Broken Heartland (13 page)

“Can we cover you, or something?” Doc's voice made it clear he didn't like the idea of the sheriff going down there, but realized it had to be done.

“No. Just be ready to come treat any wounded. But stay out until I tell you it's safe.”

Doc nodded and the sheriff realized there were no more excuses to put this off.

“Neuhauser,” he asked, “you know which of those grenades does what?”

The man shook his head. “I was a private contractor in Iraq. We didn't do grenades.”

The sheriff wondered if Neuhauser was lying, then shrugged and looked around the corner again. His guts churned. That's how he'd felt, going into the field in Vietnam. Every time. Apparently, it wasn't something you lost with age.

“Chucky,” he called. “Sheriff English again. I'm coming down there. I'm bringing my gun, but it'll be in my holster.”

Nothing. Just the wind, sighing down the alley behind the school, chasing a swirl of dead leaves toward Nebraska.

The sheriff made sure he didn't catch his own clothing on the jagged wire as he slipped inside the stairwell.

“Here I come,” he said, “ready or not.” That last part, he decided, probably applied to him at least as much as Chucky.

He lowered himself and sat on the concrete lip, dangling his feet in the well and diminishing the distance he'd have to drop. The bottom looked deeper than he remembered. He could hurt himself, jumping down there. The foolishness of that thought made him smile. He pushed off the edge.

***

It was Hailey.

Pam jumped back and Mad Dog swung around toward the door, expecting the embarrassment of being discovered
in flagrante delicto
by Galen. But Galen wasn't there. No one was. Just a smiling timber wolf. Hailey shook her head, as if surprised that Mad Dog could have gotten himself in so much mischief in so little time.

“How'd she do that?” Pam said. She beat Mad Dog to the door and hugged Hailey, then she bent and stuck her head out to make sure someone else hadn't opened the bin's door. It left Mad Dog with an interesting view, but he was relieved to discover blood flow was actually returning to his brain. It was needed there, to puzzle out what was going on, and get them somewhere Galen couldn't find them.

“I've never been able to keep her locked in or out of anyplace.” Mad Dog hugged the wolf, too, being careful not to brush against Pam. No sense tempting blood flow again. Hailey covered his face with kisses, then slipped away from both of them and ran back into the dusky corridor. She stopped, just before it twisted out of sight, and looked back over her silver-tipped shoulder. Come on, she seemed to be urging them, we've got to get going.

“I think she wants us to follow her,” Pam said. Mad Dog was sure of it. Pam crawled through the exit. More interesting views.

Mad Dog followed, glancing up and down the corridor. It weaved back and forth around a series of bins like theirs.

“Hey, what about your underwear?”

“Leave it,” she said. “It's not very practical and it's not like it makes me presentable.”

She was one hell of a distraction without it, but then he remembered how the cloth had seemed to emphasize what was underneath rather than hide anything.

“I chose that underwear for piano practice because the church is so self-righteous. A little invisible rebellion. I don't want you to think that's what I usually wear. So leave them, and close those doors behind you. If Galen comes back and can't find anything but my undies, maybe he'll think he missed the rapture.”

He might, indeed. Mad Dog grinned and shut the doors. Galen hadn't left their clothes nearby. Nor had he left the pile from Mad Dog's pockets. And apparently he'd overcome his aversion to Pam's cooties enough to take her cell phone, too.

“Our clothes are probably in his office. But I noticed these hanging just inside the entrance to this corridor.” She handed him a pair of coveralls. Not bib overalls, but the kind that enveloped you from neck to ankles and wrists. She stepped into the blue ones. He was a little disappointed and a lot relieved when her body disappeared under the heavy fabric.

His were white, or they had been. Now they were covered with a camouflage of stains. They weren't quite big enough for him. They ran out of material a couple of inches short on his arms and legs, but they'd been cut for someone with more weight around the middle and a broader posterior. Plenty of room for him, even after he relaxed the gut he suddenly realized he'd been sucking in ever since his clothes came off. He might be getting old, but apparently he wasn't too old to try and show a pretty girl his best profile.

