The Big Thaw (29 page)

“Moot,” said Volont. “You happen to have a bullhorn in your trunk?”

“Nope. Fire Department has one, though.” I handed him my walkie-talkie mike.

While we waited for an intrepid volunteer fireman to go to the station, get the bullhorn, and bring it to us, we sketched out a plan of attack.

“I’ll talk to him, and see if I can get him to give it up,” said Volont. “If he starts shooting at anything but the jail or police vehicles, we take him out.” He looked at me. “If that’s all right. I really don’t have much jurisdiction here. Your call.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “Problem one … we’re in about the only location that can engage him. If you shoot from the other sides, the missed rounds are going to fall in town.”

He looked at the target area. “Right.”

“So if he does something really stupid, it better be on this side of the building.”

“If not,” said Volont, “we go up and get him.”

“What’s this ‘we’ shit? I don’t do heights.”

“How long,” he asked, “will it take to get a TAC team in here?”

“About two hours,” I said. “Maybe a bit longer. They’re state troopers, and they have to come from all over.”

“Helicopter?”

“I doubt it.”

He sighed, audibly. “You people do need resources, don’t you?”

I almost held out my hand.

The volunteer fireman got to us. There seemed to be some problem with the bullhorn, and he’d brought extra batteries. It was one of those items that was hardly ever used.

While Volont checked out the bullhorn, I looked very closely at that concrete grain elevator. The only way up, from the outside, was via that caged ladder. I remembered the first time, as a kid, I had thought about climbing it. I couldn’t reach the ladder. I double-checked, and saw that the bottom rung was about seven or eight feet off the ground. Still, apparently. There was an aluminum stepladder, erected but on its side, under the cage. Obviously how our man had gotten up. Kicked it over, probably on purpose. That told me that he’d at least thought about somebody trying to climb up after him. All he’d have to do is lean over the edge, and shoot down into the circular cage. Anybody climbing up was not only going to get hit, they were going to get hit by plunging fire, along their longitudinal axis. In other words, the bullet wouldn’t go through your shoulder and out. It would go in between, for example, your neck and your collarbone, and come out somewhere near the bottom of your pelvis.

Ugly concept.

There were three landings, each about twenty to twenty-five feet up the ladder. Open platforms, they had rails about four feet high. From the last platform on, anybody on that ladder was a dead man. At night, maybe, you could get as high as two platforms up, without getting shot. But by the third…

I saw the sniper pop up, and crack off a round down toward the right side of the building. Toward Twenty-five, the Maitland officer. Or, likely, his car. I pressed the “talk” button on my walkie-talkie mike.

“You okay, Twenty-five?” I asked.

“You bettcha…” came the reply. “But I think my car’s dead.”

“He’s just keeping your head down,” I said.

“He sure as hell is,” he said.

“YOU ON THE GRAIN ELEVATOR! THIS IS AGENT VOLONT OF THE FBI!” came booming and crackling right behind me. Scared me nearly to death. He’d apparently gotten the thing fixed.

There was no response.

He tried again, this time adding that the suspect should surrender.

I was looking up at the top of the elevator, my rifle at my shoulder and aimed where I’d last seen the shooter, when he came popping back up at the other end of the tower. As I brought my rifle to bear, he cracked off two rounds and disappeared.

“Son of a bitch!” hollered Volont.

“Sorry,” I said, “but I almost had him that time…”

I turned, half expecting him to yell again. Close.

There was a neat, round hole in the rim of his bullhorn, and he was scrambling back behind some concrete steps leading into the side of one of the houses.

He put the bullhorn back to his face, and I turned toward the elevator. This time, I had my rifle pointed at where our sniper had popped up moments ago.

“YOU MIGHT AS WELL GIVE UP. YOU’RE SURROUNDED, AND CANNOT ESCAPE.”

Succinct, you gotta admit.

Nothing. I was all set to light him up, and nothing.

I lowered my rifle, and joined Volont behind the steps. Quickly.

“Now what?”

“You looking for suggestions?” he asked.

“Yah.”

“Wait him out.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s gonna get awfully cold up there tonight. He could well freeze to death.”

“You got a problem with that?”

“Not in the least.”

