highway, and Virgil floored it and said, “Get the fuckin’ rifles loaded up, man. They’ve got some kind of lynch mob out there, shooting the place up. There’re a lot of guys, they’ve already got a dead cop. . . .”

“Told you it was weird out here.” Jenkins unsnapped his safety belt as they rocketed along the road and pulled up one of the rifles and slapped a magazine in it and jacked a shell into the chamber, put the rifle beside his leg, picked up the other one, did the same, then struggled into his vest and dragged Virgil’s vest out of the back. They went through a long sweeping curve and he asked, “What’re we doing? Are we going straight in?”

“I don’t think so. She said there were a lot of them. And they’re all farm guys and they’ll have hunting rifles.”

“These vests won’t stop a .30-06,” Jenkins said.

“Gotta try,” Virgil said. “They might blow up hollow point, I don’t know.”

“Lift your arm up.” Virgil lifted his arm, and Jenkins said, “I’m putting four mags in your pocket. We got five apiece, thirty rounds each.”

“There they are,” Virgil said. The house, bathed in car headlights, looked like a white lighthouse, sitting on a hill on the prairie. Virgil reached under the dash and threw a switch that killed his lights: the switch was normally used on surveillance operations, so a person being followed wouldn’t see a car pulling away from a curb.

The sudden darkness didn’t quite blind them—he could see the dark ribbon of road between the snow-mounded shoulders on either side, but he had to slow down. The last half-mile took a full minute, and he hoped it wasn’t too long; at the end of it, he took an even narrower lane that ran off the main road, parallel to the side of the Rouse place, and stopped.

They piled out, and Virgil pulled on his vest and put his coat back on, made sure the extra mags were safely snapped inside his pocket, took out his phone, and called Coakley.

“THERE ARE too many of them, we can’t come straight in,” he said. “There are a dozen shooters around the place. . . . We’re coming across the field in the back. If you see people coming in the back, don’t fire at us.”

“Hurry,” she said. “We’ve only got a minute or two before they get us. You gotta hurry, Virgil.”

“We’re running in,” he said, as he and Jenkins crossed the ditch to the first fence, snow up to their shins. “We’re running.”

“Oh, my God, listen to that,” Jenkins said. “It’s a war. They’re shooting the place to pieces.”

And it sounded like a war, like a battle, a spaced boom-boom-boom of heavier rifles, with a quicker crack-crack-crack of a semiauto, probably a .223 like their own. The field they were crossing was probably forty acres, a sixteenth of a square mile, some 440 yards across. It had been plowed in the fall, and the running was tough over the invisible, snow-covered hard-as-rock furrows.

“Easy,” Virgil said, when Jenkins nearly went down. “You don’t need a broken leg.”

They were both breathing hard, running in heavy coats, vests, and boots. Jenkins said, “Listen, when we come up, I think, I dunno, it looks like they’ve got the place surrounded, but most of them are in the front. They’re probably trying to make sure that nobody can get out.”

“Look, there’s somebody inside, I think, on the ground floor. See, in the window . . . Coakley said they were upstairs. . . .”

“I say we hit them in the back, clear that out, get our people out a back door or a window . . . however—”

Virgil, gasping for air: “Okay. She said some of them are inside the house. When we clear the back, I’ll call her again, make sure they’re still upstairs, and then we both fire full mags right through the house . . . blow them out of there, pin them down, really chop the place up, scare the shit out of the, the ones who survive. . . . Watch for my burst.”

“Good, good. Slow down, slow down now, we’re making too much noise. . . . I’m going to move off to the right . . . watch for my bursts.”

They’d come at a back corner of the house, on the woodlot side, and the firing was continuing, which meant that maybe somebody was still alive inside. A hundred yards out, Jenkins dissolved in the dark,