“All right, although I don’t know why you give a damn. I left because of the politics, the paperwork, and the pissing contests-not unlike this one.”
“Worse than before?”
His voice rose an octave. “Before was a picnic. Compared to this bullshit, it was like turning out a newsletter for the Brownies. Now you use one hand to type and the other to check your back for knife handles.”
I settled back to listen, only half-interested in his complaints, delighted instead that I wouldn’t have to play informational footsie with him anymore.
I’d agreed to drive Stan back to his office, just off Exit 3, before returning downtown. I therefore followed both Hillstrom and the hearse onto the interstate at Exit 2, amused that Hillstrom was probably thinking my eagerness to have the skeleton analyzed had gotten the better of me and that I was going to follow her all the way to Burlington.
What happened instead bordered on the surreal. We had barely picked up speed off the entry ramp when a horizontal spray of red tracers spat out of the darkness from the low ridge to our right. It engulfed the hearse just ahead of Hillstrom’s car and caused both vehicles to swerve violently.
“What the hell is that?” Katz shouted in alarm.
The deadly flashes of light kept lashing out at the hearse in short spurts, forcing it to brake sharply.
“Gunfire,” I answered, swinging my own car over to the left breakdown lane. I threw open the door and dragged Katz out after me, sliding into the median-strip ditch that separated the northbound lane from the southbound. I quickly raised Dispatch on my portable radio. “M-80 from O-3. We’re under machine-gun fire on I-91 northbound, just above Exit 2. Repeat: We’re under machine-gun fire. The shots are coming from the east side, about due west of the Frog Pond behind Harris Hill. Send everyone available to seal off the area and close off the interstate, north and south.”
I began running in a low crouch toward the two cars ahead of me, both of which were also haphazardly parked in the breakdown lane. The machine-gun bursts continued in deadly earnest, brief, controlled, and aimed exclusively at the hearse. In the lights from Hillstrom’s car, I could see steam rising from the hearse’s engine, and I could smell gas from the ruptured tank.
I reached the driver’s side of the medical examiner’s car, pulled open the door, and found her staring at me from a prone position on the front seat, her eyes wide with terror.
“You hit?”
“No.”
I reached in, grabbed her hands, and pulled her out into the ditch’s shallow shelter next to Katz, who had followed me, muttering obscenities.
Only then, knowing I couldn’t reach the hearse’s driver, did I direct my attention to the source of the machine-gun fire. I drew my pistol, steadied it on the hood of Hillstrom’s car, and fired three shots at the stuttering red-hot bull’s-eye that hovered in the distant blackness.
My mind was no longer in Brattleboro, Vermont, but somewhere in the mountains of Korea, where night after night I’d lain still and silent behind my rifle, straining to pierce the darkness of the night, a box of grenades by my side. In Korea, too, they’d used incendiaries at times, hoping to hit an ammo dump or a pile of gas tanks, and we’d taken advantage of the one major drawback of using such ammunition: You can follow it right back to the muzzle that fired it.
The machine-gun fire suddenly stopped, just in time. Despite the now-overpowering reek of gas from the hearse, it hadn’t yet burst into flame.
I circled the front of Hillstrom’s car, paused for an incongruous bit of traffic, and sprinted across the road, yelling, “Stay put-don’t check out the driver ’til I give the all clear.” The absurdity that I might be hit by a car on the interstate while trying to take out a machine-gun nest rattled in the back of my mind.
I slid up against the far guardrail, expecting another burst of fire to catch me at any moment, but all remained quiet. I paused a moment to catch my breath, then vaulted over the protective guardrail and made for the grassy slope ahead. I could hear a growing chorus of siren wails approaching from all sides.
The bank led up to a short wall of trees, beyond which was an undeveloped low ridge overlooking the interstate. As I reached the tree line, the first squad car squealed to a showy stop below me. Two patrolmen jumped out, guns drawn.
“Lieutenant, you get him?”
I took cover behind a small tree. “I don’t know, but he’ll sure as hell get you if you don’t move.”
They did an embarrassed double take and scrambled for the trees to either side of me, climbing the slope like two cats with their tails on fire.
“Who’s coordinating you guys? You were right in the line of fire.”
They looked sheepishly at each other. The one named Hartley, a relative newcomer to the force, balefully admitted, “We didn’t check in. We just heard you needed help and responded.”
I shook my head and used my radio again. “M-80 from O-3; who’s coordinating on the shooter?”
“O-3 from O-2,” I heard Assistant Chief Billy Manierre’s reassuring growl. “I got it. Where are you?”
“Tree line east of the interstate, with two backup. I returned fire and haven’t heard anything since. He may be on the run.”
“All right. We’ve almost got the area boxed in. Give me five minutes and I’ll call you back.”
I sent Hartley and his partner far out to either side, to better intercept anyone coming off the ridge and to reduce the chance of all three of us being caught in a single burst of fire. I looked over my shoulder at the three cars and saw Katz following my footsteps in a hunched-over hundred-yard dash. The interstate was now mercifully empty of traffic.
He reached my side barely able to speak. “See anything?”
“I see someone who shouldn’t be here. You willing to die to get a story?”
He shrugged. “Sure-what the hell.”
That made it a hard point to argue, and I wasn’t going to test it by sending him back across the shooting gallery. “Then I guess today’s your lucky day. Stick right behind me, all right? If you don’t, I’ll shoot you myself.”
“O-3 from O-2.” I keyed the radio mike. “Go ahead.”
“Ready to close in from all four sides.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
The area we were slowly hemming in belonged mostly to the Retreat, Brattleboro’s largest landowner, and its second-largest employer. A substance-abuse and mental-rehabilitation facility founded over a century and a half ago, the Retreat had turned its real estate holdings into farmland, woodlots, and recreational areas, giving Brattleboro much of its rustic flavor.
That was of little comfort to us now, however, confronted with a half-mile square of hilly, pitch-black wilderness instead of an easily patrolled grid of residential streets.
Our problems were compounded by the haste needed to contain the area. Over the radio, I heard Manierre coordinating, in addition to our own men, several responding state troopers, Windham County deputies, a state motor vehicles inspector, and even two patrolmen from Hinsdale, New Hampshire, just across the river.
The three of us, with Katz nervously dogging my heels, left the comfort of the interstate’s openness for a claustrophobic tangle of dense, dark, and disorienting underbrush. The noise we made, stumbling and pushing our way past the enveloping branches, added to the dread that we, and not some disembodied sniper, were the ones increasingly at risk. To either side of me, I could hear the two patrolmen cursing and talking to themselves, doing their best to sustain their courage, praying the next shadowy clump of trees ahead wouldn’t suddenly come alive with a crimson burst of machine-gun fire.
It wasn’t easy. The farther we buried ourselves in this wilderness, the more the tension became punctuated by sounds far off, the flickering of half-seen flashlights, and the incessant urgent mutterings of our portable radios. As the four sides of this roughly coordinated search grid converged, the danger increased that one of us might mistake the other for a target and convert this well-intentioned effort into tragedy.