Joe Quinlan knelt down and inspected the massive entry wound in the chest.
“Looks like a high-velocity rifle,” he announced to no one in particular.
Quinlan had been in the war, and was the only one of them to have much experience with gunshot wounds. Lorne Fowler, the other deputy, voiced the question that was on all their minds.
“Think whoever done it is still up there someplace?”
The sheriff sniffed loudly.
“Bring me the bullhorn, Pete.”
Pete Green brought the megaphone from the boat. Griffiths switched it on.
“This is the sheriff speaking. If any of you are armed, lay down your weapons and come out with your hands on your heads. I’ve got five men with me and we’re coming in now.”
He drew his revolver and started up the trail. The others followed. The dusk was gathering rapidly now. The woods on either side were already in darkness. The six men walked quietly, at an even pace, without speaking. A startled bird flew off into the woods with a rapid squawking. Something scuttled away in the shrubbery. The moon had risen, a perfect white crescent cut as though with a razor out of the blackboard of the sky.
As they turned the final bend of the trail and came in view of the clearing, they all stopped. The camphouse, the only building of any size on the island, had completely disappeared. In its place lay a heap of charred timber and ashes from which a flaccid plume of smoke rose into the evening air. Some of the undergrowth on the far side of the clearing was smoldering quietly, but a more serious conflagration had been avoided, thanks to the absence of wind. There was no one in sight, and no sound other than a creaking and settling from the burned-out timbers.
“Jesus,” said Griffiths quietly.
He led the way across the open ground between the trail and the ruins of the hall. The silvery veil of moonlight made everything look unreal. Then they all heard the noise, and stopped again. It seemed to be coming from the piled ashes and debris, a kind of moaning sound. It had a human edge, like the wail of a baby you can’t ignore. The men looked at each other, none of them wanting to be the first to admit what they were all thinking.
At first they were almost relieved when the other noise cut loose, loud and insistent, mechanical, masculine. Its clamor chopped up the silence into orderly segments, and proved its reality by chipping timber off the trees with vicious slashes. By the time they realized what it was and had thrown themselves to the ground, it was over. They lay panting, retrospectively terrified.
For a long while, no one spoke. They all knew that if the gunman had aimed a little lower, they would now be dead. They also knew that unless he had aimed high on purpose, they would soon be dead anyway. The guy had some kind of rapid-fire weapon, a machine-gun or assault rifle. Returning fire would only draw attention to their position, and in any case they had no idea where the shots had come from.
“Pete?” said Griffiths eventually.
“Yeah?”
“You have your radio?”
“Nope.”
“Lorne?”
“Didn’t think we’d need it.”
There was another silence.
“OK, I’m going to try and make it back to the boat,” Griffiths said. “You guys cover me.”
He crawled backward through the scrub and rocks, high enough to make progress difficult but too low to give a man any serious cover. Hearing a sound behind him, he whirled over on his back, revolver pointed.
“It’s me,” said Joe Quinlan.
“Jesus, almost blew you away!”
“Two of us should go. That way one of us might make it.”
“I don’t believe this,” muttered the sheriff.
“It don’t need you to believe it,” Quinlan replied.
They had almost reached the woods when Griffiths stumbled on something. Another body, a guy in his forties this time, short but solidly built. He had a blond mustache and a ponytail and that was about all you could tell, because the whole back of his head wasn’t there.
“Ah, fuck it,” said Quinlan.
He stood up.
“Get down!” yelled Griffiths.
Joe Quinlan kept on walking. The sheriff wasn’t his boss. When he reached the trees, he started to run, dodging and weaving, feeling a thrill he hadn’t experienced for years, not since he was a boy playing war games up at English Camp with the Whitney kids and Lorne Fowler. It was fun! He tore through the woods, emerging on the trail about twenty yards from the pier. Only then did it occur to him that this wasn’t a game.
He backed into the trees again and worked his way down beside the path. He could see the pier now, the two boats riding at their moorings and the dead man. If this had been a trap, these were the jaws. He stayed there for a full five minutes by his watch. There had been no further firing back in the clearing. Then he stepped out on to the trail and strolled down to the pier. There was no point in hurrying. If there was anyone up there in the trees, they’d get him anyway.
He climbed over the police boat into the fire launch moored alongside. Sheriff had some kind of smart radio he wouldn’t know how to operate. Quinlan switched on the set and sent out an “Officer Down” call, adding that they’d found two bodies and were under fire. No one had actually been hit, but he wanted armed backup, and he wanted it now. If these guys were going to play hardball, let them play the pros.
Thirty minutes later, Sleight Island was thick with cops. State troopers, a SWAT team from Seattle, units from Skagit County and Bellingham, even a squad of MPs from the Navy airbase at Oak Harbor. A helicopter hovered overhead, pouring a cone of brilliant light down on to the clearing.
In the meantime, Pete and Lorne, the two deputies, had split up and circled around the remains of the hall to see what they could find. Joe Quinlan was about to offer to join them when he realized that would be uncool. He’d already upstaged the cops by volunteering to go to the boat and call HQ. He hadn’t even been thinking, but they had. He was in Vietnam, they thought. He figures he’s the hot-shit jungle warrior and we’re just a couple of farm boys.
Actually, nothing had been further from Quinlan’s mind. He hadn’t been trying to make anyone look bad, he’d just done what felt good. But he could see it from their point of view, and sat tight while they loped off through the bush with their.38s drawn, wagging their tails around like they were playing flag football. Quinlan prayed to God some guy out there wouldn’t blow their well-meaning asses over Orcas before they even figured out what they were doing wrong.
Ten minutes later, Pete Green was back, white-faced as a kid whose Halloween has turned bad on him.
“Another guy dead up there!” he exclaimed, pointing to the hillside. “Stripped down to his underwear. Jesus, made me sick to look at him!”
The five men crouched down, scanning the darkness for signs of movement, alert to every rustle in the surrounding undergrowth, trying to shut out the sporadic unnerving moans which emerged from the burned-out structure of the hall.
“I better go take a look,” said Darrell Griffiths.
Pete Green went with him. Joe Quinlan kind of tagged along. They found the corpse right behind one of the outbuildings. He was a big guy, over six feet tall, with a long beard divided into miniature pigtails looped together with some kind of silver threads. A ring in one nostril dangled suggestively over the bloody ruin of his skull, which had been dismantled with a brute force that even Quinlan found sickening. Mostly because it reminded him of other times, other deaths.