The Fool's Run

shooters will probably come in one car, from the top end of the road. Maggie will come up the way I told her, from the bottom. If she comes at all.”
    “You think she might not?”
    “If they see this purely as a clean-up, she might not risk it. But I think she will. They’ll want to talk, to find out if we’ve tried to protect ourselves—you know, letters to the FBI, that kind of thing. I don’t think she’s scared of me. She might be scared of you.”
    “She should be,” LuEllen said, with a dangerous rime of bitterness in her voice.
    “She’ll probably have a radio in the car. When she sees us, she’ll signal that we’re in sight. Then they’ll come in. She’ll try to get us down in the vicinity of the cabin. They’ll hit us there. Talk first and then shoot. Or just shoot.”
    “What do we do?”
    “The first thing we do is cool off.” I looked over at her. Her mouth was tight and her chin was up, ready for the fight. “If you go after her too soon, we both might wind up dead.”
    “I’m cool,” she said. I looked at her and she gazed back unflinchingly.
    “All right. You’ll be up on the hill, above the bottom of the road, covering Maggie. It’s possible that Dillon won’t find the map, and the shooters will trail her in. You see her coming, you call me on the radio. We’ll work out some codes. If she’s alone, I want her to see you. Just a glimpse, and it has to be convincing. Run across an open space, down toward the cabin; let your upper body show. Wear that light-blue shirt of yours. After you’ve given her a couple of chances to see you, sneak back up the hill and get back in the camouflage.”
    “What if there’s somebody with her?”
    “Lie low and call.”
    “Where will you be?”
    “I’ll be on the top end of the road. I think that’s where the shooters will come in.”
    The shooters, I thought, would show up a few minutes before Maggie, moving into position around the cabin. They would leave their car a mile or so out and walk in, following the creek. They would stay off the high ground because it was too open. The woods along the creek would give them good cover.
    Some seventy yards out a rough, steep-walled gully, too small to show on even the largest-scale topo maps, carried a feeder creek down the ridge. The shooters could jump down the ten-foot walls, wade the stream, and climb the rocks on the other side. Or they could slip back up the road where the gully was crossed by a low-railed wooden bridge. The bridge was only twenty-five feet long, and it was well out of sight of the cabin. I thought they would take the chance.
    If they crossed the bridge they were dead men. I’d be in the brush on the hillside, twenty-five yards away, with the M16.
    “What about Maggie?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “She’s not a pro, so she’ll probably make a run for it. You can try to hold her, but we can’t worry about her until the shooters are down.”
    “You mean dead.”
    “Yeah.”
    “What if the guys who show up are completely different people? What if they aren’t the people who shot Dace?”
    “I don’t know. What do you think?”
    “They’d be killers. They’d be there to kill us.” She was troubled.
    “Yeah.”
    We turned off the blacktop highway onto a gravel side road, and she watched the landscape rolling by, the tan fall grasses in the roadside ditches, the fat milkweed pods, the wild marijuana.
    “I’d let them go,” she said finally.
    I nodded. “That would be best. We lie in the briar patch like Brer Rabbit, and we never come out.”
    At the cabin we ate and made sandwiches for the next morning.
    “We stay on the hillside tonight, just in case,” I said. “We’ll put the lights and the boom box on the timer. If they come in early, they’ll see the lights changing around and hear the boom box go off and on. Not too loud.”
    Half an hour before dark I took the M16 and a sheet of paper outside, pinned the paper to a tree, and fired four shots at it from twenty-five yards. I’d have to hold it just a bit low. I fired a few more shots at a hundred yards and at 150, and found that the rifle was, as advertised, dead-on at 150.
    When I finished, I reloaded the clip, and we walked up the hill and found a comfortable nest in the deep grass. We were eighty yards from the cabin and a hundred feet above it. In the dying light and cool still evening air, the sound from the radio drifted up the hill. We’d chosen a rock classics station. Most