behind as if he were hugging the hedge. His shirtsleeves were light tan, not camouflage. His gun had fallen from his hand and lay in the dirt in front of the bush, beyond his reach.
Sharon released a soft breath, looked at his head, and saw blood. His eyelids fluttered and he groaned.
It took them ten minutes they didn't have to get him down into the basement.
A miracle, Grace thought, grunting as they negotiated the last step down. He had his right arm over her shoulder, his left over Sharon's, and Grace wasn't sure he'd been entirely conscious during the halting trip from the lilacs. Her back ached from the weight of his arm. He was a big man.
'Maybe if I could just sit for a minute,' his voice strained.
Annie closed the doors behind them while they eased him down to the dirt floor. He leaned back against a wooden support beam and closed his eyes.
He was Deputy Douglas Lee, according to the County Sheriff ID card in his wallet. They'd gone through it hurriedly while he was blacked out under the hedge. Grace thought they must have looked like criminals, peering at their booty in the moonlight.
She looked him up and down while his eyes were still closed,
thinking that unless the local Sheriff's Department was involved in this whole thing, he probably wasn't one of the psycho warriors. Then again, identification could always be faked, and the uniform could just be part of an elaborate disguise.
She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose hard. Nothing was what it seemed anymore. What looked like pretty Wisconsin countryside was really a bloody battlefield; men who looked like U.S, soldiers were really stone-cold killers who shot women in print dresses and wanted to shoot them, too.
Suddenly, the man's chin sagged to his chest and his eyelids went still.
Annie peered down at him. 'Is he dead?'
'He's not dead,' Grace said, watching his chest rise and fall. 'He just blacked out again.'
'You think he's really a deputy?'
Sharon shrugged. 'The badge looks legit. Which doesn't mean anything.'
No, Grace was thinking. We can't trust anyone except ourselves. 'I don't know,' she said aloud, looking at the wound on his head. One side of his face was streaked with dried blood-a lot of it-and fresh,shiny seepage trickled over it.See that? That's real. And even a crazy man wouldn't shoot himself in the head as part of a disguise, right? So he is a deputy. One more for our side. The odds are improving. We're now up to four against. . , how many?
'Lord God,' Annie murmured, staring at the wound. 'Who would have thought I could do that much damage with one little ol' elbow.'
Sharon had already wet a rag at the sink and was bending from the waist to dab ineffectually at his wound. 'Your elbow didn't do this. Might have made it worse, but he really was shot. See the graze right here?' When she pressed a little harder, he groaned awake and leaned forward, grabbing his head in both hands. 'Ah, shit, that hurts.'
Sharon jerked back involuntarily, holding the rag out at arm's length. He reached for it with a shaky hand and pressed it against his head.
'Who shot you?' Grace said.
'You tell me.'
There wasn't much moonlight filtering through the high, narrow windows, but there was enough to show the steadiness in Grace's hand as she raised the Sig and let him see it. 'You first.'
His eyes widened a little at the gun. 'Christ, who are you people? Your goddamned soldiers at the roadblock shot me. I thought they were Guard. Are they?'
Sharon dropped to a crouch and looked right at him. 'Who's the Sheriff of Missaqua County?'
'Ed Pitala.'
'Tell me something about him a stranger wouldn't know.'
The man looked at her hard. 'Sixties, hard as nails, two tours in 'Nam, wife Pat, who's about four times tougher and ten times smarter than he is. Loves his wife, his kids, and Jim Beam, in that order. Smokes Marlboros. And he's stone deaf in his right ear.'
Sharon raised a brow. Anybody could know most of what he said, except for the deafness. That was under wraps, information for good friends like Halloran, and maybe this man, because if the county commissioners ever found out, old Ed would be out of a job. She held out her hand. 'Deputy Sharon Mueller, Kingsford County.'
It took a second for Deputy Lee to absorb the information. 'Mike Halloran's woman?'
Sharon reddened. 'One of his deputies.' She looked up at Grace. 'He's okay.'
'You sure?'
'As sure as I can be.'
Grace still didn't trust him. 'How'd you get here?'
Surprisingly, Lee felt a nudge of angry indignation. He'd never been on the wrong end of an interrogation before, and he didn't like it. But there was an undercurrent of fear in the woman's voice, and that tempered his response.
'I told you all that. . , didn't I?' He frowned hard, squinting at the dim outline of his legs sprawled before him on the dirt floor, trying to remember.
'You started to, then you passed out.'
Lee sighed and squinted as his pupils tried to find enough light. He could almost see her now-see them. Three woman-shadows in this strange, shadowy place. A basement, he decided. Of course. They'd told him they were taking him to the basement, or had that been a dream? 'Is there water?'
One of the shadows moved, and he heard water running into something metal. A moment later, a tin cup of some sort was pressed into his hand. He drank, tasted soap, then suddenly remembered grabbing the woman in the hedge. She'd gone immediately rigid- he remembered what that had felt like, like when you pick up a wounded bird and it freezes in your palm, terrified-but then later, she'd started to flail, and . . , had he hit his head on something? He had a vague tactile memory of sticky warmth coursing down his cheek, then nothing.
'Tell us!' the interrogator woman hissed. 'How did you get here?'
Still scared, he thought. And scared people were dangerous people. He felt for his gun, panicked when he found his holster empty. 'I was at the end of my shift, heading home, stopped at a roadblock that shouldn't have been there. The soldier guarding it shot me as soon as I turned my back.'
'How'd you get away?'
His head turned toward a new voice. 'I killed him,' he said, and although his tone was flat, there was a tremor beneath it.
It made Grace feel better. It made her believe he really had killed one of the soldiers, and that killing wasn't something he was used to.
She felt her way to the sink, filled a hand with water and drank, then crouched next to him and met his eyes in the near dark. She could see only the whites. 'We don't know who we can trust.'
He almost smiled. 'Join the club. Are you supposed to be a Kings-ford Deputy, too?'
'Sharon's the deputy. Annie and I are from Minneapolis.'
Something clicked in Deputy Lee's head, and he struggled to focus on it. 'Shit,' he muttered, almost to himself. 'Three women in a Rover.'
Grace caught her breath. 'How do you know that?'
'Highway Patrol had a watch-and-stop on three women in a Minnesota Rover. Figured it was some rich housewives got lost on the way home from antiquing or something.' His eyes moved down to Grace's weapon. 'But I don't expect all Minnesota housewives carry guns like that.'
'Sure they do,' Grace told him, because he deserved that after the assumptions he'd made. She hesitated for a moment, then thought, What the hell. If they told him everything and he turned out to be one of the bad guys, they'd just shoot him again. So she let him hear all of it: the car breakdown, the deserted town, the murder of the young couple in front of the cafe, but when she got to the mass grave in the paddock and the things they overheard at the lake, Lee interrupted.
'Wait a minute, just wait a minute.' He was pressing his hands to the sides of his forehead, trying to take it all in. 'You're trying to tell me this group of whackos accidentally killed the whole damn town with some kind of gas, and now they're killing more people just to keep it quiet? Do you realize how crazy that sounds?'
