Chapter 10
Joe did the worst calculation of his life in about four seconds.
Nine miles to the elevator by road. The truck would do it in twenty minutes if the road was clear.
A man was dying in a ditch at his feet.
Ivers was hypothermic at the goat pen.
His only two experienced adults were at the bottom of the canyon, and one of them was fifteen years old.
"IMOGEN," he roared.
She was already coming. He could hear her boots on the frozen ground and Sylvie behind her with a lantern hooded down to a slit.
"Two patients," Joe said. "Ivers went through the ice two miles back and walked four hours in it. This one's worse. I don't know what's wrong with him yet."
Imogen dropped to her knees in the ditch.
"Light."
Sylvie opened the lantern hood.
Imogen got the green coat open and Joe heard her breath go out.
"Gunshot," she said. "Left side, low, back to front. And it's old."
"How old?"
"Days. Joe, this is days old and it's infected and he has been walking around on it."
The man's eyes were still open and they were still tracking.
"Nineteen," he said again. "Fuel truck."
"Don't talk," Imogen said.
"Listen to me."
"I said don't talk."
"Ma'am." The man's hand came off Joe's coat and got her wrist. "There is a fifteen year old girl sleeping in Harlan Batey's front room and I have been trying to get here since four o'clock."
The whole ditch went silent.
Imogen looked at Joe.
"Go," she said.
"Imogen."
"Go. I have got two patients and a house full of people who know how to boil water and I do not need you standing over me. Go."
Joe was on his feet.
"Pruitt!"
"Here."
"Truck. Now."
They were rolling in under four minutes and it was the worst four minutes Joe had ever spent, because every one of them was spent doing things correctly instead of fast.
Loading the rifle. Grabbing the pack that had been sitting by the mudroom door for three weeks for exactly this. Telling Colby, twice, slowly, what his job was.
"You do not leave this bench," Joe said. "No matter what you hear. No matter what you see down the canyon. If I am not back by dawn you still do not leave this bench."
"Mister Henfry."
"Say it back."
"I don't leave the bench."
"Good man."
Then the truck, and the road, and nine miles of frozen gravel in the dark with no headlights until the second mile and then with them on because speed was worth more than stealth.
Pruitt loaded the thirty aught six by feel.
"Talk to me," Joe said.
"About what?"
"About the elevator. Everything. I've never been inside it."
Pruitt talked.
"It's an old one. Concrete silos, six of them, plus the steel bins out back which is where the wheat actually is. There's a headhouse on top with the leg in it."
"What's the leg?"
"The elevator leg. The vertical conveyor that lifts grain to the top so it can gravity feed into whatever bin you want. That's the whole reason it's called an elevator."
"Electric?"
"Fifty horse motor. Dead as a rock."
"So how does grain come out?"
"Gravity," Pruitt said. "That's the beautiful part. Every bin's got a center draw at the bottom and a slide gate. You crank the gate open with a wheel and the wheat comes out under its own weight and you put a wagon under it."
"So they don't need power to steal it."
"Nobody needs power to steal it. That's the whole reason I told you about it in the first place."
Joe took the curve at the fourth mile too fast and got it back.
"What's the office like?"
"Cinder block on the north end. Scale house, counter, parts room in the back."
"Where would Bill and Sylvie be?"
"Batey's house. Which is a quarter mile north of the elevator on the same lane."
"Same lane."
"Same lane."
Joe's hands tightened on the wheel.
"So anybody who comes for the elevator drives past Harlan Batey's front door."
They came down out of the canyon at eleven twenty and Joe killed the lights a mile out and pulled off into the alfalfa.
They went the last mile on foot.
It was eleven below and the ground was so hard it did not take a print and every step sounded like a door closing.
At four hundred yards they went down on their bellies behind an irrigation berm and Joe got the binoculars up.
The elevator was lit.
That was the thing that turned his stomach. Not dark and quiet. Lit.
Two vehicles with headlights on, aimed at the base of the steel bins, and a work light of some kind on a stand, and men moving in and out of the beams.
And parked broadside across the lane, enormous and pale in the spill, a tanker truck.
"Fuel truck," Pruitt said.
"How much does that hold?"
"That's a farm delivery rig. Three thousand gallons? Thirty five hundred?"
Joe counted men.
He counted for a long time because they kept moving through and out of the light.
"I've got eleven visible," he said. "He said nineteen."
"Then there's eight somewhere."
"Yeah."
He swung the glasses north.
Harlan Batey's house sat a quarter mile up the lane, and it was dark, and there was no vehicle in front of it, and Joe's chest unclenched about four percent.
"Nothing at Batey's."
"Could mean they haven't gone yet."
