John Sandford - The Fool's Run

"I want to talk," I told Maggie. "LuEllen doesn't but she'll go along. She's afraid of you and the Anshiser people. And we have a gun. We bought a gun. We're at Dace's cabin in West Virginia, and there's only one way in, and we'll be watching it. You fly into Washington, rent a car, and come up alone."

"You don't believe me," she said.

"We kind of believe you. We're not sure about Dillon," I said. "We're not going to take any chances, after what happened to Dace. We want to talk. Bring the money."

I told her how to get to the cabin. "When you turn off that road, follow the electric wire. There's only one, and it ends at Dace's place."

"I'll see you tomorrow afternoon," she said. "I'll bring the money. You've got to believe me."

Before we left town we bought a seventy-dollar boom box from an appliance dealer. Crossing the street to a hardware store, we picked up two light timers, the kind used in greenhouses, and two hand-held CB radios. As we were checking out, I went back and got a shovel. At a discount chain store we bought insulated coveralls in a camouflage pattern, day-packs, cheap rectangular sleeping bags, plastic air mattresses, and two pairs of binoculars. At a convenience store we bought bread, lunch meat, mustard, cupcakes and cookies, and a twelve-pack of Coke.

"Even if the shooters were in Washington, they couldn't get here before dark," I told LuEllen on the way back. "And I don't think they'll come in the dark, in unfamiliar territory. Dillon will research it for them, find a map, and see that the road goes through. The shooters will probably come in one car, from the top end of the road. Maggie will come up the way I told her, from the bottom. If she comes at all."

"You think she might not?"

"If they see this purely as a clean-up, she might not risk it. But I think she will. They'll want to talk, to find out if we've tried to protect ourselves-you know, letters to the FBI, that kind of thing. I don't think she's scared of me. She might be scared of you."

"She should be," LuEllen said, with a dangerous rime of bitterness in her voice.

"She'll probably have a radio in the car. When she sees us, she'll signal that we're in sight. Then they'll come in. She'll try to get us down in the vicinity of the cabin. They'll hit us there. Talk first and then shoot. Or just shoot."

"What do we do?"

"The first thing we do is cool off." I looked over at her. Her mouth was tight and her chin was up, ready for the fight. "If you go after her too soon, we both might wind up dead."

"I'm cool," she said. I looked at her and she gazed back unflinchingly.

"All right. You'll be up on the hill, above the bottom of the road, covering Maggie. It's possible that Dillon won't find the map, and the shooters will trail her in. You see her coming, you call me on the radio. We'll work out some codes. If she's alone, I want her to see you. Just a glimpse, and it has to be convincing. Run across an open space, down toward the cabin; let your upper body show. Wear that light-blue shirt of yours. After you've given her a couple of chances to see you, sneak back up the hill and get back in the camouflage."

"What if there's somebody with her?"

"Lie low and call."

"Where will you be?"

"I'll be on the top end of the road. I think that's where the shooters will come in."

The shooters, I thought, would show up a few minutes before Maggie, moving into position around the cabin. They would leave their car a mile or so out and walk in, following the creek. They would stay off the high ground because it was too open. The woods along the creek would give them good cover.

Some seventy yards out a rough, steep-walled gully, too small to show on even the largest-scale topo maps, carried a feeder creek down the ridge. The shooters could jump down the ten-foot walls, wade the stream, and climb the rocks on the other side. Or they could slip back up the road where the gully was crossed by a low-railed wooden bridge. The bridge was only twenty-five feet long, and it was well out of sight of the cabin. I thought they would take the chance.

If they crossed the bridge they were dead men. I'd be in the brush on the hillside, twenty-five yards away, with the Ml6.

"What about Maggie?"

"I don't know," I said. "She's not a pro, so she'll probably make a run for it. You can try to hold her, but we can't worry about her until the shooters are down."

"You mean dead."

"Yeah."

"What if the guys who show up are completely different people? What if they aren't the people who shot Dace?"

"I don't know. What do you think?"

"They'd be killers. They'd be there to kill us." She was troubled.

"Yeah."

We turned off the blacktop highway onto a gravel side road, and she watched the landscape rolling by, the tan fall grasses in the roadside ditches, the fat milkweed pods, the wild marijuana.

"I'd let them go," she said finally.

I nodded. "That would be best. We lie in the briar patch like Brer Rabbit, and we never come out."

At the cabin we ate and made sandwiches for the next morning.

"We stay on the hillside tonight, just in case," I said. "We'll put the lights and the boom box on the timer. If they come in early, they'll see the lights changing around and hear the boom box go off and on. Not too loud."

Half an hour before dark I took the Ml6 and a sheet of paper outside, pinned the paper to a tree, and fired four shots at it from twenty-five yards. I'd have to hold it just a bit low. I fired a few more shots at a hundred yards and at 150, and found that the rifle was, as advertised, dead-on at 150.

When I finished, I reloaded the clip, and we walked up the hill and found a comfortable nest in the deep grass. We were eighty yards from the cabin and a hundred feet above it. In the dying light and cool still evening air, the sound from the radio drifted up the hill. We'd chosen a rock classics station. Most of the music was distinctly non-classic and in some cases barely rock, but there were interludes of Pink Floyd and the Doors and REM.

"You remember way back, when Ratface first showed up, and I did that tarot spread, the magic spread, for you and Dace?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"The cards that came up were the Emperor and the Seven of Swords. I just figured it out."

"What's that?"

"The Emperor is Anshiser. The Seven of Swords is a betrayal card. I didn't even think about it at the time."

"Too late now."

We talked about the next day, setting up radio voice codes and practicing them. At 11:15, a timer turned off the light. A few minutes later, the other one shut down the radio.

"What's the worst thing that could happen tomorrow?" LuEllen said in the sudden silence.

I thought about it for a minute. "If they are deeper into killing than I think, it's just barely possible that they'll come over the hill with a helicopter and a half dozen guys in camies and flak jackets and automatic weapons with the experience to use them. They'll take both the hillside and the woods and sweep us right out in front of them."

"What do we do?"

"Run, if we can. Fight if we can't."

"What's the best thing that can happen?"

"Jesus, LuEllen. The best thing that can happen tomorrow is that we kill some people."

We sat in silence until LuEllen stood up and shivered and said, "I'm cold." We pulled on the coveralls and lay back on the sleeping bags and looked up at the stars. We were far out in the countryside, away from the lights, and the Milky Way looked like a huge illuminated milk-bowl.

"You know any of them? The stars?"

"Some. Everybody who goes outdoors knows a few. The North Star, Polaris." I pointed it out.

"And there's Cassiopeia, the W. And that's Orion. The three bright stars are Orion's belt. You know the good thing about them?"