The Standoff

Office

There was nothing from the cabin overnight. Banish could tell that it was morning now by the brighter complexion of the drab canvas walls. In the absence of any real progress, he had devoted himself to paperwork. Photographs of the Newlands, Ables’s in-laws on his wife’s side, had come in from Provo, along with biographies and neighbor interviews. Craig Newland, Marjorie Ables’s brother, had four months earlier put in for a week’s vacation from the paper processing plant that employed him. Their Sunoco credit card account showed activity at a station twenty miles outside of Huddleston six days before, a nine-gallon fill-up at 10:37 A.M. on Saturday, July 31. Their 1987 Ford Lynx had been found parked, locked, and empty on one of the access roads adjoining Paradise Ridge, a coffee-stained AAA Triptik highlighting interstates from Utah to Montana discarded on the backseat. By all accounts, the Newlands disliked Glenn Ables but had undertaken the journey north in order to visit Marjorie and the children, whom they had not seen in over four years. They were likely the only true captives in the cabin.

Two Assistant U.S. Attorneys had come in before dawn to brief Banish on the government’s formal criminal complaint regarding the shootout. They were going to charge Ables with the murder of Deputy Marshal Bascombe, and Mellis with assault on a federal officer, while reserving future charges against twelve-year-old Judith. The wording of the complaint was important to Banish because filing it with the U.S. District Court in Helena effectively released the FBI version of the initial skirmish into the public domain. The news media could then source the complaint and air previously withheld information. On the other hand, it was a legal document, and any inaccuracies or omissions would hinder the government’s case later in court. Banish had spent the better part of two early morning hours going over it with a red pen.

The press situation itself was heating up. The Press Services Office of the External Affairs Division had called overnight from Washington to order a departure from SOP. They had decided that a pool of twenty print reporters and one Associated Press photographer would be allowed access to the staging area that morning. Their concern was that a five-day standoff without any substantive development would move a blacked-out media into broader speculation in the form of opinion pieces concerning transgressions of “the State,” or comparisons to similar standoff situations — the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia; Waco — that had ended unfavorably. Traditionally, the longer a siege dragged on, the more law enforcement came to be painted as the instigator. Banish, in order to avoid media disruption of the staging area, had already figured out a way around the command. Perkins was at that hour escorting the press pool up an adjacent mountain, one with a higher ridge and a distant but fair view of Paradise Ridge below.

That had been the only official communication from the Bureau SOG, or seat of government, in Washington, D.C. Nothing from the top brass, and specifically nothing from AD Richardsen. The obvious explanation was that no significant progress had been made. Nothing happens in a hostage negotiation until somebody picks up the phone. Banish had always played the maverick in keeping the Bureau at bay, but for this, his first active assignment in almost three years, he had expected to be kept on a short leash. Not only expected, but anticipated. Even hoped. He wondered then, fleetingly, if there was some other way they were keeping tabs on him.

He stopped what he was doing then and sat back in his chair. As he had done once or twice daily following his release from the hospital, and nearly every other hour since arriving at Paradise Ridge, he took his mental pulse. He was self-evaluating. His reason seemed to him sharp enough. The disruption of his routine at Skull Valley had at first been overwhelming. There, by adhering to strict work, meal, and sleep schedules, removing himself from the constant push-and-pull of everyday life, he had slowly and painstakingly rebuilt his mind. He had lived there inside his head like a man with a white coat and clipboard, tampering with and tempering the dark thoughts and appetites and urges that had nearly consumed him. At Skull Valley he had been his own lab rat. He ran the labyrinths and doled out the cheese. And the Bureau had left him alone there, but perhaps for too long. He saw now that the recovery of his reasoning faculties had left little room for the more gauzy shadings of the mind, such as personality, temperament, character.

Being sprung from that solitude had at first been disorienting, but since arriving on the mountain he felt that he had met each task head-on, managing to adopt a fair shadow of his former working persona. He had picked up all the familiar scents. He was able to function again and recall a detached sort of familiarity, like a dog stumbling upon a forgotten yard, digging for old bones. But he was untested and he knew it. There was, behind every action, the desperate possibility that something crucial or obvious might somehow slip past him. And a certain paranoia he was aware of, a voice muttering in his ear, that was fed by the vacuum of silence from D.C. And above all that, the hope that the call would come relieving him of responsibility, returning him to Skull Valley. But by taking one step back from himself, he was able to keep all this in check.

There was always the concern, however, that the gauge itself might be faulty. That in these steadying self-evaluations, his reason might fail to police itself accurately, and like a man stopping to take his pulse and coming away satisfied, not knowing his second hand was slow, Banish could himself be deceived.

His methods so far seemed to him sound. There was no set play book for hostage negotiation. There were strategies and there were tactics, but no methodology. Each situation was its own. The negotiator worked to isolate the suspect while at the same time setting himself in a position to wait, psychologically starving out the individual, as here, where Ables had effectively been placed under house arrest. Then the negotiator was left to his own devices. In the days when he was still considered an expert on the subject, in his lectures on tradecraft at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, Banish had likened the role of Chief Hostage Negotiator to that of a man trying to adjust a roof antenna by himself. You position the antenna, he would tell the trainees, then climb off the roof to check the progress of its reception, then go back up and try something else entirely different again. The analogy made sense in the days when cable television was just a dream and satellite dishes were fifty feet wide. When he was still one of the Young Turks at the Bureau, the best and the brightest who would reestablish the FBI as the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, antigovernment era. When he was still a family man with a wife and daughter, which had guaranteed that he would never have to adjust a roof antenna alone.

He returned to the work on his desk. The stacks of bound reports and memos and requisition authorizations were like rocks he could hang on to. They were real things he could touch and move with his hands.

These were the idle hours. The stasis when anxiety battled reason and when mistakes were most often made. The downtime that sapped men’s spirits. Even unfavorable developments were more welcome. They at least demanded some form of action. Frustration was the hostage negotiator’s enemy. Purgatory was hell.

He reinitialed the disclosure sheet he had authored detailing Perkins guidelines for that morning’s press conference, including a formal three-paragraph press release and an annotated cheat sheet of responses to anticipated questions. He was reviewing the marshals’ watch summaries for the previous day when he heard laughter coming from outside his office.

Something about it bothered him. When he heard the laughter again, he set down his pen and went out through the canvas flap door into the greater command tent. The agents there were busy at desks littered with soda cans and coffee cups and plastic junk food wrappers from the snacks the supply trucks had brought in. The switchboard desk telephones and the telex and fax machines were up and running. One agent was logging reports into a computer; another, issuing orders over the radio. Only Coyle’s chair near the front was empty.

To Banish’s right, in the corner near the small utility refrigerator, two Montana state policemen stood engaged in casual conversation, laughing and drinking out of two tall cans of doped Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Banish saw red. He exploded at the stunned men, grabbing their arms and propelling them out of the tent and into the bright light of morning. He emptied the cans there, the smell of the beer salting his nose, then he dressed down the Statics, and then Coyle, who arrived in the middle of it with a cup of coffee in her hand. By the time he was through with her, the Statics had gotten up on their hind legs.

“Look,” one said, “we just come off a twelve-hour shift.”

Banish said sharply, “No one goes off-duty on this mountain.”

The other said, “So you guys in there get cold ones, but not the men out here doing the real work?”

Banish looked down at the dark puddles the beer made in the dirt, the foam along the edges clinging to stray weeds. The beer smell wafting up. His head started to swim. He looked around and noticed a familiar face among the people standing nearby. “Kearney,” he barked.

The cop looked startled. “Yes sir,” he said, coming over.

Banish had to fight to keep himself from yelling. “These two imbeciles are dismissed. I want you personally to see them off the mountain and back to their barracks.”

Kearney nodded without question and went off alongside the disgusted troopers.

Banish turned back to Coyle. “Do you have a hearing problem, Agent Coyle?” he said.

Coyle said, “No, sir.”

“Do you have a problem following orders?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, I don’t know who put you in charge of this command tent, but if I have to give one more order twice around here, HEADS WILL ROLL. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”

“Yes, sir.”

“WAS THERE ANY PART OF THAT YOU DID NOT UNDERSTAND?”

Coyle swallowed and shook her head. “No, sir,” she said.

Banish was nodding. He knew his voice had gotten away from him. He was losing control. He looked to the command tent as a place of refuge. Agents watching from the entrance disappeared back inside. Banish turned and walked off in the opposite direction across the clearing. Men who had stopped there to stare now hustled out of his way.

He was getting away from the smell. The smell of the beer was so thick he could nearly taste it, and if he could taste it, then he could swallow it, so he was getting away from that. He was breathing clean air. It smelled of diesel fuel and exhaust, but it tasted clean, because it did not tempt his immense thirst.

Sound Truck

He came to the sound truck and knocked twice. The agent inside, the sound man, whatever his name was, slid the door open. Rap music beat tinnily from the headphones hanging around his neck. He stepped back to allow Banish inside.

“Anything?” Banish asked.

The sound man shook his head. “Nothing.”

Banish did not nod. If there had been any activity whatsoever from the cabin, he would of course have been notified immediately. It was a senseless question. He sat down in the chair nearest the open door. It creaked under him.

The sound man took the other chair. He was quiet, waiting for the senior agent to say something. He tapped two fingers on his fold-down desktop. Finally he came out with what was on his mind. “Why haven’t they answered?” he said.

Banish’s eyes were closed. His head was bowed. He just shook his head.

After a while the tin music became muffled as the sound man put his headphones back on. Banish opened his eyes and looked up. Surveillance cameras had been installed overnight, the monitor bank on the panel above the sound man’s head showing six different scenes in flickering black and white. It took Banish a moment to place each location: the cabin from three strategic angles, one head-on through the trees in front, and two wider pictures more than forty-five degrees each way; a wide view of the bridge and the crowd of protesters at the foot of the mountain; a section of empty road leading up the mountainside; and a high, wide overview of the staging area itself.

