Renewal 9 - Delay Tactics Read Free

shoulder briefly. Then he turned back to Rob. “What happened?”
    “I guess they snuck in between patrols. I was on duty with the inner patrol on the southwest, which means they got past us. Anyway, they started shooting at the gate guards and we came running. They had our boys pinned down when we showed up behind the bad guys. Once we started shooting, it was pretty much over. The only problem is we were shooting from the ditch and we had to stick our heads up to get shot. That’s where I got my new ear hole.” Rob spun his finger around his ear. “Luckily, I was the one with the first aid kit. I slapped one of those old plastic bandages on it and called it good. By then, the fight was over. We had a live one for a minute, but he did something to spook one of the young guys at the gate and got himself shot. I heard the whole thing was a diversion.”
    “Looks that way,” Terry said. “There was a group toting two big cans of diesel looking to burn something. Sally and I were heading for the fight at the gate when we heard them in the cornfield.”
    “You took ‘em out?” Rob asked.
    “I got a few of them, but Sally did the heavy lifting. She shot that one,” Terry jerked a thumb over his shoulder, “through ten rows of corn.”
    “Is she doing ok?” Rob asked, and Terry knew he meant the emotional strain of killing, not her physical wellbeing.
    Terry waggled his hand back and forth and said, “Ok, I guess. Man, she can shoot.”
    “You don’t have to tell me. She spent the last ten years making the rest of us look bad, except for Jeffry. Nobody shoots better than that guy.” Rob squirmed around on the hospital bed, trying to make himself comfortable.
    “Yeah. I guess she earned her reputation.” Terry replied. “Well, I’m sure we need to get in on the questions over here. Tell Sue to make sure you have a good scar.” Terry smiled and gave Rob a pat on the shoulder before he turned to the crowd around his foul-mouthed prisoner.
    Bill gave Terry a nod as he stepped to the prisoner’s bed. Sue was cleaning the man’s ragged leg wound. She was doing a thorough job, but she wasn’t one to waste anesthetic on bad guys. The man was gnawing on the edge of his pillow and moaning as she worked. Kirk was playing his hardened killer routine to the hilt. “Don’t be such a sissy, man. It’s just a flesh wound.”
    The man opened his eyes long enough to give Kirk a nasty look, and he saw Terry. He almost came off the bed in his attempt to strangle the younger man. “You son of a bitch! You shot me!”
    Terry took a single step back and said, “No. If I was doing the shooting, you’d probably still be running... See that pretty girl over there? She shot you. You never had a chance.”
    The assembled group laughed knowingly at Terry’s remark.
    The man’s face turned red with fury, but he didn’t reply. He grabbed the pillow with his teeth and went back to chewing.
    Sue flushed the debrided wound and started stitching. The man switching from moaning to merely hissing and wincing each time the needle passed through flesh. Kirk continued to taunt the man until Bill gave him a pointed look. Bill preferred to get some cooperation when the questions started, the taunting would not help. The other option for interrogation was something Bill would avoid at great cost. One of the prisoners that Terry and John Hall had taken at the Jenkins farm was not cooperative, and Bill had chosen to leave him imprisoned on a platform in the woods rather than resort to physical torture, although one could argue that the platforms amounted to the same thing after prisoners were exposed to the elements for a few days. The other, a mid-level officer in the Dragon’s organization, had broken under a steak dinner and spilled the beans on what he knew, which was better than nothing, but not incredibly detailed.
    As far as Bill could tell from those earlier interrogations, the actual family members would resist any questions