MacAvity's Burning

By Dan H. McLachlan

When MacAvity's Pub is fire bombed, a hunt for the perpetrators sets off a series of bloody encounters in the Gospel Hump Wilderness of Central Idaho and the steppes of Central Washington. It is feared that a war has broken out among two militias with ties to Finland and the Saulite Lutheran Church. Paul and Smoke are unwittingly thrown into the center of the conflict--a conflict which law enforcement is unable to keep from spreading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456611224

Book preview

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Chapter One

It sounded like someone just threw a pillow against my bedroom window...a fluff of sound heavy against the glass that woke me from a shallow sleep.

I rolled over and looked at the time, 2:18am, and laid back again and wondered idly if I had dreamed the sound or if I should get up and check outside to see if anything was going on.

That was when the town siren atop the fire house started its long wail. And then the water tower siren began winding up, followed by the two grain elevator sirens. Within moments the night was screaming in agony, its howling floating out over the rolling farmland like a tsunami, rattling windows and jerking people to their feet, and out onto their porches, groggy and wondering what the hell was happening. Never before had all four sirens gone off at once, and on the farms families scanned their fields heavy with grain fearing they had caught fire. But what they saw was the loom of fire lighting the sky in a bowl of smoking flame from the distant center of town. From their vantage points it appeared Ryback was burning to the ground.

From the flood of yellow light that throbbed through my windows, it appeared to me that indeed the entire town was ablaze.

I pulled on my jeans and shirt, stepped into my slippers, and was still buttoning as I hurried out onto the porch. I ran down the lawn just as Smoke came tearing to a stop in his jet black GMC pickup, it’s engine rumbling and the growing pillar of flames from town reflected in his windshield.

I ran around front and climbed into the cab beside him. We were doing thirty before I had my door shut. To our right, a stream of headlights bounced and weaved and dipped from sight to reappear as every pickup and every water truck from the farms raced in to help fight the blaze.

I glanced at Smoke who hadn’t said a word. His face was grim and set hard. He had been an Air Force colonel in Nam, an ace fighter pilot, and what he was seeing ahead of us went further than I could know.

We slid to a halt in a jam of trucks between the elevators and what we could now see was the towering column of fire that was MacAvity’s Pub. The brick walls still stood, and the window frames of blown-out glass were filled with living sheets of smokeless flame licking the darkness.

The sirens suddenly went silent, and the night, void of their sobbings, became a hollow of light and yelling--and something else unearthly and astounding--MacAvity’s was roaring like an enormous jet engine that thrust fire over a hundred feet into the mushroom of night black smoke. And the whistling. The intensity of the inferno was streaking past the window openings as giant steam engine whistles.

Smoke and I ran up the adjacent alley and out onto Main in time to see the fire hoses spring to life and gush columns of water futilely through the window openings.

It was then that a gun shot roared and Smoke grabbed my elbow and pointed at the gathering crowd of town people struggling with the hoses. Standing off to one side, was Shiela, dressed only in Butte MacAvity’s pajama top, and MacAvity, in the bottoms held up by a John Wayne holster. He was waving a .45 Ruger Blackhawk revolver.

The gunshot, over the roar of the inferno, got every-one’s attention.

Forget the fucking fire! Butte shouted. Save the town, you morons!

He waved his arm at the adjacent buildings that were steaming ominously--something no one had noticed. With effort the hoses were swung around and redirected at them, yet Roy Black and Pappy Boyd inadvertently swung theirs over the surface of the street, and swept Leaps and Shay who were manning the central hydrant off their feet.

They clambered back up hatless, and Leaps pointed at the fire and shouted.

We turned in time to see the back brick two story wall of the pub teeter and then, with a rippling bulge, fall forward into the throat of the flames. A geyser of sparks and burning chunks of wood lifted into the sky.

Holy shit, Smoke mumbled.

He leaned closer.

If there was any wind we could kiss Ryback goodbye, Paul

I nodded.

Even as still as the air was, people were dodging the falling coals. A curtain of smaller sparks rained down but were pulled back into the flames by the strong updraft. The heat against my face was growing intense, and my jeans were hot against my legs.

Smoke leaned over again.

You should see what a circle of incendiaries will do to a village, he said. Ugly.

I nodded again.

He began to work his way over to Sheila and Butte, threading his way over the fire hoses and chaos. I fell in behind him.

Butte had taken Shiela by the elbow, backed away from the inferno, and had found relief under City Hall’s sheet metal awning directly across the wide main street. Shiela had tears streaming down her cheeks, but her mouth was tight with anger and her eyes moved back and forth over the crowd like gun sights.

Butte holstered the .45 as we came up. His chest was pure white, and under the loose skin his eighty-two year old muscles were lean and hard, and his stomach was flat and smattered with silver hairs. A nasty scar ran from his left shoulder down to the middle portion of his ribs, bouncing over them like a bad road. I had never seen Butte with his shirt off, and I doubted if the sun or any of his friends had either. I made a mental note to ask him how he’d been cut. I suspected it was when he had been training Special Forces before Nam. But who could guess what the old warrior had been doing when it happened.

