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  Mike nodded. ‘They’re both on the couch, along with Holly and Jasmine. There’s a big redheaded lady—’

  ‘My cousin, June,’ Dalton said.

  Mike nodded at him. ‘She’s in a chair just to the right of the sofa as you walk in, and Loretta is in a chair to the left. Nita and Mrs Dobbins are in the love seat opposite the sofa. The whole seating arrangement is like a square. Nita and Mrs Dobbins have their backs to the Blantons.’

  Anthony asked, ‘Could you see my wife’s face? Did she look all right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mike said. ‘I saw her fine when I put the cheese sticks on the coffee table. I mean, she looked scared, but they all did. At least, the civilians did.’

  Milt touched Anthony on the shoulder. ‘We’re all worried about our wives—’ he started, but Anthony interrupted.

  ‘Maryanne’s pregnant. About eight weeks.’ He sighed and said, ‘We lost her last two pregnancies at about eight weeks.’

  Milt’s hand on Anthony’s shoulder tightened. ‘We’ll get her out,’ Milt said. ‘We’ll get ’em all out.’

  Jewel heard the tornado warning sirens only seconds before she heard the sound of the freight train. She ran out of the front door and looked at the sky. She only saw blue sky, until she turned to the west, where it was pitch black, except for a gray funnel shape. It was the largest tornado she’d ever seen, and having been raised in Oklahoma she’d seen her share. Her husband was at work but Johnny Mac was next door. She ran to her neighbors and flung open the door, only to almost hit Laurie Potter, Matt’s mom, in the face. ‘Where are the boys?’ they asked simultaneously.

  Then, stunned, they both just looked at each other. ‘They’re at your house,’ Laurie almost whispered.

  ‘No, they’re at yours,’ Jewel said, a catch in her voice. She stepped back on the sidewalk and looked to the west. ‘No time!’ she said, grabbing Laurie’s arm. ‘Shelter, now!’

  They ran into Jewel’s backyard, beyond the pool on the other side of the trampoline, just to the right of the shed that housed the garden equipment and pool supplies, and flung open the door to the storm shelter, scurrying down into its darkened depths.

  I’m not sure I can explain how I felt that day sitting in the restaurant of the Longbranch Inn, surrounded by both town and county law enforcement personnel, half of whom were in the same boat as me – the love of their life threatened by a crazy old lady who’d only let them go when she saw her son. Unfortunately, but fortunately unbeknownst to that crazy old bat, said son was as dead as a doornail, and I had no idea why. This would be the new ME’s first autopsy, and I wasn’t expecting a speedy answer on that – if I got one at all. I figured that by tomorrow I’d have to send the body off to the state guys to get any real answers. But by tomorrow, all the women upstairs could be dead. Would be dead. If we didn’t do something, and do it damn quick.

  I picked up my cell phone and called the phone number for suite 214. Eunice Blanton picked up on the first ring. ‘What the hell’s taking so long?’ she demanded.

  ‘We have a slight hitch at our end, Mrs Blanton—’

  ‘Don’t you try to trick me, you devil!’ Eunice spat into the phone. ‘I know what you cops like to do – twist things around, make it like up is down and down is up! Well, I ain’t having none of that shit, I can tell you right now!’ I heard a commotion on the other end of the line. Then the old woman came back on. ‘Say goodbye to wifey!’ she said.

  Then I heard Jean’s voice. ‘Milt, I’m sorry,’ my wife said.

  ‘Baby, hold on! We’re coming—’

  ‘Well, you’ll be too late,’ Eunice Blanton said.

  ‘Wait! Eunice, listen! Please!’ I begged, trying to come up with a convincing lie. ‘The state bureau guys came down on this and they’re not letting him go yet. I’m trying everything I can, and I’ve got a plan! I’ll get your boy to you as soon as I can! You just gotta be patient, and please don’t shoot my wife. We’ve got a little boy—’

  ‘Yeah? Me, too! And you done locked him up for no good reason!’

  ‘I’m getting him out, Eunice, I promise you that. Just give me another hour,’ I begged.

  The old bitty sighed, then said, ‘One hour. Then I’m gonna start killin’ ’em two at a time!’ And the line went dead in my ear.

