“From what I heard, he’s not all there,” one of the young MPs was saying. “He told the Colonel some kind of monsters killed his sergeant.”
“We’re out of rubber rooms, but we got concrete ones.” one of the deputies said. That got a laugh from the young cops all around.
“What did he do?” Miles moved down the counter. The men looked at him. “Press. Reporter for the Nevada City Herald,” Miles said to the two MPs.
“Murdered his sergeant,” one of the MPs said, nodding toward Bell.
“At the base?” Miles asked.
“No, out in the woods. They were on a search and rescue mission,” one of the MPs said.
“Why is he here?” Miles asked. His reporter instincts were firing.
“There’s some kind of closure on Highway 50. No one can get through,” the MP said. “We were ordered to leave him here. He’ll be picked up tomorrow. There’s no place to keep him up at the base. We were supposed to take him to the Army’s stockade in Sacramento, but were ordered to bring him here at the last minute.”
“Hey, are you a cop?”
Miles turned around; the young man in chains was looking at him.
“Are you a cop?” Bell asked. “Or a lawyer? Or what?”
“Reporter,” Miles said.
“Well, I got a story for you,” Bell said from across the room. “And it starts with I didn’t kill anybody.”
“They’re here, aren’t they?” Bell asked. He’d turned from the window and put his handcuffed wrists on his lap.
The handcuffs looked heavy duty. The MPs had left, ordered back to their base. Miles and Bell were alone in the anteroom.
“Who’s here?” Miles asked. Miles glanced at Bell’s filthy and ripped flight suit and the military insignia on his shoulder. They were about the same age, he realized.
“The Howlers,” Bell said. “That’s why the MPs couldn’t take me down to Sacramento. See, I’ve figured things out now. I think the Army knows what’s going on too. They just can’t say. But I bet they know about the Howlers by now. I turned on the Apache’s gun camera. So there’s video, and they will have seen it by now and sent it on to Washington. I flew over several hundred people attacking cars on Highway 50.” The lieutenant’s blue eyes were very clear. He seemed completely sane.
“What are you talking about?” Miles said. All morning he’d been hearing things that didn’t make any sense. He was tired of it. It had started to make him angry. If people had been lying to him, he’d had enough of it.
“I’m talking about the things that attacked me and my sergeant this morning—out there,” Bell said. Bell hadn’t been allowed to change his bandage. It was dirty, a bright red stain showing through the gauze that had been taped to his wound. For some reason the bandage reminded Miles of a book he’d read as a boy: The Red Badge of Courage.
“You’re bleeding,” Miles said.
Bell looked down at his side. “Yeah. I’m not crazy, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
A deputy came up to them and started to unlock Bell’s manacles and leg irons.
“I’d like to interview the prisoner,” Miles said.
The deputy scratched his head, picked the chains up and put them on the counter behind him. “What for, Miles?” he asked.
Miles didn’t answer. He was afraid to say why.
* * *
Rebecca stared at the people picketing the front of her father’s store. “Guns Kill!” one of the picket signs said. No shit! What do you think they’re for, she thought. There were more picketers than usual. “Question Authority,” another sign said. The picketers were city types, mostly young, in their twenties. Rebecca watched a girl her own age; their eyes met as the girl passed by the shop window. The girl was on her cell phone. Rebecca held up her middle finger in a universal gesture. The girl saw it and turned away, shocked.
“Don’t get mad, get even,” her father said from the behind the counter. “I put an ad in the paper. We’re having a 50% off sale tomorrow, on all ammo.” He laughed.
“I don’t see why they care so much about guns,” Rebecca said, turning toward her father. She searched her pockets for a cigarette.
“I’m not sure. But I’ve given it a lot of thought this morning, watching them walk up and down in the cold. They’re scared, I think,” her father said. “I asked them to come in and talk about it with me. But they were afraid of me. Like I was evil.”
“Scared of what? Guns? You?” Rebecca came back along the long glass counter that was filled with handguns of all kinds. She reached over and kissed her father on his receding hairline. She couldn’t imagine anyone in the world being afraid of her dad. She went to one of the clothes racks and slipped an orange Day-Glo hunting cap over her blond hair. She had a habit of wearing something from the huge assortment of hunting gear when she was in the store. It was something she’d done since she was a little girl. Her father looked at her and remembered the little girl he’d been left with when her mother had run off. He loved his daughter so much that he didn’t know how her mother could have walked out on her.
“If people don’t understand something, they get frightened of it,” her father said.
“Why don’t they want people to have guns?” Rebecca came around the counter.
Her father was getting a new Swarovski rifle sight out of its box. He laid it out on the counter and began to take out the parts putting them in a line on a green piece of felt he used for resting pistols on.
“Maybe they’re right about some of the assault rifles, I don’t know,” her father said. “I’ve thought about getting rid of the assault rifles myself. But now the hunting rifles?”
Rebecca was shocked. She looked at her father in amazement. It was the first time she’d ever heard him question himself.
“Since that kid fired on the school in Newtown, I haven’t been sleeping too well,” he said. “I mean, it could happen here in Timberline. I couldn’t take that. If it was one of my guns that killed those kids.”
“You said they were just a fad anyway. We could get rid of them. We don’t even sell that many,” Rebecca said. “People here don’t buy many assault rifles. They buy handguns, mostly. But I draw the line with hunting rifles and shotguns.”
“Yeah, I did say that. These military style guns are mostly Chinese made. Not even American.” He took a semi-automatic AK-47-style assault rifle off the long rack behind him. Forty-odd assault rifles were chained to the gun rack, but they were still the minority of long guns he had for sale.
“You’ve just been listening to these tree huggers,” Rebecca said, lighting her cigarette.
“Well, I been reading their signs all morning. They get you to thinking. Some of the ideas aren’t bad. Like that one that says ‘Question Authority I like that,” her father said.
“You’ll start smoking dope pretty soon, if you don’t watch out,” Rebecca said. “Then I’ll have to throw your bail.”
The shop’s doorbell rang and Sharon Collier walked in. A huge dirty-looking biker walked in behind her. It was impossible to tell how old he was; he could have been twenty, or forty. Rebecca had seen the man around town since the summer. People knew the gang sold crank; more and more of the drug was being used now, especially by the unemployed.