They made room for us. The four of us stood in silence, fire debris pinging off the tin overhead, and watched the tragedy...the crime unfold. We stood like that until dawn when all that remained standing were the front and side street walls, and a pile of smoking brick, timbers and bent pipes heaped up where MacAvity’s had once marked the rolling farmland’s center...its home and its heart.

Smoke had retrieved an army blanket from the firehouse behind us when the diminishing fire had let the morning cold come back in, and had draped it over Butte and Sheila’s shoulders.

As if awakened from a deep hypnotic state, Butte nodded to us and steered Sheila through the door marked City Hall, and shut it behind them against the night’s events and the terror he knew he would soon unleash against his attackers.

For what seemed a long time Smoke continued to look at the closed door. Then he turned and said, more to himself than to me, There’s going to be hell to pay, Pardner. Whoever is responsible for this is going to be the center of a shit storm the likes of which will bring more flaming agony on them than Hell’s Teeth itself.

He turned and headed back to his truck.

You can bank on it, he added over his shoulder.

When I caught up to him he was staring at the hood of his pickup.

I followed his stare.

Smoke growled, We’re going to get those fuckers and feed them their own fucking bodies a bite at a time.

He slammed a fist down on the fender.

The heat and falling embers from the fire had bubbled and scorched the truck’s hood and roof like a slab of bacon dropped into hot grease.

I backed off to gain safety up on the sidewalk as he pushed by me, jerked open the truck door and slid into the cab. The engine roared to life. Smoke jammed the steering to hard left, and roared around in a half donut of shrieking tires. Even the firefighters stopped their mop-up among the coals at the sound and looked our way.

Smoke accelerated down the street past the Lutheran church, past the park, and vanished as he hit third gear and flew over the ridge out of town. I could hear him gain rpms until I was certain he was making well over a hundred miles an hour as he headed home.

Chapter Two

From somewhere far off, namely my night stand, the nasty sound of my alarm was ringing me into the brilliant noon sunshine that was pressing on my eyelids.

I opened one eye cautiously to glare with annoyance at the bedroom window. When my other eye joined the party, I swung my legs onto the floor only to be overcome by a wave of sickening awareness of what had just happened that very night. It felt as if my brain had jumped naked into a blender and someone had turned it on mince. It seemed impossible that Ryback had just had its heart cut out in a puff of smoke. And staggering to the bathroom and glancing at Lana’s closed empty bedroom door, I nearly upped from mince to liquify.

Oddly, my reflection in the medicine cabinet’s mirror refused to admit to what I was feeling like. I still looked only seventy, not like I’d been 86’d. And it gave me a ray of early afternoon hope that needed to be laced thoroughly with a full pot of tea.

Ollie, the Wonder Dog and the product of a canine Maypole dance between a corgie and a border collie, nosed the bathroom door open and informed me she hadn’t had any breakfast for six hours.

I ignored her and walked buck naked out through the living room and into the kitchen. I filled and switched on the tea kettle and then got out Ollie’s mixture of cooked oatmeal, hamburger, brewer’s yeast, and ground egg shell, and I spooned the concoction into her stainless chow bowl.

Staring out the kitchen widow at the looming walls of the grain elevator across the street, an eagle’s view of Ryback came to mind without a smoking pile of rubble that had once been MacAvity’s Pub.

Ryback nestled in a stand of trees like an oasis on the side of a valley that had a stream wandering through it. The town had been built in the late eighteen hundreds around MacAvity’s Pub as if the Pub were a lighthouse calling prairie schooners filled with Northern European settlers in to anchor. And what the Pub marked was a bench of rolling farmland, rich and untouched, over two thousand feet above the Clearwater River that drained the Bitterroot mountains.

For some time now Ryback had been occupied by just us older folk. But even though the school had been closed and the playgrounds had fallen silent, things felt as if they were changing. Still, the Lutheran church standing over the town like a watchful owl had only scant services. We had become so successful and clever at farming, hardly any manpower was needed anymore, so our children wandered off--many to die in wars and many more to return as decorated warriors.

Smoke was one of those warriors. As an ace fighter pilot for the RAF and for the US Air Force during the Vietnam War, when he said somebody was going to pay for damaging his pickup and destroying MacAvity’s, a person had better step back out of his way. And he wasn’t the only one to take dead serious. There were two others--Butte MacAvity himself, who had trained Special Forces and Navy SEALS, and Lieutenant Commander Eric Hammersmith, whom Smoke had served under. Hammersmith had retired and returned to his farm out towards Cup Hand Ridge northeast of town to sit back and chuckle at the antics of mother nature and human folly.

