The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

David Edgerley Gates CABIN FEVER ^{from Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine}

Hector’s truck broke down on a fire road in the Gallatin, on the west side of Custer National Forest. He was just south of the Needles, and GPS put him close to the Yellowstone, so he wasn’t lost, but it was probably a good fifteen miles to the nearest campground, and he’d have to hike it, shank’s mare. From up on the hogback where the truck had died, he could see out across the Absarokas, a couple of thousand feet higher in elevation. Down by Granite Peak, some thirty miles to the southeast, there was a late-afternoon storm system building, thunderheads, the flicker of lightning, a curtain of rain. It looked to be coming on fast, but with luck he could still beat the weather.

It was one of Katie’s days at the Limestone clinic. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she was up in Billings. Local patients came to the clinic the other three days, and there was always a backlog. Katie took everybody who showed up, of course, which meant she didn’t get off work before seven or eight most nights, but the practice of medicine was what she’d signed on for.

A charge nurse came back to the examination room.

“Dr. Faraday? There’s somebody out front asking for Deputy Moody.”

Hector had been Katie’s boyfriend for the past year and a half. They hadn’t moved in together yet, but that was probably the next step. A big step for Hector, who took things slow, she knew. Katie wasn’t going to press it. She went out to the reception desk.

Frank Child, the new FBI guy assigned over at Crow Agency. He’d taken over from Andy Lame Deer, who was retired now, living down in Wind River.

They shook hands.

“Hector’s over in the Gallatin,” she told him. “Ranch hands at the Two Forks called in suspected rustling activity.”

The ranchers ran cattle on federal land, under permit. The cows ranged fairly wide, and sometimes you lost track.

“Well, we’ve got a thing,” Frank Child said.

Katie knew what cops meant by a “thing.” It didn’t usually pre­sage good news.

“Prisoner transport was in an accident on the interstate, about halfway between Billings and Bozeman,” he said. “Clipped by a semi. Went over the shoulder and rolled, cracked open like an egg. Econoline van.”

“Anybody hurt?” she asked.

“Driver and the guard were wearing seat belts. Prisoners in the back got bounced around pretty good, but no broken bones.”

She waited for the other shoe to drop.

“Two of the cons escaped. Both lifers. Violent felons, stone bad. One of them went down on aggravated assault, armed robbery, three strikes, the other guy’s doing thirty to life for multiple homicide, domestic, killed his wife and both kids.”

“You haven’t been able to raise Hector on his cell?”

“He might not have a decent signal up in the Gallatin.”

“Other agencies involved?”

“Full-court press,” Child told her. “State police, tribal cops, Billings and Bozeman PD, county sheriff’s departments in Stillwater and Sweet Grass. FBI is flying in Special Weapons and Tactical from Denver. Forest Service has been alerted. And we’ve asked for a National Guard unit to be deployed. There’s an awful lot of rough ground out there to cover. We’re going to need all the manpower we can get.”

“What haven’t you told me?” she asked him.

“They hijacked an SUV, family of four on a road trip. We found the vehicle abandoned at a highway rest stop east of Livingston. Four bodies in the camper shell, all of them shot in the head with the victim’s own gun. These guys are armed and dangerous, and they’ve got nothing to lose.”

“Why would they leave the highway?”

“Roadblocks, cops everywhere. Rules of engagement are shoot to kill, although you didn’t hear that from me.”

“Any idea which way they went?”

Child nodded. “They’re not city boys. They can survive in the wild. They’re in the backcountry.”

“Where?”

“Last report, on their way south, into the Absarokas.”

Which was probably where Hector was headed next.

He’d thought about staying with the truck but decided he was better off hoofing it out of there. The truck was exposed on the ridgeline, which meant you could see it from the air if anybody flew over, the park service, a private plane, but Hector didn’t figure that was likely to happen in the next twenty-four hours, or even in the next week. And out in the open, the truck was a magnet in an electrical storm, no protection. His dad always claimed you were safe in a car because the rubber tires would ground a lightning strike. Hector knew that for an old wives’ tale.

On the horizon the dark, boiling clouds were making up thicker, and already closer than Granite Peak, traveling at some fifteen miles an hour, north-northwest. He had a tarp and a waterproof poncho, but in less than two hours, if he didn’t find shelter, he was going to get pretty damn wet. He had the other basic gear, canteen, compass, a folded USCGS map for this quadrant, laminated in plastic. And he knew the country, he’d been up here before, but he was experienced enough to know that anybody could get disoriented, even in daylight. He had his cell phone too, but out here cell reception was spotty at best.

