The Standoff Read online

  On today’s bookstands and headlines, it’s the FBI who get all the glory and respect, as well as the CIA. The CIA has its own mystique to help them out. It’s glamorous to read about spies. No one wants to read about the ATF, unless maybe a story from a woman’s perspective, something that comes with a sexy, political topic perhaps a black woman’s rise to leadership in the ATF. Of course, now she probably could focus the whole book on the Athenian nightmare that she found herself in.

  Luckily, if she got fired today, at least a book on this whole debacle could bring in future paychecks.

  She snapped out of thinking about it and shook the hatless patrolman’s hand, hard and strong. He returned the same hard, strong handshake.

  “I’m Patrolman Shepard Pittman, but everyone calls me Shep. You can too. I prefer it.”

  He spoke and she noticed the way he spoke. He moved his lips as if his mouth was full, but she saw nothing in his mouth. It reminded her of a horse chewing grass.

  And then it dawned on her; he was a dip chewer, which made her wonder if he had been a baseball player once upon a time, like Dorsch. The thought made her lips curl downward into a sad frown. It was involuntary. She quickly fix it.

  “Okay, Shep. I don’t have time to kill. Show me what I’m here to see, please.”

  “Okay. Right, this way.”

  He turned and passed through the other patrolmen. They parted like the Red Sea, like he was royalty and they were peasants. They jumped to, as if they would do anything that Shep bade them to do.

  “We didn’t touch anything. Except to make sure that he’s dead.”

  Shep dropped his voice a little at the end. She heard it like a lump in his throat.

  She followed him past the patrolmen and around the cars. The blue lights flashed and washed over her face.

  The dead patrolman’s car was the last in the cluster, a good twenty feet from the nose of the closest car. It was parked on a three-way intersection of old, faded roads.

  They walked across the snow, through cones of spiraling blue lights, to the dead patrolman’s car.

  Adonis said, “Tell me about the backroads.”

  Shep said, “There’s nothing to tell. These are paved. Most aren’t. They’re backroads. They go nowhere. This whole part of the county is a smorgasbord of them. There’s no rhythm or reason. They were here when I was a boy and they’ll be here long after I’m dead.”

  Shep continued walking, but Adonis stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

  He spun around to face her.

  “You saw the video feed?”

  “I saw it.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Didn’t you see it?”

  “It was described to me. But I want to know what you saw. Did you get a look at the shooter?”

  “Sure. I saw both the driver and the guy who shot Daniel. Pretty good look too. I saw the other guys, but their faces were harder to make out. Couldn’t offer any kind of positive ID. The shooter though, he wore all white like he was giving a sermon just before a human sacrifice or something. He was weird.”

  She reckoned Daniel was the first name of the dead patrolman.

  “The driver wasn’t the shooter?”

  “Don’t you already know?”

  “Just humor me. Tell me what you saw.”

  “No. The shooter was the front passenger. He leaned over the driver and fired from inside the vehicle. No hesitation. He just shot my guy like he was nothing. Like a piece of trash.”

  Adonis nodded. She saw what she was hoping to see in Shep. He wanted retribution for his dead friend just as she did for a hundred of her dead friends.

  She looked ahead at the dead patrolman. His body was sprawled out in front of his car at the center of the intersection.

  Shot dead on backroads going nowhere , she thought.

  Dorsch’s face flashed over her mind’s eye like a taunt, like a curse. She thought of a specific photograph of him. He was smiling, big, and happy. It was on her phone.

  “Did you know him well?” she asked.

  Shep nodded. His eyes glazed only a bit like a raindrop on glass, but there were no tears.

  “What was his name?”

  Shep cleared his throat.

  “Patrolman Daniel Brant. He is a good man. Was a good man. He’s got a wife. Just married. Like a month ago. I went to it.”

  Adonis reached out her hand and brushed his forearm, an automatic thing she’d learned at the academy from a course on dealing with the public.

  “Let me take a look alone. Keep your guys back. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Shep stepped back and away.

  Adonis stepped over to the intersection and circled the dead patrolman.

  She whispered to him like she was talking to his ghost.

  “What you got to tell me?”

  Standing over him, and staying a few feet back, she saw everything she needed to know pretty quickly. Brant’s crime scene held no secrets back from her.

  The shooters hadn’t even tried to hide or cover up anything.

  She saw the van’s tire tracks in the snow. She saw that they came from the direction of the Athenian compound. She turned and looked in that direction. She looked up over the trees.

  She could see the smoke from the burning buildings filling the sky. It was five or six miles away, but plain as day.

  The tracks veered off to the right, to the east.

  They’ll be easy to track , she thought.

  They would need someone on the ground though, and she didn’t want to use the patrolmen. At least, she wanted to keep them out of it as much as possible. Abel was hers to catch or kill. That’s the way it was going to be.

  She walked around Brant’s body.

  His eyes were wide open and dead. He stared up at space. She craned her head all the way back, slowly, and followed his gaze.

  She saw the morning sun and the sky above.

