Michael McGarrity - Everyone Dies

Eugene Naiche sat in a rocking chair with a determined look on his usually jovial face, his hunting rifle resting against an end table. He rocked slowly with his hands on the arm rests, his stocky legs planted firmly on the floor.

Clayton’s boss, Sheriff Paul Hewitt, stood at the side of a curtained window, peering out at the driveway, his face washed by the colors of the flashing emergency lights of vehicles passing by on the dirt road. In the kitchen, Jeannie Naiche was making coffee for the adults and hot chocolate for the children.

Outside, tribal officers patrolled the dirt road and conducted foot searches in the woods around Clayton’s house. Volunteer fire department personnel were deploying equipment a safe distance away from the house, and the state police explosives expert, Perry Dahl, was walking a bomb-sniffing dog named Clementine around the outside of the structure. He hadn’t reported in yet.

Clayton’s handheld radio crackled. He let go of Hannah and turned up the volume.

“Clementine smells something,” Dahl said. “Hold on.”

Clayton peeled one of Hannah’s arms from around his neck.

“Don’t go, Daddy,” Hannah said.

“It’s all right, honey,” he said gently, as he put his daughter on Grace’s lap and stood. “I’m staying right here with you.”

He walked to Paul Hewitt, and spoke softly into his radio. “Where are you?” he asked Dahl.

“At your back door about to take the cover off the entrance to the crawl space,” Dahl replied. “Clementine’s really excited. We’re going in.”

Clayton waited.

“Have you been under your house lately?” Dahl asked.

“Not for a while,” Clayton replied.

“Well, someone has. There’s a lot of disturbed dirt, and the insulation and plastic vapor barrier between the floor joists has been pulled out in places. Okay, I’ve found some wires, and Clementine just sniffed out a device. Make that two devices.”

“What kind?” Clayton whispered, looking at Grace, who’d gone rigid, her arms locked around Hannah.

“Give me a minute,” Dahl answered. “I have to crawl on my back to get to them.”

Clayton turned away from his family and lowered the handheld’s volume.

Paul Hewitt turned his radio down, put a hand on Clayton’s shoulder and looked at his young sergeant. “Let’s go outside.”

Clayton nodded and glanced at Grace. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Wendell pushed himself off the couch. “Can I come, too?”

“Stay with your mother,” Clayton replied.

Grace grabbed Wendell’s hand and jerked him close to her, her eyes filled with apprehension.

Clayton smiled at his family reassuringly, his heart pounding, and walked out of the room with Paul Hewitt. On the front step he could see the spotlight of a tribal police cruiser slowly moving down the dirt road. The flashing lights of fire department vehicles up ahead cut through the stand of trees, casting broken red beams that fractured the darkness.

“We’ve got a pound of plastique planted under the floorboards at each end of the house,” Dahl said. “They’re wired together and attached to a radio receiver.”

“Can you disarm them?” Paul Hewitt asked.

“Hold it,” Dahl replied. “Yeah, but not easily. Whoever built this thing added what looks like a pulse detonator wired into the radio battery. Any power interruption will set off one or the other packs of plastique. It’s pretty sophisticated work.”

“How long will it take you?” Hewitt asked.

“I’m gonna have to get my tools and try to figure it out. An hour, maybe more, once I get started. This is all miniature equipment.”

“What’s the range of the receiver?” Hewitt asked, the handheld an inch from his lips.

“I’d say maybe five miles,” Dahl replied. “No more than ten.”

Clayton glanced up at the heavily forested peaks that loomed over the narrow valley. He knew every gully, wash, stream, outcropping, and clearing in those mountains. There were countless places within a couple of miles that a man could easily hike to and have a clear line of sight into the settlement below.

“Get out of there now,” Hewitt snapped. “The Sante Fe PD has advised that the perp may already be at our location, and there’s no way we can clear that kind of radius at night.”

“Ten-four,” Dahl said. “I’m exiting the crawl space now.”

“Roger that.”

Paul Hewitt looked at his sergeant. “Now, do you want to tell me what this is really all about?”

“Some shithead wants to kill Kerney and his entire family.”

“I know that. What’s it got to do with you?”

“I’m his son,” Clayton replied.

For once, Paul Hewitt couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.

Clayton keyed his handheld and asked the tribal police to start patrolling the roads into the mountains.

For years, the bald-headed man had prepared to become a successful killer. On his own, in public and university libraries across the western states, he’d read the works of behavioral profilers, criminologists, psychologists, and forensics specialists. He’d delved into the history of crime and the psychiatric studies of the criminal mind, scrutinized all the relevant journals for articles on criminal behavior, reviewed the latest developments in the classification systems used to target potential suspects, and pored over volumes that dealt with the use of scientific evidence in criminal investigations.

He knew the current literature on revenge killers was at best nothing more than rudimentary. About all the cops had to go on, if the murders were skillfully planned and carried out, was the belief that the killer would have openly brooded or bragged about revenge to others.

He’d never done that. His revenge was a private, personal obsession that, since the age of seven, had formed the core of his identity, right down to the name he’d chosen for himself from a little-known footnote in American history: Samuel Green. The country’s first mass murderer, Green had gone to the gallows in 1822, unrepentant, without admitting guilt, and leaving all to wonder exactly how many people he’d murdered during his two-year crime spree.

He admired those qualities, so Samuel Green he’d legally become, shedding his past but never the memory of it. He enjoyed his new name’s legacy and the innocuous sound of it.

Green hiked from the Indian Health Service Hospital parking lot to the hillside outcropping that overlooked the Istee residence, thinking he’d diverted Kerney’s attention to Sara and the unborn baby and away from Clayton, who should be just getting home from his shift. When he arrived, the sight through the night-vision scope of police vehicles patrolling the roads and a cluster of fire trucks parked on the dirt lane caught him by surprise.

At the neighboring house, all the interior and exterior lights were on. Two Lincoln County sheriff’s vehicles-one of them assigned to Sergeant Istee-and a state cop car sat outside.

From the look of things, Green assumed that Istee had his family safely out of the house. It was the first time anything had gone wrong with his plan. Was it a setback? Perhaps his phone call to Kerney had been too precipitous, too revealing.

Green decided against that kind of thinking. After all, he’d led Kerney by the nose to his next targets, and the man had taken the threat seriously and acted quickly. That was to be expected.

He sat down and considered his options. Perhaps he should just walk back to the car and let the cops spend the next two or three hours trying to figure out how to disarm the explosives and blow themselves up in the process. But he hated the idea of chancing everything to fate and possibly seeing all his hard work go to waste. Better to salvage something then to walk away empty-handed.