He was surprised the dashboard GPS had read out accurately, if in fact it had. He’d gotten some beef jerky and a couple of energy bars out of the glove box. He was carrying the .40 Smith on his belt holster and the Ruger carbine off the rifle rack, the .44 mag, a brush gun. He felt about as prepared as he could be, given the circumstances. It wasn’t the zombie apocalypse, it was just a little heavy weather. Hector thought about Katie, back in Limestone. You’re twice lucky, he told himself.

The forest service maintained a summer campground over by Tumble Mountain, fourteen, fifteen miles as the crow flies, but the way he remembered, there was a one-time dude ranch on the Boulder, abandoned and fallen into disrepair but only half the distance. He shot an azimuth with the compass, oriented himself on the map, and figured his heading at seventy-four degrees.

Four-thirty in the afternoon, three hours of hard climbing.

The manhunt had spread across three counties and there was a statewide APB, but they were beginning to tighten it up as possible sightings came in, although nothing positive as yet.

The state police had set up their command post at a forest ranger station in Pine Creek, as close as they could get by road to the western edge of the Beartooth. The search had narrowed to an area bounded north to south by the highway and the Wyoming state line, west to east from Pine Creek to the Stillwater. At a rough guess, some thirteen hundred square miles. They had two choppers in the air and a spotter plane, but there was weather moving in, a storm front from the south, and a big one that would ground the aircraft.

Frank Child was at the command post. He was in contact with the SWAT team. They were still an hour out from Bozeman, which was the nearest airstrip with runways long enough to accommodate the C-130. By the time they were on the ground and the unit fully deployed to Pine Creek, it would be after dark.

“Anything?” he asked the watch commander.

“One of the helicopters called in an abandoned vehicle on the Gallatin Trace,” the state cop told him. “Went in to take a closer look. Light bar on the roof, Stillwater County Sheriff’s Department markings. No sign of the driver, though.”

Hector Moody. “If he left his truck, which direction would he travel?” Child asked.

“Six of one. He probably lost radio contact, and his cell wouldn’t work out there. He could backtrack, go out the way he came in, but it’s twenty miles to the nearest pay phone.”

“What if he decided to go east instead?”

“Into the Absaroka watershed? Probably the better choice.” The cop looked at the map. “Seasonal campsites scattered around inside a fifteen-mile radius, some old cabins, line shacks or Civilian Conservation Corps, if they haven’t caved in by now. Up here on the Boulder there used to be a place called Beaver Lodge. Guest ranch, for dudes from back East.”

Child knew himself for a dude from back East, and he didn’t have the skills Hector had. “How bad’s the weather?”

“Bad. He wouldn’t want to get caught in the open.”

Neither would their two fugitives, Child thought. “We have any chance of getting in there?” he asked.

“With the storm? We’re going to have to suspend operations until daylight. Another hour, our visibility’s down to zero.”

“Not very promising.”

“How soon do your people get here?”

“Too late to do Hector any good tonight,” Child said.

“Well,” the state cop said, smiling, “he’s part Indian, he knows the terrain, and he doesn’t expect anybody to come looking for him. He can take care of himself.”

“He doesn’t know about those cons in the woods.”

“No way to get him word, either.”

The storm broke overhead. It was a little past seven o’clock that night. The sun didn’t set until after eight, but the sky was already black, the thunderclouds a heavy mass, lit from beneath by the occasional crack of lightning. Wind thrashed the trees, and then the rain came, in a sudden burst, like bullets.

Hector was on the final leg, moving downslope toward the confluence of the Boulder and Beaver Creek, where the old dude ranch was. The thick conifers gave him some cover from the force of the downpour, but water was already trickling downhill, and the pine needles slithered underfoot.

About a hundred yards out the trees thinned, and beyond that was space once cleared for pasture, now overgrown with weeds and wildflowers. The fences and corrals had collapsed, but through the sheets of rain Hector could see that a couple of the ranch buildings themselves were still standing.

As soon as he left the trees and started into the open, he was immediately soaked all the way through. Fighting a path across the pasture, his feet getting caught in the tall, tangled grass, his wet boots felt as heavy as sandbags, and even under the poncho his uniform was wicking water like a downspout. His skin felt raw, and he shivered with chill. The rainfall was so heavy he had trouble getting his bearings, but he managed at last to flounder up onto the porch of what had once been the bunkhouse. The roof was leaking, and Hector crowded up against the cabin wall, breathing hard. The windows were dirty and broken, but there was a glimmer of light from inside. Hector thought his eyes were playing tricks on him or the flashes of lightning had burned his retinas. He tugged the door latch open and stepped into the cabin.

There was a fire in the fireplace and somebody standing in front of it, rubbing his hands.

“Evening,” the guy said, grinning at him. “You look like a drowned rat. Come over here and warm up.”

