by P. J. Tracy
"That's no grass fire," Bonar said. "Something dirty's at the center of it, and that means man-made. Buildings of some kind, for sure."
Gino grunted from the sofa behind the driver's seat. Charlie sat next to him, looking out the window. "We had a big swamp fire north of the Cities a few years ago. Never could figure that one out. I mean, there's about fifty acres of waterlogged frog city burning like it was dry kindling. Anyway, the smoke was black like that."
Bonar said, "Peat."
"Who's Pete?"
"Very funny. There's a high peat content in swamps, rotting vegetation and all that. Oil in the making. Burns like a son of a gun forever once it gets a good start. Smells bad, too."
Gino sighed. "I'm on a road trip with Mr. Britannica."
Halloran came up from the back and looked out at the smoke. "I finally got through to Sheriff Pitala's office. His phones have been jammed with calls on the fire. That FBI agent who gave us the raid sites said they've got a lot of their people heading our way, fire trucks from all over the county, plus Pitala put the patrols back on the road, so we might be running into some serious traffic when we get close. There's a little town dead center in that fire. Sounds like it's gone."
Magozzi had been standing behind Harley, watching him punch commands into the GPS. He looked over his shoulder at Halloran. "What about the residents?"
Halloran shrugged. "He said it started small. They're assuming everyone had a chance to get out."
"They're not sure?"
"No. Ed's on the way for a closer look. His sister lives in there."
"Oh, Lord," Bonar murmured.
Gino stroked Charlie's back absently. "How shook up was the Fed you talked to?"
"Pretty much. But there's a lot going on up there with the phones ringing off the hook and people yelling in the background. Why?"
"Nothing. You just gotta wonder if whatever the Feebs are up to has anything to do with a fire that suddenly pops up out of nowhere."
"It's fire season, Gino."
"Yeah, well, nothing's ever that simple."
Harley had his face close to the windshield now. "Jesus. I think I just saw some flames shooting up in the middle of that cloud."
"Could be," Bonar said. "When those pines are dry enough and hot enough, they literally explode, and the flames can shoot straight up like bottle rockets."
"Shit. I gotta pull over. We are not driving into that thing unless I know we can get the hell out fast if we need to, and this damn GPS map is telling me there's only one turn off this road for the next ten miles, and that's the turn that leads right into Four Corners."
"Four Corners?" Magozzi asked.
"That's the name of the town in the middle of all this," Halloran said.
"We could turn around," Bonar offered.
"In this rig? On this peanut road? Are you kidding?" Harley pulled the RV to one side of the road and stopped.
Bonar was actually wringing his hands. "There's probably lots of little dirt roads cutting off this one that won't show up on that map. The county's checkered with them."
"'Probably' doesn't cut it for me. What if we get in there and the fire jumps the road behind us?"
"We'll all cook in here like pork roasts."
"You got that right. And can anybody tell me why we're planning to drive straight into hell anyhow? We're looking for our ladies, and I can guarantee that the one place they'renot is in the middle of that shit up there."
"Like Gino said, it's just one more coincidence in a long string of them," Magozzi said behind him. "We know for sure at least one of our missing people disappeared in a dead zone, and now there's a big fire smack in the middle of one. If we're going with coincidence and a possible connection to the Feds' operation, we've got to take it all the way. We've got no place else to go. And my gut tells me those women are somewhere near that fire, either running from it, trapped by it, or-" He stopped dead, but nobody seemed to notice.
Harley grunted derisively. "No way they're trapped in there. They're just too goddamned smart."
Magozzi looked at him. "Smart enough to send up a flare? What if Grace wasn't saying four people were dead. What if she was trying to say 'Four Corners'?"
Harley stomped on the accelerator.
BARELY A MOMENT had passed since Sharon Mueller had raised her gun and blown away Deputy Diebel's head.
Annie couldn't hear anything over the ringing in her ears, and she couldn't see very well, either, because she hadn't blinked in a long time.
