Dead Run (21 page)

"Good idea. After you hang up, you can write your letter of resignation, or shoot yourself in the head. Your choice."

Silence again. And then, "You have thirty seconds."

Magozzi took a quick breath. "One of your agents is missing in an area where three other agents were found murdered."

There was a lot of noise coming through the speaker then-covers being thrown aside, feet hitting the floor, a little static. "Okay, you got my attention, Magozzi, but if this is bullshit, I will personally see to it that you get your first glimpse of sky in about forty years."

Gino watched Magozzi's face redden and his chest swell, and wondered if he'd just blow up. You could almost smell the testosterone shooting right up to the satellite. "Bullfight." He nudged Harley.

But Magozzi's voice was deceptively calm when he spoke. "Sharon Mueller's missing."

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Magozzi, she's not missing. Is that what this is about? She went to Green Bay with those Monkeewrench women to do some profiling on her own time."

"She never got that far." Magozzi let that register, then went on to tell him about all the missing people, the dead undercover agents, the FBI taking over Missaqua County. "We think Sharon and the others are somewhere in the middle of whatever the hell is going on, but it's a huge search area. We're on-site, or close to it, but we need your people to narrow it down so we know where to start looking, and they aren't telling law enforcement over here shit. She's your agent, Paul, not theirs. You have enough pull in that organization to get something done that might save her life? Because that might very well be what's at stake here."

Shafer answered quickly. "You have a secure line wherever you are?"

"We're on it."

"Then give me the number and fifteen minutes."

They'd only gone ten miles toward the Missaqua County line when Shafer called back. "Do you know where Beldon is?" he asked without preamble.

Halloran nodded at Magozzi.

"Yes."

"Missaqua County Sheriff's Office is there. They're setting up a command post. Talk to Agent Knudsen. He'll share what he can with law enforcement. Who do you have with you?"

"Rolseth and I are here, Sheriff Halloran, and Deputy Carlson"- he hesitated for only a second-"and a couple others out of Kingsford County."

"I'll give them the heads-up, then. Call from there if he gives you any trouble."

Magozzi released a breath. "What's going on over here, Paul?"

"I don't know yet, but I sure as hell am going to find out. And I want to hear from you people. You're riding on my rep now, and I want to know every step you take before you take it, understood?"

"You got it."

Gino went back up to the copilot's seat and brought Harley and Bonar up-to-date on the word from Shafer. Harley was doing hands-on, eyes-on driving along a tar road that looked about six feet too narrow to accommodate the RV's width. "So punch Beldon in on the GPS and take us there," he told Gino. "Shit. Saturday night with the FBI. I haven't had this much fun since I got mugged and Tasered during Carnival in Rio a few years back."

Gino took a quick sideways glance at the size of the man behind the wheel, and marveled that a Taser would actually bring him down. "One of these days, I'd like to hear the rest of that."

Harley shrugged. "It's an okay story. Nothing epic. Hey, Bonar, grab me a carton of OJ out of the fridge, would you?"

Bonar was still planted on the sofa; Charlie happily sprawled all over him. He turned his head to browse a kitchen area that was bigger than Margie's. It was all wood-teak, if he wasn't mistaken-and not a hint of enamel anywhere. "You don't have a refrigerator in here."

"Third drawer to the right of the sink," Gino said without looking away from the GPS readout. "We've got another two-point-seven miles on this one, Harley, then right on some road-County pee-pee is what it says, but that's gotta be wrong."

Bonar eased Charlie off his lap and went to find drawer number three. "That's County Double-P. All the county roads in the state used to be letters. Great idea back in the 1800s. Sort of went to pot when they built too many and ran out of alphabet, so they just started doubling up."

Gino shook his head. "I am a stranger in a strange land."

Bonar was in deep reverence once he found the refrigerator drawers, completely concealed behind the polished teak fronts. A whole slew of them. One for liquids, one for produce, one for meat, and a big one that held more wine bottles than the cast-iron display rack down at the Municipal Off-Sale. "Amazing," he murmured, snooping without shame, finally grabbing an OJ for Harley. "You mind if I grab a cherry soda for myself?"

"Anything you want, buddy," Harley said, downshifting for a mean curve. "You like the kitchen?"

