"These are the last bumps now," the deputy said as he turned onto another farm road. "We set up in a machine shed at the back of this field. Only place close enough to the fire with a phone line."
The machine shed was corrugated steel, large enough to house a lot of farm equipment, and it looked old and faded and uncared for. Cars were jammed in the long grass off to the side, but there were no people in sight.
Grace was leaning forward against her seat belt. "Where is everybody?"
Deputy Diebel actually gave her a smile over his shoulder. He was where he wanted to be now, and considerably more relaxed. "A few of them are inside running communications, but most everybody is out fighting the fire. We drop our personal vehicles here, load up in an emergency unit, and take off."
He pulled to a stop next to the other cars, turned off the ignition, unfastened his shoulder harness, and reached down to unsnap his holster. It was an absolutely normal thing for him to do. You make enough road stops when you ride solo, unsnapping your holster before you got out of the car to confront God knows what becomes a habit.
Grace glanced over just as Sharon was raising her 9mm to the back of Deputy Diebel's head.
And then she pulled the trigger.
SHERIFF ED PITALA had forcibly pulled Dorothy away from the dispatch desk and sent her home at twoA.M., a full three hours after her shift had ended. Trying to pry her loose any earlier had met with about as much success as trying to get her to retire for the past ten years.
Dorothy had a face like a topographical map of the Rockies, a body like Aunt Bea, and a voice like a blowtorch. Her pictures hung on the wall with three previous sheriffs, all of whom she'd outlasted and outlived. Sheriff Pitala figured that if she ever up and died, he'd just slap a "closed" sign in the window and nail the door shut, because this place sure as hell couldn't run without her.
She was back by 5:30A.M., shoving a plate of ham, eggs, and biscuits under his nose. "Get away from my desk."
"Lord almighty, Dot, now I know how all my predecessors died. You scared them to death."
"You were sleeping on the job."
"Dozing. It's been quiet since you left, except for the boys checking in by phone. And before you ask, there's no sign of Doug yet, or those women the Minneapolis cops are looking for. And what the hell are you doing here? I just sent you home."
"Hmph. Three hours ago. I walked home, took all the snooze I needed in the recliner, then showered and made you breakfast. Eat it, you skinny old man, before it gets cold or you keel over. Don't know which is likely to happen first, the way you look."
She rolled him, chair and all, over to the other desk and grabbed the card-table chair she'd been sitting in for more than forty years. Not a single light was lit on the patrol board. It had been that way since the FBI pulled the cars off the road, and Dorothy thought looking at that black board was like looking at the end of the world.
"Don't know how you can sit in that damn thing," the Sheriff said around a mouthful. "There isn't a lick of padding left in that seat, if there ever was any to start with."
"If you carried a little more padding in that skinny butt of yours, it wouldn't be a problem."
Ed smiled, lips sealed shut with the honey she'd put on the biscuits. When he pulled them open again, he said, "Swear to God, Dorothy, if Pat ever kicks me out, I'm going to run right to your house and marry you."
Dorothy snorted. "I'm twelve years older than you. It wouldn't work out. You're too immature."
"You gotta get with the times. People do that stuff all the time now. We could be like Cher and whatever-his-name-is, or that Dimmy woman and her young fella."
"Dimmeee. How often do I have to tell you that?"
He didn't answer her, and when she glanced over to look at him, he was holding a bite of food in his mouth, not chewing, just looking at her with his eyes half screwed shut.
Dorothy cocked her head at him. "What! Don't tell me there was a bone in that ham, because it was a boneless ham. Born and died in a can, as far as I know."
It took a slurp of cold coffee for him to get the bite down his gullet. "Funny thing. I thought I heard you say you were twelve years older than me."
"So?"
"So that makes you seventy-seven years old, Dorothy, and as I recollect, the birth date on your records puts you at sixty-nine. If the county commissioners ever found out how old you really are, they'd make you retire."
"Who's going to tell them?"
"Not me."
"Allrighty, then. You quit jawing now, because I've got an honest-to-God light coming up on the 911 board, and I'm so excited I can barely stand it." She adjusted her headset and punched her buttons at the same time that the phone on the desk started ringing.
The phones kept ringing off the hook for the next half hour and Dorothy's 911 board was so lit up, even she was starting to get a little frazzled. By the time Ed Pitala had finished his fifteenth call, his face was red and his eyes were hard, and he was ready to start making some calls of his own. He stood up quickly and said, "Dorothy, you've got to cover the board and the phones for a minute. I've got to talk to Knudsen. You think you can manage?"
"Probably not. I'm seventy-seven years old."
"You don't look a day over sixty-nine."
She shooed him away with her fingers, and he crossed the outer office to the door that had his name on it. He rapped hard and stormed in before he got an answer. Agent Knudsen was talking on that peculiar thing he'd brought with him that looked something like a phone and a lot like something else. It didn't plug into any wall or phone jack, and as far as Ed knew, the thing probably ran on a can of baked beans. He raised his eyes and held up a finger, which the Sheriff thought was pretty laughable. Fingers never stopped anyone unless they were on a trigger.
"You can put that damn thing down or not, I don't care, because I've got a whole goddamned forest on fire, and I'm about to send out every goddamned truck in the county whether you like it or not."
Knudsen just stared at him with his mouth open for a second, and it was the first time Ed noticed that he was little more than a kid. It made him nervous to think of kids in positions of responsibility with law enforcement, but not as nervous as the other expression Knudsen was hiding behind the one that just looked surprised. This boy was scared.
"Stay put. I'll get back," Knudsen said into the phone, then gave Ed his attention. "I know all about the fire, Sheriff. It's under control."
"The hell it is. The last call I got was from one of my deputies who damn near drove into the thing, and it is nowhere near under control. That fire's crowning, and it's going through thirty-foot dry pines like they were matchsticks, and I did not walk into my own office to ask for your permission, I am just telling you that I am calling in every one of my people and getting them out there in patrol cars, because we are going to need every emergency vehicle we've got. . . ."
"Understood, Sheriff."
That stopped Ed's rant cold. Damn. He hated working his hackles into a bristle and then getting them hosed down like that. "What happened to all that crap about our patrols scaring off whoever you were trying to find?"
"We are not here to impede public safety; we're here to protect it."
Ed narrowed his eyes. "You already found what you were looking for, didn't you?"
"No, we did not."
"Any chance whatever it is has anything to do with this fire?"
"Anything's possible, but we don't think so. Your fire started small. We had smoke sightings a while ago that didn't raise any major alarms. The real fire started a bit later, with a few small explosions. Could have been propane tanks, something in the gas station . . ."