Chapter 13
Joe did not turn around.
That was Marchetti's note doing the work. He will not knock. She will be in your house and you will not know it until she speaks.
He kept his hand on the dog.
"Where are you standing?" he said.
"Corner by the pantry. Sitting, actually. I've been here about forty minutes."
"Forty minutes."
"Your watch is a nineteen year old named Colby and he's very earnest and he checks the north window every four minutes like clockwork," the voice said. "Which is the problem with checking anything every four minutes."
"He's a good kid."
"He's a good kid with a bad habit. Somebody should fix it and it shouldn't be me."
Joe let out a breath.
"I'm going to turn around."
"I'd rather you didn't yet."
"Why?"
"Because there are thirty people asleep on the floor of this house and if you turn around fast and I move, one of them wakes up and shouts, and then we've got eleven armed men coming down a dark hallway into a kitchen with children in it."
The voice was completely level. "Nobody wins that. Not me, not you, not the four year old under the table."
Joe felt something drop.
"There's a four year old under my table?"
"Since about midnight. She's got a blanket and a stuffed rabbit and she snores."
"That's Ada. She's one of Crowe's."
"She's got the whole underside of that table organized," the woman said. "I've been watching her sleep for half an hour and it's the first pleasant thing I've done in six weeks."
Joe put both hands where she could see them, if she could see them.
"You're Junie," he said.
A long pause.
"Well," the voice said. "That answers a question."
"Which one?"
"Whether Sam made it up the hill."
"He made it up the hill and your name came out of his mouth about eleven hours after that."
"Is he alive?"
There was something under the question that had not been in any of the other sentences.
"He was two nights ago," Joe said. "Gunshot through the left flank, four days old when he got here, packed with yarrow and sphagnum moss."
"Of course it was."
"My wife says it's why he's not dead. She's never seen anybody actually do it."
"He did it to me in 2003," the woman said. "Outside Barstow. It worked then too."
Joe turned around.
She let him.
She was sitting on the floor in the corner between the pantry and the wall, knees up, a rifle laid across them with the bolt out and sitting separately on the floorboards beside her hip, which was the single most deliberate thing Joe had ever seen anyone do.
She was maybe fifty. Small. Gray at the temples and cut short. A face that was not remarkable in any way that would help a person describe it.
She was soaked from the knees down and there was a rime of ice on her coat collar.
"Bolt's out," she said.
"I see that."
"I took it out in your mudroom before I came in. It's been out for forty minutes. I want that on the record because in about ninety seconds this room is going to be full of people and I'd like everyone to know what I did before they got here."
Joe looked at her.
"You came in through a barred door," he said.
"I came in through a barred door."
"How?"
"The bar's a two by four in two brackets and your mudroom window is a single pane with a latch that hasn't been adjusted since the house was built in 1974," she said. "I'd fix the window first and the bar second. The bar's fine. It's the window."
"Anything else?"
"Your spring house."
Joe's stomach turned.
"What about it?"
"There's a hasp on that door with a padlock on it and the hasp is screwed into pine with four number eight wood screws," she said. "Which means the padlock is decorative. Anybody with a flat bar takes that door off in eleven seconds and then they own your water."
"Can you fix it?"
"Carriage bolts through the frame with washers on the inside," she said. "You've got bolts in that shed. I looked."
"When did you look in my shed?"
"Tonight."
Joe sat down on the floor.
He simply sat down, in the middle of his own kitchen, at four in the morning, across from a woman with her rifle in two pieces.
"Okay," he said. "Talk."
They woke the house anyway.
It was unavoidable. Mack made a sound halfway through the first sentence and a man in the front room came up off the floor with a shotgun, and then it was eleven people in a kitchen in the dark with a lamp being lit by someone with shaking hands.
Joe stood in the middle of it with both arms out.
"NOBODY POINTS ANYTHING," he said. "Look at the floor. Look at the floor in the corner."
They looked.
A rifle with its bolt removed and set four feet away from the woman holding it.
"She's been in this house forty minutes," Joe said, "with thirty one of us asleep, and she took her gun apart before she came through the door."
Nobody moved.
Then Crowe came down the hall in his shirtsleeves with a machete in his hand and stopped dead.
He looked at the woman on the floor for a long moment.
Then he looked at the bolt lying separately on the boards.
And he lowered the blade.
"Put the light up," he said.