Hector shook some of the water off his poncho and shucked it off. He took a step forward, into the firelight, and the guy who’d been in back of the door put the barrel of a gun against the base of his skull, just behind his right ear. “We shoot him now, Roy?” the guy with the gun asked.

Wet as it was, lightning strikes sparked a wildfire at the south end of the Beartooth, just above Yellowstone Park. It started small at first, right around midnight, but in the course of the early hours, before daylight, it grew to some thirty-five square miles. Winds out of the south were pushing it north, into the Absarokas. The problem was that nobody knew it was there until four o’clock the next morning, because there were no spotter planes aloft, and the watchers manning the fire towers didn’t see anything until the storm blew over. But once the weather cleared and they had visibility, horizon to horizon, you could see the flames reflected against the night sky, and it meant all hands on deck.

The first firefighters to respond were the Bighorn Initial Attack crew, from the Crow reservation, since they were that close. They came through Limestone at 6 a.m. It was the nearest point of access. Katie already had her medical unit assembled, ready to go in with them. She wasn’t about to take no for an answer. The crew chief, Joey Raven, knew they’d need her help. He also knew she was dating Hector Moody. He didn’t turn her down.

“How bad?” she asked him.

“If it crowns, we’re in deep shit, Doc,” he said.

There were brush fires that burned through the slash and undergrowth, close to the ground, and then there were so-called crown fires, where it lit up the tops of the trees. Crown fires could move fast enough to outrun an animal, or a man.

“We’re as ready as we’re going to be, Joe,” she told him.

He nodded. “Mount up,” he said.

They’d taken his weapons and gear.

“You have a radio?” the guy named Roy asked.

“Two-way, back in the truck,” Hector said.

“Which is where?”

“Maybe eight miles west of here, on the Gallatin Trace. No good to me, no good to you. Dead metal.”

“And your cell phone doesn’t work worth squat.”

“Part of the problem that brought me here,” Hector said.

“Which makes you part of my problem,” Roy said.

“Aw, for Pete’s sake,” the other guy said. “Who needs this joker? He’s bait for the law. Kill him and leave him.”

“You never know, Little Eddie. Cop might come in handy, we have to work our way out of a tight spot.”

“We’re in a tight spot already.”

“Well, bear with me,” Roy said. He looked at Hector. “You got any bright ideas?”

“Give yourselves up. At least you’d be walking out of here instead of carried off in a meat wagon.”

“Good advice. But we’re both lifers, and neither one of us is going back, not for another thirty years in the joint.”

“All right,” Hector said. “What’s your bright idea?”

“You get us out of here,” Roy said.

“How? There must be roadblocks, police presence, the whole nine yards. They’ve set up the end zone, you’re inside it.”

“Escape and evade.”

“Never happen,” Hector said.

“It better,” he said. “Your life is going to depend on it, Deputy, not just ours.”

Eddie came in from out back and thumped a big Bakelite box on the table between them. “Found this with the freeze-dried stuff in the storage shed, and the canned goods. Like they were getting ready for the end times.”

Roy looked at the radio. “You know what this is?” he asked Hector.

Hector did. It was a basic survival tool, something useful in the third world, or post-apocalypse. No batteries, but a couple of paddles on each side, like bicycle pedals. You cranked it by hand, and it built up enough DC charge to give you half an hour of reception.

“Wind that sucker up,” Roy said. “Buy yourself some time.”

“This isn’t helping,” Frank Child said to the watch commander.

“Might flush ’em out, though,” the state cop said.

“Along with every bunny rabbit and bear in the mountains.”

They had the National Weather Service feed up, tracking the path of the fire on radar.

“Sitrep?” Child asked the FBI agent in charge of the SWAT team. They’d made it in from Bozeman a little before ten-thirty the night before.

“We can’t mount an operation in these conditions,” the SWAT guy told him.

“We can get the choppers back in the air first light,” the state cop said. Oh six hundred, an hour away.

“Fire crews?” Child asked him.

“First responders are on the Stillwater, east of the fire, with a second squad establishing a perimeter on the near side of the Yellowstone, to the west. Smoke-jumpers are on their way. Any luck, we’ll have a company of National Guard on duty by late morning. But they’ll be assigned to the fire lines.”

Child nodded. Everybody had a full plate. Nobody had time to look for two escaped cons and a missing deputy sheriff.

He signaled the SWAT team leader to one side. “Looks like we’re the fifth wheel,” Child said.

“My people aren’t trained for this,” the guy said, “but you issue us shovels, we’ll volunteer.”

“No,” Child said. “Get your gear on the helicopters. Lock and load.”

The team leader ducked his head. “We on the same page?” he asked, meaning they were violating chain of command.

“Anybody spots those guys, we’ll need boots on the ground,” Child said. “State police can’t spare the personnel.”

