Coyotes in Winter: Part 7 (Final Chapter)
Lopez was down. She lay on her back, not moving, staring up at the sky.
OK. Here we go. This is it. The end. If you forgot where we left off, see Part 6. For the first part, see Coyotes in Winter Part 1.
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Shawn fired his pistol twice, so quickly that the reports blended together. Orange Hat flinched. I ducked behind the SUV and watched, helplessly, as Lopez fell backward. Her body slapped the pavement hard and her gun popped out of her hand and clattered on the frozen ground.
Lopez was down. My first instinct was to rush to her but my training stopped me.
The way I got through the combat part of being a combat medic was training, binge drinking, sheer luck, and more training until my reactions became automatic. I never wanted to figure something out in the middle of a fight. If you act tentatively, if you’re unsure, if you’re confused, you’re dead. When I saw Lopez fall, all that training, though rusty, kicked in. I threw myself at her pistol.
Two more quick reports came from Shawn’s gun. They missed. I didn’t think about them any more than to note the sound of the gun. To note that Shawn hadn’t moved. So that when I stopped I knew which way I wanted to face.
I didn’t bother racking her pistol. Lopez always kept one in the chamber and Glocks are always ready to go. I rolled over and put the front sight of Lopez’s pistol on Shawn’s silhouette.
To my surprise, he wasn’t even looking at me. Which made sense. Lopez was down and I wasn’t a threat. I was an unarmed nurse.
Shawn had fired on his own man.
He pumped three follow up shots into Orange Hat, a bit more methodically. The car window behind Orange Hat shattered after one of the bullets exited his back.
Shawn turned to where I’d been a few moments ago, standing behind the left rear fender of Lopez’s SUV.
No time to wonder why. I lined up the sights and smoothly pulled the trigger.
My first bullet drilled into the meat of Shawn’s thigh. Yep, rusty. I adjusted and the follow-up shots pounded his chest. Seven shots total. The slide of Lopez’s pistol locked open. Magazine empty. Shawn was a broken doll sprawled on the ground. And if this makes me a cold-hearted bastard, ruthless as a coyote in winter, then now you know something about me that I’ve been trying to forget.
He rolled over, holding his leg, gasping and groaning. I scrambled to my feet and clubbed him with the pistol. He fell back. I stripped away the Beretta, then opened his coat, looking for his belt, and revealed a thick black police-issue ballistic vest. So that’s why he was still breathing.
“Nurse to a gunfight,” I said as I stripped his belt and made a tourniquet over his wound. “I’m gonna steal that.” I yanked the belt tight. He screamed. I shoved the loose end into his hand. “Keep this tight if you want to live. Seriously. Don’t let go.”
I ran to the next threat.
Holding Shawn’s gun, I shoved Orange Hat’s shoulder with my boot to roll him face up. Four bullet holes made a line across his chest and a chunk of his forehead was missing. He had a faint, fluttering pulse. Glassy eyes. Circling the drain.
Area secure. I grabbed Orange Hat’s gun and ran to Lopez.
The sirens were closer. Not close enough, however, if she’d taken two rounds to the chest.
She lay on her back, not moving, staring up at the sky. Her breathing was shallow.
“Lopez. Don’t move. I got you.” I said I got you over and over, like a good Catholic’s prayer, while I tore open her winter coat and ran my hands around her back and under her arms, as I’d been trained. They came out clean. Which meant the bullets were lodged in her chest. I started to lift up her sweater.
“Rossi…” she wheezed. Her eyes were wide and fearful. I’ve rarely seen Lopez afraid and it made my hands tremble. She grabbed the sleeve of my jacket as if hanging on. She said something but I couldn’t hear it over the gunshots ringing in my ears.
I prepared for the worst and raised her sweater. Instead of two ugly entrance wounds, I found two circular holes punched into a white ballistic vest. It was a thin, light-duty model designed for concealed wear under clothing.
Lopez shoved my hands away. She gritted her teeth, forced in a breath, and pushed out a ferocious sound, halfway between a howl of pain and a battle cry. Tried to sit up. Failed. Succeeded in rolling up on one elbow.
“What happened?” she said, aiming her death glare past my shoulder, at Shawn.
“Shawn’s wounded. Other guy’s KIA.”
“Gimme,” she said, motioning for her pistol.
I gave her all three guns. She checked the magazines and the chambers. “What the fuck, Rossi,” she said, holding up her empty Glock. “The entire mag?”
