Cam - 04 - Nightwalkers by P. T. Deutermann Read Free Book Online

three whole days? Getting his hands on a thirty-aught and some ammo, finding your house, setting up a nighttime ambush, and then getting clean away?"
    There was silence around the office conference table. I could see that my troops were as skeptical as I was. The sheriff's office had found where the shooter had set up in the construction site behind my house in Summerfield. They'd even found a single spent center-firecartridge and footprints leading out through all the red mud to the gravel construction access road. After that, nothing. No witnesses, no tire tracks, no dropped calling cards saying the Shadow did it. Nothing. They were stumped.
    "I mean," Horace said, "where would he get wheels? Did he buy the rifle? Steal it? Somebody just lend him one? Whatcha need a rifle for, Billie Ray? Not gonna murder some guy, are you?"
    "And why the warning shot?" Tony said. "Guy like that, takes a baseball bat to two women 'cause the baby was crying? You're talking some kinda single-cell organism, does that kinda shit. Give a guy like him a rifle, put him in position, he wouldn't shoot a warning shot."
    I nodded. "Yeah, that's what I think, too. Breen's definitely a POS, but I don't see him as a careful planner. It wasn't him."
    "So," Pardee said. "You maybe got more than one ghost out there?"
    I threw up my hands. "Would I necessarily know? It was a fluke that the people at Alexander State were able to warn me about Breen."
    "Have they grabbed him up?" Horace asked. "Squeezed him a little?"
    I nodded. Arlanda Cole had called first thing this morning after word got out downtown. Billie Ray had come in when called. He denied knowledge of any shootings, anywhere, anyhow. She'd said that, in her opinion, he seemed to have genuine parolee religion and that he was not about to put his freedom in danger just to scare me with a rifle. Besides that, his girlfriend could vouch for him at the time of the shooting. Of course.
    That said, I couldn't think of anyone else who would do that. During my time I'd put more than one bad guy away, but so had all of us, and it was inevitably a team effort. The perps who came back as ghosts and acted on it usually did it by walking up in broad daylight, doing a remember-me, and then opening up with a barrage of some kind. They weren't thinkers, planners, or talkers. They were doers.
    "Okay, then," Pardee said. "Let's assume we're right about that. So who--and why the warning shot?"
    I drew a blank. Somebody from the hills, like one of the Creigh clan? Long guns were their specialty, but warning shots were not their style. If the hill people thought you owed them a death, they just flat took it. Fair's fair. And the vigilantes of cat dancer fame? I'd kept my part of that Faustian bargain and paid for it with my professional reputation. They had no reason to want my skin, assuming they were even still in business. There was another Billy, one with a
y,
down in Wilmington, who might qualify, but to the best of my knowledge he was in federal hands until the end of time for his part in the nuclear power plant sabotage case.
    "How soon's that old house of yours out in Rockwell County going to be ready?" Horace asked.
    I shook my head. "My ace restoration consultant says ten years to completion. I could get a trailer, I guess." A fleeting image of that flash of light and the disappearing horseman on the western ridge crossed my mind, but that didn't make sense, either. I hadn't been there long enough to provoke this kind of violence. Even the reenacting antebellum spinster across the road, strange as she seemed, had been friendly so far. "I don't know, guys, maybe I have to start sleeping days and then doing a little night recon for the next couple of weeks. See what we can turn up."
    "We?" Tony asked hopefully.
    "The shepherds and I. This guy comes back, I might miss him, but they won't."
    They looked disappointed. The secretary told me I had a call. It was my old boss, Bobby Lee Baggett, high sheriff of