  She figured he must’ve looked up at the stars right before he died.

  She didn’t want to waste any more time. She turned back to Shep.

  “You described the asshole that shot him to me.”

  “Yes?”

  “You remembered what he was wearing, but would you recognize his face?”

  “I’ll remember it till the day I die.”

  Adonis went into her jacket pocket and pulled out her phone. She scrolled through it, through the photos until she found one she wanted. She selected it and turned the phone to Shep to look at.

  “Did you see this man?”

  Shep reached for the phone with one hand, instinctively, but Adonis held on to it.

  He stepped closer and looked down at the screen. He stared at the image and the face in the image. He pinched his fingers and zoomed the image up to a bigger size. He stared at it.

  He closed his eyes tightly, recalling the video from Brant’s dashcam. He opened them again and looked at Adonis.

  “That’s him. That’s the shooter.”

  Adonis took the phone back and nodded.

  “His name is General Joseph Abel.”

  “General?”

  “He was US Army.”

  “Great. I bet they’ll love that headline.”

  “He’s a former general turned cult leader. I’m sure they’ll spin his crazy behavior and so on. But that’s not my concern. Whatever the Army does is their problem, not ours. My concern is that he’s graduated from cult leader to weapons smuggler to terrorist.”

  “And cop killer?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve seen the Army file on him. We know he’s got the knowledge to wage war on our government, but now we know he’s got the balls too.”

  “So, what are you thinking?”

  “I was thinking shoot-to-kill.”

  “But now?”

  “We gotta take him alive,” she lied. If she had the chance to put him in her crosshairs, then she would squeeze the trigger. There was no doubt in her mind. She would kill Abel for Dor
sch, for Clip, for all the other lives destroyed in one night by that maniac. But in her mind, she knew that if she could make a clean arrest, then she had to. There was no telling what valuable secrets Abel’s twisted mind held.

  She said, “There’s no telling how many explosives are out there. If he’s connected to other networks, we need to know what he knows.”

  She stepped back and pulled the phone away from him and returned it to her jacket pocket.

  “Thanks, Shep. That’s what I needed to know. We’ll take it from here.”

  Shep said, “Like hell! You’re not shutting us out! No way!”

  “Look, I know this is hard. You’ve lost a guy. I get that. I’ve lost dozens, maybe as many as a hundred ATF agents. This is my investigation. My crime scene.”

  “I’m going after this guy. With or without your help. We’ll follow you if we have to.”

  Adonis looked back at Swan and James. They returned her stare. She saw their fingers tapping the trigger housings of their rifles like they were telling her just to give the order. Which frightened her a little because she wasn’t sure they would say no to shooting at cops. Then she saw the anger in their faces. They had lost brothers tonight too. They wanted blood as much as she did, probably.

  Adonis looked over past them at the helicopter. She saw Ramirez waiting. He had the same look of anger on his face. It was the same that was on the faces of the patrolmen. It was the same that was in Shep’s eyes.

  They needed boots on the ground if they were going to track the van. She started to work it out in her head. She could use the extra manpower, the extra guns too.

  Adonis turned away from Swan and James and Ramirez and the helicopter and looked down at her wrist at the exact place where her Timex used to be. It wasn’t there. She had forgotten that it was gone now.

  She shook herself out of thinking about that. She didn’t need to know the exact time. She knew it was after eight in the morning and she was running out of time.

  They were all losing time. Abel had a head start.

  She suddenly wished it was still nighttime because the daylight made it worse. With the night, they could’ve searched for taillights from the air, but now they couldn’t. The morning meant the locals would be getting up and out—more cars on the roads meant more people to weed through.

  Shep interrupted her thoughts. He saw she was working things out in her head. He also didn’t want to lose any more time.

  He said, “We can help you. We don’t have to step on each other’s toes. We all want this guy. We can get him a lot faster together.”

  He was right. With most of her agents down or headed to the hospital, the local resources of the South Carolina Highway Patrol were better than no resources at all.

  Shep looked over at the helicopter, and he picked up on her problem right off.

  “You need a man on the ground anyway. You may never track them from the air. You can’t see the tire tracks from up in a bird. You need us on the ground. Plus, the treetops are dense. I know that. I’ve been up there in helicopters plenty of times. You need our cars to follow the tracks on the ground.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “Okay. But one car. You and I will go by road. My guys will follow overhead. Deal?”

  “No one else? Just us?”

  He seemed like he wasn’t crazy about that.

  “Send your guys to join roadblocks. They can coordinate with us to cast a dragnet. It’ll be better this way.”

  Shep didn’t respond. He just stared back at his guys in silence.

  Adonis asked, “That gonna be a problem?”

  “Your guy killed one of us.”

  “He killed more of mine.”

  “I know. I know. I’m just saying my guys aren’t going to be happy about that.”

  “We’re not here for their happiness. This is the way it’s gotta be. I don’t want their trigger fingers to get in the way.”

  “Like your guys’ trigger fingers won’t?”

  “It’s not a pissing contest. You agree or not?”

  Shep sighed and nodded.

