Dark of the Moon

by John Sandford

  Virgil was behind the truck with two wounded agents, or maybe, he thought, one dead. He looked at the man, caught a breath. No: still alive. He popped open the back door of the truck, lifted the wounded agent inside, and a hail of bullets knocked out the far windows and then went on.

  He picked up the second agent, the unconscious one, struggling against the weight, and threw him on top of the first. He threw the first man’s weapon on top of them, then crawled into the driver’s foot-well, gripped the steering wheel overhead, shifted the truck into reverse, and hit the gas pedal with his hand.

  Felt something scratching at him, ignored it, backed straight across the driveway on two and then three rims, heard the volume of fire picking up from the DEA agents to give him cover, never tried to turn, backed entirely across the yard into the field, across the field fifty yards, eighty yards, bumping over rocks and small trees and brush, the truck rocking violently, a hundred yards, and then he hooked into the roadside ditch and hit the brake.

  HE CALLED PIRELLI on his cell phone: Pirelli screamed, “How bad, how bad?”

  “Two pretty bad,” Virgil shouted. “If you got a truck that works, get it down here. You gotta make a run like right now.”

  “I’m calling the north team in, they’re coming right by…If you got anything you can fire at the house, hose it down, hose it down…”

  Virgil got the M-16 in the back of the truck, with two magazines, began popping three-shot bursts at the house as he saw a dust funnel coming down the gravel road from the north, moving fast.

  One of the north group was trying to run right past the house. When he got close, Virgil emptied the last of the magazine at the upper windows of the house, where most of the fire seemed to be coming from, dumped the mag, slapped another one in, and as the north truck passed the driveway, hosed the house again.

  The north truck slid to a stop in the shelter of the ruined truck. An agent piled out, wild-eyed, and Virgil shouted, “You know where the hospital is?”

  “Yes, yes, we scouted it…”

  They carried the two downed agents to the working truck, and the north guy shouted, “How bad are you hit?”

  Virgil looked down at himself: blood, but not his. The agent touched his forehead, and Virgil reached up. More blood, and this time it was his. Didn’t feel like much. “You go on,” Virgil shouted. “Go on.”

  The agent took off, chased by a couple of slugs from the house when he broke from the cover of the wrecked truck.

  Virgil dug through the back of the wrecked truck, found a box with six mags in it, stuck one in the rifle, stuck the others in his jacket pockets, darted across the road and into the ditch on the west side. From there, he was able to crawl through the swampy water toward Stryker’s Ford.

  HE COULD HEAR Stryker still firing from behind the Explorer, and he cleared the truck and Stryker turned toward him and said, “Need more ammo.”

  Virgil tossed him three of the mags he’d gotten from the truck, and Stryker shouted, “I think Pirelli’s hit, he’s in the ditch on the other side.”

  “I’ll get him if you can dust off the house again,” Virgil shouted. “Let me get my kit.”

  Virgil crawled into the truck and got his first-aid kit, then back out, crouched in the ditch, and shouted, “Anytime…”

  Stryker popped up and unloaded a clip in one long burst and Virgil vaulted the narrow road, landing in the ditch on the other side, saw Pirelli with an M-16 shooting one-handed, blood soaking through his left shirtsleeve. Virgil crawled up and shouted, “How bad?”

  “It hurts. I think it broke my shoulder,” Pirelli shouted back. Everybody was shouting. Virgil could hear men screaming all around the house and hundreds of rounds pumping out. The house seemed to be falling apart, but there was still fire incoming.

  Virgil pulled a heavy pad and a roll of tape out of his kit, and he and Pirelli eased to the bottom of the ditch, Pirelli on his back. Virgil found a bloody wedge knocked out of Pirelli’s shoulder, just below the edge of his body armor. He jammed the pad under Pirelli’s shirt and wound two yards of tape around his shoulder, cinching it up tight, shouted, “No artery, don’t see any arterial bleeding,” and Pirelli nodded and said, “Reload me.”

  NOW THE FIRING from the house had stopped, and an agent launched himself out of the east-side ditch to the car where the third wounded agent had been lying, the guy who’d covered Virgil while Virgil dragged the dead man’s body. Another burst of fire from the house, but the agent made it, and the DEA shooters pounded the window where the burst had come from.