  I’d no sooner hung up the phone when it started beeping. I hit the screen and found a flashing icon – the weather icon. I punched it and the screen lit up, showing a tornado touching down in the Bishop area. I exited that and dialed my sister’s home number: no answer, so I tried her cell, but still no answer. I hoped that meant she and Johnny Mac were in the shelter and either she’d forgotten her phone or her cell service wasn’t working because of the storm.

  Turning to the assembled lawmen, I said, ‘We got a tornado in Bishop. Any volunteers to go there and assist?’

  Neither Emmett nor I raised our hands, and I wasn’t about to call upstairs to see if Dalton or Anthony wanted to volunteer. It would be a waste of breath. Charlie Smith said, ‘You guys stay here. I’ll get some off-duty guys to go up there, and you,’ he said, pointing to two of his men, ‘go to the fire station, get the rescue van and call the volunteer firefighters, if they haven’t already been called, and call our off-duty guys, and y’all head up to Bishop.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ both men said in unison and were out the door.

  ‘When it rains, it pours,’ I heard someone say under their breath. Couldn’t figure out who it was, but, truth be known, I didn’t really care.

  Johnny Mac left the girl’s bike where it was and found a depression at the base of a tree trunk. He hunkered down in that, his hands finding a sturdy tree root and grabbing on to it. He closed his eyes and prayed.

  Jean could feel herself beginning to lose it. Normally a woman in control of her emotions, she’d never been held captive before and was beginning to think that maybe this was her breaking point. She hoped, if she did break, she could come back from it. She’d seen too many patients who never did – whatever their trauma. She reached for Holly’s hand and was amazed when Holly patted hers with her free hand and whispered, ‘It’s gonna be OK, Jean. Trust me.’

  Jean had mixed feelings about this – respect and awe for Holly’s ability to handle this situation, like so many other things in her short life, and a little anger at Holly’s ability to handle this situation, like so many other things in her short life. Was this young woman for real? Where was the panic? Where was the angst? Where was the screaming and crying that Jean wanted to indulge in?

  From the other side of her, Paula whispered, ‘What the hell have you gotten me into, Jean? I can’t believe we’re even at this stupid party with all these hicks—’

  Jean sighed. ‘Paula, just shut the hell up. Really.’

  Paula opened her mouth to speak but Jean just glared at her, so she shut it again.

  Jean tried some meditative breathing to calm herself, but it didn’t work. To give herself a break, she had to admit that she was the only one of the women who’d been personally threatened not once but twice. That pissed her off – which in the circumstances was a good thing. She had a good life; she’d been happy up until about an hour ago. She loved her husband, her son, her job – everything. Who in the hell did this woman think she was, trying to take all that away from her?

  She squeezed Holly’s hand and whispered, ‘We need to get this bitch!’

  The two Longbranch police officers headed straight to the firehouse, where they found several volunteer firefighters already readying the rescue van. The officers grabbed what they needed – ropes, shovels, drills, saws – piled them in the trunk of their squad car and, with sirens blazing and flashers brightening the evening as it grew dark, followed the rescue van headed north toward the township of Bishop, the richest part of Prophesy County, infested with doctors, lawyers and bankers.

  They were halfway there when the officer riding shotgun shouted, ‘Shit! Look!’ He was pointing out of the driver’s-side window. The driver glanced that
way and almost lost control of the squad car. He figured the sirens had kept them from hearing the sound of the freight train. The tornado, which the driver calculated to be about a mile across at the bottom, maybe a category four if not a five, was headed straight at them. He saw the rescue van in front of them veer off the highway, heading for a ditch. The driver followed suit, breaking, and he and his partner clambered out of the squad car and hit the ditch with the volunteers, all lying flat on their stomachs. The driver couldn’t help glancing up as he heard the might of the tornado bearing down on them. He was just in time to see his squad car get picked up in the twister, twirled around and thrown. He covered his head, hoping the car would miss them as it came crashing down.

  Johnny Mac heard the sound of the horrible freight train crashing through the tiny forest, could see trees being ripped up from their roots. ‘Not my tree, God,’ he prayed. ‘Please, not my tree!’ He held onto the root with all his strength, one arm having worked through the dirt to the other side of it, so that now his arm was around it, securing him more tightly – he hoped.

