THEY WAITED an hour, then started working it in shifts. From the time they'd first jumped Franks, until the house went up, was little more than an hour. They'd figured out the seam a half hour later. Two hours after that, four of the DEA troops and Stryker were watching the sheet of steel, and Gomez was back at the house, watching two agents carefully probing into the basement.
Then Gomez took a radio calclass="underline" "They can hear them coming."
He and Virgil jogged up the hill, two more agents running along behind. When they got close, an agent near the culvert exit stood up and made a hands-down gesture: "Quiet."
The agents on duty had backed into a semicircle, on their stomachs, behind rocks, behind humps in the field, all zeroed in on the sheet steel. The lead agent at the site pointed them toward a red outcrop. They went that way, squatted down, peering through a clump of weeds, and Gomez drew his pistol. "Easy," Virgil breathed.
Stryker eased up next to them and said, whispering, "We could hear them talking. Must be really tight in there."
They waited twenty minutes; the lead agent said once, on the radio, to Gomez, "Patience, patience, they're right there," and Gomez repeated it to Virgil and Stryker.
Twenty minutes, and then the sheet of metal twitched, and then a man's head and shoulders pushed from beneath it. He pulled out a long weapon, looked like another M-16. He knelt for a moment, catching his breath, then turned and snaked up the bank that he'd just emerged from, looking down toward the farmstead. He watched for a second, then slipped back down the slope and pushed the sheet up, said something, and then Feur came out of the ground, sat up, gasping for air, looked around.
The two talked for a few seconds, then Feur pointed up the hill, and they both stood, crouching, weapons hung low in their hands, and then the lead agent shouted, "Freeze. DEA. Put your hands over your head."
Both men froze, then Feur shouted, "Virgil?"
Virgil yelled, "You're good, George, just drop the weapons."
Feur spotted the direction of his voice, yanked the M-16 up. Stryker cut him down, and the rest of the DEA guns tore the two men to pieces. Beside him, Gomez had gotten to his knees, and emptied his pistol at the two.
"Jesus," Virgil said. "Oh, Jesus, stop, man…"
THEY WALKED DOWN. Feur and the man he'd called John-Virgil supposed-were six feet outside the end of the culvert, lying on their backs. They'd been hit forty or fifty times. Their weapons were converted M-15s.
Feur didn't look peaceful; he looked like a dead weasel. John didn't look like anything. His face was gone.
One of the armored agents said to Gomez, "They resisted. It was straight up. We did it straight up."
Gomez nodded: "Straight up," he said. "The motherfuckers."
20
A DUCK-BILLED WRECKING machine plucked splintered lumber out of the wreckage of the farmhouse, like a steel velociraptor; the sun was rolling down below the horizon, the sky as orange as a bluebird's belly.
Virgil sat in the open door of the barn's hayloft, feet dangling, eating a bologna sandwich provided by the taxpayers, two other agents chewing along with him, talking about the fight, when Gomez walked up on the ground and called, "Let's go to town. TV is waiting."
"Fuck you," Virgil called back.
"I knew you'd say that. I talked to Davenport, and he says he wants to see your happy face on all channels, thanking the governor for this opportunity to take crime fighting into the sticks."
"Fuck Davenport," Virgil said.
"Get your ass down here. I'm too tired to fool around." Gomez walked away, stopped to talk to Stryker. Virgil stood up, dusted off the seat of his pants, picked up a half-drunk bottle of Pepsi, and stepped toward the ladder.
One of the agents, the Latino-looking New Yorker who'd given Virgil a hard time about his T-shirt, said, "Virgil. We owe you. Puttin' those guys in the truck and taking them out of the yard. We pay. You ever need help on anything… you call us. No bullshit."
The other agent nodded, said through a mouthful of Wonder Bread and bologna, "Anything."
GOMEZ AND STRYKER rode to Bluestem with Virgil, in the shot-up Ford, trailed by two more agents in one of the north-crew trucks. They'd both been back and forth since the killing of Feur. The two badly wounded DEA agents were still alive. One would probably make it, the other probably not; two more, whom Virgil didn't know, were less seriously wounded, and almost everybody was scratched and pitted by rocks, dust, and pieces of metal.
Pirelli was screwed up, but not terminally. A slug had busted up his shoulder joint, and putting that back together would be tough. His broken arm was another problem, and would take a while to heal.
"AND JUDD," Stryker said. "Where is that asshole?"
A DEA arrest team had gone after Judd as the raid on the farm was taking place, but hadn't been able to find him. His car was at his office, the door was unlocked, but there was no sign of Judd.
"This bothers me," Virgil said. "Why would he be gone?"
"Tipped?" Gomez asked.
"By who? One of your guys? When Pirelli called me, Jim and I were together, and we were together every inch of the way. Neither one of us called anyone."
Stryker nodded; Gomez said, "Maybe…I don't know."
GOMEZ ASKED, "You got a better shirt than that?"
"And another jacket," Virgil said. "We can stop at the motel."
"Keep the jacket; I don't want you guys washed up," Gomez said. "I want you looking messed up, but the T-shirt is too much. Looks crazy, given all the dead people."
"I got a black AC/DC shirt that should be perfect," Virgil said.
"Virgil."
"I take care of myself," Virgil said. "Stop worrying about it."
They stopped for two minutes at the hotel, Virgil pulled on a plain olive-drab T-shirt that gave him a vaguely military look, and Gomez said, "Not bad."
Stryker said, "Hell of a day." He had three little pockmarks on his left cheek, showing blood. He wasn't cleaning that up, either.
A DEA INFORMATION specialist had flown in from the Twin Cities and set up the press conference at the courthouse, the same room where Virgil and Stryker had been after the killing of the Schmidts.
More media this time: a half-dozen trucks, including freelance network feeds going up from satellite trucks parked in the courthouse yard. Too late for the evening news, but the late news would get it, the cable channels, and the morning network shows.
Gomez led the way: gave a terse, five-minute briefing, using the satellite photo of the farm, an outline of the fight, starting with the attack of the dogs-compressed the time a bit between the first shots at the dogs, and the fire from the house-and ending with the shootings of Feur and the man they still called John. He showed off a gas can full of glass tubes of methamphetamine, and allowed the best-looking media lady to handle one of them, holding it up to the lights for the cameras.
While she was doing it, Virgil noticed Joan and Jesse at the back of the room, looking at him and Stryker with deep skepticism. They were standing next to Williamson, who turned repeatedly to Jesse, talking at her, teeth showing.
At the very end, Gomez pulled Virgil and Stryker in front of the cameras and said, "We'd particularly like to thank Sheriff James Stryker, who as you can see was mildly wounded while suppressing the fire from the farmhouse, and Virgil Flowers, of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, who risked his own life to save the lives of two of our wounded men. Damnedest thing I ever saw, when Virgil backed that truck out of the yard. These are two good guys."
Virgil was genuinely embarrassed, but the media were happy, given local heroes in what otherwise might have been interpreted as a fuckup, with six or seven people dead, and five in the hospital.
After the briefing, the questions started, a few of them hostile, but Gomez was a pro. He turned the hostility back on the questioners, pointing out that they'd seized enough meth to save several hundred lives, "including that of young men and women; methamphetamine is one of the drugs of choice in our public schools."