by P. J. Tracy
"So what the hell did you do with them?" Gino demanded. "I haven't seen them since you dragged me into that mobile test tube and slammed the door."
Knudsen looked a little nonplussed. "Actually, they're in your RV. The big one with the bedroom eyes?"
Magozzi smiled in spite of himself. Every single man in the world reacted the same way the first time they saw Annie. And every time after that, in fact. "Annie Belinsky."
"Yeah, her. She said she'd whip the next man that tried to talk to her before she had a shower, and I swear to God she could do it. Especially with that big undercover tattooed guy from Kingsford County backing her up. Are those two married or something?"
"Not even close."
"Whatever. Anyway, when they're finished in there, we're going to have to start debriefing. At this point, they know more than any of us.
We've got three live ones in lockup we caught running from the fire in Four Corners. Camo, Ml6s, just like that woman said on the phone ..."
Magozzi stiffened a little. "The woman's name is Grace MacBride, Agent Knudsen."
Knudsen looked at him for a second, recording the connection, finding his boundaries. "Sorry, Detective. Anyhow, we need to hear what all the women have to say before we start interrogation." He turned his head when a cruiser pulled up close beside them and Sheriff Pitala climbed out.
The man's uniform was covered with soot, his face was drawn, and he walked with a stoop that Magozzi hadn't noticed before, as if a grief he wasn't sure he should be carrying was weighing him down. He nodded to the group, then turned to Knudsen. "I can't find anybody that can tell me about Hazel," he said. "I thought maybe you could help me out with that."
"Who's Hazel?"
The voice came from the steps of the RV. Everyone turned and saw Grace MacBride, black hair dripping on her shoulders, Charlie pressed against her side, smiling inappropriately. Stupid dog had no clue what was going on here, Magozzi thought; and then he realized that he felt almost the same way. As long as Grace was in it, the world was just as it should be.
Sheriff Pitala looked up at her and swept his hat from his head in manners so ingrained they transcended everything else. "Sheriff Ed Pitala. Pleased to meet you, ma'am, and Hazel's my sister. Ran the cafe in Four Corners."
Grace looked at him for a moment, then nodded ever so slightly. "Why don't you come on in for a minute, Sheriff."
HALLORAN and Bonar were wandering through the jumble of cars closest to the building, the ones that had already been there when they'd arrived. It was a motley collection of old and new, cars and trucks and vans.
"Who do you suppose these belong to?" Bonar asked.
"Sharon figured they were the cars in Four Corners when whatever went down went down. There wasn't a single drivable vehicle in the town by the time she and Grace and Annie got there."
Bonar shuddered. "You know, it's the little details that really get to you. Like walking into a town with no people, no cars, no sounds. That had to be weird."
Halloran barely heard him. He was staring at a big faded blue sedan parked almost out of sight behind a pickup truck peppered with holes. He and Bonar walked over and looked at the side. There was a hand-painted logo on the driver's door, letters just slightly off, white paint bleeding into the faded blue.
"The Cake Lady," Bonar read it aloud like a sigh, and they were both silent for a time.
"Probably stopped at the cafe for a bite on her way to the wedding," Halloran said. "That Gretchen, she loved her donuts."
Bonar was looking across the field at nothing in particular. "Ernie's going to take this hard."
"Yes, he is."
"So what kind of a world are we living in, Mike, where people put nerve gas in milk trucks and set out to kill a lot of other people they never even met?"
Halloran thought about that for a minute. "Same old world, Bonar. Same old hate. Different weapons."
IT TOOK A FULL seven hours for Agent Knudsen and the ominous black-suited men that came from the ominous black helicopter to debrief Grace, Sharon, and Annie. TheMatrix look-alikes were well-mannered, soft-spoken, and absolutely unused to interviewing anyone with a mangy mutt at her side. Not one of them thought to ask the dog to leave. There wasn't a precedent for such a thing.
"You want to debrief them, fine," Magozzi had said. "But it'll be right here in this field, this RV, or that building. We go from here to home, and that's the only choice you have."
