Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [99]
A highly unusual size for your average hunter.
The same-size bullet that killed Sergeant Mackee.
The same-size bullet that matches Dick Stone’s rifle.
Toby appears at the door.
“I see you found my love.”
He offers me a glass of iced tea.
“I didn’t mean to pry. It just looked so interesting in here.”
Toby picks up a shotgun and handles it well. “I hope you weren’t touching anything.”
“Of course not.”
“Accidents do happen with firearms.”
His big brown eyes are soft and slightly insane.
“I’m getting some weird vibes, know what I mean? Like you’re prancing around in here, trying to pretend to be something you’re not.”
“I’m not pretending anything.”
“You’re not some prissy white girl,” he says. “What are you?”
“Half Salvadoran. Got a problem with that?”
“Yes, I do. My problem is this: What’s a homegirl doing way up here, no brown faces in the whole damn state?”
I hold his look.
“I could ask the same question.”
“I got a job with the town,” says Toby Himes.
“And I’m on a visit with Julius.”
“You gonna shoot someone, just for kicks? Just because Julius says?”
“For the movement. For the sake of animals.”
“If you’re the Man,” he says, “I’ll kill you.”
The chow is barking. Outside, there is commotion and the sound of voices and heavy boots on the gravel walk.
“Whenever.”
“You tell me.”
Mr. Terminate crashes open the screen door of the ammo shed and marches through, along with another squinty two-hundred pounder with a full beard and red-checked shirt I call Mountain Man.
“…You can use it underwater,” Mountain Man is saying.
“Why in hell would anyone care? Hey, Toby.”
“Afternoon.”
“Hi, John.” Mr. Terminate ignores me.
“It’s stable,” Mountain Man insists. “Safe to transport.”
“Seriously, you don’t want to be around that shit.”
“Me? I don’t want to get anywhere near that shit.”
“Julius knows you can’t get that shit. The only place you could get that shit is the armory out on the base.”
This is it. This is the Big One: They’re talking about meth. They’re running a methamphetamine operation out of a military base.
I am beginning to get excited, when Toby Himes breaks in.
“I guarantee what the Doctor has in mind is strictly MOS.”
And then, as we say in the Bureau, the hair goes up on the back of my neck, and I know what I know. In the language of bomb experts, MOS stands for military occupational specialties.
The Army Corps of Engineers, whose job it is to locate land mines.
Mr. Terminate, Mountain Man, Toby Himes, and Stone are not working some ordinary drug deal.
They are talking about military-grade explosives.
Thirty-three
Donnato is waiting at the usual rest area off the interstate at the time of another of my alleged appointments with the dentist.
“If the suspects were talking about explosives you can only get from military occupation specialists, it means they’re dealing in very powerful, restricted material. What the bomb techs call ‘high explosives’—dynamite, plastics, TNT, ammonium nitrate—stuff that can shatter things and move things around, like rocks and trees, which is how they use it in the Army, clearing landing zones.”
I have brought a cooler this time, and we sit at the same picnic table around back—just a couple of tourists eating tuna sandwiches.
“But those kinds of explosives don’t fit the signature.”
“No.”
“The devices that blew up Laumann’s house and killed Steve weren’t military-grade.”
“Correct. Now we’re thinking your friends at Toby’s were talking about a special order. For a special mission.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Neither