by P. J. Tracy
By the time they all had crept back to the edge of the woods where they'd stashed the Molotov cocktails, Annie was beginning to understand the truth of the old saw about it being darkest before the dawn. As a rule, she was seldom up this late, and never up this early unless she was in Vegas, and they didn't have any windows there anyway, but this was ridiculous. She was staring right down at her feet and couldn't even see the white trim on the purple high-tops. Not that the trim was all that white anymore. Not after crawling through that ditch and crouching in that filthy lake with that positively disgusting dead cow .., the memory made her shudder, but it also took her back to the paddock where the real heart of this godforsaken town lay buried under four inches of manure, and that was good. It was a reminder of why she was huddled in the dark woods like a barbarian, next to a row of IIDs, as Sharon called them back in the garage.
"What the hell is an IID?"
"Improvised Incendiary Device."
"Don't talk in initials. You sound like a man. Drives me crazy the way they make up acronyms for everything. It's exclusionary, that's what it is, little boys talking in code. For heaven's sake, it's just a gas-filled Coke bottle with a rag stuck in the top, and they've got to put initials on it so it sounds like some technological marvel. Damn, now look what you've done. You got me all riled up. Let's just get out there and KSA."
Grace was staring into the darkness, eyes wide open in a futile search for light. She couldn't see the rag pile. It was too dark, and the pile was too small and too far away. Sharon's collegiate softball career seemed like a very fragile thing to carry the entire weight of what they intended to do, but there weren't a lot of choices.
They'd decided to risk the flashlight once, just to spot the pile and give Sharon something to aim at. When the time was right, Grace would hit the rags with the light, Annie would strike a match to one of the bottle wicks, then Sharon would hit the gas-soaked pile on the first throw and they'd all live happily ever after.Yeah, right.
But first the bullets had to work.
It was a simple plan, really. Primitive. First, the diversion. Bullets exploding in the house, soldiers running in from the perimeter to see what was going on, getting distracted by the fire in the garage before they realized it was following a trail that would make it a hell of a lot bigger, giving the women enough time to run out the way the men had run in.
Simple,If the bullets went off.If the men ran in.IfSharon could hit that pile with one of the bottles. Grace closed her eyes. For a woman who left nothing to chance, this was agony. Too many ifs, and this time, there were no contingency plans.
The three of them waited there in the dark, breathing through their mouths, hoping for noise and hearing nothing but silence. It was taking too long. Grace felt a trickle of sweat roll from her hairline down her cheek as she revisited the argument Annie had made at the lake, back when they were putting all this together.
"Why mess with the bullets at all? Why not just open the pumps right away, let the gasoline fill the whole damn town, and then light it up?"
"Would you run into a burning town? If the fire starts too big, they'll just sit out there on the perimeter and wait for us."
Sharon and Annie were both on the edge of panic. Sharon was holding out a bottle toward Grace in question. Grace shook her head strongly. No. The bullets had to go off first. They had to.
Back in the kitchen of the dark house, there was no noise save for the soft, breathy sound of flame. They'd turned the burner under one skillet higher than the other, hoping to prolong the noise, and ever since that moment, the immutable laws of physics had been at work, transferring heat from flame to skillet to bullets. When the proper temperature had been reached, the primer and powder so tidily contained within each bright, brassy casing ignited and then exploded.
Popcorn! Annie thought instantly, jumping at the sharp crack that split the silence. The second crack seemed louder than the first, but it didn't really sound like the shots Annie fired off at the range-more like the explosion of a small firecracker, which was just fine with her.
The louder the better. Another one went off, then a short, chattering salvo, like stuttering, and then nothing.
One skillet down.
Annie opened the matchbook and peeled off the tiny cardboard strip with the sulfur tip. Her hands were shaking.
Sharon crab-walked a few steps out of the sumac thicket that sheltered them and held a bottle at arm's length, back toward Annie. Grace pointed the flashlight like a gun, her thumb on the switch.
