Dark of the Moon

better.”
    Virgil piped up: “That shop might be a little harder than you think.”
    Pirelli raised an eyebrow: “Yeah?”
    “It’s got new Medeco locks and steel doors. Hardly any point, if the thing has cardboard walls.”
    “Have you been inside?” Pirelli asked.
    “Of course not. That would be illegal, without a warrant,” Virgil said.
    “We got stuff that’d take down those doors like they were tissue paper,” one of the agents said.
    “Sure, when you decide to,” Virgil said. “But if Franks has ten gas cans in his truck, with twenty gallons in gas and the rest in crank, and if he has time to unload the crank and stir it around in the gas, he could have a nice little campfire in there and run out with his hands over his head…Maybe you need to order up a fire truck.”
    Pirelli said, “We gotta be on top of them before he can unload. We will be less than a minute behind him, and he’ll have no reason to hurry. With any luck, he’ll want to take a leak before he unloads.”
    “I hope,” Virgil said. “But it worries me.”
    “With these kinds of deals,” Pirelli said, “there’s always about a twenty-eight percent chance of a disaster. That’s just the way it is. However we have to do it, these guys are worth eliminating.” He looked at the satellite picture, then said to Virgil: “But you’re right. It’s worth worrying about.”
     
    T HEY STOOD AROUND talking to the agents, then Virgil borrowed Pirelli’s laser pointer, and Virgil and Stryker went over the ground around the house—a ditch here, a big rock there, where they could site long guns.
    There was a long seam of darker grass extending from the barn area, up the hill, and into a clump of brush southeast of the farmstead. One of the agents asked if it were a ditch that could be used to approach the houses.
    “Don’t know,” Stryker said. “We did our recon on the north side.”
    Pirelli was on the phone with somebody doing surveillance on the two target cars as they approached Feur’s farm. One of them was working the math on a simultaneous arrival, and at twelve-forty, Pirelli said, “North side, take off.”
    Six agents got up, and walked out.
    Pirelli said, “Five minutes, guys. We’re on the road in ten. Drivers, fast, but no lights. Keep spaced out right until we’re at the exit, then close up tight. You know all this, so let’s remember it. Everybody: be careful. We don’t want to lose anybody out there, and this is a tough bunch. Virgil, Jim, you hang back a little—not way back, but a little back. We’ve choreographed the entry, here.”
    Five minutes later, Pirelli said, “Let’s mount up,” and they streamed out of the room, no jokes, no talk.
    Moving fast.

19
    B EFORE THEY SETTLED in the trucks, Virgil and Stryker squeezed into standard-duty body armor. Though it wouldn’t stop any heavy loads, it’d be good against shotguns and pistols. Some of the DEA guys were wearing heavier stuff: they’d be the first in.
    Stryker asked Virgil to drive: “I want to be able to work the radios to my guys—just in case.”
     
    F ROM THE W ORTHINGTON on-ramp to the exit nearest Feur’s place was thirty-five minutes at legal interstate speeds, half an hour at the normal illegal driving pace. Pirelli, talking to his outside pacemaker, modulated the speed of the DEA trucks, seven of them, all blacked-out GMC Yukons.
    “Keep spaced out, my happy ass,” Stryker said, watching the trucks ahead of them. “We look like a Shriner parade.”
    “As long as Feur doesn’t have lookouts on the interstate, we’ll be okay,” Virgil said. A minute later, “Real purty day, ain’t it?”
    “Sure is,” Stryker said cheerfully. He popped his safety belt, knelt on the seat, dug around in the back, and came up with the M-16. “If you see me firing this into a gopher hole, you just say to yourself, ‘Don’t bother about that—it’s just old Jim popping off a few rounds in an effort to get reelected.’”
    “Gettin’ some smoke on your ass.”
    “That’s right,” Stryker said.
    “I still don’t think Feur did the Gleasons, Jimmy. I don’t think we’re out of the woods on that guy,” Virgil said.
    “Whatever. I plan to take full credit on the meth lab, at least in the hometown papers,” Stryker said. He pulled the magazine out of the M-16, thumbed the cartridges a few times, said, “What have you got back there? Shotgun isn’t much use on a house.”
    “Shotgun, Remington semiauto