by P. J. Tracy
Sharon raised an impatient brow. "We started a goddamned forest fire, Grace. Get out here and take a look. And for God's sake, holster your weapon. Cops don't like civilians pointing guns at them."
Grace thought about it. He had his gun holstered, and even if he went for Sharon's, an easier draw from the belt, she could still put him down.
She slipped the Sig back in the holster but didn't fasten the snap, released a long breath, and started forward. Annie rose out of the bushes to follow her, a fat, wild-looking woman in a tattered dress, and the man's eyes widened to see a third.
"Jesus," he breathed in an aside to Sharon as he watched Grace and Annie approach. "Your partner looks pretty wired. This must be some case you're working."
Grace stopped two feet away, enough room to get at her weapon, close enough to use her hands if she had to. "You don't look like a cop."
That irritated him. "Deputy David Diebel. Missaqua County Sheriff's Department. And as far as that goes, you don't look much like arsonists, either. But if you really did start this thing, you've got a lot of explaining to do."
Grace and Annie looked back toward Four Corners and saw what Sharon already had. Black billows of smoke stained the morning sky, and tongues of orange flame rose above the trees and pixellated into sparks that swirled in a vortex overhead. And now they heard it, faintly-a low, distant roaring sound, like an enormous animal just coming awake.
"Oh, dear Lord," Annie murmured, thinking that Smokey the Bear was going to be really pissed. She stepped out of one of the high-tops and felt the burn when the air hit her heel. The blistering had bled a little into the shoe. Sharon was going to be pissed, too.
"Listen, ladies, we're in a bad spot here, and I need to get moving. You can call whoever you need to from the staging area, and while you're there, you can explain your involvement in this fire to Sheriff Pitala."
"Sheriff Pitala?"
"My boss.. ."
Grace glanced quickly at Sharon, who gave her an almost imperceptible nod.
".., and my guess is, he'll be mighty interested in whatever you have to say. We've got a town right in the middle of that fire, and you better pray to God that everybody who lives there got out."
His voice was a little shaky now, with understandable rage, Grace thought. This is his county, and those were his people in Four Corners, and he thought they set the fire that might have killed some of them. Something inside her that had been tight since the car broke down finally loosened. Let it go, she told herself. He's a cop. For God's sake, he's a cop. It's over. You're safe. You're all safe now.
The sound of an explosion made the deputy look up in alarm. "Shit, the big pines are going. That thing is moving fast. Get in the back, now."
"I need my weapon, Deputy," Sharon said.
"Later," he said, running to the car and opening the back door.
Sharon stopped at the open car door. "I'm a Federal officer, Deputy. Cops don't take guns from cops."
He hesitated for an instant, then pulled her 9mm out of his belt and handed it over, grip first. "Sorry. Holster that. We're going to be moving, and the roads are rough."
Sharon crawled all the way across the backseat, moving the deputy's hat up to the back window ledge so they didn't smash it. Halloran would climb all over me for blocking the window, she thought in a sudden pang of nostalgia. Actually, Halloran would have given Deputy Diebel an even more serious dressing down for storing his hat in the backseat in the first place. Things must be a lot more relaxed in Missaqua County.
Annie clambered in next to her, feet splayed on either side of the hump, one of them bare. "Shit, my shoe . . ." But by that time, Grace was already slamming the door, the deputy was behind the wheel, stomping on the accelerator, and the rear tires were squealing.
It was a frantic sound, a sound of panicked haste, and Grace felt her stomach knot as she stared straight ahead at the cage between the front seat and back, then at the doors without handles. Being locked in your own tiny, safe place was one thing; being locked in someone else's was altogether different.
She leaned forward, closer to the cage. "We need to get patched through to a landline as fast as you can."
"We're in a dead zone," he snapped back. "Radios and cells don't work. But the staging area's less than five miles from here, and like I said, there's landlines there. You better buckle up. Another mile or so and we have to take a farm road. It's straight washboard."
