AT THAT MOMENT, there was an explosion at the house. Not huge, but big enough. Then another one. A DEA agent had gotten a grenade launcher going, and hit the house with high-explosive rounds, and then with what looked like a gas round. And from behind the hill, to the northeast, where Virgil and Stryker had crawled on their scouting trip, a distinctive single boom. Virgil had never shot one, but he suspected it was a fifty-caliber rifle. The DEA was taking the house out.
Virgil said, 'Just lay here; I'll be back,' and he crawled back up the ditch. Franks was lying spread-eagled in front of the first DEA truck, obviously dead. Two agents in armor were behind the truck, a third agent on the ground. Stryker was still in the ditch, popping single shots off at the house: not much seemed to be coming out.
One of the first-in agents was squatting behind one of the trucks in the road, all four tires shot out.
'What about the guys behind the truck?' Virgil shouted.
The agent yelled back, 'Harmon is gone. Franks shot him right in the head. Two more wounded, not bad; the others are okay. How bad are you?'
'Not bad. We've got four good tires. I'll back out of here if you can get that grenade guy to put in a couple more rounds. Pirelli's hurt pretty bad. I need to make a run to the hospital.'
'Soon as you get it fired up, I'll tell him to start putting rounds in. Go like hell.'
Virgil got in the foot-well of the Explorer. The passenger-side windows were shot out, glass all over the seats, a few holes, but the tires were good, and intact, and nobody had been shooting at the engine block, where they might've hit electronics.
The truck started, and he shouted, through the broken windows, 'I'm ready,' and two seconds later, heard the first grenade impact, and he started rolling backward up the ditch, building momentum, afraid he'd bog down in the wet bottom, and then another grenade, and the boom from the fifty-cal, and another grenade, and he risked sitting up, looked back over his shoulder, and accelerated onto the road and into the shelter of the damaged DEA truck.
Pirelli was still in the ditch, half sitting now. Virgil ran down to him, and Pirelli asked, 'What time is it?'
'Damned if I know,' Virgil said, and he grabbed Pirelli by his armor and said, 'Hold on, now,' and dragged him across the road to the Ford, loaded him through the back door, flat on his back, then got in the truck and backed up another two hundred yards, hearing the grenades pounding Feur's place, then risked stopping, made a U-turn through the ditch and was on his way out. 'What time is?' Pirelli called. 'What time is it?'
'Time to go,' Virgil shouted back, and that seemed satisfactory, and Pirelli stopped talking.
IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR, he could see Feur's house, with smoke-maybe gas?-but no fire. Then he was over the rise and onto the interstate and he didn't bother calling the hospital, and he was moving too fast anyway, and if they had a brain in their head, with two wounded agents already in, they'd be ready for more. A mile from the exit, he saw a DEA-looking truck heading back, saw a shattered window: the guy who'd made the run to the hospital, headed back.
Eight minutes to the Bluestem exit, up and left, accelerating up the hill, then right to the hospital, the big arrow of the emergency room, three cop cars sitting outside of it, deputies looking toward him, flinching at the sound of his wheels, and then he was there, out, shouting, 'We got another one, Pirelli, he's hurt. Need a gurney, need a gurney…'
The hospital had one full-time surgeon, Virgil learned, with another on his way from Worthington. The one on the job was working back and forth between injured DEA agents and he looked at Pirelli and said to a nurse, 'Clean him up,' and then he was gone.
The nurses took Pirelli off and Virgil went outside, where a deputy said, 'We've got guys heading down to Feur's,' and, 'The DEA guy went back.'
'The doc say anything about the first two guys?'
'They're hurt bad. One of them's right on the edge, the other's better.' The deputy's face was pale, anxious. 'I need to get down there…'
'You need to stay here,' Virgil said. 'Coordinate. Call your guys, tell them to take it easy going in, because there's a war going on down there. Once they're inside two hundred yards, they could get shot up. Best to hold back, isolate the farmhouse, and let the DEA guys take it down. Block the roads, don't let anybody in or out. Look for people on foot.'