“Roger that. Anything else?”

“Save me a seat.”

“What’s wrong with this freakin’ thing?” Little Eddie demanded. He gave the radio a shake, but it still wasn’t pulling in a live signal.

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Hector said. “It’s thirty years old is all.”

“It doesn’t work.”

“Sure it works. They’re presets.”

“What are you talking about?” Roy asked him.

“It’s got crystals inside, for preset frequencies, that’s why it doesn’t have a dial. Back when these were made, there was an emergency broadcast system, 640 and 1240 AM, what used to be called the Civil Defense Network. Nuclear attack.”

“So how do we hear anything?”

“There should be ten or a dozen dedicated channels.”

“I think you’re a lyin’ sack of shit,” Little Eddie said to him. “And about as useful as tits on a bull.”

“Eddie,” Roy said wearily, “why don’t you go outside in the rain and hump the chickens? Leave the heavy lifting to me.”

“I don’t trust him,” Little Eddie said.

“I don’t trust him either,” Roy said. “We have a choice?”

Little Eddie stalked off, radiating hostility.

“Looks like I’m not your only problem,” Hector said.

“Well, when God passed out the brains, Eddie was at the end the line,” Roy said. “He got seconds.”

“Stupid people do dangerous things.”

Roy shook his head and smiled. “Nice try, Deputy,” he told him, “but if I leave anybody behind, it’ll be you.”

Hector, switching frequencies, picked something up.

“What have you got?” Roy asked.

Hector tipped his head closer to the tinny speakers. “NOAA weather radio,” he said.

“We need local news, or police band.”

Hector didn’t change frequencies. “You’d better listen to this,” he said. “They are reporting local conditions.”

Roy leaned forward.

Hector turned up the volume, but it distorted the sound, so he turned it down a little.

Roy frowned, concentrating. He sat back. “You catch it?” he asked. “They’re talking about something called the Sugarloaf fire, north of Yellowstone. Mean anything to you?”

“Where’s that USCGS map you took off me?”

Roy went and got it out of Hector’s backpack.

“Give me those coordinates again,” Hector said.

Roy waited until they were repeated and wrote them down.

Hector squared up the map. 45 north, 110 degrees west. He checked it again and looked across the table at Roy.

Roy could read Hector’s expression, and he didn’t think the cop was good enough to fake it. “Let’s have it,” he said.

“Fifteen, maybe eighteen miles from here, winds blowing north-northwest. It’s coming straight at us. We’re in a funnel between the Beaver Creek watershed and the Boulder.”

“How fast are the winds pushing it?”

Hector shrugged. “No way of knowing. We might have half a day, we might have half an hour.”

Roy sucked on his teeth. “Cuts it thin,” he said.

“We can’t stay here,” Hector said.

Katie had set up the aid station by the creek, where there was glacial runoff, but the water was flecked with ash and the air heavy with smoke.

The firefighters were deployed in a ragged line on the other side of the stream, working their way upslope, turning the soil and clearing away brush. It was hard, sweaty work, and a couple of them had already been sent back, smoke inhalation or heat exhaustion. Joey Raven came back to check on them. It was seven o’clock in the morning.

“I want you and the medical staff prepared to evacuate your position, Dr. Faraday,” he told Katie.

“Formal request, Joey?” she asked him, smiling. He usually just called her Doc.

“On the record, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll put it in writing.”

Katie shook her head. “No need,” she said. “You’re the guy in charge. I’m here in support. You tell me to pack it up, we’ll be ready to pack it up.”

“I appreciate the fact that you’re here at all.”

“I know,” she said. “It wasn’t an empty compliment.”

“But if it goes bad, I won’t have time to think about you.”

“You don’t have to, then,” she said.

“We’re going to start a back-burn, up on the ridge, top of the hill there. If we can keep the fire from jumping the creek and going into the trees on this side, we’ll be ahead of it.”

“Your other units calling in?”

He nodded.

“What’s your reported containment?”

“Reported containment is zero. The fire’s blown up, over a hundred square miles, last known, and rough country to get to.”

“You have the men?”

“Good men, probably not enough of them. The hotshots jump at oh eight hundred, into the Absaroka, east of the Needles.”

Into the Absaroka. Katie looked stricken.

Joey Raven was suddenly embarrassed. He swallowed the lump stuck to his Adam’s apple. “He’ll be okay,” he told her.

“We can’t go north, that’s where the cops are,” Eddie said.

“You can’t go south,” Hector told them, “or you want to get burned alive. That forest is alight. You think hell is hot?”

“I’m tired of listening to your mouth,” Eddie said.

“Jesus, get over it,” Roy said. “You want to take your chances on your own, then take your chances. I’m going out with Deputy Moody. He’s my free ticket.”

