Grace lost her patience instantly. 'You stupid man. One of them shot you in the head. Did you think that was an accident?'
He was glaring at her for calling him stupid, but her gun was still right out there, so he kept his voice soft and even. 'No, I do not think it was an accident, ma'am. Right-wing crazies, militia types-Lordknows we have enough of them in this state-but nerve gas? Mass murder? I'm having a little trouble getting my head around that.'
'Well, you'd better hurry up,' Grace snapped. 'Because at ten o'clock, two more of those trucks are going to blow somewhere.'
Lee's mind stumbled through all the information she'd fired at him, his thoughts rattling around in his brain like bumper cars at the county fair. His head was killing him. He wasn't a hundred percent sure he could trust his own judgment at the moment, but one thought kept rising to the top like oil on water, and that's the one he focused on. 'We've got to get out of here. Tell someone what's going on.'
Annie elbowed Sharon. 'Gee, why didn't we think of that?'
Lee recognized the voice of the big one he'd caught in the bushes- the wild one. Who the hell was she? And who the hell was the one with the gun and the attitude, and what were they doing with a Kingsford deputy? Do they have husbands, kids? Hell, he didn't even know their names. Someday, when he got them all out of this, they'd all go out for beers and he'd ask them those things and a million others, but not now.
'I told you, we already tried to get out of here,' Grace said rapid-fire, angry and impatient because the fool didn't listen. 'Twice. There are too many of them, and right now they're all out there on the perimeter, just waiting for us to try again.'
Lee gritted his teeth against the pain in his head, against the nausea that rose like a black bubble when he pushed himself away from the post and sat erect. He didn't pass out, though.Good. Step one, getit together, Lee,he told himself.Itall depends on you.
'The road that runs through Four Corners is almost a mile long. It's too big an area for any kind of effective perimeter. They'd have to have a thousand men to keep it tight.'
Annie snorted. 'Do the math, honey. Line-of-sight average, oblong, not a circle, they could do it with less than a hundred.'
Lee blinked in the general direction of the voice. The wild one again. Christ, what was she, a mathteacher.? 'I was raised in these woods, ma'am. Unless there's enough of them to hold hands, there's a hole in their line somewhere. I'll find it.'
Annie just closed her eyes in sad resignation. You couldn't talk to a man when he was thinking like a man. He wanted there to be a hole in the perimeter, therefore there was a hole in the perimeter. Penis is genius.
Lee was trying to stand now, fingers hooked around the post to pull himself up. There was an instant of dizziness, then Sharon was next to him, supporting his elbow. 'We already decided that was too dangerous. We have another plan.'
Lee shook his head with a smile but immediately regretted the motion. He breathed deeply, waiting for the nausea to subside. 'I'm sure you do, ladies, but I'd feel a whole lot better if you just sat tight and waited for me to come back with help.'
'Oh, for Christ's sake,' Grace said, totally disgusted and then infuriated when Lee started to talk again with one of those condescending tones a lot of men still used on women.
'Listen,' he said gently. 'I know you think trying to walk out of here is hopeless, or you would have done it yourselves. Hell, there's a bunch of boys out there with automatics; that's enough to intimidate anyone. I understand that. But you have to know they're not supermen. There has to be a way past them; you just haven't found it yet. I need to go look. It's my job.'
Sharon took a step away from him and tried to keep her voice from shaking. 'What do you think you're dealing with here? A bunch of simpering women in long dresses waving white hankies, waiting to be rescued? I had the same training you did; I'm a deputy sheriff and an FBI agent to boot, and as far as the other two go, they're just plain scary. I get the serve-and-protect impulse. I know what you think you have to do and why you think you have to do it. But we did not veto trying to walk out of here because we're intimidated. We vetoed it because it's suicide.
Lee waited a moment before he spoke, responding to that singular male sense that instinctively retreats from the murky, unspoken undercurrents that sometimes pass between women when they've decided that men are idiots. Once they got to this point, trying to talk some sense into them was like beating yourself over the head with a hammer. It was better to just slip away and do what needed to be done, and let them see the right of it later. 'I'm going to need my gun,' he said quietly.
Grace took a step closer so he could see her eyes. 'That's too bad, because we could use another weapon after they kill you.'
Lee actually smiled, although no one could see it very well. 'Tough lady,' he said, then held out his right hand. 'Deputy Douglas Lee, Missaqua County Sheriffs Department. I didn't catch your name.'
The hand hung there alone for a moment while Grace tried to process the gesture. Tough, maybe. Rude, never. She shifted the Sig to her left hand and gave him the other one. 'Grace MacBride.'
'Pleased to meet you, Ms. MacBride.' His face searched the darkness in the basement. 'And the woman I met in the bushes?'
A drawl answered him. 'Annie Belinsky. The womanyou attacked in the bushes.'
Lee dropped his eyes. 'I do need to apologize for that. Never once in my life did I think I would lay violent hands on a lady.'
Grace handed him his gun, butt-first, and he slid it into his holster in a smooth, powerful movement. Then he moved toward the door, his gait growing more steady with every stride.
He's huge, Grace thought as his shadowed form passed her. And he seems stronger now, almost whole. Rationally, she knew that just because they were bigger and stronger didn't automatically make men more competent, more capable of accomplishing what a smaller person could not-but sometimes it was a comfort to wish it were thatway. It was part of the male mystique so deeply ingrained in women that you grew up wanting to believe it, even though it didn't make any sense at all. Or maybe there was a God and miracles and truth in biology, and Deputy Lee would find a way out and come back and save them all. Wouldn't that be lovely. Grace closed her eyes.Youthinks of Magozzi that way, too. Even you, with all you've seen and all you know, still want desperately to believe the lie of fairy tales.
Deputy Lee opened the wooden door that led to the concrete stairs, then turned and looked at them, standing there in a pathetic little semicircle, watching him leave. It occurred to him then that he hadn't really seen their faces, not clearly; that he wouldn't recognize one of them on the street; that if he didn't make it back in time and, God forbid, they disappeared forever in this town, he wouldn't even be able to give a description. At least he'd gotten their names.
He gave them a bleak smile. 'Well, I guess I'll see you later.'
The three women watched in desolate silence as he crept up the steps and slowly raised the slanted storm door on the outside. A slice of fading moonlight came down the stairs and lay a lighter stripe on the black dirt floor in front of their feet. They all stared down at it, listening to the storm door's soft thump as it was closed.
Lee straightened, releasing a long exhale, then looked around carefully. Shadows. Nothing but black, silent shadows everywhere. He had his 9mm back in his hand, safety off, and he could smell the sweat of his own fear. Still, it felt better out here than it had in the clammy basement-better to be moving, to be taking action, than to be hiding and waiting for the bogeyman to come.
And it felt better to be alone again. There was a small twinge of guilt as he realized how glad he was to be away from the women.
He was a short distance into the trees when a small yellow fireburst bloomed in the woods directly ahead. His brain never had time to process the sound or the image that his senses recorded, or even the great pressure of the projectiles that drilled into his body.
For an instant that imitated life, he remained erect, then he toppled backward slowly, his body rigid, like a giant redwood severed from its trunk, reluctantly yielding to gravity.
Back in the basement, all three women closed their eyes at the same time. 'Ml6, triple burst,' Sharon murmured. 'No nine millimeter. He didn't have a chance to shoot back.'
GRACE, ANNIE, and Sharon stood immobile in the dark basement for a full minute after they heard the triple