One fool had tried to exert a little nonexistent authority, citing all sorts of statutes and policies that mandated an FBI debriefing at an FBI office with all the prerequisite equipment and witnesses. Agent Knudsen had silenced him with a single gesture. The kid, Halloran thought, had a lot more influence than any of them had realized.
When it was all over, Agent Knudsen personally escorted the three women back to the RV. By that time, the sun was setting on the chaotic day, and most of the choppers and vehicles had already left. Magozzi met them at the door. He was wearing a dishtowel apron and a stern expression that didn't go with it. He looked at Knudsen, then at Grace. "Do we feed him or eat him?"
Charlie had made some decisions about Agent Knudsen in the past few hours. He walked over to the agent, sat down next to his leg, and lifted his head to be patted. Knudsen hated dogs. Always had, always would. Except for this one. He laid a hand on Charlie's head, and Charlie's stump of a tail wiggled.
"Feed him," Grace said.
They should have fed him sooner, Magozzi thought a few hours later, because all the fat and carbs and protein that Harley and Bonar had managed to whip up in a cooking frenzy had done little to mitigate the three glasses of Bordeaux Agent Knudsen had slammed before the meal, and they sure as hell weren't affecting the glass he was drinking now.
Grace, Sharon, and Annie had all been frighteningly quiet during the meal, and everyone else had been quiet, too, mentally tiptoeing around them as if they were recently returned combat vets, which, in a way, they were. The women were pressed close together on one side of the table, the men crowded on the other. Magozzi felt a chasm running right down the middle, and wondered how hard it was going to be to cross it. The only thing that gave him hope was when the women excused themselves and went to the back of the RV to crash on the hidden beds that pulled down from the office walls. Grace hadn't actually smiled at him, but she'd trailed her fingers lightly across his hand as she passed.
Just before Annie disappeared down the broad aisle, she paused at the doorway with a pink flounce of the chiffon-and-marabou dressing gown she'd donned after her shower. It showed a lot of cleavage and a lot of plump, delicious leg when she moved, and Gino had been wondering ever since he dropped his jaw at the first sight of it how the hell the FBI had managed to debrief a woman who looked like that.
"Not so long ago," she said, "this body was neck-deep in a scummy lake, butting up against a dead cow."
Every man in the front of the RV smiled at her. Of the three women, Annie was truly the ultimate survivor, the only one who could live through hell, then immediately let it go. Magozzi wondered what it was in her past that made her able to do that-besides knifing a man to death when she was seventeen, of course.
Agent Knudsen, who was already four or five sheets to the wind, brandished an off-center smile. He held up his glass to her. "Not so long ago, dear lady, you were neck-deep in a scummy lake next to a truck filled with nerve gas." His glass wobbled, and a dribble of wine fell to the table.
Annie gave him a quick curtsy and disappeared down the aisle.
"What truck? What lake? What the fuck are you people talking about?" Gino demanded. He looked a little blurry-eyed and aggressive.
"Have you called Angela?" Magozzi asked him.
"About twenty thousand times." He rolled his eyes toward Harley. "I sure as hell hope you get free minutes on your sat phone." He moved his head back toward Knudsen. "So what's all this lake shit?"
Knudsen was making the mistake a lot of nondrinkers make when they have a little too much. He
was gesturing with his glass, and Roadrunner was frantically blotting up spills as they happened. "There were three trucks originally-three targets. The first one had some kind of accident and crashed in Four Corners. They shoved it into the lake the women ended up hiding in. It's a really long story."
Harley was immediately alarmed. "Are you shitting me? They were really exposed to that gas?"
Knudsen stuck his lips out. "No worries. You would not believe how fast sarin hydrolyzes, and there probably wasn't a whole lot left in the truck anyway." He dropped his chin and raised his eyebrows almost up to his hairline. "Now, if it had been VX, that would have been a whole different story. Big trouble. Big problem." He grinned foolishly, inappropriately, a lot like Charlie.