Standing in the wings, or on the wings I guess, were two others, Major General Flint Walden who’d commanded nearly all the air over Vietnam, and Huey Houston, a decorated helicopter pilot who had also served under Hammersmith. Hammersmith was Flint’s anvil, and when Flint said, Fly them, Hammersmith turned to Smoke and Huey.

Thinking of Huey derailed me from my narrow gage mental tracks. He had married Joy Chu, an FBI agent, and the two of them had taken flight to rebuild Huey’s Lutheran mission in Cambodia. And I doubted they would ever return to Huey’s farm which was now leased out. But that didn’t bother me as much as some things.

There were actually two things now working on my moods. The first was that Lana had taken a fancy to the idea of living in the jungles eating rice and bugs and swatting mosquitos. She loved the idea to holding beautiful Cambodian babies--probably because we hadn’t been able to have any of our own Anglo Saxon babies. So two years ago she threw a wok and a quart of Deet into her day pack and headed out to join the mission. I doubted she would ever return either, and I was thinking of leasing out her bedroom and couch to homeless border corgies.

The second thing that was breathing on my track switch was the sudden awareness that Smoke had come in without my notice and was standing directly behind me.

Your tea water’s hot, Pardner, he said.

He was right.

"And you’re standing in the kitchen in your starkers, which ain’t too hot," he added

It’s the way of my people, Smoke, I said.

Well, you and your people better make your tea and cover your pee pee because you and I have been summoned to Magnet by our dear friend and fearless leader, Sheriff Charlie Rand.

He paused, looking me over critically.

"And Butte, incidentally, is presently wearing donated clothing that hasn’t been burned along the edges. You should follow his example.

I loaded an infuser ball with Irish Breakfast tea, poured the hot water into a cup, and dropped the tea in.

What’s Charlie want?

Smoke shook his head. "If you’d left your cell phone on ring, you’d not have been a missing link that needed to be repaired in the Ryback phone tree. And then you’d have been told there was going to be a town meeting in fifteen minutes. He added, Which we’re not attending."

I was beginning to sense that Smoke was literally seething under his bonhomie exterior.

To discuss the fire? I ventured.

Smoke turned and pulled down a cup and a jar of instant coffee.

Get dressed, Paul.

Oh oh. Smoke never called me by name.

What is it, Smoke?

Yeah, they’re going to discuss the fire.

He took up the kettle and poured the water to make his coffee.

And, he added, they’re going to discuss the fact that this morning our one and only Pastor Donnie Larken was found dead in the church--shot to death.

Silence.

Oh man, I groaned.

Yeah. Exactly, Smoke said. Thank God Alice was over-nighting at her sister’s in Walla Walla. Ten to one she would have been killed right along with Donny.

He put the kettle back, took a sip, and looked out at the elevators.

It’s crazy, he said. Butte called me from Hammersmith’s where he and Shiela are now bunked, and it seems while everyone was at the fire, Donny’s wrists were being duct tapped to his pulpit, and then he was double-tapped with a .22 to his spine an inch below his skull.

He shook his head.

Seemed whoever did it wanted him to know what had happened before his functions stopped completely.

He turned from the window and sat at the table.

And Butte says it had to be more than one guy and that they were probably the same guys that tried to kill Shiela and him.

He nodded for me to go get dressed, then sipped from his cup.

I left for my bedroom. There was nothing else to say.

Chapter Three

When Smoke retired from the Air Force, he came home in a beautiful black 1978 GMC pickup. Or at least some thought it was a pickup. I thought of it as a fighter jet he’d walked off with from a military air field. He certainly flew it like one. And no one seemed to know what he had done to it under the hood. All we knew was that it sounded like a very dangerous cougar purring, and was the hottest rig in town.

So it was no surprise that we were up and over Cup Hand Ridge and had landed within thirty minutes in the parking lot of the county courthouse. The attached sheriff’s office sat atop a basement full of prisoners accessed by a secured delivery ramp.

Barbara, Charley’s new dispatcher, buzzed us in through the bullet proof glass door and motioned for us to open the secure inner door leading to the deputies’ work room and Charlie’s narrow office.

He looked up when we came in and motioned for us to take seats in the oak captain chairs that lined both sides of a dining room sized table. He came around and joined us.

We liked Charlie. In fact there wasn’t a person in Ryback or anywhere else in the county that didn’t either respect him or fear him. He was one of the sons of a large family of boys that owned a huge ranch east of Ryback tucked away in the Bitterroot Mountains, so he knew the character of our people and how to treat us. And when Charlie finally let his brothers take over the ranch’s operation, he took himself to Denver to study and practice law enforcement before returning to the ranch to become our lawman. But he never gave up his cowboy roots. He still wore his felt Stetson in the winter and his straw in the summer, and still wore his Justin boots, jeans, and his tooled belt that held his shield and Colt XSE .45 Commander.

He sat down and looked us over, shaking his head in wonder.

We waited.

He put both his palms flat on the table top and studied them for a