Home of the Brave (Raine Stockton Dog Mysteries Book 9) (25 page)

“Hey!” one of the soldiers barked, turning his rifle on her.  “Shut up!”

They had never ordered us not to talk before. The strain was starting to show on them too.

And then the soldier swung the rifle toward Margie.  “Quiet those kids down!”  And to me, “And the dogs!  Shut them up!”

I said, very calmly, “I don’t have any more treats.  They’re hungry and thirsty and they’ve been crated too long.  There’s nothing I can do.”  I thought to myself,
He’s losing it
. And my heart started to pound.

Margie slowly pushed herself to her feet.  Her hair was greasy and tangled with sweat and her makeup had long since worn off, but her eyes were defiant and unafraid.  She called across the room to the row of children, “Hey, kids! We’re going to have a sing along!  Who remembers our camp song?” 

Only the sound of barking and an occasional sob broke the silence.  Margie began to sing,

Oh beautiful, for collie dogs …

She said, “Come on, kids, you know it!  Where are my stars?”  She began again:

Oh beautiful, for collie dogs
…

Another voice, small but true, joined in. 

And German shepherds too …

When I looked, Melanie was on her feet.  I gave her the biggest smile I could find, even as my eyes flooded with tears. One by one other voices joined, and other children stood, until the sound of their singing almost drowned out the barking of the dogs.

For poodles and Siberians

With shining eyes of blue!

Oh Labradors, oh Rottweilers …

That was when we heard the police siren.

For a moment nothing happened.  The singing voices trickled off, the dogs continued to bark, and some to howl.  It was only one sweet sharp blast of hope, over as abruptly as it had begun, but it froze our world for a moment; it changed everything.  No one blinked, no one breathed.  For a moment I think we weren’t entirely sure of what we had heard.

And then, movement.  The radios on the collars of the soldiers started to crackle.  They spoke words into them that I could neither hear nor comprehend.  I looked at Jolene.  Her nostrils were flared, her expression still and alert.  The soldiers started to move toward the doors, backing away, covering us with their rifles.  And then they were gone.

For a moment we just stared at each other.  Someone whispered, “Is that it? Are they gone?”

Melanie launched herself across the room into my arms and I swept her up, hugging her harder than I’ve ever hugged anyone in my life.  The other kids started to swarm into the arms of the instructors and counselors, their protectors.  Steve ran toward the nearest door until Jolene shouted, “No!  Stay away from the doors!” And he had the good sense to listen to her.

She made us all move away from the walls and doors to the center of the room, near the dogs, and we huddled there, I don’t know how long.  We watched the doors.  We clung to each other.  We waited.  And then we heard the sound of helicopters overhead, lots of them, close.  My face broke into a broad grin as I turned my face toward the ceiling, and so did Steve’s and Margie’s and Kathy’s and Lee’s.  Melanie looked up at me anxiously.  “Is it over?”

And then I heard the sweetest words I had ever heard in my life.  “FBI!  Stand back!”

I hugged Melanie tightly.  “Yeah,” I said.  “It’s over.”

Chapter
Twenty-Six

S
unday night.  We were all curled up together on Miles’s big sofa, a bowl of popcorn between us, watching
Independence Day
on his giant-screen television
.
  Pepper slept next to Melanie and Cisco was stretched out on the sofa next to me, his head in my lap.  I did not like to encourage him to get on the furniture, but Miles had no scruples whatsoever.  And besides, this was a special occasion. 

Mischief and Magic, the clowns, lolled belly-up on the plush rug in front of the television.  Nike, mine for the weekend,  had dutifully explored every inch of the double-wide for danger, and had eventually settled in a corner where she could keep an eye on everything: Miles, me, Melanie, the dogs, the television.  The way she lay so alertly in sphinx position with her gaze straight ahead made it look as though she was actually enjoying the movie.

Melanie fell asleep before the White House blew up, her head on her dad’s shoulder, one hand in the popcorn bowl and the other entangled in Pepper’s fur.  I woke up with a start around the time Will Smith was dragging the alien across the desert by the tentacles.  Miles soothed me with a kiss atop my head.  “Okay?” he whispered.

I nodded and settled against his shoulder again, stroking Cisco’s ear.

So much about the past twenty-four hours was a blur, and was likely to remain so.  I remember Melanie running into her father’s arms, and I remember the look on his face as he swept her up, but I do not remember how we got out of the building.  I remember Cisco galloping to me, all grins and waving tail, and I remember falling to my knees and sobbing out loud as I wrapped my arms around him.  I remember Miles kissing me and holding my face with strong fingers curved against my scalp and whispering, “I love your hair!” which made me laugh and cry even harder.

Someone told me that two of the insurgents had been shot trying to escape.  I don’t know who they were.  Someone else—I don’t know who—told me about Reggie Connor and how Cisco had found him and how he turned out to be in collusion with the militants the whole time, but none of it made much sense to me.  I remember thinking, dazed, that it must have been Reggie’s sock Cisco had found by the lake after all, and that poor Gene Hicks, a bit player in this whole drama, had probably moved on long before any of this ever happened.

What made even less sense to me was Lyle Reston.  I had known him since he was six.

They took Jolene to the hospital, where I heard she had surgery on her hand but was doing fine and would be released on Monday.  Nike came home with me.

I hadn’t had much sleep.  The FBI interviews had lasted until midnight, and then I stayed to help Margie and Steve with the hysterical parents who came to pick up their children.  Somehow I ended up at Miles’s house with all the dogs.  He made me something wonderful to eat.  I slept.

The FBI was still combing the woods with special search teams and helicopters, but I had a feeling they wouldn’t find any more of the terrorists.  This had been too well planned. 

