Чак Хоган: The Standoff

The FBI man said, “We got a call.”

Moody looked at him. “A call?”

“A party requesting our presence. They said they were local law.”

Moody cocked his head in suspicion, thumbs returning to his belt. “Nobody here called you,” he said, looking around. “Who the hell would’ve called you?”

He was surveying his men for reassurance when his eyes settled finally on Blood. Blood stepped forward. “I called you,” he said.

The FBI man turned to him, eyeing the uniform. “Sheriff?”

“Leonard M. Blood.”

The agent nodded. “Reginald Perkins, FBI. Special Agent in Charge, Butte, Montana. Local field office for this region.”

Moody interrupted loudly. “What the hell is this?”

He was looking at Blood. His eyes were big and wet with anger. Blood turned to him. “There’s children up there, Moody. And other families. Look at your men here. Walking around with their safeties off, all anxious. This needs discipline.”

Moody came closer and said lowly, “You Indian son of a bitch. First you kneecap one of my men, now you kneecap me.”

Blood merely nodded at that. He returned to Perkins. “I called you men from the hospital. He’s got loyal neighbors up there.”

Perkins nodded. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll get your statement later.”

Blood had been dismissed so fast he didn’t even know it. It was remarkable, the ease. He was still looking at Perkins, realizing this, but Perkins’s attention was given over now to a gathering rumble coming up the mountain road behind. Blood turned.

The signboard above the broad windshield read CHARTERED in yellow block lettering. The bus, silver and green, airport-style, labored over the rise and halfway into the center of the clearing and stopped there with a gusty sigh. It was full of uniformed men.

The door folded back and open and a black man stepped out. He wore a blue jumpsuit with a black flak vest over it, black boots, a black ball cap with a yellow star insignia, and a holstered sidearm.

He stood for a moment, looking around at the trees and the distant green mountains. The man wore an expression of impatient disbelief. Then he started toward the gathering, keenly aware of his audience, walking slowly, boot-proud, over the dry, weedy dirt. Closer, his skin was richly black, his nose large, lips curled into a no-nonsense grimace. The lettering around the gold star on his ball cap and underneath the badge pinned to his chest read UNITED STATES MARSHAL.

He eyed all, then zeroed in on Perkins and spoke roughly. “FBI?” he said.

Perkins went forward. “Perkins, SAC, Butte.”

“Fagin, Deputy Marshal, L.A.”

They nodded at each other cursorily, then Fagin stepped off and scanned the clearing again, as though looking for a good place to spit. “Where the fuck am I?” he said.

Perkins said, “You’re in Montana. The northwestern corner, a gunshot away from the Canadian border. This is Paradise Ridge.”

Fagin squinted up at the small mountain. “Son of a bitch finally forced our hand.”

Moody came forward. “This area is secured.”

Fagin regarded him and his uniform, then saw Blood.

“Chief of Police,” Fagin said. “And a real, live sheriff. Well, how-dee.” He sized up all the blue uniforms behind, and the white men wearing them, looking from face to face, his rough voice rising. “Maybe one of you men here can point out to me the Einstein who got it in his fucking head to go knocking on this federal fugitive’s fucking front door.”

Blood swallowed. He licked his lips and acknowledged a burning on the back of his neck. “That would be me,” he said.

Fagin turned back to him, staring, near enough that Blood could smell the tobacco of his last cigar. “Do you know where I spent the last two weeks?” he said, taking another step closer. “I spent the last fourteen fucking days up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire with my Special Ops Group, spending taxpayers’ money and freezing my fucking ass preparing for a tactical apprehension operation up here in the Montana hills — a full-blown fucking TAO. We were going to take this motherfucker down.”

Blood held his own. “I had a notice to evict,” he told him. “That’s all I knew.”

Fagin nodded, mouth curled, voice low and patronizing. “Well, Kemo Sabe,” he said, “I guess the element of surprise is pretty well gone now.”

Perkins stepped in then, like a referee. “What’s this guy Ables’s file?” he said. “We heard weapons.”

Fagin broke off slowly from Blood, backing away. “Illegal firearms trafficking, bench warrant default. Dabbles in explosives. Also, civil rights violations. No formal charges, but it’s part of his file. Hillbilly Aryan. A known white supremacist.”

His words were greeted with neither shock nor surprise from the policemen. Fagin surveyed the assembled uniforms with a sneer that could otherwise have been considered a grin. “And no one says a fucking word,” he said.

Fagin looked back at the bus and made a circular motion in the air with his forefinger. Marshals saddled with rifles and gear began climbing out. Fagin said, “All right. We’ll bivouac a fire base right here, tents and trailers for an overnight. Clear out this area and start e-vacking the locals.” He looked across at Perkins. “This fucker’s got his whole family up there,” he said. “You’re the local negotiator?”

Perkins looked warily around the clearing. “Maybe I’ll check with the Bureau on this one,” he said.

Dawn. Morning comes fast to the top of a mountain, like someone polishing the great black night sky, revealing it to be blue. Deputy Marshal Bascombe’s breath swirled in the growing light around him. His thermal underwear was a half size too small and pulled at him in all the wrong places, and his stomach was grumbling again.

He was in the fifth hour of his third surveillance watch. They had come up the mountainside in two-by-two cover formation to a gully thirty-five yards below the cabin. Or was it a ravine? The sides were smooth. Like a trench at this point, cutting horizontally across the mountain, then falling off through the trees and trailing away. Whatever it was, it was not man-made.

He was kneeling down, well hidden, with a good view of the cabin through the trees. He ran his thumb and forefinger along his upper lip, smoothing out his mustache. The boredom of a surveillance run. Bascombe looked around for birds. Because there was a deadness in these woods, a stillness, more like December than August, and there should have been birds. In the hometown of his youth, in rural Maryland, he had walked through the woods to school each day, browner woods than these, and there were hummingbirds that darted through the air, careening around tree trunks like bullets with wings. And if he stood still long enough in those woods, a stray hummingbird might careen around him too, mistaking him for a tree and rocketing toward him, jumping from breeze to breeze, and he would shut his eyes and feel it splitting the air around him and hear its small wings, fast like an insect’s, fanning a hairpin turn. Then he would open his eyes and watch it darting around tree trunks and away.

So there should have been birds here, and animals, something rustling in the underbrush other than deputy marshals. Squirrels in the trees, brown toads hopping, even coyotes. But — birds. If only to eat up some of the damn bugs.

It was the beginning of the marshals’ second full day on the mountain. They slept in cots on pancake mattresses and ate Red Cross “food.” They showered eight at a time, one minute lukewarm and two minutes cold. You could go a full wrist rotation between FM radio stations, from French blah-BLAH-blah to Bible readings and doomsday predictions. Hell is a place with no takeout and no classic rock. It’s a place full of bugs and no birds. Where the wilderness is silent except for your stomach rumbling and the odd crackle of static through the radio wire in your ear.