The car accelerated away, turned left on the highway, away from Trippton, and was gone.
Shrake had run down to the creek and shouted at Jenkins, “Backstroke, backstroke!”
Jenkins stood up in knee-deep water and said, “Fuck you,” and, “Somebody’s got to call the fire department.”
Virgil turned to look at Sharf’s cabin, which looked like a burning haystack, flames shooting up into the sky. He fished out his phone, but failed to get a signal. They were three hundred yards from the mouth of the valley, and he said, “You guys go collect that woman. I’m going to run down to the highway and see if I can get a signal.”
But at that moment a man and a woman ran into the road from the opposite side of the valley, saw the three of them, and yelled, “We called the fire department, they’re on the way.”
The three of them jogged past the neighbors, and Virgil said, “Call the sheriff, tell them that Virgil Flowers said we have a situation here.”
“You sure do,” the woman said, and, “You’re a police officer?”
“Yes. Tell him we need a couple of cars.”
When Virgil, Jenkins, and Shrake got back to the cabin, the Chihuahua was gone, and so was the woman.
“They’re on foot, so they’ve gotta be around here someplace,” Shrake said.
Jenkins had taken his wallet out of his pants pocket and was pulling out damp pieces of paper, spreading them on a rock next to a weed garden. “Goddamn job, I’m gonna quit. That fuckin’ dog bit me twice. I’m putting in for disability leave, or maybe retirement.”
“If you do that, you won’t be able to beat up people,” Shrake said.
Jenkins said, “Oh… yeah.”
Virgil looked past them, down at the road, where a dozen neighbors had gathered to witness the festivities, and as a lone fire truck turned the corner at the end of the valley, saw Muddy ambling along, looking up at them.
“Talk to the fire guys,” Virgil told the other two. Then he stared at Muddy until he was sure Muddy was looking back at him, and tilted his head toward the woods. Muddy nodded, and drifted back up the road where he’d come from.
The fire truck arrived, and another one turned the corner at the end of the valley, and a fireman ran up the hill, and Jenkins and Shrake went to meet him. The cabin was more than fully involved — the fire was actually beginning to slow, from lack of anything more to burn, and smoke, and the stink of burning insulation, suffused the air.
Virgil nodded at Shrake and backed away from the fire into the woods, until he was out of sight of the road, then hurried deeper in. A hundred feet from the cabin, Muddy stepped out of the dark, and Virgil said, “There was a woman with Sharf. When the cabin caught fire, she must’ve run into the woods. I’d like to find her.”
Muddy said, “All right. You think she went deeper into the valley, or out toward the highway?”
Virgil had to think about it for a moment, then said, “If she’s like everybody else, she’s got a cell phone, and once she can get some damn reception, she’ll be calling somebody to come get her. I expect she’d either go higher, or toward the highway. She was a pretty big woman, and didn’t look like she was in that good of shape.”
“So she probably walked up a ways, to get around the cabin.…”
Muddy knew the trails around the place, took them up a hundred feet or so, behind the cabin, and then along the valley wall. The light wind was in their faces, and after they were clear of the cabin, they were also clear of the smoke. They moved slowly, stopping to listen, and eventually were out of range of the voices around the burning house, but not out of range of the sound of the heavy engines on the fire trucks.
Four hundred yards down the valley, and maybe two hundred from the highway, Muddy stopped so abruptly that Virgil nearly bumped into him. They stood for a moment, then Muddy whispered, “Smell it?”
Virgil closed his eyes and smelled, very faintly, an odor somewhere between roses and violets. Perfume. He whispered, “Yes.”
Muddy moved on another twenty or thirty feet, and then stopped again and whispered, “We’re close now.”
Virgil cleared his throat and said, in a normal speaking voice, “I’ve got a gun, and I don’t want to shoot you, but I can see you, and I’m not sure if you have a gun or not, so if you move suddenly, I’m going to have to use my gun.”
Two or three seconds later, the woman said, “Don’t shoot me.”
“Then come out of there.”
She’d been huddled behind a tree, clutching the dog, which yapped once at Virgil and then shut up. Virgil turned on the jacklight, aimed over her head, but still lighting her up: she put up a hand to shade her eyes, and Virgil whispered to Muddy, “Better take off.”
The boy slipped away, and Virgil said to the woman, “What’s your name?”
“Judy. Burk.”
“Let’s go down to the road, Judy. We need to talk this over.”
Virgil walked Judy and the dog down to the road, where an elderly white-haired man named John seemed to be having some kind of seizure. Somebody said something to him as Virgil and Judy came up, and he spun around, saw Virgil, and asked, “Are you the man in charge of this disaster?”
“I’m with the BCA,” Virgil said.
“You burned down my house! You owe me for a house!”
Virgil said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t burn it down. D. Wayne Sharf did. I was standing outside when he set it on fire.”
John spun in a crazed dervish-like circle, making gargling sounds as he did, and when he came out of it, wild-eyed, he said, “He wouldn’t have burned it down if you hadn’t been there.”
Virgil said, “I’m sorry about the house — you said it was your house?”
“Yes, it’s my house! It was worth…” He hesitated, the better to pump the price, Virgil thought. “At least a hundred and twenty thousand!”
Several people in the crowd laughed, and a tough-looking guy in a T-shirt said, “Shit, John, if I’d known you’d shingled it with gold, I might have come over and stolen some shingles.”
There was more laughter, which made the man angrier, and then Shrake came up behind him and patted him on the shoulder and said, “It’s not going to be worth anything to you if you have a heart attack and die. You’ve got to ease up a little.”
John pulled himself together, then raised a finger at Virgil, but before he could say what he was going to say, Virgil asked, “Has the DEA been in touch with you, about the drugs?”
The finger stopped in mid-shake. “What drugs?”
“The basement was full of methamphetamine. Probably a half-million dollars’ worth. Was that yours? Or was it D. Wayne’s?”
John slowed some more. “Well, it wasn’t mine. I rented the place.”
A voice in the crowd asked, “Do you have to pay income taxes on drugs?”
“If you sell them, you do,” Shrake said.
“I don’t know about any drugs,” John said.
“Why don’t you give me your name, address, and phone number,” Virgil said. “I’ll have the DEA guy get in touch.”
John looked around and then said, “Give me your card. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Right. Virgil gave him a card, and took his name, and John went away. Virgil, Shrake, and Judy walked up the valley wall to the clearing where the cabin once stood. Jenkins was chatting to one of the firemen, like two guys at a barbecue. A fire hose led up to the site from one of the trucks, but nothing was being sprayed on the fire.
“So… couldn’t save it?” Virgil asked.
The fireman shook his head: “It was gone before we got here. The problem is, half-burned houses attract people, and they get hurt. Once they’re that far gone, better to let them burn. You get a nice clean ash.”