It would take weeks, if then, for all the details to be sorted out, but the prevailing theory was that Camp Bluebird had been used as a training site and munitions dump for the radicals, just as I’d guessed.  The arrival of a camp filled with children and dogs had been an inconvenience for them, to say the least, and the addition of an explosives dog demo pushed the situation to critical.  When Jolene arrived early and Willie knew he couldn’t finish moving all the munitions before Nike discovered them, he decided to go rogue, figuring he had a better chance at survival by trying to sell the stolen munitions himself than to face the charges that would be levied if he was discovered to be working for the militants.  Lyle Reston claimed he carried out the orders of a man called the Professor when he shot Willie.  He still denied the murder of Carl Brunner, but a ballistics test of the bullet found deep in the frame of Jessie Connor’s burned out car told a different story.

By the way, when I asked Jolene just before they put her in the ambulance why she had decided to come out to the camp two hours early, she gave me what in other circumstances might have passed for a wry grin and replied, “Just to piss you off.”

Reggie maintained that his involvement was only peripheral, and that he knew he was in over his head when they burned up his dad’s car.  He continued to insist he knew nothing about the hostage event, but speculated that they might have been planning to negotiate for the return of the munitions that had been confiscated from Willie’s pickup.  Beyond that, the last I heard, he refused to give up names or say more, hoping for a lawyer who could cut him a deal for immunity.  Good luck with that. 

Henry Middleton was being interviewed, but so far could be charged with nothing more than exercising his right to freedom of assembly.  He claimed absolutely no knowledge of the activities of any of the suspects in the case, and was so arrogant he didn’t even ask for a lawyer.  The FBI was no easily discouraged, however, and I had a feeling he’d be asking for one soon.

The scary thing was that the FBI never found the hand grenades or the remainder of the ammunition that Nike had discovered buried in the rocks.  Or at least they hadn’t so far.  The terrorists had not left empty-handed.

  “I can’t believe that idiot is still coming here tomorrow,” Miles said, stirring me from a troubled half-doze.  I opened my eyes to see one of Jeb Wilson’s campaign ads on television.  “Some kind of crazy machismo BS, I guess.  Everybody wants to be a hero on the Fourth of July.”

I blinked a couple of times to focus and reached for a handful of popcorn.  “I don’t think he’s going to be in the parade anymore.  Just make a quick speech afterward.” 

“And that’s the other thing.  Why are they still having the parade?”

“There’s no reason not to.  The problem is all way on the other side of the county, and it’s not even a problem anymore.  Most people probably don’t know what happened yet.  Besides, everything turned out okay.”  I popped a piece of popcorn in my mouth, and glanced up at him.  “You never did tell me what you’ve got against Jeb Wilson.”

He hesitated.  “I’ve had a couple of run-ins with him during the course of doing business that turned out to be not entirely above-board. Almost lost my shirt in one, and he had a very creative way of keeping me from filing a complaint. But it’s not just one thing.  It’s a pattern.  He was on the board of one of the banks that got nailed in the sub-prime lending scandal … only by the time the bank collapsed he was no longer on the board and his record was squeaky clean.  Then there was that insurance debacle in Florida after the hurricane, and his company wasn’t even indicted.  .” 

I said, “Those sound like the kinds of things that could ruin a campaign.”

He shrugged and took a handful of popcorn.  “For an ordinary person, maybe.  But Wilson’s got a hell of a cleanup team.  Every time the opposition tries to nail him, the evidence mysteriously gets turned against them.  And the scary thing is, if he makes it to Washington, there’s no limit to the kind of damage he could do.”

I wondered if Buck knew about any of this.  And then I figured he had more important things on his mind right now. 

I said, “So I take it you’re not going to the parade.”

He replied without hesitation.  “I am not.  I’m staying right here with my two girls and barbecuing hamburgers and watching fireworks from my deck.”

I snuggled closer.  “Um, one of your girls has to take Nike back to her owner at nine in the morning.”

Miles tilted my face up with his finger and kissed me.  “And I’m driving you,” he said.  “Barbecue starts at one.”

I rested my head against his shoulder and closed my eyes.  Sometimes a little overprotectiveness is not such a bad thing.

The one thing that never ceases to amaze me is the resilience of dogs and kids.  At nine the next morning, we drove into town with Pepper and Cisco happily looking out the windows of Miles’s SUV while Melanie, sitting between them, chatted on about her adventures at dog camp.  In honor of the holiday, Melanie had tied festive red-white-and-blue bandannas around the golden retrievers’ necks and had wanted to do the same for Nike until I convinced her that working dogs didn’t dress up for holidays.  Nike, good police dog that she was, was crated quietly in the cargo area of the SUV for the short trip into town.  Since she had come home with me, she had been nothing but alert and obedient, her intense gaze taking in every corner, crevice, shadow and nuance of her new environment.  I thought she was looking for Jolene.

“The bad thing about it is,” Melanie went on, “we never got to do the play.  Or have the competitions on Sunday.  I think Pepper could have won
Idol.”

My smile was a little strained only because even thinking about the camp, about what should have been, what never would be, and what might have happened still made me a little nauseous.  It was kind of like the way you feel after stepping off a really scary roller coaster, thinking you’re okay, right before your knees buckle.  Miles noticed and covered my hand with his briefly.

I said, “I guess Margie will be refunding a lot of tuition.”

“I don’t think anyone will be asking for it,” Miles replied.  “We got our kids back.  You guys kept them safe.  Who’s going to put a price on that?”

Melanie said, “You know what would be fun?  We could have an agility trial before lunch and Dad could be the judge.  Mischief and Magic can’t be in it though,” she added quickly. “They’re too fast.”

This time the smile was more genuine; almost a grin.  “Cisco is pretty fast.”

“True,” she agreed sagely, “but he lacks discipline.  You’re always saying so.”