Chapter 1 #3
Leonard went to look at his potential office, while Sherwood, Lucas, White, and Martha eventually congregated in the kitchen, where a window over the kitchen sink looked across a semicircular flower garden, now a bristling clump of cut-down plants poking up through the shallow snow.
“That’s a spy hat you’re wearing,” White said to Sherwood. “European. Viennese, like in the movies. Don’t see those much in Minnesota.”
Sherwood started to smile at White as Leonard wandered into the kitchen, carrying an unlit cigar. He stepped past his wife, opened his mouth to say something to Sherwood, dropped the cigar, quickly bent to pick it up…
· · ·
WHACK/BANG!
The two sounds were not simultaneous, though nearly so, as the bullet was traveling at three thousand feet per second, and the sound of the shot itself at only eleven hundred.
The high-velocity slug punched through the kitchen window glass two inches above Leonard’s bowed head and hit Martha in the cheek below her right eye, splattering blood and bone around the kitchen.
“Jesus! Jesus!” somebody screamed, a gravelly masculine shriek of either alarm or fear, and Sherwood reeled away from the falling woman. Lucas, who had been looking down the hall toward the living room, jerked away and saw White, her face covered with blood, dropping toward the floor.
Sherwood snagged Leonard by his jacket and yanked him to the floor and Lucas shouted at him, “Refrigerator,” and another slug punched through, lower, and missed everything, and Sherwood dragged Leonard behind the refrigerator and Lucas grabbed White, who he thought had been hit, to drag her out of the kitchen, but she slapped his hand away and said, “I’m okay, got some spatter,” and crawled with him into the living room.
Lucas said, “They gotta have come in from the circle, they gotta be running…” and White, already fumbling for her pistol, shouted, “Go, go, go…”
They scrambled toward the front door, hands and knees, heard Bernie screaming, “Mama, mama…” and another marshal shouting at somebody, “Stay down, get in here…roll in here…” and somebody else shouted, “Watch the back door, watch the back…”
Lucas and White had been low-crawling across the entry space. At the front door, Lucas got to his knees and looked out through the small security window in the door, couldn’t see anything but trees and parked cars.
Beard shouted, “Stay here! Stay here! Cover Leonard and Bernard, shape up, guys…”
He wasn’t shouting at Lucas and White, but at his own men. White had gone sideways, peeked out a window that looked toward the woods where the shot had come from, and snapped at Lucas: “Nothing moving! Don’t see anyone! Are they waiting to take another shot, or…”
Lucas: “They’re running, they gotta be. They can’t wait, not with the muzzle blast from the rifle. You could hear it a mile away. People will be looking at them already. They gotta know there are a bunch of guns in here.”
He yanked the front door open, looked out and sideways, ran down the front steps, his Walther in his hand, watching the woods as he went, stumbling a couple of times, the heavy Sorel boots awkward at speed. White was a step behind him, gun up, peering into the woods.
A blue Jeep Wagoneer flashed by the driveway entrance as they ran past the parked SUVs. When they reached the end of the driveway, they saw it stop at the next driveway as two men burst out of the woods, both in parkas, one carrying a rifle, one carrying a spotting scope on a folded tripod.
They popped doors on opposite sides of the Wagoneer and climbed in and Lucas started firing at the truck, felt White line up next to him, as though they were on a shooting range, or a firing squad, and together they put thirty-four rounds into and around the truck, which accelerated out of the cul-de-sac and onto the main street.
Lucas reloaded, jammed the Walther back in his holster, took out his iPhone and called 9-1-1.
When it was answered, he shouted, “U.S. Marshal: we’ve got a woman shot and the shooter is running in a blue Jeep Wagoneer north on Willow Drive in Orono toward Highway 12, it’ll be full of bullet holes, shattered back window, at least three guys inside, they’re armed and professionals, stop them but don’t approach them, they have a rifle and probably other weapons, we need an ambulance right now, right now! ”
It all came out in one long sentence, and he could hear the 9-1-1 operator shouting at someone else and he gave her the address for the ambulance and turned and saw White running toward her 4Runner, which she’d left parked in the circle so the Witness Protection people could have the driveway.
She was in the truck in a minute and accelerated toward Lucas as he stepped into the street and he was repeating everything to a new voice on the 9-1-1 call and White skidded to a stop and he climbed in the passenger side and shouted, “Go,” and she went.