The seconds ticked by as their ears hummed in the silence. Then the first bullet in the second skillet did what it was supposed to do, and Annie struck the match and leaned forward to touch it to the cloth wick. It exploded into flames instantly, with a foul stench and an accompanying puff of oily smoke. Grace turned on the flashlight and trained it on the rags as Sharon jumped to her feet and flung the bottle toward the gas station in a panic. It hit the dirt, bounced, then rolled, but it didn't shatter and it didn't explode. Gasoline spilled out through the cloth into a puddle of fire that made a soft whooshing sound, a good ten feet from the pile of rags. It burned merrily on the ground, harmlessly contained by the bare dirt around it. "Shit," Sharon hissed, grabbing another bottle.
Annie was scrambling with a second match, trying once, twice, then ripping off a new one, goddamned cheap gas-station matches, and then there was another soft explosion from the house, the third match blossomed, and almost immediately a man's voice from the woods behind them, shouting, and it sounded so close, so damn close. . ..
Sharon let the second bottle fly toward the rags, arcing it upward, a flaming arrow soaring through the air, then coming down. It hit the ground with enough impact to shatter, and the explosion of fire seared the back bumper of an old junked Buick, but it didn't spread to the trail of gas leading into the station.
Her eyes were watering from the smoke and the terror because there were more voices now, closer still. They'd be here in a minute, and then they'd see the bottle flying, they'd seethem, and Grace and Annie would die because the all-star pitcher of the women's Badger softball team choked the one time in her life that it really mattered.
She held out the third bottle for the kiss of flame, tears running from her eyes, then took a breath and turned her back on the woods and gave the bastards a better target.Concentrate, Sharon. Focus. Mencan always do that better than women, so narrow that brain bridge, be a man.Ychromosome, come to Mama. You're Robert Redford in The Natural.You're Kevin Costner in For Love of the Game,and there is nothing else in the world except this single pitch. Bases loaded, two outs, full count, bottom of the ninth, but don't thinly of any of that. Just thinly of the ball and the stride zone, and black out everything else. . ..
The flaming bottle wobbled through the air, end over end, whishing like a huge pendulum, writing with a jagged contrail of black smoke. It shattered on impact within inches of the rags, and instantaneously, the pile exploded in a pillar of fire, sucking oxygen out of the air with the throat-deep woof of the world's biggest Great Dane.
In that first second of combustion, Sharon imagined that she could actually feel the change in air pressure, feel herself being sucked toward the column of black smoke and fire.
Strike three.
Shouts. Lots of them. Much closer now.
"Hurry!" Grace hissed from behind her.
But Sharon hadn't moved. She was standing perfectly still, a paralyzed lawn-ornament woman, grinning fiercely, her gaze fixed hypnotically on the circle of fire.
"Sharon!"
The rags were burning furiously, noisily, but there was no fiery snake rushing toward the station, no fire at all along the trail of gasoline they'd poured from the rags to the inside of the garage, andhowmany soldiers does it take to put out a burning rag pile? Fifty? A hundred? I don't think so.
There would be no trail of fire to the garage. Goddamnit, too much of the gas had soaked into the dirt or evaporated or God knew what, but now there would be no ex
plosions as cans of flammable liquid blew up, no danger at all of a raging conflagration spreading to the pumps and the gas pouring out of the hoses. There was just a little circle of flames now, burning in the dirt-a little girl's campfire, that's all it was.Bring hot dogs.
Grace and Annie were hissing-whispering-squealing at her, panic fragmenting their words into unintelligibility, and now Grace was starting to scramble away from the trees on her hands and knees to come and get her. . . .
Sharon spun and dipped and grabbed another bottle and shoved it at Annie. "Light the goddamned thing and get out of here!"
Annie lit the rag wick and smiled at her, looking genuinely wicked in the reflected flames. "KSA, honey."
Okay, Sharon, here you go, Kicking Some Ass. So throw long-very, very long, all the way to that back door, because if God is great, God is good, then there would still be gasoline on the concrete floor.
