Mark stared for a long moment, then slowly nodded.

“Good, good.” Ruger lit himself a cigarette. “Here’s the deal, Marky-​boy. I am not here exactly by choice—God knows. My car broke down and I need a new one. Renting one ain’t an option right now. Also, I got a friend out there in the cornfield with a busted leg. You bozos are going to help me get him back here so we can patch him up, and then he and I are going to get the fuck out of this episode of Green Acres in your pop’s Bronco, which, I must admit, I am going to steal.”

Mark blinked several times in rapid succession.

“As I see it, Marky, this can go one of a couple of ways. The ideal way would, of course, involve you four helping me and then putting up no fuss as I tie you up and drive off in the car. I think I speak for all of us when I say that that’s the way we’d all like it to go. On the other hand, if you folks don’t want to cooperate, then I can just simply pop all four of you, take the car anyway, and still be on my merry way. You see, it really doesn’t matter all that much to me except that it would be more work for me if I had to do it alone, and work always makes me kind of cranky.”

“‘Pop’ us? You mean you’d shoot us? You’d actually shoot us?”

“Deader’n shit,” Ruger agreed.

“Holy Jesus.”

“Mm-​hm. So what’s it gonna be?”

“I can’t believe you’d actually just…shoot us. I mean, what have we ever done to you?”

“Mark…” Val whispered.

“To me?” said Ruger. “You folks have never done anything to me. If my car hadn’t crashed, you’d have never even known I existed, and vice versa. Just luck of the draw, Marky.”

“But—shoot us?”

Ruger rolled his eyes. “Yes! What part of ‘shoot you’ don’t you understand, farm boy?”

“Why?”

“Mark, be still,” Guthrie said in a quiet but very firm voice.

“No…Dad, he’s talking about murdering all of us.”

Guthrie reached over and clamped a strong hand on his son’s wrist. “Yes, and if you don’t shut your mouth he just might! Now be still!”

Mark shut his mouth.

Ruger nodded in appreciation. “Your old man is sharp, Marky-​boy. You’re the kind of fella that could let his mouth get his ass in trouble.”

“I’m just trying to understand this,” Mark muttered.

“What’s not to understand? Don’t you ever watch TV? I’m a bad guy on the run, and you all are the innocent saps who get tied up and robbed. End of scene. There’s nothing to understand. There’s no meaning to it.”

“What is it you want us to do?” asked Val, trying to steer the conversation back to a straightforward business negotiation. She eyed Ruger carefully as he took a long drag on his cigarette, wondering why he was stretching this whole thing out. What was he really waiting for? He could have tied them up, taken the Bronco, and been gone half an hour ago, but instead he was dragging this out for some reason she could not work out. More than once she saw him tilt his head to one side as if listening to a voice outside, or perhaps inside his head.

Ruger licked his lips and said, “Well, two of you are going to be stretcher bearers for my buddy. He’s out in the field waiting on us.”

“Where in the field?” asked Guthrie.

“By a big post with a scarecrow. Good half mile from here.”

Guthrie nodded, and to Val he said, “By the new section of fence.”

Her stomach turned at the thought of monsters like Ruger and his friend polluting the spot where she and Crow had made love just last night. Her mouth was a thin line as she asked, “And then?”

“Then we try to patch him up.”

“You said he broke his leg?” Guthrie asked.

Ruger laughed. “Oh yeah. Stepped in a hole and broke the living shit out of it. He has one of those…whaddya call it when the bones are sticking out?”

“Compound fracture,” murmured Val.

“Uh-​huh. A real motherfucker of a compound fracture. I set it, more or less, and splinted it up, but he needs someone else to check it out. I don’t suppose any of you are doctors?”

“I know some first aid,” said Val.

“Well, well. That’s handy.”

“Just some basic stuff, though.”

“Well, beggars can’t be choosers.”

Mark held up a finger and in his formal, pedantic voice said, “Let me get this straight. If we help you, that is, if we bring your friend back here, patch him up as best we can, and let you take the car, then you’ll just go away and not hurt us? Is that it?”

“In a nutshell.”

“How do we know that we can trust you?”

“I guess you just have to,” Ruger said, and then he smiled his serpent’s smile, white teeth gleaming, eyes twinkling like cold and distant stars. “Besides, why would I lie?”

4

“Hey, what’s that?”

