polished teak fronts. A whole slew of them. One for liquids, one for produce, one for meat, and a big one that held more wine bottles than the cast-iron display rack down at the Municipal Off-Sale. 'Amazing,' he murmured, snooping without shame, finally grabbing an OJ for Harley. 'You mind if I grab a cherry soda for myself?'
'Anything you want, buddy,' Harley said, downshifting for a mean curve. 'You like the kitchen?'
'Are you kidding? Haven't seen anything this beautiful outside the pagesof Bon Appetit.'
Gino rolled his eyes. 'Ah, Jesus, next thing you know, you two guys'll be trading recipes and watchingOprah together.'
Harley glowered at him. 'I loveOprah.'
In the back office, Road runner was running multiple programs full-blast, digging as deep as he ever had into closed Federal sites, looking for the tiniest piece of data on whatever operation the dead undercover agents had been running. So far he hadn't found a scrap, which was extraordinary.
Halloran and Magozzi were planted at a small booth next to the windows, alternating between looking over at Roadrunner when he cursed at the keyboard and looking out at what Halloran saw as a quiet country night, and what Magozzi saw as a black landscape of nothingness. 'Christ, somebody turned the lights out in the whole state.'
Halloran smiled a little. 'It's pretty empty up this way. The Silver Dome should be coming up soon, though.'
'What's the Silver Dome?'
'Supper club. Dining, dancing, tablecloths and everything.'
Another half mile around a long curve, and Magozzi saw what looked like a dollhouse-sized Vegas in the middle of a black hole. Christmas twinkle lights were strung all over a dirt parking lot jammed with pickups, and a pink-and-green sign with neon letters as tall as he was blinked on and off, announcing, 'Fine Dining, Dancing, Entertainment.' The sign was attached to a Quonset hut.
'What's the entertainment?'
'Bowling.' Halloran kept his eyes on Magozzi, who didn't even crack a smile. He liked him for that. He looked back out the window and sighed. There was nothing left to see for miles after the Silver Dome, just trees that blocked the moon and an occasional piece of empty land that didn't. 'I don't mind telling you, this is one of the few times on the job I've been seriously scared.'
And that, bizarrely, was when Magozzi smiled. 'Who are you kidding, Halloran? We're not on the job. What we really are is a couple of frantic guys chasing a couple of skirts. Saving our women. Caveman stuff.'
Halloran put his big hands on the table and sighed again. 'You, maybe.'
Magozzi raised a brow.
'Sharon isn't coming back.'
'To you, or Kingsford County?'
'Neither.'
'Well, Jesus, Halloran, she took a bullet in the neck. And like it or not, you and the job are all wrapped up in that. That kind of thing shuts you down for a while, makes you afraid to get back out there.'
Halloran was quiet for a long time, and then he said, 'I should give it some more time.'
'Damn straight. You know what, Halloran? Come to think of it, the last time we were together, we were busting into a gunfight, chasing after the same two women.'
Halloran blinked. 'My God. You're right.'
'Maybe we should get together a couple of times between catastrophes, break the monotony.'
Suddenly the shriek of an alarm blasted through the back of the rig and Roadrunner exploded out of his chair and stabbed a button on the console. 'GRACE!?'
Magozzi was halfway out of his seat, frozen, afraid to move, afraid to breathe. And then he heard the sound of a dial tone buzzing through the big speakers. 'What just happened?' he asked, his voice shaking.
'GODDAMNIT!' Roadrunner stabbed another button, and the sound of numbers dialing filled the rig. 'We had a sat line rigged on auto-dial to rotate every five minutes on all three of the women's cells. Someone just answered Grace's cell, and then I lost the signal. ... CHRIST, THERE IT IS AGAIN!'
The speakers hissed with white noise, then an earsplitting shrill tone, and then, by God, Grace's voice, garbled and fuzzy and broken, coming through the speakers: '.., need help .., four . ., people dead . . . Roadrunner... ?'
And then, abruptly, nothing. The speakers went silent.
TWENTY MINUTES after hearing Grace's disconnected message, the atmosphere inside the Monkeewrench RV was supercharged, almost electric.
Even working together with all the legal and illegal computer resources they could muster, Roadrunner and Harley hadn't been able to reconnect with Grace or pinpoint the tower that had picked up the call from her cell. Not one of the cell-provider sites they'd hacked into had registered any activity from Grace's cell in the past hour. After fifteen frustrating minutes on the side of the road, Harley was back behind the wheel, driving toward Beldon at an alarming clip on the dark, twisting road, praying that this trip to hook up with the Feds wasn't taking them in the wrong direction.
Bonar was riding shotgun, holding Charlie in his lap with one hand, manipulating an outside spot with the other, supposedly lighting the road beyond the headlights to spot deer. A useless venture at this speed, he thought-they'd never be able to stop in time-but it never occurred to Bonar to suggest that Harley slow down. The call from Grace had been chilling.
Gino was in the back office, poring over a map of Wisconsin cellphone towers that Roadrunner had printed out. As far as he could tell, there wasn't a single one anywhere near Missaqua County. After ten minutes of working the map and abusing his haircut, he was absolutely convinced that they were way off track, and almost afraid to say it aloud. Roadrunner already looked insane, attacking the computers, spewing profanity like a Marine, and Magozzi and Halloran both seemed so brittle that it was a miracle they hadn't snapped into pieces. Gino went back to the map, looking at the sites marked for upcoming cell-tower construction, wondering how current the map was.
Halloran was monopolizing one sat phone line, trying to find the tower that had picked up Grace's call the old-fashioned way, by calling all the cellular providers in the state, pushing his badge on sleepy flunkies on weekend duty, trying to get some help from part-time workers with an average IQ in the single digits who thought they could coast through the late shift. He'd finally connected with someone who seemed to know what he was talking about, who proceeded to tell Halloran how it was possible that no one had a record of a call that had obviously gone through. The explanation gave Halloran a headache. He hung up and tried to rub the lines out of his forehead.
'Did you get anything.?' Gino asked him.
'Yeah, I found out why there's no record of the call. The guy who runs the whole network for Wisconsin Cellular just told me it was black magic. How's that make you feel? The people who run the system can't even explain why it works the way it does. Christ. He said if the conditions were perfect, there's a solar storm or sunspots or maybe goddamned Jupiter aligns with goddamned Mars, then sometimes a phone can snatch a tower's signal way beyond the normal range. And if the connection is short enough or distorted enough, it might not register in their software at all.'
'I tried to tell you that,' Roadrunner called from across the room.
'Yeah, well, this guy said it in English.'
They all looked up when Magozzi started to raise his voice. He'd finally gotten through to Minneapolis SAC Paul Shafer, and now he was snapping out an exact quote of Grace's call. He'd memorized every word. He stood up and yelled down the aisle toward the front of the rig, asking how far they were from Beldon, totally forgetting they had an intercom, then he went back to the phone, listened for a second, then exploded: 'Jesus Christ, Shafer, were you listening? She saiddead people, at least four of them, and they're right in the middle of it. . . . Fuck tracing the call; we already tried that, and if these guys can't do it, your guys sure as hell aren't going to be able to manage it. . . .' And then he shut up and just listened for a long time before replacing the receiver and looking helplessly at Gino. 'You aren't going to fucking believe this.'
Everybody in the office stopped what they were doing.
'Shafer's been rolling some people out of bed, pretty much laying his career on the line, calling in favors, and when that didn't work, making some threats. He says the Wisconsin Feds moved their undercover guys in when a few of the people they were watching made some unusual purchases. They think they might be making nerve
