Strangers (23 page)

“Show yourself,” Felix called out.

“Not until you tell me what you want.”

“Official business. Show yourself.”

“No. You're trespassing.”

“Better cooperate, Stendreyer. We have a search warrant—”

“Fuck your search warrant!”

The first shot came immediately after that last profane shout. I saw the rifle's muzzle flash; Stendreyer was hidden somewhere among the piles of junk, all right. The shot was hurried and high, the slug missing both Felix and the deputy and whining off rock somewhere down close to the two cruisers. I ducked reflexively, muscles wiring up all through my body. Evans had disappeared from sight, but he wasn't hit; I could hear him scrambling for cover around the front of the sheriff's car.

Up on the incline, Felix and the other deputy had both thrown themselves to the ground, twisting away from each other, digging out their service weapons. There was a little cover among the humped rocks on Felix's side, hardly any over on the other. Stendreyer fired at Felix first, the bullet tearing up rock splinters a couple of feet from his head, then shifted his sights and pumped a round at the deputy. I heard the man yell, saw him jerk and slide backward, losing his weapon. Outside by the front fender, Evans's shocked voice rose above the rolling echoes of the shots, “Jesus Christ!”

Felix, flattened behind one of the outcrops, fired three times in rapid succession, the roar of his .357 Magnum almost as loud as the rifle shots. Evans was running back to the other cruiser now, going for either the radio or a twin to Felix's pump-action scattergun. I leaned around to grab hold of that one, but it was locked into its console brackets and I couldn't tear it loose.

Stendreyer's rifle sounded again, another wild shot. When I got my head back up to eye level at the window, I saw that Felix was up and running in a sideways zigzag to where the wounded deputy, on hands and knees, was trying to propel himself down the incline. Blood shone in bright patches and ribbons on the left shoulder of the deputy's jacket. Felix wrapped an arm around him mid-body, half carried, half dragged him to the stretched chain and then over it. From behind the second cruiser, Evans had opened up with the pump gun and then his sidearm—not with any hope of hitting Stendreyer at that distance, just trying to provide some cover.

I was out of the car by that time, crawling between the two vehicles to help Felix drag the wounded deputy to safety behind them. Evans stopped firing then, and there were no more shots from above. The stillness that followed the last faded echo had a tingling electric quality you could almost feel.

We propped the deputy up against the cruiser's rear fender. His face was gray with pain, his breath coming in heavy gasps. “Christ Almighty that was close. Christ Almighty.”

As close as they come; he owed his life to Felix's courage under fire. Military combat training: when a comrade goes down, you give him immediate aid no matter what the risk to yourself. But you couldn't tell from looking at the sheriff how close he'd come to dying in the act. Except for the grim set of his mouth and jaw, his face was as emotionless as ever. He wasn't breathing hard, had not even broken a sweat.

“How bad you hit, Harry?” he asked the deputy.

“Shoulder. The bastard's crazy. Crazy.”

Evans was there, too, now. “Bleeding pretty bad.”

“I never been shot before. Christ Almighty.”

Felix glanced at me. “You okay?”

I nodded, gave him a thumb's-up.

With Evans's help I got the deputy's jacket half off and his tunic open so the wound was visible. Plenty of blood, all right, but it wasn't as bad as it might have been; the bullet had gone through the fleshy part above the armpit, cutting muscle, maybe nicking bone and an artery. I used my handkerchief for a tourniquet to try to staunch the bleeding. While we were doing this, Felix had leaned in through the open driver's door to get at his radio mike and was issuing instructions for a medevac helicopter and sheriff's department and highway patrol backup. If this was going to be a protracted siege, they might have to bring a SWAT team out here from somewhere, but it was too soon to make that request.

Felix finished the call, backed out. A second, slightly longer look directed at me said as plainly as words that he was sorry he'd brought me along, not because it would reflect badly on his record but because it had put me in harm's way. Another mistake in judgment he'd never make again.

“How you doing, Harry?”

“Okay. Hurts like blazes … can't move my arm.”

