I picked up my portable and looked at the caller ID. PRIVATE CALL , it said unhelpfully. I answered. The male voice on the other end was definitely not Billie Ray Breen but possibly an older voice, disguised by some kind of sound filter.
"Nice shooting, Lieutenant," he said.
"What do you know about that?" I asked, figuring this was either a crank call, precipitated by the newspaper article, or a neighbor unhappy with nocturnal gunfire right down the street.
"I might know who sent him," he said.
"Well, ducky," I said. "You gonna tell me?"
"I just did," he said. "Relearned an old lesson, too. Never send a boy to do a man's work."
"Murdering someone with a rifle from behind a bush is hardly man's work," I said. "The word coward comes to mind. Was that you in the getaway car?"
"Probably," he said. "Salvo knew that was a balloon he was looking at, by the way. That really was supposed to be another scare shot. Our mistake was not thinking through what the balloon really meant."
He had my attention now. Either this was some sicko cop with an old grudge who had access to the file, or this was my real ghost.
"Balloon didn't survive," I said.
"Shit happens."
"So what's the beef?" I asked, unconsciously picking up the SIG.
"It's one of those eye-for-an-eye deals, Lieutenant. You owe somebody a death."
"Somebody? We all owe God a death, or so I'm told. You claiming to work for God?"
"Not hardly," he said. I was glad he was willing to keep talking. I couldn't do a trace, of course, but the sheriff's office had tagged the line for record keeping and maybe we'd get lucky. "But you're gonna think so, time we're done with you."
"You got a mouse in your pocket there, sport? You keep saying 'we.'"
"Nah," he said. "I just keep saying that to make you think I've got lots of help. What I've really got is lots of time and dedication. Serious dedication."
"Dedication or commitment?"
"What?"
"Well, which is it, dedication or commitment?"
"What's it matter?"
"There's a difference," I said. "A chicken is dedicated to the production of eggs. A pig is committed to the production of bacon."
"Oh," he said. "Then I'm definitely committed, just like you."
"Well, shit," I said. "Go up against a guy with a long gun, it's just a matter of time. Not exactly a contest there."
"If I just wanted to kill you, you'd be in the ground already. That's not my objective."
"Careful," I said. "You forgot to say 'we.'"
"Well, so I did," he replied.
I didn't say anything. I just sat there, fingering the grips on my SIG.
"So aren't you curious? About my real objective?"
"Actually," I said, "I'm getting bored. 'Bye now."
"Wait!" he said.
"What now?"
"You color-blind, Lieutenant? Can you see red and green?"
"Last time I checked."
"See the red spot on your chest, do you?"
I didn't bother to even look. I lunged sideways out of the chair practically on top of Frick. Just as I hit the deck I heard something snap and then what sounded like a cannon going off in my face. It was so loud and the flash so bright that I was literally immobilized, unable to even put hand and brain together long enough to fire back with the gun in my hand. The shepherds appeared to be equally paralyzed, if not more so.
It took a good ninety seconds for me to collect my wits about me. My ears were ringing, and my night vision was a maze of bright lights and floating green spots. I thought about getting up from the floor and letting off a few rounds into the darkened backyard, but that would be pointless. The stink of burned explosives filled the porch, overlaid with another, sweetish smell I couldn't recognize.
I found the portable phone by feeling around on the floor, but it was dead. No surprise there. Then I realized what had happened. He'd fired off a flashbang, one of those sensory disruptors we used to use in the SWAT world when entering a hot zone. I sat there on the floor with the dogs, blinking my eyes and trying to clear my ears. I finally saw the perforated grenade case lying in a corner. Then I thought I heard a cop-car siren, possibly two, coming down the street out front. An exasperated neighbor had called 911. They were probably getting tired of the war zone that had erupted around my house.
Me, too.
The next morning I sat in Sheriff Baggett's office in downtown Triboro.
"Thought you'd moved," he said as he read through the patrol reports from the previous night.
"I did."
"So how's this guy know you're there in Summerfield? And where's he getting a flashbang?"
"All good questions," I said.
"This business has gone a little bit beyond Billie Ray Breen, don't you think?"
"That's a fair assumption, but still an assumption."
He nodded. "I used to have a rule about assuming."
"Which you shared frequently, as I recall."
He grinned. "How's about this: we'll pull the string on the flashbang casing, and how he set it off remotely. Plus, I've already sent one of my surveillance nerds out front to sweep your vehicle. Your job is to come up with a motive. Tell me who might be doing this shit. We have to stop scaring the upstanding and increasingly vocal citizens of Summerfield."
"I sympathize," I said. I was probably shouting a little bit, as the ringing in my ears hadn't quite gone away. "I'll clear permanently out of my house there today or tomorrow, and then you can find me in the countryside. Can you brief Sheriff Walker?"
"I will, but I think we'd better be circumspect about all the lurid details-your new neighbors may ask you to leave. Rockwell County doesn't handle urban drama very well."
There was a knock on the door, and Maggie, Sheriff Baggett's secretary, announced that the surveillance tech was back. He told her to send him in.
Her in, as it turned out. She was a petite blonde who looked like she was at least fifteen. She was wearing plastic gloves, a hairnet, and a blue jumpsuit that bore signs of crawling around under a car in the parking lot. She was holding the frame from a license plate, which I presumed had come off my Suburban. Like most Americans, I couldn't tell you my license plate number if I tried.
"Sat-com," she said. "Same rig they use on semitrailers with sensitive cargo. GPS track report every ten minutes, location to fifty feet. Commercially available, or swiped at a truck stop. If that's what they did, they'd need RFID programming capability."
The sheriff frowned. "This isn't amateur's night."
"No, sir," she said. "Although it isn't rocket science, either. It's a matter of having the right gear and a little bit of specialized knowledge." She handed him the frame.
"For you, maybe," the sheriff said, turning the frame over in his hands. He looked over at me to see if I had any questions.
"On the off-chance that that thing is rough, did you look for smooth?" I asked.
She blinked and then shook her pretty blond head. The sheriff pointed to the door, and out she went.
"Hmmm," he said. "A flashbang, a penny-ante, semidisposable hitter from the barrios of Charlotte, and now this. What's all that sound like?"
"Someone in law enforcement, with a grudge," I said promptly.
"Yeah," he said, nodding slowly. "We'll have input from the phone company in a few days, but I'm not holding my breath. Your line was disabled at the street box, by the way, not up at your house. Not cut, but switched off."