"Are you kidding? Haven't seen anything this beautiful outside the pagesof Bon Appetit."

Gino rolled his eyes. "Ah, Jesus, next thing you know, you two guys'll be trading recipes and watchingOprah together."

Harley glowered at him. "I loveOprah."

In the back office, Road runner was running multiple programs full-blast, digging as deep as he ever had into closed Federal sites, looking for the tiniest piece of data on whatever operation the dead undercover agents had been running. So far he hadn't found a scrap, which was extraordinary.

Halloran and Magozzi were planted at a small booth next to the windows, alternating between looking over at Roadrunner when he cursed at the keyboard and looking out at what Halloran saw as a quiet country night, and what Magozzi saw as a black landscape of nothingness. "Christ, somebody turned the lights out in the whole state."

Halloran smiled a little. "It's pretty empty up this way. The Silver Dome should be coming up soon, though."

"What's the Silver Dome?"

"Supper club. Dining, dancing, tablecloths and everything."

Another half mile around a long curve, and Magozzi saw what looked like a dollhouse-sized Vegas in the middle of a black hole. Christmas twinkle lights were strung all over a dirt parking lot jammed with pickups, and a pink-and-green sign with neon letters as tall as he was blinked on and off, announcing, "Fine Dining, Dancing, Entertainment." The sign was attached to a Quonset hut.

"What's the entertainment?"

"Bowling." Halloran kept his eyes on Magozzi, who didn't even crack a smile. He liked him for that. He looked back out the window and sighed. There was nothing left to see for miles after the Silver Dome, just trees that blocked the moon and an occasional piece of empty land that didn't. "I don't mind telling you, this is one of the few times on the job I've been seriously scared."

And that, bizarrely, was when Magozzi smiled. "Who are you kidding, Halloran? We're not on the job. What we really are is a couple of frantic guys chasing a couple of skirts. Saving our women. Caveman stuff."

Halloran put his big hands on the table and sighed again. "You, maybe."

Magozzi raised a brow.

"Sharon isn't coming back."

"To you, or Kingsford County?"

"Neither."

"Well, Jesus, Halloran, she took a bullet in the neck. And like it or not, you and the job are all wrapped up in that. That kind of thing shuts you down for a while, makes you afraid to get back out there."

Halloran was quiet for a long time, and then he said, "I should give it some more time."

"Damn straight. You know what, Halloran? Come to think of it, the last time we were together, we were busting into a gunfight, chasing after the same two women."

Halloran blinked. "My God. You're right."

"Maybe we should get together a couple of times between catastrophes, break the monotony."

Suddenly the shriek of an alarm blasted through the back of the rig and Roadrunner exploded out of his chair and stabbed a button on the console. "GRACE!?"

Magozzi was halfway out of his seat, frozen, afraid to move, afraid to breathe. And then he heard the sound of a dial tone buzzing through the big speakers. "What just happened?" he asked, his voice shaking.

"GODDAMNIT!" Roadrunner stabbed another button, and the sound of numbers dialing filled the rig. "We had a sat line rigged on auto-dial to rotate every five minutes on all three of the women's cells. Someone just answered Grace's cell, and then I lost the signal. ... CHRIST, THERE IT IS AGAIN!"

The speakers hissed with white noise, then an earsplitting shrill tone, and then, by God, Grace's voice, garbled and fuzzy and broken, coming through the speakers: ".., need help .., four . ., people dead . . . Roadrunner... ?"

And then, abruptly, nothing. The speakers went silent.

TWENTY MINUTES after hearing Grace's disconnected message, the atmosphere inside the Monkeewrench RV was supercharged, almost electric.

Even working together with all the legal and illegal computer resources they could muster, Roadrunner and Harley hadn't been able to reconnect with Grace or pinpoint the tower that had picked up the call from her cell. Not one of the cell-provider sites they'd hacked into had registered any activity from Grace's cell in the past hour. After fifteen frustrating minutes on the side of the road, Harley was back behind the wheel, driving toward Beldon at an alarming clip on the dark, twisting road, praying that this trip to hook up with the Feds wasn't taking them in the wrong direction.

