Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

Their sedan looked like a rental or something. No armor, no cage, not even any tinting. If he’d known it was going to be that easy, he would have brought his .308 and popped the two gang bangers and both deputies that morning instead of wasting time on surveillance.

Still, prep was half the fun – wiping the fingerprints off his rifle and each twenty-round magazine, just in case one got left behind. He liked to prepare for the unexpected. He didn’t plan to use more than six rounds – eight max, since he was shooting through glass. With any luck, he’d get the angle right and the first round would shatter the near passenger window, then continue on to splash the driver. He’d take an immediate follow-up shot in any case, just to nail down the marshal behind the wheel. He had to keep the car in place at all costs. The marshal in the passenger seat would go next – before he even figured out he should draw his gun. Childers anticipated getting at least one of the bangers in the back seat before the car crashed, depending on the angle. The last guy would be a sitting duck, chained up and seat-belted in the back. Childers could take him with ease even if he tried to hunker down.

His scope was set for match-grade copper jacketed rounds. No need for any fancy armor-piercing or hollow-point stuff. The shots wouldn’t be from that far away – less than a hundred meters. At this range, .308 rounds would cut through the cheap steel like butter. Trijicon red-dot optic with 4× magnification would be plenty. Yep. Six to eight shots would do the trick – but he always brought more than he needed. Ammo didn’t do any good if it was back in the truck. Besides, Childers knew firsthand, humans did bizarre shit when they got shot. Some dropped their guns if they only believed they’d been shot. A few fell over and died from a wound that by all rights should never have been fatal. Others soaked up massive amounts of lead and still shot back, just flat refusing to die. He’d watched more than one Marine with part of his face blown off continue to engage the enemy. Oohrah. But skinny Iraqi kids did the same thing sometimes, so you could never tell. Childers hoped for the best, but always planned for things to go sideways.

He did a slow three-sixty, checking his immediate and far surroundings before he settled in. It sucked to set up your hide under a hornets’ nest – another thing he’d learned from experience.

Juneau PD was just a couple of blocks away, but the worker bees would be out on the street. The guys at the station were, well, the kind of guys to hang around at the station. He didn’t worry too much about them. If things went too sideways, the Salmon Creek trailhead wasn’t far. The nimble little Yamaha would do seventy in a heartbeat. He could get well into the mountains before anyone could stop him. Juneau was buzzing with helicopters, but it would take a while before they got organized enough to get up and look for him. Even then, the forests were just too thick.

It was just after lunch. He had time for the caffeine from his last cup of coffee to wear off before he took a leak and settled in behind the rifle. Schimmel was his ears at the courthouse. The goofy bastard didn’t have to do much, just sing out when the marshals’ sedan rolled out of the underground garage, and then follow behind at a distance.

It was a good plan. The way Childers figured it, everyone on the prisoner transport would be dead by nightfall.

Chapter 13

“Lola and I will take care of the jail run,” Cutter said to Senior Inspector Scott Keen. Both men stood in the gallery at the back of the courtroom, out of earshot of the two prisoners.

Inspector Keen, tasked with security of both the judge and the court proceeding itself, swayed a little, stunned into slack-jawed amazement by Judge Shawna Forsberg’s ruling shortly after they’d come back from the noon recess. He’d known it was coming. Everyone had. But hope sprang eternal that the judge would consider the logistical nightmare sequestering a jury would be for the Marshals Service and the individual jurors.

Cutter had seen it coming immediately after the judge took the bench, felt it in the mood of the court. Her demeanor had changed from earlier in the day. She’d obviously made her decision. Her high-back leather chair could have swallowed her up, and that morning, she’d let it. Now, she sat perched on the edge of her seat, obviously mulling heavily on the tens of thousands of dollars she was about to cost the American taxpayer in the name of justice.

She’d heard a couple of housekeeping arguments from both sets of counsel. Cutter hadn’t paid much attention to the content of the motions. Instead, he sat and got a read on the mood of the court participants – observing body language and listening to the subtext of what was said. As a deputy marshal, Cutter’s job was to make sure the prisoners showed up on time and behaved themselves during court. If they did not, he administered the necessary measures to make them. A judge might bang his or her gavel and demand order – but it was a deputy marshal who cajoled or muscled everyone into compliance. A judge wanted some guy to remove his ball cap in the courtroom – it was someone from the US Marshals Service who made him do it. If a juror didn’t show up for court – the judge sent deputy marshals to knock on their door. As long as things ran smoothly, Cutter didn’t worry about the guilt or innocence side of a court proceeding. Paraphrasing the immortal words of actor Tommy Lee Jones in the movie The