Dark of the Moon

19

BEFORE THEY SETTLED in the trucks, Virgil and Stryker squeezed into standard-duty body armor. Though it wouldn't stop any heavy loads, it'd be good against shotguns and pistols. Some of the DEA guys were wearing heavier stuff: they'd be the first in.

Stryker asked Virgil to drive: "I want to be able to work the radios to my guys-just in case."

FROM THE WORTHINGTON on-ramp to the exit nearest Feur's place was thirty-five minutes at legal interstate speeds, half an hour at the normal illegal driving pace. Pirelli, talking to his outside pacemaker, modulated the speed of the DEA trucks, seven of them, all blacked-out GMC Yukons.

"Keep spaced out, my happy ass," Stryker said, watching the trucks ahead of them. "We look like a Shriner parade."

"As long as Feur doesn't have lookouts on the interstate, we'll be okay," Virgil said. A minute later, "Real purty day, ain't it?"

"Sure is," Stryker said cheerfully. He popped his safety belt, knelt on the seat, dug around in the back, and came up with the M-16. "If you see me firing this into a gopher hole, you just say to yourself, 'Don't bother about that-it's just old Jim popping off a few rounds in an effort to get reelected.'"

"Gettin' some smoke on your ass."

"That's right," Stryker said.

"I still don't think Feur did the Gleasons, Jimmy. I don't think we're out of the woods on that guy," Virgil said.

"Whatever. I plan to take full credit on the meth lab, at least in the hometown papers," Stryker said. He pulled the magazine out of the M-16, thumbed the cartridges a few times, said, "What have you got back there? Shotgun isn't much use on a house."

"Shotgun, Remington semiauto.30-06."

"That'll knock the corner off a brick," Stryker said, with approval. "FMJs?"

"Yeah."

"I got sixty rounds. Wish I had a couple more clips."

"This is an arrest, not a war," Virgil said.

"Whatever," Stryker said. He slapped the mag back into the rifle, jacked a round into the chamber, clicked on the safety.

"I hope this thing works like Pirelli says," Virgil said. "I can appreciate your needing to get reelected, but nailing that psycho is more important than keeping a few oil-field workers from taking their vitamin pills."

Ahead, the GMCs slowed, and Virgil slowed with them, the speed dropping to fifty-five. We really do look like a Shriner parade, Virgil thought. Hope nobody's watching.

As far as they ever found out, nobody was. They were four miles from the exit when the speed picked up, and Pirelli called Virgil on his cell: "Feur got home fifteen minutes ago. Franks is coming up to the exit. We're going in. You guys hang back a bit."

"Ten-ninety-six," Virgil said, and shut his phone.

"What does that mean?" Stryker asked. "I never heard of a ten-ninety-six."

"Means, 'Fuck you,'" Virgil said. He closed on the GMCs.

Stryker said, "I'm gonna try to crawl in the backseat. Stupid we're both sitting up front." He pulled the headrest out, tossed it in the back, and crawled awkwardly over the seat. "You want me to uncase the Remington?" he asked.

"Might as well," Virgil said. "Hope to hell we don't need it. There're two magazines in the side sleeve, all set."

FOR THE FIRST MINUTE or so north of the interstate, Virgil thought, it was unlikely that anyone ahead would notice them. Then they hit the gravel road and a plume of dust exploded from under the trucks' wheels, along with a roaring sound, like a nearby train, and everybody behind the first two trucks slowed down. The interval grew, and drivers began to move into the left lane, one truck fishtailing, and Stryker shouted, "Watch that, watch that…"

"He can't hear you," Virgil shouted back.

"I can't see a thing…" Stryker was holding on to the passenger seat, peering out from the back, into the thickening cloud of road dust.

THEY TOPPED the rise south of Feur's place, and if nobody had seen them yet, they would pretty soon; but they were also less than a minute out, closing fast, and when Virgil moved right to get out of the funnel of road dust, Stryker shouted, "Franks' truck is in the yard, it's in the yard…"

THE FIRST TWO DEA trucks hit the yard, and the agents were out, shouting at Franks, who'd just gotten out of his truck. Franks may have said something, and a dog rocketed out of the truck and jumped one of the agents, who went down, rolling with the dog.