Banish thought he could discern the small dark blot the throw phone made on the wavy ground in the trees before the cabin. When the sound man looked up again, Banish caught his eye with a head nod. The sound man pulled off his headphones. “What about the external microphones?” Banish said.

The sound man shook his head. “Nothing between the music. Except once around three in the morning, a marshal taking a piss against a tree.”

“My men don’t piss on duty,” Fagin said.

Banish turned slowly, unimpressed by theatrics. Fagin was standing outside the open van door in full uniform minus his ball cap a camouflage bandanna wrapped tightly around his hard black head.

“Mighty big squirrels, then,” said the sound man in his Virginian accent.

Fagin nodded. “Must fucking be.” He stood with his big arms crossed, sizing up both of them. He looked as though he had had a shower. “Beautiful Montana morning,” he said, eyes cool and bright. There was something about Fagin that was always coiled.

“Actually,” the sound man said, turning more in his chair, “there was one strange thing overnight. A growling sound.”

Banish said, “What do you mean?”

“Not from inside the cabin — out there in the no-man’s-land. Every once in a while. Guttural noises, deep and fierce.”

“Coyotes,” Fagin said. “Bloodthirsty sons of bitches. My men see them stalking the perimeter at night through the trees. Yellow fucking eyes, and stealthy. It’s the dog meat. Music doesn’t scare them anymore.”

Fagin’s voice trailed off slightly at the end, and then his entire countenance gradually changed, his sharp eyes showing just a touch of vacancy. Then he frowned. He was receiving a transmission in his ear.

He looked up. “Where the fuck’s Perkins?”

“With the press,” Banish said. “Up there.” He motioned toward the adjoining peak.

Fagin said, “Fuck.” Then he moved off fast.

Banish turned back around. The sound man was looking at him, but Banish shrugged mildly. Delegation was another part of command “Put me through,” Banish said, lifting the handset off its hook.

The sound man readjusted his headphones, then cut the music with a flip of a switch, cueing Banish to begin.

Banish said flatly, “This is Special Agent Bob Watson.” He was watching the cabin on the wavy monitor, the dark blot of the orphan telephone. “Your cabin is completely surrounded. There is no chance for escape...”

The Baltimore Sun

HUDDLESTON Mont.” Aug. 7 — Federal authorities obtained a murder warrant yesterday against fugitive Glenn Alien Ables in the shooting death of Deputy U.S. Marshal Stanley Bascombe.

FBI agents yesterday continued to surround Ables’s remote mountaintop cabin in a tense standoff, wary that a full-scale assault could endanger the lives of the five children living inside.

Ables was indicted two years ago on federal weapons charges. Bascombe was killed during a gun battle touched off when a family dog picked up the scent of four U.S. Marshals conducting what has been described as a routine surveillance in a ravine below Ables’s cabin, according to authorities.

Bascombe’s body was flown home to Maryland two days ago. He will be eulogized at a service today at St. Paul’s Church in Baltimore by E. Walter Leveralt, Director of the U.S. Marshals Service.

Ables, a notorious white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klansman, has been charged with firing the shot that killed Bascombe. Charles Mellis, 29, Ables’s brother-in-law and one of four other relatives also hiding out in the cabin, faces a lesser charge of assault on a federal agent.

Authorities reportedly have received no response from the cabin since the initial shooting. They continued yesterday the tense and prolonged process of attempting to lure Ables out of the cabin. “This is not a routine arrest,” said Frank Spona, spokesman for the FBI in Washington, D.C. “We will exhaust every possible means we believe will effect a peaceful resolution.”

Ables has vowed not to be taken alive.

[The fifth day of the standoff was marked by mounting tension and swirling rumors, according to the Associated Press.

[A bizarre scene unfolded early yesterday as members of the elite U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group arrested five heavily armed men on a mountain road leading to a high ridge overlooking both Ables’s secluded cabin and the federal command post. Marshals, who described the young men as members of a neo-Nazi skinhead sect known as The Truth, stopped the Jeep and confiscated at least eight semiautomatic rifles without incident.

[The five men had swastikas painted on their faces, according to eyewitnesses. A banner proclaiming “Great White Revolution” was also recovered.

[Also yesterday, a Helena television station, without identifying its sources, reported that authorities had previously cut the eleven-member family’s water supply. Authorities have said that such action would be routine, although they have denied several other media reports, including one broadcast that tear gas canisters had been launched at Ables’s cabin.

[“We have purposefully and patiently taken no aggressive action,” said Reginald Perkins, Special Agent in Charge of the Butte, Montana, FBI Field Office, in the first FBI briefing at Paradise Ridge. “The critical factor in this situation is that there are juveniles in the residence.”

[Authorities denied that Ables’s continued lawlessness showed ineptitude on their part.

[“I see no embarrassment,” said Perkins. “This whole prolonged procedure shows only caring on the part of the government. The situation right now is that we care more about the children than Mr. Ables does, and this is a shame.”

[Authorities have said they are unsure how many weapons Ables may have stockpiled in the cabin, though it is widely known that his wife and children, ranging in age from 18 months to 14 years, regularly practice target shooting in the area.

[“We are prepared to face an arsenal,” Perkins said.

[Perkins also said he has no way of knowing how long the standoff will continue. According to the Associated Press, it was not immediately clear whether he was acting as the government’s chief negotiator.]

Authorities have established a federal command post on the mountain consisting of at least nine tents, a fleet of military vehicles, several U-Haul trucks, a fire truck, helicopters, and hundreds of police and support personnel. The standoff includes agents of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, U.S. Marshals Service deputies, the Montana State Police, the local Border County Sheriff’s Department, and members of the Huddleston town police.

The duration of the siege has done nothing to abate the groundswell of support for Ables in and around this tiny Northwestern hamlet. Local residents, members of various Christian Identity sects, neo-Nazis from neighboring states, and thrill-seekers from all across the country continue to gather daily at the police barricade, heckling vehicles leaving the scene and local police officers posted on the bridge, and occasionally making racist remarks or chanting pro-Aryan slogans.

Ables and his family moved to this remote northern Montana community from Chicago several years ago. The area is not far from the headquarters of the Church of Christian White Aryan Resistance (WAR), considered to be one of the largest and most active white supremacist organizations in the United States. A delegation of that group late yesterday delivered hate literature to the police barricade at the foot of Paradise Mountain.

Ables has previously denied any association with WAR.

Through it all, Ables, 41, has gone from being a religious and racial extremist to a folk hero among his neighbors. Residents help by delivering mail and groceries up to the fugitive’s cabin, which has no electricity or telephone service.

Neighbors described Ables as proud and self-sufficient, someone who before the standoff would take a group of local children fishing.

“Glenn’s a man of morals,” said Deke Belcher, 77, a neighbor of Ables, who said the FBI and federal marshals should leave the mountain and its residents alone. “He was provoked,” said Belcher.

Office

Sheriff Blood entered the command tent and tipped his hat to the agent at the first desk, telling her who he was. She was the no-nonsense type, with a disapproving look and a voice that wore glasses. She seemed more like an agent than a woman, just as the men there seemed more like agents than men. There were two genders on the mountain, agents and everyone else. She inspected the newspapers in his arms, perhaps for a weapon of some kind, aside from the gun he was wearing on his hip, then directed him to the rear of the tent. He tipped his hat to her again and moved on.

The inside of the tent itself was something. A bright, serious place, with agents clicking things into computer keyboards and a general droning noise caused by all the various voices speaking into telephones and radios and to each other all at once. The main attraction stood wide in the center of the tent, a glass or clear plastic half-wall visible from both sides and somehow glowingly lit from within. An agent in black-rimmed glasses was sketching onto it with a kind of crayon pen, adding to the elaborate color-coded diagram overview of the mountaintop and Ables’s entire compound, complete with distances and heights and more. It sure did beat drawing maps in the dirt with a stick. Blood felt as though he were in the control room of a submarine heading into war.

There were voices inside the canvas office in back, one of them excited. Blood stopped and debated going in, but there was only the draped flap of canvas and no solid place to knock, so he pushed aside the canvas drape and entered.

The voice that was getting worked up belonged to Perkins, the most animated Blood had yet seen him. He was saying, “I’m up there with twenty newspaper people and no cover and he comes out of nowhere tearing after a Jeep full of neo-Nazis? You know what that was? That was an embarrassment. Fagin is reckless and I don’t like it.”

Banish was sitting behind a desk inside, Perkins standing with his back mostly toward Blood. Neither acknowledged the intrusion, so Blood stepped fully inside. There was a crooked-arm fluorescent lamp poised like a vulture over the paper stacks on Banish’s desk, and a telephone next to a walkie-talkie standing in a battery charger, and electrical wires trailing back under the separating canvas wall. A windbreaker jacket and a pair of boots and a pitcher of water were set on a small wooden stand in the shadowed corner behind.

Banish said, “He did what had to be done.”

Perkins was standing between two metal folding chairs set in the cramped area before the desk. “I want to know how they got up there in the first place,” he continued. “The press almost got a show up there they never would have forgotten. I’m standing there feeding these scribblers your answers, and all of a sudden there’s a stopped Jeep and marshals everywhere. And an AP photographer clicking away. And me ending up looking like an ass because I don’t have a clue as to what the hell is going on. Five kids with swastikas on their faces, semiautomatic rifles, and I’m left holding the ball. That was humiliation.” Perkins jabbed at the air before him with his finger.

Banish didn’t seem concerned. In fact, he seemed almost bored. “The crazier they appear, the more patient we come off as being,” he said. “Anything else?”

Perkins stood there before Banish, clearly fired up now, hands going from fists to open palms and back to fists again at his sides, over and over. It was somehow a personal thing with him. “Do you understand the vantage point they would have had?” he said. “Like fish in a bucket. We’re vulnerable up here. Can you see that at all? Do you realize how close we came?”

“Fagin has secured the surrounding mountains,” Banish said, still more interested in the work on his desk. “It was an unfortunate incident, but we will benefit from it in the long run, and learn from it.”