“Hang in there. Chopper'll put down back on the flats. We'll get you there one way or another.”

Evans said, “Damn quiet now. You think Stendreyer's still up there?”

“Probably. He's got nowhere else to go.”

“He could try to get away on foot, through the hills in back. Hide in one of the old mines or prospect holes.”

“We'd still get him and he knows it.”

“He might still try it.”

The hurt deputy, Harry, said, “Damn crazy desert rat bastard.” His wound was still leaking. Jacket, tunic, the front of his pants, his bare left hand were all smeared with crimson.

“I think I could climb that hill up on the right,” Evans said, “get a good look at the trailer from the top. Maybe take him if I can get a clean shot.”

Felix shook his head. “He'd spot you going if he's still there—thirty or forty yards of open ground before you'd be out of his sight. Even if you made it to the top of the hill, there's not much cover and you couldn't see the side of the trailer where he's forted up. He'd blow you away before you could get close enough to use that riot gun.”

“Yeah. If he's still there.”

“We'll find out.”

Felix reached inside the cruiser again, this time to hit the trunk release. The trunk popped up with an audible thump, a sudden movement calculated to draw fire if Stendreyer was there and watching through his rifle's scope sight. Nothing happened. He crawled around to the rear, levered up and leaned into the trunk long enough to grab something, and then pulled back out. That didn't draw any more fire, either.

“He's gone,” Evans said.

Felix said what I was thinking, “Not necessarily.”

The object he'd snatched out of the trunk was a bullhorn, battery powered, pistol grip. He took it to the front fender, switched it on, and then raised up just far enough to balance it on the hood.

“Max Stendreyer!”

Maximum amplification; his voice boomed out, shattering the silence, creating a series of diminishing echoes off the hills.

Nothing from above.

“Give it up, Stendreyer! You can't get away, you can't outlast us! Come out and down with your hands empty!”

Rolling echoes, nothing else.

Felix made two more full-volume pitches for surrender, both brief, both unanswered. Then he lowered the bullhorn, scooted back to where the rest of us were.

“Gone,” Evans said again. “Got to be.”

“Maybe.”

“Sheriff, he'd've fired again by now if he—”

Up on the bench the rifle cracked again, once. All of us except Felix cringed a little in reflex; he just knelt there, head up, listening. But the shot had not been aimed in our direction. No smack of metal against metal, no crashing glass, no buzzing passage or shrieking ricochet. Just a fresh set of echoes diminishing into more heavy stillness.

“Still up there,” the wounded deputy said.

“He was,” Felix said. “Maybe now he's nowhere.”

“Christ Almighty. You don't mean he—?”

“Single shot after all this time, not aimed at us. What does that tell you?”

“Might be a trick,” Evans said, “draw us out into the open where he could get a clear shot.”

“He'd have known that wouldn't work.”

“He tried to kill you and Harry once, didn't he?”

“To keep us from taking him into custody.”

“Rather die than go to prison? Wouldn't be my choice.”

“You're not Stendreyer.”

The radio crackled with an incoming message. Felix leaned in to answer it. Harry was shivering now, his color even grayer. The wind had picked up, blowing cold, making little purling whistles when it gusted. You could smell more rain in the air.

Felix listened, spoke briefly before signing off, pulled back out again. “Chopper's on the way, be down in ten minutes. Backup units should be there about the same time.”

Evans asked, “How do we get Harry to the chopper? Wait for the backups?”

“If I'm wrong about Stendreyer, yes. If I'm not, you take him.”

“How're you gonna know one way or the other?”

“By doing what you suggested a while ago.”

“Sheriff—”

Felix drew his sidearm, lifted himself into a crouch. “If there's no more shooting, the three of you leave as soon as you hear the chopper.”

He was already moving by the time the last few words were out. He stayed low to the end of Evans's cruiser, then straightened partway and ran in a weave across the thirty-some yards of open ground. I don't know about the two deputies, but watching him I held my breath.

Nothing happened. He made it to the foot of the hill at the road's edge, out of sight of the trailer above, and began to climb.