The third truck went past the driveway turnoff and set up on the road. The fourth stopped across the driveway, and the fifth stopped short, the agents out in the road. Virgil swerved around the back truck and put the Explorer in the ditch opposite the end of the driveway, and shouted, "Out the left side, left side," and they both got under cover, saw running agents on the road, and then the gunfire.

There were two dogs out, one of them on an agent's face, the other wheeling in the dirt in a fight around Franks' truck, and then the screaming agent, dog on his face, managed to throw it off and another agent shot at it, missed, and the dog went for him, and another agent fired.

Four or five of them were in the yard when a machine gun stuttered from the house and one of the agents went down and the others started screaming and firing at the house, little pecks of paint and dust and wood popping off the front of the house, windows shattering. Franks, who'd been standing hands-over-head, turned toward the shed and hit the front door. The door popped open-unlocked-and Franks disappeared, and two agents were down.

Stryker was on the ground in the ditch, the M-16 to his shoulder, and he opened up on the top row of windows in the house, blowing out most of a magazine in a single hose job.

Virgil scrambled across the street, into the ditch on the far side, keeping a truck between himself and the house, and when he heard another machine gun open behind him, lurched out of the ditch, running toward the first truck in the yard. An agent was on the ground six feet from the truck and Virgil hooked him and dragged him behind it, the agent's M-16 bumping along under his arm, hung on a sling.

The truck had fifty bullet holes in it, broken glass spraying all over, two tires gone. The agent was still alive, but his legs were torn to pieces, and he was fading. A brown-and-white dog, that might have been a pit bull, bleeding from its sides and head, scrambled around the truck, pulling with his front legs, back apparently broken, fixing on Virgil. Virgil loved dogs, but he didn't even think about it and yanked his pistol and shot the dog twice.

HEARD SOMEBODY SCREAMING. Another agent, behind the other entry truck, was shouting at him, and Virgil saw a bloody patch in the dust behind him, but the agent was still operating and he pointed out between the trucks and Virgil saw a third agent down and he shouted back, and the other agent screamed, "You get him, I'll unload on the house, I can't move, I'm hit…"

Virgil shouted, "Do it," and the agent rolled and opened up with his M-16, tearing across the windows, and Virgil kicked out from behind the truck's wheel, grabbed the downed agent, and dragged him back, behind a tire. Another dog was coming for them, tongue out, bleeding, picked the agent with the gun, who was reloading, hit him just as he slapped the magazine in. But the dog got a piece of armor, not an arm, and tore at it and the agent found a pistol and put it at the dog's head and fired. The dog lurched and turned and looked at Virgil, a doggy smile on its bloody face, and then it toppled over.

Virgil was behind the truck with two wounded agents, or maybe, he thought, one dead. He looked at the man, caught a breath. No: still alive. He popped open the back door of the truck, lifted the wounded agent inside, and a hail of bullets knocked out the far windows and then went on.

He picked up the second agent, the unconscious one, struggling against the weight, and threw him on top of the first. He threw the first man's weapon on top of them, then crawled into the driver's foot-well, gripped the steering wheel overhead, shifted the truck into reverse, and hit the gas pedal with his hand.

Felt something scratching at him, ignored it, backed straight across the driveway on two and then three rims, heard the volume of fire picking up from the DEA agents to give him cover, never tried to turn, backed entirely across the yard into the field, across the field fifty yards, eighty yards, bumping over rocks and small trees and brush, the truck rocking violently, a hundred yards, and then he hooked into the roadside ditch and hit the brake.

HE CALLED PIRELLI on his cell phone: Pirelli screamed, "How bad, how bad?"

"Two pretty bad," Virgil shouted. "If you got a truck that works, get it down here. You gotta make a run like right now."

"I'm calling the north team in, they're coming right by…If you got anything you can fire at the house, hose it down, hose it down…"

Virgil got the M-16 in the back of the truck, with two magazines, began popping three-shot bursts at the house as he saw a dust funnel coming down the gravel road from the north, moving fast.

