second.”
“Yes, sir,” Carl said, starting back toward his Jeep.
He kept looking northward as he walked. More rain was coming; he would have known that with a blindfold on. Carl was a country boy, too.
He could smell rain ten miles away.
Danny crossed the Mississippi River just east of Lake Concordia and dropped out of the rain clouds at five hundred feet. This leg of the Mississippi was dotted with oxbow lakes, and Lake St. John lay just ahead. He flew around the eastern rim of the C-shaped lake, his eyes tracking the well-trimmed lots that bordered the eastern shore. As he neared the midpoint of the seven-mile horseshoe, he saw a cluster of brightly colored pavilion tents beside a large cypress lake house. A group of men had gathered in a muddy cotton field across the road, and they began waving him down when they caught sight of the helicopter.
Danny descended rapidly toward the group, then flared at the last moment and touched down softly in the newly planted field. A big man wearing a brown uniform and clutching a Stetson to his head ran beneath the spinning rotor blades and opened the door on the Bell’s left side. Billy Ray Ellis was a big man, still muscular at fifty-three, with burly forearms covered in black hair. Despite his limited law enforcement experience, he was so popular in the county that he’d beaten the incumbent sheriff by twenty percentage points. Ellis heaved his bulk into the seat beside Danny, yanked the door shut, pulled on the second headset, and started talking as he fastened his harness.
“Get this baby back in the air, Danny. Push her hard as she’ll go. We got a bad situation waiting for us.”
Danny pulled pitch and applied power with the collective, then nudged the cyclic. The Bell tilted forward and bit into the sky. “What’s happened? The message I got said Code Black. Is it a school shooting or something?”
Ellis shook his big head. “Do you know Dr. Shields? Warren Shields?”
Danny felt as though the bottom had fallen out of the chopper. “Yeah,” he managed to choke out. “I taught him to fly last year.”
“That’s right, I forgot. Well, apparently, Dr. Shields has barricaded himself inside his residence, and he’s holding his wife and daughter hostage.”
Danny closed his eyes, fighting vertigo. After several moments of composing himself, he opened them again, picked out a landmark on the ground, and said, “How do you know that?”
“Shields’s nine-year-old son managed to escape the house and get to a neighbor’s place. Jumped off the roof or something. It’s the daughter who’s still in the house. The boy thinks his daddy shot somebody. We don’t know who that was yet, but it could be Shields’s partner, Kyle Auster.”
“That’s unbelievable,” breathed Danny, trying to mask his panic.
“I agree. There was also some kind of fire at their medical office a little while ago. Details are sketchy, but some people were hurt bad. It may be that Shields set the fire. I don’t know if the man’s lost his mind or what. I always liked him myself.”
“Who’s on the scene now?”
“Ray Breen’s assembling the TRU as they arrive.”
“Ray talked to the wife and little girl on the phone-”
Relief flooded through Danny like a narcotic.
“-but Shields wouldn’t put Dr. Auster on. Sounds fishy, don’t it?”
Danny nodded and pushed the engine to its limit. As soon as the sheriff got distracted, he would take out his clone phone and see whether Laurel had managed to send him any messages.
“Shields sure has a pretty wife,” Ellis said thoughtfully. “You know her?”
“She teaches my son.”
“Oh,” said the sheriff, his voice suddenly grave. “That’s right.” Ellis was a deacon in the Baptist church, and he tended to assume the manner of a pastor when discussing anything he saw as a sad circumstance. An autistic son obviously qualified in his book. “Have you heard any rumors of marital problems?” he asked, changing the subject. “Anything like that?”
Danny stared stone-faced through the windshield. “Nothing. But then I never hear anything like that.”
“Me either. But in my experience, when this kind of thing happens, there’s marriage trouble at the bottom of it. Does Shields have a hot temper?”
“No. The opposite, in fact.”
The departmental radio suddenly crackled to life in Danny’s headset.
“Sheriff, this is Ray at the command post. I got a fella down here claiming to be a government agent, and he’s causing me all kind of problems.”
Ellis picked up the mike and keyed it angrily. “What kind of government agent? An FBI man or what?”
“One ID says he’s a special investigator for the attorney general, and another says he’s with the state Medicaid office. Name’s Paul Biegler. Says he’s down here investigatin’ Dr. Shields and Dr. Auster for some sort of fraud.”
The sheriff knit his heavy brows in puzzlement. “Is he standing right there, Ray?”
“No, sir. I got him waitin’ outside the trailer. He claims he was in that fire over at Dr. Auster’s office. Claims one of the employees tried to blow the place up. He’s got bandages on his face, and he says he was wounded by shrapnel or something. He’s got two other boys with him, and he’s trying to take over the damn scene.”
“
“I said, Biegler says he’s got federal warrants for Dr. Shields and Dr. Auster, and that makes this a federal case. He says if we don’t give him tactical command, he’s going to call the FBI down from Jackson to take over.”
Danny saw the sheriff’s knuckles go white. “Bull
“Yes, sir. A big ten-four on that.”
“How far out are we, Danny?”
Danny scanned the river for landmarks, then checked his airspeed. “Twenty minutes, tops.”
“Tell him I’m almost there now, Ray. And put a man on him. Let me know if he makes any calls to Jackson.”
“You got it, Sheriff.”
“Out.”
Ellis turned to Danny. “What in the Sam Hill is going on? Sounds like our good doctors have got themselves into serious trouble. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Kyle Auster was up to no good. But Dr. Shields? I just can’t see that one.”
“Me, either,” Danny agreed. “He’s a straight arrow.”
“I got to think about this. You remember what happened with that engineer on Milburn Street? Blew hisself all over me without so much as a by-your-leave. And he was alone in the house. If Dr. Shields really has his wife and daughter in there, and if he’s really shot his partner, I might have to send the TRU in there hard.”
Danny closed his eyes in silent prayer. Most of Ellis’s deputies had only moderate training, and their practical law enforcement experience was limited. Worse, the TRU was commanded by a deputy with juvenile delusions of heroism. The possibility that those men might make an assault into Laurel’s house with grenades and automatic weapons nauseated him with fear. He could not allow that to happen.
When Sheriff Ellis settled back in his seat with his thoughts, Danny let go of the collective and pulled his cell phone out of his pants pocket. No new messages. Nevertheless, he flipped open the phone and began keying a message with his left hand. The first he sent read,
“Must be pretty important messages to slow us down for.”
Danny gritted his teeth. “We’re not going any slower. This is like taking your hand off the wheel in a car, but leaving your foot on the gas. I increased friction on the collective, so it stays in place.”
Ellis’s eyes were still on the cell phone.
“Problems with taking care of my boy,” Danny lied. “My wife didn’t come home to let the babysitter go on