Little Eddie looked at his feet, sullen and intransigent.

“Oh, Christ, it’s like pulling teeth,” Roy said. “When were you going to get past being a moron?”

“I’m with you,” Eddie said, but his feelings were obviously hurt. He cut a savage look at Hector.

“Let’s take a walk,” Roy said.

“Eddie’s right,” Hector said. “You can’t go north, and you can’t go south. Six of one.”

“Then we go out through the fire lines,” Roy said.

They had two choppers, twin Hueys. Fixed-wing wasn’t of much use here, although there was an observer aircraft up, watching the fire. You could see smoke on the horizon, and when they got closer, they actually saw treetops bursting into flame, like Roman candles lit off on the Fourth of July. The fire was a greedy hunger, something that had to be fed, a living thing, and almost as if it had a will of its own.

“Swing around,” Child said to the state police pilot.

“I don’t know what you’re looking for, sir.”

“Circle over to the Gallatin Trace and find that truck.”

Ten minutes later they spotted it, up on the hogback.

“Okay,” Child said. “Make a pass, backtrack, see if we cut any sign.”

They quartered across the ridgeline, flying into the smoke again. The fire was eating up ground. From their altitude, a couple of hundred feet, it was like looking straight down into a blast furnace.

“There,” Child told the pilot. “The meadow, those cabins.”

“Beaver Creek Ranch,” the pilot said.

“Can you set her down?”

“I can’t give you much of a window,” the pilot said.

“Ten minutes?”

“If that.”

“Do it,” Child said.

They dropped into one of the corrals. The second chopper orbited overhead. On the ground you could feel the superheated air, and the acrid haze was thick. The team moved fast but stayed loose, checking the buildings. Time was tight. They had no margin for error.

“Somebody spent the night here,” one of the SWAT guys said, coming out of the bunkhouse. “Fireplace is still warm.”

“Ambient heat?” Child asked him.

“Nope. Freshly opened canned goods scattered around too.”

“All right. Come on.”

They dog-trotted back to the chopper and scrambled aboard.

“Wind it up,” Child said to the pilot, buckling in.

They lifted off. “What’s our heading?” the pilot asked.

“Which way would you go to outrun the fire?”

“Fire’s traveling almost due north. I’d be moving east.”

“Let’s hope Hector made the same call,” Child said.

They were walking into the sun, but the sun was only a smear of patchy light through the smoke. Behind them and back on the right, the woods were smoldering, heating up toward flashpoint. All it would take was a sudden gust of wind, or a backdraft, and the trees would ignite, quick as a matchhead. They were in a sort of a vortex, or vacuum, a self-sustained system. The fire had created its own momentum, its own pressure gradient, its own weather, sucking air in like the eye of a hurricane.

Hector was out in front, where the other two could keep him in their sights, Roy a few paces back, Little Eddie behind them both. It meant Hector was breaking trail, which was tiring, but it meant he was setting the course. Even without a compass, he could plot their general direction, using dead reckoning and the position of the sun. A little past 8 a.m., some six or seven miles until they reached the Stillwater and an uphill climb, but once across, they’d be on level ground, the fire downwind, and some protection with the creek at their back. Somewhere this side of the Stillwater, he knew, the early initial attack crews would be maintaining a firebreak. The way Hector saw it, he had to make sure none of them got in the way of an itchy trigger finger.

More to it than that, he knew. Roy had enough sense to button his lip and let Hector do the talking, even if Little Eddie was the wild card, but after Hector led them out, they’d have no real reason to keep him alive.

Hector wasn’t out of the woods yet.

The slurry tankers came in at 500 feet and dropped chemical retardant on the leading edge of the fire. They were PBY Catalinas, with a load capacity of 1500 gallons apiece. The hotshots jumped at 2000 feet, from a Twin Otter flying above the Catalinas. Their drop zone was a burned-over area between the Boulder River and Iron Mountain, and their immediate objective was to suppress spot fires and contain any back-burn.

“Smoke-jumpers,” the state police helicopter pilot told his passengers, pointing out the red chute canopies opening.

“They must have asbestos balls,” one of the SWAT guys said. “That LZ’s hotter than a cast-iron griddle.”

They’d overflown the worst of it. Below them there was a lot of smoke, blanketing the trees like low-lying fog, but there were no flames they could see.

“Where are we on the map?” Child asked.

“That’s the Stillwater down there,” the pilot said. He put the chopper into a shallow bank, turning back west again.

“Fire line on the ridge?”

The pilot nodded. “If it breaks out and moves east, that’s where they hope to stop it.”

“Which way is the wind blowing?”

“Still steady, north-northwest, not as strong. Ten knots.”

“Jesus, we could use some more rain.”