We were both looking up when the sniper’s head bobbed up. Arms extended into the air. No sign of his rifle.

“Shit,” I muttered, “I think I could hit him now…”

Volont gave me a withering look, and picked up his bullhorn. “ARE YOU SURRENDERING?”

Faintly, we could hear a voice, but we couldn’t make out the words.

“WE CAN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU’RE SAYING!”

“… I kill him?” wafted down from the top of the elevator.

“DID YOU KILL HIM? IS THAT THE QUESTION?”

“… yes…” came back. Along with something else we lost.

“I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU MEAN. YOU DIDN’T, I REPEAT, DID NOT KILL ANYONE!”

That should have been good news to a man who was about to surrender. If you’re under fifty, the difference between twenty years and life can be a long time.

With that, the sniper simply stood up, and began climbing over the top rail. Apparently, it wasn’t good news to him.

“Shit,” I said. “He’s gonna jump…”

He extended both arms in a cruciform, like he was going to do a swan dive or something.

“DON’T DO IT…”

He teetered there for a second. Composing himself for the jump. He just needed to screw his courage up a little bit more.

Then, unexpectedly, he slipped. His feet just went out from under him, his butt smacked into the rail, his arms flailed, and, instinctively, he caught himself.

Our suicidal sniper was now hanging by his hands about 100 feet over our heads. Instinct having taken over when he slipped, it looked like he had lost his resolve. He looked to be hanging on for, as they say, dear life.

Two volunteer firemen thundered past me, followed by an ambulance EMT and Volont. They rushed the fallen stepladder into position, and began climbing frantically toward the top of the elevator.

The fire chief came up beside me. “We ain’t got a ladder that will make it more than seventy-five feet,” he said, simply. “They better hurry.”

“Yeah.”

“Funny, isn’t it, I mean the way they want to jump, and then they don’t?”

“Sure is,” I said. “I wonder why he just didn’t shoot himself.”

It took, oh, probably a minute, for them to get to the top. It seemed like an hour to me, and I was just an observer. They had to go over the rail, and then about twenty feet to my left, before they could get to him. I could hear them hollering to him to hang on.

It was very close. Too close for me.

The two firemen each grabbed at him over the edge, and then the EMT reached way down, and caught the back of his coat in her hands. I could just see the top of Volont’s head, and supposed he was pulling on her waist. They all seemed to freeze that way for an instant, and they all sort of heaved together, and the dangling sniper slid back up, over the rail, and they all disappeared from view.

“Know who he is?” asked the fire chief.

“Not yet,” I breathed. “But we will…”

By the time they got back down, there was a little crowd of us waiting for them at the bottom of the ladder. Lamar and me, Art, the two troopers from the parking lot, several firemen, and a couple of EMTs.

Volont suggested the troopers handcuff the sniper. As they did so, I got my first clear look at him. I was flabbergasted.

Our trembling, nearly collapsing sniper was none other than Horace Blitek, the screwy member of the Borglan defense team.

You could have, as they say, knocked me over with a feather.

We hauled him up to the hospital in an ambulance, to be checked out.

We were met by my old friend Dr. Henry Zimmer at the entrance to the emergency room of our thirty-bed hospital. As soon as Henry had heard there was a sniper, he had prudently called in two extra nurses, a couple of lab and X-ray techs, and his junior partner, Dr. Paul Kline. Consequently, as soon as Horace Blitek was out of the ambulance on his stretcher, he was nearly mobbed by attention.

“So, this is the guy everybody’s making such a fuss about?” said Henry.

“Yep. In the flesh,” I said. “He did try to jump, Henry. You might want to know that.”

“Depressed,” asked Henry, “or just in a hurry?” He chuckled, and started in to the ER, where Horace Blitek could just barely be seen through the little bevy of nurses and ambulance personnel. “We’ll see if we can’t cheer him up…”

While they attended to Blitek, I got a chance to talk to Volont and Art.

“All he had was an SKS. The pauses were to reload. Just had loose ammo in boxes. No clips.” Volont shook his head. “He had to reload by hand after every few rounds.”

The SKS doesn’t have a detachable magazine, but it was a favorite of some survivalist types, for some reason. Semiauto rifle, 7.62 mm. Chinese manufacture of an old Soviet design. They cost about $75.00, which may have gone a long way toward their popularity.

