Chapter 11
The dark came down like a dropped curtain.
Joe went flat on the frozen gravel before the sound of the shot finished rolling across the alfalfa, and he heard the work light's bulb still tinkling down onto the parking lot in pieces.
Then everything was shouting.
Nineteen men who had been standing in a lit circle for two hours were now in absolute blackness with their night vision burned to nothing, and Joe, who had spent that entire two hours out in a ditch, could see.
Not well. But he could see.
He could see the shapes of them turning in place like cattle.
"HARLAN," he shouted. "DITCH. GO."
He got a fistful of the old man's coat and hauled, and they went off the edge of the lane and down into the barrow ditch in a tangle, and Harlan Batey made a sound like a kicked dog and kept moving anyway.
Somebody fired three rounds into the sky.
"HOLD FIRE," Teague roared. "HOLD YOUR FIRE, THERE'S FUEL ON THE GROUND."
That was the thing that saved everybody's life in the first eleven seconds, and Joe would think about it later with a complicated kind of respect.
Even then. Even with his light shot out and his men coming apart, Teague was the man who remembered where he was standing.
Up on the silos, the rifle fired again.
This time Joe heard the impact before the report, which meant it was close, and what it hit was the headlight of the lead pickup.
Then the second headlight.
Then, four seconds later, the other truck's.
Four shots. Four lights. From a hundred and eleven feet up in the dark at maybe ninety yards.
"That's him," Joe breathed.
"Who?" said Batey.
"The man in the green coat."
"Son, the man in the green coat is laying in your ditch dying."
Joe's mind went completely white for a second.
Because Harlan Batey was right.
The man with the wood stocked rifle was nine miles up the canyon, face down in the weeds by the east fence with a four day old gunshot wound and Joe's wife kneeling over him.
Somebody else was on top of those silos.
"Pruitt," Joe hissed into the dark.
"Here." Closer than expected, eleven feet up the ditch.
"Is that you?"
"Is what me?"
"Is there any chance that's you on that silo?"
"Mister Henfry, I'm laying on your left."
The rifle fired a fifth time.
Something in the parking lot went up with a hard flat bang and a hiss, and a man screamed, and Joe risked his head over the lip of the ditch.
Steam. A great white column of it boiling up into the dark.
"Radiator," said Pruitt. "He's killing the trucks."
Down south, toward the gravel pit, the shooting had not stopped. It had gotten worse, and the orange glow had spread wider along the horizon, and now Joe could see individual points of muzzle flash winking out there like something electrical.
Teague's voice came across the lot.
"EVERYBODY OFF THE FUEL. PULL BACK TO THE SCALE HOUSE."
"What about the hoses?"
"LEAVE THEM."
Joe grabbed Pruitt's arm.
"He's going to lose this," he said.
"How do you figure?"
"He's got nineteen men. Eight of them are at the gravel pit in a fight they're apparently losing, and the eleven here just had every light they own shot out by somebody they can't find."
Joe was talking fast. "And he can't shoot back because he's standing in diesel. He's got a thousand tons of leverage and it's all pointed at his own feet."
"So what do we do?"
"We get Bill."
They went up the ditch on their elbows.
Forty yards to the office, and the whole distance was flat open gravel, and for the first twenty yards it was the longest thing Joe had ever done.
Then the sixth shot came from the silo and it did not hit a vehicle.
It hit the cinder block wall of the scale house, about a foot above head height, and the crack of it going to pieces sent every man near that building diving for the ground.
"He's covering us," Joe said.
"He doesn't know we're here."
"He knows exactly where we are."
They made the corner of the office building.
The door was open eleven inches. Joe went through it low with his handgun up, and the room was black, and he had to force himself to stop and listen instead of moving.
Breathing. Two sets. One of them ragged.
"Bill."
"Joe." A wet, exhausted voice from the floor to his right. "They left me. They all ran out."
"Are you alone?"
"There's a fella on the floor over there who fell down when the light went out and I hit him with a chair."
Joe put the red light on and found Bill Tandy sitting against a filing cabinet with his hands zip tied in front of him and a folding chair in pieces beside him, and eleven feet away a man of about twenty five lying face down and not moving.
"Is he dead?"
"He's breathing," Bill said. "I'm eighty one. I don't swing like I used to."
Pruitt cut the ties.
Getting Bill Tandy out of that building and four hundred yards up a frozen lane with a broken face took nine minutes and every bit of strength Joe had left.
They did it with the old man between them and his arms over their shoulders and his boots mostly dragging.
Behind them, the shooting at the gravel pit stopped.
