Chapter 5 #2
Arlan Crowe got out of the passenger side of the flatbed.
He was a compact man. That was the surprise. From four hundred yards yesterday he had seemed enormous, and up close he was maybe five foot nine, thick through the chest and shoulders, with a gray canvas work coat and a flat brimmed hat and reading glasses pushed up on the brim.
He was somewhere around fifty five. He had a face like a man who ran a business, because he was a man who ran a business.
On his right hip, under the coat, the leather flap holster was buttoned shut.
On his left hip, butt forward, in a crossdraw rig that did not fit him and had not been adjusted, was an ivory gripped Uberti with a seven and a half inch barrel.
He had worn it on purpose.
Joe looked at it for three full seconds and then made himself stop.
"Mister Henfry," Crowe called.
"That's close enough."
Crowe stopped at fifty yards, which was not what Joe had asked for but was not nothing either.
"I'd like to come closer so we don't have to shout."
"I'd like you to stay there so we do."
"All right."
Crowe put his hands in his coat pockets. Not a threat. A man standing in the cold.
"Your boy's in your house," he said.
"I know."
"You know now. You didn't know at eleven fifty one."
"No."
"I want to say plainly that I'm not proud of that," Crowe said. "It was a cheap thing and I did it because I needed you awake all night and I didn't have anything better. You'd have done the same."
"I wouldn't have."
"You would if it was your daughter," Crowe said. "That's the whole point of the conversation we're about to have."
Joe did not answer.
"How long have you got to live, Mister Henfry?"
"Say that again."
"It's not a threat, it's a question about supplies."
Crowe took a hand out of his pocket and gestured up the hill.
"You've got, what, a year of grain in that cellar? Two? For four people, before you took in half the county. You've got water off a spring, which is the only reason I'm being polite.
You've got a bad roof line and a good field of fire and a man in the blowdown up there on the right who has been very still for an hour, which is impressive, and a boy in the ditch on the left who moved twice."
Joe's stomach turned over.
"So that's your situation," Crowe said. "Here's mine."
He took a step forward and stopped himself.
"Eleven vials of insulin," he said. "Long acting and short. They've been in a hole in the ground with a creek running through it since day two, and I've got them at about fifty two degrees, and I check it with a thermometer four times a day."
"That's good practice."
"It buys me months, not years. And the vials are dated and I have read the dates about eleven hundred times." Crowe's voice did not change but something in it thinned out. "Her name's Merrit. She's nine. She was diagnosed at four."
Joe said nothing.
"Now here's the part you're waiting for," Crowe said. "I'm not asking your wife to make insulin. I'm not stupid and I'm not a fantasist. Nobody in this valley is making insulin, and I have accepted that, and accepting it took me about three days and it was the worst three days of my life."
"Then what do you want."
"I want somebody who knows what they're looking at," Crowe said.
"I want somebody who can tell me what a nine year old with rising blood sugar looks like when she's going into ketoacidosis and how fast, and what to do about it with what I've actually got. I want somebody who knows how to stretch a vial, which is a real thing people do,
which I have read about and do not trust myself to do. I want somebody who can teach me to test without strips when the strips run out."
He stopped.
"And when it's the end," he said, "I want somebody in the room who's done it before."
The wind moved in the timber.
Joe stood at the gate with his hand eleven inches from a rifle and felt the entire shape of the morning change under him.
"You killed a man on that road yesterday," he said.
"I did."
"You put a pistol against his head."
"I did."
"Why."
Arlan Crowe was quiet for a second.
"Because he was going to take an hour to die," he said, "and he was in a great deal of pain, and there wasn't a thing on this earth to be done for him."
"That's not why."
"No," Crowe said. "That's half of it. The other half is that eleven men were watching and I needed every one of them to see me do it calm, because the day I look uncertain in front of that crew is the day I stop running it and somebody worse does."
"That's honest."
"It's the most honest thing I'll say today and I'd like credit for it."