Perkins nodded, not at all satisfied. “That’s it, then,” he said. When he received no answer, he went stiffly out past Blood without even a look.

Banish closed his eyes. There were bright pink sores on either side of the bridge of his nose, from a pair of half-glasses overturned on the stacks of reports on the table before him. He appeared to be having a rough time of it. His cheeks, neck, and chin were roughened with a thick peppery stubble, and the harsh light from the lamp looming over his desk washed his skin pale.

He rubbed the sore marks on his nose, then reopened his eyes and put his glasses back on. He picked up a sheaf of papers and continued reading. Blood came ahead to the desk. “Are those my newspapers?” Banish said without looking up.

Blood set them down. “And a fresh batch of these pamphlets.”

“Anything else?”

Blood said, “I was out behind enemy lines earlier. I counted cars. Ninety-eight of them now, from eight different states, and one license plate from Heaven.”

Banish nodded dismissively. “We have someone out taking down plate numbers,” he said. “Anything else?”

“Well,” Blood said, “now that you ask.” He pulled a piece of paper from his coat pocket. “Here’s a thing that seems to be getting a lot of play down there. Raising a good stink, as far as stinks go.” He presented him with a copy of a letter. “I’m sure you can verify the handwriting. It’s from Glenn Ables to the pastor over there at the WAR church, dated two years ago this past July. That would place it right before his original arrest. You can read it for yourself. He says an Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agent visited his cabin and tried to strong-arm him into becoming an informer.”

Banish barely scanned the revelatory letter and set it aside with the rest, returning to his reading. “Anything else?”

Blood looked at him, looked at the letter. “You don’t think that’s something,” he said.

Banish said, “This is a tactical operation, not an investigation.”

Blood’s eyes opened a little wider. “Well, even so,” he said, “that seems to me like a pretty big fish flopping around right there.”

Banish said, “I don’t care who did what to whom. I’m here to get a man out of his cabin.”

Blood was about to toss off a shrug, then Banish looked up and surprised him with a question. “Is WAR a big concern around here?”

Blood’s narrowed a little. “Concern?” he said. “I wouldn’t say that exactly.”

Banish said, “What would you say to five armed young men with swastikas painted on their faces, not at all intimidated by law enforcement?”

Blood pshawed him. “Jackassery,” he said. “Pure childishness. Secret handshakes and such. And carting guns in your truck — around here that’s like packing fishing rods. People up here believe generally in four things: family, property, Jesus, and guns. And not necessarily in that order. It doesn’t mean you aim to use them on people.”

“So it’s nothing, then.”

Blood improved his posture. “I’m a sworn officer of the law,” he said. “I turn a blind eye on nothing worth seeing. But ninety-five percent of it is all jaw. It’s talk. Nothing you can arrest anybody for.”

“Not unless they violate the letter of the law.”

That felt loaded. Blood accepted it gingerly. “That’s right,” he said. “Like living near a nuclear plant, I suppose. It’s right there, so it’s always somewhere in your mind, but unless and until it goes off, there isn’t anything much you can do.”

Banish showed him some distaste then, nodding. “As for that note,” he said, “we’ve seen it before. We also know that Ables disassociated himself from the White Aryan Resistance. He rejected them as too moderate. Anything else?”

Blood stood there. “Guess not,” he said.

Banish set aside the sheaf of papers then, and Blood saw photographs underneath, grade school portraits of the Ables children. Banish picked them up and was looking at them intently, which Blood took to mean that it was time for him to leave. He lingered another few moments in case it was another of the agent’s games, but Banish was truly absorbed in the photographs and seemingly oblivious to Blood’s presence.

On his way back out through the main tent, as he neared the telephone switchboard, Blood saw the agent there acknowledging something through his headset and throwing a series of switches. The woman agent from the entrance noticed this too and discreetly got up from behind her desk and crossed to the switchboard, her badge flap hanging off her skirt belt. “What did he want?” she quietly asked the switchboard agent.

“An outside line. He told me to turn off the recorder.”

Whatever was going on, Blood was already at the exit and could stall no longer. He stopped a good distance away outside to think. There was a wide anthill on the ground by his foot, a herculean effort fashioned of sand of a lighter color than the dirt base it was founded upon. Blood leveled it with a soft swipe of his boot toe. He watched the ants dig out and race around in circles, then he started back down the mountain.

Cincinnati, Ohio

Frank Dewey looked at the telephone on the third ring. The other four lines were already lit up. He had wanted to get away in time for his son’s afternoon football practice, but his partner was off on an extended trip to Vegas, mixing business with a little pleasure, and the office was swamped. Dewey had seventeen employees under him, and two part-timers, which was a lot for a Cincinnati professional investigation firm. But business was absolutely booming.

Dewey and Stone Associates specialized in peace-of-mind investigations. In the age of AIDS and personals ads, people were running scared. Courtship was fast becoming a thing of the past. People wanted facts and they wanted them now, and a comprehensive background check in many cases revealed more than years of a relationship ever would. In a matter of days or even hours, Dewey and Stone could distill a person’s social, financial, and health status into a concise two-to-three-page report. Five hundred dollars for a simple background check, or seventy-five dollars per hour per operative for a comprehensive investigation, was a small premium to pay for insurance against a relationship ending in disillusionment or even tragedy.

Example. A young woman, the daughter of a friend and business associate, had come into the office two days before requesting a background check on her new boyfriend. There were now two pieces of paper on Dewey’s desk. One was a copy of the boyfriend’s San Francisco rap sheet, showing two separate arrests for heroin possession in 1989, a year and a half before moving to Cincy. The other was a copy of a recent outpatient receipt from a local clinic that had forwarded blood samples under the boyfriend’s Social Security number and a dummy name to a serology clearing house in Philadelphia. The results of the tests were to be mailed back directly to the dummy patient’s home address, which was listed as a mail drop two blocks away from the boyfriend’s apartment.

The young woman was due in Saturday morning at nine. It satisfied Dewey’s personal law of averages: Ninety-five percent of the time, if they’re suspicious enough to hire a private investigator, they’re probably right.

He checked his watch under his starched blue sleeve cuff, then heard the phone ring again and pressed the button and grabbed up the line. “Dewey and Stone Associates,” he said.

“Mr. Dewey.”

Dewey recognized the voice immediately. He sat back from his glass-topped desk and folded one leg neatly over the other, adjusting his sleeve cuff back over his gold watchband. This client interested him. Dewey couldn’t say why, but he felt a sort of kinship with the guy, one of the few cases he still personally oversaw.

“Mr. Banish,” he said. “You’re two days late. I thought maybe something happened.”

“Something came up.”

This guy never missed his twice-monthly call. He never missed a payment. The money was transferred to Dewey and Stone from a local bank account in Cincinnati, but correspondence was mailed out from the firm to a General Delivery address somewhere in the middle of the state of Montana.

“Look, Mr. Banish,” said Dewey, sitting forward again, opening a side drawer and fingering through files. “We got to take you off billable hours here. You’re a regular client, it’s not hard work. I think we could settle on a monthly fee.”

“Whatever,” Banish said. “Go ahead.”

He was impatient and that was unusual. This Banish was a strange guy. Something told Dewey he was ex-cop.

“She’s broken it off with her beau,” Dewey said, flipping open the file. “We don’t know exactly what happened, or why, or how, but they’re through. She was back at the piano bar again three nights ago. She requested two songs to be played and stayed about an hour, drank two Manhattans. She left alone.”

Banish said, “Good.” He said it without much emotion, but it seemed a reasonable enough response regarding one’s former wife.

“The downside is, she’s smoking again. And not the filters. There may have been more riding on this relationship than we originally thought. Also, she’s seriously considering giving up the condo for something smaller.”

“Smaller?” said Banish. “What about Nicole?”

Dewey laid it out straight. “Well, that’s the thing right there, Mr. Banish,” he said. “The big news is that it looks like your daughter is getting married.” He opened the file on his desk. “The same guy, the one who works at the radio station. A half-carat.” He picked up a copy of the credit card bill. “Just under three grand on his Visa, mail-ordered from Tiffany’s in Chicago on the twenty-fifth of July. He signed for delivery on the twenty-eighth.”

Dewey sat waiting for a response. Even he couldn’t help feeling for the guy. Here was Dewey, a total stranger to these people, and he’d seen the couple together countless times, in fact from their very first date up till now, whereas by all indications Banish hadn’t seen his own daughter in more than two years.

So it seemed important to say something here. “He proposed in a restaurant,” Dewey said. “One knee, all that. People at the other tables clapped.” Nothing came back right away. “Look, Mr. Banish,” he said. “I don’t ask, because it’s not my place, and because my clients are always right. Always. And that hasn’t changed. But maybe you could go see them now. Maybe you could at least try giving them a call.”

Banish said, “That is not possible.”

Again Dewey waited for Banish. And Frank Dewey was not a man normally made uncomfortable. But, whether ex-cop to ex-cop, or father to father, he felt as though he knew this guy. Something here got to him. He thought of his own twelve-year-old son, and football practice, and what Dewey himself stood someday to lose. He sat forward in his chair, checking his watch again. He would get away right after this call.

“You want the usual package?” he said. “Pictures, phone tapes, transcripts?”

After a good long while Banish’s voice said, “Just the pictures.”

Command Tent

[PARASIEGE, p. 35]

Therefore, it must be assumed that SA Banish willfully and knowingly disobeyed the Press Service Office’s command.

Again, SA Banish’s judgment and competence were called into question. The near success of a terrorist assault on the federal staging area went all but ignored, while overworked agents accused of minor logistic transgressions were promptly and publicly disciplined.

Following the extremist incident on the adjoining mountain, SA Banish received a local county sheriff in private conference, then placed a long-distance telephone call which, per SA Banish’s order, went unmonitored. This accounts for the three-minute tape lapse as reported by investigators. Directly following that conversation, SA Banish departed the command tent without informing SA Coyle of his destination. It is presumed that he withdrew to his private trailer. He did not return to the command tent for a matter of hours.