It did not taper. It stopped, all at once, the way a faucet stops.
"That's bad," said Pruitt.
"That's good."
"How is that good?"
"Because if Teague's eight men had won, it'd keep going while they mopped up," Joe said. "Somebody just quit."
They found Sylvie in the alfalfa field in the truck with her hands still on the wheel, exactly where she had been told to be, counting.
"Eleven minutes," she said, when Joe opened the door. "I got to eleven minutes four times and then I started over because I didn't know what else to do."
"Move over."
"Is that Bill?"
"That's Bill. Move over."
They got him in the middle of the bench seat. Harlan Batey in the bed with Pruitt, which was a cruelty at eleven below, and there was nothing to do about it.
Joe turned the truck around in the frozen field.
And stopped.
There was a man standing in the headlights.
Joe's hand went to the rifle beside the seat and stopped halfway, because the man had no weapon in his hands at all.
He was in a canvas work coat and a flat brimmed hat. He had reading glasses pushed up on the brim. He was about five foot nine and thick through the chest and he was absolutely covered, from his collar to the tops of his boots, in blood that was not his.
In his right hand, hanging down, was a machete.
In his left hand was another one.
Joe got out of the truck.
"Crowe."
Arlan Crowe stood in the headlights and did not say anything for a moment.
The two blades were the same. Black coated, straight backed, about eighteen inches, with rubberized grips and a hook at the end of the spine. Modern things. The kind of thing a man buys from a catalog and puts in a truck and forgets about.
They were not black anymore from about the midpoint down.
"Is that Bill Tandy in there?" Crowe said.
"Yes."
"Alive?"
"Yes."
Crowe nodded slowly.
"Good," he said.
"Crowe, what happened at the pit?"
"Eight men came up my lane at eleven fifteen and shot the dog," Arlan Crowe said.
That was all he said about it for a while.
"Get in the truck," Joe said. "Whatever you did down there, get in the truck, we're leaving."
"I can't."
"Crowe."
"Merrit's at the yard."
Joe stopped with his hand on the door.
"Your daughter's at the gravel pit."
"My daughter is in a root cellar under a shop floor with two women and eleven other people's children," Crowe said, "and she has been down there since eleven twenty, and I have got six men left on their feet out of fourteen."
"Six."
"Six." He said it flatly. "Ivers walked to you. Two are dead in my yard. One won't last the night. Four ran."
Joe looked at the two machetes.
"Why those?" he said.
Crowe glanced down at his own hands as if he had forgotten he was holding them.
"Because they came into the shop," he said. "Into the building. Into a room full of benches and lathes and a hundred places to trip, with rifles, in the dark, at eleven feet."
"And you had machetes in a truck."
"I had machetes in a truck," Crowe said.
"I bought them in 2019 for clearing scrub off the fence line and I never used them once, and tonight I got them out of a toolbox in the dark and I went into my own shop, which I have walked in for twenty two years, and I knew where every single thing in that room was and they did not."
He looked past Joe at the burning glow to the south.
"It took about four minutes," he said.
Nobody in that truck said anything.
"How many?" Joe asked.
"Five."
"And the other three?"
"Ran." Crowe's mouth moved. "One of them dropped his rifle in the door and I let him go because he was maybe nineteen years old and he was crying, and I am going to regret that in about a week."
Joe stood in the headlights of his own truck at one in the morning and made a decision.
"Get in," he said.
"I told you."
"Get in the truck, Crowe. We drive to the pit, we load your daughter and your women and your children and your six men, and everybody comes up my mountain tonight."
Arlan Crowe stood absolutely still.
"That's eleven more mouths," he said.
"It's nineteen."
"You've got a winter counted out on a card and I've watched you do it."
"I've got a winter counted out on a card and the card says the last week of May," Joe said. "So it says April instead. I'll take April."
"You don't know me."
"I know exactly what you are," Joe said. "That's the entire problem. Get in the truck."
They made four trips.
It took until nearly five in the morning and it was the most dangerous thing Joe had ever done, nine miles each way on a county road with a fire burning and armed men somewhere behind them, and they did it with the headlights off for the first mile every time.
Nobody came after them.
That was the thing Joe could not stop turning over. Nobody came.
On the third trip he found out why.
They were loading the last of Crowe's people out of the shop when a man came up out of the dark on the north side of the yard with his hands up.
One of Crowe's remaining six put a rifle on him and Crowe said, "Don't."
The man was maybe forty. He had a rifle slung and he made no move toward it.
"I'm not here for a fight," he said.