danger.”
“I’ll be fine. I am fine.”
He locked the doors, checked the windows, turned out the downstairs lights, and briefly moved aside a curtain. Out front, Cy Borkmann sat in his truck drinking coffee from his big silver thermos. Upstairs, Cork looked in on his daughters, who were in their rooms, in bed but not yet asleep. He talked with each of them awhile, kissed them good night, then went to his own room, where quietly and rather gently he and Jo made love. For a long time after that, he lay with his wife in his arms. They’d never finished their talk about her past with Ben Jacoby, but at the moment it didn’t matter. Cork knew that despite every threatening thing, past and present, he was the luckiest man on earth.
26
In the early morning shortly before sunrise, Jo drove toward a blood-red streak of sky, carrying away in her Camry everything that was most important to Cork.
After they’d gone, he approached Howard Morgan’s Explorer, parked at the curb where Borkmann’s truck had been the night before.
Morgan stepped out and stretched. “So they’re off,” he said.
“Thanks, Howard.”
“No problem. Good to see them go. Safer, I mean.”
“I know what you mean. Be glad to fix you some breakfast.”
“Thanks, but I’ve been thinking for the last couple hours about a stack of blueberry pancakes at the Broiler. Then I got a bed that’s calling my name.”
Cork went back inside, pulled down a bowl from the cupboard, shook in some raisin bran. He was just about to pour in some milk when Rutledge called.
They waited in an oak grove a quarter mile north of the farmhouse. Four cruisers, an unmarked Suburban, twelve deputies, two DEA agents, Undersheriff Jeff McGruder, and Sheriff Roy Killen. Cork and Rutledge were there, too. The sheriff’s people wore midnight blue Kevlar vests and camouflage outfits. A couple of the deputies smoked. They all watched the sheriff as he held the field glasses level on the farmhouse. They should have gone in before this-they all knew it-but Killen had decided to wait. The problem was the mist.
The farmhouse was an old white structure with paint flaking off in leprous patches, a sagging front porch, and a satellite dish on the roof. Across the yard stood the barn, in far better shape than the house and painted a new dark red. Cork had been told that there were empty animal pens, but he couldn’t see them because of the mist.
The buildings stood a quarter mile off the road, in a field long fallow, full of thistle and timothy gone yellow in the dry of late autumn. The mist did not quite touch the ground and reached only a couple of dozen feet into the air, so that everything about the scene seemed to exist in colored layers. Far away were the yellow grass, the gray mist, the blue sky. Nearer, the russet oak leaves, the midnight blue vests, the camouflage outfits. Enclosing it all was the waiting.
Killen didn’t like the idea of going in with the mist still thick. He couldn’t see the farmhouse yard at all. Someone looking out a second-floor window could spot the cruisers coming and take up a hidden position in the yard. He didn’t want to risk his people. Better, he’d decided, to let the mist burn off. So they waited.
Traffic picked up on the rural highway that ran past the oak grove, many of the cars heading to a small white church built among Norway pines just visible in the distance. Around the church, the mist had already vanished, but it still hung thick over the fields and the farmhouse and the red barn.
After a while, Killen spoke to McGruder and the two DEA agents, then approached Cork and Rutledge.
Killen was near sixty, with freckles across his forehead and age spots on the back of his hands, retirement not many years away. “I don’t know what it is with this fog but we wait much longer and the whole damn world’s going to know we’re here,” he said. “We’re going in. You two stay back. This is our business.”
He went to his deputies, who’d stopped talking and had thrown down their cigarettes when they heard what Killen had said to Cork and Rutledge.
“All right, let’s do it. Just like we talked about, boys. Quick and simple. Everybody do their job.”
They moved to the cruisers, and as the doors shut, popping like muted gunfire, Cork heard the bell in the little church steeple to the north begin to ring, clear notes that carried far in the morning air.
An unmarked Suburban went first. It stopped at the chained gate that blocked the access to the farmhouse. A deputy leaped out, split the chain with a bolt cutter, swung the gate wide. A couple of seconds later the cruisers sped through, hauling ass down the dirt lane, disappearing into the gray mist.
The dogs had already given the bust away. They began to bark as soon as the cruisers turned off the highway. Cork and Rutledge, staying far back on the lane as they’d been instructed, heard the dogs going crazy as the mist ate the cars. A few moments later, gunfire erupted. From the rapid crack of the first weapon, Cork knew it was a heavy automatic of some kind. Shotgun blasts boomed from a second-floor window, something Cork and Rutledge could see above the top of the mist, and immediately the boards around the window frame exploded in chips and splinters as the deputies returned fire.
Rutledge drew his sidearm. “I can’t just stand here and do nothing.”
“If you’re thinking of going into that mist, Simon, I’ve got to tell you it’s a bad idea. Way too confusing. Your Glock’ll be no good at a distance, anyway.”
“I have to do something,” Rutledge said. He swung out of the vehicle and ran.
Cork jumped out, too, calling after him, “Simon!” but the BCA agent had already vanished into the mist. “Shit,” he said. He popped the tailgate open and pulled his Remington from its cradle. He grabbed several slugs, jacked five into the chamber, stuffed a few more into the pocket of his windbreaker. He stood by the Pathfinder, resisting the temptation to move forward, although every impulse pushed him in that direction. He waited, as Killen had told him to do, while the gunfire became sporadic and the sound of the automatic weapon ceased.
The mist had begun to lift, ragged white fingers reaching toward the sky, then evaporating. The long grass of the fields became clearer by the moment. Cork glimpsed a slender figure sprinting from the farmhouse, a figure with long, dark hair, wearing a yellow sweatshirt, carrying a rifle, and making hard for the south end of the field.
He got on the radio, tried to raise Killen or McGruder, got no answer. He left the Pathfinder and gave chase.
The mist was spotty, heavy in some places, almost gone in others. The long grass was still wet with dew and slapped at the cuffs of his khakis. He cut at an angle he calculated would bring him to the fleeing figure somewhere near the fence at the end of the field. Behind him, the gunfire had ceased completely.
Barbed wire edged the field. When Cork reached the fence, he saw that the figure had stopped. The rifle lay against the wire as the figure bent and spread the strands to slip through. Thirty yards back, Cork went prone in the tall grass, put the stock of his shotgun to his shoulder, and sighted. The mist still lingered between Cork and the fence, but the yellow sweatshirt made an easy target.
“Police,” Cork shouted. “Raise your hands.”
The figure let go of the strands, surprised. A hand shot toward the rifle.
Cork hollered, “Don’t touch the weapon.”
The figure ignored him, swung back, and pulled off a round that went high and wide.
“O’Connor,” Rutledge shouted from somewhere behind Cork.
The figure at the fence corrected its aim, pointed the barrel above the place where Cork lay, and sighted toward Rutledge’s voice.
Cork fired. The figure took half a step back into the fence, then crumpled to the ground, leaving an arm snagged on the wire, raised as if in surrender.
Lydell Cramer’s sister and Harmon LaRusse were killed in the exchange of gunfire at the farmhouse. The dogs, too. The man in the mist whom Cork had shot, Carl Berger, was taken to the hospital in Moose Lake, where