One of the north group was trying to run right past the house. When he got close, Virgil emptied the last of the magazine at the upper windows of the house, where most of the fire seemed to be coming from, dumped the mag, slapped another one in, and as the north truck passed the driveway, hosed the house again.

The north truck slid to a stop in the shelter of the ruined truck. An agent piled out, wild-eyed, and Virgil shouted, "You know where the hospital is?"

"Yes, yes, we scouted it…"

They carried the two downed agents to the working truck, and the north guy shouted, "How bad are you hit?"

Virgil looked down at himself: blood, but not his. The agent touched his forehead, and Virgil reached up. More blood, and this time it was his. Didn't feel like much. "You go on," Virgil shouted. "Go on."

The agent took off, chased by a couple of slugs from the house when he broke from the cover of the wrecked truck.

Virgil dug through the back of the wrecked truck, found a box with six mags in it, stuck one in the rifle, stuck the others in his jacket pockets, darted across the road and into the ditch on the west side. From there, he was able to crawl through the swampy water toward Stryker's Ford.

HE COULD HEAR Stryker still firing from behind the Explorer, and he cleared the truck and Stryker turned toward him and said, "Need more ammo."

Virgil tossed him three of the mags he'd gotten from the truck, and Stryker shouted, "I think Pirelli's hit, he's in the ditch on the other side."

"I'll get him if you can dust off the house again," Virgil shouted. "Let me get my kit."

Virgil crawled into the truck and got his first-aid kit, then back out, crouched in the ditch, and shouted, "Anytime…"

Stryker popped up and unloaded a clip in one long burst and Virgil vaulted the narrow road, landing in the ditch on the other side, saw Pirelli with an M-16 shooting one-handed, blood soaking through his left shirtsleeve. Virgil crawled up and shouted, "How bad?"

"It hurts. I think it broke my shoulder," Pirelli shouted back. Everybody was shouting. Virgil could hear men screaming all around the house and hundreds of rounds pumping out. The house seemed to be falling apart, but there was still fire incoming.

Virgil pulled a heavy pad and a roll of tape out of his kit, and he and Pirelli eased to the bottom of the ditch, Pirelli on his back. Virgil found a bloody wedge knocked out of Pirelli's shoulder, just below the edge of his body armor. He jammed the pad under Pirelli's shirt and wound two yards of tape around his shoulder, cinching it up tight, shouted, "No artery, don't see any arterial bleeding," and Pirelli nodded and said, "Reload me."

NOW THE FIRING from the house had stopped, and an agent launched himself out of the east-side ditch to the car where the third wounded agent had been lying, the guy who'd covered Virgil while Virgil dragged the dead man's body. Another burst of fire from the house, but the agent made it, and the DEA shooters pounded the window where the burst had come from.

Virgil, down in the ditch, reloaded Pirelli's M-16 and then heard Stryker scream, "Watch out, watch out!" and Virgil looked up and saw, at the shed, Franks walking out through the shed door with a long revolver in one hand. He took three steps and shot at the agents behind the truck, no effort to cover himself, and the unwounded agent stumbled back away from the man on the ground, trying for his gun, and then somebody hit Franks with a burst, and Virgil could see his shirt shaking, but Franks stayed on his feet and fired another shot from the pistol and then he went down.

Distracted by the appearance of Franks, Pirelli had half risen to his knees, shouting, and now another burst of gunfire spattered around them and Pirelli went down again, flapping one arm, and Virgil shouted, "Get down," but it was too late; Pirelli had been hit again. Virgil crawled down to him, and Pirelli sat up and said, "Got me," and dropped back on the ground. Two holes: one in a leg and the other in the right arm. The one in the arm was bleeding hard, but not arterially; the arm was crooked and surely broken.

Virgil ripped open Pirelli's pant leg: that hit was superficial, ripping away skin and a quarter-inch of meat.

"How bad?" Pirelli groaned.

