The Triggerman Dance

Holt threw a set of truck keys to Randell, then helped Valerie and John lift the big dog into the bed of John's old pickup lay there will all the innocence of the dead, a helpless mass held together by skin. The labrador watched through the rear cab widow, puzzled.

"Lead the way," Holt said. "We'll follow."

A few miles out Highway 371, Holt noticed that John's pickup truck was accelerating, fast. The Land Rover kept up easily, though doing seventy miles an hour on the narrow, winding two lane seemed foolhardy. He checked the rearview to find Lane Fargo right on his tail, a senselessly aggressive act wholly indicative of Lane's shame at being overcome by lowly motorcycle thugs. Holt lowered his window and waved Fargo off.

He didn't even notice it until rounding a gentle bend, where John's right-turn signal began to flash. Holt saw the brake lights, the abrupt slowing of the Ford, the turnoff to a dirt road leading back into the hills, and, only then, the column of deep black smoke rising from somewhere in the middle distance.

"No," he said.

Keeping up with John on the rutted dirt road wasn't easy. The Ford threw up clouds of dust as it skidded around the turns and braked heavily before the drops. Lewis, Clark and Sally bounced savagely in the back of the Rover—at one point Holt glanced back to see all three of them suspended between floor and roof, twelve legs scrambling for a purchase that wasn't there. The road snaked on, twist upon turn, cutback upon rise upon dip. Then it widened into a straight-away that banked into a steep climb. The Ford's back end slid left and right as it raced up the hill and disappeared over the crest. Holt laid back a little, then punched the Rover up and over the ridge, where before him lay a gentle meadow marked with a few trailers, a cinderblock building, and what must have been a house trailer, far on the perimeter of the place, flaring up like a struck match, gushing black smoke into the blue desert sky.

A short heavyset man stood about thirty yards from the inferno, a water hose in both hands. The arc of water feebly vanished into the flames. The Ford skidded to a stop beside him and John jumped out, followed by the dog. Holt braked early and pulled in behind the Ford. He yanked his fire extinguisher free of the floorboard by the seat, but he could see that it was already too late: the trailer looked like a box of fireworks set on fire. The propane tank already had blown, judging by the gaping hole at one end. He saw the heavyset man nodding violently, taking one hand off the hose to point down the road.

"Those pigs" hissed Valerie. "Those absolute human swine."

Then, as Holt watched, John returned to his truck, threw forward the seat and pulled out a cloth case, from which he extracted what looked like a 12 gauge Remington automatic. He hurled the case back behind the seat and slammed it back. From somewhere in the cab he took a box of shells, pried open the top and grabbed three, which he loaded into the gun. Then he was back in the truck and the labrador had jumped in with him and the Ford fishtailed in a wide, gravel-throwing turn that threw up a cloud of dust as John gunned it back down hill toward the dirt road.

"Stay with him, Dad."

"I'm staying with him, Val. Hold on tight."

John must have known every foot of the miserable dirt road because he took it at an astonishing velocity. A mile from the trailers he shot up a wide, well-tended drive to a ranch house set in a meadow of grazing horses. By the time Holt caught up, John was talking with two men by a corral, then he jumped back into his truck and skidded back out in Holt's direction. John nodded at him as he flew past. Lane Fargo, Randell and Titisi had to swerve to miss him. Then another stop a half mile further down Again John was conferring with neighbors as Holt finally arrived and again the young man was in his truck and blasting back to the road by the time the dust cleared and Holt could make sense of what was going on. Another half mile down, the Ford skidded to a stop beside a run-down little batch of trailers. Three women sat in the shade, drinking beers and smoking. This time, Holt saw that John took his shotgun with him as he walked past the women and threw open the door of the largest trailer, a sun faded slum of a unit, slouching off-center and unshaded by a very large and very dead tree. John disappeared inside, then came out and pushed past the women, who appeared to be cussing him mightily. John snapped something back at them, but Holt was too far away to hear it. Beside him, Valerie was scanning the desert with her dark brown eyes. "He'll never find them out here They're miles away by now."

"He needs to play this out."