Chapter 3 #2
The rest of their conversation was jumbled, confused, bits and pieces, with a lot of silence.
They’d all seen death, and Lucas and White had been shot themselves, but to see it close up, widescreen with surround sound, as they had with Masha Sokolov, left them shocked; left them with things to think about on their own.
When they got back to the hideout, two local cop cars were parked in the street next to the driveway, the cops standing beside their vehicles, apparently to keep any traffic moving through.
“Let’s go see where the shots came from,” Sherwood said.
A Hennepin County ambulance was at the top of the drive, engine turning over, a paramedic sitting inside the open back doors, reading his phone. He glanced up and nodded as they passed and went back to his phone.
Beard had arrived a minute earlier. Inside the hideout, he’d peeled off to talk to his men, who were posted around the interior, looking out.
Lucas, White, and Sherwood headed for the kitchen.
They passed Bernie, who was lying on the living room couch, forearm across his eyes.
He sobbed once, and then they were in the kitchen. Leonid was nowhere to be seen.
Masha was still on the blood-soaked floor, a tall woman gone small in death, curled up in a fetal position; she looked crumpled, like a paper wad.
A butcher-shop odor hung in the kitchen.
Sherwood stepped past her, apparently unaffected by the body and blood, looked at a cabinet hit by the slug after it went through Masha’s head, and lined it up with a bullet hole in the kitchen window.
“Right in the direction of that big black tree?” he asked.
“Cottonwood, yeah.” Lucas wouldn’t look directly at Masha, a life gone to waste.
He kept his neck bent away as he looked out the window and said, “That’s about right.
Let’s go check it out. We saw where they came out of the woods, there’s enough snow that we should be able to follow their tracks back to where they were set up. Don’t think there’ll be much to see.”
“We gotta look,” White said. “Maybe somebody dropped a matchbook from the bar they hang out at.”
Sherwood frowned at her, then shrugged: “Marshals are weird,” he said.
“We get that way,” Lucas agreed. “Let’s go.”
They walked out the driveway and Lucas saw pencil-thin rims of Masha’s blood coming off Sherwood’s left shoe. They turned left up the street and White said to Sherwood, “You didn’t seem all that upset by the shooting.”
“If I’d been hit, I would have been,” Sherwood said.
White persisted: “But you’ve seen shot-up people before.”
“Oh, yeah. You know. It was a war.”
“Iraq?”
“Some, earlier on. Then some in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then later, some more time in Syria.”
“I know a CIA sniper who used to go through there,” Lucas said.
“What’s his name?” Sherwood asked, curious.
“It’s a her, though she won’t admit to being with the CIA. She works with an Unspecified Agency. Barbara Cartwright.”
“Wow. I know Barb, a bit.” Sherwood laughed, shook his head. “She’s a piece of work. She’s got a legend going. How did you hook up with her?”
“Met her out in Taos, New Mexico, during that virus hassle,” Lucas said.
“You’re not the guy…There was a marshal who had a daughter…”
“Yeah, that’s me,” Lucas said. “Me and my daughter Letty.”
“Didn’t know that, and I should have,” Sherwood said. “Wasn’t in my backgrounder package. You guys did a nice job out there.”
“Lucas certainly thinks so,” White said. “His head was the size of a fuckin’ watermelon, until he had to start doing regular marshal stuff again.”
“Barb about burned down the Albuquerque airport, as I hear it,” Sherwood said. “We were all pretty proud of her, the amount of damage she did.”
“Two million bucks’ worth of cars and trucks, up in smoke,” Lucas said. “Didn’t do the parking garage any good, either. I understand they’ve been working on the third floor ever since.”
· · ·
“Tracks,” White said, pointing into a shallow roadside ditch. To Sherwood, she said, “That’s not really a heavy-duty coat you got there. That’s a fashion coat. Aren’t you cold?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t allow it.” He didn’t smile.
White had no response to that, and kept her mouth shut.
· · ·
The tracks led back into the woods between the Sokolov house and the next one up the circle. They followed through the trees and around the brush, and Lucas pointed out White’s and his own tracks where they crossed the sniper’s and the spotter’s.
They were close to one of the other houses, and a man shouted at them, “Hey! What are you guys doing?”
White shouted back, “U.S. Marshals. Go back inside.”
“Did you shoot someone?”
“No.”
“We heard a gunshot. A bunch of gunshots.”
