Chapter 10 #2
"Pruitt, take her to the truck. Alfalfa field, a mile north, off the road in the ditch."
"And you?"
"I'm going down the lane."
"Like hell."
"Pruitt."
"Mister Henfry, you go down that lane alone and there's nineteen of them and then there's nobody left who knows where your cache is."
Joe stopped.
That landed harder than anything else could have.
"Okay," he said. "Sylvie, can you drive a truck?"
"I can drive a tractor."
"That's close enough. It's a three on the tree and I'm going to tell you once."
He told her once. She repeated it back correctly.
"Alfalfa field," he said. "You sit in that truck with the doors locked, and if you hear shooting you wait eleven minutes and then you drive up that canyon and you tell my wife everything."
"Eleven minutes."
"Count them out loud. It keeps you from guessing."
She went.
Joe and Pruitt went down the lane in the barrow ditch, on their bellies for the last two hundred yards, and they found Harlan Batey at forty yards from the elevator office.
He was alive.
He was lying in the ditch with his lever action beside him and his right hand pressed against the side of his head, and when Joe put a hand on his shoulder the old man swung at him.
"It's Henfry."
"They hit me."
"I know."
"They hit me with a rifle butt and I fell in this ditch and I have been laying here trying to decide if I was dead."
"You're not dead."
"I'm seventy four years old, son, that is a matter of opinion."
Joe got him rolled over. There was a split above the ear, bleeding badly the way scalps do, and his eyes were not tracking right.
"Where's Bill?"
Harlan Batey went quiet.
"Harlan."
"They took him inside," Batey said. "Into the office. He walked up to them with his hands out and he told them the board voted and that wheat belonged to eleven hundred families, and one of them laughed and another one hit me, and Bill kept talking."
"He kept talking?"
"He never stopped talking." Batey's voice broke. "Son, I have known Bill Tandy for fifty years and I never once heard him raise his voice and he stood in that light and told nineteen men they ought to be ashamed, and they took him inside, and I don't know what happened after that."
"How long ago?"
"Hour and a half."
Joe lay in the frozen ditch and looked at the lit office window forty yards away.
"Pruitt," he said. "I need you to tell me the truth about something."
"Yeah."
"Is there any version of this where I get an eighty one year old man out of a cinder block office building with nineteen men around it."
Pruitt was quiet for a long moment.
"No," he said.
"Say the whole thing."
"There's no version," Pruitt said. "Not with two men and no light and no distraction and no way out. You'd die in the parking lot and so would he."
Joe put his face in the dirt.
Then he lifted it.
"Then I need a distraction," he said.
"Joe."
"Not for me. For them." He rolled onto his side. "Harlan. The fans."
"What?"
"The aeration fans. Ivers said four of them, five horse, in the floor of the bins. Are there fans in the concrete silos too?"
"No. Just the steel bins."
"And they're going to burn the steel bins."
"That's where the wheat is."
"How do they get inside to set a fire?"
"Manhole at the top of the cone," Batey said, sitting up slowly. "Or through the draw gate at the bottom."
Joe was moving now, fast, in his head.
"Harlan, listen to me. Grain dust."
Batey's head came up.
"You know about grain dust," he said.
"I know that grain elevators explode. I know it's one of the most dangerous industrial environments in the world and that the reason is dust suspended in air."
"That's right."
"How much do you need?"
"In a bin that size? Not much. Forty grams in a cubic meter and you've got a bomb." Batey put a hand against his head. "That's why we run dust collection. That's why we ground everything. That's why no man has ever taken a cutting torch into that headhouse in the entire history of this co-op."
Joe went still.
"So if nineteen men pour three thousand gallons of diesel into a bin full of nine hundred tons of wheat," he said slowly, "and then somebody lights it."
Harlan Batey looked at him.
"Then everybody within a hundred yards dies," he said. "Including Bill."
"Do they know that?"
"Son, I have been running this elevator since 1996 and I would not walk into a bin with a lit cigarette."
"Do they know that?"
Batey was quiet.
"No," he said. "No, if they did, they wouldn't be standing where they're standing."
Joe rolled over onto his back and looked at the stars.
"That's the distraction," he said.
"That's not a distraction," said Pruitt. "That's a massacre."
"I'm not going to set it off."
"Then what?"
Joe sat up in the ditch.
"I'm going to tell them," he said.
Pruitt grabbed his sleeve.
"Are you out of your mind?"
"Think about it."
"They'll shoot you."
"They will not shoot a man who walks up in the open and tells them they are about to die," Joe said, "because the first thing that happens when I say it is that every single one of them looks at the man next to him, and about four of them believe me immediately,
because at least four out of nineteen have worked around grain."
He was already getting up.
"And the man in charge has to decide in front of all of them whether he's going to keep going," Joe said. "And whatever he decides, for about eleven minutes, nobody is pouring diesel."
"And then?"
"And then I've got Harlan Batey, who sat on that board for twenty eight years, standing next to me saying the same thing."
Batey said, "I'm coming?"
"You're the only reason it works. Nobody believes the Californian. Everybody believes the man whose name is on the sign."
The old man got up out of the ditch with blood down the whole side of his face.
"Well," he said. "All right then."
They walked in at twelve forty in the morning.
Joe left the Ruger in the ditch with Pruitt, which was the hardest physical act of his life, and he walked up that lane with his hands out at his sides and an old man beside him and a work light burning his eyes out.
Somebody shouted at forty yards.
They kept walking.
At twenty yards four men came out of the light with rifles up and Joe stopped and said, in the loudest, flattest voice he had:
"Nobody light anything. There is diesel vapor in that bin and you are all standing in a bomb."
Nothing happened for about two seconds.
Then a lot of things happened at once, and the first of them was that a man near the tanker said, in a voice that carried:
"I told you. I said that this afternoon."
And Joe Henfry, standing in a light with his hands out and nineteen rifles in front of him, felt the entire night turn over.
"Who said that?" he called.
"Shut up," said the man in front of him.
"Whoever said that, you're right and you're about to be dead for being right."
"I said shut up."
"Harlan," Joe said.
Harlan Batey stepped forward with blood on his face.
"My name is on that scale house," he said.
"I have run this elevator for twenty eight years. There is enough dust in bin two to level everything you can see, and you have been pumping fuel into it for two hours, and if one of you strikes a match in the next four hours every man here goes up with it."
Nobody moved.
And then a voice from the dark behind the tanker said, "Let them through."
It was calm and unhurried and completely unfamiliar and Joe hated it instantly.
The men parted.
A man came around the front of the tanker.
He was big. Six three, maybe, heavy through the shoulders, in a good insulated coat, and he was holding a clipboard, which was the most frightening detail of the entire night.
He looked at Joe with mild interest.
"You're Henfry," he said.
"Yes."
"You're the one Arlan's been playing house with."
"Where's Bill Tandy?"
"In the office."
"Alive?"