“What the fuck, Lopez. Were you wearing the vest all day?”
“I put it on when I set your stupid distraction at the back door.” Lopez tried to stand.
“Take it easy…”
“Which didn’t work.”
“…you could have a cracked rib or internal bruising.”
“I’m fine. Why are you always such a mother hen?”
“Why are you always such a badass?”
Lopez settled back, cursing. “I’m bruised, all right. Not gonna be wearing an underwire for a while. Where’s Fuentes?”
A state police cruiser half-slid into the parking lot, followed by a firetruck, an ambulance, and various cars and trucks owned by the volunteer fire department.
I’d forgotten about the sisters. The back seat of Shawn’s SUV was empty, the door open.
The first ambulance took Shawn away, escorted by a state trooper.
They packed Lopez up in another ambulance. Her vest had stopped the bullets from penetrating, but she had deep bruises, a mild concussion from her head hitting the pavement, and trouble breathing. I had a minute with her while the paramedics ran a line and started a drip.
“Do you think Shawn ran this whole thing?” I said. “Him and one other guy?”
“He had help.” Her words were muffled by an oxygen mask. “Frank. Shay. Must be others. It’s up to the state cops now.”
“Why did he kill his own guy?”
“He wanted to kill all of us, Rossi. That’s why he had that old Beretta. Then he could make up whatever story he wanted.”
I stepped out of the ambulance and closed the door. The moment before it shut, Lopez gave me the finger and I laughed and slapped the closed door twice, like they do in cop shows.
The investigator detained me inside the diner for follow-up questions. Lopez had briefed him and given him the recording from her phone, but I could tell he had doubts. As a good investigator should. He let me make coffee though, so I guess Lopez’s story carried some weight. That gave me a bit of freedom to snoop around.
Fuentes and her sister weren’t outside and they weren’t inside.
I asked Shay if they’d seen where Fuentes went, and she gave me an are-you-kidding sneer. And why would she talk? If they played their hands right, they’d be out on bail tomorrow. Cut a deal with the DA and trade what they knew for a lighter sentence. The cops took Frank and Shay out in handcuffs and I became the last loose end. I sensed a long night ahead for me.
In the meantime, where was Fuentes?
I decided to work backward.
I checked the bathroom at the back of the diner. A vent window above the toilet had been forced open. The window looked big enough for Fuentes to squeeze through. The bottles piled up against the back door had been undisturbed.
I imagined Fuentes wriggling through the window, wearing her goofy blue children’s winter hat with the silver glitter pompom, and grabbing her sister after the shooting stopped. She probably cooked up that plan after we’d called Shawn. In her defense, our plan was crazy. Her plan made more sense.
Who called in the fire alarm?
The pay phone receiver dangled from its cord while an evidence tech worked on the keypad.
Frank and Shay were tied to the booth. Only Fuentes could’ve called 911.
I laughed at myself. We were so caught up in our own problems that we didn’t consider having her make the call. We’d built our own trap of assumptions: That only petty thieves would commit petty crimes. That we needed to explain trafficking to Fuentes, who had lived inside a trafficking organization for over a year. Or that the people we were investigating would behave according to our logic. We were trapped from the moment Fuentes walked right up to our booth without us noticing. We were too oblivious.
I wondered where the Fuentes sisters would go. If they could find a sanctuary. They made it this far, thousands of miles from home, across two borders, all on their own wits. If nothing else, they were very good at being overlooked and underestimated.
I stayed in town the following week to have some earthy discussions with the district attorney. There would be more investigations and questioning and trials, but that was a year in the future.
Lopez recovered at her sister’s house in Rochester. After the DA finished with me, I drove to Rochester to check in on her, then went to Rochester General to check out the big city emergency department and catch up with an old Army friend.
When I was there, a mom brought in her eleven-year-old daughter for asthma treatment. They needed winter clothing so I helped my buddy drag out the lost-and-found boxes for them. The girl picked out a pair of mittens and a familiar-looking blue knit cap, one that had snowflakes topped off by a pompom sprinkled with silver glitter, and I wondered how long that had been in there.
COYOTES IN WINTER by Todd Brasel
Images created with DALL-E and Midjourney and processed with LD and Snapseed for MacOS and iPad
Story composed in Scrivener 3 for MacOS and iPad and Apple Notes
Special thanks to Gayla Brasel and Jackie Kessler for beta reading & feedback
Soundtrack: “Haiku Ten” by Sigmatropic (featuring Cat Power)
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