  Virgil, down in the ditch, reloaded Pirelli’s M-16 and then heard Stryker scream, “Watch out, watch out!” and Virgil looked up and saw, at the shed, Franks walking out through the shed door with a long revolver in one hand. He took three steps and shot at the agents behind the truck, no effort to cover himself, and the unwounded agent stumbled back away from the man on the ground, trying for his gun, and then somebody hit Franks with a burst, and Virgil could see his shirt shaking, but Franks stayed on his feet and fired another shot from the pistol and then he went down.

  Distracted by the appearance of Franks, Pirelli had half risen to his knees, shouting, and now another burst of gunfire spattered around them and Pirelli went down again, flapping one arm, and Virgil shouted, “Get down,” but it was too late; Pirelli had been hit again. Virgil crawled down to him, and Pirelli sat up and said, “Got me,” and dropped back on the ground. Two holes: one in a leg and the other in the right arm. The one in the arm was bleeding hard, but not arterially; the arm was crooked and surely broken.

  Virgil ripped open Pirelli’s pant leg: that hit was superficial, ripping away skin and a quarter-inch of meat.

  “How bad?” Pirelli groaned.

  “You’re not dead yet,” Virgil said. More tape to put pressure on the wounds; then Virgil said, “This is gonna hurt. I’ve gotta move you across the road and up the ditch where we can get you outa here.”

  “Do it.”

  He braced himself and grabbed Pirelli’s armor at the neckline, cocked himself, and shouted at Stryker, who said, “Ten seconds,” and disappeared, crawling down the ditch. Then Stryker flashed a hand, screamed, “Go!” and Virgil ran across the road, dragging Pirelli. Stryker popped up, twenty feet from his previous position, and burned another mag.

  Pirelli made no sound at all when they landed in the water on the other side. Virgil kept the motion going, dragging him up the ditch, through the muck, to the wrecked DEA truck. Five minutes, a hundred yards, Pirelli didn’t make a sound. They reached the truck, went another ten yards, and stopped. Virgil said, gasping for air: “Somebody’ll come and get you.”

  “That place is bunkered up. We didn’t know it, but it’s gotta be bunkered up,” Pirelli said. His face was pale as a cloud, his eyes unfocused with shock, but he was coherent.

  “Something,” Virgil said.

  AT THAT MOMENT, there was an explosion at the house. Not huge, but big enough. Then another one. A DEA agent had gotten a grenade launcher going, and hit the house with high-explosive rounds, and then with what looked like a gas round. And from behind the hill, to the northeast, where Virgil and Stryker had crawled on their scouting trip, a distinctive single boom. Virgil had never shot one, but he suspected it was a fifty-caliber rifle. The DEA was taking the house out.

  Virgil said, “Just lay here; I’ll be back,” and he crawled back up the ditch. Franks was lying spread-eagled in front of the first DEA truck, obviously dead. Two agents in armor were behind the truck, a third agent on the ground. Stryker was still in the ditch, popping single shots off at the house: not much seemed to be coming out.

  One of the first-in agents was squatting behind one of the trucks in the road, all four tires shot out.

  “What about the guys behind the truck?” Virgil shouted.

  The agent yelled back, “Harmon is gone. Franks shot him right in the head. Two more wounded, not bad; the others are okay. How bad are you?”

  “Not bad. We’
ve got four good tires. I’ll back out of here if you can get that grenade guy to put in a couple more rounds. Pirelli’s hurt pretty bad. I need to make a run to the hospital.”

  “Soon as you get it fired up, I’ll tell him to start putting rounds in. Go like hell.”

  Virgil got in the foot-well of the Explorer. The passenger-side windows were shot out, glass all over the seats, a few holes, but the tires were good, and intact, and nobody had been shooting at the engine block, where they might’ve hit electronics.

  The truck started, and he shouted, through the broken windows, “I’m ready,” and two seconds later, heard the first grenade impact, and he started rolling backward up the ditch, building momentum, afraid he’d bog down in the wet bottom, and then another grenade, and the boom from the fifty-cal, and another grenade, and he risked sitting up, looked back over his shoulder, and accelerated onto the road and into the shelter of the damaged DEA truck.

