an inch on the diagonal from the ear. It was the haymaker. It conked the old boy so solid his lights went out before he hit the ground, and the shotgun clattered away into the dust. He'd be gone cold for a good five minutes.
Earl stepped in, grabbed the keys off the desk, and went back and unlocked Sam, who had dressed silently, even to the point of tightening his tie. His eyes bulged with anticipation or fear, and he was already breathing hard and shallow.
'Let's go,' Earl hissed, and the two of them scurried out the door.
But before Sam could lurch himself off into the night, Earl had him under control.
'We goin' run out the front, trying to step in the tracks cut up by the horses. Step in horse shit if you see any. You got me?'
'How can I see? I can't see the?'
Whoomph!
It wasn't a blast so much as an unleashing; a blade of light ruptured up the shank of the dark sky, spreading illumination as it rose. When it rose high enough, it fragmented, sending flowers of devouring flame off in a thousand directions. Enough landed upon the house to catch its roof ablaze, and in this comforting glow, Earl and Sam found the cut and shit-caked tracks of the angry horses, and dashed out the front gate.
'Off here,' he yelled.
They left the road and headed to the trees. It was a maze of interlocking pines, a complete bafflement in the dark. But Earl found an incline just where he knew it to be, and climbed a small hill, and at the top, oriented toward the east, found a brief interruption of meadow, and then another wall of trees. Where he thought it should be, he stopped, then snapped on, ever so briefly, his flashlight, until the beam disclosed a loop of rope around the trunk of a pine. He went to it, and with his K-bar cut it free and stuffed it into his belt.
'This way, you stay with me, goddammit. We got some hard travel ahead.
We got twenty miles to go in about ten hours. You up to it? 'Cause if you ain't, I can't carry you, Mr. Sam.'
'I will run till I die, Earl. You are a great man. You are a great American.'
'That I doubt. But I do mean to get you clear of here, goddammit, so let's go.'
And off they went into the woods, stopping every one hundred yards or so for Earl to find and cut a rope necklace from a pine trunk. they got the fire out by dawn, but already the dogs had found the scent.
'He won't git far,' Pepper told Sheriff Leon. 'My pups got him lined up right fine. They'll be nipping at him by noon, Sheriff, and by four you can put him back in the cuffs and I can kick his ass for the knot he done give me.' Pepper was the conked one. The left side of his head was swollen like a softball. He had a headache, and he'd swallowed a plug of Brown's Mule when he'd been hit. That was the worst, for he'd puked brown slop for an hour and it had emptied him of hunger for the '; so he had two grudges going, one for the knot on the skull, the other for the wasted plug.
'Yes sir, the pups be on his Arkansas behind.'
But the sheriff was not so convinced.
He knew there had to be a second man and that the second man had to be mighty smart. Already the sheriff found himself behind the eight ball.
The fire in town proved to be nothing but an old building burning and some kind of firecracker put together from some.45 shells. It was clever. This feller'd thought hard to come up with that one.
Meanwhile, as all the sheriff's deputies are hiding behind trees and looking for targets at what's nothing but burning lumber, whoever he is is back in the compound, jury-rigging a bomb out of the generator and freeing up that goddamned Arkansas lawyer.
He should have killed the dogs, though, the sheriff thought. He should have slipped in there and cut twenty dog throats. Why didn't he kill the dogs?
'Okay,' he said. 'Y'all got your sleeping packs? This may be a long 'un.'
His deputies by now had switched to hiking boots, for there were no horse trails in the deep woods, and they all carried packs. It was the drill. They'd hunted men before. They also all had rifles.
'Sheriff, you want I should go on up to the Farm and tell Warden and Bigboy we gots a runner. They's got them good hounds, too.'
'Hell, they hounds ain't no better ' my hounds,' Pepper put in. 'My pups out track them mangy Farm mutts any day of the week, including Sunday and Armistice Day. Yes sir, my hounds the best hounds.'
Pepper's hound pride meant little to the sheriff, and he considered telling Warden and Bigboy and getting the guards in on the hunt. Some of them were essentially professional man hunters as they'd run many a nigger to ground their own self over the years. But again: that meant notification and coordination, it meant trying to rendezvous in deep, twisting piney roads and nobody had radios or anything, and it could just mess it up bad. Sometimes too many on a manhunt got in their own way and ended up chasing each the other.
'Naw, it's only one man, maybe two. Running through woods they don't know, toward what they ain't sure. We knows our land, and them dogs old Pepper has are good enough. You boys, let's git her going. And, let me say this again, man fleeing justice who done lit up a municipal building is a desperate man. No limit likely on what he's willing to do to taste some free cooze and a jar of lightning down the road. So if you git him in your sights, you jack. Okay? Understood? You shoot him dead. This boy's had the smell of mischief on him from the git-go, and his wagon should be fixed. Let's move it out.'
With Pepper's six best hounds straining against their chains, driven almost insane by the thickness of the Sam-smell clinging to the earth, they set out, the dogs snuffling furiously at what they believed to be Sara's path out of the compound, around the back of the house and crosswise to the wire, where he'd obviously slid underneath.
The sheriff commanded the wire cut, for now that he'd started he didn't feel like backtracking to the gate, then circling around again to this spot. One by one his men slipped through, and then he followed.
'Cut the dogs free, Sheriff?'
'Cut ', Pepper. Let ' hunt.'
So Pepper clicked to his animals in some strange dog tongue he knew, and the old blue, the master of the pack, fought through his instincts and settled. Soon the others followed.
Pepper passed among them, freeing each, and though each had instincts that commanded onward, they had had their obedience beaten into them by Pepper's brutality, and so they knew they risked a thumping if they disobeyed, no matter how their loins ached to.
Finally Pepper said, 'Go/' and the six took off like nags from a gate, yelping their excitement as they gobbled up the Samness of the track, and plunged, muscles working, jowls slobbering, toward the woods.
'Oh, they got it rich,' Pepper said. 'Watch them pups hunt. They are hunters and they got locked in on that of' boy. Going to bring in the meat.'
The dogs plunged ahead, almost in formation, so strong was the Sam-smell, and for just a second the sheriff allowed himself a whisper of pleasure.
They had it so strong. They were so sure. It was going to be easy.
But then the pack seemed to explode. Each dog picked a different direction. One raced into brambles, another circled back around, two more began barking at a tree, and the last two simply stood stock-still and began to whimper. They'd stopped before they'd even got going.
'What's happening? They lose it?' 'Goddamn,' said old Pepper. 'Goddamn him, that goddamned tricky bastard.'
'What happened?'
'He done laid a false scent. He brings the dogs here where he's smeared up ever-thing with Arkansas scent. He must have had some clothes or something, and he riled up a big scent trap here, and my pups is all messed up in their heads. It ain't that there's no scent, it's that there's too goddamned many scents.'
The sheriff felt the frustration rising in him like a column of steam, pressure increasing, heat rising, pain swelling.
'Goddamn him! Goddamn him all to hell.' 'That goddamn lawyer is smart,' said Opic Brown, one of the younger fellows.
'Lawyer nothing. Some other bird's in on this one, don't you see. He been watching us and thinking this thing through a while. Who else set that fire last night, God himself?'
'No, sir.'