"You're not dead yet," Virgil said. More tape to put pressure on the wounds; then Virgil said, "This is gonna hurt. I've gotta move you across the road and up the ditch where we can get you outa here."

"Do it."

He braced himself and grabbed Pirelli's armor at the neckline, cocked himself, and shouted at Stryker, who said, "Ten seconds," and disappeared, crawling down the ditch. Then Stryker flashed a hand, screamed, "Go!" and Virgil ran across the road, dragging Pirelli. Stryker popped up, twenty feet from his previous position, and burned another mag.

Pirelli made no sound at all when they landed in the water on the other side. Virgil kept the motion going, dragging him up the ditch, through the muck, to the wrecked DEA truck. Five minutes, a hundred yards, Pirelli didn't make a sound. They reached the truck, went another ten yards, and stopped. Virgil said, gasping for air: "Somebody'll come and get you."

"That place is bunkered up. We didn't know it, but it's gotta be bunkered up," Pirelli said. His face was pale as a cloud, his eyes unfocused with shock, but he was coherent.

"Something," Virgil said.

AT THAT MOMENT, there was an explosion at the house. Not huge, but big enough. Then another one. A DEA agent had gotten a grenade launcher going, and hit the house with high-explosive rounds, and then with what looked like a gas round. And from behind the hill, to the northeast, where Virgil and Stryker had crawled on their scouting trip, a distinctive single boom. Virgil had never shot one, but he suspected it was a fifty-caliber rifle. The DEA was taking the house out.

Virgil said, "Just lay here; I'll be back," and he crawled back up the ditch. Franks was lying spread-eagled in front of the first DEA truck, obviously dead. Two agents in armor were behind the truck, a third agent on the ground. Stryker was still in the ditch, popping single shots off at the house: not much seemed to be coming out.

One of the first-in agents was squatting behind one of the trucks in the road, all four tires shot out.

"What about the guys behind the truck?" Virgil shouted.

The agent yelled back, "Harmon is gone. Franks shot him right in the head. Two more wounded, not bad; the others are okay. How bad are you?"

"Not bad. We've got four good tires. I'll back out of here if you can get that grenade guy to put in a couple more rounds. Pirelli's hurt pretty bad. I need to make a run to the hospital."

"Soon as you get it fired up, I'll tell him to start putting rounds in. Go like hell."

Virgil got in the foot-well of the Explorer. The passenger-side windows were shot out, glass all over the seats, a few holes, but the tires were good, and intact, and nobody had been shooting at the engine block, where they might've hit electronics.

The truck started, and he shouted, through the broken windows, "I'm ready," and two seconds later, heard the first grenade impact, and he started rolling backward up the ditch, building momentum, afraid he'd bog down in the wet bottom, and then another grenade, and the boom from the fifty-cal, and another grenade, and he risked sitting up, looked back over his shoulder, and accelerated onto the road and into the shelter of the damaged DEA truck.

Pirelli was still in the ditch, half sitting now. Virgil ran down to him, and Pirelli asked, "What time is it?"

"Damned if I know," Virgil said, and he grabbed Pirelli by his armor and said, "Hold on, now," and dragged him across the road to the Ford, loaded him through the back door, flat on his back, then got in the truck and backed up another two hundred yards, hearing the grenades pounding Feur's place, then risked stopping, made a U-turn through the ditch and was on his way out. "What time is?" Pirelli called. "What time is it?"

"Time to go," Virgil shouted back, and that seemed satisfactory, and Pirelli stopped talking.

IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR, he could see Feur's house, with smoke-maybe gas?-but no fire. Then he was over the rise and onto the interstate and he didn't bother calling the hospital, and he was moving too fast anyway, and if they had a brain in their head, with two wounded agents already in, they'd be ready for more. A mile from the exit, he saw a DEA-looking truck heading back, saw a shattered window: the guy who'd made the run to the hospital, headed back.