Up to this point, Roadrunner had been pretty quiet for a man who had literally saved the day. "What were the targets?" he asked Knudsen. His voice was polite, almost deferential. He was asking about the people he'd saved.
The question sobered everyone. Even Knudsen put down his glass, and his gaze seemed to sharpen. "I really can't tell you that."
Gino bristled a little. "You can't tell the man who saved your ass? Who has a better right to know?"
Knudsen fiddled with the stem of his glass for a minute, then laid his gaze on Roadrunner, right where it belonged. "One of the trucks was parked at a mosque outside Detroit-one of the biggest in the country, by the way. The other was at an Immigration Services field office in a Chicago suburb."
No one said a word.
Magozzi looked down at his hands on the table, thinking how accomplished they were in some things, how versatile, and ultimately, how helpless. "They were sending a message."
Knudsen nodded. He looked one hundred percent sober. "That's what it looks like. They were very careful with the target sites. The mosque and the immigration office were both quite isolated, which makes the targets pretty specific." He dug in his pocket, pulled out a wrinkled business card, and smoothed it flat on the table. "We found about a thousand of these in Hemmer's desk at the dairy."
All the men leaned over to read it. There was no name on it, no address, no logo of any sort-just a simple quote:
". . it is their right, it is their duty . . , to provide new Guards for their future security."
"Sounds familiar," Halloran murmured.
"It should," Bonar replied. "It's from the Declaration of Independence. What the forefathers said you had to do when the government wasn't doing enough to protect you."
Knudsen nodded sadly.
And this, Magozzi thought, was the dreaded black place. The desperate place where people always went when anger and fear couldn't find any other answer, the place that obliterated logic and compassion and reason and all the other higher functions of the human mind that civilization had fostered.
No one wanted to talk after that. They found their rest in leather recliners, or doubled up on the sofa beds. Roadrunner was mothering again, covering everyone with blankets before he stretched out in the middle of the aisle and immediately fell asleep.
To his everlasting shame, Harley woke up in the middle of the night on one of the sofa beds, with both arms wrapped tightly around a happily sleeping Agent Knudsen.
SHARON MUELLER was up at dawn, shrouded in a big terry robe from the RV's closet, standing near Deputy Douglas Lee's bloodied patrol car.
It was quiet in the field. Dew sparkled on the seeded heads of tall grass, and a hawk flew overhead, screeching occasionally for its mate.
She heard the RV door close softly in the distance, then felt Hallo-ran approaching. She didn't have to look to know it was him. She would never have to look to know he was there.
He moved up beside her, hands shoved in his pockets, light eyes fixed on the car. "Who killed the man who was pretending to be Deputy Lee?"
"I did."
It was amazing how easily it slipped out-no guilt clouding the issue, no lingering questions, none of the doubts that used to fill hermind whenever she held a gun so similar to the one that had ended her mother's life, hesitant-always hesitant-to pull the trigger and end someone else's. It was part of the reason she'd been shot in the Monkeewrench garage all those months ago. She hadn't been too slow to get at her gun and pull the trigger to keep a killer from shooting her. She'd just been paralyzed by the past, and that had made her a bad cop. But that was over. She could go back to Kingsford County now if she wanted. She could go back on the street. Maybe she could even go back to Halloran.
Halloran didn't even bat an eye. He just nodded. "It was a righteous shooting."
"I shot him in the back," Sharon said.
"Even so."
"I know. I'm okay with it."
Halloran swallowed hard and wondered how people did this.Youdid it when you were a kid,he told himself.You did it every time you stepped to the edge of that cliff at the lime quarry, swung the rope out over the water, and hoped you didn't shatter yourself on the sharp-edged rocks that were waiting below, always waiting.
"I was thinking maybe we should get married. Have kids. Do the whole thing."
Sharon bent in half almost immediately, laughing out loud, and Halloran thought either he'd just proposed to an absolutely insane woman or he'd screwed this up just like he'd screwed up everything else in his life.