  Pirelli was still in the ditch, half sitting now. Virgil ran down to him, and Pirelli asked, “What time is it?”

  “Damned if I know,” Virgil said, and he grabbed Pirelli by his armor and said, “Hold on, now,” and dragged him across the road to the Ford, loaded him through the back door, flat on his back, then got in the truck and backed up another two hundred yards, hearing the grenades pounding Feur’s place, then risked stopping, made a U-turn through the ditch and was on his way out. “What time is?” Pirelli called. “What time is it?”

  “Time to go,” Virgil shouted back, and that seemed satisfactory, and Pirelli stopped talking.

  IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR, he could see Feur’s house, with smoke—maybe gas?—but no fire. Then he was over the rise and onto the interstate and he didn’t bother calling the hospital, and he was moving too fast anyway, and if they had a brain in their head, with two wounded agents already in, they’d be ready for more. A mile from the exit, he saw a DEA-looking truck heading back, saw a shattered window: the guy who’d made the run to the hospital, headed back.

  Eight minutes to the Bluestem exit, up and left, accelerating up the hill, then right to the hospital, the big arrow of the emergency room, three cop cars sitting outside of it, deputies looking toward him, flinching at the sound of his wheels, and then he was there, out, shouting, “We got another one, Pirelli, he’s hurt. Need a gurney, need a gurney…”

  The hospital had one full-time surgeon, Virgil learned, with another on his way from Worthington. The one on the job was working back and forth between injured DEA agents and he looked at Pirelli and said to a nurse, “Clean him up,” and then he was gone.

  The nurses took Pirelli off and Virgil went outside, where a deputy said, “We’ve got guys heading down to Feur’s,” and, “The DEA guy went back.”

  “The doc say anything about the first two guys?”

  “They’re hurt bad. One of them’s right on the edge, the other’s better.” The deputy’s face was pale, anxious. “I need to get down there…”

  “You need to stay here,” Virgil said. “Coordinate. Call your guys, tell them to take it easy going in, because there’s a war going on down there. Once they’re inside two hundred yards, they could get shot up. Best to hold back, isolate the farmhouse, and let the DEA guys take it down. Block the roads, don’t let anybody in or out. Look for people on foot.”

  “I’ll call them,” the deputy said, and then Virgil was in his truck and rolling. He was halfway down the highway when an agent named Gomez called: “We’ve got contact with Feur: he’s still inside, he won’t talk, says for you to call him.”

  “I’ll be there in three or four minutes, if you can stall him. You could listen in.”

  DEPUTIES HAD SET UP a roadblock just off the interstate. Virgil went on through, did a U-turn four hundred yards out, backed down to the wrecked DEA truck, and left his truck there. Carrying the M-16 he’d taken from the DEA agent and two mags, he worked his way back down the roadside ditch.

  THE HOUSE WAS a ruin. The second floor was gone, part of it falling inside the frame of the house, part of it out in the yard. Popping his head up every few yards, Virgil could see what appeared to be olive-drab sandbags, the kind used by the Corps of Engineers for flood control.

  They had been bunkered up, he thought, but the pounding from the grenade launcher had knocked out the frame of the house.

  As he crawled, he noticed that there was no firing; very little sound at all. A lot of gasoline around, though. Five dead trucks, all shot to pieces, leaking gas; smoke coming out of one of them.

  Stryker was no longer in the ditch. He’d moved across the road, and was sitting behind one of the trucks. Virgil heard a grenade hit the house, and made his move, slid in next to Stryker.

  Another agent came running over. All he said was, “You ready? It’s for you.” He had a phone in his hand, and he pushed the “call” button, and handed it to Virgil.

  Feur answered a minute later. “What?”

  Virgil said, “This is Virgil Flowers. You feel like coming out?”

  Feur chuckled. “No, I guess not. I have a question for you, though. Why in the hell did you come in shooting? You could have knocked on the door. I could take a couple years inside. But you came in shooting and now there are dead cops, and I’m not gonna sit on death row, waiting for the needle.”