Grace sat back and buckled the lap belt, and felt the wind from the deputy's open window buffeting against her face, lifting her hair away from her ears. Relax, she told herself. There's not a single thing you can do for five more minutes anyway. She glanced at her watch. Dear God. Only four hours and forty-five minutes left. Was that enough time to find two particular trucks out of the millions across the country? And even if they found them, was it enough time to disarm them?
Suddenly, the weight of a thousand lives came down on her, and five short minutes seemed like a lifetime. She tried to look forward to the end of it, when they'd get to the staging area and a phone. . . . Her thoughts stuttered to a halt. Who were they going to call? Who did you call to report something like this? She went through all the possibilities, starting with Magozzi, the one and only cop she really trusted, and she smiled when she ended up at the only real choice they had. She'd run from the FBI for ten years, maligning them every chance she got, hating them almost constantly for what a few bad agents had done to her once, and now she was sitting next to one of them, planning to call the rest in for help.
And the wheel goes round and round, she thought, rolling her head to look at Annie. The woman was going to kill herself the minute she got a look in a mirror. She didn't do disheveled. But Grace envied Annie's ability to disconnect instantly, to throw back her head and close her eyes and go from total terror to total relaxation in the space of a few minutes.
Sharon was a different story. She was buckled in but sitting straight up, her back nowhere near the seat, and that surprised Grace. Of all of them, she should have been the most relaxed in a police car with a fellow officer. Then again, maybe she was never caged in the backseat before, or maybe she was as screwed up after getting shot last fall as Grace was after Atlanta. Maybe the two of them were more alike than Grace knew.
The deputy braked suddenly and cranked the wheel to the right.
Annie's eyes flew open as she felt herself thrown forward, and her heart pounded.God, take it easy, fat woman, you're going to have a heart attach- He just made a turn, that's all.
"It's going to get bumpy now, ladies," Deputy Diebel called over his shoulder as he turned sharply off the highway and onto a dirt road carved into the forest. "Hang on."
The car's axles tap-danced over the washboard surface, jostling the women against one another in the back. Annie had her arms folded under her breasts to support them. Stupid things were about to pop out of their sockets, or whatever the hell held them in there, and theyhurt.
The car jittered over another series of bone-jarring washboards and something hard and narrow stowed under the front seat poked at Sharon's toes. She moved her foot and looked down as her eyebrows crept toward one another.
There was a ghastly scraping sound as the car suddenly bottomed out on a hard ridge of dirt, and the deputy's hat bounced off the ledge and slid down between Annie and Sharon. Sharon grabbed it automatically and set it in her lap, but her eyes were on the fields and woods and great clouds of dust flashing by the window.
Another minute, and they turned off the dirt road onto a highway. "Another mile, ladies, and we're there."
Annie patted Sharon's knee. "Relax, honey, it's almost over."
Sharon nodded slowly, turning the deputy's hat over and over on her lap, fingering the familiar rigid brim, finding an odd sort of comfort in this small piece of a uniform just like the one she used to wear. It looked just like the one sitting on her hall closet shelf, waiting for the day she might return to her job in Kingsford County, except for the size, of
course, and the name on the inside label. She took a very deep breath and let it out slowly. Her hands were shaking.
"These are the last bumps now," the deputy said as he turned onto another farm road. "We set up in a machine shed at the back of this field. Only place close enough to the fire with a phone line."
The machine shed was corrugated steel, large enough to house a lot of farm equipment, and it looked old and faded and uncared for. Cars were jammed in the long grass off to the side, but there were no people in sight.
Grace was leaning forward against her seat belt. "Where is everybody?"
Deputy Diebel actually gave her a smile over his shoulder. He was where he wanted to be now, and considerably more relaxed. "A few of them are inside running communications, but most everybody is out fighting the fire. We drop our personal vehicles here, load up in an emergency unit, and take off."