She hurled the bottle, and as she dove back into the shelter of the trees, the interior of the garage flashed with a greatwhoosh, a sudden and early sunrise in Four Corners.
Instantly, the shouts in the woods behind them multiplied and increased in volume. The women crowded together, peering out through the spaces between the sumac, their hearts hammering.
Within seconds, a line of men pounded down the cartway less than twenty feet away through the trees. Just as the first of these darted out onto the broken asphalt of the cul-de-sac, dozens of others seemed to materialize magically from every direction, popping from the forest, appearing around buildings, all converging on the fiery furnace still contained within Dale's garage. They seemed to pour into the once-quiet clearing of Four Corners, as if someone were spilling bottomless bottles of men into the town.
Grace stared without blinking at the cartway, waiting for it to clear. Breathing fast, her hand clenched around the Sig, every muscle in her body tensed and ready to run.Hurry up, hurry up, she screamed at the men in her mind. By the time it seemed safe to slip out the back and into the emptying woods, the heat from the fire was rolling over them in palpable waves.
Doubled over their bent knees, their faces running with sweat, the women clambered from their hiding place, dodged from tree to tree until they were on the other side of the cartway, then plunged into the deepest part of the forest.
COLONEL HEMMER and Private Acker were at the back of an old hay field five miles from Four Corners. An overgrown, two-track field road led deep into the property, where a large metal machine shed stood crumbling into its own rust. Meryll Christian had stored some of his farm equipment there, back when the old bachelor had still been alive and farming, but with no heirs to claim the property, the State took possession. Hemmer had picked it up for back taxes five years ago, thinking he'd reseed that field one day, never dreaming of the grand purpose it would eventually serve.
Acker and Hemmer were in a jeep in the middle of a cluster of other vehicles parked in the long grass. Acker had the field radio mike off and held it to his chest, waiting for Colonel Hemmer to speak. He'd been silent for almost thirty seconds-Acker timed such things on his watch-and he'd served the man long enough to dread the silences that almost always meant that the Colonel was quietly seething, mentally busting some heads.
In this case, the heads Hemmer was wishing he could bust belonged to women he'd never met. Jesus. They'd set the goddamn gas station on fire. "Is it contained?" he asked suddenly, making Acker jump.
"Sounds like it's just in the garage bay at this point, but there are a lot of flammables in there, and the pumps out front were running full blast. The men shut them off, but there's a lot of gasoline everywhere."
Hemmer puzzled over that for a second, then shook his head in disdain. "They were trying to set the whole town on fire."
"Looks that way. They had some half-assed trail running from the garage to the pumps, but the men took care of that. They're using some on-site hoses to keep the fire down in the back so it doesn't hit those dry pines, but as soon as daylight comes, you're going to be able to see the smoke from the garage for miles if they can't get it under control."
Hemmer's pale eyes rolled skyward. It wasn't exactly light yet, just showing a little indigo in the black, but even that was too close for comfort. They had maybe an hour tops. "They're certain the gunfire came from the house?"
"Yes, sir."
"And no one got out?"
"No, sir. They were in sight of the house within seconds, and we've still got men around it."
Hemmer nodded, pleased and a little troubled, all at the same time. "So the women are still in there."
"They have to be. We've got them, sir."
"Possibly."
"Sir?"
Hemmer rolled his head toward him. "Doesn't it bother you at all, Acker, that they would set the gas station on fire and then try to hide in the house next door?"
Acker's shrug was hapless. "They're women, sir."
Hemmer had a deep scar on the left side of his mouth that pulled it down a little when he tried to smile, which he didn't do often. Very few people realized that the resulting grimace when he heard
something that pleased him was a sign of approval. Acker was one
of them.
"You want to send some men into the house, sir?"
"No. Everybody on the fire. You and I will take care of the women."
This time Acker smiled back at him.