Eight minutes to the Bluestem exit, up and left, accelerating up the hill, then right to the hospital, the big arrow of the emergency room, three cop cars sitting outside of it, deputies looking toward him, flinching at the sound of his wheels, and then he was there, out, shouting, "We got another one, Pirelli, he's hurt. Need a gurney, need a gurney…"

The hospital had one full-time surgeon, Virgil learned, with another on his way from Worthington. The one on the job was working back and forth between injured DEA agents and he looked at Pirelli and said to a nurse, "Clean him up," and then he was gone.

The nurses took Pirelli off and Virgil went outside, where a deputy said, "We've got guys heading down to Feur's," and, "The DEA guy went back."

"The doc say anything about the first two guys?"

"They're hurt bad. One of them's right on the edge, the other's better." The deputy's face was pale, anxious. "I need to get down there…"

"You need to stay here," Virgil said. "Coordinate. Call your guys, tell them to take it easy going in, because there's a war going on down there. Once they're inside two hundred yards, they could get shot up. Best to hold back, isolate the farmhouse, and let the DEA guys take it down. Block the roads, don't let anybody in or out. Look for people on foot."

"I'll call them," the deputy said, and then Virgil was in his truck and rolling. He was halfway down the highway when an agent named Gomez called: "We've got contact with Feur: he's still inside, he won't talk, says for you to call him."

"I'll be there in three or four minutes, if you can stall him. You could listen in."

DEPUTIES HAD SET UP a roadblock just off the interstate. Virgil went on through, did a U-turn four hundred yards out, backed down to the wrecked DEA truck, and left his truck there. Carrying the M-16 he'd taken from the DEA agent and two mags, he worked his way back down the roadside ditch.

THE HOUSE WAS a ruin. The second floor was gone, part of it falling inside the frame of the house, part of it out in the yard. Popping his head up every few yards, Virgil could see what appeared to be olive-drab sandbags, the kind used by the Corps of Engineers for flood control.

They had been bunkered up, he thought, but the pounding from the grenade launcher had knocked out the frame of the house.

As he crawled, he noticed that there was no firing; very little sound at all. A lot of gasoline around, though. Five dead trucks, all shot to pieces, leaking gas; smoke coming out of one of them.

Stryker was no longer in the ditch. He'd moved across the road, and was sitting behind one of the trucks. Virgil heard a grenade hit the house, and made his move, slid in next to Stryker.

Another agent came running over. All he said was, "You ready? It's for you." He had a phone in his hand, and he pushed the "call" button, and handed it to Virgil.

Feur answered a minute later. "What?"

Virgil said, "This is Virgil Flowers. You feel like coming out?"

Feur chuckled. "No, I guess not. I have a question for you, though. Why in the hell did you come in shooting? You could have knocked on the door. I could take a couple years inside. But you came in shooting and now there are dead cops, and I'm not gonna sit on death row, waiting for the needle."

"Ah, man," Virgil said. "It was Franks' goddamn dogs. We weren't shooting you. The dogs went after an agent, chewing him up. Somebody shot at the dog, somebody shot back from the house."

"All this happened because of dogs?" Feur didn't seem surprised.

"Well, not exactly. If you hadn't been making a ton of crank, if you hadn't built bunkers inside the house, if you hadn't shot back…Was that you, or Trevor, or one of the other guys?"

"Trevor," Feur said. "Silly fool. Always liked those guns too much. He paid for it: he's gone now. There's only two of us left, me'n John. We're both hurt, trying to decide what to do."

"You aren't gonna take any more cops with you," Virgil said. "The DEA is talking about bringing in a tank from the National Guard. Run that house over like a trash compactor."

After a few seconds of silence, Feur said, "Call me back in two minutes. John's hurt, I need to see what he wants to do."

VIRGIL PUNCHED OFF. He'd been holding the phone close, so the agent could listen in, and the agent said, "Good. If he's talking, he'll quit." Then, "What about our guys?"

Virgil said, "One's real bad, one may be dying. Not dead yet, they're working on both of them at the hospital. Pirelli's got a bunch of holes, but I don't think he's gonna die. What about the others…?"

"We sent two more in; not good, but not terrible." The agent nodded, chewed his lip, said, "Why'd Franks turn those dogs loose?"

"Crazy guy," Virgil said. "A whole house full of crazy guys."