“Now we just need shoes,” she said. Hell, she still looked sexy, even in the most functional of work clothes, though knowing there was nothing but girl flesh under the fabric might have something to do with that.

“What's Hailey doing with that other bin?” Mad Dog turned to where Pam was pointing. Hailey was a couple of bins down on the opposite side. She'd jumped up and was pawing at the latch—probably the same way she'd opened the outer door on her way to rescue them. Only she didn't seem to be giving it her best effort. In fact, once she got Mad Dog's attention, she sat in front of the door, looking from it to him. She whined.

“She wants you to open that one,” Pam said. “You don't suppose Galen's turned these things into prison cells, do you?”

Mad Dog couldn't think of any other reason Hailey would want in there. Not unless that was where their clothes and belongings had gone.

There was only one way to find out. He finished opening the outer door, then hauled up on the bar that unlocked the inner one. How had Hailey managed to do that one? The latch was tight and he had to plant his feet and grab the bar with both hands and put some muscle into it. But it gave, and since the inner door wasn't held in place by a few tons of grain, it swung open easily.

“Thank God,” someone said. “I thought I was dead.”

Mad Dog reached in and helped the young man out of his makeshift jail. The kid seemed dazed. He stumbled and practically fell into Pam's arms and she eased him to the floor.

Mad Dog didn't like the way she cuddled him to her and began making soothing noises, but now, at least, he knew what had happened to Mark Brown.

***

“Heather?” The burglar with the armful of notebooks and the pistol on his belt swung around and said in an accusing voice, “What are you doing here? You're supposed to be in school.”

“Chairman Wynn.” The former chairman of the Benteen County Board of Supervisors was pretty much the last person Heather would have expected to find breaking into cabins at the Bible camp. Even if he had been recalled, along with the rest of his compatriots, for financial irregularities associated with the failed get-rich-quick-wind-farm scheme, he wasn't the criminal type. But that wasn't the only reason it surprised her. He was also the father of the perpetual screw-up, Deputy Wynn-Some Lose-Some, whose misadventures had begun the day's catastrophes.

“Why are you trying to scare an old man to death by pretending to stick a gun in his back?”

Heather flashed her badge as she pocketed the pepper spray. “I'm official, Mr. Chairman. Dad's shorthanded today. I came back to help him celebrate his re-election, so I'm helping out. But what about you? I thought you were in Wichita with your son.”

“The doctors say he's better than 50/50 to make it. And they've decided to keep him in a coma for a few days. I figured I could pace the halls and worry with his mama, or I could hop back in the Beechcraft and come home. Maybe find out what he was up to this morning.”

Heather felt a lot of sympathy for Wynn-Some's father. Deputy Wynn had been creating problems, or exacerbating them, for years. And the Senior Wynn and his fellow supervisors might have misused county funds, but they'd meant well. They'd been caught in a con-artist's scheme they thought might rescue the county from its continuing slide into insolvency. The senior Wynn had enough problems without being charged with burglarizing the Bible camp.

“You found this window already broken, right?”

It took him a moment to realize what she was offering. “Uh, right,” he said.

“I understand why you'd be interested in looking around here,” Heather said. “As soon as Dad and Mrs. Kraus told me about the accident, I wanted to come see why a bus load of kids would be coming here in the middle of the night.”

“I think they were on their way from here, not coming here,” he said. “I mean, you saw all those cars out in the lot.”

Heather had.

“I think they gathered here before my boy ran into….” He paused, recognizing that might not be the best choice of words, considering. “…encountered the bus,” he continued, “on its way somewhere else.”

She nodded at the notebooks. “You find something that tells us where?”

“Not where,” he said, “but maybe why.”

She let her eyebrows ask the question.

“You should take a look in there.” He gestured toward the candy-striped cabin. “That's no kid's camp infirmary. It's a high-tech medical lab. They've got more newfangled gizmos than Doc has down at the clinic.”

