her kneecap, but she’d struck it hard enough to jar her teeth. She would bear a bruise.
Losing her footing a second time, she reached for a bush to break her fall. The brittle foliage scraped her arm. A night bird swooped low directly in front of her, its screech causing her to cry out in fright despite the need for stealth.
Her lungs began to burn, her heart felt near to bursting, but she pushed on, upward. If she was wrong, they would all have a good laugh over her frantic climb later. Much later.
But for now she must assume that her friends were in danger of being caught, captured, punished to the extreme. If she arrived too late, they might even pay with their lives.
Even in the darkness, she knew she was approaching the crest that overlooked Ernie’s camp. She was panting hard as she scrambled up the last several yards. Sweat dripped into her eyes, causing them to sting. As she topped the hill, she closed her eyes to blink away the sweat, but also to postpone, even for a millisecond, what she would see below.
Praying for the best, expecting the worst, she opened her eyes.
What she saw caused her to stagger backward. She gasped for breath through her mouth, which hung open in disbelief.
Because there was nothing to see below. The clearing was empty.
Forty-Two
The sheriff stood at the edge of the clearing with his hands on his hips in a pose of disgust. He watched while deputies used flashlights to search the area, which obviously had been recently vacated.
“Goddamn it.”
Thatcher came alongside him in time to overhear his muttered blasphemy. “They just left with Tup. His given name is Thomas.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Hanging on. Doc Perkins gave him a shot of morphine. But up to that point he was vocal. Very. Cursed the sons of bitches who had laid the trap, cussed his sorry-assed cousin who’d abandoned him.” Thatcher paused, then added, “Honestly, when we arrived, and there was nothing here, I thought Elray had been lying about all of it, even the stills.”
Elray’s memory of the stills’ location had been miraculously restored when Bill again threatened to turn him over to his great-uncle Hiram. Shortly thereafter, three sheriff’s department vehicles, one with Dr. Perkins as a ride-along, had set out from town with Elray giving directions. Because the night was so dark, he’d mistaken landmarks several times, and they’d had to double back in order to find turnoffs previously missed.
The various roads they traveled became progressively narrow and rutted, winding through hills that all looked the same to Thatcher. He had begun to suspect Elray of leading them on a wild-goose chase, when the kid had suddenly sat forward and pointed through the windshield.
“Over there. Behind them cedars.”
Tup Johnson had been found in the grave-like hole that Elray had described. He was still alive, but if he didn’t die of gangrene or sepsis, he would surely lose the limb, which was half-severed already, grotesquely dark and swollen, and had jagged broken bones protruding from it.
As Bill and his deputies had fanned out to investigate the scene, he asked Thatcher to remain with Tup and try to get from him as much information as he could. Apparently it had slipped the sheriff’s mind that Thatcher had declined to become a deputy. But none of this would be taking place if he had let Elray go. So, having only himself to blame for his involvement, he’d done as Bill requested.
“No, Elray wasn’t lying, Thatcher,” Bill said now. “There were stills here, all right. Two, just like the kid claimed. You ever seen one before?”
“Only pictures.”
“Those stacks of rocks are the fireboxes. Some of the charred wood is still smoldering.”
“Cookers sat on top?”
“Right. Scotty figured the flues were backed up to the cliff face there, an old trick to disperse the smoke, keep it from being easily spotted.”
“What about the man Elray and Tup saw working here?”
“Not a trace. All we know for sure was that he wasn’t a Johnson.”
“He had a partner,” Thatcher said, bringing Bill around to him. “Yeah. Tup says there were two of them, but he never got a glimpse of either. While he was writhing on the ground, they came up behind him and put a burlap sack over his head. He thought for sure they would put a bullet through it. But one held his good arm while the other released the trap.”
“No sign of it,” Bill said. “Retrieved to use another day, no doubt.”