“Ma’am,” Konane said, “this was a robbery. We get a dozen of these a day. Once you get us a list of the property we’ll put it into the computer and keep an eye out. Since you say the men were wearing masks you can’t give us a description more than their height and approximate size.
We really don’t have much to work with.”
“This wasn’t just a simple robbery,” Boomer said.
“Oh no?” Konane waited “We were shot at,” Boomer said.
“That’s attempted murder.”
Konane nodded.
“True, but we still don’t have anything more to go on at the moment.
Like I said, we’ll see if anything stolen turns up. Once you get us a list of what was stolen, of course.”
“What about the slugs in the wall?” Boomer demanded.
“Aren’t you interested in those?”
Konane sighed.
“This isn’t like a cop show on TV. OK?”
Boomer shook his head, but he didn’t say anything. Konane had Trace sign the report and they were gone.
Boomer felt the pocket of his shirt. “Give me the phone.
There’s someone I want to call.” Boomer pulled out the card Skibicki had given him and dialed the number.
“Skibicki,” the voice on the other end growled.
“Sergeant major, this is Boomer Watson.”
“What’s up, sir?”
“Can you get out to Makakilo City right away? I need to talk to you.”
“Reference?” The sergeant major succinctly asked.
“My friend just got robbed here and both of us got shot at.”
“You call the cops?”
“Yeah, but they weren’t much help,” Boomer said.
“What’s the address?”
Boomer got it from Trace and relayed it.
“I’ll be there in a half hour.” The phone went dead.
During the wait. Boomer and Trace cleaned up the house as much as possible, although there was little they could do about the bullet holes in the wall.
Skibicki arrived and Trace and Boomer told him what had just happened as he checked out the place.
“You didn’t get a good look at them?” he asked Boomer.
“No. I heard Trace yell and didn’t know what the setup was inside so I just tried to clear the room out by returning fire. They ran up the hill there and I spotted them just before they hit the tree line.”
Skibicki took out a pocket knife and dug into one of the bullet holes in the wall, extracting the spent round.
“Nine millimeter. Had to be subsonic since you say the weapons were silenced, and this round didn’t penetrate very far into the wall. Your ordinary crook doesn’t carry silenced weapons.”
He walked out to the patio and looked around. “If you’re right about professionals here to steal the manuscript, they most likely had the house under surveillance. And if I was going to surveil, I’d do it from there,” he added, pointing up to the lush vegetation adorning Puu Makakilo.
“That’s where they ran, right?”
“Let’s take a look,” Boomer suggested. They went out the back door and began scrambling up the hill.
Skibicki led the way, snaking through the vegetation, following the trail the two men had made in their scramble to escape. They came to the small clearing where the two had obviously spent some time, judging by the cigarette butts littering the ground. It was a perfect place to watch the house.
Boomer and Skibicki quartered the ground, searching.
Finally Boomer halted and pointed.
“They had either a scope or rifle set up here on a tripod. Maybe a camera.
They were watching you for a while. Trace. Normal burglars don’t sit for a couple of days before they rob a house,” he added.
Skibicki walked over to a tree and noted the numerous scars torn into the wood. He turned and checked out a faint line scratched in the dirt with what looked like the toe of a boot.
“Not bad,” he muttered noting the placing of the impacts and the distance of the line from the tree.
“Do you think they’ll come back?” Trace asked as they went back down the hill.
“I don’t know,” Boomer said.
“If all they wanted was the manuscript and your notes, then they won’t be back.”
“That doesn’t make much sense,” Skibicki said.
“What doesn’t?” Trace asked.
“They may have gotten the manuscript and all her stuff, but she still has everything in her head, right?”
Trace nodded.
“Then they’ll be back,” Skibicki concluded.
Boomer had to concur with that reasoning.
“It’s probably not safe to stay here,” he said.
“If you’re right,” Skibicki said, “I’ve got a place where you’ll be safe.”
The place Skibicki chose for Boomer and Trace was his mother’s house, high along the slopes of the Waiwa Forest Reserve, six kilometers due north of the East Loch of Pearl Harbor.
Maggie welcomed them and after a brief huddle with Skibicki settled Trace down in her spare bedroom. The four of them met in her living room, brightly lit by the sun in a descending hover over the mountains to the west.
“This is ridiculous,” Trace said.
“I mean, I just got shot at for Christ’s sake and the police act like it’s no big deal.”
“The crime rate is so high nowadays,” Maggie said.
“I remember when you could leave your house unlocked all the time. I used to never lock my car, no matter where on the island I went. Now I have to carry a can of mace on my key chain.”
“I don’t think the cops are going to do much about this,” Boomer said.
He looked” at Skibicki.
“What do you say we do a little work on our own?”
Skibicki nodded.
“What do you have in mind?”
Although night was settling over the mountainside, the two men had no trouble maneuvering. Their night vision goggles took what light there was and computer-enhanced it to provide a greenish version of daylight inside the lenses.
One of the men set the tripod for the Remington 700 down, then carefully screwed the rifle onto the tripod. He flipped the on switch for the rifle’s night scope and gave it a few seconds to warm up, before trading his goggles for the view through the scope. He scanned the house, then the immediate area.
“Anything?” the other asked.
“House is dark, no cars parked outside.”
The second man sat down, leaning his back against the small pack he was carrying. The woman comes back, you do her, first clear shot you get.
Take out her trigger-happy boyfriend too and anybody else.”
The first man smiled and settled in comfortably behind the scope.
CHAPTER 7
Boomer watched as Skibicki unlocked the footlocker that was bolted to the back of his jeep. The drawer on top held tiger-stripe fatigues, their fabric worn with time. He lifted the tray to get to the contents beneath. He grabbed a Calico M-950-A machine pistol and checked its functioning. It had a built-in sound-suppressor that gave it a short, stubby barrel.
The body consisted of a pistol grip and an open bolt assembly facing up.
Skibicki reached in a black bag and pulled out a cylindrical magazine — the most unique feature of the Calico.
The magazine, two and a quarter inches in diameter and a little over seven inches long settled into place on top of the weapon, overhanging the rear slightly. Totally unlike any other magazine Skibicki had ever used, the fluted cartridge carrier in the center of the magazine held seven 9mm bullets and the helix around the cartridge carrier held forty three more rounds, giving the moulded plastic contraption a fifty-round capacity and outgunning any other pistols and automatic weapons around.