She wanted to look and she trusted him, but she didn't think a good deputy would turn her back on a suspect until she was done questioning him.

Chairman Wynn knelt on the brightly painted porch and spread the notebooks out. He opened one as she bent to join him. “Look here.”

He started flipping pages. Each one was headed by a first name and last initial—Butch B., Annie G., Mark G., Linda R., Chucky W. And lots more. Benteen County wasn't a big place. Maybe a quarter of the current students attending Buffalo Springs High were listed. Several of them had been aboard that bus this morning.

She said as much, and he pointed at the series of abbreviated categories beneath each name. “This is medical information. See, this first row. BT means blood type, I think. I mean, A, B, O, AB. What else could it be? Especially since the next row, RH, is all pluses and minuses.”

“Makes sense,” she said. “You know what the others are? BP, that's probably blood pressure. And BPM, pulse rate. But what are some of these others? HLA, for instance. That doesn't mean anything to me.”

“Human leukocyte antigens,” he said.

She turned to him, surprised.

“I wouldn't have known that,” he said, “if the doctors hadn't run some tests on me this morning. They thought my son might need a liver transplant. HLA, that's one of the key factors.”

“Oh.” Heather didn't know what to say. A liver transplant, that was scary. But it struck her that all this might somehow link to the vials of supposed stem cells she'd left in the Gas — Food's refrigerator, next to a stack of beer. Link, maybe, but to what end?

“You have any idea what this is all about?”

He shook his head. “Medical experiments on those kids. Or maybe it's just a health study. But why conduct it out here? And why in secret? Who's funding all this? That equipment in there is expensive. Why would anyone put those kids on that bus this morning?”

Good questions. Heather didn't have answers, and didn't have to pretend she did, because her cell phone rang.

It was the other Heather. “You all right?”

“Fine,” Deputy Heather said. “It's just Chairman Wynn.”

“Not chairman anymore,” he said. Heather didn't make the correction.

“Good,” her sister said. “'Cause you may want to come out here. The Gustafsons just drove in with Annie to pick up her car. And Mr. Gustafson, he's real upset about where his daughter was last night. I think you'll want to talk to him.”

Heather agreed. She snapped her phone shut. “Come on, Mr. Chairman. Let's go ask one of the kids on this list what it means.”

A gust of wind tore across the porch carrying bright leaves and riffling the pages of the other notebooks. It left one opened to a page with the same list of names running down the left side. Across from them were numbers, percentages. Heather checked the heading at the top. “Match to Recipient,” it said. Suddenly, she wanted to talk to Annie Gustafson real bad.

***

The sheriff didn't land quietly. There was no way to do that among the remains of broken window frames and shattered glass. But he was still alive and he stayed that way.

“Chucky?” he said. No answer.

Greer's shotgun lay at the sheriff's feet and he was tempted to pick it up. But a shotgun was the last weapon he wanted if he had to pull a trigger in a hostage situation. There wasn't time to unload it, so he kicked it aside and bent and peered through the windows.

It was dark in the old classroom. The lights might have been turned on, but it didn't matter. They'd been shot out. Broken fluorescent tubes and debris from ceiling tiles covered the floor.

All the desks had been cleared away from the door. No, not cleared, drawn up in front of the teacher's desk, near the green chalkboard on which a dark and illegible scrawl offered today's lesson. And the desks had been overturned, as if to make a sort of fortification that faced the stairwell.

What remained of the door at the bottom of the stairs was still locked, not that it made any difference, not with all those windows lying in splintered heaps. The sheriff stepped through one.

“Chucky?” he said again, still without response. “I'm coming in.” He was pretty sure Chucky wasn't there anymore, but there was no sense surprising the boy if the sheriff turned out to be wrong.

It was quiet inside, but for the ringing in his ears from the shock of those grenades. He hoped that was why he couldn't hear the muffled breathing of the hostages or the wounded. He doubted it though. He had no trouble hearing the sounds his feet made, crunching debris as he advanced toward that fortress of desks.

“Chucky? Anybody?” One last try.