Plunder Squad

Eight

Parker drove the ATV southward through scrubland, looking for a way over or around the ridge separating him from the house. The thick brush-stroke of black smoke drawn upward into the sky was his guide to where he wanted to be, but for the first twenty minutes he couldn’t find a way to get there. Then the hill flattened somewhat, in an area where the trees grew thicker, and Parker worked his way through the trees as though through a labyrinth, occasionally having to back out of a spot where the trunks were too close together. He couldn’t see the smoke from in here, but he maintained his direction fairly well, and when he emerged at last to where the trees were once more sparse, the smoke was up to his left and he was on the correct side of the ridge.

Driving was easier over here, on the flats, but it still took a quarter of an hour to cover the distance back to the house. When he got there, he saw that the house too had caught fire, and both house and car were now little more than black skeletons, both still smoldering. He made a wide sweep around the spot, picked up the dirt road, and headed east.

Something over an hour later he came to a blacktop road which was also mainly east-west. He followed it east until he came to a town that called itself Tracy. At a pay phone in a gas station there, while the ATV’s tank was being filled, he made a long-distance call to Mackey. There was no answer from his room, so Parker told the desk clerk, “Send somebody out to the pool for him. He’ll be out there.”

It took a couple minutes, but abruptly there was a click and Mackey’s open voice: “Yeah? Hello?”

“Hello, it’s me.”

“What? Oh, yeah.” He sounded very cheerful. “How’d things go?”

“Good. What about things there?”

Mackey’s big grin could be heard in his voice. “It’s on,” he said.