Chapter 50

As soon as the radios cut out, Walt kills the Mag, and we're up against the drafty gaps, surveilling by firelight, searching the front yard for shadows.

I'm working up the nerve to tell him to get his mind back where it belongs, when he says, "Ferg at 10 o'clock," and there it is, Ferg's round silhouette jogging out from the side of the house into the front field.

I don't get how I missed it.

Then Walt says, "Van der Horn," and the shaggy form is strolling past the window again.

Apparently it's not Walt's focus that needs sharpening.

What I seem to have forgotten is that Walt compartmentalizes better than anyone I know. Granted, some of his compartments are less watertight than others, but this one, the one that contains unbalanced losers and threats to the lives of his deputies and the public, this one is unbreachable.

We slip out the door and around the back of the shed. Ferg arrives first with ragged breaths and cagey eyes. When Bud trots up from behind us, Walt directs us all to stand behind the structure, though he's half-concealed, half-vulnerable, keeping his eye on the house.

Van der Horn is standing in front of the window now. The sheer curtains are drawn, and the lights are on. He's making a target of himself, but on so many levels it's not that simple.

"Think he knows we're here?" Ferg whispers.

"He knows," Walt says, stepping out in front of the shed, his arms spread wide and high.

Anxiety seizes me. Short of unloading an automatic weapon, there's no way in that position anyone inside the house could hit him, but it worries me all the same.

"Van der Horn!" Walt yells, his voice rumbling and projecting an octave below normal.

In the void that follows, it's just the crackles and pops of the fire and the crumpling of hot metal. I'm conscious again of the smoke, stifling and burning.

Walt's shoulders rise and fall. Next to me, Bud brings his shotgun up across his chest. Ferg moves in closer.

"No reason for anyone else to get hurt!" Walt calls out, his right hand now moving to the butt of his sidearm. "Come out with your hands where we can see 'em, and let's end this!"

And then what? We take him to the station? Call for transport? Have him back in Denver by tomorrow afternoon?

Not one of us believes for a second it'll go that way. It's way beyond the turning point now, but following protocol is what we do, even for lost causes.

I get flashes of Chance's basement: Sean's stupid lime green blood-spattered Oxford; the cold, two-hundred pound concrete thud of body-bagged deadweight; watching myself from outside myself, coming apart, hysterical.

That was the turning point for Sean and me, or at least we pretended it was. For the next few weeks we tried feebly to move forward, as if that were the critical point from which the fresh momentum was supposed to originate. The truth was it had become irreversible long ago.

One way or another this is over, too. We're entombed together now in this deafening, blinding, rank, hopeless moment. Still we forge ahead, play at trying to work it out and make it right.

"Five minutes, Van der Horn!" Walt yells. "Five minutes then we're coming in!"

Seven minutes later, I'm following the route around the farmhouse I took with Wicks and Romano and Ferg a month ago, but this time it's dark and I'm alone and I'm out of practice. My wrists are tactically crossed, flashlight in one hand, gun in the other, and a probing ache through my right shoulder and neck.

I'm relieved when I hit the backyard and I see Ferg's beacon shining from the other side.

For minutes again, there's nothing but my audiovisual respiration and the dull but persistent thumping of my heart, and always the dry crumbling and popping from the fire glowing menacingly behind Ferg's miniature shadow.

I adjust my weight and my footing, and the scuffing of my boots in the dirt is too loud.

But then there's an eruption of incoherent yelling, Walt and Bud, and a booming crack, the front door splintering.

They're in, and I'm holding my breath, willing my heart to mellow out, anticipating gunfire. Seconds pass, then a minute, and there's nothing.

My radio whistles and hisses. "Vic. Ferg. Come in."

"Go ahead, Walt," I say.

"Any sign of him out the back?"

I freeze and my body stops doing the things it absolutely must do to remain in operation. God, please, I'm thinking. I can't pass out.

"Nothing, Sheriff," Ferg responds, I guess because I've dropped the ball. "We were back here before you went in. Over."

"Well, he's not in here. Over."

Fuck.

I'm all nerves and cold sweat and wooziness, and my mind starts trying to find a way out of this, suggesting that I maybe just back myself up until I hit a fence, bench myself. The second the bench presents itself to my consciousness, though, so does the body bag, and I know I have to get it together.

Just like that I'm back in the game, and here's what my memory has to offer: rusty grate in the floor of the quonset hut, concrete chute without a ladder then later with a ladder, deadly assumptions, Charles Van der Horn bleeding out in front of us, Charles Van der Horn dead on the catwalk.

I press the button on my shoulder mic. "Walt. Come in."

"Go ahead, Vic," he says and he's breathing hard.

"The rugs," I say. "Check under the rugs. Over."

I don't even expect him to ask for an explanation. He's got that much faith in me, and I can't let him down. I can't let any of them down.

Again the seconds drag out and there's the crackling, the crumbling, the smoke in my eyes, and then the scuffing of boots on dirt, but I haven't moved, not even an inch, not even a centimeter, so I turn fast towards the sound, but while my body is quick, my reasoning is sluggish, and I'm still thinking there's a possibility it was just me, or that I'm about to come face-to-face with a possum or even a dog that got left behind, that's been living out here by itself all this time, roughing it.

Still, my training has long since become automatic so my arm is outstretched, finger to trigger, and from there it's all so fast and so slow.

He's actually smiling, and it's not even a mocking smile, it's almost warm. His pale eyes, made paler by my flashlight beam, are almost expressive, not so dead, and really, the only thing that screws it up is he's got a.38 snub nose revolver pointed right at me.

The radio gasps. My scalp itches.

In the tiny patch of silence, there's the click, and if I thought my heartbeat and my breathing and my boots scuffing were loud, this is earsplitting.

"Vic," Walt says, but he sounds like he's miles, continents away, and his voice is muffled by the blood pumping up my arms, struggling to get where I need it, and the thumping, laboring pulse in my head, and my chest aches, and it's like the circuits are overloaded, like when the internet slows down in the office after 3:30 because all the kids are home playing Grand Theft Auto on Xbox. "You're right," he says. "We found it. He's out there somewhere."

I want to laugh, but at the same time, I don't.