Officer Rhoda Thomas slowed the cruiser and rolled to a stop. She flicked on the searchlight and directed it where Officer Head was pointing. The black stretch of A-32 glowed a dark charcoal in the harsh white light, and the yellow lane divider gleamed, but cutting right through the dividing line and across the road itself were long black smears, intensely black even in the light’s glow. “Just skid marks,” observed Rhoda. “Nothing.”

“No, wait, they look pretty fresh.”

“So?”

“So, let’s check ’em out.” Head jerked the door handle and stepped out. Puzzled and reluctant, Rhoda followed suit. They walked over to where the skid marks began and stood looking at the road. With a totally reflexive action, Head unsnapped his pistol and jiggled the butt to loosen it in its leather holster. Rhoda watched, copied the movement though it was the first time she had ever performed that particular ritual, but she didn’t want to appear as raw as she knew she was. She was fascinated by him. She thought he looked like Samuel L. Jackson with more muscles and a shaved head.

They were an incongruous pair: the petite Rhoda in her pale gray chief’s department uniform with the six-​pointed star gleaming as brightly as all her buttons and fittings; and Head, older, bigger, heavier, though not at all fat, in his blue Philadelphia Police Department rig, numbered shield on his breast and all of his equipment showing signs of eleven long years of hard use on big-​city streets. Rhoda looked like an extra in a cheap movie, and Head looked unpretentiously real. He had hard eyes that had seen it all, a harder mouth that was drawn tight, and the posture of a predator. Beside him, Rhoda looked like a child. It wasn’t a sex thing: Head’s partner, Maddie, was as serious and seasoned a cop as he was, and she was buddied up with Officer Jim Polk farther up A-32. No, this was a reality check for Rhoda, and she knew it.

“These are from tonight,” he said, squatting down and running his fingertips along the smear of burned rubber. “Take a look. They veer right off the road.” He clicked on his own long-​handled flash and swept the beam along the path of the skid marks. “See? Right there, they leave the road and go off into the field.” He moved to the very edge of the verge and shone his light into the corn. The light showed them the smashed-​down corridor of stalks. “Bingo.”

Rhoda came up behind him. “You think they had an accident?”

“Be nice if it was that easy,” he said, then smiled thinly and added, “Be really nice if they totaled the car and themselves.”

“You think that’s likely?”

His smile became a grin and he shook his head. “Nah. Accident, maybe, but if they wrecked their ride, then they probably hightailed their asses out of here hours ago.” He stood and rubbed the skid mark with the toe of his shoe. “Could have been a blowout, who knows?” He turned and shone the light up and down the road, reading the scene. “Looks like a big car traveling in one hell of a hurry went off the road here and right into that field.”

She looked from the tracks to his face and then into the cornfield. The flash struck small splinters off chrome and glass way back in the field. “Oh, shit.”

“Yeah,” he agreed and drew his sidearm, laying his gun arm across the wrist of the hand holding the flash so that the beam and the barrel tracked together.

“You think they’re still in the car?” Rhoda whispered.

“I doubt it.” He listened to the night. Distant rumbling thunder, the caw of a night bird, traffic on the highway miles away. Head sucked his teeth.

“What do you want to do? Should we go check it out?”

“Uh-​uh, honey. I’m not going anywhere near that car until we get some backup.” He nodded at her sidearm. “You any good with that?”

“I suck,” she said.

“Swell.”

“I’m better with a shotgun,” she said hopefully. “Can’t miss with a shotgun.”

“Yeah. Got one in the unit?”

“In the trunk.”

“Get it.” Together they backed up to their unit. Rhoda popped the trunk and Head kept the barrel of the pistol trained on the smashed corridor of cornstalks.

Rhoda removed the pump-​action shotgun from the clips that fastened it to the underside of the hood. It was a Mossberg Bullpup 12 with a pistol grip and thirty-​inch barrel. With a hand that even in the darkness was visibly shaking, she worked the pump and blew out a puff of air that had soured in her lungs.

Head glanced at it out of the corner of his eye and his eyebrows went up. “That’s a lot of shotgun for a small town.”

“The chief likes ’em.”

“How about you?”

She shrugged. “As long as it doesn’t knock me on my behind, I don’t much care one way or another.”

Nodding, Head indicated the crash site with his pistol. “Point that cannon right there. I’m going to call for backup.” He reached into the unit and lifted the handset. “What’s your call number?”