"Could mean they already did."
Joe made himself look at the whole picture for three full minutes without acting, which took everything he had.
What he saw did not make sense.
"Pruitt."
"Yeah."
"What are they doing?"
Pruitt looked.
"Loading," he said.
"Loading what? There's no wagons. There's no grain trucks. There's two pickups and a tanker."
"Maybe they're hauling in bags."
"Nine hundred tons in pickups?" Joe shook his head. "That's eleven hundred trips. Nobody's that stupid."
He watched a man walk from the base of the bins to the tanker truck, carrying something in both hands, and set it down, and walk back.
"They're not taking the grain," Joe said slowly.
"Then what?"
Joe watched another man do the same thing.
And then he understood, and the understanding was so cold and so complete that he had to put the binoculars down for a second.
"They're not taking it," he said. "They're going to burn it."
Pruitt turned his head.
"Why in God's name."
"Because if nobody can have it, then whoever's got food is in charge," Joe said. "Nine hundred tons of wheat is the only thing standing between this valley and four thousand people who will do anything for anybody who feeds them."
"That's insane."
"That's a business plan."
Joe got the glasses back up.
"They're running hose off that tanker," he said. "Look at the base of bin two. That's a hose."
"Can you even burn wheat?"
"You can burn anything with three thousand gallons of diesel and eleven hours."
Joe went flat and put his forehead against the frozen dirt for a second and thought.
"Okay," he said. "Talk me out of this."
"Out of what?"
"I've got one rifle that shoots through engine blocks, a partner, four hundred yards of open alfalfa, and nineteen men. I cannot fight this."
"No."
"So what do I do?"
Pruitt was quiet.
"You get Bill and the girl," he said, "and you go home."
Joe closed his eyes.
"Say it again."
"You get Bill Tandy and Sylvie Kessick out of that house and you drive them up your mountain," Pruitt said, "and in the morning there's a black hole in the ground where nine hundred tons of wheat used to be, and four thousand people in this valley start dying in February instead of never."
"And the board? Batey? Alta? Those are seventy nine year old people who voted four to nothing."
"I know it."
"There's a hundred and eleven things in that elevator I can't replace and one of them is a VFD in a wooden crate that Ivers walked eleven miles through the ice to tell me about."
Joe pushed himself up on his elbows.
"He didn't walk eleven miles to tell me about a VFD," he said.
"What?"
"Ivers. He went through the ice two miles back and kept walking for four hours." Joe's mind was moving now. "Pruitt, Ivers came from Crowe's yard. Crowe's yard is on this road."
Pruitt sat up.
"Then Crowe knows."
"Crowe has known for hours." Joe swung the binoculars south, past the elevator, down the county road toward the gravel pit. "And Crowe has fourteen men and a shop full of trucks."
"And he's not here."
"He's not here yet."
Joe looked at the dark lane, at Batey's house, at the lit bins and the tanker and eleven men working with hoses.
"Two things," he said. "Batey's house first. That's not a choice, that's the whole reason I came. Then we find out where Arlan Crowe is."
They came at the house from the north, through a windbreak of Russian olive, and got to the back door in eleven minutes.
The door was open.
Joe stood in Harlan Batey's dark kitchen with his heart in his throat and the smell of a cold woodstove and said, very quietly, "Bill."
Nothing.
"Bill Tandy. It's Joe."
Something moved in the front room.
"Get down!" a voice screamed, and Joe hit the floor as a shotgun went off into the ceiling and plaster came down in sheets.
"SYLVIE!"
Silence.
Then, in a voice that did not sound like a person: "Joe?"
"It's me. It's Joe. Don't shoot again."
"Joe, oh God."
He came around the corner on his hands and knees with a red light and found Sylvie Kessick sitting on the floor with her back against the couch and the shotgun across her lap and her hands shaking so badly she could not have worked the action again if she wanted to.
"Where's Bill?"
"He's."
"Sylvie. Where's Bill?"
"Up the lane." She got it out in one breath. "He went up the lane two hours ago when they came past and he told me to stay here and lock the door and he never came back and I've been sitting here for two hours."
Joe felt the floor drop out from under him.
"Harlan?"
"He went with him."
"Both of them went up the lane?"
"Both of them went up the lane." Sylvie's teeth were chattering, not from cold.
"They saw the tanker go by and Mister Batey said a word I've never heard him say and got his gun and Bill went with him and told me if anybody came in the door I should shoot the ceiling because it makes the same noise and nobody gets killed."
Joe put a hand over his eyes.
"That's exactly what he would say."
"Was that stupid?"
"That was the smartest thing anybody's done tonight."
He got her up.