Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [121]
Stone ducks back into the house, from which we stare at Megan’s body, lying prone in the blasted doorway, appearing to be smoking like the fallen timbers swollen with heat that are crumbling around us, a century of farm life hissing away in vapors. Dick Stone’s mouth howls in anguish like the silent cavernous winds of hell; a meaty arm hooks my neck and does not let go as we stagger away, conjoined like primordial brutes as a savage twister of coal black smoke drives us away from daylight.
Thirty-nine
We drive to a turnout where a chain hangs across a dirt road. When we emerged from the tunnel, we ran across a hundred yards of open wash beyond the perimeter, clouds of ink black smoke roiling behind us. We kept on going—a call on the satellite phone to an associate of Mr. Terminate—and then a grandma biker chick right out of Omaha, a wrinkled witch a hundred years old, met us and took us to a safe house in a trailer park, where we were given a stolen car. We drive for ninety minutes into the national park. Only when we passed a green sign for the parking lot for the Hard Edge Trail do I realize that our destination is the place where Steve Crawford died.
Stone gets out and unhooks the chain, gets back in and drives the sedan over it. Branches sweep the windshield as we ascend a rutted fire road. The Northwest fir is as impenetrable as the Virginia woodland surrounding Quantico; voracious organisms choking one another out for the sun.
At times the car is almost engulfed by closely growing colonnades of young Douglas fir, and I am gripped with a claustrophobic unease, as sickening as having crawled through that tunnel. Spring rains cut deep gullies in the moist terrain and now our heads hit the inside roof of the car as we launch out of our seats. Ten miles an hour seems way too fast.
“Watch out!”
“Got it,” Stone mutters, slowing to a stop before a huge tree felled across the road.
We stare at an impassable tangle of branches and fine sprays of dark green needles spewing out in all the wrong directions. Nothing looks more like a forbidding mistake than a huge horizontal tree lying across your path.
“We’re not that far,” Dick Stone says, arming himself with the Colt, a Commando submachine gun, three hundred rounds of ammunition, and a collapsible snow shovel.
We climb around the tree and follow the road on foot. During the drive, we gained altitude, and the mountain air is pure and chill.
“I’ve been in some odd situations, Dick, but this is one of the strangest. Ever zoom out of yourself? All the way out, so you’re looking down from somewhere else?”
“Not sober.”
“What are we doing in the woods? I don’t even like the woods. There’re ticks and poison oak.”
The road is wide enough to walk side by side, but sometimes one of us will walk ahead, over gullies cut by cascading rocks, sometimes along the lip of the road. We continue that way, flowing around each other, as Stone twirls the shovel lightly over one shoulder.
“Why are you and I always digging another man’s trenches?” I muse.
“Some of us are soldiers. Born that way.”
We are walking single file where the road washes out. At the bottom of a huge rounded boulder split by a tree, Stone takes a turn onto the well-kept Hard Edge Trail. A Forest Service sign points back to the parking lot at 5.7 miles.
We continue up, retracing Steve Crawford’s steps.
We crest a ravine and look down at the creek where the hiker found the remains. I recognize the rock formations from the postblast photos.
“Good God!” says Stone. “What are you two doing here?”
Toby Himes and Mr. Terminate are sitting on a fallen log. Toby, always appropriately dressed for whatever occasion, wears an impeccable hiker’s outfit—clean boots, wind-resistant