rifle and confessed to going after me and Tori?” Jack asked, having picked up the gist from his boss’s side of the conversation.
They were sitting in the downstairs main room of the observatory, Jack on one of the sofas, Tucker in a big club chair. Tori was upstairs and, outside, the floodlit parking area was starting to get busy, as more cops and feds arrived and the militia task force started assembling prior to making the trek out to the Forgotten at first light.
Except now it sounded like it might not have been the militia after all.
Tucker nodded. “A drifter named Wayne Gibbs. He’s got priors in California for aggravated assault, is strongly antigovernment, and says he’s been camping in a cave a little ways away from where you and Tori were searching. As far as he’s concerned, he was just protecting his homestead. And, yeah, he’s got a prescription for antipsychotics that hasn’t been filled since summer.”
“Damn.” Jack shook his head, not just because it sounded too convenient, but also because he could actually see it. Hell, he had seen it: a couple of years earlier, there had been a similar case when an ex-marine decided the country owed him some land. The guy had moved his camper and his junkyard dog onto a chunk of land near Station Eight and claimed squatter’s rights, then went after a couple of rangers with his shotgun when they tried to run him off.
And that wasn’t the only instance of people squatting on state and federal land in the area either. Between the economy and the loss of most of Bear Claw’s homeless shelters due to budget cuts, there were more and more indigents trying to scratch a living wherever they could, including the state park.
They were usually found pretty quickly, though. Which begged the question, “Why did it take us this long to notice him?”
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