Rough Country

watch. A half-hour passed, and then forty minutes, and Virgil decided if the pilot hadn’t arrived by the end of an hour, he’d bail. He’d feel guilty about it, but he would.
    The pilot, whose name was Hank Underwood, walked in five minutes later and said, “Sorry.”
    “Broken?” Harris asked.
    “Yeah. Worse than we thought,” Underwood said. He was a short, dark man about Virgil’s age. “Not his arm, it’s a wrist bone, the navicular. He could be in a cast for five months. He was supposed to start football practice in three weeks.”
    They were talking about it, walking out to Underwood’s single-engine Cessna, and Virgil said the broken arm might be a blessing in disguise. “Maybe he’ll turn out to be great at math and become a scientist.”
    “Rather play football,” Underwood said. “All his pals will be . . . but you could be right.” He sounded doubtful.
    Underwood put Harris in the back, because he was shorter than Virgil, and as they took off into the darkness, the plane smelling of warm oil and cold air, said, “When we get up there, I’ll roll a bit, to give you a view. We’ll go up one side and down the other, using Deer River as our guide.”
    “How’re we going to mark him?” Virgil asked.
    “GPS,” Underwood said. “We’ll circle until we can get an azimuth that runs through him and some point in Deer River, and mark ourselves, and then do it again, from another angle. Won’t be exact, but it’ll be pretty damn close.”
    “As long as we’ve only got one fire,” Harris said.
    Underwood said, “Not many people camping in a swamp. It’s usually dark as a coal sack along there. Our biggest problem will be if he’s sleeping in his boat, and isn’t cooking at all.”
    “Don’t want to spook him,” Virgil said.
    “We’ll be well off. We’ll go up one side of the river, fool around for a while, then come back down the other,” Underwood said. “If he’s close enough to the highway, he might not even hear us.”
     
     
     
    THEY COULD SEE Deer River within a couple of minutes of taking off. “The place he’s supposed to be is right down this way from the lights,” Underwood said, gesturing. “See the line of lights? Now, ninety degrees towards us.”
    The river plain was pitch-black. They flew up the side, past the town, did a wide circle to the west, slowly, scanning the terrain, then came right back down the highway. On the second pass, Harris said, suddenly, “Got a fire.”
    “Where?” Virgil asked.
    “About two-thirty . . . coming up on three . . . It flickers . . . lost it, goddamnit, got it, got it again . . .”
    “Brush between us and it,” Underwood said.
    Virgil scanned down at the same angle as Harris, at three o’clock. “Got it,” Virgil said. “I got it. It’s small.”
    “No point in a barn fire to cook a weenie,” Harris said.
     
     
     
    UNDERWOOD TOOK THEM around the town, and they put azimuth lines from GPS markers through intersections of the highway, crossing at the fire. “Don’t see another damn thing out there,” Virgil said, scanning the darkness.
    “There isn’t anything else out there,” Harris said. “You couldn’t pay me five hundred dollars to camp out in there. No telling what you’d run into.”
    “Maybe even a crazy killer,” Underwood said. “ Friday the 13th , huh?”
    “Never saw it,” Harris said. “But that’s the general idea.”
     
     
     
    THEY WERE ALL CRANKED when they landed. Virgil and Harris left Underwood to put the plane away, and after warning the pilot to keep his mouth shut, went roaring off to the sheriff’s office. The sheriff and a couple of deputies were waiting for them, with a USGS topo map, and Virgil and Harris used a yardstick to draw out their lines.
    “Not bad,” the sheriff said, his finger on the map where the lines crossed. “Man, that’s not more’n a mile from where the kids thought they saw him. Gotta be him.”
    “What time are you putting the chopper up?” Virgil asked.
    “Sunrise is just about six o’clock—so, about six o’clock.” Sanders looked at his watch. “Seven hours. You’ll want to be on the ground, up in Deer River, by five at the latest. We’ll put you in a boat.”
    “Who’s in the helicopter?” Virgil asked.
    “Me and the pilot,” the sheriff said. “I’m paying for it, so I get the ride.”
    “He’ll probably shoot you down,” Virgil said.
    “You just want the ride,” Sanders said; and he was right. And he clapped