Chapter 3 #5
He told them about the fuel, and the propane, and the diesel truck with no computer in it.
And then he told them about the wall in the shed.
He told them every gun in the house, by caliber, and how many rounds of each, and exactly where they were, and who was allowed to touch which.
He got to the last one.
"There's a Ruger Number One behind the workbench," he said.
"Single shot, four fifty eight Winchester Magnum, and before anybody tells me a single shot is useless, it's not for people. It's for engines. It's the only thing on this property that will reliably stop a vehicle, and if I'm at the end of that driveway and something's coming up it that won't stop,
that's what I'll have in my hands."
Stance Ulebrook whistled low.
"Four fifty eight," he said. "In Utah."
"I bought it because it was pretty."
"Everybody buys the good ones because they're pretty," Stance said. "That's how it works. A man buys a thing for a foolish reason and then twenty years later it turns out to be the only sensible object he owns."
He touched the ivory grip on his hip without seeming to notice he was doing it.
"This was my grandfather's," he said. "He bought it in 1982 to shoot at cans."
The light went orange, and then blue.
Delores fed everybody. Tobin Kessick woke up and asked for water and got it and asked where his sister was and was told, and went back to sleep with his hand in hers.
Stance stood up at full dark and put his hat on.
"You're not riding nine miles in the dark," Bill said.
"I am."
"Stance."
"My people don't know where I am and there's no way to tell them," Stance said. "They'll be sitting up all night with a lamp on and a gun across their knees and I won't have it. I'll be over the saddle by midnight."
Joe walked him out.
The bay gelding was in the lean-to with a nosebag on, and it lifted its head and sighed at the sight of him in a way that was almost editorial.
"I'm going to send two men over in the morning," Stance said, cinching the girth. "Fence work and hands for whatever you're doing. You need labor, and I need to know the route between here and there is walkable with a wagon."
"A wagon."
"I've got two. Nineteen thirties, for parades." He pulled the latigo through. "Turns out a parade wagon is a truck. Nobody expected that."
He checked the coach gun in the scabbard and swung up.
Then he stopped, one hand on the horn, and looked down at Joe in the dark.
"Henfry."
"Yeah."
"That radio of yours. Does it transmit?"
Joe hesitated.
"Yes."
"Don't."
"I wasn't going to."
"I know you weren't," Stance said. "I'm saying it anyway, because in about eleven days you're going to be sitting in that house at two in the morning and you're going to have the thought that maybe you could talk to them. Maybe you could find out who they are.
Maybe you could reason with a man who reads property descriptions out loud."
Joe said nothing.
"That thought is going to feel extremely intelligent when it arrives," Stance said. "It is not. The second you key that mic they have a direction, and if they've got two receivers they have a spot, and if they've got a spot they don't need the list anymore."
"Understood."
"Say it back."
"I don't key the mic."
"Good man."
Stance turned the horse.
"Stance."
He looked back.
"Why'd you ride nine miles for people you don't know," Joe said.
Stance Ulebrook sat in the saddle for a moment in the dark.
"Because I'm fifty one years old and I've got no children," he said, "and this morning I stood in my barn and did the count on my own property and figured out that if it's just me and four hands, I lose it. I lose all of it, and it'll take them one afternoon."
He settled the hat.
"And Bill Tandy said there was a nurse up here," he said. "A man will ride a long way for a nurse."
He put the horse down the drive at a walk and the dark took him in about forty seconds.
Joe stood there until he could not hear the hooves anymore.
Then he went back in the house.
He did not sleep well and he knew he wouldn't, so at eleven o'clock he stopped pretending and came down and sat by the stove with the little handheld radio and listened.
Nothing on four forty six.
Nothing above it.
He worked down through the bands, patient, the way he had practiced.
At eleven fifty two, low down where nothing should have been, a carrier came up.
It was weak and full of hiss and Joe had to press the radio against his ear.
A man's voice. The calm one.
"...and scratch the bench. We're not doing the bench."
A second voice, further from the mic, said something Joe could not make out.
"Because there's a nurse up there," the calm voice said. "You don't take a place with a nurse in it. You wait until somebody needs her."
The hiss swelled and fell.
"Put her at the top of the other list," the calm voice said. "The one we're keeping for after."
And then, clear as a bell and much closer than the first transmission had been, close enough that Joe's skin went cold all the way up his back, a third voice said:
"Copy. And the girl? The blonde one, eleven or so. She was out behind the shed with him today."