Found Missing: Day 14

 Word Count: 84,062

Summary of Events:

The following morning Dallas, Blake — because he was Dallas' friend — two other officers, and the two detectives set out for Beiseker, stopping for lunch at Irricana — where Dallas got to know the other two officers by their nicknames of Van and Man — before they arrived at the Brauer property, a small farmyard outside of town, where they discovered that Talbert Brauer was holed up in a room in the basement with a weeping woman and determined to get the gold chain before he came out . . .

Excerpt of the Day:

Van nodded. “Gold chains are pretty easy to come by, how can we know which one is yours?”

“It is the ältest one of them all!” Talbert bellowed.

“Eltest?” Van asked.

“Oldest,” Dallas replied.

“You do not have it, do you?” Talbert demanded.

“Maybe we’re just double-checking,” Van called back. “Making sure we have the right one.”

“You have nothing!” Talbert roared. “You are lying!”

“How about you?” Van challenged. “What do you have behind that door? We can hear you have a friend who doesn’t sound like she’s all that pleased to be there!”

“Ich bin gegen sie!” Talbert shouted.

Immediately there was the subtly distorted crack of a gun being fired and Van cried out, dropping his gun at once and following it down as far as his knees, clutching at his thigh, blood oozing between his fingers.

Dallas, who’d lowered his gun, raised it and fixed his gaze on the door, ready to return fire if necessary, noticing toward the bottom of his peripheral vision the bullet hole in the door, which was actually quite clean, but that was probably because it was an MDF shell.

“Obviously he has a gun behind that door,” Van said through his teeth as he continued to press on his wound while thick, carmine blood oozed between his fingers.

Man came down the stairs, having been summoned by Det. Sgt. Cooke, and while Dallas kept the door covered Man helped Van move out of the way before taking up a secondary station facing the door, while Blake was tasked with radioing back to Strathmore that they needed an ambulance and a hostage negotiator.

Dallas saw out his peripheral vision that Det. Sgt. Nash removed the belt from his pants and fixed it as a tourniquet around Van’s thigh above the wound.

Det. Sgt. Cooke called for Blake to toss them a towel to put between Van’s hands and wound while Dallas and Man waited tensely.

No more shots were fired, nothing more was said from inside the room — even if the weeping continued — instead, things descended into a tense silence as Blake came down with a tensor bandage, as well as the towel, which they used to cover over the wound so Van’s hands were free before Blake helped him hobble up the stairs to wait for medical assistance, and maybe be able to take advantage of medical supplies in the bathroom up there.

With Van removed from the scene, Dallas focused his gaze on the door and stiffened the brace in his arm. It seemed that Talbert Brauer wasn’t the Godfather-like Mafioso mastermind of the operation he’d expected a ninety-eight-year-old man to be, instead it seemed that he was an active participant, if not maybe even the sole perpetrator.

As a result, it was likely Mrs. Hardwick whom he was hearing weeping behind the door. He hoped it was. Even if he hadn’t come five hundred kilometres from Saskatchewan to find her, he wasn’t going to complain about getting more than he’d bargained for in that regard.

Pronunciations:

Ich: ih+ ch as in Bach

Gegen: gehgehn

Sie: zee