Staging Area

At dinnertime Sheriff Blood was eating his tin plate serving of meatloaf and rice at a picnic table set apart from the long bench rows of off-duty marshals and agents hungrily chowing down. He was closer to the marshals’ row, and the men’s displeasure there was apparent. They looked ragged, first of all, as four days of mountain living will do to men accustomed to the city. Even their short-clipped haircuts looked bushy. There are itches you get from mountains that bugs are only a part of, to the point where even Blood himself was feeling a little dusty. He had been living out of the overnight pack he regularly kept with his fishing gear in the back of his Bronco.

So there was that, the griminess settling into pores used to regular and thorough washing, which is why mountain men always rub their arms as though to stay warm. Then there was the aggravation of it all: a prolonged staring match with a man who wouldn’t blink, who wouldn’t even open his eyes, a criminal who was so close they could just about spit on him without taking a running start. The feeling that they were being shown up, that this man, this criminal, was enjoying some dark chuckling in his cabin at their expense. It was obvious to any that these were proud men who did not take affronts kindly. These were men not normally thumbed at. In this you could see the reason that the object of their animosity was starting, like five-day-old cream, to turn.

The top ranks were growing antsy too. Blood was near enough to the black van earlier in the day to hear Banish and Fagin and the sound man entertaining potential strategies. The sound man suggested “insinuating” a listening device into the cabin by way of the chimney, but Banish dismissed it, citing Ables’s background in electronics. Then Fagin pushed hard for some sort of gas attack, which Banish rejected as well, saying that the Ables family might have gas masks themselves and, if so, the agents and marshals going in would be facing a slaughter. Banish shot down each proposal similarly, with stubborn reason, and there was nothing Fagin or the sound man could do to change his mind.

Now it was that guard-changing time of day, the period just before dusk when the moon rises high and fat across from the setting sun and things don’t seem quite as they should. There was a nip in the air, but it was humid enough still and the bugs came fierce. Brian Kearney appeared with a tin plate and plunked it down across from Blood, his back to the marshals’ bench, the rookie unusually quiet and even serious, not saying hello, not given to his normal idle chatter. He ate purposefully and glumly, as though he had deep troubles. He likely was stewing about the way the Mellis family was being treated down below. Blood drew him out only once, about bees, after shooing a yellow jacket off his food.

“I saw a man stung to death once,” Kearney said. “In basic training. He was on grounds keeping duty, up on a cherry picker pruning trees, and I guess he must have hit on a hive, because by the time he got down he was completely covered in them. It was a swarm. He was thrashing around and running, I think even trying to scream, and there was that mad droning noise you’d expect. None of us knew what to do. We went and kind of pushed him with poles into a pond right by there, thinking the water would help, but it didn’t. I thought a lot about that afterward. What it must have been like to be covered with those bees — they were frenzied — all yellow and black and furry, driving their stingers into him one after the other, and then him going like that into the water. I wonder if he even knew what was happening to him. If he knew why we were all pushing and kicking at him and being so rough.”

Blood said, “That’s some ugly death.”

Kearney was looking down at the table. “Stung more than a thousand times. I never killed a bee since. I know they don’t hold grudges, but at the time it seemed like payback, it truly did.”

“You mean to say, nature took a hand.”

Kearney barely nodded. “And he was a good kid too, he didn’t deserve it. A skinny kid. No one deserved that.”

Blood was surprised by the hue of Kearney’s thoughts. Then they were both distracted by a thick round of laughter from the marshals’ bench. A minor uproar, but it was dark laughter, the kind that conics at someone else’s expense. The kind that sets you off listening for more. Part of it is the curiosity, the way a barking dog makes you turn on the lights at night. And part of it is the little kid inside that wants to know whether or not they’re laughing at you. Blood consciously ignored their comments and monitored them at the same time.

“The man is incompetent,” he heard one of them say behind Kearney.

“He’s a screw up, I think. He don’t know what the hell he’s doing.”

“He’s just stalling for time is all.”

“I heard his last negotiation went bad.”

Blood watched Kearney stiffen across the table. The rookie’s shoulders broadened and thin mists of breath curled out of his mouth. Blood looked him in the eye and there was an acknowledgment without gesture, and then they were both looking at each other and plainly listening.

Another marshal said, “What do you mean?”

“I mean deaths. Hostage deaths. Him blowing the whole thing.”

“You gotta be shitting.”

Then something Blood couldn’t quite hear. Then:

“I hear he drinks.”

“Get the fuck out.”

“No, wait,” said a new voice, indignant. “I seen him taking brew away from some state troopers today.”

Kearney’s eyes started to glow.

“Probably got into his private cabinet.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“The selfish bastard.”

Kearney put down his fork. He placed his hands flat on the tabletop and made as though he was going to stand. Blood rose just slightly ahead of him, grasping his wrist.

“Let it go,” Blood told him. “Not your fight.”

It was just a few marshals talking. All were listening, but most of them probably only because they had to, because it was their necks on the line, not because they enjoyed gossip or wanted to hear. There was one talker who seemed to be the ringleader and Blood picked him out from among the others, set back from the bench, holding court. Blood looked around and saw Perkins too, hanging off to one side but well within listening range, not busying himself, not even moving, not doing a damn thing.

Kearney was glowering. To him it was something more than blatant disrespect, beyond outright offense.

“I heard they couldn’t can him, so they stuck him out in some dry prairie town where he wouldn’t hurt no one. They buried the fucking guy.”

“Then what the hell’s he doing mixed up in this?”

“Good question. A good fucking question.”

Another new voice, doubting. “How do you say you know all this?”

But over him, someone else snapping his fingers in emphasis, rising to the emotion. “This guy could go at any minute—”

“That’s not half of it. He did time in a fucking hospital. That’s right — but not just any hospital either.”

Kearney’s eyes were burning right through Blood.

Reactions now. Another voice. “The fuck you talking about?”

“I’m telling you, this guy’s three bricks short, he’s crazy—”

Kearney shot upright. Before Blood could stop him, he had turned and stepped over the seat bench and was now facing the wide double row of U.S. Marshals. Blood rose behind him.

“Who said that?” Kearney said. His fists were at his sides.

The marshals all stopped and looked over at him. Nobody said anything, but Kearney must have picked out the ringleader right off, probably by the slant of the man’s grin.

“Get up,” Kearney said.

The marshal just kept grinning at first and looking around at all the others. None of them grinned back. Most were still looking over at Kearney. The marshal sat a bit straighter then, his grin leveling out as he met Kearney’s stare, but still he said nothing.

“Get up,” Kearney said, voice louder now, nearly menacing.

Blood could tell that Kearney was shaking, but not from fear. He had never seen him like this. This happy-go-lucky kid. Built like a baseball player, and tall, summoning shoulders to fill out his police uniform, and the marshal was seeing this now too.

Blood looked again over at Perkins. He was pretending to be unaware of what was happening. Fagin had entered the bench area from the side, looking on with interest.

The ringleader shrugged up at Kearney. “What’s your problem?” he said.

Kearney said, “Get up.”

The marshal stood then. He had no other choice. He was grinning at being called out, making as much a joke of it as he could. “What?” he continued, half-mocking. Only the marshals’ table now separated them. “What’s it to you?”

The men sitting near him pulled gradually away, to get a better view and also to distance themselves. They were going to let this happen. The marshal sensed this and looked around.

“What do you think this here is?” he said to Kearney.

Kearney said, “I’m calling you a liar.”

“Brian,” Blood said behind him.

“I mean, what the hell do you care,” the marshal continued, “what FBI agent drinks and which one don’t? What the hell are you? Some hick-town traffic cop.”

Kearney’s breath was swirling around his head. His voice was somebody else’s now. “Take back what you said, or I’ll take it back from you.”

The marshal tried to rally his mates. “What the hell is this Okie talking about?”

Kearney was remarkably fast crashing over the table to get to the marshal. The others all leapt to their feet but not one interfered. Kearney grabbed the man by the front of his uniform and in one rough move propelled him back against the next parallel table, where the FBI agents quickly cleared out of the way. Blood hurried up and over his own table after them.

Kearney had stopped there, leaning over the marshal bent backward and flat across the tabletop.

“You take it back,” he said, breathing hard.

Blood saw the marshal reaching behind him for a glass bottle of ketchup. Blood started toward them fast, but before he could get there Fagin was standing between the two men.

Fagin backed Kearney off with one flat hand and allowed his marshal to get to his feet. The bottle remained on the table. “I like a good fucking brawl as much as the next guy,” Fagin announced. “But not here, and not now.”

The marshal said, “Sir, you—”

Fagin cut him off. “Dinner’s over. Everybody break it up, and I want my over nights up and reporting for duty ASAP.”

Kearney started away then, fast. Fagin turned and watched him go. Then he noticed Blood looking across at him. “What the fuck was that all about?” Fagin said. But Blood looked into the man’s eyes and saw that he knew.

Command Tent

Brian Kearney walked for a while, and finally when he knew where he was, the high lamps were on and cutting into the twilight falling over the clearing, and he was standing in front of the command tent. He didn’t think he’d planned on going there, but now that he was there he realized he probably had. He wanted to warn Agent Banish somehow. He wanted to warn him that lies were being spread. But as soon as Brian reached the tent, he realized that he had nothing to say. And then he felt even worse. He looked around at the lit clearing and had to ask himself what it was all for. He felt about two inches tall and half as powerful. Right about then, Agent Banish stepped out of the tent in front of him.

Agent Banish was wearing a blue FBI jacket and had a radio in his hand. He looked at Brian strangely, as though he didn’t know where he had come from, or maybe Brian had interrupted a train of thought. “What is it?” Agent Banish said.