“All done now. Go back inside. Don’t come out here, a crime scene crew is on its way. If you mess up a crime scene, you go to jail.”
The man retreated, muttering.
· · ·
The shooters had been following a game trail in the thin snow, frozen leaves crisp underfoot like potato chips, and walking to one side of the trail, the three of them found the sniper’s nest quickly enough.
The gunman had set up behind a fallen tree and had used a hand-sized black sandbag on the trunk to steady the rifle. The sandbag was still in place. Three holes in the snow, and elbow and knee prints, marked the spot where the spotting scope had been mounted on a tripod.
“He’s a good shot,” Sherwood said, looking down toward the hideout. “Threaded that slug over and under quite a bit of brush.”
“They were in and out in a hurry,” White said, looking at the setup. “No snow melt where the shooter’s legs were, or the spotter’s knees. They came, they saw, they shot, they ran.”
“Which makes me think about a drone again,” Sherwood said, looking up at the sky.
“Overhead’s pretty thin. Maybe it’d be too high to be heard.
It spots our SUVs coming in and that triggers the shooters.
They were here in what, fifteen minutes?
They knew where they were going and exactly how long it would take to get here, where they would go in the woods.
They did all that even though they couldn’t know that we’d be late arriving. ”
Lucas nodded and said, “Brass,” and pointed. “Don’t touch anything.”
Sherwood and White looked at the end of a rifle shell protruding from the snow near the log. Lucas bent over it, close enough to see the stamp on the case head, stood up and said, “Huh. Says .277, never heard of it. There’s another shell over there, so it’s a semiauto, at least.”
“That’s the new Army rifle,” Sherwood said. “Rare gun, at this point. I guess some of them are getting out to the public, a civilian version. If it’d been a stolen Army rifle, they could have hosed down the whole kitchen and we’d all be dead.”
“The American Army, you mean, not Russian,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. You can touch the shell, if you want to look at it. This won’t be a basic police investigation, looking at a trial,” Sherwood said.
“These people are not the kind to surrender. It’ll come to a bloody end, or if they manage to exfiltrate, nothing at all.
We’re locking down private jets, by the way.
Nothing moves in or out of the local airports without a complete inspection.
Wherever they are, they’re going by car.
They’ll have to do something about their wounded. ”
“I’ll leave the shells for the crime scene people—you can never tell what’s going to happen. By the way, you also ought to lock down some U.S. Marshal cell phones,” Lucas said. “If they were tipped by one of the marshals here, it would have had to be by a cell phone.”
“Yes, I thought of that, and we will do that,” Sherwood said.
He looked through the woods to the house and said, “This was a nice op, up to the point where you two ran down the driveway and shot them up. That shouldn’t have happened.
The driver should have been covering them with an automatic weapon, just in case. She didn’t.”
“You sound disappointed,” White said.
“You learn from the mistakes of the dead and wounded,” Sherwood said, like a classroom professor.
“Somebody didn’t think this through, not quite well enough.
They didn’t think about the Marshal’s Service and all the guns you people carry.
I’d be more impressed by the hitters if you two were dead at the end of the driveway. ”
“Thanks,” White said.
“Didn’t say I’d be happy; just impressed,” Sherwood said.
· · ·
Not happy, just impressed. Lucas felt a finger of the depression ghost stroking his brain.
He’d been close to two high-powered rifle slugs, hadn’t been hit, but had seen the blood spraying across the hideout’s kitchen, had thought for an instant that a friend had been hit—White still showed streaks of blood on her parka.
If it got worse, he’d be on the meds again.
He hated them, but clinical depression was a real thing, and not his friend.
It wasn’t a coincidence, because White was feeling the same finger: she asked: “You okay?”
“Yeah. Sorta getting on some hate.”
· · ·
Lucas’s phone rang and he took it out. He recognized the 9-1-1 operator’s voice when she said, “We found your Subaru, but you’re not going to like it.”
“Where is it?”
“I understand it’s in a little lane up by Barret’s Pond. Abandoned. No cameras nearby. No way to walk out of there, I’m told, so it looks like there was a third car picking them up. More blood in the Subaru.”
“Gimme the address. We’ll head up there.” Lucas took down the address, and after a last look around, they started walking back to the house. The sky was turning darker, and the cold was getting stronger.
· · ·
Sherwood: “Before we leave here…I have to ask for your phones.”
White: “Aw, man, we’re the ones who lit them up.”