HE LOOKED at the phone, and redialed. Feur answered, and said, "We're quittin'. But we can't get out of here. We're all piled in. We're not gonna shoot, but you'll have to get us out."

"Where are you?"

"Right in the middle of the house, first floor, the whole top floor came down on us. Can't see any cracks, just a lot of lumber. John is hurtin' bad."

Virgil could hear another man talking in the background, but couldn't make out what he was saying. "Gonna take a while," Virgil said. "I'll tell you what, Reverend. You best not resist. Won't do any good, for one thing, but the other thing is, these boys are pretty pissed. If they toss an incendiary grenade in there, you'll get a little preview of hell."

"We're done," Feur said. "We're done."

"Just in case, you know, something happens," Virgil said. "Why'd you do the Gleasons and the Schmidts?"

Feur said, "I don't lie on the Bible, Virgil. I had nothing to do with that. And look-it wouldn't make any difference to anybody or anything if I came right out and admitted it. Not with those dead cops all over the yard. But I had nothin' to do with it."

THE AGENTS TOOK it slowly: built a commanding view of the house from the loft of the barn, from the top of the shed, then moved in close to the house, pushed some sandbags around, built a strong point that looked right down into the wreckage.

The agent named Harold Gomez had taken charge. Another agent said to him, "We need some chains, maybe a Bobcat. We need to move some big pieces."

Gomez nodded. "Get one. Get two. Get them down here."

ANOTHER SANDBAGGED strongpoint went up at the opposite corner of the house. With an agent there, his gun trained on the wreckage, Virgil and Gomez moved in close to look at the house. To their left, another agent had spread a blanket over the forms of the dead DEA man and Franks.

The wrecked house smelled bad, raw lumber and dust and old paint, the odor of rotten eggs. A couple of other agents moving around the wreckage pointed out parts of a body, blown to pieces, under a portion of the second floor that had collapsed into the yard.

"Direct hit with a grenade," Gomez said.

An agent put down his rifle, walked up the front steps, dragged some siding and two-by-fours to the side, and then a few more pieces. He shouted, "Can you hear us?"

No answer.

"Careful," Gomez said. "Basement could be a problem."

THEY MOVED FARTHER around the house, and Gomez said, "You've got a cut on your scalp."

"Piece of glass or metal," Virgil said. "When I was backing the truck out."

"Goddamnit," Gomez said. "Goddamnit. Ah, Jesus, what do I tell Harmon's wife?"

ANOTHER AGENT HAD PUT on gloves, and was clearing debris from the other side of the house, walking carefully on an exposed piece of floor. "Hey, you in there? Hey?"

To Gomez: "Looks like another body, or pieces of one."

Moved more lumber, but they'd need the Bobcat, Virgil decided. He called Feur on the cell phone. No answer.

"Maybe hurt," Gomez said. Moved a bit more lumber. "I gotta go into town, see my guys…" Gomez might be going into shock, Virgil thought.

More rotten eggs.

Virgil sniffed, sniffed again, then said quietly and urgently to the agent on the house, moving lumber, "Get off there. Don't ask me any questions, just get off, right now." And to the agent on the other side-"Quiet. Get off there…get back, get those guys out of the sandbags, you guys get back…"

He was talking quietly as he could, backing away. Gomez: "What, what?"

Virgil said, "That's propane. That's the rotten-egg smell." He looked around, saw the tank next to the barn. "They're filling the place up with propane. They're gonna blow it up."

"Propane…" Gomez was quick. He backed away, turned away, said quietly into his radio, "Guys, everybody get back, keep it quiet, but get the hell back, there's gas, they may be getting ready to blow it…"

TEN MINUTES LATER, Virgil was feeling a little stupid, sitting in the ditch across the road. An agent suggested that he run up next to the barn, and turn the propane off, but the barn was too close to the house, too exposed if there was an explosion. "Give it another ten minutes," Virgil said. "Maybe I'm full of shit."