Bonar was riding shotgun, holding Charlie in his lap with one hand, manipulating an outside spot with the other, supposedly lighting the road beyond the headlights to spot deer. A useless venture at this speed, he thought-they'd never be able to stop in time-but it never occurred to Bonar to suggest that Harley slow down. The call from Grace had been chilling.

Gino was in the back office, poring over a map of Wisconsin cellphone towers that Roadrunner had printed out. As far as he could tell, there wasn't a single one anywhere near Missaqua County. After ten minutes of working the map and abusing his haircut, he was absolutely convinced that they were way off track, and almost afraid to say it aloud. Roadrunner already looked insane, attacking the computers, spewing profanity like a Marine, and Magozzi and Halloran both seemed so brittle that it was a miracle they hadn't snapped into pieces. Gino went back to the map, looking at the sites marked for upcoming cell-tower construction, wondering how current the map was.

Halloran was monopolizing one sat phone line, trying to find the tower that had picked up Grace's call the old-fashioned way, by calling all the cellular providers in the state, pushing his badge on sleepy flunkies on weekend duty, trying to get some help from part-time workers with an average IQ in the single digits who thought they could coast through the late shift. He'd finally connected with someone who seemed to know what he was talking about, who proceeded to tell Halloran how it was possible that no one had a record of a call that had obviously gone through. The explanation gave Halloran a headache. He hung up and tried to rub the lines out of his forehead.

"Did you get anything.?" Gino asked him.

"Yeah, I found out why there's no record of the call. The guy who runs the whole network for Wisconsin Cellular just told me it was black magic. How's that make you feel? The people who run the system can't even explain why it works the way it does. Christ. He said if the conditions were perfect, there's a solar storm or sunspots or maybe goddamned Jupiter aligns with goddamned Mars, then sometimes a phone can snatch a tower's signal way beyond the normal range. And if the connection is short enough or distorted enough, it might not register in their software at all."

"I tried to tell you that," Roadrunner called from across the room.

"Yeah, well, this guy said it in English."

They all looked up when Magozzi started to raise his voice. He'd finally gotten through to Minneapolis SAC Paul Shafer, and now he was snapping out an exact quote of Grace's call. He'd memorized every word. He stood up and yelled down the aisle toward the front of the rig, asking how far they were from Beldon, totally forgetting they had an intercom, then he went back to the phone, listened for a second, then exploded: "Jesus Christ, Shafer, were you listening? She saiddead people, at least four of them, and they're right in the middle of it. . . . Fuck tracing the call; we already tried that, and if these guys can't do it, your guys sure as hell aren't going to be able to manage it. . . ." And then he shut up and just listened for a long time before replacing the receiver and looking helplessly at Gino. "You aren't going to fucking believe this."

Everybody in the office stopped what they were doing.

"Shafer's been rolling some people out of bed, pretty much laying his career on the line, calling in favors, and when that didn't work, making some threats. He says the Wisconsin Feds moved their undercover guys in when a few of the people they were watching made some unusual purchases. They think they might be making nerve gas."

Halloran's pencil froze on a pageful of scribbles. Roadrunner sat perfectly still, staring at lines of data scrolling by on the monitor, seeing nothing.

"How sure are they?" Gino asked, his voice tense, his words clipped.

"Shafer didn't know, but he called the agent in Beldon, gave him some background, told him about the call from Grace." He took a breath, upset by the mere mention of her name. "He'll fill us in on what they know when we get there."

Up front in the cab, Harley listened to the exchange on the intercom and pushed the accelerator to the floor.

Ten minutes later they drove into Beldon, flying past a speed-limit sign so fast that Bonar couldn't read it. The streets were dark and quiet, but the parking lot of the Missaqua County Sheriff's Office was lit up like one of those casinos in the middle of the prairie, crowded with dark, nondescript sedans. Magozzi suspected the inside of the cinder-block building was equally crowded with dark, nondescript suits. Harley rocked to a stop and within seconds, all of them exploded from the RV's front door like fizz from a punctured pop can.

Sheriff Ed Pitala was waiting for them outside the front entrance, a cigarette smoldering at the corner of his mouth. He looked lean and mean and nowhere near his sixty-plus years, and it wasn't a stretch to imagine him slamming a Federal agent up against a wall. But he was all smiles when he saw Halloran and Bonar.