'They have to be. We've got them, sir.'
'Possibly.'
'Sir?'
Hemmer rolled his head toward him. 'Doesn't it bother you at all, Acker, that they would set the gas station on fire and then try to hide in the house next door?'
Acker's shrug was hapless. 'They're women, sir.'
Hemmer had a deep scar on the left side of his mouth that pulled it down a little when he tried to smile, which he didn't do often. Very few people realized that the resulting grimace when he heard
something that pleased him was a sign of approval. Acker was one
of them.
'You want to send some men into the house, sir?'
'No. Everybody on the fire. You and I will take care of the women.'
This time Acker smiled back at him.
EVERY SINGLE MAN in the Monkeewrench RV was running on adrenaline, and not much else. They'd covered only two of the seven dead zones in Deputy Lee's patrol sector in the past hour, no joy in either, and the next one was a good twenty miles away. They'd run through four pots of coffee and all the high-energy snack food left in the bus from the last trip, but it wasn't doing Harley much good. He'd been night-driving since Minneapolis, and his eyes were starting to look like two pinwheels spinning in opposite directions. Bonar, who'd been riding shotgun with Charlie in his lap since Gino went in the back with Magozzi, Halloran, and Roadrunner, feared that the shoulder harness was the one and only thing holding the tattooed giant upright.
Back in the office, Roadrunner looked up from his computer station for the first time in an hour. Up until now, he'd been in some strange cybertrance, punctuated by occasional violent outbursts of furious typing. He was running multisite cross-checks on the suspect men and sites on the FBI raid list, hoping to find things the Feds had missed, printing them out, then feeding the papers to Magozzi, Gino, and Halloran. 'Goddamnit, this is going nowhere!' His voice was a frustrated whine. 'I didn't get a single red flag on any of those men, and unless you can find something I didn't, they're just as clean as Agent Knudsen said they were. Just ordinary people.'
Magozzi tapped one of the papers he was speed-reading. 'If the Feds are looking for milk trucks, this Franklin Hemmer has to be the primary target.'
Gino fanned through the sheaf of papers he was holding. 'Which one's Hemmer?'
'The guy who owns the dairy.'
'Oh, yeah. Christ, what kind of a sick fuck would fill up milk trucks with nerve gas? I'm never going to be able to eat cereal again.'
Roadrunner punched the print key, and more papers started spewing out. 'This is kind of interesting. I just pulled the county tax rolls on Hemmer, and it seems he has about a thousand acres scattered all over the place.'
Halloran held up his own stack of papers. 'His tax returns list him as businessman and farmer, which explains the thousand acres.'
Magozzi grunted. 'The only thing I see on the raid list is Hemmer's house and the dairy. How come none of that acreage was searched?'
'The FBI must have done drive-bys. It's probably all just cropland, and there's no way he's cooking nerve gas in the middle of a hayfield.' Halloran sighed, setting the papers aside for a minute. Roadrunner was right. This wasn't going anywhere, and it wasn't getting them any closer to finding the women.
He looked out the back window to rest his eyes. The sky had been gradually lightening for the past half hour, as if someone had spilled a big bottle of bleach on it.
He glanced over at Magozzi and wondered if he looked that bad. The skin across Magozzi's face was taut, as if he were about to jump out of it, he had a black five o'clock shadow twelve hours gone, and it was getting hard to tell where the beard ended and the black circles under his eyes began.
They'd talked the case inside and out nonstop since they left Beldon, like tired dogs chasing their tails, never getting anywhere. Every scrap of information they had blew into a brick wall, and the frustration was building to that dangerous point where you start thinking that there just isn't a goddamned thing you can do. If they didn't find Sharon, Grace, and Annie standing in the middle of the road in one of the dead zones, they'd be right back where they started with no clue where to look next, getting eaten alive by the thought that the women were out there somewhere in a bad place.
He turned back toward the window and looked out at the kind of wild country he'd loved all his life, and thought he'd gladly blow up every square inch of it if that would put them one step closer to the missing women. He wondered how old you had to get before you stopped making mistakes. He shouldn't have let Sharon go into the Monkeewrench warehouse last fall. He shouldn't have stopped trying to call her, just because she never answered. And he sure as hell shouldn't have sent that goddamned form letter that said she was going to be fired. Christ. Hurt feelings could mess up a man's head beyond recognition. And pride.Pride goeth before the fall, Mikey. It was another one of those blasted Bible quotes that his mother and Father Newberry had been so fond of spouting when he'd been a kid, and it had taken him twenty years to hear the truth in it, because he surely was taking a tumble now.
He wasn't all that sure he could stand it if he lost another deputy.
No, goddamnit, that wasn't right. He wasn't sure if he could stand it if he lostSharon.
The admission, even to himself, was almost his undoing. He rubbed at his eyes because they were tired and starting to water, blurring the colors that were beginning to show up outside the window.
'Dead zone coming up,' Harley s voice boomed through the RV intercom. 'And this is a big one. We've got about five square miles to cover. Eyes front.'
They all got up instantly and started to head for the front of the bus and the big windows. By the time they got there, Bonar and Harley were looking at a smear of smoke on the horizon.
'I wonder what's burning,' Harley was saying.
Bonar shrugged. 'Could be anything. Folks still burn garbage up this way, and every now and then, one of those hundred-year-old barns with hundred-year-old hay in it goes up. And it's been real dry. Could be a grass fire. Long way away, though.'
Magozzi was half listening to their conversation, but most of his attention was focused on the road ahead and the passing countryside. It was a lot lighter now, and the sky was taking on that early-morning frosted-blue color that promises heat to come. He could see patches of woods, fallow fields, and not a single sign of human life anywhere. It seemed that you could call a place like this a dead zone for a lot of reasons.
His eyes kept going back to that smudge of gray on the horizon. For no good reason he could think of, the smoke bothered him.
BY THE TIME Hemmer and Acker got into Four Corners, the town wasn't quiet anymore. Dozens of shouting men had converged with shovels and hoses on the fire that had once been Dale's garage bay. There were still occasional minor explosions as something inside reached ignition point, but they were beating it.
Jesus, there was a lot of gasoline. An unbelievable amount of gasoline around the pumps and all over the road, but other men were shoveling dirt on it as fast as they could. To a civilian, it would have looked like mass confusion, but Hemmer recognized it for what it was-ordered chaos. Yes, it was loud, but there was no one for miles around to hear the noise, so that didn't bother Colonel Hemmer. The smoke cloud did.
The damn thing was huge; acrid, black smoke billowing into an enormous, oily, reeking mass spreading over the town like a visible, airborne cancer. It boiled into a huge cauliflower shape directly over the station while its edges sank toward the ground, a dark and deadly blanket settling onto a fiery bed. Soon enough, someone would see it and raise an alarm, if they hadn't already. But he didn't need a lot of time. The women in the house were the last loose end, and with the deputy dead, the last witnesses. Even if outsiders did come in, it was going to take them far too long to find out what had happened here. He glanced at his watch. The two trucks they had left on the road were already nearing their destinations. Innocent, lumbering things that looked like they belonged where they were going, and there they would sit, benign, unmanned, unnoticed-until ten hundred hours, when they would automatically send out a wake-up call that the whole world would hear.
Gagging against the smoke and the odious stench of burning rubber, Acker and Hemmer crept up to the
