Dark of the Moon

both stiff, and they stood up, their bodies obscured by weeds even if somebody had night-vision goggles, and stretched, and watched as a pickup truck slowed, pulled into Feur’s yard, and then slowly backed up to the machine shed.
    The driver got out and walked over to the house, skirting a puddle in the middle of the drive, and then stood on the porch, waiting. Lights came up, and a minute later, the driver was let into the house. “Let’s go see who it is,” Stryker said.
    Back through the weeds, on their knees, and duckwalking, down to the back of the machine shed, then up along the side. The driver had parked only a couple of feet from the main door.
    “Take a chance?” Virgil asked.
    “The lights are on the other side of the house…I think they’d be paying attention over there.”
    “Cover me, then.”
    Stryker snuggled down with the machine gun, and Virgil crawled along the ground next to the door, behind the truck. Missouri plates. He heard a rattling, and froze. Nothing. He fumbled in his pocket, found a pen, wrote the number in the palm of his hand, and then again on his forearm.
    He was about to start back when a thought occurred to him. He’d just rewired the lights on his trailer connection, and if this Dodge was anything like his truck…
    He groped around for a minute, then risked a quick flash with his light, well under the truck bed. Spotted the wires, got a grip on them, and hung on them, all of his weight, yanking until something came free. He risked another flash—hell, the first one had worked—and saw raw copper on two wires.
    That should do it, he thought.
    Then the dog barked. Once.
     
    A FUCKIN ’ DOG in the truck. And not a small one.
    He said aloud, “I’m coming,” and he scuttled back across the face of the building into the dark beside Stryker, and the dog barked again, several times.
    “What the hell was that all about?” Stryker whispered, as they duckwalked away. The dog started barking again, but the sound was muffled by the truck cab, and nobody came out of the house. Fifty yards out, they were on their feet, hunched over, and then a hundred yards out, they were upright and moving away. They found their nest, and settled into it.
    “Wires,” Virgil said. “Whenever we find out who this guy is…why, I’m afraid he’ll have a moving violation. If we need it.”
    “A moving violation?” Stryker asked.
    “I yanked the wires on a taillight,” Virgil said.
    “That’ll go on his permanent record,” Stryker said.
    “Yes, it will.”
    “When that dog…You owe me money for a laundry bill.”
     
    N OTHING MORE HAPPENED at the house for half an hour, when the door opened, and three men, one of them Feur, came out, looked around, and then crossed the yard to the machine shed. They were inside for ten minutes, then came out carrying four five-gallon metal gas cans. They loaded them carefully in the truck’s camper, moved some things around in the interior of the camper, went back inside the shed, got four more cans. They closed the doors on the camper, talked for a few minutes, and then the driver got back in the truck, waved, and pulled out. The left rear taillight was out.
    “Let’s go,” Stryker said.
    They eased away in the dark, and two hundred yards out, tried to cross to the road. Stryker got tangled in the fence and ripped his coat, said, “Damnit, I just bought it this spring,” and then they were on the road, jogging. The moon, on its way down, broke through the ragged clouds on the back edge of the squall line, and helped them along.
    “We’re there,” Stryker said, his face a pale oval in the light from his GPS. They cut across the ditch back into the dark, risked a couple of flashes, got the truck, pulled around in a circle, and bumped back onto the road.
    “Let’s go talk to the computer,” he said. “See where this guy is coming from.”
    “Two possibilities,” Virgil said. “The gas cans have something in them besides gas. Maybe, in addition to gas. Get some plastic chemistry flasks, slip them down in there, fill it the rest of the way with gasoline.”
    “The other possibility…” Stryker reached overhead and started pulling gaffer tapes off the internal lights.
    “The other possibility is that there really is gas in the cans, but our guy couldn’t stop because he couldn’t risk being seen. A guy on the run, or being really careful.”
    “Careful about what?”
    “Say he’s the shooter,” Virgil said. “Coming in