Phantoms

said. “So they should be deformed. Some of them should be, anyway.” He paused, then said, “Hey, you’re a million miles away. What’re you thinking about?”
    “Paul Henderson.” Frank held the .45 slug in front of Gordy’s face. “Paul fired three like this last night, over at the substation.”
    “At his killer.”
    “Yeah.”
    “So?”
    “So I have this crazy hunch that if we asked the lab to run ballistics tests on it, they’d find it came from Paul’s revolver.”
    Gordy blinked at him.
    “And,” Frank said, “I also think that if we searched through all of the slugs on the floor here, we’d find exactly two more like this one. Not just one more, mind you. And not three more. Just two more with precisely the same markings as this one.”
    “You mean… the same three Paul fired last night.”
    “Yeah.”
    “But how’d they get from there to here?”
    Frank didn’t answer. Instead, he stood and thumbed the send button on the walkie-talkie. “Sheriff?”
    Bryce Hammond’s voice issued crisply from the small speaker. “What is it, Frank?”
    “We’re still here at the Sheffield house. I think you’d better come over. There’s something you ought to see.”
    “More bodies?”
    “No, sir. Uh… something sort of weird.”
    “We’ll be there,” the sheriff said.
    Then, to Gordy, Frank said, “What I think is… sometime within the past couple of hours, sometime after Sergeant Harker was taken from Gilmartin’s Market, it was here, right in this room. It got rid of all the bullets it’d taken last night and this morning.”
    “The hits it took?”
    “Yes.”
    “Got rid of them? Just like that?”
    “Just like that,” Frank said.
    “But how?”
    “Looks like it just sort of… expelled them. Looks like it shed those bullets the way a dog shakes off loose hairs.”
     

Chapter 29
    On the Run
     
    Driving through Santa Mira in the stolen Datsun, Fletcher Kale heard about Snowfield on the radio.
    Although it had captured the rest of the country’s attention, Kale wasn’t very interested. He was never particularly concerned about other people’s tragedies.
    He reached out to switch off the radio, already weary of hearing about Snowfield when he had so many problems of his own—and then he caught a name that did mean something to him. Jake Johnson. Johnson was one of the deputies who had gone up to Snowfield last night. Now he was missing and might even be dead.
     
    Jake Johnson …
    A year ago, Kale had sold Johnson a solidly built log cabin on five acres in the mountains.
    Johnson had professed to be an avid hunter and had pretended to want the cabin for that purpose. However, from a number of things the deputy let slip, Kate decided that Johnson was actually a survivalist, one of those doomsayers who believed the would was rushing toward Armageddon and that society was going to collapse either because of runaway inflation or nuclear war or some other catastrophe. Kale became increasingly convinced that Johnson wanted the cabin for a hiding place that could be stocked with food and ammunition—and then easily defended in times of social upheaval.
    The cabin was certainly remote enough for that purpose. It was on Snowtop Mountain, all the way around the other side from the town of Snowfield. To get to the place, you had to go up a county fire road, a narrow dirt track that was passable virtually only to a four-wheel vehicle, then switch to another, even tougher track. The final quarter-mile had to be covered on foot.
    Two months after Johnson purchased the mountain property, Kale sneaked up there on a warm June morning when he knew the deputy was on duty in Santa Mira. He wanted to see if Johnson was turning the place into a wilderness fortress, as he suspected.
    He found the cabin untouched, but he discovered that Johnson was doing extensive work in some of the limestone caves to which there was an entrance on his land. Outside the caves, there were sacks of cement and sand, a wheelbarrow, and a pile of stones.
    Just inside the mouth of the first cave, there had been two Coleman gas lanterns standing on the stone floor, by the wall. Kale had picked up one of the lanterns and had gone deeper into the subterranean chambers.
    The first cave was long and narrow, little more than a tunnel. At the end of it, he followed a series of doglegs, twisting through irregular limestone antechambers, before he came into the first roomlike cave.
    Stacked against one wall were cases of