okay?” I asked Hester.
She nodded, then spoke very deliberately. “How many grenades do you think they have left?” She shook her head, reached inside her coat, and pulled out a bottle of water. She took a swig, tilted her head toward the wounded side, and let the water do its work. She turned away, spit, and turned back to me. “God, that’s irritating,” she said.
“Now that you bring it up, I don’t suppose you walk in someplace and buy just one.”
“Right.” She was looking out a wide crack that some past farmer had tried to fill with cement. It hadn’t worked. “It’s getting dark.”
“Yeah. I was thinking about that.”
“Me, too.”
“George is comin’ down as soon as it’s dark enough.” I looked around. “The yard light will cast a shadow on this corner, from about the big door over the whole left side of the place.”
“They’ll shoot it out,” she said. “Damn thith thing.”
“Be quiet and have some more water. No, they won’t. If they leave it on, they can see anybody who comes our way up the lane.”
It was the grenades that had me worried. “I’ve been thinking,” I said. “Either they got modern frags, or concussion grenades.” She looked at me questioningly. “Modern grenades have a fine wire wrapped around a central core. Notched. Tiny fragments, but a cloud of’em. Lethal radius to ten or fifteen feet, not worth shit twenty- five feet away. Well, somethin’ like that. Not like the old grenades in the movies, with the Hershey-bar squares.”
She nodded in agreement.
“Concussion grenades don’t have very effective fragments at all.”
She nodded again.
“I don’t think any fragments made it through the barn, so…” We left it at that. I had no idea if I was right or not. Just something to say.
“You want me to see if I can start George’s heater for you?”
“No thanks. I’m just fine.”
I patted her on the shoulder and moved back over to my position.
“Hester okay? “asked Sally.
“Yeah. You think dehydration could be a problem for her?”
“Well, she’s thin, and she lost a bunch of blood…might as well not take a chance. How much water you got left?”
I patted the left side of my Canadian Army parka. “Three bottles.”
“Better keep ‘em on the inside,” she said.
I only had two inside pockets that were available, so I gave her one of the bottles. Our body temperature would keep them from freezing.
“She has one bottle now.”
“I’ll make sure she drinks,” said Sally. “What do you think’s gonna happen when it gets dark?”
“No idea. Just stay alert. Everybody calling the shots is outside this barn, one way or the other.”
“Yeah. You know what?”
“What, Sally?”
“I wish the people at the Academy could see me now.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” she said. “All the guys gave us gals shit. About being smaller. About having to do only eighty-five percent as many push-ups and sit-ups and things. ‘I suppose the bad guys will only try eighty-five percent as hard to kill you.’ Shit like that.”
“Sorry to hear that. I thought it might have changed since I was there.”
“Oh, it has,” she said. “They have electric lights now.”
“You little shit,” I said. “I’m not that old.”
“Yeah, right. I’m about eighty-five percent as old as you.”
She looked right at me as she said it, and the reflection of the setting sun bounced off the little gold and silver badge on her winter hat, and just about blinded me.
I told her what had happened. “You better unpin that hat badge and stick it in your pocket.”
“Anyway,” she continued, as she stuffed the badge inside her coat, “I think I can hold my own, huh?”
“With the best of em,” I said.
“You’re not just trying to cheer me up?”
“No, I’m trying to cheer myself up.” I grinned. “Just getting back for the electric light comment,” I said. “Can’t think of anybody else I’d rather be pinned down with.”
At that moment, Lamar’s voice came crackling over the walkie-talkie and we both jumped.
“Go ahead, One,” she said.
“Tell Three the TAC team’s here.”
That was good news. I told Sally to have Lamar give the TAC team leader my cell phone number, and I’d talk with him on the phone. I was still worried that the people trying to kill us might somehow be monitoring our radio traffic, or that the media would be monitoring us and broadcast something that the riflemen in the shed could somehow hear. I was also getting worried about the batteries in the walkie-talkie. Especially in cold weather, they will deplete really fast if you do much transmitting.
The Assistant TAC team leader was a trooper sergeant named Ed Henning. I’d met him once or twice.
“My boss ain’t here yet. What you got up there? “asked Ed.
I told him, gave an approximate number of six suspects, told him where we thought they were, said they all seemed to have AK-47s, and that they seemed to have chucked at least one grenade at us.
“What you got cornered up there?” he asked. “Osama bin Laden?”
“Close enough,” I said.
While I’d been on my cell phone, Sally had been busy on her walkie-talkie. “George says he’s comin’ down in about ten minutes,” she told me.
Good. If we had any chance of making a break for it, I didn’t want George stranded on the upper floor of the barn. Besides, I was really worried about these guys trying to set the place on fire. If we had to get out of a burning barn, anybody in the hayloft was as good as dead.
“Make sure he tells you when,” I said.
“He will.”
CHAPTER 08
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2001 15:12
Our next move was to go look up one Jose Gonzales, also known as Orejas. After Ben’s comment about the common name, I was pretty sure even Jose Gonzales wasn’t our man’s real name, either. The address was 206 Jefferson, Battenberg. It was an old, two-story frame house, of the sort that the zoning board would call a single- family dwelling. We went up the porch steps and stood under the overhanging roof and knocked on the storm door. And knocked and knocked. No answer. I tried the knob. Locked. We could see through the cheap lacy curtains on the front windows, and there was no sign of life.
Hester tapped the printed list of about fifteen names neatly duct-taped to the mailbox. “At least one of these should be here.”
I knocked again, and an elderly woman came around the corner of the house, clutching her hooded
