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CHAPTER 29
April 5, 1979
Dean drove the Nova with Guthrie in the passenger seat down 100S. He found the approximate spot where Josh had parked his car. Etheridge, along with Reggie, pulled to a stop behind them.
A rain storm had rolled through overnight. The first thunderstorm of the spring. The thunder had sounded distant even with the thumping of the rain on the roof and the flashes of sheet lightning strobing the rooms.
A dampness hung everywhere in the forest, still dripping off the leaves, making stepping a squishy endeavor. The temperature had dropped along with the rain, and all four were wearing Zion Police jackets. Dandelions had seeded overnight.
Dean told them they were looking for anything that looked like it could stash drugs. Containers, trash bags, a hole beneath a large rock, whatever. But he thought it would be obvious. So they fanned out with Dean taking a leading spot to get them going in the direction he believed Josh went to and came from. As they started walking, the four drifted apart, eventually losing sight of each other, so much so, Dean felt as if he were all alone.
The forest floor heaved with leaves and tall grasses and brush. Thrushes and sparrows sang and bounced from tree to tree. He even saw a bright red bird he thought was a scarlet tanager. It darted from one limb to another and disappeared in the throng of branches.
The family cabin on Lake Tonga had long been a place with pleasant memories for Dean, but it had been years since he had been there. Of all the bad decisions he had made in life, he had almost made his worst that last evening. He had taken a boat out to fish that day. His number was coming up in the draft. The choice, for him, had not been one of evading the dreaded lottery by any of the legitimate deferments available to him—the path Tony took just two years later. For Dean, the choice was between serve or flee. He had taken the boat out to fish not thinking—at least not consciously—of the Canadian border that cut across the lake. He may have crossed into the country without knowing it. But when he had realized how close it was, that Canada was within reach, that he could avoid the war he did not want to fight in, he almost took it. It would have been an easy out, even a way to avoid his parents.
He must have sat on that lake for an hour, staring at Canada before rowing back to the cabin on Lake Tonga. He joined the Marines the next day.
Guthrie’s shout of “Over here” awoke Dean from his memories.
He worked his way over to Guthrie, with Etheridge and Reggie catching up. “Well shit,” said Dean. Two school buses, still yellow beneath the dirt and leaves that had fallen on the roofs and hoods, sat in a V—one along a southwest-northeast axis and the other on the southwest-northwest axis—beside two large trees, the bark thick from their decades of growth. The Zion High School lettering was visible along the side of each bus. Bus numbers 22 and 40.
“This what we’re looking for?” Guthrie smiled, holding out his hands and gesturing to the buses.
The four of them circled the buses, checking the surrounding brush for anything out of the ordinary. Reggie found what looked to be a dump site with trash bags of beer and Coke cans, empty bags of chips, cigarette packs, and so on. Etheridge had been smart enough to bring a camera, and he took several photos, and they left the dump site, knowing they would return later to gather it.
“We need to get a forensics team out here,” said Guthrie.
Dean agreed and had Guthrie head back to the car to radio it in. Reggie put on a pair of driving gloves and pushed open the front door of the bus on the southwest to northeast line. The creak crescendoed through the forest, startling a flock of birds from a nearby oak, adding their pounding wings and songs to morning.
Reggie stepped aside to let Dean step in. Etheridge followed him. The smells—sweet, corrosive, dangerous—of a variety of chemicals filled the place despite the cracked windows. All seats but the driver’s, which had packages of rubber gloves and surgical masks stacked, had been removed. A set of small card tables—not one matched the other—and a short bookshelf lined the side of the bus to the back, where an old claw-foot bathtub sat.
Glassware that looked like it came from the high school chemistry rooms, tubing, milk bottles filled with what looked like water, jugs of white, brown, and gray bottles with chemical names. A brown, well-used couch, and a small generator, with a hose from the exhaust taped and stretched to one of the open windows.
