He came just after eleven. When I took one of my periodic looks through the scope, there was an IR blob in the tiny clearing that hadn't been there before. I let my eyes relax and then concentrated. I should have been able to see his human form with that night-sight, but I couldn't. That meant he was wearing something thick enough to reduce his heat signature. Still, there was definitely someone there. I unlocked the safety on the rifle, pulled the stock into my shoulder, and settled my finger on the trigger. I thought about calling the cops, but I couldn't be absolutely sure that I, or my scope, wasn't imagining things. The dogs, alerted by my sudden attention to the rifle, woke up and watched me from their beds.
I heard a car coming down the street beyond the trees. It sounded like one of my neighbors pulling into his driveway, confirmed when I heard a garage door rattling up. A passenger jet whispered overhead in the night sky as it descended into TriBoro's airport. I took a deep breath and forced my back and shoulder muscles to relax. I kept looking at that blob of color, then away to clear the image and blink. I looked back, and now there was a change. A beam of green light, no thicker than a pencil lead, was suddenly visible in the center of the shapeless blob. Then there was a bright flash as he fired.
I didn't hesitate. I squeezed the stock harder into my shoulder and fired one back, right below the middle of that green blob, which suddenly disappeared. The shepherds had jumped up with the first shot and got really excited when I fired. I made myself stay on the scope as I jacked another round into the chamber, suddenly conscious of the fact that I was taking shelter behind a flimsy wooden lattice wall. I was getting ready to put a second round up there when I heard a different car start up and accelerate out beyond the trees. My shooter could not have covered the distance between his hide and the street that quickly, which meant he'd had some help. Said help had apparently heard his boy's shot and then mine, no more than a second apart. The shooter's rifle and mine made two distinctly different sounds. The helper had correctly assumed that it might be time to vacate the scene of the crime.
I waited some more, watching the clearing. The blob was still visible in my scope, but it had subtly changed shape, or at least I thought it had. Trouble was, that didn't tell me much. Was he up there, scanning the house for my hiding place with his own night-sight? I moved the rifle back from the lattice about one inch. My night-sight was entirely passive, so, with the lattice, my own heat signature ought to be minimal.
If I'd hit him, nothing more would happen. If he was waiting for me to move and show myself, I wasn't going to accommodate him. Then I remembered my cell phone. I put the rifle back on the milk crate and called the internal operations number at the Manceford County Sheriff's Office, told them who I was, and that I had shots fired at my house. I asked them to come with sound and lights, hoping to make my attacker move, assuming he still could. If he did, I'd set the shepherds loose to take him into custody.
He couldn't move, as it turned out. My single round had hung what was left of his heart on the branches of the tree behind him. The new mystery was that it absolutely wasn't Billie Ray Breen.
I met downtown with the detectives assigned to the case the next morning. They had identified the shooter as a guy who'd been long suspected of being a contract killer over in Charlotte. He was a Guatemalan illegal who'd been in the country for six years. He'd been arrested and turned over to the federal immigration authorities on no less than three different occasions, and yet there he was. His rifle was a plain vanilla hunting gun with all identifying marks long since ground off. When I showed the investigating officers my little balloon rig, with the balloon deflated, by the way, we all made the obvious conclusion. This one hadn't been a warning shot.
Billie Ray, of course, was the prime suspect as the hit man's employer. The detectives had picked him up and put him through a long interview but got nothing of value. I fingered him for the driver of the unseen vehicle, but he had an alibi, again from his current lady-love, and he vigorously denied any connection to the two shootings. They were going to look at his finances, assuming they could find anything recognizable as his finances, but the chances were slim we could pin this on him. The good news, as one of the detectives pointed out, was that, if he'd paid for the hit, he'd probably blown whatever money he did have on this Guatemalan, so unless he turned bank robber or professional sniper, I would probably have some peace and quiet for a while.
Arlanda Cole put him on daily reporting for an additional ninety days, just to complicate his life. She also made arrangements to have him attend the shooter's autopsy. She told him she wanted him to see how contract killings sometimes came out, especially when it came to prison ghosts going up against ex-cops. I ended up doing a morning's worth of paperwork and an interview downtown with an ADA, even though it was pretty clear that I'd been the intended victim in this incident. One of the detectives wanted to bet me that the Guatemalan's live-in girlfriend would be able to exhume a lawyer to bring a wrongful death suit. I wouldn't take that bet.
I got clear of the police bureaucracy at noon and drove up to meet with Carol. I hadn't told her about the two shooting incidents at my Summerfield home, not wanting to color our association with violence before we even got started. I'd seen the police beat reporter for the local city rag hanging out in the lobby when I'd gone in to talk to the ADA, but hopefully whatever he wrote would stay down in TriBoro.
Carol gave me a second key to the gates, along with my first bill-for the gates. I drove over to town and found a local bank so I could open a checking account for operations here in Rockwell County. Then I drove out to Glory's End. The two halves of the black wrought-iron gates fit perfectly on the hinge pins. The complete gate set was sixteen feet wide and about eight feet high in the middle. The padlock keys worked just fine, but I noted that the gates themselves didn't offer much actual security, as anyone could simply drive onto the edge of the open field on either side to get around them. I made a note to hire a backhoe to come out and make that harder. Leaving one half of the gate open, I drove up to the main house and turned the shepherds loose.
Nothing had changed, as best I could tell. A gentle spring breeze was stirring the trees around the house. I could see signs of bulbs sprouting in the garden beds among all the weeds. The view from the porches was very nice: rolling fields, dense greenery down in the river bottoms, and a few thousand trees beginning to swell their tops with a green haze. I heard a vehicle coming up the gravel drive. It turned out to be Sheriff Hodge Walker, rolling in his personal cruiser.
"Saw the gates open, thought I might find you here," he said, getting out of his vehicle. The shepherds greeted him, and he stopped to pet each one. "Heard you resolved your ghost problem the other night."
"After a fashion," I said. "I nailed a shooter, and the weapon was the same one that fired the warning round, but so far we can't tie him to an employer." I told him about the parole officer's little playacting with Billie Ray.
"I'll pulse the Manceford County system, see if we can find out what kind of ride your ghost is drivin' these days," he said. "Get that data up in our patrol division computers. One of my deputies sees your ghost, we'll get you some warning."
"I'd certainly appreciate that," I said. "I don't think he knows about this place, but there's no telling, these days. A deed gets recorded, and a Web search can find it."
"Maybe not quite yet, not in this county," he said with a grin. I remembered the old man down at the courthouse.
We chatted for a few minutes. I gave him my cell phone number and told him I'd be staying across the road in the stone cottage as soon as they got a lease drawn up. He took it all aboard, wished me luck with the restoration project, and left. I went inside the house to look around some more.