Part 24 (1/2)

'Better than him,' Charlie said numbly.

'We need to hurry.' Drummond scrambled back to his horse blanket.

'You think he might have a car around here somewhere?' Charlie asked.

Drummond packed snow into the bald spots on his blanket. 'Maybe, but that shot was probably heard for miles. If there's a road down from here, they'll block it.'

Charlie pulled his blanket back on with all of the joy of getting into a cold bath.

'Fine diversionary tactic, by the way,' Drummond said.

'The old there's-someone-behind-you trick? Who'd have thought it would work?'

'It wasn't that simple. There was nothing distinctive about his appearance or dialect. Yet you deduced he wasn't in league with the helicopter. How?'

'Oh, that,' Charlie said. 'Lucky guess: I didn't hear anything when he was chattering. I got the sense he was missing a lot of teeth.'

'Ah, symptomatic of methamphetamine usage?'

'Like a big, old red nose is to whiskey.'

'I see.' Drummond rolled onto his haunches, pulled his blanket over him, and shoved off.

'Fine diversionary tactic, by the way' was as much commendation as Charlie ever would have expected. 'The young and impressionable profit more from constructive criticism than puffery,' Drummond had long maintained*an adage Charlie speculated had been originated by a childless Spartan. With a coping sigh, he resumed crawling downhill. The ground seemed particularly coa.r.s.e and cold.

'You have a good nose,' Drummond said. 'I was thinking of the first time I saw it. At the office, when you were ten. I let you go down to the bas.e.m.e.nt. Do you remember?'

'No.' Charlie braced for a recounting of an early trip down the Easy Way.

'There was another stairwell, down to the subbas.e.m.e.nt, but we'd walled it off before we moved in; we needed to keep the existence of the subbas.e.m.e.nt secret from the legitimate employees. And none of them ever guessed a thing. But you said, Dad, there's a secret room down here!' I asked, What makes you think that?' You just shrugged, so I dismissed it as childish fantasy. On the subway home, though, you blurted out, The closet opens inward!' Which was the key. We'd made the stairs to the subbas.e.m.e.nt accessible by what appeared to be a utility closet, which was kept locked. You'd noticed there were no hinges on the outside of the frame. You intuited that the door opened inward*which closet doors customarily do not*meaning the door led somewhere. Ten months we'd been there and no one had thought of that. I had it fixed that night.'

Drummond was fond of citing ability to frame underachievement. Charlie girded for the inevitable drop of the other shoe.

Drummond said no more.

When they'd crept another hundred yards downhill, Charlie considered that Drummond had told the story in appreciation. It kindled in Charlie a good feeling, like winning. He wouldn't have thought such a nice moment could arise from capping a meth head, but there it was.

As they forged onward, the terrain didn't bother him as much.

At a back table at Miss Tabby's, Fielding read the message, forwarded to him by Pitman. Two minutes ago, a man on the ridge texted the pool player: TEH 2 DEA f.u.x R HER.

'There are some who will tell you that with all of its haste and lack of punctuation, text messaging is the death of communication via the English language,' Fielding told Pitman over the phone. 'This message, however, is evidence of its singularly descriptive powers.'

'DEA f.u.x' is singular,' agreed Pitman, adding a chuckle.

Obviously the kid was just sucking up.

'What I meant was the readout of the lat.i.tude and longitude of the guy's cell phone to three thousandths of a degree,' Fielding said. 'Shakespeare couldn't have done any better.'

'Oh, that, of course. I put the hunting pack into a la.s.so perimeter around the coordinates.'

'Good. Also, it occurred to me that the rabbits must be using tarps or something like that, layered with snow, to mask them from the infrared. So pa.s.s along word to the boys in the hunting pack that if they step on a mound of snow and it says Ouch,' shoot.'

41.

Still shrouded by the snow-packed horse blanket, and on hands and knees that felt frozen solid, Charlie followed Drummond to the edge of a cliff. As the branches overhead thinned, he braced for a sky full of search craft. by the snow-packed horse blanket, and on hands and knees that felt frozen solid, Charlie followed Drummond to the edge of a cliff. As the branches overhead thinned, he braced for a sky full of search craft.

Other than a few unhurried snowflakes, he saw only blackness. Below was farmland, miles of it, dormant aside from an old truck meandering along a narrow road, headlights every so often revealing a dark house or outbuilding.

'I like that one,' said Drummond, pointing to an enormous dwelling, with three parallel gambrel roofs intersected at right angles by a pair of A-frames. It appeared as if five different houses had been roped together.

Someone had gotten carried away with their Design Your Own Country Mansion software, Charlie thought. He understood that Drummond's appraisal wasn't based on aesthetics, though. No lights burned in or around the house. The long driveway wasn't plowed. There might be a vehicle they could use, a weekend station wagon perhaps.

Reaching the house would require a simple two-hundred-foot downhill crawl*simple, providing no sniper lay in wait.

