Lincoln was frozen: he'd watched Doyle hit the ground, heard Dickey screaming, had seen Loretta go inside the house and then a detective (detective?) follow. There were cops EVERYWHERE. What was worse, he couldn't place the shooter that had taken Doyle. That had been a precise piece of work-part of him realized this even in his horror- and now he was in the worst trouble he had ever been in.

If he moved, he risked getting caught. If he stayed put, he risked getting found in a sniper's nest on the scene of a Federal level crime. He had risen to his feet and was starting to thread through the drying racks when he heard the barn door shriek on its hinges. The hair on the back of his neck stood up.

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Short handedness and the situation put Gutterson leaving the barn alone.

"I don't like this," Rachel had remarked under her breath as he reached around her for his Kevlar.

"What? The ghost of Coover Bennett gonna get us?" He offered his rifle and she took it grimly, handing him two loaded clips. Up the hill, Art to his 3'o'clock and a state trooper he didn't know to his 7.

They prowled. Tim strained his ears; there are times when you can hear a heartbeat from a hundred miles away. You just have to listen. The trooper stuck his head up in the hayloft and dropped back down. "Nothing up there but dryin' racks."

A silent 'would you?' from Art passed over the head of the state boy and Tim nodded infinitesimally. Gutterson pointedly said he had to take a leak, and Art swept the trooper out the door. Then he went to work.

The dust on the floor boards around the ladder had been disturbed; he'd seen that just as soon as they'd walked in. He'd heard the floorboards creak too, and he knew damn well that the trooper wasn't paying near enough attention.

Up the ladder he went. Standing on the top rung of the ladder, his head and shoulders just barely cleared the trap door opening. The force of the blow he took to the head was enough to leave Gutterson near breathless anyway. Never mind the fall down the ladder. Never mind the pair of boots that connected with his stomach as whoever was in the loft burned out of the barn in a puff of blue smoke. The clatter brought Art back at a run.

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Lincoln took to the woods and headed south across the face of Green Mountain. The ghost of Coover Bennett rode the dust of his heels.