“Gross!” Teddy Barnes said. Teddy was wearing his cap pulled down so that his ears were at right angles to his head. His thick lenses made his eyes look like blue tennis balls. “Or cat poop,” he said. Andy tried to strike Teddy with his worn Reeboks, but he was too slow.
“He said I eat cat poop!” Andy yelled.
“Well, you don’t, do you?” his mother said. “Sticks and stones. All here?” she said, standing. She had been fat until she had started hiking and eating right. Now her thick legs were defined with muscle and well tanned. Her husband and sons could sit and watch television, but she had turned the garage into a gymnasium and spent her spare time on her program.
Ruth pointed at the little heads as they bobbed and weaved. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven…” She stopped counting and held up two fingers to quiet the boys. “Be quiet. What’s this? Silence,” Ruth said.
“What’s this? What’s this sign?” Sarah added.
“Akela. The wolf!” several shouted. Soon the air was filled with small waving hands echoing the women’s “V” signs.
“And it means what, everyone?”
“Shhhhhhhhh-” It sounded as though all of the children had sprung air leaks.
“Okay.” Ruth started to count the heads again. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen.”
“Fourteen?” Sarah said. “Who’s out?”
“Who’s missing?” Ruth asked. She turned 360 degrees, her eyes scanning the forest floor for a flash of yellow or a flesh tone amid the green, brown, and stone-gray.
“One, two, three, four,” Sarah counted as she pointed at each head until she got to the last scout. “Oh, dear God-who’s missing?” she said.
The children looked around at each other.
“George is,” a child said.
“George!” Ruth yelled out. “George Lee!”
“He musta went with that ranger man,” Timothy Buchanan said. Timothy was George’s best friend. “He left his hat, though.” The child pointed to a blue-and-yellow hat that was lying beside the rock.
“What man?” Sarah asked.
“He asked for George Lee,” Timothy said.
Panic threatened to close Ruth’s throat. She fought to maintain control in front of Sarah and the children.
“Yes,” Timothy said. “He said George Lee. And he’s gonna give us merit badges for these leaves. White oak and-”
“What in the world?” Ruth said.
“What did the man look like?” Sarah asked.
“He was big,” Timothy said.
“And he had a gun…,” another child added. “… Like a cowboy. Silver with a black handle and silver diamond shapes on the handle.”
“In a holster,” the black child added. A slug’s-trail of mucus, which ran from his nostril to his lip, glistened. He wiped it onto his sleeve and inspected it in a shaft of filtered sunlight.
“And cowboy boots,” one said.
“But no spurs,” offered someone else.
“Where is he? When did he come up here?” Sarah asked.
“He was already here when we got here,” Timothy said.
“And was he wearing a uniform?” Ruth asked.
“Yes,” Timothy said. “Brown with a Smokey the Bear hat and glasses that showed you your face back.”
“He was tall like Michael Jordan,” another child said.
“Was he black like Michael Jordan?” Ruth asked.
“No, he was a ranger with a red beard on his lip.”
“They don’t have black rangers,” someone added.
The black scout objected. “They got African-American rangers, polices, cowboys, and silver war soldiers, too.”
“They did not!” another child said. “They were just cooks and cleaners.”
“Which way did they go?” Ruth asked.
“That way.” A scout pointed up the trail. “To his Jeep.”
“Well, no need to panic,” Ruth decided. “He knew George’s name and had a description and he was in uniform. It must have been some sort of emergency. It happens.”
“Isn’t his daddy a…?” Sarah started.
“A government official would certainly know how to get to his son if he needed him. He’s DSF, you know.”
“DSF?”
“Drug Strike Force. It’s a branch of the DEA or something,” Ruth said. “I’m going to hurry on ahead-y’all can catch up.”
“We can’t go faster,” Andy whined. “My feet hurt-I’ll pass out-I’m starving-I’m all fuzzy-headed.”
Several scouts began laughing. Someone was mimicking his whines.
“Ah’m fat. Ah’m mooshy-headed. Ah’m stupid.”
“Uh-uh!” Sarah said. “We’re all one team. All for one, and one for all. We pull together or we’ll pull apart.” The double entendre was wasted on the children.
“Very well,” Ruth said as she lifted the pack. “Stay here all night, then. Come up at your own pace. And, remember, bears almost never attack if you simply play dead. Just lie up against a tree like you’re doing now and close your eyes, and no peeping even if she does bite you.”
“Den Six-line up!” Sarah yelled.
“Forget it!” Andy jumped to his feet. By the time the scouts were lined up, Ruth was already running far up the trail.
The ranger stopped at the overlook and placed George’s limp body on the railing that had been made out of foot-wide stone cemented into a wall stretching between two large rock facings. He looked off at the scenery for a few seconds, drinking up the natural splendor. He picked up a coconut-sized rock, placed it on the rail near George’s head, and shoved it out with a quick motion. It seemed as if four or five seconds passed before the canyon gave up the echoing sound of the missile landing on the rocks below. He contemplated the child for a few moments, as a man might stare at a car someone else owns, removed the hat and glasses so he could wipe his forehead with a handkerchief. “Well, George. Nothing personal,” he said as he placed his hands under the body and lifted.
He caught a flash of something through the trees moving up the trail. It was a scout leader. He watched behind her for the others but saw no one except the lone woman jogging toward him. Quickly he took a metal tube with a threaded end from his pocket and screwed it into the barrel of a small black automatic, which he pulled from his right boot.
Ruth had run all the way to the overlook without stopping even once. She was thrilled when she saw the man leaning against the stone railing watching her over his right shoulder. She was trying to put a smile on when she realized that the man was alone.
“Sir, are you the ranger who came for George Lee?” She almost yelled it. Maybe George was in the woods relieving himself or wandering ahead.
The man straightened and his face softened in a smile. He had his right hand behind his back, the left propped on the top of the railing. There was something strange about his wearing dark glasses in such a shady place.
It’s all right, he’s a park ranger. She looked around, still expecting to see the child.
She was closing the last ten feet between them with her right arm extended. “I was worried sick-” she started.
Then she saw the gun.
2
Nashville, Tennessee, was originally built to take advantage of the Cumberland River. It was established as Fort Nashboro and a reconstructed facsimile with ramparts stands as a tourist attraction, a few short blocks down the hill from Nashville’s greater tourist attraction, the original Grand Ole Opry. That building is in turn a few blocks down the hill from the federal courthouse, where, sharing the floor with the federal prosecutor’s offices, the Drug Enforcement Agency is located.
Special Agent in Charge, Rainey Lee, had been a DEA agent since just after leaving college and had led the DEA/DSF for four years. The DSF was an elite branch of the agency, and its cloak of secrecy was a large part of the appeal it held for men like Rainey Lee. He had gone straight to work at the DEA when it was formed from several branches of the Justice Department. At six feet five Rainey Lee was the tallest agent in the organization, and at forty-eight had packed sixty additional pounds around his basketball player’s frame since college, when he had played for Duke University.