Free Gray Ghost (The Bill Dix Detective Series Book 1) by C.L. Swinney Page B

he righted the chair and retied Thomas’s wrists before he knocked on the door.
    Roger unlocked it. “What now?”
    “ We turn this guy in. It’s time to turn everything over to the local officers.”
    “ All right. We’ll take him out of the shed and transport him to the police department.”
    “ Okay, let’s go.”
    Roger’s guards untied Thomas’s legs from the chair and allowed him to stand to get his balance. After a minute, they started escorting him from the shed out to the backyard.
    Thomas brushed past the two young men when he went through the door. His right hand was free of the rope Dix had loosely placed on him. With speed and agility, Thomas grabbed the gun from one of the armed guards and ran toward the side yard of the house. He had fired a few rounds in the direction of the house and the shed before he took cover behind an abandoned car surrounded by tall grass.
    Everybody scrambled for cover as a round echoed in the air. A .223 caliber round caught Thomas on the left side of his body. The bullet tore through major organs and he slumped over dead next to the car.
    Dix rushed from behind the shed to find Roger standing over Thomas’s body.
    Petersen ran from the house and approached the body, checking for a pulse, then turned to Dix. “He’s dead.” Removing the rope from Thomas’s left hand, he handed it to one of the young men looking over his shoulder. “Make this disappear.”
    Roger turned to his son. “Get the guy’s gear from the shed.” The only thing they kept was the handheld GPS with the coordinates to the speedboat.
    The boy returned quickly. They put the ghillie suit back on Thomas’s lifeless body. One of Roger’s sons placed a Colt .45 close to the dead sniper’s hand.
    Petersen turned to the group. “Okay, who shot him?”
    The son whose gun Thomas had stolen looked down. “I did.”
    Petersen nodded. “We need to come up with a story and then make sure everyone else goes along with it.”
    Fortunately, no one else had been injured.
    Petersen spoke first. “We need to have a reason for shooting this guy. Here’s what I’m thinking. Roger, we say you caught the guy and planned on calling the local police to turn him in. Before you could do that, the sniper grabbed your kid’s gun and ordered him at gunpoint to let him go. The sniper became desperate and made a run for one of the cars parked out front. He turned and fired at the house, and Roger shot him to protect his family.” The group nodded.
    When everyone had agreed on their part in the story, Roger placed a frantic phone call to the police, telling the dispatcher he’d just shot someone.
    Dix hoped their story would work. With the secluded location and no other witnesses, we just might pull it off. It was a crime scene, after all. He didn’t feel good about Petersen compromising it, but he didn’t see that he’d had a choice.
    He could barely hear the steel drums from the celebration in town but realized their sound had probably covered the gunshots. Now police sirens grew louder than the drums.
    Dix felt his cell phone vibrate and answered. “Stand by.” He heard Snead’s twang on the other end. “Hey bud, what’s up?”
    Dix took a deep breath, “Remember when I mentioned the sniper?”
    “ Yeah.”
    “ Well, he gave us all kinds of information about this Caller guy. He confessed to killing Sean and Preston but claimed it was an accident. Then he got a hand free, took a gun, and escaped. He fired a few rounds at the house and was killed by a single round.”
    “ What the hell you guys doing over there? Sounds like rookies at amateur night.”
    “ Somehow, he got one hand free of the restraints I’d tied on him.”
    “ How in tarnation did that happen?”
    “ The rope must have been a little loose.”
    “ Didn’t I teach you better than that?”
    Dix knew it wasn’t wise to argue with Snead.
    “ Well, he’d have spent the rest of his worthless life in prison or gotten the death