The new 9-1-1 operator was talking to him and he repeated most of what he’d already said, but more slowly, with road directions as best he knew them, told the operator that they were in pursuit and the operator said everything was coming, but there wasn’t much around, so it would be a few minutes before anything got there.
There was no traffic at all. White accelerated across strips of black ice, the tires got loose and she nearly took out a spruce tree, but she got it back and punched the truck onto Willow. Looking down the long straight road, they saw no sign of the Jeep.
There were narrow side roads coming off Willow and Lucas checked them as best he could as White said, “I don’t think they’d go in there, lots of dead ends and all tangled up, can’t move fast, bet they went to the highway…”
“Probably, but they must’ve scouted the area, maybe they knew a better way out…”
They were coming up to a cluster of buildings and a U.S. Inn motel and Lucas saw the huge blue Wagoneer in the motel’s parking lot, oddly angled in a parking space and he pointed and said “Shelly! Shelly! There! There!”
White took the truck that way, bouncing across a curb past a fire hydrant and between two parked cars and a minute later they were blocking the Wagoneer and were out of the 4Runner, fresh mags in their pistols.
Lucas called, “Wait it out, wait it out,” and they waited behind the 4Runner, looking for life, as a family gawked at them, trailing roller-suitcases toward the motel’s front door and White screamed, “Don’t go there, go back to your car. U.S. Marshals. Go back, go back, run!”
The family ran back toward their pickup, still trailing the suitcases as Lucas yelled at White, “Don’t see anyone, I think they ditched it…”
Lucas got back on his phone, still open to the 9-1-1 operator, and said, “The Wagoneer is at the U.S. Inn off whatever the fuck it is, Willow and Highway 12. We’re covering it, they’re either inside the truck or they’re inside the motel or they got picked up here…”
Nothing moved in the Jeep. The back window was mostly shot out and they could see what looked like a dozen bullet holes in the tailgate. White said, “Watch it. I’m gonna go low and peek.”
“I gotcha,” Lucas said.
He braced his arm on the side of the truck, pistol pointed at the Wagoneer as White scrambled toward the truck in a half-duckwalk, half-run.
She sheltered behind the back right fender, got a two-handed grip on her pistol, then peeked in the back window, quickly up-and-down, hopped a couple of feet, then peeked again, more slowly, then stood up a third time for a good look from a different spot.
She turned to Lucas: “Empty…”
Lucas’s phone rang, but he rejected it and went back to 9-1-1 and told the operator that the truck was empty and that the shooters were either inside the motel or gone.
The operator said, “One minute, two cars. We got more coming. Are you going in?”
“We gotta check the truck,” Lucas said, “Then we’re going inside.”
“Wait for backup, Marshal! Wait for backup! It’s close!” the operator said.
White had already pulled open the driver’s-side door and Lucas went that way and his phone rang again: Beard, the lead marshal.
“Where are you?”
Lucas told him and told him that an ambulance was on the way to the house.
White reached out for his phone and Lucas gave it to her and she said, “Looks like there were three of them. We shot up the getaway vehicle, we’ve got blood in the back seat and the passenger seat, quite a bit of it, and a little blood on the windshield but none on the driver’s seat.
They’ve got at least two wounded and one, probably one, still okay, but the driver might have been hit high and that’s the windshield blood.
They’ve still got a rifle unless they threw it out the window on the way over here. ”
Then she listened and said, “Okay, there’ll be some cops here in a minute and we’re going into the motel to check it out, but I don’t see any blood trails on the ground here. I think they’re gone.”
Lucas held out his hand for the phone and White handed it to him and he said, “I can see three video cameras in this parking lot so if they’re running, we’ve probably got their vehicle on video.
As soon as the cops get here…” A cop car pulled into the parking lot as he spoke.
“…And there’s one here right now. We’re going in, we’ll try to get the video, you’ve got to start talking to everybody about tracking them. ”
“Got it. We’ll be there in a couple of minutes, me and Sherwood,” Beard said.
“Martha?”
“Martha’s dead,” Beard said. “Half of her head is gone.”
“Ah, man. We’ll be inside the motel.”
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One cop got out of the first-arriving car, and then another pulled in, also with a lone cop. White waved them over, said one of them should cover the truck as a crime scene while the other came with her and Lucas, into the motel.
“We need a uniform,” she said.