Six Seconds

73

Cold Butte, Montana

Maggie forced her way through the crowd toward the school.

She scanned faces and body types, locking on to those resembling Logan or Jake, until they all blurred. For each passing second heightened her fear that some thing bad was going to happen as images swirled in her mind.

Jake after Iraq; Fatima’s terrifying visions; the reporter and his family; Samara; the strangers; the crash; Logan’s call.

Something horrible was taking shape.

Something terrible was coming.

Maggie kept moving but it was getting harder. The air above her shook as another low-flying heli copter thundered by.

Her progress became mired.

The road to the school was cleared of traffic, bordered on both sides with police barriers to hold back crowds in lines four or five people deep and growing. Those farthest back strained for a view of the route. The pope would pass by only a few feet away. Electric anticipation was written on the faces of chil dren, teenagers, men and women. Some older people prayed with closed eyes and rosaries entwined in fingers, their faces serene.

A smiling woman with a silver cross around her neck, and a large security tag identifying her as a nun, was moving along the police side of the barricades dis tributing programs to the crowd.

One was placed in Maggie’s hand. She studied the events, times, names, pictures, and was drawn to the group photo of the children’s choir that would sing for the pope inside the school.

The boy second from the right in the second row. Logan.

Listed as Logan Russell.

Maggie stared in disbelief. Tears brimming, she called out.

“Excuse me!” She waved her program frantically, asking others to help her get the nun’s attention. “Sister!

Excuse me! Please, I have an emergency!”

Word was passed along and in seconds the nun returned, leaned toward Maggie as people shifted in place, allowing the two women to talk.

“Yes, how may I help?”

Finding Logan was Maggie’s only thought, eclips ing Graham’s instruction to locate Blake Walker, com pelling her to lie her way closer to her son.

“My nephew’s in the choir.” Maggie tapped her finger to the program. “I’ve just arrived. I can’t reach his parents on their phone. Do you know where the children are right now?”

Six Seconds 423

The nun looked down the road to the school, about half a block away.

“See the school parking lot?”

Maggie followed her attention and saw the lot, along with more barricades, scores of police vehicles, officers, police dogs, metal detectors, news trucks and cameras.

“They’re bringing them to the lot on a school bus with their parents.” She glanced at her watch. “Any minute now. They’ll go through the checkpoint, see? Then into the school. But I don’t think you’ll make it through the crowd in time. Ma’am?”

Maggie was not there.

She’d disappeared into the crowd.

As Maggie headed off, Graham spotted a county sheriff’s SUV parked nearby and asked the deputy behind the wheel for directions.

“The fastest way to Crystal Road?” The deputy looked harried. “Hang tough a sec.” He finished a call, racked his mike, turned away from the traffic and crowds to a vast empty sea of short grass in the opposite direction of the event.

“That’s Pioneer Field. Your vehicle should clear it. Go across it, south, that way-” he pointed “-and you’ll come up at a road and an old falling down home stead. Go left there for about a mile, then left again at the T-stop. That’s Crystal. The place you want is six or eight miles out. Should be no traffic there.”

A low-hanging dust trail followed Graham’s car along the soft, wind-dried grass, the gently rolling terrain. He came to the homestead, went left to the

424 Rick Mofina

T-stop, then left again at a wooden signpost, blistered by sun and rain that said, Crystal Creek Road.

Graham accelerated, raising a billowing cloud as he roared down the empty stretch, punctuated every quarter mile by lonely postboxes, with names like Smith, Clark or Peterson painted on them, or displayed in crafted arches over gateposts that led to small houses, or faraway ranches.

Gravel popcorned against his undercarriage as he drove two miles, then three, then four. Five. No postbox with Russell, or Conlin. He studied each home he passed for a rig or trailer.

No luck.

On the horizon far behind him he saw the helicop ters orbiting the papal site.

The odometer told him he’d gone seven miles, then eight.

Was he wasting time?

What if Maggie needed him at the school? Chances were slim his phone would work out here. Hands sweating on the wheel, he rounded a bend and a valley spread below him. Graham descended into it, sped by a stand of cottonwoods at a stream, then crossed a railtie bridge.

He climbed out of the valley to a bluff that over looked it and the town and thought, one more mile and he’d turn around.

That’s when he saw it in the distance.

A bright red rig, parked under the broad branches of a cottonwood tree, next to a small bungalow, the site rising like an island amid the windswept land.

The mailbox crowning the post leaning at the en

Six Seconds 425 trance bore a name printed on paper in marker, sunfaded and covered with clear plastic, fastened by duct tape that was surrendering its hold.

B. Russell.

The long grass lane reached some one hundred yards to the house, assuring anyone inside a clear view of anyone approaching. Graham expected that with a world event taking place a few miles away, no one would be home.

But he couldn’t be certain unless he checked.

He continued down the lane with every measure of cop wisdom screaming that he was going about this all wrong.