He pulled to a stop next to the other cars, turned off the ignition, unfastened his shoulder harness, and reached down to unsnap his holster. It was an absolutely normal thing for him to do. You make enough road stops when you ride solo, unsnapping your holster before you got out of the car to confront God knows what becomes a habit.
Grace glanced over just as Sharon was raising her 9mm to the back of Deputy Diebel's head.
And then she pulled the trigger.
SHERIFF ED PITALA had forcibly pulled Dorothy away from the dispatch desk and sent her home at twoA.M., a full three hours after her shift had ended. Trying to pry her loose any earlier had met with about as much success as trying to get her to retire for the past ten years.
Dorothy had a face like a topographical map of the Rockies, a body like Aunt Bea, and a voice like a blowtorch. Her pictures hung on the wall with three previous sheriffs, all of whom she'd outlasted and outlived. Sheriff Pitala figured that if she ever up and died, he'd just slap a "closed" sign in the window and nail the door shut, because this place sure as hell couldn't run without her.
She was back by 5:30A.M., shoving a plate of ham, eggs, and biscuits under his nose. "Get away from my desk."
"Lord almighty, Dot, now I know how all my predecessors died. You scared them to death."
"You were sleeping on the job."
"Dozing. It's been quiet since you left, except for the boys checking in by phone. And before you ask, there's no sign of Doug yet, or those women the Minneapolis cops are looking for. And what the hell are you doing here? I just sent you home."
"Hmph. Three hours ago. I walked home, took all the snooze I needed in the recliner, then showered and made you breakfast. Eat it, you skinny old man, before it gets cold or you keel over. Don't know which is likely to happen first, the way you look."
She rolled him, chair and all, over to the other desk and grabbed the card-table chair she'd been sitting in for more than forty years. Not a single light was lit on the patrol board. It had been that way since the FBI pulled the cars off the road, and Dorothy thought looking at that black board was like looking at the end of the world.
"Don't know how you can sit in that damn thing," the Sheriff said around a mouthful. "There isn't a lick of padding left in that seat, if there ever was any to start with."
"If you carried a little more padding in that skinny butt of yours, it wouldn't be a problem."
Ed smiled, lips sealed shut with the honey she'd put on the biscuits. When he pulled them open again, he said, "Swear to God, Dorothy, if Pat ever kicks me out, I'm going to run right to your house and marry you."
Dorothy snorted. "I'm twelve years older than you. It wouldn't work out. You're too immature."
"You gotta get with the times. People do that stuff all the time now. We could be like Cher and whatever-his-name-is, or that Dimmy woman and her young fella."
"Dimmeee. How often do I have to tell you that?"
He didn't answer her, and when she glanced over to look at him, he was holding a bite of food in his mouth, not chewing, just looking at her with his eyes half screwed shut.
Dorothy cocked her head at him. "What! Don't tell me there was a bone in that ham, because it was a boneless ham. Born and died in a can, as far as I know."
It took a slurp of cold coffee for him to get the bite down his gullet. "Funny thing. I thought I heard you say you were twelve years older than me."
"So?"
"So that makes you seventy-seven years old, Dorothy, and as I recollect, the birth date on your records puts you at sixty-nine. If the county commissioners ever found out how old you really are, they'd make you retire."
"Who's going to tell them?"
"Not me."
"Allrighty, then. You quit jawing now, because I've got an honest-to-God light coming up on the 911 board, and I'm so excited I can barely stand it." She adjusted her headset and punched her buttons at the same time that the phone on the desk started ringing.
The phones kept ringing off the hook for the next half hour and Dorothy's 911 board was so lit up, even she was starting to get a little frazzled. By the time Ed Pitala had finished his fifteenth call, his face was red and his eyes were hard, and he was ready to start making some calls of his own. He stood up quickly and said, "Dorothy, you've got to cover the board and the phones for a minute. I've got to talk to Knudsen. You think you can manage?"
