Dead Run (29 page)

"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 of some kind, for sure."

Gino grunted from the sofa behind the driver's seat. Charlie sat next to him, looking out the window. "We had a big swamp fire north of the Cities a few years ago. Never could figure that one out. I mean, there's about fifty acres of waterlogged frog city burning like it was dry kindling. Anyway, the smoke was black like that."

Bonar said, "Peat."

"Who's Pete?"

"Very funny. There's a high peat content in swamps, rotting vegetation and all that. Oil in the making. Burns like a son of a gun forever once it gets a good start. Smells bad, too."

Gino sighed. "I'm on a road trip with Mr. Britannica."

Halloran came up from the back and looked out at the smoke. "I finally got through to Sheriff Pitala's office. His phones have been jammed with calls on the fire. That FBI agent who gave us the raid sites said they've got a lot of their people heading our way, fire trucks from all over the county, plus Pitala put the patrols back on the road, so we might be running into some serious traffic when we get close. There's a little town dead center in that fire. Sounds like it's gone."

Magozzi had been standing behind Harley, watching him punch commands into the GPS. He looked over his shoulder at Halloran. "What about the residents?"

Halloran shrugged. "He said it started small. They're assuming everyone had a chance to get out."

"They're not sure?"

"No. Ed's on the way for a closer look. His sister lives in there."

"Oh, Lord," Bonar murmured.

Gino stroked Charlie's back absently. "How shook up was the Fed you talked to?"

"Pretty much. But there's a lot going on up there with the phones ringing off the hook and people yelling in the background. Why?"

"Nothing. You just gotta wonder if whatever the Feebs are up to has anything to do with a fire that suddenly pops up out of nowhere."

"It's fire season, Gino."

"Yeah, well, nothing's ever that simple."

Harley had his face close to the windshield now. "Jesus. I think I just saw some flames shooting up in the middle of that cloud."

"Could be," Bonar said. "When those pines are dry enough and hot enough, they literally explode, and the flames can shoot straight up like bottle rockets."

"Shit. I gotta pull over. We are not driving into that thing unless I know we can get the hell out fast if we need to, and this damn GPS map is telling me there's only one turn off this road for the next ten miles, and that's the turn that leads right into Four Corners."

"Four Corners?" Magozzi asked.

"That's the name of the town in the middle of all this," Halloran said.

"We could turn around," Bonar offered.

"In this rig? On this peanut road? Are you kidding?" Harley pulled the RV to one side of the road and stopped.

Bonar was actually wringing his hands. "There's probably lots of little dirt roads cutting off this one that won't show up on that map. The county's checkered with them."

"'Probably' doesn't cut it for me. What if we get in there and the fire jumps the road behind us?"

"We'll all cook in here like pork roasts."

"You got that right. And can anybody tell me why we're planning to drive straight into hell anyhow? We're looking for our ladies, and I can guarantee that the one place they'renot is in the middle of that shit up there."

"Like Gino said, it's just one more coincidence in a long string of them," Magozzi said behind him. "We know for sure at least one of our missing people disappeared in a dead zone, and now there's a big fire smack in the middle of one. If we're going with coincidence and a possible connection to the Feds' operation, we've got to take it all the way. We've got no place else to go. And my gut tells me those women are somewhere near that fire, either running from it, trapped by it, or-" He stopped dead, but nobody seemed to notice.

Harley grunted derisively. "No way they're trapped in there. They're just too goddamned smart."

Magozzi looked at him. "Smart enough to send up a flare? What if Grace wasn't saying four people were dead. What if she was trying to say 'Four Corners'?"

Harley stomped on the accelerator.

BARELY A MOMENT had passed since Sharon Mueller had raised her gun and blown away Deputy Diebel's head.

Annie couldn't hear anything over the ringing in her ears, and she couldn't see very well, either, because she hadn't blinked in a long time.

Blink. You have to blink, or your eyeballs will dry up and fall out, and then you'll be blind-blind and deaf, and your last memory of sound will be the thunderous roar of a gun, and your last memory of sight will be this shocking thing that Sharon just did. Don't look-

She was actually staring at Sharon's face-the side of her face, actually-sort of three quarters, sort of profile, and she didn't recognize her at all. She blinked at last, but that didn't help. She moved her jaw, trying to clear her ears, and then someone turned down the ringing sound. It was still there, but it was softer, hiding way behind theeardrum, muffled like a jangling phone under a pillow. Another noise began to tiptoe in. Sharon, she realized, making the oddest little sound, like she was screaming as loud as she could with her mouth closed, screaming through her nose.

Oh, dear. Poor Sharon. She was staring at something awful in the front of the car, on the other side of the cage, and Annie knew what she was looking at. She'd had just a glimpse, just the tiniest flash on the back of her retina before she'd shifted her gaze to Sharon's face and refused to look forward again, just like when you went to a horror movie. You didn't keep looking at the screen when something gross happened. You just shifted your eyes a little to one side, not so far that anyone would notice, just far enough, and then later, when people asked how you could watch that stuff, you just shrugged and said it wasn't so bad, really. It was a trick, a secret trick. She should have told Sharon about it, because Sharon was still staring at all the blood and little pieces of matter sliding down the windshield.

"Sharon." Grace reached across Annie to touch Sharon's left hand, which had fallen into her lap like a dead thing. It was ice-cold. Her right hand still held the 9mm, still pointed at the place where Deputy Diebel's head had been before his body slumped to the right, over the console. "Sharon."

Annie watched Sharon's eyes move just a little, hardly far enough to notice-maybe she did know the trick. Hello, Sharon. Anybody in there?