“Ask,” the pilot said. “He might be listening.”

“God answers prayers,” Child said, “it’s his day job.”

They saw the planes go over, two fairly low to the ground, one at higher altitude. Roy and Little Eddie crouched under the trees. Hector didn’t bother. The aircraft were flying too fast and too far up to notice them.

“Get your ass down here,” Roy snarled.

“We don’t have time to waste,” Hector said. “Get your own ass up and get it in gear. We have to be over the Stillwater in an hour or we’re going to fry like bacon fat. Come on.”

Hector didn’t care one way or the other, of course. He would have been perfectly happy to leave them there, but he knew full well one of them would shoot him in the back.

He struck out again, and they followed.

“How far?” Roy asked him.

“Couple of miles, as the crow flies.”

“Home free,” Roy said, grinning.

And then they heard the choppers overhead.

Joey Raven, the fire boss, hadn’t given Katie the word to pull out, so she’d stayed on station. They were treating a number of Joey’s crew, some minor burns, abrasions, blisters, but mostly smoke in their lungs. The fire itself hadn’t approached; they’d been lucky so far. She hoped their luck held.

“Fifteen percent,” he told her. He meant containment, and it was better than expected, given the dry conditions.

“Chance of rain?” she asked.

“Sudden storm would be good,” he said. “We’d need a real frog-strangler, flood out the canyons and drown the bastard, but there’s nothing on the radar.”

“You good?”

“I’m good, Doc,” he said. His face was streaked with soot, and he looked exhausted.

“Come inside a minute,” she said.

He stepped into her trailer.

Katie handed him a pint of Johnnie Walker Black.

“Shouldn’t,” he told her.

“Medicinal purposes,” she said.

“Where were you when my first wife left me?” he asked.

“Probably in third grade,” she said.

Joey uncapped the scotch and had a healthy jolt. “You’re a good man, Doc,” he said, screwing the top back on.

“You too, Joey,” she said.

“Proof is in the pudding.” He gave her the bottle and went outside again.

Katie turned the pint of Johnnie Walker in her hand. Hector didn’t drink hard liquor, just beer. Katie usually only drank wine. She took the cap off again and tipped the bottle up. The whiskey burned her throat and brought tears to her eyes.

This time Roy grabbed Hector and pulled him to cover. The big Hueys came in down on the deck, close enough that the rotor wash whipped the trees and the engine noise hammered the earth.

“Don’t even think about it,” Roy hissed in Hector’s ear, hugging him close, his whisker stubble scratching Hector’s skin.

The heavy thump of the twin turbos faded as the choppers crossed the next ridgeline. They dropped into the valley on the other side, but the reverberations still echoed behind them.

“You see their insignia?” Roy asked.

Hector nodded. “State police,” he said.

“Looking for me and Eddie.”

“Not necessarily,” Hector said. “I think the fire’s their biggest priority right now. They’re probably pulling emergency personnel from every available resource.”

“Where does that leave us?”

“I’d say you two were under the radar. Just be cool, don’t do anything stupid. And that goes double for him.”

Little Eddie gave him a poisonous stare.

“I can walk you out of here, but only if nobody gets hurt,” Hector said. “Any crazy shit goes down, we’re all dead meat.”

“You first, asshole,” Little Eddie said.

Hector was watching Roy.

Roy nodded. “Okay,” he said.

“You answer for Eddie?” Hector asked.

“I’ll answer for him and me both,” Roy said.

“Shit, you listening to this bush-league tin badge?” Little Eddie asked him. “He’s going to sell us out.”

“That’s as may be,” Roy said. “Just remember,” he said to Hector. “You cross me, you put the law wise and they try to take me down, you’ll have your guts in your lap before I hit the ground.”

“I knew I could count on you,” Hector said.

They set the helicopters down on a patch of open dirt behind the creek, near the field hospital unit. Child climbed out.

“You have enough fuel?” he asked the pilot.

“Two hours reserve.”

“Better get some coffee,” Child told the SWAT guys. “Mount up again in five.”

He went into the medical tent.

“Hi,” Katie said.

“Dr. Faraday.”

“You look ridden hard and put away wet.”

“No joy,” he told her, without ceremony. “We saw his truck but we didn’t find Hector.”

“Your bedside manner needs a little work,” she said.

He smiled. “Least said, soonest mended.”

“What about your bad guys?”

“Apples and oranges,” Child said.

“You sure?”

“Somebody spent the night at a dude ranch on the Boulder, maybe ten miles west of here. Might have been Hector, might be our fugitives. Either way, they’d head in this direction. It’s their only safe way out of the fire.”

“How much time do they have?”

“Depends. If the wind shifts—” He stopped.

“What?”