“Well, I guess he was right,” Evans said. Then, with something like awe in his voice, “More guts than anybody I know.”

“Than anybody I know, too,” I said, the first words I'd uttered since the crisis began.

The hillside was steep in places, but there were cuts and outcrops Felix could veer through and over that let him move pretty fast. He was already near the top when the distant whirring of the approaching medevac helicopter became audible, and out of sight as Evans and I began helping the wounded deputy into the cruiser.

*   *   *

I stayed with Evans and the other standby units at the intersection of the county and Lost Horse roads, awaiting word from Felix. No room for me in the chopper and I would not have ridden in it if there had been; those things scare the hell out of me. Evans didn't seem to mind, since I'd been part of it all along, and none of the other officers questioned my presence.

The skirmish in Lost Horse was one more thing Kerry did not need to know about, I thought while we waited. Technically, it had been the sheriff who'd put me in harm's way out there, but I could've and probably should've turned down his invitation to ride along. There's always a potential for violence in an arrest situation, the more so when the perp is an unstable type like Stendreyer. Hindsight, the great teacher.

A couple of minutes after the helicopter went airborne again, Evans's radio crackled and Felix's voice confirmed what I'd expected to hear. “Max Stendreyer confirmed dead of self-inflicted gunshot wound,” he said. “Emergency requests canceled. Repeat, Stendreyer confirmed dead, emergency requests canceled.”

 

23

At the sheriff's request, Evans returned to Lost Horse and one of the other deputies waited at the intersection to accompany the coroner's wagon when it arrived. The rain started, heavier than before, as the rest of the standby units dispersed.

I rode back to Mineral Springs in one of the highway patrol cars that had responded, answering the inevitable questions on the way as best and as briefly as I could. The HP officers still seemed nonplussed and a little antagonistic when they dropped me off at the Goldtown. A civilian guest of a rural county sheriff, and a retirement age civilian at that, caught up in the midst of a crisis situation was something new, mystifying, and unacceptable in their experience. Joe Felix would take flack for it, and not only from the D.A., and I was sorry for that. But I had no doubt that he'd weather it all right. And continue to be elected sheriff of Bedrock County for as long as he wanted the job.

Stendreyer's suicide had come as no surprise to him, nor to me. The man had lived a hermit's life, avoiding people except when necessary to run his little scams, surrounded by wide-open spaces. No contest, then, once he accepted the fact that he had no chance of escape, between dying quick by his own hand and spending long years cooped up with others in a prison cell. Besides, he'd been part of the region's gun culture for most if not all of his fifty years. Live by the gun, kill by the gun, die by the gun.

So he would not have gotten rid of the piece he'd used on Rick Firestone; Felix and his deputies would find it and a ballistics test would prove it was the murder weapon—enough indisputable evidence to satisfy even a stickler like Mendoza. I wondered what else they'd find in or around Stendreyer's trailer. Something else to connect him to Firestone? Wad of cash? Some of the stolen goods he'd kept instead of selling? Marijuana stash?

I wondered, too, if Felix would get in touch with me again and answer those questions, tie off the last few loose ends. Maybe, maybe not. If he didn't want anything more to do with me, respect notwithstanding, I wouldn't blame him. Not that it mattered, in any event, where Cody Hatcher's future was concerned. Mendoza would have to let the kid off the hook on the criminal assault charges once DNA evidence identified Firestone as the rapist; Felix would make sure of that. The robbery charges were another matter. If the prosecutor wanted to be as hard-nosed as Felix had indicated, and he probably would, he'd make every effort to nail the kid for multiple felonies with maximum penalties.

Hard times ahead for Cody. And for Cheryl. I didn't care a great deal about the kid, but how would she handle it? Not well, especially not if she remained in Mineral Springs. This damn town would crucify her right along with her son.

I still had to face her with the bad news, a chore I was going to hate. But I'd had to bring painful news to people in the past—hellishly painful news, once, the time I'd had to tell Emily her birth mother was dead, and how she'd died, and why. I'd get through the session with Cheryl this afternoon, as soon as possible. And then I'd make a beeline for the California border.