made her able to do that-besides knifing a man to death when she was seventeen, of course.
Agent Knudsen, who was already four or five sheets to the wind, brandished an off-center smile. He held up his glass to her. 'Not so long ago, dear lady, you were neck-deep in a scummy lake next to a truck filled with nerve gas.' His glass wobbled, and a dribble of wine fell to the table.
Annie gave him a quick curtsy and disappeared down the aisle.
'What truck? What lake? What the fuck are you people talking about?' Gino demanded. He looked a little blurry-eyed and aggressive.
'Have you called Angela?' Magozzi asked him.
'About twenty thousand times.' He rolled his eyes toward Harley. 'I sure as hell hope you get free minutes on your sat phone.' He moved his head back toward Knudsen. 'So what's all this lake shit?'
Knudsen was making the mistake a lot of nondrinkers make when they have a little too much. He was gesturing with his glass, and Roadrunner was frantically blotting up spills as they happened. 'There were three trucks originally-three targets. The first one had some kind of accident and crashed in Four Corners. They shoved it into the lake the women ended up hiding in. It's a really long story.'
Harley was immediately alarmed. 'Are you shitting me? They were really exposed to that gas?'
Knudsen stuck his lips out. 'No worries. You would not believe how fast sarin hydrolyzes, and there probably wasn't a whole lot left in the truck anyway.' He dropped his chin and raised his eyebrows almost up to his hairline. 'Now, if it had been VX, that would have been a whole different story. Big trouble. Big problem.' He grinned foolishly, inappropriately, a lot like Charlie.
Up to this point, Roadrunner had been pretty quiet for a man who had literally saved the day. 'What were the targets?' he asked Knudsen. His voice was polite, almost deferential. He was asking about the people he'd saved.
The question sobered everyone. Even Knudsen put down his glass, and his gaze seemed to sharpen. 'I really can't tell you that.'
Gino bristled a little. 'You can't tell the man who saved your ass? Who has a better right to know?'
Knudsen fiddled with the stem of his glass for a minute, then laid his gaze on Roadrunner, right where it belonged. 'One of the trucks was parked at a mosque outside Detroit-one of the biggest in the country, by the way. The other was at an Immigration Services field office in a Chicago suburb.'
No one said a word.
Magozzi looked down at his hands on the table, thinking how accomplished they were in some things, how versatile, and ultimately, how helpless. 'They were sending a message.'
Knudsen nodded. He looked one hundred percent sober. 'That's what it looks like. They were very careful with the target sites. The mosque and the immigration office were both quite isolated, which makes the targets pretty specific.' He dug in his pocket, pulled out a wrinkled business card, and smoothed it flat on the table. 'We found about a thousand of these in Hemmer's desk at the dairy.'
All the men leaned over to read it. There was no name on it, no address, no logo of any sort-just a simple quote:
'. . it is their right, it is their duty . . , to provide new Guards for their future security.'
'Sounds familiar,' Halloran murmured.
'It should,' Bonar replied. 'It's from the Declaration of Independence. What the forefathers said you had to do when the government wasn't doing enough to protect you.'
Knudsen nodded sadly.
And this, Magozzi thought, was the dreaded black place. The desperate place where people always went when anger and fear couldn't find any other answer, the place that obliterated logic and compassion and reason and all the other higher functions of the human mind that civilization had fostered.
No one wanted to talk after that. They found their rest in leather recliners, or doubled up on the sofa beds. Roadrunner was mothering again, covering everyone with blankets before he stretched out in the middle of the aisle and immediately fell asleep.
To his everlasting shame, Harley woke up in the middle of the night on one of the sofa beds, with both arms wrapped tightly around a happily sleeping Agent Knudsen.
SHARON MUELLER was up at dawn, shrouded in a big terry robe from the RV's closet, standing near Deputy Douglas Lee's bloodied patrol car.
It was quiet in the field. Dew sparkled on the seeded heads of tall grass, and a hawk flew overhead, screeching occasionally for its mate.
She heard the RV door close softly in the distance, then felt Hallo-ran approaching. She didn't have to look to know it was him. She would never have to look to know he was there.
He moved up beside her, hands shoved in his pockets, light eyes fixed on the car. 'Who killed the man who was pretending to be Deputy Lee?'
'I did.'
It was amazing how easily it slipped out-no guilt clouding the issue, no lingering questions, none of the doubts that used to fill hermind whenever she held a gun so similar to the one that had ended her mother's life, hesitant-always hesitant-to pull the trigger and end someone else's. It was part of the reason she'd been shot in the Monkeewrench garage all those months ago. She hadn't been too slow to get at her gun and pull the trigger to keep a killer from shooting her. She'd just been paralyzed by the past, and that had made her a bad cop. But that was over. She could go back to Kingsford County now if she wanted. She could go back on the street. Maybe she could even go back to Halloran.
Halloran didn't even bat an eye. He just nodded. 'It was a righteous shooting.'
'I shot him in the back,' Sharon said.
'Even so.'
'I know. I'm okay with it.'
Halloran swallowed hard and wondered how people did this.Youdid it when you were a kid,he told himself.You did it every time you stepped to the edge of that cliff at the lime quarry, swung the rope out over the water, and hoped you didn't shatter yourself on the sharp-edged rocks that were waiting below, always waiting.
'I was thinking maybe we should get married. Have kids. Do the whole thing.'
Sharon bent in half almost immediately, laughing out loud, and Halloran thought either he'd just proposed to an absolutely insane woman or he'd screwed this up just like he'd screwed up everything else in his life.
'Oh, God, I'm sorry, Mike,' Sharon finally gasped, straightening, at least making an attempt at a sober face befitting the occasion. 'But we haven't even had a real date yet.'
'Okay. We could do that first if you want.'
She turned toward him then and grabbed his whiskered face in both hands and pulled it down to hers. Then he felt the woman beneath the thick terry robe and saw in his mind's eye the woman in the red dress, high heels, and lips like colored water, who had laid her hand on his heart in the Kingsford County Sheriffs Office way back last October, and refused to let go.
FIVE HOURS LATER, Gino and Magozzi were leaning against the side of the RV, staring across an empty tar road, across a field at a huge barn. Grace's Range Rover was parked right behind them. The road was so narrow that both vehicles blocked it, but from what they'd seen in the past hour, chances were slim that another vehicle would ever come along. Northern Wisconsin was the end of the world, according to Gino. They could hear a single blackbird calling from a cornfield next to the barn, and not much else.
'So that's what started all this,' Magozzi said, tipping his head to get a different angle on the barn.
Grace walked up from the Range Rover and leaned between them. 'That's it.'
Gino shook his head in disbelief. 'Sharon took you fifty miles out of your way to see this?'
'That's right.'
Gino pushed away from the sun-heated metal skin of the RV. 'Well, it's about the dumbest thing I ever saw in my life,' he said, heading back inside for a little liquid refreshment and some more of that gooey chocolate crap with the unpronounceable name that Harley had made last night. He hadn't wanted to make this side trip. He'd been anxious to get home to Angela.