Brian couldn’t even shake his head. He stood there kind of searching Agent Banish’s face, studying it for imperfections. It was deep-creased and shadowed, and bruised-looking under the eyes, and his lips were chapped. His shirt collar was sagged and rumpled, and he looked pale, even old. But his chin and cheeks were shaved, and the eyes themselves seemed clear. He was about to say something else, because Brian was paralyzed and simply could not speak, but then like a cat hearing something in the walls, Agent Banish became distracted. He started to glance around the clearing.

Brian looked too. He picked up on the nearby agents touching their ears and moving around, reacting. People starting to scatter throughout the gloomy clearing. Voices being raised.

Agent Banish turned on his radio. “Fagin,” he said into it.

After a moment the radio crackled with Marshal Fagin’s voice. “We have movement.”

Agent Banish’s mouth tightened. “The phone?”

“Negative. Southeast side of the compound. Escapees. Three.”

Agent Banish said, “Presume complicity. Get up there and bring them in separately and quietly.”

He switched off the radio and started away at a brisk pace across the clearing. Brian stood there just long enough to watch him disappear, striding hard into the shadows falling between two high lights, then hurried over to a Jeep to get back down as fast as he could to his assigned post. Things were finally starting to happen, and he knew now that Agent Banish was in full control.

Sound Truck

Perkins was already at the sound truck when Banish arrived. The sound man was seated in front of the monitor bank. Banish climbed inside. His blood was pumping again.

On the monitor showing the artificially bright eastern angle of the mountaintop, a team of marshals was rough-searching three people lying prone on the ground.

Perkins said, “The Newlands and Charles Mellis.”

“Escaped or released?”

The sound man said with a shrug, “They just walked out.”

Banish watched the monitor a moment longer. “Keep all three separated,” he said to Perkins. “Debrief them before you feed them. Read them their rights, then get everything down on tape. Cover it with your 302 and see me after. I want observations and impressions. Then call the U.S. Attorneys. They’ll need statements and so on.”

Perkins was nodding, taking it all in. “Wait,” he said. “We have only two holding tents.”

Banish acknowledged this with a frown. “All right,” he said. “Clear the personal effects out of my trailer. Put Mellis in there and assign two marshals to guard it full-time.” He raised his radio then. “Fagin. Anything?”

Fagin’s voice came back from the mountaintop. “Negative.”

Banish nodded. He said, “Keep watching.”

Sound Truck

Perkins was waiting for Banish outside the sound truck. His ear wire was out and hanging down to his lapel and he was smoking a cigarette. Banish had not smelled tobacco on him before. A roar started up again before they could speak, a UH-1 National Guard helicopter lifting off into the early evening sky and circling away. Dirt swirled up and the clearing shook. Banish would return to his office to find half the papers shaken off his desk again.

Perkins released a sighed stream of smoke out one side of his mouth. “The Newlands check out,” he said. “I took them backward and forward through it, the same exact story. Kept in a back room by the rear porch, given bread and fruit and water rations twice daily, but didn’t know what was going on inside. Ables purposefully kept them isolated. They said they could hear music playing and the voice on the loudspeaker, but they didn’t know what the reaction was. They heard the infant crying every once in a while, but Mrs. Mellis brought them their food and she never said anything.”

“So what happened?”

“They said it came out of nowhere. Ables appeared with Charles Mellis and told all three to get their things and go.”

“Why not Mellis’s wife?”

“Unknown. The Newlands say they don’t know much about Mellis, except that he was very tight with Ables. But since the shootout, they’ve been in back of the cabin and everyone else was in the front.”

Banish nodded. “What does Mellis say?”

Perkins took another deep drag, blew it out. “He admitted right away to being involved in the shootout. I Miranda’d him but he kept right on talking. Said Ables is losing control up there. Said he’s not thinking clearly, he’s talking to himself, pacing around the cabin, blah, blah, blah. But then a funny thing happened. Mellis figured out that I wasn’t Watson and he clammed up. He says he has something important to say, but only to the man in charge.”

Banish was shaking his head.

Perkins said, “All he said was that people will get hurt. That’s all he would tell me. Ask me, do I believe him? I don’t know. My read is that he’s serious, at least about refusing to talk to anyone else. He does seem anxious to spill, though.”

Banish said, “Out of the question.” The negotiator never met with the hostages.

“We need a break here,” said Perkins. “The men, everybody, getting very anxious. Maybe you should at least look at the videotape.”

“How does he seem?” Banish said, avoiding.

Perkins twisted apart his shirt collar. “Truthfully, I think Fagin scared him a little up there. But you get past that and he’s overly helpful. Like someone with a lot to get off his chest. Like the guy who walks in off the street and says he wants to show you where the bodies are buried.”

Banish was frowning and shaking his head again when in the distance they heard the pop-pop of gunfire. Both men looked quickly up toward the mountaintop, which could not be seen from where they were standing. Then more scattered reports.

Perkins flicked away his cigarette and fumbled the wire back into his ear. Banish worked his radio. “Fagin,” Banish said.

Fagin’s voice came back loud and full of adrenaline. “Shooting out the lights.”

Banish heard a burst of reports through the radio and the sound of glass breaking, then Fagin’s voice again over it. “Fucking crap-shoot, from holes in the cabin walls.”

Banish nodded, pleased. “Good,” he told him. “Put that down as their first communication. Hold your fire and get everybody down low.”

A pause. “I didn’t get that last part.”

“You got it all right. Hold your fire and get your men down low. There are still children in there. Pull back when it stops, then get those lights repaired ASAP.”

More gunfire and shattering and ricochets through the radio. “Motherfuckers,” spat Fagin, muffled.

Banish switched off. Perkins’s eyes were attentive and he was standing up straighter in his sagging clothes. “It’s working,” he said.

Banish showed him no reaction. “Get to the sound truck,” he said. “Have him start ringing the telephone again.”

Perkins nodded. “You think Ables is losing it?”

Another distant smattering of reports. Banish looked up at the mountain. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Staging Area

Brian pulled up the Jeep before the tents and hopped out. He could tell just by the look on Mr. and Mrs. Mellis’s faces that the sheer magnitude of the staging area the tents, the vehicles, the equipment — astounded them. It made him see it with fresh eyes again, and he got a bolt of renewed enthusiasm. The FBI in Huddleston. And him involved in the process, dealing with FBI agents, knowing them and being known by name.

He helped Mrs. Mellis out of the Jeep and walked them both toward the far-right tent nearest the chain fence and the long row of service vehicles. They slowed halfway, looking up and squinting as a spotlight swiped the clearing and a huge helicopter roared overhead.

Mr. Mellis was wiping his flat hands on the legs of his trousers. It had been a long wait for them. Brian explained that their son was still under arrest, but that he had asked to see them and the federal authorities had OK’d it. The couple kept nodding their heads, too grateful to quibble. At this point they would take whatever they could get.

Three men emerged from the tent, two tall marshals with Charles Mellis between them. He was a big spud, with a bushy beard and oversized boots, and shackles on his wrists and ankles. Brian had the parents stay where they were, then pulled off to the side himself. The marshals walked their prisoner about halfway, then stopped and undid both sets of cuffs, which Brian thought was a really fine gesture.

Charles Mellis jogged the last few steps into his mother’s arms. He towered over her. Her arms went around his hips but her hands didn’t touch behind. She was crying and saying his name over and over again, “Charlie, Charlie,” and his father, a good-sized guy himself, was smiling and patting his son on the back, and even, it seemed, wiping his eyes.

His mother pulled back to get a better look up at her son, probably to make sure he was all right, and then he was shaking his father’s hand and hugging his mother again, holding her head against one of his suspender buckles. Just standing there witnessing it, Brian felt a warm buzz of satisfaction that he had admittedly done nothing to earn.

He was backing away farther, trying to let the family have even more of a private moment, when he saw two men watching from the shadow of a large truck off to the side. Brian instantly recognized the posture of the taller one with his arms crossed as belonging to Agent Banish, and was surprised that he was there watching, even more surprised than he had been when the order came down to the barricade originally to let Mr. and Mrs. Mellis through. Brian moved toward the two men through the shadows under the high lights. He saw that the second expressionless man was Agent Perkins.

Brian was probably too caught up in the moment, but he felt as though he had to thank Agent Banish for doing the right thing. He said to him, “It’s a good thing you did here.”

Agent Banish showed no reaction. He did not respond or even let on that he had heard. Instead, he said something to Agent Perkins that did not involve Brian. He said, “I’ll see him” — almost with an air of regret. Then he turned and walked away.

Trailer

Banish had the two marshals wait outside, then entered his former trailer behind Perkins. Charles Mellis was seated without restraints behind the small wooden table, drumming his thick fingers on its chipped surface. He was big and eager-looking, like some dogs, and the tangled black-red beard hanging from his sideburns and crowding his mouth sprang like a disguise from his pale, freckled baby-face.

His eyes were black and guarded, probably sizing up Banish in comparison to his imagined Watson. He was a big, sloppy kid. He had wrinkled wet lips and knuckles the size of walnuts.

Banish glanced at the bed he had had no luck with. Mellis’s feet would hang over the end like tongues.

Banish moved to stand across from him. “Special Agent Bob Watson,” he said.

Mellis showed relief. He placed the voice. He was nodding.

Perkins chimed in. “Mr. Mellis, your rights as I explained them to you still stand.”

“He’s crazy,” Mellis blurted. “He’s gone off the deep end. And violent.”

Banish said, “We know he’s violent. Do you mean violent toward his family?”

“Getting there.” Mellis nodded. “Sure getting there. And it’s a change in him, in who he is, and that’s got me worried.”

“But everyone else is in good health. The children.”

“So far.” He nodded.

“Health conditions OK? Enough food, water?”

“Enough for now. Glenn’s a survivor. But he’s ranting and raving like you wouldn’t know.”

Mellis was holding Banish’s gaze and blinking slowly. He used his arms on the table to help him over the words, occasionally dropping his bearded chin to accentuate what he was saying. He appeared earnest and overly sincere, the way lonely people become when addressed on the witness stand.