ELEVEN MINUTES AFTER Virgil moved the agents off the house, the place blew. Not like a bomb, but with a hollow whump. Five tons of lumber went straight up in the air or sideways with a gout of smoke, curled at the top, like an atomic bomb. Virgil covered his head with his hands, and when nothing landed on him, peeked over the edge of the ditch. A ripple of fire was running through the wreckage: "Now, you need the fire department," he said.

"Holy mackerel," Gomez said. "Holy fuck." A few seconds later a helicopter showed up, and when it turned, they could see the Channel Five logo on the side.

Virgil shook his head. "That's what we needed. That's exactly what we needed. Smile, Harry, you're on TV."

Not done yet.

Gomez made a call, said, "That oughta get rid of the chopper," and with the helicopter still circling, they walked cautiously across the street, to the house. An agent ran out of the field behind the barn to the propane tank, pulled off the valve cover, and Virgil could see him spinning the valve.

Gomez said, "Gonna be another one of them right-wing legends. Last stand at Reverend Feur's."

"Anybody look in Franks' truck yet?"

"Not yet."

They went that way, yanked open the back panel on the camper, saw the row of gas cans. A couple of other agents drifted over. Gomez turned the cap on one, sniffed, said, "Gas," tipped it into the sun, to see better, then walked away and carefully poured the gasoline into the dirt at the side of the yard. A gallon or so poured out, and then a glass tube fell out, and another. Gomez kept swirling the can until he had them all, twelve tall bottles that might once have contained spices, all full of powder.

"It's all true," he said. To one of the agents: "What am I gonna tell Harmon's wife?"

The agent shook his head, and finally said, "That we killed all those motherfuckers who did it."

THE AGENTS UNLOADED the rest of the gas cans, and all carried glass bottles. They went through the shed, found five more cans, all with bottles. Feur and his friends had been moving meth twenty and thirty pounds at a time. "Been doing it for years," Gomez said.

They walked through the barn, knocked in the doors of the two old Quonset huts, without finding anything more. Looked into the house: the interior had been blown to flinders, and the fire was getting stronger.

"Fire department's coming," one of the agents said. "Not that I care."

THE HELICOPTER WENT AWAY, the maddening thump leaving the place in the silence of insects and birds. Virgil, Stryker, and Gomez climbed into the barn's loft to look at the house from a high point; amazing, Virgil thought, what gas could do.

They were standing there when the fire truck arrived. The fireman put foam on the fire for three or four minutes, and the fire was gone.

Gomez said, "We're gonna have to say something. Press conference up in Bluestem; we sort of had it set up for tonight. Still gonna have to do something…"

"Call Pirelli. He was still talking when I saw him, maybe…"

Gomez got on his phone, pushed a button. No answer.

Stryker came over and said, "Get off the phone."

"What?"

"Get off the phone. Look at this-look at this." He led them to the loft door, looking down at the house.

"FEUR WAS a mean, feral asshole," Stryker said. "What's he doing committing suicide? He'd want his day in court, if we'd had him cornered."

Gomez spread his hands: "What?"

Stryker pointed up the hillside. "That satellite photo that you had in the motel. One of your guys was looking at a seam that comes down to the house, and he wondered if it was a ditch that we could crawl down. We didn't know. But when we walked around the barn, right over it, I didn't see a thing. Didn't notice it. The only way you can see anything, is to get up high. Up here."

"Yeah?" Virgil looked at the hillside, still didn't see much.

"It's that line of greener weeds," Stryker said, pointing down and to the right. "See it? That's what you get when you dig. New weeds. It's a dead straight line. It looks to me like somebody put down a culvert."

"What?" Gomez, eyes wide. "That little line?"

"All you'd need to do is get the pipe, rent a backhoe, run the line straight up the hill to that brush. Then if the cops ever caught you in the house, you get down the basement, light a candle, turn on the gas, and seal the tunnel. Regular old manhole cover with some plastic tape or foam. Then you crawl out the culvert…skin your knees up some…I keep thinking, he didn't answer the cell phone the last time Virgil called."

"Sonofabitch," Gomez said. They climbed down from the loft, and Gomez got on his radio. A half dozen agents came running.

