At the crest of the hill they turned down the game path to the notch in the bluff. A voice in his ear said, “I’m going to give you the rope. You’ve been down here once before, so you know — just use the rope to keep your balance. Don’t try to hang from it, or anything. Stick your hand out.”
Virgil did, and a nearly invisible shape put a rope in his hand. He turned and backed down through the notch in the bluff, feeling his way. At the bottom, a man’s hand clapped him on the back and whispered, “You’re good.”
Two minutes later a new voice, which might have been Gomez, spoke through the earbud. “We’re cocked. Everybody set? We go in five. Four. Three…”
At “Go!” a half-dozen lights exploded through the forest and the screaming started and then a calm Gomez said, “We’ve got two runners. Danny, one of them’s coming right at you. The other one’s coming right at Raleigh.”
Another new voice: “Raleigh here. He’s gone up the hill. You guys in the notch, spread out, I’m looking for him.”
A brilliant light down to their right swiveled toward them and burst through the trees like a flight of arrows. Virgil put a hand up to protect his eyes. Gomez said, “Mike, watch the guy by the door, he’s got his hand low, watch his hand, watch his hand…”
Somebody started screaming about hands, and Virgil, able to see again, began drifting down the hillside. The three DEA agents with him were moving forward, to his right, and a voice in his ear said, “Virgil, the trail’s right below you, twenty feet. Stay back and if I tell you, use that flash of yours to illuminate it. You got all that?”
“Five by five,” Virgil said. He pulled the flash out of its bag. It was made of plastic, but was heavy, with an oversized rechargeable battery down in the handle.
Somebody else said, quietly, “Here he comes,” and then somebody else said, “Shit, he’s turned down, I think he saw us—”
“No, no, no… He’s on the trail. He’s on the trail—”
“No, no, there are two of them, two of them, goddamnit…”
Virgil felt the trail underfoot, and now could see well down to his right; to his left he could make out the opening in the overhead above the path, a lighter streak in the dark woods, and somebody said, “Virgil, one of them’s coming at you. The other one’s going sideways down the hill. Stay low. If anybody uses a gun, I’m going to light him up.”
He didn’t mean with a flashlight; he meant with a machine gun.
Virgil crouched by the trail, making himself into a stump, and heard footfalls coming fast. Virgil said into the microphone, “Virgil here. Anybody running up the trail?”
“No, just the one guy. I’m trying to get in front of him, but I don’t think I’m gonna make it, I’m— Ah, shit!” The voice in his ear stopped but the same voice, shouting in the clear, “I fell, I’m down, I fell…”
The man running up the trail was close now. Virgil waited until he thought he could see motion against the background, then hit the runner in the face with all 2800 lumens. The man shouted something unintelligible, and he was right there, right on top of Virgil, about to go by, and Virgil stuck out a leg and the man tripped over it and went down, hard, grunted, tried to get back to his feet just as Virgil was trying to stand up, and their legs got tangled and they went down again, and the man hit Virgil in the shoulder with what felt like a gun — fuck that, it was a gun — and Virgil smashed him in the face with the end of the flashlight.
The man dropped and stopped moving, and Virgil pointed the flash at him. He was on his back with a wicked cut across his forehead, his eyes full of blood; but he was breathing, and Virgil didn’t see any brains leaking out.
A gun lay by his side, and Virgil used the toe of his boot to edge it off the trail. Somebody was screaming in the clear about somebody running down the hill, and Virgil turned the thermonuclear flash that way, the light smashing between the tree trunks. He picked up a thin figure, moving fast, and what might have been a hint of red hair, and then the man was gone.
Virgil pressed the button at his throat and said, “I got one down here, he was armed, another’s heading out toward the mouth of the valley. I think it might be Zorn. Watch for guns…”
One of the DEA agents ran into the lighted area of the trail and called, “Where?” and Virgil pointed with the flash, and the agent went crashing off through the brush, and a few seconds later, was followed by a second man.
The man with Virgil groaned and tried to sit up, but Virgil pushed him back down. Virgil said, “Lay back. You’re hurt. We need to get you to a doctor.”
“What happened?” the man asked. “Did I wreck the truck?”
“More like assault with battery,” Virgil said.
One of the DEA agents came up, looked at the man, and asked, “How bad?”
“Might have a concussion. I hit him with the flashlight. Gun’s right there by the side of the trail.”
“Okay. Let’s get some cuffs on him. We got an ambulance one minute out.”
“That was quick,” Virgil said.
“No, we had it waiting, just in case. It’s on its way up the valley now.”
When Virgil got down to the sheds, five men were sitting on the ground, hands cuffed behind them, looking like prisoners of war. “We lost one of them,” Gomez said. “We saw two runners, but there were three. Bricks and Mortar are down at Zorn’s place, his old lady says he’s up in the Cities. We said, ‘So what’s his cell phone number, we need to call him.’ She said he doesn’t have one. We said, ‘Everybody has a cell phone.’ She pulls out a wooden kitchen match, scratches it on the screen door, fires up a Camel, and says, ‘Fuck you.’”
“That’s a high-class hillbilly, right there,” Virgil said.
“Yes, it is. Anyway, we got the crew, we got the sheds, we got the makings. We’ll make a movie of it all, and package it up for the U.S. Attorney. He’ll find the weak sister, and get him to talk about Zorn. Good job all the way around.”
“What about the drone?”
“Ah, it broke.”
“It broke?”
“Yeah, it broke. Don’t mention it, okay? I mean, if anybody asks. We’ve got some bugs to work out.”
Virgil looked at the group of sitting men and asked, “You mind if I talk to the POWs?”
“They’ve all asked for attorneys, so you won’t get anything usable.”
“I don’t need it for a court. I just need some information.”
Gomez shrugged: “Go ahead.”
Virgil walked over to the prisoners, who were sitting in a shallow semicircle, all dressed in jeans and boots and work shirts, looking more like lumberjacks than dope manufacturers. He squatted down and said, “You all get attorneys, and you don’t have to answer any questions at all, but I’ve got one that doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
They all glanced at each other, then one of them said, “We’re not talking.”
Virgiclass="underline" “You all look like country people to me, and some of you probably got dogs, and like dogs. Some asshole up this valley has been stealing dogs, including some pretty good hunting dogs. We know what they’re going to do with them — they’re going to sell them off to medical laboratories for experiments. Now, I know you wouldn’t want that to happen to your dogs.… So, you know anything at all about these stolen dogs? Where they might be? We know you don’t have them, but somebody up this valley does.”
After a few seconds one of the men said, “We didn’t have nothing to do with no dogs.”