Donald Harstad: A Long December

So what did I know about second-rate criminals? They were not only pretty stupid, but they tended to hang around the stuff involved in their crimes because it was fun. It made them feel good. It gave them a sense of importance.

The parking lot, and the street immediately adjacent to the office, looked strangely empty. Not one single media vehicle present. Not one. They must have all gone down around the old Dodd place. I shook my head. It had to be really crowded on that gravel road.

Once in the office, I called Lamar.

“How you doin’?” he asked.

“Just speak up a bit, and I’m fine,” I said.

“How’s Hester?”

“Pretty well sedated, I think, but they say she’ll be fine after some surgery tomorrow.”

“Good. Good.”

“So, how’s it going down there? “I asked.

“Well, there was a bunch of shooting, but that FBI team went through ‘em like a knife through butter. Hasn’t been a shot fired in quite a while. FBI’s going through the area, seein’ what they got. You want,” he asked, in a rare moment of insight, “to talk to Volont about this? He’s right here…”

Volont came on the line. “How are you?”

I told him, and also about Hester. He seemed pleased. “How’d we come out down there?”

“This isn’t a secure line,” he said. “If you’re up to it, come on down. We have some questions, and George isn’t sure about everything.”

“No car,” I said. “It’s down there where you are.”

“You don’t have a spare vehicle in the lot?”

“We don’t have a single vehicle in the lot, as a matter of fact. The media must have you surrounded.”

“We got all of that stuff way back out at the highway, except for one rig. Let me get back to you. You don’t have to come back down unless you feel up to it.”

“I’m fine.”

I sat down at Dispatch and sipped a cup of coffee.

“Did they really blow up the ambulance?” asked Pam.

“Yeah.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Maybe no particular reason,” I said. “I don’t know.” I took another sip of coffee as Big Ears wandered in, looked at me and wagged his tail, and disappeared behind the dispatch desk. It dawned on me that there should have been a reason for the bomb. There damned well had to be a reason, in fact. Even if you had access to somebody delusional enough to blow themselves up for the cause, you didn’t spend those people too lightly. I mean, how many could you convince to do that in any given week?

My slowly focusing train of thought was broken by a phone call from Volont.

“Houseman,” I said.

“Your chariot awaits,” said Volont.

“What?”

“Just step outside. Your ride should be just about in the lot.”

Just then a voice crackled on the radio: “918, Nation County Comm?”

Pam told them to go ahead. It was the Cedar Rapids police helicopter. Volont had sent it up for me.

It was an ex-military OH-58, and I just fit in the backseat, behind the pilot and the observer /crew chief.

“You Houseman?”

“You bet!”

“You were one of the guys in the barn?”

“Yep!”

I. fastened the minimal military seatbelt, the crew chief handed me a headset with a long cord and a switch that he clipped into my belt. “Just press the switch to talk,” he said.

I put the headset on, and the noise level dropped right off.

“On the way,” said a voice in the earphones, and the machine very slowly lifted up, above the tops of the trees and the surrounding buildings. Then we began to move south.

“FBI,” said voice in my ear, “wants us to fly you over the scene. If you lean forward, you can see the FLIR screen here…”

The back of the seat in front of me was pressed firmly against my knees, so to look at the screen, I had to unfasten my belt and lean to the side. Encumbered with my winter parka, I found I couldn’t lean very far in any direction. Since I kept the mike button firmly in my hand, just so I wouldn’t lose it, it took a minute to adjust my position.

“Got it,” I said finally. I peered into the screen. “Holy shit, we’re there already!”

“The joys of powered flight,” said the voice in my headset. “Okay, now we’ll start with the barn…”

We flew in, hovered, and then slowly moved west, covering the entire area in one short sweep.

I could see people moving through the area, with blinking lights on their shoulders. “Those are ours?”

“Yep. The HRT guys have little infrared strobes.”

As we banked, I looked down and saw nothing but darkness. Not even the blinking lights. I glanced back at the screen, and there everybody was. Magic.

“No bad guys left on the ground?”

“That’s what they’re looking for now. Once the sweep is complete, they’ll bring in floodlights and start processing the scene.”

As we made another pass over the area of the barn, I saw a glow. George’s Mr. Heater. Still working.

The glow from the shattered ambulance was still pretty intense. The oxygen from the storage bottle had long since expired, but the intense heat had really cooked that aluminum. It was an ugly sight.

“Let me show you the shed again,” said the pilot, and we moved slowly over the farmyard to the furthest shed. “See the outline?”

Sure enough. They’d shut the engine off, but the faint outline of a car was still visible through the thin steel of the shed roof.

“I’m surprised you can see that well through a steel roof,” I said.

“We are, too,” said the pilot. “We think it might be a new roof, one of fiberglass, you know the kind that lets some light in?”

Ah. “Bet you’re right.”

“You see, though,” he said. “You can tell it’s a car.”

I could. So where was the van Hector had told me about?

“Could we swing around on the perimeter for a little way? “I asked. “I got a tip that a van was bringing some of the assholes up this way, and I can’t account for so many of ‘em with just one vehicle.”

“Could be two trips,” said the pilot, “but our time is yours.”

We banked again, and the pilot began to follow the gravel roads around the farm. There were at least fifty cars parked all along the two or three miles of roadway that could be used to access the farm. No figures moved in the wooded area, or in the fields. Just cars.

“All cop cars? “I asked.

“We think so,” said the pilot. “They always leave their engines running, so they look hot from here.”

That was true. Probably not a single cop car would be sitting in this cold weather with its engine off. Why freeze?

We were inbound on the southern leg when the crew chief said, “What’s that?”

“Where? “asked the pilot.

“Go right, about a hundred yards off the road, at the very edge of the monitor…see that smudge?”

We banked and swung abruptly, and I found my unbelted self pressed against the flimsy little aluminum door. I hoped like hell the latch held.

In a moment, we were hovering over a dim shape.

“Looks like it could be a van,” said the pilot.

The shape seemed covered by black cobwebs. Tree branches, very cold tree branches.

“Let’s get somebody down there,” I said.

“Nation County One,” said the pilot. “We’d like some people about a mile west of your position, on the gravel road, we have what might be a van parked in a stand of trees, about a hundred yards off the road…”

I keyed my mike after Lamar acknowledged. From my time in marijuana-hunting helicopters, I knew I was able to hear all the pilot’s frequencies, but was only able to be heard on the intercom. “Tell him we think it’s red,” I said.

“What?”

“Tell him it’s green. Trust me. They’re gonna think you guys are magic.”