T. Parker - The Triggerman Dance

A short heavyset man stood about thirty yards from the inferno, a water hose in both hands. The arc of water feebly vanished into the flames. The Ford skidded to a stop beside him and John jumped out, followed by the dog. Holt braked early and pulled in behind the Ford. He yanked his fire extinguisher free of the floorboard by the seat, but he could see that it was already too late: the trailer looked like a box of fireworks set on fire. The propane tank already had blown, judging by the gaping hole at one end. He saw the heavyset man nodding violently, taking one hand off the hose to point down the road.

"Those pigs" hissed Valerie. "Those absolute human swine."

Then, as Holt watched, John returned to his truck, threw forward the seat and pulled out a cloth case, from which he extracted what looked like a 12 gauge Remington automatic. He hurled the case back behind the seat and slammed it back. From somewhere in the cab he took a box of shells, pried open the top and grabbed three, which he loaded into the gun. Then he was back in the truck and the labrador had jumped in with him and the Ford fishtailed in a wide, gravel-throwing turn that threw up a cloud of dust as John gunned it back down hill toward the dirt road.

"Stay with him, Dad."

"I'm staying with him, Val. Hold on tight."

John must have known every foot of the miserable dirt road because he took it at an astonishing velocity. A mile from the trailers he shot up a wide, well-tended drive to a ranch house set in a meadow of grazing horses. By the time Holt caught up, John was talking with two men by a corral, then he jumped back into his truck and skidded back out in Holt's direction. John nodded at him as he flew past. Lane Fargo, Randell and Titisi had to swerve to miss him. Then another stop a half mile further down Again John was conferring with neighbors as Holt finally arrived and again the young man was in his truck and blasting back to the road by the time the dust cleared and Holt could make sense of what was going on. Another half mile down, the Ford skidded to a stop beside a run-down little batch of trailers. Three women sat in the shade, drinking beers and smoking. This time, Holt saw that John took his shotgun with him as he walked past the women and threw open the door of the largest trailer, a sun faded slum of a unit, slouching off-center and unshaded by a very large and very dead tree. John disappeared inside, then came out and pushed past the women, who appeared to be cussing him mightily. John snapped something back at them, but Holt was too far away to hear it. Beside him, Valerie was scanning the desert with her dark brown eyes. "He'll never find them out here They're miles away by now."

"He needs to play this out."

Two more miles of anguishing dirt road, three more fruitless stops, all transpiring under the growing desert heat. Finally the Ford slowed and grunted to a stop where the dirt road met the highway again, and the door flew open and John got out slammed it hard, took three steps to the wooden fence running alongside the road and kicked one of the dry twisted posts, his boot shattering it and the three strands of rusted barbed win shivering with the impact. He walked back to the truck and looked down into the bed. Then he opened the driver's side door Pulled out the gun and a small, six-pack sized cooler. He walked to the edge of the dirt road and hurled the cooler into the air then raised the gun and blasted it three times before it landed, each shot reducing the thing to smaller pieces that threw off wobbling jets of dark liquid until the mangled former box landed in the sagebrush, bounced, and rolled off into the sand. John pitched his gun back into the truck cab, looked at Holt, then turned his back to them, shook his head, and lowered it.

"Righteous anger," said Holt. "It's the best thing he can have right now."

"Besides a home and a live dog."

"Well put."

"Poor man. It's my fault. It's all my fault. I'll make it up to him."

"We'll make it up to him, Valerie."

Then she looked at her father with an expression he had come to both love and fear. He loved the way it came so directly from Carolyn and himself, passed on like a gift, the way her pupils dilated and her wide lips formed a slight frown and the vertical lines between her eyebrows furrowed-all of her conviction gathering force, being brought to bear. He feared it because Valerie was intractable when she looked like this, ferociously stubborn. And he knew how that ungovernable determination had led to the best things in his life, and the worst. It was the Holt energy, passed from generation to generation, powerful as a runaway big-rig, and as difficult to stop.

So he simply waited for his daughter to speak.

"We're taking him home," she said.

Holt's heart sank a little. "That's not a good idea for anyone," he said. "But maybe he could spend a few weeks here at the lake house-time to get a new trailer."

Valerie continued to look at him, disbelief mounting in her dark brown eyes. Holt wondered how a twenty-two-year old woman could turn his logic to mush, make him feel idiotic.

"So they can find him, and burn up our house, too?" she asked. "No. He needs a home, a base to operate from. He needs safety and time to regroup. He saved my life. He's coming to Liberty Ridge, Dad."

"Maybe he doesn't want to come to Liberty Ridge."

"He does. Look, Dad, what did you say about thirty seconds ago?"

"I said righteous anger-"

"-You said 'we'll make it up to him.' So, this is how we make it up to him. Simple!"

She reached across the truck with both hands, grabbed her father's face and kissed him once on each cheek, then once on his forehead.

Then, with all assumptions made but not another word, she got out of the truck and walked toward John, the man who had, at great price, saved her life. Vann Holt watched her approach him, his heart pounding not only from the punishment of the chase, but from colliding emotions of gratitude, impotence, jealousy and shame. He watched her place her hand on John's arm.

"Not like that, we won't," he said. "Not like that, girl of mine."

Josh Weinstein and Sharon Dumars watched the scene unfold from the privacy of a 1986 Dodge van parked across the highway at a feed and tack store. The van featured one-way windows, an antenna tuned to the transmission frequency of a beeper-cum- radio attached to John's belt, a parabolic microphone mounted on top, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and large magnetic signs on each side that said "Empire Cable Services." Anyone calling that number would find it disconnected and no longer in use.

They sat on two stools in the oven-like heat, peering through the windows with binoculars.

When Rusty met his double-barreled end, Sharon gasped and tightened, and though Weinstein found himself profoundly shaken by the sight of a perfectly good Bureau dog blown to smithereens by Bureau part-timers, he told himself that Rusty did not die in vain.

The stunt-packs of blood had gone off perfectly, assuaging Weinstein's second-biggest worry. They'd worked hard on the choreography, but he knew that a lucky, unanticipated move from Valerie could dislodge the wiring duct-taped to Sam's shoulder beneath the t-shirt and denim vest. They'd been thorough enough to use a half pint of Sam's own blood, on the off chance that a suspicious Holt, or, more likely, Lane Fargo, might try to run some lab work on what would surely splatter all over Valerie's body and clothes. Weinstein's greatest fear, though-that some genuine innocent bystander would come by and skew the whole delicate charade-never materialized. The Riverside County Sheriff was a worry, too. So Weinstein, Dumars and all four of their teammates had flooded the Indio Sheriff's Substation with calls just before noon. Posing as property owners, they reported hunters trespassing onto posted property many miles from Anza Valley-a common enough occurrence in many parts of the desert on any October Not a deputy was seen.