The Bone Orchard: A Novel

My hair was matted and wet. Blood was pooling inside my ear and running into the corner of my eye. I hurled my body across the passenger seat, nearly impaling myself on the gearshift. I pawed at the glove compartment before realizing it was locked and that I needed to turn off the engine and remove the keys. I managed to drop the keys on the floor twice before I got the glove compartment open and saw my newly cleaned pistol inside.

My slick hand closed around the textured grip of the Walther. It was a .380. In the gravel pit where I practiced shooting, I could put all seven bullets in a tight cluster from a distance of fifteen yards. Beyond that, my aim got iffy. I pulled back the slide and chambered a round.

I stared at the heavy little pistol in my hand, trying to feel confident about it, telling myself that at least the Walther gave me a chance, while I waited for the next blast to come.

Rolling onto my side and looking up at the ceiling, I tried to make sense of the wreckage inside the vehicle. The first blast had angled toward the right side of the vehicle before the shooter had corrected his aim and taken out the rest of the windshield. The driver’s side window was also shattered. My quick guess was that the shots had been fired from that direction: up the hill and to my left.

I managed to get my entire body on the right side of the vehicle, then popped the handle on the passenger door. Even before it had fully swung open, I lunged through the crack and dropped hard to the wet grass. I landed flat on my chest and stomach, a belly flop in the mud.

I wriggled away toward the rear of the Bronco, hoping that my estimate of the sniper’s location was correct and that I wasn’t completely exposed now. When I’d crawled around to the rear of the truck, I pushed myself up onto my knees and then my heels, making myself as small a target as possible.

Blood was oozing between my skin and my shirt collar. With my free hand, I rubbed my right eye and found that I could see better. The pain in my head and face was sharp and stinging. The phrase “death by a thousand cuts” came to my mind, but if I died, it wasn’t going to be from these small wounds. It was going to be because the shooter got the drop on me for real and fired a load of heavy shot into my heart and lungs.

Where was Kathy? She had heard Pluto baying and had gone outside to see what had gotten him riled up. The front door was standing open.

I glanced around the yard, looking for better cover. There was an open stretch of unmowed grass and then a stone wall and a cluster of sugar maples. I hated to waste a bullet, but I didn’t see much of a choice.

I sprang to my feet, extended my arms across the cold, wet roof of the Bronco, and squeezed off a shot in the direction of the pine grove. I didn’t expect to hit anyone. In fact, I aimed at a tree, in the unlikely event that Kathy herself was up there, playing cat and mouse with our assailant. If I was lucky, the shot would catch the sniper off guard and the unexpected muzzle flash would cause him to duck behind whatever he was using for cover.

A second after I’d pulled the trigger, I took off across the yard. The sniper wasn’t intimidated by my return fire, because he let loose with another blast from the shotgun. I must have been correct about his position—somewhere between the house and the pines—because he didn’t have a clear line on me. I heard the blast and thought I felt the pellets ruffling the air behind my head, but the sensation might have been something I imagined.

I hurdled over the stone wall without breaking my neck and dived down behind the roots of the nearest maple. I had good cover here, and the sniper knew it. He also knew that I was armed. The question was, What would he choose to do with this knowledge? Would he try to reposition himself to take me down from a different angle—he obviously had some sort of night-vision scope—or would he cut and run, figuring that one of Kathy’s neighbors would have already called the cops?

The nearest house was probably half a mile away, but the sound of gunshots travels a long distance, and the people at the bottom of the hill would’ve heard them. A single shot after dark would have been cause for concern, but this was a full-on firefight.

I couldn’t wait for help, not knowing where Kathy was. I looked to my left for the next place where I could take cover and spotted Kathy’s bronze Nissan, which was parked in front of the old hay barn. Filling my lungs with air again, I jumped to my feet and sprinted as fast as I could toward the humpbacked SUV. As I ran, I wondered if I would feel the shot that would kill me or if everything would go suddenly black and that would be the end of the picture.

When I found myself crouched against the damp metal of the Nissan, I experienced a feeling of surprise; I hadn’t expected to make it. The gunman hadn’t fired another shot. That meant he was probably on the move—but was he coming toward me or running away?