  “Okay. I agree.”

  “Good.”

  “Come on. We’ll take my car.”

  He walked off away from the dead patrolman and toward his car. He went over to his guys without Adonis and barked orders at them. There was a brief argument, and then he barked louder. The two other patrolmen seemed upset but did not dare question Shep’s orders.

  Shep came back to his cruiser and opened his door.

  “Come on. Get in.”

  Adonis looked at her guys and signaled for them to rejoin the helicopter. She did a couple of hand signals for Ramirez to understand the plan. He nodded and fired the helicopter back up. Swan and James strapped into the rear again and shut the door. The bird was up in the air seconds later, hovering above Adonis and Shep and his police cruiser.

  Adonis got in the passenger side and Shep fired up the car. They took off slowly and steadily.

  Adonis rolled her window down and stuck her head out occasionally to double-check that they were following the right tire tracks and to look up at the ATF bird.

  The helicopter followed overhead.

  Chapter 24

  B Y SEVEN O’CLOCK in the morning, Abe had Widow doing all kinds of lifting and pushing and moving things around in the barn and around the outside of the house and then around the farm, like they were working in planned concentric circles. All of this at the price of coffee—naturally. But the extra coffee was promised to him at breakfast time.

  By eight in the morning, Widow had arranged the heavy items in the barn, moved firewood from a stack of chopped wood up to the house, and learned the general layout of the terrain as if he had worked there for a week already.

  Now, he and Abe were talking about going out into the field.

  Abby stepped outside in different clothes than she had worn earlier. She appeared to have taken a shower and applied makeup and dressed for the day. She wore the same winter coat as earlier, but now she had blue jeans and a white sweater on underneath. She’d changed her earrings as well.

  Abby overheard Widow and Abe talking about going out into the fields on a pair of ATVs that Abe had stashed and covered in the back of the barn. After the last act of labor that Widow did, he and Abe sat on a pair of patio armchairs on the front porch. They took a break, or Widow did. Not surprisingly, Abe was fully energized and ready to oversee Widow on the next project.

  Widow was trying to make the short break last long enough for him to be rescued. Abby picked up on it right away. So, she swooped in for the rescue.

  On the porch, she looked at the men and then at a pair of empty coffee mugs on a small glass-top table between the two men and the two patio armchairs.

  She waddled over to them in a way that made Widow think of a momma duck, but she hovered over them like a momma bear and stared at the mugs.

  She moved her eyes up and inspected Widow’s face the same way she would her own son.

  “Mr. Widow, have you been up all night?”

  Widow and Abe looked at her. Widow looked tired. She saw black circles around his eyes and the look of defeat on his face, a look she had seen before on Walter’s face when Abe was in an overzealous, pushy mode.

  Abe looked at her like she was interrupting the boys during poker night, which he never played anymore. He had been grounded from poker nights because he kept losing their money.

  Nowadays, the only poker he played was against his grandson, even when he lost all their quarters and dimes and nickels, which were Abby’s coins. She was the one who collected them in an old cookie jar.

  Widow cracked a smile at her. He was glad to see her.

  “I have, ma’am.”

  “Are you tired, son?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m very tired.”

  “Abe, what the hell are you trying to do?”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been makin’ this poor boy work all morning. Look at him. He’s ti
red.”

  “What? He’s fine. Look at him. He can take it.”

  “Abraham!”

  “What? He seems okay to me.”

  Widow yawned right there as if on cue, a desperate attempt to reiterate her point, which it was. The only thing more obvious would have been if he said: Hint , Hint , with air quotes around it.

  He said, “I’m okay.”

  Abby asked, “How many coffees have you had?”

  Widow stuck up one hand and counted on his fingers. He held up four.

  “Four?”

  “If you are asking how many I’ve had since last night, that’s the number. If you’re asking how many this morning, the answer is one here at the house.”

  “That’s a lot of coffee. You don’t know what you want.”

  “I’m okay,” he repeated.

  “I’ve made up a spare room for you. I think you should go up there and lie down. Get some rest.”

  Abe said, “But we need to get out to The Sevens.”

  The Sevens, as Widow understood from Abe’s explanation, were not yet at the height and weight where they could be harvested and sold. The process took about ten years to mature enough for the market. Out in the fields, there were dozens of large plots, sectioned off by growth years, so they could track each batch, as Widow had seen on the drive in.

  The Sevens were the seven-year-old trees. They renamed them according to year. Each section moved up a number grade, once the Tens were cut down and sold. That’s how they designated which were ready.

  Widow vaguely understood that there was work that needed to be done out at The Sevens involving the sprinkler systems and a backhoe and his hard work. Hearing Abe explain it, the only thing that Widow got out of it was the realization it would be his back put to work and not Abe’s.

  “You boys come inside. We’re having breakfast soon.”

  “But morning time is work time,” Abe protested.

  “I said work time’s over. Widow doesn’t work here anyway. He’s our guest. Now, he’s already paid us back for the ride from Walter. In fact, I’d say we owe him now.”