"Piece of glass or metal," Virgil said. "When I was backing the truck out."
"Goddamnit," Gomez said. "Goddamnit. Ah, Jesus, what do I tell Harmon's wife?"
ANOTHER AGENT HAD PUT on gloves, and was clearing debris from the other side of the house, walking carefully on an exposed piece of floor. "Hey, you in there? Hey?"
To Gomez: "Looks like another body, or pieces of one."
Moved more lumber, but they'd need the Bobcat, Virgil decided. He called Feur on the cell phone. No answer.
"Maybe hurt," Gomez said. Moved a bit more lumber. "I gotta go into town, see my guys…" Gomez might be going into shock, Virgil thought.
More rotten eggs.
Virgil sniffed, sniffed again, then said quietly and urgently to the agent on the house, moving lumber, "Get off there. Don't ask me any questions, just get off, right now." And to the agent on the other side-"Quiet. Get off there…get back, get those guys out of the sandbags, you guys get back…"
He was talking quietly as he could, backing away. Gomez: "What, what?"
Virgil said, "That's propane. That's the rotten-egg smell." He looked around, saw the tank next to the barn. "They're filling the place up with propane. They're gonna blow it up."
"Propane…" Gomez was quick. He backed away, turned away, said quietly into his radio, "Guys, everybody get back, keep it quiet, but get the hell back, there's gas, they may be getting ready to blow it…"
TEN MINUTES LATER, Virgil was feeling a little stupid, sitting in the ditch across the road. An agent suggested that he run up next to the barn, and turn the propane off, but the barn was too close to the house, too exposed if there was an explosion. "Give it another ten minutes," Virgil said. "Maybe I'm full of shit."
ELEVEN MINUTES AFTER Virgil moved the agents off the house, the place blew. Not like a bomb, but with a hollow whump. Five tons of lumber went straight up in the air or sideways with a gout of smoke, curled at the top, like an atomic bomb. Virgil covered his head with his hands, and when nothing landed on him, peeked over the edge of the ditch. A ripple of fire was running through the wreckage: "Now, you need the fire department," he said.
"Holy mackerel," Gomez said. "Holy fuck." A few seconds later a helicopter showed up, and when it turned, they could see the Channel Five logo on the side.
Virgil shook his head. "That's what we needed. That's exactly what we needed. Smile, Harry, you're on TV."
Not done yet.
Gomez made a call, said, "That oughta get rid of the chopper," and with the helicopter still circling, they walked cautiously across the street, to the house. An agent ran out of the field behind the barn to the propane tank, pulled off the valve cover, and Virgil could see him spinning the valve.
Gomez said, "Gonna be another one of them right-wing legends. Last stand at Reverend Feur's."
"Anybody look in Franks' truck yet?"
"Not yet."
They went that way, yanked open the back panel on the camper, saw the row of gas cans. A couple of other agents drifted over. Gomez turned the cap on one, sniffed, said, "Gas," tipped it into the sun, to see better, then walked away and carefully poured the gasoline into the dirt at the side of the yard. A gallon or so poured out, and then a glass tube fell out, and another. Gomez kept swirling the can until he had them all, twelve tall bottles that might once have contained spices, all full of powder.
"It's all true," he said. To one of the agents: "What am I gonna tell Harmon's wife?"
The agent shook his head, and finally said, "That we killed all those motherfuckers who did it."
THE AGENTS UNLOADED the rest of the gas cans, and all carried glass bottles. They went through the shed, found five more cans, all with bottles. Feur and his friends had been moving meth twenty and thirty pounds at a time. "Been doing it for years," Gomez said.
They walked through the barn, knocked in the doors of the two old Quonset huts, without finding anything more. Looked into the house: the interior had been blown to flinders, and the fire was getting stronger.
"Fire department's coming," one of the agents said. "Not that I care."
THE HELICOPTER WENT AWAY, the maddening thump leaving the place in the silence of insects and birds. Virgil, Stryker, and Gomez climbed into the barn's loft to look at the house from a high point; amazing, Virgil thought, what gas could do.
They were standing there when the fire truck arrived. The fireman put foam on the fire for three or four minutes, and the fire was gone.
Gomez said, "We're gonna have to say something. Press conference up in Bluestem; we sort of had it set up for tonight. Still gonna have to do something…"
"Call Pirelli. He was still talking when I saw him, maybe…"
Gomez got on his phone, pushed a button. No answer.
Stryker came over and said, "Get off the phone."
"What?"
"Get off the phone. Look at this-look at this." He led them to the loft door, looking down at the house.
"FEUR WAS a mean, feral asshole," Stryker said. "What's he doing committing suicide? He'd want his day in court, if we'd had him cornered."
Gomez spread his hands: "What?"
Stryker pointed up the hillside. "That satellite photo that you had in the motel. One of your guys was looking at a seam that comes down to the house, and he wondered if it was a ditch that we could crawl down. We didn't know. But when we walked around the barn, right over it, I didn't see a thing. Didn't notice it. The only way you can see anything, is to get up high. Up here."
"Yeah?" Virgil looked at the hillside, still didn't see much.
"It's that line of greener weeds," Stryker said, pointing down and to the right. "See it? That's what you get when you dig. New weeds. It's a dead straight line. It looks to me like somebody put down a culvert."
"What?" Gomez, eyes wide. "That little line?"
"All you'd need to do is get the pipe, rent a backhoe, run the line straight up the hill to that brush. Then if the cops ever caught you in the house, you get down the basement, light a candle, turn on the gas, and seal the tunnel. Regular old manhole cover with some plastic tape or foam. Then you crawl out the culvert…skin your knees up some…I keep thinking, he didn't answer the cell phone the last time Virgil called."
"Sonofabitch," Gomez said. They climbed down from the loft, and Gomez got on his radio. A half dozen agents came running.
"THE LINE GOES right into that clump of trees," Stryker said, pointing up the hill. "There's like three clumps coming down the hill, and then the last clump on the bottom, it goes right into that clump."
"They might already be out," Virgil said.
Gomez told his guys, "Armor up. Fast. Let's go, let's go…"
Eight of them crossed the field in a long skirmish line, while the two functioning north squad trucks ferried six more agents in an end run to block off the field to the south. The last hundred yards they did on hands and knees, moving two at a time, the DEA agents performing like well-trained infantry. Gomez was working the radio, had the north squad in position, and they tightened the noose on the end of the seam.
And when they got there, they found a depression that had once been a farm dump, two rusted car bodies from the forties and fifties, corroded farm machinery, a half-buried cylindrical washing machine.
One of the agents put his finger to his lips, and pointed urgently. There, on the side of the slope nearest the farmhouse, a piece of corrugated steel, like the kind used in silos, was too conveniently arranged on the slope. The agent eased up to it, listened, peered under the sheet, then put his finger to his lips again, and backed off.
"That's it," he whispered to Gomez. Gomez waved back the troops. They moved back in a loose circle, and Gomez walked away with his radio. Fifty yards out, he stopped, clicked on the radio, and briefed the waiting agents, listening on their headsets.
It'd be a hell of a crawl, Virgil thought, looking down to the farmhouse. The smallest culvert that would take your hips and shoulders, pushing with your toes, bad air…Anything more than a two-foot culvert would take a hell of a lot of digging. The seam wasn't that big…