Chapter 16
BOULDER
Her voice is still in my ear when the second crate starts down the rope.
I'm at the corner of the equipment shed, twenty yards off the barn mouth, close enough to count heads and crates both. Warden stands at the tailgate with a penlight cupped in his fist, and everything about the set of him says the clock in his head is running loud.
She called it from a dark window by sound alone. Loft, north end, over the tack room. His men went straight to it, which means they had moved into my brother's barn while Wade was alive. This was never about taking ground. Warden came back to dig up what he'd hidden here.
Rancor's order sits on all of us like a hand on a shoulder. Nobody moves till we know what he's doing here. So I wait. Waiting has never cost me like this. My hands want a shorter distance. My patch says hold.
I hold.
A second crate swings on the rope. Dewey Ledbetter is exactly as much use as Brick said he was. He grabs for it late from the truck bed, the corner comes down hard on the tailgate, and wood cracks loud enough to jump every man in the yard. The lid springs its nails along one side.
A penlight rakes the damage, quick and scared. For two full seconds, the beam shows me what this barn's been holding. Long shapes wrapped in waxed paper. Oiled metal. Magazines bricked in tight as canning jars. Rifles bedded down for a long winter.
There it is. Proof enough for any table in any county.
Warden rounds on Dewey, voice low and skinned. "Close it up. Get the rest down. Now."
I ease off the shed corner to close half the distance while their eyes are on the broken crate. That half-stride is where the night nearly bills me.
Dewey scrambles off the tailgate for the sprung lid, catches his boot on the hitch, and his flashlight swings wild. The beam rakes the shed wall and finds my shoulder for a quarter second. My cut. The iron in my hand.
He makes a sound like a kicked dog. Warden turns with the sound, penlight falling, pistol coming up, and I am one long stride from cover with his muzzle swinging onto me.
From the corner of my eye I catch a small dark shape arcing down out of the upstairs window. It crosses the strip of yard beneath the motion eye Spark mounted. Then the yard turns white.
Both floods slam on at once. Every man facing the barn mouth takes the full blast on eyes that have been soaking in dark for an hour.
The yard breaks open. Whiskey comes off the fence line and puts Dewey into the Ford's fender hard enough to dent it, down and pinned before his flashlight stops rolling.
Cross has the panel truck's door open and the driver out of it by the collar.
A muzzle flashes blind by the barn door, one of Warden's men firing into the glare, and I hear Brick grunt somewhere to my right and keep coming anyway.
Then Rancor's voice cracks across the yard.
"Down. All of you. It's done."
Warden's still hunting a target in the white, blinking, gun up. He finds me late. I take the pistol away at the wrist and put him into the gravel. He tries to get up and I put a knee between his shoulders to end the discussion.
The whole thing takes about as long as a crate riding down a rope. Nobody dead. Two shots fired, both of them theirs.
Ten minutes puts the yard in order.
Warden's zip-tied to the rail on the equipment shed, bleeding from the eyebrow, saying nothing, which is the first smart thing he's done tonight.
Dewey's face down by his Ford, apologizing to the gravel.
The panel truck driver sits on the ground with his hands on his head like he's done this before.
Cross tapes Brick's shoulder where the blind round burned a line, and Brick complains about the tape and not the wound.
The crates stand in a row by the barn mouth.
Rancor counts them without touching, a man building a case with his hands in his pockets.
In the middle of the light strip, small and dark on the gravel, sits one of Wade's boots.
No time to key a warning, so she threw the nearest heavy thing she had.
I pick the boot up and stand there holding it longer than I mean to. My brother's been saving my life since I was sixteen. Turns out he still had one left in him.
She comes down once Rancor calls the yard safe, the prospect's shadow on her, the whole way.
She doesn't come to me first. She goes to Dewey's Ford, pops the hood, and pulls the rotor button out of the distributor quick as pulling a splinter.
Nobody drives anything off this farm tonight unless the Thunder Bastards say so.
Then she closes the hood soft, like she's tucking the old truck in, and her eyes come find me.
I meet her halfway across the yard. I don't try to say it. I pull her in with one arm, Wade's boot in my other hand, her fist with the rotor button caught between us.
"You did that," I say into her hair. "All of it."
"You came when I asked." She says it like it's the only fact that mattered tonight.