William Krueger - Northwest Angle

A man shot through the right eye. Cork knew that, before Meloux’s hands began to tremble, the old Mide might still have been able to make such a difficult shot. But now?

“Any gunfire from the cabin?” he asked.

“No. Nothing but silence. Oh, by the way, we’ve got an update from the Northwest Angle. Before the Lake of the Woods sheriff’s people arrived, there’d been a significant exchange of gunfire on Oak Island between the Seven Trumpets people and some locals. There were casualties, but the situation’s under control.”

“Any ID on the casualties?”

“Not yet.”

Cork, of necessity, put aside his concern over those they’d left behind on Oak Island, closed his eyes, and thought out loud. “Three men down. That means Abigail Hornett is still alive and inside, along with the last man from Seven Trumpets. Did Pender get a look at the two guys with Jenny and Stephen?”

“Yeah. Black hair, lanky, maybe six feet. Once we ID’d Gabriel Hornett, Pender confirmed that he’d been one of the men. Pender also said the other guy looked a lot like him.”

“Joshua Hornett, his brother.”

“Real soldiers of God,” Ed Larson said. The first words he’d spoken, and it was as if he’d spit. He was a man nearing sixty, slender and with grayed temples. He wore wire rims. Although he headed up major crimes investigation for the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department, he looked as if he’d be more at home in a college classroom. “True believers. The worst kind.”

“Gabriel Hornett, for sure,” Cork said. “But from what I understand, not so much his brother, right, Sarah?”

Sarah Hornett stood by herself. Among the gathering of law officers, she’d looked helpless and a little dazed. When Cork spoke to her, she seemed grateful to be able to offer something.

“Joshua’s not like the others,” she told them. “He doesn’t really believe all that crap. He’s just weak and won’t stand up to them. He scares pretty easy.”

Anne and Rose and Mal stood near Cork. The two women held hands. Cork glanced at them, wanting to offer assurance, but at the moment, he had none.

“You have a plan?” he asked Dross, and then shot a look at Larson. Their too long delay in replying told him everything he needed to know.

“We’ve got a call into Bemidji BCA for a hostage negotiator,” Larson said.

“It’ll take hours for him to get here,” Cork said. “And that’ll only work if you can get those Seven Trumpets people talking.”

What he was afraid of but didn’t say because of the proximity of Anne and Rose was that in a situation like this, with Abigail Hornett, the truest of the believers, inside, she might well choose the road of martyrdom over negotiation, go out in a flame of religious fervor and a hail of bullets and take the hostages with her. She was the person probably responsible for the torture and murder of Lily Smalldog. God alone knew the full horror of her capabilities.

“Who’s in the rocks?” he asked.

“Morgan and Pender.”

That was good. Aside from Meloux when he’d been a young man, Cork didn’t know anyone who was better with a rifle than Howard Morgan.

“What did you issue Morgan?”

“The Remington M-Twenty-four.”

“All right,” Cork said, thinking fast. “Meloux’s cabin has a window in the west wall. It looks out at the rocks where you’ve got Morgan and Pender. If we can get Abigail Hornett to the center of that room, Morgan’ll have a good chance of taking her out.”

“How do we do that?” Larson said. “If those two Seven Trumpets people have half a brain, they’re not going to do anything that’ll give us a clear shot.”

“We leave that up to Meloux,” Cork told him.

“If he’s still alive,” Larson said.

Which was a possibility Cork hadn’t considered. And decided not to.

He explained what he had in mind and ended with “If it doesn’t work, they won’t be any worse off in that cabin than they are now.”

But if they were lucky, he thought to himself, if God or Kitchimanidoo or simple luck were on their side, Jenny and Stephen and the others might have a chance.

“If Morgan is able to take out the woman, that still leaves one of the Seven Trumpets inside,” Larson said.

“Cut off a snake’s head and the body dies,” Cork said. “It’s Joshua Hornett with her. If what Sarah says is true, he’s different from his mother. She’s the head; he just follows.”

“It’s true,” Sarah insisted.

Dross shook her head faintly, not convinced.

“Look, Marsha, those are my children in there, my friends,” Cork argued. “And Abigail Hornett, she’s already tortured and killed a young girl and was more than willing to skin that baby alive if it got her what she wanted. To her, they’re all doomed anyway, all part of the army of Satan. And in her deranged thinking, she’s the good guy. I believe she wouldn’t hesitate to kill them all, negotiator or no. The sooner we get her out of the picture, the better chance we have of getting everyone else out of there alive. Believe me, Marsha.”

He knew this was one of the most difficult decisions she’d ever had to make, but he was determined she would.

“Make the call,” he said.

She looked toward the cabin and said mostly to herself, “If it doesn’t work, they’re no worse off.”

“That’s right,” Cork agreed quietly, as if he were the voice of her conscience.

She turned to Larson. “Call Morgan,” she said. “Explain it to him. Tell him to be ready to take the shot when the opportunity comes. Don’t wait for our okay.”

“There are two other women in there,” Cork reminded Larson. “You tell Morgan to make absolutely certain of his target before he fires.”

“He knows that,” Larson said. He put a reassuring hand on Cork’s shoulder, then moved away to make radio contact with Morgan.

The bullhorn sat on the ground at Dross’s feet. She opened her hand toward it. “Your show, Cork.”

FIFTY-TWO

As if prisoners of war, they’d been marched to the cabin, an armed man leading and another bringing up the rear. Jenny and Stephen held the ice chest between them with Waaboo cradled inside. He was quiet, which because of all the activity and tension, Jenny thought was odd. But she knew him well enough now to understand that he was a child who, more often than not, was perfectly content to observe.

They came to the clearing on Crow Point, and as they crossed the meadow, Jenny saw an outline of flattened wild grass and then saw the body that lay there.

“Keep moving,” the man at her back ordered.

They approached the cabin, and everything inside her screamed not to enter. When they’d fled, Meloux had been alive. There’d been gunfire behind them, a lot of it, and then silence. Because these men had come for them despite Meloux’s intervention, Jenny believed the fine old man was dead. And his bullet-riddled body was something she did not want to see.

The door opened at their approach, and the woman Aaron had introduced as Abigail stepped out. She held a military-looking rifle, and seemed quite comfortable with it in her callused hands. She said to the man in the lead, “There was one more. Where is he?”

“Fish food,” came the reply.

The woman nodded and looked directly at Jenny, as if to gauge the effect of this exchange, and Jenny made her face stone. She was determined to give this woman nothing. As if she’d erected a shield, she wouldn’t even allow herself to think about Aaron now. For Waaboo, she held herself together. She had to be there, in each moment, be vigilant and alert. She had to watch for any opportunity to act, because if she didn’t find a way to change the direction everything was headed, they would, all of them—she and Waaboo and Stephen and Rainy—end up as outlines in the wild grass.