Free Dead Run by P. J. Tracy Page B

play had the nerve to point guns, loaded or not, at one of the taxpayers who paid their salaries. He squared his shoulders and dropped his head and looked from one to the other. "You boys have just bought yourselves a world of hurt. . . ."
    "Harold?"
    Confused by the unexpected sound of his wife's voice, Harold swung his big head around to see Jean out of the truck, cowering by the right fender, terrified eyes jerking back and forth from her husband to the rifles. Jesus Christ, he would never understand women. She wouldn't eat eggs for fear of clogging an artery forty years down the line, but she'd walk out in front of two M16s as if she were made of Kevlar.
    "Get back in the truck, Jean," he said calmly, because even though he was sure-absolutely sure-those guns weren't loaded, he didn't need her out here complicating matters.
    She looked at him for a moment, then turned and got back into the truck.
    "You too, sir," Freckle-face called out, gesturing with his rifle. "Back in the truck, please. Now. You're almost cleared for entry. I'm just waiting for a callback. It should only be another minute or so."
    Harold glared at him for a second, then climbed up into the truck. He glanced at the tears coursing down his wife's face, saw the violent trembling of her hands, and for the first time in his life, wanted to harm another human being. Two of them, in fact. For right now, there wasn't a whole lot he could do with a couple of puffed-up hot-shots who might or might not be carrying live ammunition, but by God, the second he got near a phone he was going to burn up the wires all the way to Washington if he had to, and see these assholes up on ...
    Wait a minute, Harold.
    He'd been staring at the soldiers by the jeep, vision and mind clouded by the red blur of impotent fury, and goddamnit, he hadn't seen it, hadn't seen what any clear-eyed fool would have noticed right off, and now he felt a ball of fear that clenched at his stomach and almost stopped his heart.
    "Jean," he whispered, eyes straight ahead now, lips barely moving, sweat rolling down from his forehead like someone had just turned on a faucet. "Get down on the seat and hang on."
    The funny thing was that Jean, as strong-minded a woman as he'd ever known, did as she was told without a second's hesitation, probably because she had known long before he did how wrong things were here. "Are we going to find Tommy?" was the only thing she asked.
    "That's where we're going."
    Harold eased the gearshift out of park, slowly, carefully, sliding his butt forward on the seat until he could barely see over the wheel, and then his lug-soled lace-up punched the accelerator and the old Ford leaped forward and smashed through the sawhorses like a crazed bull going through a barn wall. Shards of wood were flying everywhere, and the engine was roaring so loud that they could hardly hear the gunfire that was shattering the windows around them.
     
     
     
    ANNIE AND SHARON had moved up next to Grace at the cafe's screen door by the time the distant popping sound started to syncopate the roar of whatever was coming.
    Annie was pretty excited. She'd already identified the roaring as the approach of a big pickup-she'd spent a fair amount of time in those during her Mississippi youth, both upright and reclined-and at this point she wasn't at all particular about the mode of transportation arriving. Just so she didn't have to walk ten miles in this heat or spend two hours trying to patch twenty-five telephone wires. The popping was troublesome, though. "What is that? Firecrackers?"
    "Automatic rifles," Sharon replied without a trace of doubt, slipping her weapon from her leather shoulder bag, and Annie's vision of rescue by some husky country good ol' boys took a dark turn.
    Grace already had her Sig in her hand. Over the years, her survival instinct had been honed down to the most primal level. She never stopped to analyze, to moralize, to ethically weigh the wisdom of pulling her gun. If she