Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(82)

There was a second flash and a second SPAT! And another. And Virgil realized that the truck was being shot at—that he was being shot at—and he jammed himself over the seat back into the second row and climbed through to the back hatch, as the truck continued to jerk, continued to SPAT! SPAT! SPAT! The truck was being hit, but it sounded like the shots were going into the engine compartment. Virgil reached back, ran the combination on his gun safe, got out the Glock, pushed open the back hatch, and climbed out and got behind a tire.

There was a last SPAT! and Virgil emptied the Glock, all seventeen rounds, at the last spot where he’d seen a flash, holding his gun at what he thought might be six feet above the flash. He had no real hope of hitting anything, but he might scare the shooter. He was slapping another magazine in the Glock when he smelled the gas . . .

He couldn’t tell where it was coming from, then saw the reflection of fire on the snow under the engine compartment.

The gunfire from across the water had stopped, but the gunman might still be there waiting for Virgil to reveal himself. He took a chance, dashed around the back of the cabin, went through the little-used back door, having to kick a snowdrift out of the way before the screen door would open out. He ran through the cabin to the front door, went to his hands and knees, pushed the door open, reached out around the jamb until he got hold of the snow shovel he’d left there, pulled it inside.

He ran back through the cabin with the shovel, back to the truck. Fire was now dripping from the bottom of the engine compartment into the snow—a stream of burning gasoline. He didn’t know exactly where the gas was coming from, but he began frantically throwing snow on the fire he could see, but it didn’t stop. Still afraid of showing himself at the front of the truck, he dropped the shovel and, with freezing hands, called 911. When the operator answered, he told her that he had a bad truck fire and about the shooting. The operator knew where Johnson Johnson’s cabin was and said that deputies and a fire truck would be on the way.

Virgil used the shovel to bank snow along the driver’s side, popped the driver’s-side doors, front and back, and began pulling gear out. The fire was close and hot, still confined to the engine compartment.

The truck was only ten feet from the cabin. Virgil thought about trying to shift the truck into neutral and rolling it down toward the river, but the front seat was now too hot, and fire broke through the dashboard above the gas pedal . . .

When the fire truck finally got there, six or seven minutes after his call, the entire front interior of his truck was burning. The firemen put the fire out in two minutes, hosing it with foam.

Virgil had hauled all his gear around behind the cabin, and he sat on his duffel bag and watched them do it. When it was all done, one of the firemen came over and said, “Not looking so good.”

Virgil said, “No, it really isn’t.”

—

The cops arrived a minute later, and when Virgil told them what had happened, they looked across the stretch of frozen river to where the shots had come from, and said, “Probably came in on the other side of the finger there, on the river, on a sled. Walk across that finger, probably fifty yards, wait until you show up. Long gone now.”

“Are you sure that he’s gone, so that we could run across and check it out?” Virgil asked.

The cop looked across the ice for a moment, shook his head. “Not by ourselves. We’d be sitting ducks for a guy with a deer rifle. Let’s get some help out here.”

He went to call for more cops, and, while he did, Virgil finally looked at the front of his 4Runner. He found four bullet holes but was sure that the truck had been hit more often than that. He got a flashlight and checked the mesh grille and found another hole. It was possible, he thought, that one had gone through one of the holes in the mesh without hitting the mesh itself.

The holes, he thought, looked to be .30 caliber. Virgil had gotten the impression that the shooter had been squeezing off shots one at a time—most probably working a bolt-action rifle.

A deer rifle, and not a .223, was the most popular firearm with gun enthusiasts. David Birkmann had said he had been a deer hunter, so he might have one. But in the entire southern part of the state—good deer country—such guns were limited to shotguns firing only slugs. Unless Birkmann traveled to hunt, he’d probably be shooting a shotgun. A 12-gauge shotgun—about the only kind used for hunting deer—would have a slug more than twice as large as those that had hit the truck . . .

He would ask Birkmann about his gun, and who could confirm it, but Virgil also had to consider the possibility that he’d been shot at by Jesse McGovern’s people.

As for the fire, one lucky shot probably hit the gas line or fuel pump, spattering gas around the inside of the hot engine compartment, or maybe one of the incoming bullets had sparked off the iron engine itself. Whatever had happened, the truck was done.

—

Twenty minutes later, six heavily armored deputies, along with Jeff Purdy, had assembled at Johnson’s cabin, all of them armed with semiauto .223 black rifles. Johnson’s cabin faced out on a backwater of the main river, a cul-de-sac. The opposite shore was a finger of land, a narrow peninsula, that extended upstream to the north. Virgil hadn’t been out on it because it was low and marshy and probably covered with poison ivy, but he thought it couldn’t have been more than a couple of hundred yards across.

The deputies spread out along the near shore, always three deputies with guns up, focusing on the far shore, while two more, on the far ends of the line, hurriedly crossed the open ice.