They put her at the table with a blanket and a cup of something hot and eleven people standing around the walls, and Imogen took one look at her legs and said, "Boots off, now."
"I'm fine."
"Your boots are frozen to your socks. Boots off."
"Ma'am."
"I've had this argument twice this month and I won both times."
The woman looked around the kitchen.
"She's serious," said Delores.
"I can see that she's serious."
She took the boots off.
Her feet were white and waxy at the toes and Imogen made a sound in her throat and sent Hazel for a pot and a thermometer.
"How long since you had these dry?" Imogen said.
"Four days."
"Four."
"There's been weather."
"You are eleven hours from losing toes," Imogen said. "Maybe eight. Sit there and put them in this and do not argue with me while I run the water up from a hundred and two."
"I know how it's done."
"Then you know it hurts, and you know I'm going to be angry the whole time."
The woman almost smiled.
"Your father was like this," she said.
Imogen stopped with her hand on the pot.
"Say that again."
"Your father. He didn't nurse anybody, but when he decided a thing was going to happen it happened, and there was no talking about it, and he'd be furious the entire time in a way that meant he cared." She put her feet in the water and hissed. "I worked for him eight years."
"Sam said 1996."
"Ninety six to two thousand four."
"What's your name?"
"Junie's fine."
"That's not a name."
"It's the one I had in that yard," the woman said. "I've had four since. Junie's the one you're entitled to."
Imogen stood over her.
"Why did my father hire a nineteen year old girl off the street?"
"Because I came in asking for work pulling parts and he watched me walk across that yard and he said, you counted the cars."
"Did you?"
"There were forty three vehicles in the front lot and eleven in the crush pile and one of them was a Bronco with the plate still on it," Junie said, "and he asked me and I told him, and he sent me to the office and I never touched a wrench."
Imogen sat down slowly.
"That's exactly what he would do."
"He was the only person who ever looked at me and saw a use instead of a problem," Junie said. "I was nineteen and I'd been thrown out of two places and he paid me eight hundred a month to be careful on his behalf."
"Eight hundred," said Joe.
"Same as Sam. He never paid anybody a different number in his life. He'd have paid the governor eight hundred dollars a month."
Imogen laughed and it came out broken.
They got the whole story over two hours, in pieces, while the water went from a hundred and two to a hundred and six and Junie's toes came back pink and she swore twice in a language nobody recognized.
Sam had called her in August from Cedar City.
She had thought about it for two weeks and decided no.
Then, on the second of October, she had changed her mind, and she would not say why, and Joe watched Imogen decide not to push it.
She had driven from Nevada on the sixth and seventh of October, which meant she had been on the road when it happened.
"I was on I-15 north of Beaver when the sky went," she said. "In a 1984 diesel Land Cruiser with mechanical injection, which is why I'm sitting here and about eleven hundred other people on that interstate are not."
"What did you see?"
"I saw four hundred cars stop at once," she said. "That's the thing nobody tells you about. Not the lights. The cars. Doing eighty and then just coasting, all of them, all at the same second, and people steering onto the shoulder because that's what you do."
"And then?"
"And then I drove around them for six hours and got to Kamas on the eighth and Sam wasn't there."
"Where was he?"
"Up here," she said. "On your ridge."
Crowe said, "And you've been where since October?"
Junie looked at him.
"I know who you are," she said.
"I expect you do."
"You're the man who killed Stance Ulebrook on a road in front of eleven witnesses."
The kitchen went tight.
"I am," said Crowe.
"And you're the man whose hat I shot through on the eighteenth."
"That was you."
"That was me."
"Why?"
"Because you were standing on the step of a fuel tanker yelling at eleven men, and you're the only one of them worth anything, and I wanted you off that step before somebody on your own side did something permanent."
Crowe went completely still.
"That wasn't me on the tanker," he said.
Junie's head came up.
"What?"
"On the eighteenth I was at the gravel pit with eight men in my shop," Crowe said. "I have never been on that tanker. I have not set foot on the elevator property since the fourth of October."
The kitchen was absolutely silent.
"Describe him," Junie said.
"Six three. Heavy. Insulated coat, dark. And he was carrying a clipboard."
"A clipboard."
"He had a clipboard in his hand the entire time," said Joe. "That's how he was standing there when I walked up. Nineteen men and a fuel truck and a man with a clipboard doing a dust survey."
Junie put both hands flat on the table.
"That's not what I thought I was looking at," she said.
"What did you think you were looking at?"