"Probably not. I'm seventy-seven years old."
"You don't look a day over sixty-nine."
She shooed him away with her fingers, and he crossed the outer office to the door that had his name on it. He rapped hard and stormed in before he got an answer. Agent Knudsen was talking on that peculiar thing he'd brought with him that looked something like a phone and a lot like something else. It didn't plug into any wall or phone jack, and as far as Ed knew, the thing probably ran on a can of baked beans. He raised his eyes and held up a finger, which the Sheriff thought was pretty laughable. Fingers never stopped anyone unless they were on a trigger.
"You can put that damn thing down or not, I don't care, because I've got a whole goddamned forest on fire, and I'm about to send out every goddamned truck in the county whether you like it or not."
Knudsen just stared at him with his mouth open for a second, and it was the first time Ed noticed that he was little more than a kid. It made him nervous to think of kids in positions of responsibility with law enforcement, but not as nervous as the other expression Knudsen was hiding behind the one that just looked surprised. This boy was scared.
"Stay put. I'll get back," Knudsen said into the phone, then gave Ed his attention. "I know all about the fire, Sheriff. It's under control."
"The hell it is. The last call I got was from one of my deputies who damn near drove into the thing, and it is nowhere near under control. That fire's crowning, and it's going through thirty-foot dry pines like they were matchsticks, and I did not walk into my own office to ask for your permission, I am just telling you that I am calling in every one of my people and getting them out there in patrol cars, because we are going to need every emergency vehicle we've got. . . ."
"Understood, Sheriff."
That stopped Ed's rant cold. Damn. He hated working his hackles into a bristle and then getting them hosed down like that. "What happened to all that crap about our patrols scaring off whoever you were trying to find?"
"We are not here to impede public safety; we're here to protect it."
Ed narrowed his eyes. "You already found what you were looking for, didn't you?"
"No, we did not."
"Any chance whatever it is has anything to do with this fire?"
"Anything's possible, but we don't think so. Your fire started small. We had smoke sightings a while ago that didn't raise any major alarms. The real fire started a bit later, with a few small explosions. Could have been propane tanks, something in the gas station . . ."
Ed caught his breath. "What gas station?"
Knudsen frowned. "I don't know. Is there more than one in Four Corners?"
"Four Corners?" he repeated stupidly, and Knudsen looked at him sideways.
Ed shook his head. "My people weren't close enough yet. I knew the general area, that's all."
"Oh. Sorry. We did a fly-over a few minutes ago, that's who I was talking to. All he could make out was that the center of it looked like it might have been a gas station, and it spread out from there. I'm afraid there isn't much left of Four Corners."
Ed blanched and felt his knees start to give way. He grabbed the nearest chair and nearly fell into it.
"Hazel?" The whisper came from the doorway. Dorothy was standing there with her eyes and open mouth making three circles in a face that didn't look sixty-nine anymore, or even seventy-seven-it looked a whole lot older.
Knudsen's face went still. "You knew someone in that town?"
"My sister," Ed said. "Well, half sister. She owns the cafe next to the gas station."
The agent caught his breath and took a minute, then spoke very quietly. "Remember, Sheriff, it started small. She would have had time to get out. Everyone would have."
Ed looked like he was shrinking in that chair, as if the fire were right there, sucking all the moisture out of him. "You think so? We got over fifty calls on that fire in the past half hour, and not one of them came from Four Corners or anyone who lived there. If they had all that time, why didn't one of them pick up a phone?"
HALLORAN and Roadrunner were in the back of the RV- Roadrunner back at the computers, Halloran on the satellite phone, trying to get through to Sheriff Pitala about the fire. Everyone else was in the front, looking out the big windows at the smoke cloud that had gotten more and more ominous the closer they got. The damn thing was huge now, right in the middle of the next dead zone, and they were still at least five miles away. The center of it was black and nasty and halfway up the sky; the sides were gray, expanding outward by the minute.