Blink. You have to blink, or your eyeballs will dry up and fall out, and then you'll be blind-blind and deaf, and your last memory of sound will be the thunderous roar of a gun, and your last memory of sight will be this shocking thing that Sharon just did. Don't look-
She was actually staring at Sharon's face-the side of her face, actually-sort of three quarters, sort of profile, and she didn't recognize her at all. She blinked at last, but that didn't help. She moved her jaw, trying to clear her ears, and then someone turned down the ringing sound. It was still there, but it was softer, hiding way behind theeardrum, muffled like a jangling phone under a pillow. Another noise began to tiptoe in. Sharon, she realized, making the oddest little sound, like she was screaming as loud as she could with her mouth closed, screaming through her nose.
Oh, dear. Poor Sharon. She was staring at something awful in the front of the car, on the other side of the cage, and Annie knew what she was looking at. She'd had just a glimpse, just the tiniest flash on the back of her retina before she'd shifted her gaze to Sharon's face and refused to look forward again, just like when you went to a horror movie. You didn't keep looking at the screen when something gross happened. You just shifted your eyes a little to one side, not so far that anyone would notice, just far enough, and then later, when people asked how you could watch that stuff, you just shrugged and said it wasn't so bad, really. It was a trick, a secret trick. She should have told Sharon about it, because Sharon was still staring at all the blood and little pieces of matter sliding down the windshield.
"Sharon." Grace reached across Annie to touch Sharon's left hand, which had fallen into her lap like a dead thing. It was ice-cold. Her right hand still held the 9mm, still pointed at the place where Deputy Diebel's head had been before his body slumped to the right, over the console. "Sharon."
Annie watched Sharon's eyes move just a little, hardly far enough to notice-maybe she did know the trick. Hello, Sharon. Anybody in there?
The noises stopped, and Sharon's throat moved. Her mouth opened and a whistle came out, then a whisper: "Sorry about the noise." And then her right hand started to shake, hard, and she lowered it slowly to lie in her lap with the left one. She felt Annie and Grace looking at her, and she turned her head to meet their eyes.
"I'm sorry," she said, her tone calm, perfectly controlled, pretending to be normal but sounding hideously abnormal coming from her face. It was a ghastly gray color, and all the skin looked loose.
Grace didn't know what to say to that. Sharon had just killed the man who was driving them to safety, a deputy just like her, and now she was apologizing as if she'd burped at the dinner table.
"I have to do it again," Sharon said suddenly, lifting the gun so fast that Grace couldn't believe it, firing two quick shots and blowing out her side window.
Annie slammed her hands over her ears, but it was too late. Instant deafness. She couldn't hear the safety glass falling to the ground as Sharon pounded at it with the butt of her gun, desperate to reach for the outside door handle, to crawl through the window opening itself if she had to, anything to get out of the car.
In the end, she couldn't manage it. Not just yet. She was simply too tired. Funny how pulling a little trigger could wear you out. But that wasn't really true, either. On the range, she could get a hundred shots off without feeling the strain in her finger or the muscles in her forearm quiver. Killing an actual person was surprisingly exhausting. Sharon had never done it before, had never dreamed she would ever have
to do it, in spite of all the training and preparation. She sat there on the edge of the seat, ready to do something she couldn't quite remember, her thoughts tripping away to touch on things, losing focus almost immediately. The psychology major inside her head put a finger to her mouth and nodded sagely. Oh, yes. She was going to need therapy.
"Sharon?" Grace's voice, tentative, filled with tension.
"Right here."
"Look at me."
Sharon turned and gave Grace her eyes, and then Annie. Why were they looking at her so oddly? Why did they still look afraid? She'd taken care of everything, hadn't she?
"Why?" Grace said.
Oh, that.She felt a bad, naughty smile trying to form. . . .Don't dothat, don't smile, can't excuse smiling after you filled a person, not evenwith displacement behavior or any of that gobbledy gook. . , oh, shit. I forgot to tell them why.
A wave of clarity rolled over her mind, washing away all the silly, disgusting, normal human reactions to trauma you were allowed to have when you were just a person and not a cop. She took a deep breath and came back to the here and now.
