They followed the couple inside, where Don had sketched a map of his farm buildings, the waterways behind them, and the best way through the fields.
When her husband finished, Donna White said, “We have to warn you, there might be one tiny problem with this idea.”
Jenkins: “Uh-oh. What is it?”
“We don’t have much traffic through here at night. A little while after dark... maybe ten after nine, a car went past while I was doing the dishes. I couldn’t see it, but I could see its headlights on the trees, and it looked to me like it stopped a little way up the highway. Like it might have been dropping somebody off.”
Virgil and Jenkins looked at each other, and Virgil said, “We might all be wandering around the same field?”
“I thought I should mention it,” Donna White said.
—
They got the Whites to turn off all the lights on the north end of the house before they slipped outside. They were both wearing dark blue armored vests over their night clothing, and Virgil was carrying the thermonuclear flash. They both carried Glocks, and Jenkins had his shotgun. They’d memorized angles and distances on White’s map, but Holland had been correct: it was dark.
The farm did have a bright pole light by the barn, and so they were able to barely see the line of a fence that separated the farm yard from a cornfield, and they crossed the fence without a problem. White had told them that if they walked toward the lights of the KFMC radio tower in Fairmont, they would come to Highway 81, but a couple of hundred yards farther down the road than they wanted.
They decided that was okay: they were walking less than half a mile total, before sneaking back toward the bridge. They should make it well before 10 o’clock.
The field was open enough, but walking was tough: it had been plowed that spring, and they were walking across the rows of furrows. One minute out, the mosquitoes showed up. They paused to pull the nets over their heads and gloves on their hands. The nets made it even harder to see, but they stumbled on. Ten minutes into the trek, Jenkins, who was a couple of yards behind Virgil, caught up, touched Virgil’s arm, and, when Virgil stopped, he whispered, “Look at the stars.”
Virgil said, “Shhhh,” but looked: the stars were good, though he’d seen better in the desert Southwest, he thought. Still, they craned their necks upward for a minute, the Milky Way looking like a rainbow, only it was in black and white, before they moved again. They were about a hundred yards from the highway when a car went past, which helped. They no longer had to navigate by the radio tower lights, but turned straight toward the highway. There’d be another fence to cross when they got close to the road. They were nearly there when Jenkins caught up again, touched Virgil’s arm, and whispered, “Look.”
Virgil looked. He wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing, but he thought it might be the flashlight beam from a cell phone, maybe a hundred yards away toward the bridge. Jenkins breathed, “I think the idiot’s tangled up in the fence. You want to light him up?”
“Not until we’re a lot closer,” Virgil whispered back. “If he gets outside the flash coverage, we might not see him again. He could hide, and warn off the car picking him up...”
They continued on to the fence. There were three strands ofbarbed wire, which they managed to cross without incident, but then Virgil went knee-deep in muck in the roadside ditch. Jenkins whispered, “What happened?” and stepped into the same muddy hole.
Virgil got out, but Jenkins said, “I think I’m losing my fuckin’ shoe... Wait, wait...”
He had to reach, elbow-deep, into the sulfurous muck to get hold of the shoe and then managed to stagger out onto the dry ground of the roadside bank. “I lost my fuckin’ sock,” he said. He sat down on the highway and tried to clean out his shoe, to get it back on.
From not too far away, they heard somebody talking; couldn’t make it out, but it sounded like somebody had said “Motherfucker.”
“I think he fell in the ditch,” Jenkins whispered.
Virgil wanted to laugh at both of them but stuffed his knuckles into his mouth and managed to smother the impulse.
As they waited on the highway, they saw the cell phone light again, blinking off and on, as the person ahead of them walked toward the bridge. Virgil turned to block the light of his own phone, and looked at the time. Eight minutes to 10. “Wardell’s gotta be close,” he whispered to Jenkins. “We gotta move.”
Jenkins got on his feet, and they walked toward the bridge, Jenkins’s foot squeaking in its wet shoe. It was dark enough that they could stay on the road, and the road was quieter than walking on the gravel shoulders. They were fifty yards away from the mystery walker when the cell phone flash came on, and they saw it move down into the ditch.
“He’s hiding. Waiting for the drop.”
The cell phone light came on again, and they could see the other man’s arms windmilling in the night, and they could hear some more squealing.
“Mosquitoes,” Jenkins said, and Virgil could hear him trying not to laugh.
“Sneak up another few steps and sit down,” Virgil suggested.
They did that, and waited. The night was not quite silent: they could hear a bird, up in a tree, chirping like an old man muttering in the night; and also the sound of flowing water. The man up ahead coughed once, and then again.
A minute before 10 o’clock, a set of headlights turned onto Highway 18 from Highway 53, which was about a mile and a half away. Virgil nudged Jenkins, and they duckwalked onto the shoulder of the road. The headlights got closer, bright enough that Virgil couldn’t see the truck behind them, but he was sure it was Holland in the Tahoe.
The truck stopped on the bridge, the driver hopped out, walked around the abutment, was out of sight for a minute, and then was back in the truck. When the Tahoe passed them, Holland’s hand was pressed to the driver’s-side window glass: he must’ve caught them in the headlights, crouched on the side of the road. Another minute, and the truck turned north and was out of sight.
Ten minutes, then the cell phone flash came up, moved across the bridge, down under the abutment. A moment later, it was back, and whoever was holding it was jogging toward them. Virgil whispered, “I’m going to light him up.”