Etheridge looked at him and shook his head. This was bigger than just distributing drugs. Josh and company were making them. And not growing a few marijuana plants. This was a serious operation. Dean rattled off the drugs he knew about and nothing correlated with what he was seeing, but that did not necessarily mean much. Dean had smoked marijuana a bit in Vietnam before the military cracked down and opened the way for heroin. The crime lab people would have to tell him what he was dealing with.
“Let’s leave everything and check out the second bus,” said Dean.
The first bus was the lab and the second bus the warehouse. Dean stopped just inside the door with Etheridge and Reggie standing outside. More bottles and jugs. And three boxes of canned Green Giant Green Beans filled with sandwich-size Ziploc bags of yellowish powder. Dean picked up one of the bags.
He heard the grunt before he heard the shot. Heard it before one of the bus’s windows shattered. Then the sound of the bullet being fired. He ducked, pocketed the Ziploc bag, and moved as fast as he could to the door. Outside, Reggie was holding his stomach and stumbling back. Etheridge, standing next to the front wheel, looked back at Reggie.
The third shot kicked up grass at Reggie’s right foot. Etheridge had his pistol out and was scanning the woods. Reggie fell over, his eyes wide with fear, his hand to his gut, where blood came out.
Dean landed on the grass next to Etheridge. A fusillade came. Two guns. One with the familiar pop of the M16. Grass kicked up, bark splintered, more windows shattered. The shots were coming from the other side of the buses, through the gap at the base of the V they formed.
Reggie’s heels kicked at the ground. Dean nodded at Etheridge, who nodded once back. Both lifted their pistols over the hood of the bus, fired several shots at random. A pause in the fusillade. Etheridge reached over and fired again as Dean crouched low and jogged for Reggie. He grabbed his foot and pulled hard, dragging him to the cover of the bus.
“Jesus,” shouted Etheridge.
Dean looked down at Reggie, whose eyes were clenched shut and his hands, covered with blood, clutched at his stomach. “We’ll get you out of here. Hold on.” He looked back at Etheridge. “We have to get out of here.”
Reggie let out a scream.
More gunfire. Two guns again.
“No disagreement. How?” Etheridge raised his pistol around the side of the bus and fired off two shots in the general direction he thought the shooting came from.
The sound of breaking glass. A flash of light and fire in the first bus. An engulfing inferno almost immediately. Orange and yellow flames whipping out of the windows. Tinges of blue. Dark, thick smoke churning out of the windows. More glass cracking and breaking—as if all the world’s glass were blasting apart at that very moment.
“We run. I’ve got Reggie.”
Dean holstered his pistol, reached down and grabbed Reggie’s arms, pulling them over his left shoulder. He bent down and got Reggie’s torso over his back and stood up with his legs.
Reggie’s blood flowed down Dean’s back as he jogged, weaving back and forth in the hopes of making a more difficult target. Etheridge followed and turned around and fired a few covering shots as they retreated. The second bus lit up like a torch after they had moved about fifty yards. The gunfire had let up, but they did not slow down.
When Dean had carried his comrades like this, he had been much younger and much more fit, but the adrenaline kept pumping now just as it did then. Guthrie ran into them half way back. He was sweating and his pistol was out. The gunfire had stopped some time before, but Etheridge had nearly shot their fellow officer in surprise.
“What the hell’s going on?” said Guthrie. He saw then that Dean was carrying Reggie. “Shit.”
At the cars, Guthrie called on the radio for back up. Dean set Reggie down against the patrol car’s front passenger tire. He felt for a pulse. None. Blood soaked the officer’s shirt and pants. He laid Reggie on his back and started CPR. He cracked a couple of Reggie’s ribs doing so. He pushed on his chest until he heard the sirens. Guthrie and Etheridge standing over him.
Dean stopped and sat down against the car. He felt Reggie’s blood on his back and legs and hands. Another body he had carried out of the forest to see go into a body bag. Another life snuffed out of existence. He wondered, again, as he took a drink from his flask, if life had any point other than pain and disappointment.
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