Page 52 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)

52.

TC McGuire had put out a BOLO, a be-on-the-lookout-for bulletin, describing Bear, including screenshots from the mine security footage.

Sitting across from him in the command post, Debi Starr asked, “Did you say he’s wanted in connection to a capital murder case?”

McGuire said he had not but would revise the announcement.

California still had the death penalty for certain homicides—like this, committing murder-for-hire, though the state had not in fact executed anyone in years.

But the designation was an attention-getter.

Starr said to Tamara Olsen, “You ever do demolition?”

“Some.”

“Mind looking at some tough pictures?”

“I guess not.”

The officer displayed what Shaw could see were images of the deadly workshop she’d taken with the digital camera. With the flash, it was as if she had used a vivid setting; the blood was particularly bright, the scorch particularly black.

“Hm. The head…” The sergeant was clearly taken aback. As Shaw had guessed, she had little, if any, combat experience.

Starr asked, “How much C-four would you think could cause that?”

“Half kilo. Maybe little more.”

Shaw would have thought the amount would be less, but his knowledge of explosives was largely theoretical. He’d set dynamite charges to blow snowbanks for controlled avalanches. And he’d disarmed a bomb once. It had been fake—used as a diversion—but he hadn’t known at the time it wasn’t real.

“And how much was used on the top of the levee this morning?”

Olsen now looked over the waterfall. “Two ki’s.”

Starr said, “Assuming that this was part of the batch stolen from the armory, that leaves more than two kilos for the lower part. Would that be enough to bring it all down?”

It was Dorion who spoke now. “It could. But remember, it doesn’t have to blow the whole thing. One big V-shaped notch would still produce the same level of flooding.”

Olsen said she agreed. Her phone hummed and she took a call. After a brief conversation, she disconnected. “The first chopper’ll be here in about forty minutes, with the bomb curtains. I’m going back to the motel to pick up the rest of the gear we’ll need.”

Starr asked, “Anything we should do?”

As she walked away, she gave a faint laugh. “Pray for no short circuits in the detonators.”

Just after she cruised down the hill in her SUV, a dark gray pickup made its way to the command post and stopped.

“She’s here,” Dorion whispered to Colter.

It was Mary Dove. The vehicle rocked to a stop. The lean woman, with the same silver braid as yesterday, climbed out. Usually dressed in a long skirt, today she wore jeans and a work shirt under a black leather jacket. Cowboy boots. The F-150 featured a rifle rack in the back window and Shaw noted that her favorite weapon, a Winchester .308—the same as Bear’s gun—sat beneath a Ruger cylinder-fed .22 carbine, silver and black.

There was no greeting other than nods among the Shaw family. They had, after all, breakfasted together just yesterday. Shaw made introductions, and Mary Dove took in the names of those present. Shaw knew she would be memorizing them and making minute observations about each one.

She would also be noting in particular her son’s own grim expression, its genesis: Annie Coyne’s arrest.

Absurd.

And yet Debi Starr presented sufficient probable cause to the difficult magistrate to justify the warrant.

He recalled too the blaze in Coyne’s eyes when the subject of Redding and his father, and the old man’s “theft” of the farmland years ago at a poker table, was brought up.

He chose not to play the percentage game as to her innocence or guilt.

Mary Dove was regarding the levee. “My. It looks fragile. What’s the prognosis?”

The word came to her naturally. She was, after all, a medical doctor.

Dorion said, “We just don’t know.”

Tolifson offered, “And there could be another IED inside.”

Colter said, “We’re getting bomb curtains to drape over the top. Army Corps of Engineers. The woman you passed on the way up here. Forty minutes.”

“And what’s our percentage that’ll work?” she asked her son.

Everyone in the family knew his numeric approach to decision making (even his nieces, who recently estimated the odds that he could be talked into buying ice cream on any particular visit at eighty-two percent).

“Have to keep that one blank for the time being. Not enough data.”

The woman looked down at the village. “And your remainer is still there? Mrs. Petaluma.”

Dorion nodded and pointed to the house and the garden.

Starr grimaced. “And just so you know. She’s armed.”

“Has she shot anybody?”

“Not in recent memory,” the policewoman said

“And you speak the same language?” Starr asked.

“I speak Ohlone and some Miwok. And I would think, her being from around here, she speaks mostly Miwok. But they’re related languages. She’ll understand me well enough.”

Tolifson said, “As long as we can make her appreciate the danger. But I was thinking you could appeal to her heart. Say the town thinks of her as a valuable resident. We’d be devastated if anything happened to her. And—to be frank—if the levee does go, we’re going to have our hands full…” His voice faded, as often happened, when Mary Dove turned her gaze toward someone.

“With all respect, Mayor. I’m not asking about language for accurate translation. She understood everything you’ve said to her and everything she heard on the TV. This is something different.” She eyed the man closely. “There’s an expression allinik liwwap. It means ‘white people talking.’?”

“Not trusting what we’re telling her.”

“Partly that. Also, you’re not getting where she’s coming from. Now, I’ll see what I can do.” Mary Dove walked to the truck.

“No,” Dorion and Shaw said simultaneously.

She looked back.

“You’ll have to do it by phone.”

“I’ve already tried her,” their mother pointed out. “She didn’t return the calls.”

“You can’t go down there,” Colter said. “Because of the levee.”

Dorion said, “Water like that, you can’t outrun.”

She debated. Then pulled her mobile out of her back pocket and hit a redial button.

A tilt of her head. “Voicemail.” After a moment she said into the unit, “ Ku?í hiéma. Hópopi kan Mary Dove Shaw.”

She left a brief message in both Indigenous and English and then her number.

Slipping her phone back, she said, “We’ll see.”

“Any other remainers?” Mary Dove asked.

McGuire said, “A couple of families we think have some meth or opioids they don’t want to lose. Then a couple of crazy survivalists. Those people. Wacky, you know.”

The Shaw family regarded each other with varying degrees of smiles on their faces.

Then Colter noted the transport van, in which Annie Coyne was being held, drive up the hill and park about a hundred yards south of the CP.

Colter’s phone hummed and he glanced at the text. After reading it, he gazed out of the town for a moment and then asked, “TC?”

“Yessir?” McGuire responded.

“You know computers pretty well, I’ve been noticing.”

“Some. For an old guy like me.”

“I’ve got a job for you.” Shaw turned the man’s laptop his way.