"THE LINE GOES right into that clump of trees," Stryker said, pointing up the hill. "There's like three clumps coming down the hill, and then the last clump on the bottom, it goes right into that clump."

"They might already be out," Virgil said.

Gomez told his guys, "Armor up. Fast. Let's go, let's go…"

Eight of them crossed the field in a long skirmish line, while the two functioning north squad trucks ferried six more agents in an end run to block off the field to the south. The last hundred yards they did on hands and knees, moving two at a time, the DEA agents performing like well-trained infantry. Gomez was working the radio, had the north squad in position, and they tightened the noose on the end of the seam.

And when they got there, they found a depression that had once been a farm dump, two rusted car bodies from the forties and fifties, corroded farm machinery, a half-buried cylindrical washing machine.

One of the agents put his finger to his lips, and pointed urgently. There, on the side of the slope nearest the farmhouse, a piece of corrugated steel, like the kind used in silos, was too conveniently arranged on the slope. The agent eased up to it, listened, peered under the sheet, then put his finger to his lips again, and backed off.

"That's it," he whispered to Gomez. Gomez waved back the troops. They moved back in a loose circle, and Gomez walked away with his radio. Fifty yards out, he stopped, clicked on the radio, and briefed the waiting agents, listening on their headsets.

It'd be a hell of a crawl, Virgil thought, looking down to the farmhouse. The smallest culvert that would take your hips and shoulders, pushing with your toes, bad air…Anything more than a two-foot culvert would take a hell of a lot of digging. The seam wasn't that big…

THEY WAITED an hour, then started working it in shifts. From the time they'd first jumped Franks, until the house went up, was little more than an hour. They'd figured out the seam a half hour later. Two hours after that, four of the DEA troops and Stryker were watching the sheet of steel, and Gomez was back at the house, watching two agents carefully probing into the basement.

Then Gomez took a radio call: "They can hear them coming."

He and Virgil jogged up the hill, two more agents running along behind. When they got close, an agent near the culvert exit stood up and made a hands-down gesture: "Quiet."

The agents on duty had backed into a semicircle, on their stomachs, behind rocks, behind humps in the field, all zeroed in on the sheet steel. The lead agent at the site pointed them toward a red outcrop. They went that way, squatted down, peering through a clump of weeds, and Gomez drew his pistol. "Easy," Virgil breathed.

Stryker eased up next to them and said, whispering, "We could hear them talking. Must be really tight in there."

They waited twenty minutes; the lead agent said once, on the radio, to Gomez, "Patience, patience, they're right there," and Gomez repeated it to Virgil and Stryker.

Twenty minutes, and then the sheet of metal twitched, and then a man's head and shoulders pushed from beneath it. He pulled out a long weapon, looked like another M-16. He knelt for a moment, catching his breath, then turned and snaked up the bank that he'd just emerged from, looking down toward the farmstead. He watched for a second, then slipped back down the slope and pushed the sheet up, said something, and then Feur came out of the ground, sat up, gasping for air, looked around.

The two talked for a few seconds, then Feur pointed up the hill, and they both stood, crouching, weapons hung low in their hands, and then the lead agent shouted, "Freeze. DEA. Put your hands over your head."

Both men froze, then Feur shouted, "Virgil?"

Virgil yelled, "You're good, George, just drop the weapons."

Feur spotted the direction of his voice, yanked the M-16 up. Stryker cut him down, and the rest of the DEA guns tore the two men to pieces. Beside him, Gomez had gotten to his knees, and emptied his pistol at the two.

"Jesus," Virgil said. "Oh, Jesus, stop, man…"

THEY WALKED DOWN. Feur and the man he'd called John-Virgil supposed-were six feet outside the end of the culvert, lying on their backs. They'd been hit forty or fifty times. Their weapons were converted M-15s.

Feur didn't look peaceful; he looked like a dead weasel. John didn't look like anything. His face was gone.

One of the armored agents said to Gomez, "They resisted. It was straight up. We did it straight up."

Gomez nodded: "Straight up," he said. "The motherfuckers."