"He didn't check my badge," she said simply, because that was when it had started. That had been the first thing to bother her. "He should have looked that thing up and down and sideways, made sure I was FBI, but he didn't. All he cared about was getting my gun."
Grace and Annie were still staring at her, saying nothing. It wasn't enough.
"He had another gun under the front seat. A long one. Part of it's probably in plain view in the front, and I was too goddamned stupid to check out the car before we got in. Too goddamned relieved to see a cop to even think about checking the car. My fault."
"Cops all carry shotguns," Annie said carefully, and Sharon nodded impatiently.
"In the trunk. Always. Unless it's racked. Besides, the barrel was all wrong." She pulled an untidy memory from her brain, and her voice got hard. "I know guns. My father was a collector. Don't know where he got half of them; now they'd be illegal as hell. But one of them was an Ml6. Just like the one under the seat. Our Deputy Diebel was oneof them."
Grace was very quiet, her gaze turned inward, trying to decide if Sharon had jumped too fast and way too far, or if all her vigilance had failed her once again.
"And there's this." Sharon lifted the hat from where it still sat on her lap, undisturbed by shooting and window-breaking and madness. She flipped it over and showed Annie and Grace the inside.
Annie looked down at it stupidly. "It's a hat."
"Look at the name tag."
Grace grabbed the hat and squinted down at the small, faded printing that read "Douglas Lee." "Oh my God."
"What?" Annie snatched the hat and held it close to her face. "Oh, Lord. This ishis car, isn't it? This was Deputy Lee's car. . . ." Her eyes jerked to the front seat, then quickly darted away. "Jesus God in heaven. We went right with him. We just hopped in the car and let him drive away with us."
Sharon's neck was starting to hurt from looking to the right for so long, but she couldn't look anywhere else, she just had to keep looking at Grace and Annie because her thoughts were slipping again, like marbles on ice. "I killed him," she said matter-of-factly. "Just like he was going to kill us. They killed Deputy Lee and took his car and his hat, and that bastard up there is probably carrying Deputy Lee's gun, so I killed him right in Deputy Lee's own car." She leaned forward and hissed toward the bloody ruin that had been the man's head. "How's that for poetic justice, Deputy Fucking Diebel?" And then she scrambled right out the open window and tumbled to the ground and started to suck in huge breaths.
It was the first time Sharon had really scared Grace, even more than when she'd fired the gun in the first place.She's losing it. She's forgetting everything. Damnit, she didn't even look before she went out there.
Annie had her arm out the window, reaching for the outside door handle, but Grace was looking everywhere frantically, around every car, the sides of the building, through the tall grass, and into the trees beyond.
She was positive of only one thing-if this was where that imposter in the front seat wanted to take them, she didn't want to be here.
EXCEPT FOR ROADRUNNER, who was still back in the office, all of the men were in the front of the RV, looking worriedly at the towers of flame in the woods on their right, moving steadily toward the road.
Less than a mile from the Four Corners turnoff, Harley eased the rig to a stop at a makeshift roadblock that some firefighters had set up. There were two fire trucks ahead of them, pulled as close to the nonexistent shoulder as they could get, and it still left only about an inch of clearance for the RV to get by. One of the engines looked like it should have been pulled by horses.
Two men in heavy yellow firefighting gear were gesturing wildly for Harley to back up the rig, which was just plain ridiculous. Magozzi and Halloran went outside with their badges and guns and attitudes, and it still took another minute before they could talk the firefighters into letting them pass through. Charlie slipped out the open door before anyone noticed.
"Your dog's loose." Halloran pointed on the way back to the RV, and Magozzi saw Charlie rooting around in the ditch, running back to the woods toward the fire-stupid dog-then back up to the road again to plunge his nose into a piece of debris he'd found.
"Charlie, come!" Magozzi slapped his thigh.
Charlie looked up, then back down at whatever treasure he'd been examining, then snatched it up in his jaws and raced toward Magozzi and dropped it at his feet.