"You don't get credit," Joe said. "He was my friend."
"He was your friend for four days."
"He rode nine miles in the dark for people he'd never met."
"I know exactly who he was," Crowe said, and for the first time his voice moved.
"I have known Stance Ulebrook for twenty two years. I towed his stock trailer out of a ditch in 2011 in a blizzard and he paid me in beef and I had it in my freezer for a year. I did not want him on that road.
I made him an offer and it was a real offer and he stood up on that wagon box and put both barrels at me."
"He knew what the offer meant."
"He knew what the offer meant," Crowe agreed. "That's why he did it."
They looked at each other across fifty yards.
"You're wearing his gun," Joe said.
Crowe did not look down at it.
"Yes."
"Take it off."
"No."
"Take it off or this conversation ends."
"It doesn't end," Crowe said, "and we both know it doesn't end, because you haven't heard my offer yet and you are far too careful a man to walk away before you hear it."
Joe made himself breathe.
"Say it."
"Fuel," Crowe said. "I've got eleven hundred gallons of diesel and four hundred of gasoline and both of them stabilized, and I've got a shop full of mechanical trucks and men who can keep them running for a decade.
You've got a diesel truck with nothing in it and a tank that is going to be dry by March."
"Go on."
"Ammunition. I've got a reloading bench, three presses, eleven thousand primers and about four hundred pounds of lead I've been casting since the second week. You cannot buy primers anymore. Nobody can. There is a finite number of primers in this valley and I have a meaningful percentage of them."
"Go on."
"Medicine," Crowe said. "I've got the contents of a veterinary supply and two rural pharmacies that I did not loot, that I bought, on day three, with cash, from people who were happy to take it, and I have it in a cellar with the dates written on the boxes. Amoxicillin. Doxycycline. Metronidazole.
Ketamine, if you can believe that, and fentanyl patches, and I will not pretend I like having them."
Joe said nothing.
"And information," Crowe said. "I've got eleven repeaters and four working radios and twenty two years of invoices in a filing cabinet that tell me who lives where and what they had in their yard in 2019. You already know about the invoices. Your man Pruitt told you."
"How do you know his name."
"Because he worked for me in 2016 for a season and I don't forget a name," Crowe said, "and if he's still in that blowdown he's been hearing me say it, and I hope it's ruined his morning."
Up on the bank, something moved half an inch and went still.
Joe put both hands on the gate.
"And in exchange," he said.
"Your wife."
"No."
"Two afternoons a week," Crowe said. "Here. Not at my place. I will bring Merrit up this road with two men and no long guns and I will hand her to you at this gate and go back down and wait, and your wife can do whatever she likes with her for four hours,
and I will never once come up that hill past this post."
Joe stared at him.
"You'd leave your daughter with us."
"I'd leave my daughter with a pediatric nurse and a house full of old people and children," Crowe said, "which is the only situation left in this county that I would leave her in."
"You don't know us."
"I know everything about you," Crowe said.
"That's my whole business. I know you bought forty acres in 2024 and put in a spring line and a solar array and a fourteen hundred gallon buried tank. I know you drive a seventy eight Ford. I know your wife is a pediatric nurse out of Culver City with fourteen years and a specialty in endocrine,
which is on a resume that is sitting in a file at the clinic in Heber where she applied for part time work in February and did not take the job."
Joe's mouth went dry.
"That's how you knew."
"That's how I knew."
"And the rest? The gate, the roof, the dog?"
"Men with binoculars," Crowe said. "Two of them, four days, up on the knob. They're not there now. I pulled them this morning as a courtesy and you can go up and look at the cigarette butts if you want to check me."
Joe looked at him for a long moment.
"There's a problem with your offer," he said.
"Name it."
"You're a murderer."
"Yes," Crowe said. "And in about nine months, so will you be, and the difference between us is going to be four hundred yards and a better reason, and I'd like you to hold onto that thought, because you're going to need it."
"That's not the problem."
"Then name the problem."