Banish said, “I’m going to ask you some direct questions now, Mr. Mellis. Approximately how many guns does Mr. Ables have in the residence?”

Mellis inflated as though he couldn’t get the words out, then swept the table with an elaborate arm gesture. “How many do you need?” he said finally, blowing out a breath.

Banish nodded, encouraging him. “Why won’t Mr. Ables use the telephone we provided?”

“He don’t trust you-all. He says there’s a sharpshooter out there waiting to put one in his back. Says if I went out for it, I’d get one in the back. And he says there’s poison or gas or something on the mouth part.”

“Is he monitoring our transmissions?”

Mellis expelled another breath of relief, as though grateful that the question had been asked. It was easier to betray someone with a nod. “He’s got a whole setup in there, he knows all the government frequencies.”

Banish’s eyes stayed on Mellis’s face, trained not to react. “What about your wife, Mr. Mellis?”

“Shelley couldn’t leave the kids. Margie’s not so good now, her cancer’s back, and I knew Shelley wouldn’t leave. Margie’s stubborn too. Says she’s through with hospitals.”

“Why are you telling us all this, Mr. Mellis? What do you expect to gain from it?”

Mellis straightened in concern. “Nothing for myself. I didn’t shoot nobody up there. Not without being shot at first.”

“What happened to make him let you go, then?”

Mellis shook his head. “It finally got so that I just asked him to — can you see what I mean? — and he did. Glenn said he was letting the Newlands go because he couldn’t use them for nothing, and I saw that things were getting bad with him, so I asked him if I could just go too. Not that I’m a traitor. I ain’t, I am not.” He shook his head strenuously back and forth. “And I ain’t broke with Glenn either. I ain’t stabbing him in the back. But he’s got his kids up there under the gun with him now too, and I don’t think he’s reasoning things so well.” He was looking back and forth from Banish to Perkins. “So I thought maybe I could argue his case for him down here. I never told him that, of course. He wouldn’t stand for it and he’d probably just as soon shoot me. But when I seen those kids’ little faces. They’re all my family and I want to do right by them. Because I seen what’s coming and it ain’t pretty, nor is it safe. Because Glenn don’t bend. I see that now, he don’t bend for nothing, it’s glory or death with him, but still he don’t really want to hurt nobody. Truly, he don’t. I knowed the man for years. But you’re backing him up against a brick wall. You’re pushing his fatherhood and his manhood right up in his face and forcing him to do something he don’t want to do. Nobody can draw a line in the dirt with Glenn Ables. Not without him stepping over it and going right for your throat. That’s why I’m here now and I’m asking you — for them kids up there, and Margie, and my wife, a couple of human lives that maybe don’t add up much to you, but to me, they do, a lot. Couldn’t you just drop the charges? All he wants is to be left alone up there. All he wants is his land back and his family. If you could just drop the charges before it’s too late, and all just go away—”

His eyes were getting damp. He looked as though he wanted to stand, but he didn’t, being careful or perhaps just polite. Glistenings of spit speckled the stray whiskers around his mouth.

Banish said, “Is that what you brought me in here to tell me?”

Mellis nodded once. “Yes.”

Banish turned to leave. Perkins turned with him and they got as far as the door before Mellis said, “Wait.” He said it without rising from his chair, without any urgency. He said it almost sadly. “All right,” he said.

They turned. Mellis looked long at Perkins, then looked away. Banish turned to Perkins. He nodded to him. Perkins frowned and stared down at the trailer floor a moment, smiling bitterly, then stepped outside the trailer.

Banish moved closer to Mellis. “That nigger up there on the mountain,” Mellis said in confidence, “that big dark one. He got me in the gut with the butt of his rifle when I come out. Had my hands up over my head peaceful and obedient and everything.”

Banish said, “So?”

“Just keep him the hell away from me. I mean that.”

“You’re making threats now, Mr. Mellis?”

“No, sir. I am just telling you straight. I thought maybe you might care. But that ain’t what I have to say. You need to understand why I’m saying what I’m saying, though. It’s on account of things already going too far and me seeing the toll it’s taking on one man.” He was looking up at Banish from where he sat. “I’m trying to prevent things here, so that it’ll help. But I want you to take that into your decision-making, so that things’ll go easier for Glenn when this is all over and done with.”

Banish said, “Just tell me what you have to tell me.”

“But I’m a man of my word and I want to take you at yours, and have this said in good faith. I don’t care for myself. I’m asking you — couldn’t you just think of this as coming from Glenn’s mouth instead of my own, and take that into your considerations later?”

Banish said patiently, “You’ll have to tell me what it is first, Mr. Mellis.”

“A claymore mine. A bomb. He’s booby-trapped the mountain.”

Banish felt the color wash from his face. Training or no training, his head started to buzz.

“Where?” he said as evenly as he could.

“Near the cabin. It’s just one.”

“Where?”

“Now I’m only saying this in good faith—”

Banish said forcefully, “Where?”

Mellis nodded over his own shoulder. “Up near the cabin. There’s no saying exactly, but I could take you up there—”

Banish reached across and grabbed the big kid’s flannel collar. “Say exactly,” he said.

Mellis looked scared. “It don’t have no marker. It’s all woods up there. Near a stump and a fallen tree. It’s hidden.”

“Command-detonated?”

“No — simple trip wire.”

“Between the cabin and the lights?”

“Sure.” Mellis nodded, blinking.

Banish released him and stood back a few steps. A claymore mine. Banish thought of all the men up there.

Staging Area

Fagin was standing under a high arc light and watching his marshals suiting up Banish in a BDU, a battle dress uniform, black fatigues and a flak jacket and bulletproof helmet. They were issuing him a 9mm sidearm and having him sign for it.

Fagin said, “This is fucking bullshit.”

He looked at the agents and other marshals standing around them, including ever-present Perkins, and then off to the side, being zipped into a similar black BDU suit, Charles fucking Mellis.

Fagin said, “This is fucking goofy, you following him into the woods like this.”

“The mountain is secure,” Banish said, tugging on his gloves. “He is unarmed. I will be watching him, and your men will be watching us from the trees.”

“Fuck it,” Fagin said. “I’m going too.”

Banish shook his head. “He doesn’t like you.”

“Doesn’t like me? He doesn’t like me? You think I’m up here to fucking meet people?”

“You’re staying behind. And I want all your men pulled back another twenty yards.”

“Fuck that. Fuck it. I’m in charge of security and I won’t allow it.”

Banish accepted his weapon and ejected the clip, thumbing out rounds, counting them. “It’s real simple,” he said. “I am responsible for every man on this mountain. Mellis is the only one who knows where the mine is, and he has agreed to lead me and only me to it. We will climb up the mountain, slip into the no-man’s-land, isolate the trip mechanism, and then back off so you and your men can disable it.”

Fagin said, “He’s bullshitting. He’s stalling or something. He’s full of shit up to his fucking beard.”

Banish said, “If so, then he has nothing to gain except wasting my time. If not, then there’s a tree trunk up there with a projectile mine strapped to it. It’s on a trip wire a raccoon could trigger and it’s facing downhill. That’s a widow-maker, Fagin. These woods are full of agents and marshals. Some may be your men, but all of them are mine. The circumstance here is that, for better or for worse, he trusts me. Things might be different if you had thought a moment before suckering him up there.”

“Fuck him. Fucking piece of trash.”

They handed Banish a flashlight and then the strobe. “What’s this?”

“Infrared strobe,” Fagin said. “So night-vision can pick you up in the trees if we need to, fast. No fucking lights up there still.”

Banish said, “Good. Better cover. And stay off the radio. He’s listening in.”

“Fuck it,” Fagin said, more determined than ever. “I’m going.”

Banish didn’t answer, reloading the 15-clip and popping it back in and tucking the piece into his holster.

Fagin grabbed him by the shoulder and said, “You listen to me. I’ve got a fucking job to do here. The marshals are in charge of security, and I am in charge of the marshals, and that’s that. So don’t talk to me about widow-makers. I’ve lost one man already, and I don’t care who you are, I’m not losing one more. You are not going up there solo and I’m the best fucking man to go with you.”

A voice came up behind Fagin. “I’ll go.”

Fagin turned to see who it was. He saw the Indian sheriff coming toward them carrying a big Browning 12-gauge.

Banish said immediately, “No way.”

Fagin eyed the shotgun and reached for it. The Indian presented it, and Fagin hefted the thing and turned it over in his hands. The semiautomatic Browning shotgun was a sporting piece, but the Indian had stripped down the walnut stock and dulled all the steel parts. He had custom-policed the thing.

“Expensive piece,” Fagin said, sighting down the barrel, feeling its weight. “Nice weapon. You come prepared, anyway.”

The Indian said, “I know this mountain. I hunted all over it as a boy.”

“Negative,” Banish said, done suiting up. “This is no photo op. No politicians on the mountain, and no heroes.”

The Indian said, “Politicians?”

“That’s right. You’re not riding to reelection on a short hike up a hill.”

This was something here. Fagin rode Banish like a bastard day and night and the mope reacted as though he were asking him for the time. Then the Indian comes up and says word one and Banish runs down his throat.

The Indian was confused. “Two officers in my jurisdiction were shot at—”

“Jurisdiction.” Banish was shaking his head. “Now you sound like the police chief. Now all of a sudden you’re worried about jurisdiction.”

“That’s right.” The Indian nodded, relaxed but firm. “Because I figure now maybe I can earn my keep up here.” He looked around. “You’ve all been feeding me these past few days, and it hasn’t been particularly good food, but it’s kept me from going hungry. And I’ve been using the facilities here, running up quite a tab. But I am the sheriff of this county and am nobody’s lapdog. Now you are climbing up my tree. Now you need me.”

Banish said, “Somebody take this man’s gun away from him and get him a cold drink.”

Fagin had had enough. “Will you two shut up, you fucks. A claymore mine. Eight hundred steel ball bearings blasted into a hundred-fifty-yard kill zone, shredding you to fucking ribbons before you can even think to shit yourself. If one of you bickering girls doesn’t know where the fuck he’s going, then you’re both gonna get there, and awful fucking fast.”