EVERY SINGLE MAN in the Monkeewrench RV was running on adrenaline, and not much else. They'd covered only two of the seven dead zones in Deputy Lee's patrol sector in the past hour, no joy in either, and the next one was a good twenty miles away. They'd run through four pots of coffee and all the high-energy snack food left in the bus from the last trip, but it wasn't doing Harley much good. He'd been night-driving since Minneapolis, and his eyes were starting to look like two pinwheels spinning in opposite directions. Bonar, who'd been riding shotgun with Charlie in his lap since Gino went in the back with Magozzi, Halloran, and Roadrunner, feared that the shoulder harness was the one and only thing holding the tattooed giant upright.
Back in the office, Roadrunner looked up from his computer station for the first time in an hour. Up until now, he'd been in some strange cybertrance, punctuated by occasional violent outbursts of furious typing. He was running multisite cross-checks on the suspect men and sites on the FBI raid list, hoping to find things the Feds had missed, printing them out, then feeding the papers to Magozzi, Gino, and Halloran. "Goddamnit, this is going nowhere!" His voice was a frustrated whine. "I didn't get a single red flag on any of those men, and unless you can find something I didn't, they're just as clean as Agent Knudsen said they were. Just ordinary people."
Magozzi tapped one of the papers he was speed-reading. "If the Feds are looking for milk trucks, this Franklin Hemmer has to be the primary target."
Gino fanned through the sheaf of papers he was holding. "Which one's Hemmer?"
"The guy who owns the dairy."
"Oh, yeah. Christ, what kind of a sick fuck would fill up milk trucks with nerve gas? I'm never going to be able to eat cereal again."
Roadrunner punched the print key, and more papers started spewing out. "This is kind of interesting. I just pulled the county tax rolls on Hemmer, and it seems he has about a thousand acres scattered all over the place."
Halloran held up his own stack of papers. "His tax returns list him as businessman and farmer, which explains the thousand acres."
Magozzi grunted. "The only thing I see on the raid list is Hemmer's house and the dairy. How come none of that acreage was searched?"
"The FBI must have done drive-bys. It's probably all just cropland, and there's no way he's cooking nerve gas in the middle of a hayfield." Halloran sighed, setting the papers aside for a minute. Roadrunner was right. This wasn't going anywhere, and it wasn't getting them any closer to finding the women.
He looked out the back window to rest his eyes. The sky had been gradually lightening for the past half hour, as if someone had spilled a big bott
le of bleach on it.
He glanced over at Magozzi and wondered if he looked that bad. The skin across Magozzi's face was taut, as if he were about to jump out of it, he had a black five o'clock shadow twelve hours gone, and it was getting hard to tell where the beard ended and the black circles under his eyes began.
They'd talked the case inside and out nonstop since they left Beldon, like tired dogs chasing their tails, never getting anywhere. Every scrap of information they had blew into a brick wall, and the frustration was building to that dangerous point where you start thinking that there just isn't a goddamned thing you can do. If they didn't find Sharon, Grace, and Annie standing in the middle of the road in one of the dead zones, they'd be right back where they started with no clue where to look next, getting eaten alive by the thought that the women were out there somewhere in a bad place.
He turned back toward the window and looked out at the kind of wild country he'd loved all his life, and thought he'd gladly blow up every square inch of it if that would put them one step closer to the missing women. He wondered how old you had to get before you stopped making mistakes. He shouldn't have let Sharon go into the Monkeewrench warehouse last fall. He shouldn't have stopped trying to call her, just because she never answered. And he sure as hell shouldn't have sent that goddamned form letter that said she was going to be fired. Christ. Hurt feelings could mess up a man's head beyond recognition. And pride.Pride goeth before the fall, Mikey. It was another one of those blasted Bible quotes that his mother and Father Newberry had been so fond of spouting when he'd been a kid, and it had taken him twenty years to hear the truth in it, because he surely was taking a tumble now.
He wasn't all that sure he could stand it if he lost another deputy.
No, goddamnit, that wasn't right. He wasn't sure if he could stand it if he lostSharon.
The admission, even to himself, was almost his undoing. He rubbed at his eyes because they were tired and starting to water, blurring the colors that were beginning to show up outside the window.