I decided to risk a peek at the dooryard. Light was spilling out onto the long grass from the front windows and open door. It reached as far as Pluto’s unmoving body. The dog had never had any particular affection for me, despite the hours we’d spent together, but he had rescued lost children and located the bodies of frozen Alzheimer’s sufferers so their relatives would have something to bury. The heroic animal had deserved a better end than this.

It was hard to see past the illuminated patch. I began, calculating if I could make it through the door without getting winged. That was when I noticed the dark liquid on the front steps. It didn’t look red. The tricky light made it appear more like spilled motor oil. But I knew that it was blood, and I knew that it belonged to Kathy.

Without another thought, I leaped out from behind the SUV, firing a random shot back toward the pine grove and the orchard beyond. I might even have yelled something. I went leaping up the front steps, taking them two at a time, leaving my boot prints in the streaked blood.

I found her lying facedown in the hallway in a spreading pool of blood. One of her arms was outstretched; the other was at her side. Her right knee was drawn up. The position of her body was that of a swimmer doing the crawl.

“Kathy?”

The sniper must have caught her as she stepped out the door and onto the front steps. She had let Pluto outside to chase his raccoon. Then came the shot that ended the dog’s life. I could only imagine the horror she’d experienced in that moment, watching her life’s companion slaughtered before her eyes.

The second shot must have come soon after. As shocked as she was, Kathy’s muscle memory would have kicked in and sent her diving for cover. She had too much training and experience to have remained frozen and upright when a gun was going off nearby.

The shotgun blast had struck her in the torso as she was turning back toward the house. Her fleece vest was shredded in the back and bloodstained along the side.

“Kathy?”

I dropped to my knees beside her and turned her over as gently as I could. I was more terrified than I’d ever been in my life. Her face was an unnatural color: a gray that was almost the color of bone. Her eyes were closed and sunken deep into their sockets. Her lips were a bruised shade of blue.

The front of her vest and turtleneck, from her left lung down across the abdomen, had been ripped by the pellets, but it was hard for me to tell how bad the damage was because her entire torso was painted with blood. I pressed two slick fingers beneath her jawline but felt no pulse. I tried again with a wrist. I thought I could detect a faint flutter.

“Kathy?”

I pulled up her shirt and saw the horrible patterned wounds below her bra and rib cage. The pellets had driven threads from her clothing into the ragged holes. Blood was still pumping from them. Her heart was laboring to beat.

As I tore off my own shirt, the buttons went popping everywhere. I wadded the flannel into a ball and pressed it hard against the multiple wounds. My eyes lost focus as they flooded with tears. I felt the warmth of my friend’s blood soaking through the knees of my jeans.

To this day, I can’t remember hearing the siren. The wail of the approaching ambulance was drowned out by my strangled cries for help.





14



What I didn’t see in my rush down the hall was the cell phone lying a few feet from Kathy’s outstretched hand. What I didn’t hear was the voice of the 911 dispatcher, who was still on the line, repeating with practiced calmness that help was on the way.

How had Kathy even managed to key in those three numbers? While losing that much blood?

The deputy sheriff and the EMTs arrived within seconds of one another.

The cop, whose name was Skip Morrison, had been more than an acquaintance but less than a friend when I’d lived in the district; we’d gone out for beers a few times. He was a long-limbed guy who bounced around like a marionette on strings and had freckles that multiplied when he spent more than an hour in the sun.

Seeing the dead dog and the blood smeared like a slug’s trail leading into the house, Deputy Morrison radioed for backup, then ordered the paramedics to stay put while he scoped out the situation. He unholstered his service weapon and darted across the yard. He flattened himself against the peeling clapboards of the house and edged into position so that if he craned his long neck, he could peek inside the building.

He saw me shirtless and covered with blood, crouched over the prone body of Kathy Frost, whose house he knew this was. From the back, he couldn’t identify the half-naked man. Nor would he have recognized me beneath my shaggy hair and stubbled beard. It was unclear from his vantage point what I was doing to the motionless warden. In his report, he said he’d heard me sobbing.