Fagin thumbed the marshals over to equip the Indian before Banish could say anything else. Fagin was going to win this one. He was right as rain this time and Banish fucking knew it.

He spoke to one of the other deputy marshals, then issued coded orders over the radio to his men, and by the time he was done the Indian was suited and ready. The three of them walked off toward the trees, all camouflage and dark paint, Banish with the flashlight in his hands and Mellis in between, taller and wider than both. They walked into the dark tree line at the base of the mountain and were gone. It was at least a good fifteen-minute hike up to the zone.

Fagin shook his head. Fucking Banish. Doesn’t want to be involved with Tactical, then doesn’t want anyone else but himself involved. Crazy fuck.

He saw Perkins drifting over toward him. Perkins was like that, shifty, blowing around and feeling his way into things and then melding with them. A penny boy. A chameleon in a suit and tie, and Fagin could use that. He knew he had a sounding board here.

“Crazy fuck,” Fagin said aloud when Perkins was near enough.

Perkins looked at him as though he wasn’t sure what Fagin was talking about. “Sorry?”

“Fucking unpredictable,” Fagin said. “I don’t like that.”

Perkins nodded. “Well,” he said, a sentence. “Maybe it’ll all work out his way in the end.”

Fagin looked at him more closely. Perkins was smiling faintly.

“You serve in “Nam?” Fagin said.

Perkins shook his head.

Fagin nodded back behind them. “When those Hueys take off sometimes, dipping away over the trees, I do get flashes.” It was a fertile part of his memory when triggered. “Banish served,” he added. “Psyops specialist. Psychological Operations. Propaganda and persuasion.”

Perkins nodded slow. “Like Tokyo Rose,” he said.

Fucking citizen. “A little more sophisticated than that,” Fagin said. “Deception. Head games. The fingernails on the blackboard.”

Perkins looked at Fagin. “You have good sources,” he said, dropping his hand lightly into his pants pockets and rocking twice on his heels. “From what I understand, Banish was a real asshole before the crack-up too.”

Hearing a Mormon trying to swear was like listening to a drunk trying to sing. “At least then,” Fagin said, “he was a respected asshole.”

They both nearly nodded then, Fagin looking across at the dark trees and Perkins doing the same. Fagin could feel the conversation ending then and them going their separate ways. He was glad.

“You know what?” he said.

Perkins shook his head. “What?”

Fagin spat at a tuft of straw weeds, and missed. “I’m just waiting for him to fuck up.”

No-Man’s-Land

Banish switched off the flashlight. They were coming up through the trees. Mellis was a few yards ahead of Banish, Blood somewhere behind. The big kid climbed quickly but Banish kept him close and in full view. The wider spacing of the trunks meant that they were near the top. They were into the zone. The spotter marshals sat somewhere high in the trees behind them. Music blared into the no-man’s-land from the left.

Mellis covered the uneven, rising ground in broad, lumbering strides, often talking to Banish over his shoulder. “It’ll go easier for him now, right? This’ll make things easier.”

Banish said, “When did you help him set it up?”

“Some months ago. Glenn always knew what was coming. He knew he was being watched. He always said Judgment would come at his front doorstep. The first shots of the final battle would be fired there, he said.”

Banish could smell the dogs. “Where did he get the mine?”

“I think he stole it off an army base. Don’t know for sure. Looks like a small suitcase without a handle, and curved.”

“I know what it looks like,” Banish said. “How much farther?”

“I think we’re almost there.”

The odor of the dogs was pungent and pervasive and Banish directed his breathing through his mouth. “How close are we to the cabin?”

“Maybe fifty yards,” said Mellis.

“Twenty-five,” said Blood behind them.

Mellis was looking around more now, picking up speed, anxious. Dull moonlight fell more freely through the thinning tree cover. “Almost there,” he said. “It’ll go better for Glenn, right? Less injuries, less killing?”

“You are doing the right thing,” Banish said.

Mellis moving impatiently. “Right around here somewheres.”

“Where’s the trip?”

“Not sure,” Mellis said. “Be careful.”

Banish dropped back a bit, allowing Mellis some room as he followed him down and up again over a steep gully. There was a large fallen tree ahead of them and some ragged stumps on the other side. Mellis moved quickly toward it, Banish more cautious behind, glancing around.

Mellis said, “It’s right over here.”

Mellis reached the fallen tree and climbed over it, disappearing for a moment, then straightened up fast. He turned to face them and there was something black and glimmering in his shaking hands. Banish barely had time to react. Mellis raised the gun and aimed it at Banish’s head across the fallen stump. Banish tried to get his hands up. There was a snap and a brilliant flare of white, and the gun muzzle exploded in his face.

Fallen Tree

Banish went down. As though someone had slipped a rope around his neck and yanked it from behind. The shot rang to near deafness in Blood’s ears. He was looking down at Banish. Banish was lying in a heap and not moving. Mellis was heaving bursts of mist and giggling nervously at the sight.

Then he looked up at Blood. Blood brought the shotgun level, groping for the trigger. Too late. He took off diving for cover behind a clutch of trees as Mellis fired on him, choking rounds from the handgun and yelling something crazy.

Staging Area

Fagin looked up fast at the racket. His face went taut. “Fucking double-cross!” he said, and started at a run for the Hueys.

Sniper’s Nest

Deputy U.S. Marshal Robert Taber scanned the hazy green woods below with his NVD. Radio silence had been broken and there were now twelve different voices yelling at once in his ear. He had heard the gunfire. He was scoping out the woods for individuals. His right hand found his Remington and brought it to his side and felt for the trigger guard. He was breathing short, sharp breaths.

Motion in the trees up ahead. In murky shades of green, two ghostly figures moving along the ground, both racing away about fifteen yards apart, both headed up toward the top of the mountain. Taber saw traded heat bursts corresponding with reports from two different weapons. He sighted one figure, then the other.

He heard his name on the radio and clicked on fast. “I can’t tell who’s—” he was yelling, then stray rounds sprayed the leafy branches above his head. He ducked and pitched back blindly against the body of the tree.

Paradise Point

Mellis hauling up the mountain, laughing crazily and firing behind him. Blood reloading, weaving tree to tree, shotgun blasting. Mellis was maybe fifteen yards ahead but getting away, galloping hard through the woods while Blood advanced in fits, using the trees for cover and taking fire.

There was a brief respite. Blood, pulse racing, reasoned that Mellis was reloading and so tried to take the advantage, keeping on the pressure with short, sweeping blasts and racing ahead. As the tree spacing grew more generous, affording more and more steely moonlight, Blood could make out the cabin sitting silently in the distance. Then Mellis crossed into view again, firing downhill and chipping away at branches and plugging trees, and Blood spun around fast behind a fat trunk, taking shelter from the hail.

Fallen Tree

He rolled over onto his stomach. He felt his knees and brought them up under him and groped around. There was a buzzing drone in his head so distant that he reasoned it must have been the neighbor’s telephone. For some reason it woke him. He reached for the pillow next to his and felt for his wife’s shoulder.

Then Banish remembered the woods. He remembered being shot. He flailed around and found the hard, dead bark of the fallen tree next to him.

Banish explored his face with rough, trembling hands. He found no wound there. His heart went cold.

He flapped around. Dark night. Reports cracking under the steady droning. The sickening smell of the dogs. The woods coming alive. He was vulnerable here.

Banish held his hand up in front of his face. Nothing. The woods were pitch-black. He knelt against the felled tree and tried to stand, but could not tell exactly which way was up and then slipped back down again. He landed hard against the dead tree.

Where was Mellis? The son of a bitch. He would get Mellis. He would hunt the bastard down and kill him.

The flashlight. Banish slipped it off his belt and picked at the switch. Nothing. He shook it and felt the batteries click and tried it again. They were dead.

Cabin

They were in a race for the cabin. Blood could hear Mellis’s strangled laughter like war whoops behind the stuttered backward cracking of his gun. Blood answered, but as always the woods got in the way and he did more defoliating than anything.

This was his last push. He knew he had but one more chance to cut Mellis down before they reached the cabin. As Blood moved wide to his right, hastily vying for a side shot, he could see the cabin more clearly. He could see now that the near wall was somehow starting to move. Black rectangles appeared in it like slots sliding open. Blood slowed and eventually stopped. He watched gun barrels come poking out. He turned and dove hard behind a deadfall tree.

The firepower was all-out deafening. The mountain filled with noise and rippling echoes and the branches shook, the cabin fire shredding the surrounding trees to mulch and kindling. Hot rounds picked at the dead trunk he was lying behind and pitched splinters into the air, Blood protecting his face with his arms. He stayed down low. He crept long ways to a clear spot blocked by standing trees and cautiously put up his head.

He had one hand over his ear and was squinting. It was noise and flame from every side of the cabin, tremendous. The woods were crumbling and staggering around him. Clear enough, then, that the whole thing had been orchestrated. Ables wasn’t satisfied with just principles anymore. He wanted lives.

An awful roaring noise, rumbling the very ground, and Blood braced for whatever was coming next. A spotlight pierced the dark scene and then a helicopter rose fast over the trees beyond the cabin, turning and dipping down close for action. It was answering fire, glowing phosphorescent green and ripping the ground and the cabin walls, and Blood stayed where he was just long enough to see Fagin riding shotgun, leaning out of the helicopter door and braced against the skid and howling and tearing away. Then Blood ducked off and started fast down the ravaged slope.

Fallen Tree

Banish had his gun out now. He was listening hard. Nothing through the drone except gun chatter. Sounded like a firefight. Sounded close. Where was Nicole? He couldn’t let anything happen to her.