  Johnny Mac didn’t cry. He wasn’t a baby. He admitted he was scared shitless, something he wouldn’t mention to his mother – if he made it out of this alive – because she didn’t like him using cuss words. But, he figured, scared shitless was the only way to describe the feeling he had right now. He hoped Matt and the other boy were OK, and that Aunt Jewel had made it to her shelter and wasn’t out looking for him in this. God, if something happened to Aunt Jewel because he’d lied to her, he would never forgive himself – and he knew his dad never would either. The guilt almost brought tears to his eyes, but he choked them down, deciding that living through this was his best course.

  Johnny Mac felt his legs being lifted and he wrapped his arms even tighter around the tree root, squeezing his eyes shut to protect them from the debris flying around. The noise was so profound he couldn’t hear his own thoughts – although he wasn’t sure at that moment if he had any. It seemed to last forever. At one point he felt he was vertical, his feet up in the air and his head down toward the tree root. He screamed once or twice, but got grit in his mouth and shut it. He wasn’t sure how long he could hold on. His arms were on fire; he felt his shoes being torn from his feet. It was hard to breathe and his chest felt tight.

  And then it passed. His body fell back to earth, knocking the breath out of him. Debris fell to the ground around him, and the horrible noise subsided as the funnel cloud moved on. But it was so dark in what was left of the forest that he could barely see his hands in front of his face. He stuck his hand in his pocket and was glad to feel the small flashlight his dad insisted he carry at all times. Not that he did – carry it all the time, that is. Half the time he forgot it, along with his lucky rabbit’s foot and his lucky dollar bill on his bedside table. But today he had them all, although the flashlight was going to be handier than either the rabbit’s foot or his lucky dollar bill. Then he smiled, thinking that both of those charms, along with his prayer to God, had already paid off. He wasn’t dead.

  Jasper Thorne and Drew Gleeson, Longbranch EMTs, were heading to Bishop when they saw the Longbranch police department squad car flipped over in the middle of the highway. Jasper, who was driving, slammed on the break and swerved to miss it, and the ambulance came to rest across the two lanes.

  ‘Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle!’ Jasper muttered.

  Drew was out of his side of the ambulance, heading for the squad car, when he heard a shout from the other side of the road. Looking that way, he saw several bedraggled people pulling themselves out of a ditch. Drew headed in their direction, followed by Jasper.

  ‘You guys all right?’ he called out.

  There was some nodding of heads and a couple of shakes, but everybody looked in one piece. The lone woman in the group had blood on her face and Drew went to her first.

  ‘Jasper, you got the bag?’ he asked his partner.

  ‘On my way,’ he said, heading back to the ambulance for it.

  Drew sat the woman down and said, ‘Who are you guys?’

  ‘We’re volunteer firefighters,’ she said. ‘Except for the two cops, of course.’

  ‘I expect we were headed the same place as y’all – Bishop?’ one of the officers said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Drew said, taking the bag that Jasper had brought to him and opening it. He took out some alcohol wipes and set to work on the blood on the woman’s face. ‘Y’all get a look at the twister?’ Drew asked.

  ‘Yeah, I did,’ the driver said. ‘I’d say it was a mile across at the bottom, at least a C-4 if not a C-5. We were lucky, it just clipped us. Got our squad car, which was right behind the rescue van, but didn’t touch the van.’

  ‘Anybody else hurt?’ Jasper asked the men standing around.

  One guy, who was holding his arm, said, ‘I think I may have broken my arm.’

  Jasper took him to the open back doors of the ambulance and sat him down while he checked his arm.

  Meanwhile, Drew found the cut on the woman’s head. It was small but deep and was still bleeding. He also took her to the ambulance, sitting her down next to the guy with the broken arm, then found some butterfly bandages to close the wound and stop the bleeding.

  Looking at both the injured, Drew said, ‘We need to keep going to Bishop. We can leave y’all here with the squad car, after we move it off the highway, or y’all can come with us and we’ll stash you somewhere in Bishop.’

  The woman stood up. ‘Hey, it’s a scratch. They’re going to need all the bodies they can get up there.’

