Chapter 15
SPARK
The barn light clicks off at nine, right on Wade's old habit, and the yard settles into dark like the farm still believes the story we tell it every night.
Cole's been back from the county line an hour, and I can see that he's carrying his anger careful, like a can of old gas.
I wash the mugs to give my hands a job and put the night's news in order while I do it. Spade didn't send any of it. For about a minute that felt like good news. Then I did what Wade taught me to do with any machine acting wrong, and looked at what the parts are telling me.
"You know what a governor's for," I say.
He looks up.
"It's the part that keeps an engine from running past safe.
Cheap little piece. Nobody thinks about it till it's gone.
" I set the last mug on the towel. "Warden's play only works under his club's cover.
Spade not looking too close, that was his governor.
After today, Spade's looking. If Warden figures out he's on his own, what will he do? "
He nods and turns it over. "With a little luck, he'll freak out and run."
That's one possibility. But an engine with no governor runs fast right up until it grenades, and I know better than to count on luck.
The call comes a little after eleven, Brick's voice low off the back track.
"Two vehicles. Lights off, engines low. Box truck and a pickup." A pause, static breathing. "Pickup's whining."
The back track only means one thing. They're coming in.
Cole is up and moving without a sound, cut on, pistol checked by feel. Through the window the yard doesn't change at all. Porch light burning, the prospect's silhouette right where a bored man stands, everything exactly as advertised. Whatever's shifting out there is shifting in the dark.
Rancor comes through the radio once. "Nobody moves until we figure out what he's doing here."
Cole stops at the kitchen door. Whatever he wants to say, there's no time to say it in, so he presses his mouth to my hair, once.
"Upstairs window's better than this one," he says. "Go watch your farm from there."
Then he's gone, into the dark. I take the stairs without turning on the light and set up at the window of Wade's room, radio in my fist.
The truck tells me the first thing before it's even parked.
The back track crosses the pipe culvert by the equipment shed, and the box booms over it, hollow as a drum.
A loaded truck thuds across that culvert.
An empty one booms. He's brought nothing with him.
Are they getting ready to receive a delivery here?
They kill the engines by the barn and then voices reach me in pieces, the wind doing me favors. One of them I've heard in daylight.
"All of it. Tonight." It's Warden. "Before Spade starts counting."
So the questions have already started inside his own house.
Whatever got asked today is chewing on him tonight.
The small side door of the barn opens, not the rollers. I know it by the latch, a two-note clack Wade never fixed because he liked knowing when it opened.
I close my eyes and listen. I could name this barn's sounds with a fever. Which stall gate sighs, where the tin lifts when the wind comes off the fields. The third rung of the loft ladder, that knocks like a knuckle because the bolt's worked loose since I was twelve.
The third rung knocks.
Boots go up. Two men, maybe three. And then comes the sound that changes the whole night.
Boards are coming up. Not pried. No nail-scream, no splintering, no crowbar work. They're lifted and laid aside. They have to be on the north end of the loft, over the old tack room, where the roofline makes a dead space Wade never used because the boards up there never held a nail right.
I bring the radio up and whisper, "They're in the loft, north end, over the tack room."
One beat. Then Cole, low, in my ear. "Copy, Spark."
Out along the fence line a shadow detaches and drifts, big enough that I know it by size alone, moving to get an angle on the loft hatch. The night rearranges itself around what I told it, and nobody out there makes a sound.
And while they move, I work the piece that doesn't fit. An empty truck, and men climbing straight to a dead space nobody has looked inside in years.
That's when it comes together. Somebody did carpentry in our loft, and carpentry takes tools, daylight, quiet.
For three weeks I rattled around this place alone, listening for every engine on the county road, and this barn never made a sound that wasn't mine.
Since then it's been ringed with Thunder Bastards.
The only stretch anybody had it to themselves was while Wade was still alive.
They were inside before he was in the ground.
Warden never wanted to rent. He wanted back inside.
The loft hatch swings out over the barn mouth, hinges easing slow. The old hay pulley takes weight for the first time in years, rope creaking in the cold, and a long dark shape rides down through the hatch, heavy, handled gently.
Rancor said nobody moves until we figure out what he's doing here.
The crate settles into the truck bed, soft as an egg.
There's our answer.