“He’s alive, Katie. I’d bet money on it. Hector could walk away from a plane wreck and give you frequent-flier miles. Thing is, he’s not the only guy with a ticket.”

“You think they might be with him, and he’s a hostage.”

“It’s one possibility,” Child told her. “I’m just covering my ass.”

“That makes two of us,” she said.

Crossing the fire line turned out to be easy. Joey Raven even detailed one of his men to take them back to the aid station, the three guys stumbling out of the burning woods, smudged with soot and bruised by what was a very close call. They were lucky to be alive, the crew chief figured.

As they made their way down the hillside toward the creek, the choppers were lifting off again from the beaten earth behind the field hospital.

Roy glanced at Hector.

Hector shrugged. Who knew?

When they got to the banks of the creek, Joey’s guy left them there and trudged back upslope to the smouldering firebreak on the ridge.

The three of them waded across the shallow streambed.

“Home free,” Roy said, grinning.

Don’t count your chickens, Hector thought.

“Not firefighters,” the SWAT commander said, checking them out through his field glasses, the recon second nature. “Guy in the middle’s a uniformed LEO.”

Child raised his own binoculars, turning back to look just as the helicopter overflew the top of the ridge. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Put this bird down and do it now,” he said to the pilot.

“Aid station’s the nearest LZ,” the pilot said.

“No,” Child said. “It’s got to be up here. They’re a hundred yards from the field hospital. They see us coming back, we’ll have civilian collateral damage, big-time.”

“I can’t land in the trees.”

Child glanced at the SWAT guy. “How close to the ground do we have to be?” he asked him.

“Thirty feet or less.”

“Can you hover that low?” Child asked the pilot.

“We’ve got a lot of updraft. The rising air’s hot. Tricky trim problem. You’re looking at an unstable jump platform.”

“Time to cowboy,” the SWAT commander said.

“I’m good with it,” Child said.

The state cop took them down to treetop level. The SWAT team opened the cargo bay doors, hooked up, and began the rappel to the ground. Frank Child had never done this before in his life. The chopper was bucking like a rodeo horse, veering and yawing, sliding in the currents of hot air. Child was nauseous, and frozen with vertigo.

“I don’t care if you puke,” the SWAT commander said. “Just go out the damn door or get out of my way.”

Child’s feet were stuck to the lurching cargo deck.

The guy behind him put both hands in the small of Child’s back and put all his weight into it. Child’s feet slithered on the deck plates, and he found himself treading empty air.

“I’m thinking this is where we part company, Deputy,” Roy said to Hector. “Time to trade up to a newer model year, no offense. Something modest, low-profile.”

Parked in back of the field hospital were a couple of vehicles, two pickups and a silver Isuzu Trooper, a little the worse for wear, rust spots covered with primer. Hector knew the Trooper belonged to Katie Faraday.

“So far we’ve been lucky,” he said. “You think your luck’s going to hold?”

“Maybe that’s up to you.”

“Okay,” Hector said. “We take one of the trucks. I’ll go in, I’ll get the keys. No secret handshake, no Captain Midnight decoder ring, straight and simple. Police business.”

“You talk good game,” Roy said.

“Let’s do it easy. No reason to do it hard.”

“They’ve got roadblocks as far east as Billings.”

“I can evade the checkpoints, or alibi my way past them. I’m wearing the star, right? Once you get past Billings, it’s a straight shot into the Dakotas. You’d have a head start.”

“And you think I’d let you go?”

“No,” Hector said. “But it’s a fair trade. Keep it clean. Don’t complicate things. Nobody’s dead yet.”

“Well, you’re wrong about that,” Roy said. “Sorry to say.”

“Something happened.”

“Yeah. Call it an unhappy accident. Little Eddie got kind of a hair across his ass.”

“I only shot the first one,” Eddie said. “The guy went for his gun. You did the others.”

“You left me no play, kid,” Roy said. “Fortunes of war.”

“Capital murder,” Hector said.

“Something you might keep in mind,” Roy said.

“I’ll remember,” Hector told him.

“Let’s go talk to these people inside the tent,” Roy said.

The choice Hector had been trying to steer him away from.

“You know what your problem is?” Roy asked. “You wear your heart on your sleeve. It shows on your face.”

“All right,” Hector said. “Let’s go talk to them.”

“Short and sweet,” Roy said.

They’d bellied up to the ridge, where they were overlooking the creek. The estimated range was about five hundred yards, the declination some ten degrees. You had to compensate for the shot. Uphill you aimed high, downhill you aimed low, which was counterintuitive. The team carried M4s, in 5.56, the barrels chopped down for work in close quarters, with muzzle suppressors and high-cap mags, two of them duct-taped end to end, but the designated shooter was posting a Winchester model 70 with a Leupold infrared scope, a .308 bolt gun, still the Marine sniper rifle of choice, even in this day and age. The guy behind the sights had been a force recon Marine for twelve years before the FBI recruited him. Now his name and rank were classified.

