because this place sure as hell couldn't run without her.
She was back by 5:30A.M., shoving a plate of ham, eggs, and biscuits under his nose. 'Get away from my desk.'
'Lord almighty, Dot, now I know how all my predecessors died. You scared them to death.'
'You were sleeping on the job.'
'Dozing. It's been quiet since you left, except for the boys checking in by phone. And before you ask, there's no sign of Doug yet, or those women the Minneapolis cops are looking for. And what the hell are you doing here? I just sent you home.'
'Hmph. Three hours ago. I walked home, took all the snooze I needed in the recliner, then showered and made you breakfast. Eat it, you skinny old man, before it gets cold or you keel over. Don't know which is likely to happen first, the way you look.'
She rolled him, chair and all, over to the other desk and grabbed the card-table chair she'd been sitting in for more than forty years. Not a single light was lit on the patrol board. It had been that way since the FBI pulled the cars off the road, and Dorothy thought looking at that black board was like looking at the end of the world.
'Don't know how you can sit in that damn thing,' the Sheriff said around a mouthful. 'There isn't a lick of padding left in that seat, if there ever was any to start with.'
'If you carried a little more padding in that skinny butt of yours, it wouldn't be a problem.'
Ed smiled, lips sealed shut with the honey she'd put on the biscuits. When he pulled them open again, he said, 'Swear to God, Dorothy, if Pat ever kicks me out, I'm going to run right to your house and marry you.'
Dorothy snorted. 'I'm twelve years older than you. It wouldn't work out. You're too immature.'
'You gotta get with the times. People do that stuff all the time now. We could be like Cher and whatever- his-name-is, or that Dimmy woman and her young fella.'
'Dimmeee. How often do I have to tell you that?'
He didn't answer her, and when she glanced over to look at him, he was holding a bite of food in his mouth, not chewing, just looking at her with his eyes half screwed shut.
Dorothy cocked her head at him. 'What! Don't tell me there was a bone in that ham, because it was a boneless ham. Born and died in a can, as far as I know.'
It took a slurp of cold coffee for him to get the bite down his gullet. 'Funny thing. I thought I heard you say you were twelve years older than me.'
'So?'
'So that makes you seventy-seven years old, Dorothy, and as I recollect, the birth date on your records puts you at sixty-nine. If the county commissioners ever found out how old you really are, they'd make you retire.'
'Who's going to tell them?'
'Not me.'
'Allrighty, then. You quit jawing now, because I've got an honest-to-God light coming up on the 911 board, and I'm so excited I can barely stand it.' She adjusted her headset and punched her buttons at the same time that the phone on the desk started ringing.
The phones kept ringing off the hook for the next half hour and Dorothy's 911 board was so lit up, even she was starting to get a little frazzled. By the time Ed Pitala had finished his fifteenth call, his face was red and his eyes were hard, and he was ready to start making some calls of his own. He stood up quickly and said, 'Dorothy, you've got to cover the board and the phones for a minute. I've got to talk to Knudsen. You think you can manage?'
'Probably not. I'm seventy-seven years old.'
'You don't look a day over sixty-nine.'
She shooed him away with her fingers, and he crossed the outer office to the door that had his name on it. He rapped hard and stormed in before he got an answer. Agent Knudsen was talking on that peculiar thing he'd brought with him that looked something like a phone and a lot like something else. It didn't plug into any wall or phone jack, and as far as Ed knew, the thing probably ran on a can of baked beans. He raised his eyes and held up a finger, which the Sheriff thought was pretty laughable. Fingers never stopped anyone unless they were on a trigger.
'You can put that damn thing down or not, I don't care, because I've got a whole goddamned forest on fire, and I'm about to send out every goddamned truck in the county whether you like it or not.'
Knudsen just stared at him with his mouth open for a second, and it was the first time Ed noticed that he was little more than a kid. It made him nervous to think of kids in positions of responsibility with law enforcement, but not as nervous as the other expression Knudsen was hiding behind the one that just looked surprised. This boy was scared.
'Stay put. I'll get back,' Knudsen said into the phone, then gave Ed his attention. 'I know all about the fire, Sheriff. It's under control.'
'The hell it is. The last call I got was from one of my deputies who damn near drove into the thing, and it is nowhere near under control. That fire's crowning, and it's going through thirty-foot dry pines like they were matchsticks, and I did not walk into my own office to ask for your permission, I am just telling you that I am calling in every one of my people and getting them out there in patrol cars, because we are going to need every emergency vehicle we've got. . . .'
'Understood, Sheriff.'
That stopped Ed's rant cold. Damn. He hated working his hackles into a bristle and then getting them hosed down like that. 'What happened to all that crap about our patrols scaring off whoever you were trying to find?'
'We are not here to impede public safety; we're here to protect it.'
Ed narrowed his eyes. 'You already found what you were looking for, didn't you?'
'No, we did not.'
'Any chance whatever it is has anything to do with this fire?'
'Anything's possible, but we don't think so. Your fire started small. We had smoke sightings a while ago that didn't raise any major alarms. The real fire started a bit later, with a few small explosions. Could have been propane tanks, something in the gas station . . .'
Ed caught his breath. 'What gas station?'
Knudsen frowned. 'I don't know. Is there more than one in Four Corners?'
'Four Corners?' he repeated stupidly, and Knudsen looked at him sideways.
'You didn't know the fire was in the town?'
Ed shook his head. 'My people weren't close enough yet. I knew the general area, that's all.'
'Oh. Sorry. We did a fly-over a few minutes ago, that's who I was talking to. All he could make out was that the center of it looked like it might have been a gas station, and it spread out from there. I'm afraid there isn't much left of Four Corners.'
Ed blanched and felt his knees start to give way. He grabbed the nearest chair and nearly fell into it.
'Hazel?' The whisper came from the doorway. Dorothy was standing there with her eyes and open mouth making three circles in a face that didn't look sixty-nine anymore, or even seventy-seven-it looked a whole lot older.
Knudsen's face went still. 'You knew someone in that town?'
'My sister,' Ed said. 'Well, half sister. She owns the cafe next to the gas station.'
The agent caught his breath and took a minute, then spoke very quietly. 'Remember, Sheriff, it started small. She would have had time to get out. Everyone would have.'
Ed looked like he was shrinking in that chair, as if the fire were right there, sucking all the moisture out of him. 'You think so? We got over fifty calls on that fire in the past half hour, and not one of them came from Four Corners or anyone who lived there. If they had all that time, why didn't one of them pick up a phone?'
HALLORAN and Roadrunner were in the back of the RV- Roadrunner back at the computers, Halloran on the satellite phone, trying to get through to Sheriff Pitala about the fire. Everyone else was in the front, looking out the big windows at the smoke cloud that had gotten more and more ominous the closer they got. The damn thing was huge now, right in the middle of the next dead zone, and they were still at least five miles away. The center of it was black and nasty and halfway up the sky; the sides were gray, expanding outward by the minute.
'That's no grass fire,' Bonar said. 'Something dirty's at the center of it, and that means man-made. Buildings
