Grace thought about it. He had his gun holstered, and even if he went for Sharon's, an easier draw from the belt, she could still put him down.
She slipped the Sig back in the holster but didn't fasten the snap, released a long breath, and started forward. Annie rose out of the bushes to follow her, a fat, wild-looking woman in a tattered dress, and the man's eyes widened to see a third.
"Jesus," he breathed in an aside to Sharon as he watched Grace and Annie approach. "Your partner looks pretty wired. This must be some case you're working."
Grace stopped two feet away, enough room to get at her weapon, close enough to use her hands if she had to. "You don't look like a cop."
That irritated him. "Deputy David Diebel. Missaqua County Sheriff's Department. And as far as that goes, you don't look much like arsonists, either. But if you really did start this thing, you've got a lot of explaining to do."
Grace and Annie looked back toward Four Corners and saw what Sharon already had. Black billows of smoke stained the morning sky, and tongues of orange flame rose above the trees and pixellated into sparks that swirled in a vortex overhead. And now they heard it, faintly-a low, distant roaring sound, like an enormous animal just coming awake.
"Oh, dear Lord," Annie murmured, thinking that Smokey the Bear was going to be really pissed. She stepped out of one of the high-tops and felt the burn when the air hit her heel. The blistering had bled a little into the shoe. Sharon was going to be pissed, too.
"Listen, ladies, we're in a bad spot here, and I need to get moving. You can call whoever you need to from the staging area, and while you're there, you can explain your involvement in this fire to Sheriff Pitala."
"Sheriff Pitala?"
"My boss.. ."
Grace glanced quickly at Sharon, who gave her an almost imperceptible nod.
".., and my guess is, he'll be mighty interested in whatever you have to say. We've got a town right in the middle of that fire, and you better pray to God that everybody who lives there got out."
His voice was a little shaky now, with understandable rage, Grace thought. This is his county, and those were his people in Four Corners, and he thought they set the fire that might have killed some of them. Something inside her that had been tight since the car broke down finally loosened. Let it go, she told herself. He's a cop. For God's sake, he's a cop. It's over. You're safe. You're all safe now.
The sound of an explosion made the deputy look up in alarm. "Shit, the big pines are going. That thing is moving fast. Get in the back, now."
"I need my weapon, Deputy," Sharon said.
"Later," he said, running to the car and opening the back door.
Sharon stopped at the open car door. "I'm a Federal officer, Deputy. Cops don't take guns from cops."
He hesitated for an instant, then pulled her 9mm out of his belt and handed it over, grip first. "Sorry. Holster that. We're going to be moving, and the roads are rough."
Sharon crawled all the way across the backseat, moving the deputy's hat up to the back window ledge so they didn't smash it. Halloran would climb all over me for blocking the window, she thought in a sudden pang of nostalgia. Actually, Halloran would have given Deputy Diebel an even more serious dressing down for storing his hat in the backseat in the first place. Things must be a lot more relaxed in Missaqua County.
Annie clambered in next to her, feet splayed on either side of the hump, one of them bare. "Shit, my shoe . . ." But by that time, Grace was already slamming the door, the deputy was behind the wheel, stomping on the accelerator, and the rear tires were squealing.
It was a frantic sound, a sound of panicked haste, and Grace felt her stomach knot as she stared straight ahead at the cage between the front seat and back, then at the doors without handles. Being locked in your own tiny, safe place was one thing; being locked in someone else's was altogether different.
She leaned forward, closer to the cage. "We need to get patched through to a landline as fast as you can."
"We're in a dead zone," he snapped back. "Radios and cells don't work. But the staging area's less than five miles from here, and like I said, there's landlines there. You better buckle up. Another mile or so and we have to take a farm road. It's straight washboard."
Grace sat back and buckled the lap belt, and felt the wind from the deputy's open window buffeting against her face, lifting her hair away from her ears. Relax, she told herself. There's not a single thing you can do for five more minutes anyway. She glanced at her watch. Dear God. Only four hours and forty-five minutes left. Was that enough time to find two particular trucks out of the millions across the country? And even if they found them, was it enough time to disarm them?
Suddenly, the weight of a thousand lives came down on her, and five short minutes seemed like a lifetime. She tried to look forward to the end of it, when they'd get to the staging area and a phone. . . . Her thoughts stuttered to a halt. Who were they going to call? Who did you call to report something like this? She went through all the possibilities, starting with Magozzi, the one and only cop she really trusted, and she smiled when she ended up at the only real choice they had. She'd run from the FBI for ten years, maligning them every chance she got, hating them almost constantly for what a few bad agents had done to her once, and now she was sitting next to one of them, planning to call the rest in for help.
And the wheel goes round and round, she thought, rolling her head to look at Annie. The woman was going to kill herself the minute she got a look in a mirror. She didn't do disheveled. But Grace envied Annie's ability to disconnect instantly, to throw back her head and close her eyes and go from total terror to total relaxation in the space of a few minutes.
Sharon was a different story. She was buckled in but sitting straight up, her back nowhere near the seat, and that surprised Grace. Of all of them, she should have been the most relaxed in a police car with a fellow officer. Then again, maybe she was never caged in the backseat before, or maybe she was as screwed up after getting shot last fall as Grace was after Atlanta. Maybe the two of them were more alike than Grace knew.
The deputy braked suddenly and cranked the wheel to the right.
Annie's eyes flew open as she felt herself thrown forward, and her heart pounded.God, take it easy, fat woman, you're going to have a heart attach- He just made a turn, that's all.
"It's going to get bumpy now, ladies," Deputy Diebel called over his shoulder as he turned sharply off the highway and onto a dirt road carved into the forest. "Hang on."
The car's axles tap-danced over the washboard surface, jostling the women against one another in the back. Annie had her arms folded under her breasts to support them. Stupid things were about to pop out of their sockets, or whatever the hell held them in there, and theyhurt.
The car jittered over another series of bone-jarring washboards and something hard and narrow stowed under the front seat poked at Sharon's toes. She moved her foot and looked down as her eyebrows crept toward one another.
There was a ghastly scraping sound as the car suddenly bottomed out on a hard ridge of dirt, and the deputy's hat bounced off the ledge and slid down between Annie and Sharon. Sharon grabbed it automatically and set it in her lap, but her eyes were on the fields and woods and great clouds of dust flashing by the window.
Another minute, and they turned off the dirt road onto a highway. "Another mile, ladies, and we're there."
Annie patted Sharon's knee. "Relax, honey, it's almost over."
Sharon nodded slowly, turning the deputy's hat over and over on her lap, fingering the familiar rigid brim, finding an odd sort of comfort in this small piece of a uniform just like the one she used to wear. It looked just like the one sitting on her hall closet shelf, waiting for the day she might return to her job in Kingsford County, except for the size, of course, and the name on the inside label. She took a very deep breath and let it out slowly. Her hands were shaking.