  “Ah, man,” Virgil said. “It was Franks’ goddamn dogs. We weren’t shooting you. The dogs went after an agent, chewing him up. Somebody shot at the dog, somebody shot back from the house.”

  “All this happened because of dogs?” Feur didn’t seem surprised.

  “Well, not exactly. If you hadn’t been making a ton of crank, if you hadn’t built bunkers inside the house, if you hadn’t shot back…Was that you, or Trevor, or one of the other guys?”

  “Trevor,” Feur said. “Silly fool. Always liked those guns too much. He paid for it: he’s gone now. There’s only two of us left, me’n John. We’re both hurt, trying to decide what to do.”

  “You aren’t gonna take any more cops with you,” Virgil said. “The DEA is talking about bringing in a tank from the National Guard. Run that house over like a trash compactor.”

  After a few seconds of silence, Feur said, “Call me back in two minutes. John’s hurt, I need to see what he wants to do.”

  VIRGIL PUNCHED OFF. He’d been holding the phone close, so the agent could listen in, and the agent said, “Good. If he’s talking, he’ll quit.” Then, “What about our guys?”

  Virgil said, “One’s real bad, one may be dying. Not dead yet, they’re working on both of them at the hospital. Pirelli’s got a bunch of holes, but I don’t think he’s gonna die. What about the others…?”

  “We sent two more in; not good, but not terrible.” The agent nodded, chewed his lip, said, “Why’d Franks turn those dogs loose?”

  “Crazy guy,” Virgil said. “A whole house full of crazy guys.”

  HE LOOKED at the phone, and redialed. Feur answered, and said, “We’re quittin’. But we can’t get out of here. We’re all piled in. We’re not gonna shoot, but you’ll have to get us out.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Right in the middle of the house, first floor, the whole top floor came down on us. Can’t see any cracks, just a lot of lumber. John is hurtin’ bad.”

  Virgil could hear another man talking in the background, but couldn’t make out what he was saying. “Gonna take a while,” Virgil said. “I’ll tell you what, Reverend. You best not resist. Won’t do any good, for one thing, but the other thing is, these boys are pretty pissed. If they toss an incendiary grenade in there, you’ll get a little preview of hell.”

  “We’re done,” Feur said. “We’re done.”

  “Just in case, you know, something happens,” Virgil said. “Why’d you do the Gleasons and the Schmidts?”

  Feur said, “I don’t lie on the Bible, Virgil. I had nothing to do with that. And look—it wouldn’t make any difference to anybody or anything if I came right out and admitted it. Not with those dead cops all ov
er the yard. But I had nothin’ to do with it.”

  THE AGENTS TOOK it slowly: built a commanding view of the house from the loft of the barn, from the top of the shed, then moved in close to the house, pushed some sandbags around, built a strong point that looked right down into the wreckage.

  The agent named Harold Gomez had taken charge. Another agent said to him, “We need some chains, maybe a Bobcat. We need to move some big pieces.”

  Gomez nodded. “Get one. Get two. Get them down here.”

  ANOTHER SANDBAGGED strongpoint went up at the opposite corner of the house. With an agent there, his gun trained on the wreckage, Virgil and Gomez moved in close to look at the house. To their left, another agent had spread a blanket over the forms of the dead DEA man and Franks.

  The wrecked house smelled bad, raw lumber and dust and old paint, the odor of rotten eggs. A couple of other agents moving around the wreckage pointed out parts of a body, blown to pieces, under a portion of the second floor that had collapsed into the yard.

  “Direct hit with a grenade,” Gomez said.

  An agent put down his rifle, walked up the front steps, dragged some siding and two-by-fours to the side, and then a few more pieces. He shouted, “Can you hear us?”

  No answer.

  “Careful,” Gomez said. “Basement could be a problem.”

  THEY MOVED FARTHER around the house, and Gomez said, “You’ve got a cut on your scalp.”

  “Piece of glass or metal,” Virgil said. “When I was backing the truck out.”

  “Goddamnit,” Gomez said. “Goddamnit. Ah, Jesus, what do I tell Harmon’s wife?”