His eyes widened a little at the gun. "Christ, who are you people? Your goddamned soldiers at the roadblock shot me. I thought they were Guard. Are they?"
Sharon dropped to a crouch and looked right at him. "Who's the Sheriff of Missaqua County?"
"Ed Pitala."
"Tell me something about him a stranger wouldn't know."
The man looked at her hard. "Sixties, hard as nails, two tours in 'Nam, wife Pat, who's about four times tougher and ten times smarter than he is. Loves his wife, his kids, and Jim Beam, in that order. Smokes Marlboros. And he's stone deaf in his right ear."
Sharon raised a brow. Anybody could know most of what he said, except for the deafness. That was under wraps, information for good friends like Halloran, and maybe this man, because if the county commissioners ever found out, old Ed would be out of a job. She held out her hand. "Deputy Sharon Mueller, Kingsford County."
It took a second for Deputy Lee to absorb the information. "Mike Halloran's woman?"
Sharon reddened. "One of his deputies." She looked up at Grace. "He's okay."
"You sure?"
"As sure as I can be."
Grace still didn't trust him. "How'd you get here?"
Surprisingly, Lee felt a nudge of angry indignation. He'd never been on the wrong end of an interrogation before, and he didn't like it. But there was an undercurrent of fear in the woman's voice, and that tempered his response.
"I told you all that. . , didn't I?" He frowned hard, squinting at the dim outline of his legs sprawled before him on the dirt floor, trying to remember.
"You started to, then you passed out."
Lee sighed and squinted as his pupils tried to find enough light. He could almost see her now-see them. Three woman-shadows in this strange, shadowy place. A basement, he decided. Of course. They'd told him they were taking him to the basement, or had that been a dream? "Is there water?"
One of the shadows moved, and he heard water running into something metal. A moment later, a tin cup of some sort was pressed into his hand. He drank, tasted soap, then suddenly remembered grabbing the woman in the hedge. She'd gone immediately rigid- he remembered what that had felt like, like when you pick up a wounded bird and it freezes in your palm, terrified-but then later, she'd started to flail, and . . , had he hit his head on something? He had a vague tactile memory of sticky warmth coursing down his cheek, then nothing.
"Tell us!" the interrogator woman hissed. "How did you get here?"
Still scared, he thought. And scared people were dangerous people. He felt for his gun, panicked when he found his holster empty. "I was at the end of my shift, heading home, stopped at a roadblock that shouldn't have been there. The soldier guarding it shot me as soon as I turned my back."
"How'd you get away?"
His head turned toward a new voice. "I killed him," he said, and although his tone was flat, there was a tremor beneath it.
It made Grace feel better. It made her believe he really had killed one of the soldiers, and that killing wasn't something he was used to.
She felt her way to the sink, filled a hand with water and drank, then crouched next to him and met his eyes in the near dark. She could see only the whites. "We don't know who we can trust."
He almost smiled. "Join the club. Are you supposed to be a Kings-ford Deputy, too?"
"Sharon's the deputy. Annie and I are from Minneapolis."
Something clicked in Deputy Lee's head, and he struggled to focus on it. "Shit," he muttered, almost to himself. "Three women in a Rover."
Grace caught her breath. "How do you know that?"
"Highway Patrol had a watch-and-stop on three women in a Minnesota Rover. Figured it was some rich housewives got lost on the way home from antiquing or something." His eyes moved down to Grace's weapon. "But I don't expect all Minnesota housewives carry guns like that."
"Sure they do," Grace told him, because he deserved that after the assumptions he'd made. She hesitated for a moment, then thought, What the hell. If they told him everything and he turned out to be one of the bad guys, they'd just shoot him again. So she let him hear all of it: the car breakdown, the deserted town, the murder of the young couple in front of the cafe, but when she got to the mass grave in the paddock and the things they overheard at the lake, Lee interrupted.
"Wait a minute, just wait a minute." He was pressing his hands to the sides of his forehead, trying to take it all in. "You're trying to tell me this group of whackos accidentally killed the whole damn town with some kind of gas, and now they're killing more people just to keep it quiet? Do you realize how crazy that sounds?"
Grace lost her patience instantly. "You stupid man. One of them shot you in the head. Did you think that was an accident?"
He was glaring at her for calling him stupid, but her gun was still right out there, so he kept his voice soft and even. "No, I do not think it was an accident, ma'am. Right-wing crazies, militia types-Lordknows we have enough of them in this state-but nerve gas? Mass murder? I'm having a little trouble getting my head around that."
"Well, you'd better hurry up," Grace snapped. "Because at ten o'clock, two more of those trucks are going to blow somewhere."
Lee's mind stumbled through all the information she'd fired at him, his thoughts rattling around in his brain like bumper cars at the county fair. His head was killing him. He wasn't a hundred percent sure he could trust his own judgment at the moment, but one thought kept rising to the top like oil on water, and that's the one he focused on. "We've got to get out of here. Tell someone what's going on."
Annie elbowed Sharon. "Gee, why didn't we think of that?"
Lee recognized the voice of the big one he'd caught in the bushes- the wild one. Who the hell was she? And who the hell was the one with the gun and the attitude, and what were they doing with a Kingsford deputy? Do they have husbands, kids? Hell, he didn't even know their names. Someday, when he got them all out of this, they'd all go out for beers and he'd ask them those things and a million others, but not now.
"I told you, we already tried to get out of here," Grace said rapid-fire, angry and impatient because the fool didn't listen. "Twice. There are too many of them, and right now they're all out there on the perimeter, just waiting for us to try again."
Lee gritted his teeth against the pain in his head, against the nausea that rose like a black bubble when he pushed himself away from the post and sat erect. He didn't pass out, though.Good. Step one, getit together, Lee,he told himself.Itall depends on you.
"The road that runs through Four Corners is almost a mile long. It's too big an area for any kind of effective perimeter. They'd have to have a thousand men to keep it tight."
Annie snorted. "Do the math, honey. Line-of-sight average, oblong, not a circle, they could do it with less than a hundred."
Lee blinked in the general direction of the voice. The wild one again. Christ, what was she, a mathteacher.? "I was raised in these woods, ma'am. Unless there's enough of them to hold hands, there's a hole in their line somewhere. I'll find it."
Annie just closed her eyes in sad resignation. You couldn't talk to a man when he was thinking like a man. He wanted there to be a hole in the perimeter, therefore there was a hole in the perimeter. Penis is genius.
Lee was trying to stand now, fingers hooked around the post to pull himself up. There was an instant of dizziness, then Sharon was next to him, supporting his elbow. "We already decided that was too dangerous. We have another plan."
Lee shook his head with a smile but immediately regretted the motion. He breathed deeply, waiting for the nausea to subside. "I'm sure you do, ladies, but I'd feel a whole lot better if you just sat tight and waited for me to come back with help."
"Oh, for Christ's sake," Grace said, totally disgusted and then infuriated when Lee started to talk again with one of those condescending tones a lot of men still used on women.