“So, why didn’t he shoot himself?” I asked.

Volont grinned. “Out of ammunition. Not even proficient enough to save one for himself.”

“So,” said Art, “now we just have to find out why he was so pissed off.”

Henry pronounced Blitek fit a few minutes later. “Just some bruises on his forearms, and on his butt. Otherwise, he’s just a picture of physical health.”

“Thanks, Henry. We just needed to be sure.”

“You might want to have a psychiatrist check him out, though. He’s really upset. Told me that he’s let Gabriel down, and that Gabriel is going to ‘get’ him.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “You do get some strange ones for us, Houseman. But a personal feud with an archangel…”

“Yeah…”

Volont and I conferred. Based on what Henry had just said, we really needed to talk with Blitek. Even in his possibly mentally disturbed state.

“We won’t be able to use anything we get against him…”

Volont shrugged. “Then we don’t use it against
him
… but we use it to get Gabriel.”

We took Blitek to the office, and began making the arrangements for an emergency committal to a mental health institute, for evaluation. He had, after all, attempted suicide. But we’d have at least two hours before the arrival of the mental health referee, who would examine him.

While we had been at the hospital with Blitek, two state troopers, and Art and George, had been to the top of the elevator. Lots of shell casings. 7.62 mm. The rifle. Some brown cardboard ammo boxes. Nothing else, though. Courtesy Maitland PD, chains and padlocks had been installed on the caged, exterior access ladder, in three layers, where a cop in a car could see them. A potential sniper could still climb to the top, but it was hoped that he’d at least be more obvious. The area was pronounced secure.

Pronouncement be damned, I noticed that almost everybody was suddenly using the back door to the office.

We sat Blitek in a chair in the reception area, while we tried to find a room without bystanders where we could interview him. “Cletus and his attorney are in the interview room,” said Lamar. He indicated Blitek, sitting bedraggled in the corner. “Shit,” he said, “he looks like somethin’ the cat dragged in.”

He did. At the hospital, they had pretty well undressed him, looking at what turned out to be minor injuries, and prodding and probing to make certain there was no internal damage. Typically for those under emotional duress, and on the downside of a suicide high to boot, he had then replaced his clothing in a rather haphazard manner, not tucking in his long John top, or buttoning his plaid shirt. His fly was unzipped. His boots were untied, with the laces dragging on the floor. He was sitting in a small wooden chair, with his head in his hands, and his elbows on his knees; his disheveled gray and brown hair sticking straight out between his fingers. The only bright element in the picture was the touch of silver provided by the handcuffs.

We decided the best place for him was the kitchen. Available coffee, rest room, and no phones. We kicked everybody else out, including the troopers and Maitland officers who were regaling a small crowd of late arrivers with lurid descriptions of the monster sniper. They looked a bit silly as we brought Blitek in and shooed them out.

We sat him down, and I went out a different door on my way to get note tablets and pens for the interview. As I did, I had to excuse my passage though the interview room containing Cletus Borglan and Attorney Gunston.

Cletus looked kind of bad, and Gunston was being all protective. “Did you manage to get whoever it was? Is this area secure now?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. Just passing through. I was on my way back with the tablets before it occurred to me. I excused my way through the interview room again, and hit the kitchen with a plan.

“I think,” I said, “we’d be better off doing this interview in your office, Lamar.” Way back on the other side of the building.

As he started to protest, I motioned him over by the sink. “I just came through the interview room,” I said, in a low voice. “Cletus and his attorney are in there, and they don’t know who the shooter was.”

I could almost see the cartoon lightbulb come on over Lamar’s head. To arrive at his office, we would have to transit the interview room occupied by Cletus and company.

“Let’s take him back to my office,” said Lamar, in a loud, clear voice.

We paraded past Cletus and Gunston. Lamar, Volont, Blitek, and me. Slowly, of course, so that Blitek wouldn’t trip on his shoelaces. Blitek’s head was down, and in his state, I don’t think he even noticed who we were passing by. None of us said a word. Except for Lamar, who simply said, “Excuse us, please,” as he led the way through.