Page 61 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)

61.

Another thought landed hard in Colter Shaw’s mind.

If Annie Coyne was the fall person, which he knew was true, she had to be eliminated.

It was the only way the plot would work. Alive, she would deliver credible alibis, counter evidence and witnesses to prove she wasn’t behind the levee explosion or the planting of lithium samples.

But if she were to die, the authorities would be inclined to follow the path of least resistance in the investigation: assign the guilt to her and close the case.

He drew his weapon.

“Colter,” Starr began, “what…”

“Bring the keys to the van.”

“Heck. Of course!” Nodding, she clearly understood.

She started after him, fishing in her pocket, as the items on her service belt bounced sideways and up and down. The woman was getting quite a spoonful of law enforcement today, the sort that had surely never been seen in a small town before.

More activity in a single day than any true crime podcast could offer up in a month.

He sprinted through brush down the hill toward the van. Just as he broke from the bushes he saw Bear, holding a gas can in both hands. Their eyes met and Colter aimed in his direction. Bear was strong but a three-gallon container weighs about twenty-five pounds. He was straining to hold it. The cap was off.

“Down. Careful.” Colter didn’t want it to tip over and spill. The engine of the van was running and the hot tailpipe might set off a blaze.

The man nodded. And began to crouch and do as told. “Okay, Mr. Shovel. We’re all good here.”

Starr ran up and targeted him too. The big gun was held steady in her hand.

“Have to ask: You know how to use that thing?” Colter whispered.

“I plink pennies with my twenty-two on the range. Make souvenirs for the twins and their friends. Twenty-five and fifty feet.”

Hitting coins at that distance? Hell, she could outshoot him.

“Lie face down on the ground!” she called.

Bear was crouching, the can now resting on the grass. His hand rested atop it, and he wasn’t doing as she instructed.

Starr said, “I’m considering that a deadly weapon and you should understand that that authorizes me to use force to stop you.”

Nothing.

“Sir, that translates into I am about to shoot you in the face.”

“All right!” He released his grip on the can.

A breeze blew it over.

No!

He’d been faking the weight. The gas was already under the van. And in his left hand was a cigarette lighter.

Without a word, Starr fired but just as she did, Bear dropped fully to the ground and touched the lighter to the pool of gas.

It erupted in a huge tower of orange and blue flames and a cloud of smoke. The man probably lost hairs on his forearm and maybe some skin but the tactic worked. He had put up an effective smoke screen. They heard two shots from the other side as the man fired, but he had no better target of them than they did of him. Glancing back to the command post, Colter saw that Tolifson, Dorion and Lavelle were crouching but none had been hit.

He and Starr didn’t return fire.

Never fire a weapon without a clear view of your target and what’s behind it.

The two ran forward to the van, and he skirted the flames to the left, Starr to the right, both staying low. But the man was gone.

Starr could get nowhere near the rear door, the only one accessing the prisoner compartment. Colter glanced into the driver’s seat; there was a small grille-covered window between the driver’s and the prisoner’s areas. It was, however, only eight inches high.

Annie Coyne’s screams cut through the air—piercing even from inside the enclosed space.

Starr tried again but had to back away. “Colter, what should I do? I can’t get close! Can we shoot the lock out? She’s dying in there. Jesus!”

“No. Locks don’t shoot out.”

“Henry and the fire truck, they’re at the evac station. I don’t know—”

Colter squinted at the van and the surroundings. He said calmly, “Drive it away.”

“What?”

“Just get in and drive away from the flames. Fifteen feet, twenty.” He pointed uphill toward the CP.

“Oh.” A why-didn’t-I-think-of-that grimace. She ran to the driver’s side, leapt in and started the engine, then sped forward.

Colter looked underneath. The flames hadn’t spread far or enthusiastically, because of the soaked terrain, and the vehicle had not caught fire.

Starr stopped abruptly, slammed the transmission into park and jumped out, running to the back door.

Covering her as she opened the lock, looking for Bear, Colter called over of the roar and crackle of the flames, “You understand she’s innocent.”

“Yeah, yeah, Colter. All good. We’ll get it taken care of.”

She flung the door open.

Choking, Annie Coyne stumbled out.

Colter called to her, “Stay low and get to the command post.”

Coyne oriented herself and began to stagger there.

The officer started in that direction too.

“No,” Colter said. “Stay with me, Starr. Better shooting vantage.”

He was watching Bear’s F-150 pickup skid into downtown and race for the bridge over the spillway. It was a tough shot for their pistols and there was a risk they’d hit one of the houses that Bear sped past—houses that might be occupied by remainers.

He and Starr stood down from firing.

Then the man was over the bridge and disappearing into the forest on the road that led up to Route 13.

As soon as that happened, the corporals started firing toward the southern hilltop, basically covering shots to keep Colter and Starr down and stop them from hitting Bear’s truck when it emerged. Clearly, their operation had gone to hell and they needed to escape.