Magozzi picked up a battered, filthy, purple high-top tennis shoe and held it with two fingers. Christ. All hell was breaking loose, and the dog wanted to play fetch with a piece of someone's discarded trash. He heard Halloran whisper, "Oh, shit," and turned to look at him. The man was staring at the shoe, looking like he was about to double over.
"That's Sharon's."
Magozzi looked at what he was holding. "It's a shoe. It could belong to anyone. It could have been here for months."
Halloran was shaking his head back and forth. "It's a Converse. Lavender high-top. They stopped making them years ago. Sharon loved those stupid, ugly shoes. It was one of the first things she asked me to bring from her place when she was in the hospital in Minneapolis."
Magozzi looked into the shoe and felt his stomach turn. There was blood in there. "Shit," he murmured, glancing up as Charlie raced away. He called after him, but the dog ignored him and just pressed his nose down hard on the tar and started trotting, the dog who was afraid of anything and everything, who hid between Grace's legs when toddlers on tricycles approached, and there he was, weaving past fire engines and stepping over hoses, dodging scary, shouting men in big yellow coats, oblivious to everything except the twin streams of air and scent going in and out of his nostrils.
"Goddamnit!" Harley shouted from inside the rig, banging his hand on the wheel. "Roadrunner! Get your ass up here and get that dog!"
Roadrunner came racing up from the back, clutching a forgotten piece of paper in his hand, and jumped clear of the narrow steps instead of trying to negotiate them in his size-twelves. Gino was right behind him, both of them hurrying to catch up to Magozzi and Halloran, four grown men chasing a mangy mongrel down a road while the world was burning.
Harley and Bonar were in the RV, staring at the spectacle in disbelief.
"What the hell?" Bonar said.
"It's Grace's dog," Harley explained. "Anything happens to that dog, she'll kill us all." He moved the rig forward slowly, easing past the two fire trucks while Bonar held his breath, waiting for the sound of metal screeching against metal. A hundred yards farther, and Harley stopped to pick up the men. It had taken the dog less than a minute to leave them far behind.
"What the hell got into him?" Bonar asked when the others were back inside, panting and sweating.
Magozzi nodded at where Halloran was clutching a filthy shoe against his chest. "Charlie found that. Halloran says it belongs to Sharon."
Bonar looked at i
t more closely, and his face fell. "Oh my God."
Gino was banging on the back of the driver's seat. "Goddamn, that dog is a friggin' genius. I swear to God he's tracking, and there's only one thing in the world that dog would be interested in finding, and that's Grace MacBride."
Roadrunner was staring out the big front window as Harley eased the RV forward to keep pace with the dog. Charlie was moving at a dead run, covering ground at an astounding pace for a dog who sat upright in chairs and took his meals at the table like any other fat, slow human being.
Gino was bent over, still breathing hard, waiting for the heart attack. "That dog nearly killed me. How far has he gone?"
"Over a mile-maybe two."
"Jesus, he's fast."
Roadrunner caught his breath when Charlie made an abrupt right onto a narrow dirt road.
"Harley," he whispered. "I know where he's going. And you gotta catch him. He's got another three miles to go, and he'll be dead by then."
"Three miles to where?"
"I just pulled up an old deed on one of those pieces of property Hemmer owns. It has a building on it, and it's less than five miles from Four Corners."
IT DIDN'T TAKE LONG for Grace to decide that this overgrown field was deserted, and that all the cars parked in the high grass were empty. There were two doors accessing the corrugated steel building-a large, rolling one for heavy farm equipment, and a smaller, man-sized door next to it. Both were chained and padlocked from the outside.
"Stay on her; stay down!" she'd commanded Annie when her friend had tumbled out of the car onto the ground next to Sharon, and Annie had done what Annie always did best. . , wrapped her arms around Sharon and held her still, kept her safe, just as she had held Grace on a few occasions, back in the days when she was the strong one.
While Annie and Sharon lay there next to what had once been Deputy Douglas Lee's patrol car, Grace did what had to be done. She crawled out the back door, around to the front, and pulled the man who had called himself Deputy David Diebel off the console so she could get to the radio and computer. The computer didn't work, and no one answered her desperate radio calls.