That threat made the relatively slow descent feel like a prolonged freefall. Charlie began perspiring for the first time tonight. Halfway down, his s.h.i.+rt was soaked through. The wind, no longer impeded by woods, threatened to freeze him in place.

They made it to the cornfield at the base of the slope. Here a sniper would have seen the field, in Grimm brothers fas.h.i.+on, sprout two grown men. Drummond let his frosty camouflage fall so that it conformed to the ground, taking on the appearance of just another patch of snowy field.

While shedding his blanket in the same fas.h.i.+on, Charlie picked up, on his periphery, the silhouette of a stout man with a rifle. His heart leaped, and the rest of him followed.

Drummond simultaneously drew the Colt and whirled around.

At what proved to be a scarecrow*a good one, replete with dungaree overalls, plaid s.h.i.+rt, worn cowboy hat, and a hoe that, in the dark, at a certain angle, could be mistaken for a rifle.

'If I were a crow, I would have been scared to death,' Charlie said. Embarra.s.sment burned sensation back into his cheeks.

With a brief smile, Drummond stole toward the house, choosing a route through the darkest shadows. Still shaken, Charlie tramped after him. Halfway, without explanation, Drummond veered toward the barn, an archetypal, apple-red two-story with a gable-roofed hayloft.

The sliding door was unlocked. Drummond raised the latch and threw his weight into the handle, grinding the wheels through a season's worth of decaying leaves. The building released a shaft of stale air tinged not with the hay Charlie had antic.i.p.ated but gasoline. The source was a vintage Jeep Wagoneer. With its wooden side panels, the old sport utility vehicle fit the cla.s.sic barn the way a round-back sleigh went with an Alpine chalet.

'I should be able to start it, provided it starts at all,' said Drummond. He felt his way through the darkness and opened the driver's door.

'Let me get this one?' Charlie said. He jangled the keys suspended from a hook on the inside wall.

The Wagoneer's dome light showed a lopsided grin crease Drummond's face. 'Maybe I ought to learn more about the Easy Way,' he said.

And so it was that*s.h.i.+vering, windburned, cut, aching, and painfully aware a h.e.l.lfire missile might at any moment turn the barn to splinters*Charlie, for the first time he could recall, shared a laugh with his father.

42.

If any among the handful of drivers on the Stonewall Jackson Memorial highway*a narrow, winding country road*were to look into the four-door GMC pickup, they would have seen a heavyset, prematurely gray-haired man at the wheel. Wearing an insulated red flannel s.h.i.+rt and a scuffed Hillcats baseball cap, Benjamin Stuart Mallory, known to colleagues as 'Bull,' hoped to pa.s.s for a worker on his way home from the late s.h.i.+ft at one of the area mills. among the handful of drivers on the Stonewall Jackson Memorial highway*a narrow, winding country road*were to look into the four-door GMC pickup, they would have seen a heavyset, prematurely gray-haired man at the wheel. Wearing an insulated red flannel s.h.i.+rt and a scuffed Hillcats baseball cap, Benjamin Stuart Mallory, known to colleagues as 'Bull,' hoped to pa.s.s for a worker on his way home from the late s.h.i.+ft at one of the area mills.

On the seat beside him, hidden beneath his coat, was a glossy black Steyr Tactical Machine Pistol, the weapon of preference in testosterone-fueled crowds. The shooting he was planning would be pa.s.sed off as crossfire in a meth dealer turf war. He liked that the Steyr was light and small enough to be held in one hand, yet capable of delivering the same firepower as a submachine gun. Its primary disadvantage was accuracy, but even if 90 percent of his rounds went awry, he could still do the job several times over.

He turned off the road at the position Pitman had texted him, a driveway leading to a darkened, tin-roofed farmhouse, a half mile below the ridge where the slain meth cook had been found. Bull parked in such a way that a pa.s.serby might think he'd stopped to collect his mail.

He lowered his window enough to allow the nose of the Steyr out, then took up his PVS-29. The difference between this monocular and a typical night scope was its proprietary light intensifier that amplified more electrons and thus delivered an unbelievably bright and sharp image. He'd once asked one of Langley's 'Toy Makers' exactly how many more electrons. 'Thirty-eight thousand bucks worth,' the man replied. From a hundred yards away, on this overcast and particularly dark night, an ordinary scope would have enabled Bull to distinguish only the gender of the occupants of the vehicle presently approaching, and maybe not even that much. The PVS-29 turned night into a hazy afternoon, meaning he would have little difficulty recognizing rabbits Drummond and Charlie Clark.

The vehicle was a late-model Toyota coupe. At the wheel was a young woman in her mid-twenties, fair-haired with a roundish face. Pretty enough, Bull thought, that it was peculiar she was out so late alone. Of course the rabbits might be hiding below the window line, one of them poking a gun into her hip. Also peculiar: she was speaking; she was too young and too normal-looking to be talking to herself.