"Where is he?" I asked her again.
"Who?" she asked in a faint voice. She was trying to stand up, but it wasn't happening.
"Callendar."
"Oh, him," she said. "He's in the bridge." Then her eyes rolled back as she fainted.
Up on the walk I heard the unmistakable sound of the coach gun's action being closed. She'd reloaded.
"Hester, you damned fool," I yelled. "You've shot Valeria. Put that goddamned thing down!"
"You lie, you godforsaken Yankee bastard!"
"Come see for yourself, Hester. Come see her body. Come see what you did!"
"Body?" Her voice changed all of a sudden, transitioning from banshee to mother. "Body?"
I heard the shotgun drop to the ground, and then she was there, an old lady now, immediately starting up with the hysterical wailing and crying. I actually didn't think Valeria was dead or, for that matter, even that seriously injured, given the range, but she'd been pincushioned pretty good and there was a lot of bleeding. As I backed away from the suddenly anguished mother, I heard a horse go blasting out of the barnyard paddock behind me. I whirled around and caught just a single glance, but the hat was unmistakable: The major was away.
Holy shit, I thought. Had Valeria been just a decoy?
An hour later the grounds of Laurel Grove returned to some semblance of normalcy. The EMS crew had packaged Valeria up and transported her to the hospital. One of the techs confirmed that she had mostly flesh wounds, with some of the pellets still visible right under her skin. Lots of pellets, though, so there'd definitely be some surgery and then some really good drugs required. I'd alerted the sheriff, and he now had Hester up in the big house for a combination of consolation and some embarrassing questions. My guys had come running when I'd fired the first shots and then had wisely taken cover halfway across the lawn once Hester opened up with that ten-gauge antique. The shepherds were cowering safely back under the apple tree, probably wondering why any of us ever left it. I realized I had yet another training issue: guns and their noise.
With the major on the loose, there'd be no chance of catching up with Callendar, if that's what he was doing. We pretty much had to assume now that they were all in on it. When we did catch this little shit, some prominent people were going to be in the dock with him. The problem now, of course, was catching him. At this juncture he had every motive to hit the bricks and get out of the county.
He's in the bridge. Not at. Not by. Not on, but in? Not possible: There was no bridge.
"So what now, boss?" Tony asked. He was holding Hester's coach gun, which I reminded him was still loaded-and cocked. He gingerly let the hammers down, broke the action, and pulled out two ancient shells.
At the moment, I was fresh out of answers. I was hoping the sheriff could convince Hester to let him search the house, just in case our boy had gone to ground there and never left. If Valeria had been a decoy, then the major could be doing the same thing: riding around the countryside at night to make us think he was in contact with Callendar. Or, having heard gunfire, he could be chasing the ghosts of the Recent Unpleasantness across the empty fields of his aging brain.
Then we heard an interesting noise. It came from across the fields of Glory's End and the Dan River, and it carried well on the night air: the satisfying sound of a concussion grenade going off with a truly authoritative boom.
Well now, I thought. Who set that off?
A minute later we heard gunfire, the rapid-fire pop-pop-pop of an untrained shooter, interspersed with the steadier booming of a larger caliber gun being deliberately aimed and fired. There was a pause of about thirty seconds, and then it started up again. Finally there were four more shots from the big gun and then a growing silence from across the dark fields. It was amazing how sound carried out here in the peaceful countryside.
"Sounds like the OK Corral going down over there," Pardee said. The shepherds had heard the distant gunfire and decided to rejoin us.
Then the sheriff came hustling out of the house and onto the drive with his cell phone jammed to one ear. I thought I could hear radio traffic crackling from inside his cruiser, so we walked across the lawn to see what was up.
"Okay, I'll wait here," the sheriff said, then snapped the phone shut and turned to us. "Goddamn Hildy!"
"What happened?"
"Hildy is what happened," he said, shaking his head. "She made a command decision. Decided to go bust the carriage house. Bad guy had put some kind of booby trap in his truck, and it went off when she climbed in to search it."
"Booby trap?" I said with a straight face. He gave me a suspicious look, then remembered, and then grinned, despite himself.
"Anyways," he said. "One of the outside deputies thought he saw someone running down toward the river, so he yelled and then fired some warning shots. Boy runner sent three back at him and disappeared down by the bridge tower. By the time they all got down there, they thought they saw him swimming across, although it was pretty dark. He helped them decide by putting another couple rounds in their general direction, so Willard, who's a crack shot, by the way, put four rounds from his. 44 Mag all around the guy, and he disappeared."
"And of course they think they got him," I said.
"Of course."
"In fact…"
"We don't know jack shit," the sheriff finished. "He was using that wire you told me about, which explains how he could shoot and swim at the same time."
"Another Callendar disappears into the Dan River," I said. "Fancy that."
The next morning we met at the sheriff's office in town. I'd sent Pardee and Tony back to town and their day jobs, as the immediate threat seemed to be over. The sheriff had invited an ADA named Lee Davis from the county prosecutor's office to sit in. I'd left the shepherds in the car. I told them there wouldn't be any doughnuts, but I don't think they believed me, based on all the resentful looks. There were cops all around; had to be some doughnuts in there.
Captain Hildy showed up looking like a raccoon. She'd been wearing protective glasses when the concussion grenade went off, and they had imprinted their circular lens covers around her eyes, complete with dark rubber smudges. Everyone pretended not to notice, which was the safe thing to do. She arrived at the meeting carrying the expended grenade case. I suspected that she wanted to know how that little piece of police equipment had ended up in the bad guy's truck. The sheriff and I had entered into a mutual conspiracy of absolute omerta.
"Okay, people," he said. "Here's where we stand: Our prime on the Craney killing has apparently disappeared into the depths of the Dan River. He might be dead. He might be wounded and holed up. He might be down the road and gone. We have no way of knowing which until either we find a floater or he pops up on the radar again."
He looked through his notes for a moment before going on. "Subject Cubby Johnson remains in the ICU, unable to talk. The quacks say his infection is responding to treatment. Patience Johnson, his wife, states emphatically that she knows nothing about nothing, and she is obviously terrified that both of them are going to lose their jobs at Laurel Grove."
"Are they?" I asked.
"I tried to gloss over Cubby's role in this case when I talked to Ms. Hester. She was mostly focused on her daughter's condition and how she was going to get to the hospital. I offered to have one of my people take her, but she refused to ride in a cop car. I called out the pastor at Saint Stephen's, and he came and got her."
"It vas dis Hester voman who shot her own daughter?" Captain Hildy asked.