Dark of the Moon

another one of them right-wing legends. Last stand at Reverend Feur’s.”
    “Anybody look in Franks’ truck yet?”
    “Not yet.”
    They went that way, yanked open the back panel on the camper, saw the row of gas cans. A couple of other agents drifted over. Gomez turned the cap on one, sniffed, said, “Gas,” tipped it into the sun, to see better, then walked away and carefully poured the gasoline into the dirt at the side of the yard. A gallon or so poured out, and then a glass tube fell out, and another. Gomez kept swirling the can until he had them all, twelve tall bottles that might once have contained spices, all full of powder.
    “It’s all true,” he said. To one of the agents: “What am I gonna tell Harmon’s wife?”
    The agent shook his head, and finally said, “That we killed all those motherfuckers who did it.”
     
    T HE AGENTS UNLOADED the rest of the gas cans, and all carried glass bottles. They went through the shed, found five more cans, all with bottles. Feur and his friends had been moving meth twenty and thirty pounds at a time. “Been doing it for years,” Gomez said.
    They walked through the barn, knocked in the doors of the two old Quonset huts, without finding anything more. Looked into the house: the interior had been blown to flinders, and the fire was getting stronger.
    “Fire department’s coming,” one of the agents said. “Not that I care.”
     
    T HE HELICOPTER WENT AWAY, the maddening thump leaving the place in the silence of insects and birds. Virgil, Stryker, and Gomez climbed into the barn’s loft to look at the house from a high point; amazing, Virgil thought, what gas could do.
    They were standing there when the fire truck arrived. The fireman put foam on the fire for three or four minutes, and the fire was gone.
    Gomez said, “We’re gonna have to say something. Press conference up in Bluestem; we sort of had it set up for tonight. Still gonna have to do something…”
    “Call Pirelli. He was still talking when I saw him, maybe…”
    Gomez got on his phone, pushed a button. No answer.
    Stryker came over and said, “Get off the phone.”
    “What?”
    “Get off the phone. Look at this—look at this.” He led them to the loft door, looking down at the house.
     
    “F EUR WAS a mean, feral asshole,” Stryker said. “What’s he doing committing suicide? He’d want his day in court, if we’d had him cornered.”
    Gomez spread his hands: “What?”
    Stryker pointed up the hillside. “That satellite photo that you had in the motel. One of your guys was looking at a seam that comes down to the house, and he wondered if it was a ditch that we could crawl down. We didn’t know. But when we walked around the barn, right over it, I didn’t see a thing. Didn’t notice it. The only way you can see anything, is to get up high. Up here.”
    “Yeah?” Virgil looked at the hillside, still didn’t see much.
    “It’s that line of greener weeds,” Stryker said, pointing down and to the right. “See it? That’s what you get when you dig. New weeds. It’s a dead straight line. It looks to me like somebody put down a culvert.”
    “What?” Gomez, eyes wide. “That little line?”
    “All you’d need to do is get the pipe, rent a backhoe, run the line straight up the hill to that brush. Then if the cops ever caught you in the house, you get down the basement, light a candle, turn on the gas, and seal the tunnel. Regular old manhole cover with some plastic tape or foam. Then you crawl out the culvert…skin your knees up some…I keep thinking, he didn’t answer the cell phone the last time Virgil called.”
    “Sonofabitch,” Gomez said. They climbed down from the loft, and Gomez got on his radio. A half dozen agents came running.
     
    “T HE LINE GOES right into that clump of trees,” Stryker said, pointing up the hill. “There’s like three clumps coming down the hill, and then the last clump on the bottom, it goes right into that clump.”
    “They might already be out,” Virgil said.
    Gomez told his guys, “Armor up. Fast. Let’s go, let’s go…”
    Eight of them crossed the field in a long skirmish line, while the two functioning north squad trucks ferried six more agents in an end run to block off the field to the south. The last hundred yards they did on hands and knees, moving two at a time, the DEA agents performing like well-trained infantry. Gomez was working the radio, had the north squad in position, and they tightened the