“I don’t like the way this is shaping up,” Child said.

“We’ve got good position,” the SWAT commander said. “We’re on top of it. It’s not Waco.”

Your lips to God’s ears, Child thought.

Katie was enormously relieved to see him, but something about his body English warned her off. Hector was avoiding direct eye contact. She didn’t step forward right away. The two men with him. They spelled trouble, or even danger. She remembered what Frank Child had told her, killers with nothing to lose.

“We need to commandeer a vehicle,” Hector said, addressing the group at large. His eyes grazed past Katie, but he didn’t focus on her. “Get us as far as Limestone, I’ll leave it at the sheriff’s substation, take a car from the motor pool.”

Katie looked at the three nurses who’d come with her from the clinic. They all knew Hector was bluffing. There was no motor pool in Limestone. He drove his own truck, and the county reimbursed him for mileage and maintenance.

“Who owns the Trooper?” Hector asked them.

Now they knew for a fact that something was very wrong, but nobody gave him away.

“I do,” Katie said. She fished the keys out of her jacket pocket and handed them to him. “Gas tank’s half full. Just pay me back for what you use.”

Hector nodded and thanked her.

There was a loaded Beretta M9 under the front seat too. She carried it for emergencies, and Hector knew that. Which was why he’d asked to borrow her truck.

“Wait a minute, little lady,” the bigger of the two men with Hector said. “Whyn’t you come along for the ride, keep the deputy company.”

“I’m sorry?” Katie asked him, frowning and pretending to be puzzled, although she knew why. “I’m the only doctor here.”

“All to the good,” the guy told her. “We might need one.”

“This isn’t a smart move at all,” Hector said to him.

“You let me be the judge of that,” Roy said.

Little Eddie grinned. He was liking this better now.

It was shaping up worse, Child saw, watching them through the binoculars. They had two hostages instead of one, and the four of them were bunched too close to take the shot.

“Your guy think on his feet?” the SWAT commander asked.

“Hector can think on his hands and knees,” Child said. Not that Child wanted it to come to that.

“Let ’em get clear of the background,” the team leader said to the rifleman. He meant away from anybody in the tent.

The shooter nodded. He dialed in the range.

“On my mark,” the team leader told him. “Condition Zero.”

The shooter put his targets in the crosshairs.

“Keep it tight,” Roy said. He had Katie’s arm pinned painfully behind her back. Hector was a step in front and Little Eddie a step behind.

Hector caught something in his peripheral vision, a flicker of reflected sunlight up on the ridge, and then it was gone.

They got to the Trooper. Hector shook out Katie’s keys to find the right one. He unlocked the driver’s door and tugged it open, but he dropped the keys in the dirt.

“Quit dicking around,” Roy said.

Hector crouched down to pick up the keys and slid his hand under the driver’s seat.

Roy looked at Eddie. “There’s always some wetbrain has to douche the cat,” Roy said, tired of coddling morons.

Straightening up, Hector uncoiled like a spring, pivoting off the balls of his feet, and hit Katie so hard in a body block it knocked the wind right out of her lungs.

“You stinking prick,” Roy shouted at him, the three of them going down in a tangle of armpits and elbows.

The sniper round was a jacketed hollowpoint, a 180-grain rebated Silvertip boattail moving at a velocity approaching twenty-one hundred feet per second, without buffeting or deflection. It hit Eddie at the base of the skull, on a downward trajectory, and blew his spine through his throat like a wet rope.

Hector rolled clear of Katie and ground the muzzle of the Beretta into the socket of Roy’s left eye. “Your call,” he said to him. “Doesn’t matter to me one way or the other.”

Roy’s shoulders sagged.

Katie sat up and coughed. It hurt to catch her breath.

“Damn,” Child said, putting the glasses down. He glanced over at the shooter. The ex-Marine ejected his spent round and policed up the brass, force of habit. “I never saw anybody take a shot like that, cold-bore,” Child said.

The shooter looked at him. “No, you never did,” he said.

The SWAT commander got on the radio and called the choppers back in, requesting emergency evac.

Hector helped Katie get to her feet. She flinched with the pain.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m okay, but don’t hug me quite so hard,” she said. “You broke one of my ribs.”

Hector let go and gave her room to breathe.

“I was afraid you weren’t coming out,” she said.

“So was I,” he told her.

“Aw, you’re like a bad penny. You always turn up.”

“Heads or tails?” Hector asked, smiling.

“You know what’s the matter with you?”

“No, what?” he asked her.

“I wish I knew,” Katie said.