  ‘I’m fine, too,’ said the guy with the broken arm. ‘We all got jobs to do.’

  Drew looked at Jasper. ‘Is it broken?’ he asked.

  ‘Like a two-dollar watch,’ Jasper said.

  Drew looked at the guy. ‘Well, we can’t let you be part of the rescue party ’cause of that arm,’ he said. ‘We’ll take you with us, but the best I can do is to let you take notes – if you can write with your left hand,’ he said, noting that it was his right arm that was broken.

  ‘No problem,’ the volunteer firefighter said. ‘I’m a southpaw.’

  ‘Good,’ Drew said, slapping him on his good arm. ‘Both of y’all hop in the back here while we move the squad car.’

  The five remaining volunteer firefighters, the two police officers and the two EMTs managed to rock and slide the upside-down car to the side of the road and remove it from the highway. Then the firefighters and the cops got in the rescue van, while the EMTs got back in the ambulance with the two injured firefighters, and they headed toward Bishop, sirens blasting away again.

  We had an hour. To do what I didn’t know. The fact that Darrell Blanton was dead was pretty much putting a wrench in the works, I can tell you that. I saw this movie once, called, I think, Weekend at Bernie’s, where these guys used all kinds of contraptions to make it look like this guy Bernie was still alive when he wasn’t. I supposed I could stand Darrell’s corpse up under the window of suite 214 and get him to wave at his mama. I decided not to share this idea with the rest of the guys. The problem of who killed ol’ Darrell wasn’t bothering me too much at the moment. I really didn’t care. All I cared about were the hostages, and I’d care about them the most even if my wife wasn’t one of ’em. Adding her to the mix just plain threw the thought of Darrell’s killer right out of my mind.

  We were a little ahead now. We knew where our people were and where the bad guys were. We could go in guns blazing, but five’d get you ten, and one of our women would get hit by somebody – either them or us. And just because everybody up there was in those positions when Mike was there didn’t mean they were going to stay in those positions. Maybe what I should do – what I should have done at the very beginning – is call in the state guys with their hostage negotiators and SWAT teams and let them do their thing.

  Except these guys, these pros, always had an acceptable hostage body count – some formula that figured a certain percentage of loss was to be expecte
d. Well, I didn’t expect it. Not any loss, not on my watch. I was getting my wife back, as were Emmett and Anthony and Will. And Dalton and Mike Reynolds were getting their fiancées back. And we were getting Loretta and June and even Paula out of there as well. Nobody was going to die. Maybe Eunice Blanton, but that was it.

  I used my cell phone to call Anthony’s cell. He answered on the first ring. I’d instructed both him and Dalton to turn their ringers off and keep their phones on vibrate. I called Anthony instead of Dalton because with Dalton’s less-than-extensive knowledge of all things electronic he could have just as easily turned his volume up. It wouldn’t be cool for Eunice Blanton to hear a phone ringing in another room.

  ‘Hello?’ Anthony whispered.

  ‘Can you hear anything from next door?’ I asked him.

  ‘A little bit,’ he said. ‘I got one of the glasses out of the bathroom and held it against the wall and I can hear the occasional word, but nobody’s talking much in there. Not even the old bat. I heard her on the phone with you, I’m thinking?’

  ‘Yeah, I called up there.’

  ‘Yeah, I figured. We got another hour, huh?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll keep listening and call you if I hear anything pertinent,’ Anthony said.

  ‘Roger and out,’ I said.

  ‘Mama, I feel sick,’ Earl Blanton said, using the hand that wasn’t holding the shotgun to rub his stomach.

  Eunice turned to her son then glanced at the former bowls of chocolate Jean had placed around the room. She slapped Earl in the face. ‘You think now’s the time to eat your weight in candy, you idiot!’

  ‘But, Mama, it was just sittin’ there—’ Earl started.

  Eunice slapped him again. Earl said, ‘Ow, Mama!’ and moved his tummy hand to his face. ‘You don’t gotta do that!’

  ‘Well, if not me, then who? Somebody’s gotta set your stupid Blanton ass straight!’ Eunice turned back to the assembled. ‘See what I gotta put up with?’ she said to no one in particular. To her son, she said, ‘Don’t you even think about getting started on them nuts, you hear me?’