P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

Cam glanced quickly at the Suburban to see if the other two were getting out, but his position and his own pickup truck blocked the view. Just to make sure, he took careful aim and fired two rounds high, one through each side of the Suburban’s windshield. He knew that the trajectory was such that he wouldn’t hit anyone in the vehicle, but the big slugs did a satisfying job of showering safety glass all over the interior. He rolled then, in case someone was setting up on him, emerging at the back of the trailer. Frick was still shaking the man down on the pavement like a terrier with a rat. The man Cam had shot was wadded up in a fetal position against the loading dock, holding his broken leg and moaning. Cam sprinted toward his pickup, kicked the gun lying on the concrete under the Suburban, and then opened the door and yelled for Frick, who released the man, bounded over immediately, and jumped into the truck. He could see faces on the loading dock now, and men pointing at the two men down on the concrete. Cam slammed his door and burned rubber as he headed for the gate, which fortunately was still wide open. He hung a two-wheeled turn to the left and bolted out of the warehouse area onto Terminal Avenue, driving back up toward Tilly’s. The two gate goons stared at him as he flew by. He was tempted to throw a couple of rounds in their direction just on general principles, but he was past them too quickly. He checked his rearview mirror, but there were no headlights visible behind him.

He slowed as he reached the end of Terminal and turned right onto the access road just as two semis came rumbling by, headed into the warehouse complex. He saw some blood on Frick’s muzzle in the glare of their headlights. He’d trained her to run at full speed right at the target, knock the man down, deliver a dozen or so bites to the arms and hands, and then latch onto a coat or a shirt and shake him until he went limp and stopped resisting, all the while making as fierce a racket as she could. Frack didn’t have it in him to go on the offensive like that, although he was fully capable of all that and more if somebody came into the house or attacked Cam. At ninety pounds, Frick did just fine, and the sudden appearance of a German shepherd coming at you full tilt, ears flat, about nine yards of ivory showing and a wolf’s roar in her throat, was usually enough to paralyze any attacker.

“Good girl,” he told her repeatedly as he drove up the access road to the freeway at normal speed, still trying to control the shaking in his arms. “Very good girl.” It had begun to rain, and he switched on his wipers. The good news was that he’d gotten away from four assailants, none of whom would be in the mood to do much of anything for a while. The bad news was that four men had sucked him into an ambush by using the supposedly secret communications channel that he and Bobby Lee had set up. If those guys were cops, they’d probably manage to get out of there before the Sheriff’s Office showed up in response to the warehouse calls. They’d dump the gate guard somewhere and then ditch the battered Suburban, which was probably a throwaway drug seizure, as quickly as they could in some accommodating auto junkyard. The bullet wound would be harder to explain at an ER, but cops occasionally incurred a few self-inflicted wounds when they’d mess around with their own gun collections. All it would take would be one buddy corroborating the “accidental” circumstances, and then it would turn into a line-of-duty paper drill, along with a lot of ribbing from fellow officers. The dog bites might be a tougher proposition to explain, however.

He tried to recall faces, to remember if he’d ever seen any of those guys before, but the only thing he was pretty sure about was that they were not Manceford County cops, as had been the case with the older deputy who’d come calling at his house. The truth was that he still didn’t know anything about his attackers. It might easily have been one cop with some buddies, or just a leg-breaking squad for hire. There’d been no badges flashed or anyone yelling “Police officers. Freeze!” at him. So if they were all cops, then this thing was a whole lot bigger than Manceford County.

Cam cleaned frick up and removed the Hollywood spiked collar, making sure she hadn’t been injured in the melee. Then he’d put both dogs out back to patrol the yard. He’d had to use some steel wool to get the Suburban’s paint smears off the left front bumper. His cleanup wouldn’t withstand examination by a good forensics team, but a casual look would show no damage or marks. The rear bumper showed nothing except a slight deformation in the standoff bar, and he couldn’t do anything about that. He’d cleaned the. 45 and reloaded it, and he’d washed his hands in paint thinner and then orange sand soap to get powder residues off. Then he carefully vacuumed the pickup truck to get the dog hair out of it. Thinking defense, he slipped a big three-ball trailer hitch, angled high, into the receiver at the back of the truck, and then called the sheriff.

As usual, the sheriff was in uniform when he arrived at Cam’s house. Cam handed him a cup of coffee and then they sat down at the kitchen table while Cam told him what had happened earlier. The sheriff nodded at the end of Cam’s recitation.

“We had a disturbance call at that warehouse area just after twenty-two-thirty,” he said. “By the time the responding units got there, both vehicles involved were gone. The gate guard verified the part about their snatching him up at the gate.”

“He wasn’t hurt?”

“No. Shook up, scared, but not hurt. They pushed him down in the backseat and told him to close his eyes and be still. That’s what he did. Said the two guys on the left side got swatted pretty hard when you hit the doors. He was fixing to climb out over the guy in back when you shot the glass out of the windshield. Thought that was a good time to get back down and stay down. They stopped about a block away from the scene and rolled him out on the street and then took off.”

“Minus the doors on the right side.”

“Presumably, although they were not found at the scene.”

“Anyone see me?”

“Not really. All the truckers could talk about was that dog.”

“She evens the odds right out,” Cam said.

The sheriff grinned then. He loved dogs, especially police dogs. “I don’t understand how they got past the two responding units,” he said. “Suburban missing its doors, no windshield. And our people were on-scene within five minutes.”

“If they were the two I saw, they were faster than that,” Cam said. “But look: I was summoned there via a text pager. How did that happen?”

The sheriff sipped some coffee. “I don’t know. I got my pagers from the evidence locker. Throwaways. Got four of them.” He looked over at Cam. “I still have all four.”

“So someone in evidence control must have run his mouth,” Cam said.

“People talk about me and what I’m doing all the time,” the sheriff said. “But you’re sure these weren’t Manceford County people?”

“They weren’t Manceford County cops, I know that,” Cam said. “But, I don’t know that they were cops at all.”

The sheriff nodded. “There’s the rub. You didn’t take the first warning, now we get this shit. Guys with baseball bats and guns? People who’ve obviously operated as a team before?”

“I’ve got more,” Cam said. He then told him about catching up with Marlor, their little talk on the front porch, and what Marlor had said he was going to do. The sheriff listened in silence, an expression of growing disbelief on his face.

“And you just let him do it?”

“He told me he was going to kill himself, but not when or how.”