"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…
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.