'I'll call them,' the deputy said, and then Virgil was in his truck and rolling. He was halfway down the highway when an agent named Gomez called: 'We've got contact with Feur: he's still inside, he won't talk, says for you to call him.'
'I'll be there in three or four minutes, if you can stall him. You could listen in.'
DEPUTIES HAD SET UP a roadblock just off the interstate. Virgil went on through, did a U-turn four hundred yards out, backed down to the wrecked DEA truck, and left his truck there. Carrying the M-16 he'd taken from the DEA agent and two mags, he worked his way back down the roadside ditch.
THE HOUSE WAS a ruin. The second floor was gone, part of it falling inside the frame of the house, part of it out in the yard. Popping his head up every few yards, Virgil could see what appeared to be olive-drab sandbags, the kind used by the Corps of Engineers for flood control.
They had been bunkered up, he thought, but the pounding from the grenade launcher had knocked out the frame of the house.
As he crawled, he noticed that there was no firing; very little sound at all. A lot of gasoline around, though. Five dead trucks, all shot to pieces, leaking gas; smoke coming out of one of them.
Stryker was no longer in the ditch. He'd moved across the road, and was sitting behind one of the trucks. Virgil heard a grenade hit the house, and made his move, slid in next to Stryker.
Another agent came running over. All he said was, 'You ready? It's for you.' He had a phone in his hand, and he pushed the 'call' button, and handed it to Virgil.
Feur answered a minute later. 'What?'
Virgil said, 'This is Virgil Flowers. You feel like coming out?'
Feur chuckled. 'No, I guess not. I have a question for you, though. Why in the hell did you come in shooting? You could have knocked on the door. I could take a couple years inside. But you came in shooting and now there are dead cops, and I'm not gonna sit on death row, waiting for the needle.'
'Ah, man,' Virgil said. 'It was Franks' goddamn dogs. We weren't shooting you. The dogs went after an agent, chewing him up. Somebody shot at the dog, somebody shot back from the house.'
'All this happened because of dogs?' Feur didn't seem surprised.
'Well, not exactly. If you hadn't been making a ton of crank, if you hadn't built bunkers inside the house, if you hadn't shot back…Was that you, or Trevor, or one of the other guys?'
'Trevor,' Feur said. 'Silly fool. Always liked those guns too much. He paid for it: he's gone now. There's only two of us left, me'n John. We're both hurt, trying to decide what to do.'
'You aren't gonna take any more cops with you,' Virgil said. 'The DEA is talking about bringing in a tank from the National Guard. Run that house over like a trash compactor.'
After a few seconds of silence, Feur said, 'Call me back in two minutes. John's hurt, I need to see what he wants to do.'
VIRGIL PUNCHED OFF. He'd been holding the phone close, so the agent could listen in, and the agent said, 'Good. If he's talking, he'll quit.' Then, 'What about our guys?'
Virgil said, 'One's real bad, one may be dying. Not dead yet, they're working on both of them at the hospital. Pirelli's got a bunch of holes, but I don't think he's gonna die. What about the others…?'
'We sent two more in; not good, but not terrible.' The agent nodded, chewed his lip, said, 'Why'd Franks turn those dogs loose?'
'Crazy guy,' Virgil said. 'A whole house full of crazy guys.'
HE LOOKED at the phone, and redialed. Feur answered, and said, 'We're quittin'. But we can't get out of here. We're all piled in. We're not gonna shoot, but you'll have to get us out.'
'Where are you?'
'Right in the middle of the house, first floor, the whole top floor came down on us. Can't see any cracks, just a lot of lumber. John is hurtin' bad.'
Virgil could hear another man talking in the background, but couldn't make out what he was saying. 'Gonna take a while,' Virgil said. 'I'll tell you what, Reverend. You best not resist. Won't do any good, for one thing, but the