He was stumbling around. He was seeing things in the dark, traces of things, like ghosts drifting down and settling in the blackness in front of him, and he was giving them meaning. He saw Lucy Ames smiling into the sterile rec room of the Retreat. He felt her bullet burrowing deep into him and dropping him to the tile floor. He saw his house on Long Island ripped to pieces inside. He saw the wide, bright trading floor in the World Financial Center, heard the buzzing of hundreds of telephones, saw the blood on the floor. He saw a mother and daughter standing up against a wall, throats cut, necks sliced open. Their mouths were wide. Their tongues were swollen. Their eyes were staring and wet.

“Banish!”

Someone was yelling and near. Banish got a read on the voice and spun and fired. The gun kicked back wildly in his hand. He re aimed as well as he could and then stopped, turning his head, listening for more.

Fallen Tree

Bark chipped off the tree next to Blood and he froze. Banish wasn’t dead. He was somehow on his knees on the floor of the woods waving a gun, motioning wildly and mumbling aloud. His flashlight was lying on the ground behind him, illuminating a bright cone of bark trash. He looked this way and that way, but he did not register Blood.

Blood glanced quickly around. The gunfight was going on unseen away from them, occasional stray bullets whistling past, picking off leaves, thumping trunks. Blood bent down carefully. He found a broken piece of squaw wood and tossed it back over Banish’s head and Banish turned at the noise and fired twice. By the second shot Blood was upon him, pitching himself sidelong against Banish and knocking him flat against the ground. He kicked the gun free and managed to wrestle one of Banish’s arms behind his back. They were rolling around on the ground. Banish was still struggling.

“Banish!” Blood said. “Banish!”

Banish was fighting for Blood’s Browning. He had wild strength. Blood managed to force the butt of the shotgun against the back of Banish’s neck and then pin his elbows with his knees. Blood kept saying “Banish” over and over again, trying to get through to him, keeping his head pushed into the bark trash on the ground.

That seemed to work. Banish eventually stopped resisting, then relaxed completely. Blood let up on his neck and allowed him to turn over beneath him. There was a glancing dent on the right front of Banish’s helmet and a spray pattern of black powder burn over half his face. He had come closer to death than anyone Blood had ever seen. Banish blinked several times, opening and closing his mouth and trying to speak.

“Blood?” he said.

Blood said, “You’re all right.”

“I can’t see.”

“You’re alive, you’re all right.”

“I can’t see.”

“That’s just the flash. Come on.”

He helped him to his feet and took Banish’s arm over his shoulders. Bullets split through the trees. They started to move.

UH-1

Fagin leaned way out of the Huey as it swept wide over the treetops to make another pass. They had the fuckers on the run now. Massive firepower down there, outlying trees being blown back from the cabin as though caught in a storm. It made Fagin howl all the more. He was pumping tracers into the mountaintop, phosphorous-tipped rounds glowing in loud, green streaks, threading their way through the dark night to the target, chewing up cabin wood. Fagin knew what the fuck it was he was feeling, the great spirit having fully arisen within him once again: the glory and majesty of the early days of Vietnam.

Motherfuckers!

His hold line snapped tight around his waist as the bird swooped in low to make another pass. The searchlight came around and found Mellis, unmistakable fucking bearded fucking Mellis, stomping along the side of the cabin and firing blindly over his head. He was galloping for the elevated porch in back. Fagin rolled right and choked the M-60, lighting up the cabin side, tracer fire eating its way into the ground at Mellis’s pounding boots, but then the Huey lurched and his kill fire missed its mark, and Mellis reached the rear of the cabin and disappeared under the overhang of the porch. Fagin swore wildly back at the farm-boy pilot. The UH-1 came around again and swung down low and Fagin, screaming now, gave the fucking porch everything he had.

Barn

Blood told him they were taking cover. A structure down land from the cabin, a barn. A few more steps and Banish smelled a musty odor, and then the shooting was not as loud. His head fought the buzzing drone.

He pulled the strobe off his belt and felt it into Blood’s hands and told him what to do with it. Blood traded him his flashlight and Banish heard him walk away and outside. There was a low whir as the strobe was switched on.

Banish saw a shadow. He waved the flashlight in front of him and several times, fleetingly in the far corners of his eyes, he saw hints of light. He perceived texture within the blackness. He saw the beam indirectly and, through it, the stripped-back wooden walls of the barn, debris and discard scattered around the dirt floor. His eyesight was beginning to fill back in. He was despondent.

UH-1

Captain Greg Ohmer of the Montana National Guard topped out over the tree cover and throttled hard left to bring the UH-1 back around. There were some zings as the bird took a few sparking hits broadside, and Greg tightened up his grip on the stick, saying “Sweet Jesus Mother of Mary” over and over again in an unnaturally high voice and fighting to hold the shaking helicopter even and low.

Fifty weeks out of the year, Greg Ohmer was the owner and manager of a Burger King franchise in downtown Billings. He had a wife and a nine-year-old daughter and lived in a small house a few miles west of the city. His biggest worry going into this year’s two-week tour in the reserves was leaving his restaurant in the hands of his twenty-year-old assistant manager.

Greg Ohmer had not sat in the cockpit of a helicopter for more than three years — and even then only to renew his pilot’s license. Patrol missions were one thing, especially during the day, cruising above the mountain ridge and looking out over the blue-green mountains into the snow peaks of British Columbia; Greg had never stopped loving to fly. But these low-maneuver tactical raids under heavy unfriendly fire were something else entirely. He was WAGing it up there, wild-ass-guess flying, piloting via his PAVE nightfall system and recalling his training as he went, watching the altitudinal wind gusts and trying to keep his rotors and his tail fin clear of the treetops, and basically bringing the cranky UH-1 in as tight as possible without choking up the engine or one-eightying out.

He swung around so that Marshal Fagin stayed on the hot side of the bird, then tensed up his shoulders and dipped down into the gauntlet and white-knuckled it on through, muttering to himself as he went. Fagin got off fifty or so unanswered rounds this time, hanging out of the gun door and howling. Greg came out of the pass and realized that the resistance was finally, thank God, falling off. He pulled back on the throttle too sharply and jerked the bird up and clear of the heat. There, from above the dark canopy of tree cover, he noticed a strobe light pulsing faintly down land.

He radioed back to Marshal Fagin. Fagin’s reply filled his head and the gray flight helmet he wore. “Take her the fuck down!” he bellowed. This Fagin fellow was a psycho son of a bitch. Greg Ohmer eased back on the throttle and the UH-1 swooped wide and out.

Barn

Blood had his Browning up and was standing watch just inside the open doorway. Now that he was able to catch his breath, a clear sense of doom was settling over the barn and himself. It was a debacle. There would be a good load of finger-pointing after a thing like this, and Blood felt that his own performance had been lacking. He had a shotgun, Mellis had a handgun. He wished sorely that he had done more and wondered if he’d catch any blame. He turned then and looked behind him.

Banish was standing in the center of the barn. His hands were on his hips and his head was low and he was shaking it and blinking, plainly trying to encourage his eyes to see. Now and again he brought up a hand and felt his head. He had unstrapped the helmet and was feeling where Mellis’s bullet had glanced him. He was disoriented from the blow, which explained a good deal.

Blood heard the helicopter approaching. He turned and looked up as it slowed to a hover overhead, whipping back the treetops and shaking the ramshackle barn. He saw a man drop out of the open door and watched him rappel down. It was Fagin, a rifle slung over his shoulder. Land marshals emerged from the woods. A spotlight swung over from the helicopter, filling the entrance with blinding white, and Blood backed away inside.

He saw Banish clumsily exploring the barn, his hands helping him to see. It was dusty from disuse and appeared pretty much abandoned, filled with various pieces of refuse like a rusted-out sit-down mower and busted sawhorses, plucked-up tar shingles with nails still stuck in them, stacks of bug-infested wood off to the left, and a discarded plastic gasoline tank cracked up one side. It looked like the community junk house Banish was over by some old rolls of tarpaulin in back, still trying to see.

Fagin entered with the swirling, kicked-up bark trash from the helicopter wind, his rifle at the ready, the harsh spotlight lighting his back and darkening his front. “The fuck happened!” he bellowed. He saw Blood there and came up close enough for Blood to see his shadowed face beyond the light, see it full and big-eyed and hungry. It was the look some animals get after tasting blood. “I want some fucking answers,” he said.

Blood said, “It was a trap.”

“You’re goddamn fucking right it was a trap.” Fagin looked up and across at Banish. “The fuck’s wrong with him?”

Blood turned to look. Banish was pulling at the tarp now, trying to unroll it.

Fagin said, “Banish. Banish!”

Banish did not answer.

“Fucking mental,” said Fagin, stalking around. “Will someone please give me some goddamn fucking answers here?”

Blood remained looking at Banish, realizing then that he was not merely exploring. There was something wrapped up in the tarpaulin and Banish was trying to get at it. Blood started toward him, then Fagin grabbed his arm, stopping him, and Blood made ready to receive the riot act.

Fagin nodded at Blood’s leg. “You’re hit,” he said.

Blood looked down. His black uniform was split across the side of his left thigh and soaked darkly below. He hadn’t felt a thing until it was pointed out to him. After that, it began to burn fierce.

Blood pressed his hand above the cut and some dark red washed out. It was not very deep.

He started back toward Banish, favoring the leg. The barn was full of marshals now, and white light from the helicopter, and stirred-up, swirling dust. Fagin came up behind and they both watched Banish pulling at a tight swathe of white sheets rolled within the tarpaulin. His actions grew impatient and finally savage. He wrenched at the bedsheets with his bare hands until they tore apart and came free.

There was an awful puff of smell. Blood didn’t need more than a second to recognize the corpse’s face. It was a few days gone, lips wrinkled and black, skin sunken, gray. Contact wound through the T-shirt over the heart, eyes filmy and staring up at the rafters.

Fagin backed away covering his nose, saying sharply, “Jesus fucking Christ.”

Banish just sat back. The Ables girl was lying there dead and stinking and his face got tight, then he made a little fist as though he was going to yell. Instead, he took the fist and pounded it once into the dirt ground.