Perkins said, “Two pairs of in-laws. The wife’s brother and sister-in-law, the Newlands. Which doesn’t check, because they feud with Ables. Mormons from Provo and reputedly unsympathetic, so they may simply have picked the wrong week to visit. We’re working on photos. Also Ables’s sister, Michelle, and her husband, Charles Mellis. The Mellises are known sympathizers and have been sharing the five-room cabin with the family for more than a year now.”
Banish found what he was looking for and read it at arm’s length. “Charles Maynard Mellis. One prior, assault on a police officer, 1990. Probation.” He put it down again, satisfied. “That’s a lot of people in a cabin with not much food or water, and no plumbing.”
Perkins raised an issue. “National Guard,” he said.
“No,” said Banish. “No weekend warriors. Amend that — I want two helicopter pilots only, not from this immediate area, and two UH-1s. We’ll need light air support.”
Perkins had something else for him. “We do have nine evacuated families who feel the Red Cross is doing more for us than for them, and didn’t mind saying as much on the local TV news last night.”
Banish frowned again. “Set them all up in campers somewhere away from the barricade. Other questions?”
Perkins sat back, satisfied, having distinguished himself here. Banish obviously was not a details man. This was a major operation in which, regardless of the outcome, Perkins’s support talents would be recognized in D.C. And appreciated. He would make certain that his name crossed AD Richardsen’s lips favorably.
To his left, Fagin sat up in his folding chair. “I have a question,” he said, speaking mouthfuls of thick smoke, then finishing off the cheroot and killing it under his boot tread. “Why all the pussyfooting around?”
Banish said, “You know why.”
“Because this guy’s hiding behind his family?”
“The children’s safety is our primary concern.” Banish addressed the entire tent. “Be advised, the children are presumed to be armed and are by all accounts unfriendly. Everything we do here is designed to avoid the kill-or-be-killed confrontation. That should be perfectly clear to everyone. This man is hiding behind his family because he knows it will work, and it is working. That is why we cannot go in and get him. That is why we must make him come out to us.”
Perkins became distracted by a low, garbled buzzing noise. It was the white wire receiver whispering in Fagin’s ear. A few other heads turned as well, while Fagin sat there impassively. Perkins decided that he must have one too.
Banish was summing up. “First step tomorrow morning is to establish communication. Ables does not have a telephone, so arrangements are being made to deliver one to him. No television either, although flyby surveillance did pick up a large antenna” — Banish pointed to the backdrop photo— “and he is believed to have an adequate in-house generator. We are as yet without encryption here, and Ables’s military specialty was electronics, so he may be monitoring our broadcasts. Radio use will therefore be kept to a minimum. Be advised, he’s a combat veteran, so he’s used to being messed with. He may even try messing with us.”
Perkins said, “We’re still holding that neighbor, Deke Belcher. The one who walked away from the Red Cross group and met Ables before the shootout.”
Banish said, “What’s his story?”
“He says he didn’t do anything. He says it’s his land up there and he’s walked that mountain every day of his life.”
Banish was impatient. “Sweat him overnight,” he said. “I’ll question him tomorrow with local law present. I want town police posted down at the bridge barricade, backed up by marshals. Familiar faces should cool off the locals for a while.”
Fagin said, “Just tell them to stay out of my way.”
Banish was done and reaching for his raincoat, inviting Fagin to follow him outside. “Tell them yourself.”
Staging Area
They were going on a half hour now in the rain and everyone was beefing. The man next to him stamped his feet and said, “This is bullshit,” but Brian Kearney was keeping quiet. Just like down at the station, it was easy to jump into these grumblings. Everyone getting united against a common evil like the town council, the lack of air-conditioning in the cruisers, or the rain. One voice started it, backed up by another, and another, like a house of cards built in the break room between shifts, and it could even get kind of fun, everybody throwing in his two cents’ worth, louder and louder, complaint upon complaint, the argument growing and growing. It was happening in this situation now. About the way things were being handled. About how Ables was just a guy with his back to the wall, and who wouldn’t have acted differently? No one liked that Haley got shot in the knee, but they blamed the sheriff for that. And on and on. Not that any of them had actually been there. Not that any of them had gotten shot at. Sometimes this griping seemed like their full-time work.
Brian had always been lucky. Taking a bullet in the hip radio like that. Those types of things always happened to him. Not lottery-lucky, just dumb-lucky. Like being let off the school bus right before that car plowed into it. Like transporting a prisoner to the hospital and Brian’s appendix bursting in the admitting room. Like going to the wrong funeral home for a wake and mistakenly offering his condolences to the dead stranger’s daughter, and then their getting to talking, and she eventually becoming his wife. And now again, here it was: two months after sending in his application to the FBI, the FBI had come to him.
So Brian was keeping quiet and waiting. It was pitch-black outside the large tent they called the command tent, and the rain was falling straight and loud and never letting up. It ran in a stream off his chin. His uniform and longjohns were soaked through and he was shivering. But the way Brian managed to stick it out quietly was by seeing it all as a test, thinking somewhat biblically now. Funny and strange how the things you pay no attention to in Sunday school stick with you.
Chief Moody was ripped, all the complaints now beginning to fall back on him — as in, Who called this meeting? He was pacing back and forth like a bear in a blue raincoat and swearing to himself, rain smacking off his lips like spit. Nobody liked to look like a fool, the chief even less so. He’d been up and down like a seesaw all day. When Brian first approached him after getting back from the hospital about needing a new radio, the chief shouted him out of his face. Then when Brian tried again before dinner, the chief straightaway handed him his. And that dinner, served off the back of a Red Cross truck — that might have been another test.
So there they were, thirty police officers standing with hands in pockets and shoulders shrugged against the rain, and all of them complaining. Maybe they had forgotten what it was to be a police officer, Brian thought, being so long into it themselves. Or maybe none of them quite saw what it was that was going on. There was no ambition in these men, none whatsoever, except to get out of that rain.
The FBI. The Federal Bureau of Investigation. Major leaguers, come to play in a weed field. Unbelievable that Sheriff Blood had called them in. The chief would surely have him for it. The sheriff was standing off to the side now, kind of as usual. The type to barely even pay attention to a thing, and wind up remembering more about it than you did. He’d glance sidelong at a tree, if at all, and then three hours later give you a leaf count if you asked for it. The only man Brian knew who could seem as though he were reclining while standing up. And even there in that rain — he might as well have been leaning back against a post fence, one foot on the low rail, arms spread wide, switching a strand of straw in his mouth and being warmed by the afternoon sun. All those lazy Indians you hear about, that type of personality, Sheriff Blood played that for his own.