Colter and Starr crouched, though the slugs came nowhere close.

She placed a call—sheriff’s department again—and told whoever answered that the shoot-out was ongoing and they needed to get a roadblock on the south end of Route 13.

Colter didn’t disagree but he believed that would probably not be their escape route. He told her, “I think their plan is to head down one of the mining trails to a clearing, a chopper’ll pick them up. We have to stop them here, now.”

“You think they have a…Never mind. Whoever they’re working for has money. Of course there’s a helicopter.” She squinted at the Expeditions. “Okay, grilles and tires. Here we go.”

Colter nodded at his small pistol. “Not much good at this range. Shoot some pennies for us.”

The officer grinned, then did something that he’d never seen. She stepped back a few yards, walked behind a tree and rested her left hand on a branch, palm up, and placed her right, holding the pistol on it. You always fired a long gun on a rest, a pistol rarely.

There followed a stunning fusillade of shots from the big weapon. A pause between each one to reacquire, but no more than a second. Soon the slide locked back and she reloaded. He noted four extra mags. Twice what most cops carry.

“Glad I’m not a coin downrange from you,” he said, shouting since they were both partially deafened.

The grille of one vehicle was perforated and steaming, and two tires of the other were flattened.

Bear’s pickup—their escape vehicle—remained hidden in the brush; Starr had no target toward it.

Olsen and the fake corporals were now trapped on the east side of the highway, hunkered down behind the SUVs, which were nothing more than bullet-resistant barricades at this point. One of the men started across, shooting as he went but Starr fired his way—Colter let go a couple of rounds too—and the fake corporal dropped. He probably didn’t get hit, but his mind had been changed. He crawled back under cover.

Tolifson shouted, “CHP called me. They’re on the way. But they’re saying thirty minutes.”

A puff of smoke appeared from a tangle of brush behind which Bear’s truck was hidden. A big slug—a hunting-rifle bullet—suddenly snapped over Colter’s head.

He and Starr dropped.

Dirt kicked up behind them.

It would be the rifle Bear had used to shoot Ed Gutiérrez. And he clearly knew what he was about when it came to weapons.

Two more rounds followed the first. A pause.

Olsen and the corporals started across the highway but Starr rose quickly and fired, driving them back.

She dropped just as one of Bear’s slugs slammed into a tree very close to them, and two more followed, digging up dirt a few yards from them.

Another pause. Another trio of shots. They were getting closer.

“Internal mag,” Colter shouted.

She nodded.

Bear had a hunting rifle, which unlike an assault weapon had a fixed magazine that held only three rounds. After every third shot he would have to reload, which took maybe four or five seconds.

Colter said, “Count the rounds. We’ve got to get out of here. No cover.”

“I’ll draw him out,” Starr said. She rose fast, fired a few shots at the lead SUV, and when she dropped, they counted three rounds from Bear. The boom of the last shot had not subsided when she and Colter started sprinting to the command post.

Just as Bear reloaded and let go with another three, they tumbled to the ground, where Tolifson, Dorion and Fiona lay behind a berm of earth in front of the tents. McGuire was behind the department pickup.

“A standoff,” Colter said, still shouting.

Starr said, “There’s one way they can change that.”

Colter Shaw had figured this out too. “They’re going to blow the levee, so we’ll have to break cover and try to save the remainers.”

Colter glanced quickly into the valley and saw Mary Dove crouching with Mrs. Petaluma behind an open doorway. No more than fifty yards from the black bulwark of earth that was soon to unleash a tide in their direction.

—

Rotund bombsmith Hire Denton was sitting in his Jeep, a quarter mile from the levee, listening absently to the gunshots. Wasn’t his problem.

He was on a website, shopping for more Bob, good old-time black powder.

He was squinting at the price—a little high—for something you could buy in gun stores for reloading ammo, but your average clerk at, say, Frederick’s Gun Shop, might not be inclined to step into the back and wheel out a hundred-pound keg.

He decided to go ahead and make the purchase, of which the payment was the easy part. Delivery of even low explosives like Bob took some logistics. He was about to send the info when—

Ding…

Ah, it was the Go message from the boss.

He’d been wondering if he’d ever hear, and if his efforts in the cold water to plant Charlie at the Never Summer would have been a waste of time—though he would of course be paid whether Charlie met his fate or not.

Here was the answer.

And so it was goodbye, my friend, enjoy your last few seconds on earth.

Charlie, an exceedingly high explosive, was meager on smoke but big on destruction.

He took his other phone, the one he would use to call the two numbers. First, the arming circuit, then the detonation circuit. The phone was passcode protected, and ten digits—so it could virtually never be guessed.

Hire Denton, however, had no trouble remembering it. The string of digits was the phone number of his local Wendy’s, where he placed an order at least three times a week, the 20 Nuggs Combo being his favorite.