"Oh, God, I'm sorry, Mike," Sharon finally gasped, straightening, at least making an attempt at a sober face befitting the occasion. "But we haven't even had a real date yet."
"Okay. We could do that first if you want."
She turned toward him then and grabbed his whiskered face in both hands and pulled it down to hers. Then he felt the woman beneath the thick terry robe and saw in his mind's eye the woman in the red dress, high heels, and lips like colored water, who had laid her hand on his heart in the Kingsford County Sheriffs Office way back last October, and refused to let go.
FIVE HOURS LATER, Gino and Magozzi were leaning against the side of the RV, staring across an empty tar road, across a field at a huge barn. Grace's Range Rover was parked right behind them. The road was so narrow that both vehicles blocked it, but from what they'd seen in the past hour, chances were slim that another vehicle would ever come along. Northern Wisconsin was the end of the world, according to Gino. They could hear a single blackbird calling from a cornfield next to the barn, and not much else.
"So that's what started all this," Magozzi said, tipping his head to get a different angle on the barn.
Grace walked up from the Range Rover and leaned between them. "That's it."
Gino shook his head in disbelief. "Sharon took you fifty miles out of your way to see this?"
"That's right."
Gino pushed away from the sun-heated metal skin of the RV. "Well, it's about the dumbest thing I ever saw in my life," he said, heading back inside for a little liquid refreshment and some more of that gooey chocolate crap with the unpronounceable name that Harley had made last night. He hadn't wanted to make this side trip. He'd been anxious to get home to Angela.
"I think it's pretty amazing," Magozzi said after Gino had left.
The whole side of the barn was painted in a huge, amazingly accurate replication of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, wearing a T-shirt with "On Wisconsin" emblazoned across the front.
Grace smiled at him like the Mona Lisa on the barn. "The thing is," she said, "if we hadn't gone out of our way to see this barn that Gino thinks is about the dumbest thing he ever saw in his life, we ever would have gotten lost. We never would have ended up in Four Corners, and a thousand more people would have died."
They both stared at the barn for a while longer, Grace thinking of lungs that had happened and things that might have been, Magozzi linking of things that were to come.
"You want to make out now?" he asked.
Grace looked down at the ground and smiled, thinking that you ever knew how short your time was. But sometimes, if you were sally lucky, you got the faintest glimpse of how you should spend it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
LONG, LONG AGO, back
when P.J.'s body parts were all still relatively close to their original locations, we sent an unfinished manuscript over the transom. The agent who read it saw through the problems to the possibilities, and championed the story and the author in spite of the book's flaws. We spent the next ten years promising ourselves that one day we would send our thanks in the form of a book that the poor woman could sell. That book wasMonkeewrench. We were not sure what a "good" agent was, so we settled for an amazing one. Ellen Geiger of Curtis Brown Ltd., this one's for you, babe.
Amazing people apparently gather in packs, because Ellen Geiger led us straight to Christine Pepe, executive editor, vice president, and all-around wonder woman at G. P. Putnam's Sons. We know what you're thinking-that every author says really nice things about his or her editor in these acknowledgment pages-but you have to understand that this woman has already earned any accolade you can think of. She is a truly gifted editor with laser-sight judgment who makes everything we write better. We respect her professionalism, we admire her intelligence and talent, and, most of all, we value her friendship.
We began the Monkeewrench series with these two women and heir colleagues in their respective firms. At Curtis Brown, a very special thank-you to David Barbor, who tolerates our nonsense with immutable grace; to Ed Wintle, who parries our nonsense with surprising skill; and of course, to Anna Abreu, who can brighten the darkest day with the sound of her voice. You people are the best.
At Putnam, we are indebted to Carole Baron, president, a consummate professional and truly a class act; to dedicated, delightful Marilyn Ducksworth, who won us over in about two seconds; to the patient and talented Kara Welsh and the New American Library family; to Dr. Michael Barson, who babies us on tour, and his staff, Megan Millenky and Lisa Moraleda. And a thousand thanks to tireless, sweet, unflappable Lily Chin, assistant to Christine Pepe.