“When you get killed, don’t come complaining to me,” Jenkins said.

Virgil checked the time. “We got a couple of hours. I didn’t have a chance to eat, and I . . . Man, those potpies.”

“Why don’t we all run over to Fairmont and get something decent?” Holland said.

“Good. I made it down there in, like, eighteen minutes last night,” Virgil said. “We’ll take my truck, use the lights and siren, see if we can beat the time.”

—

They spent ten minutes with Shrake at the hospital, ate, and made it back to Skinner & Holland, where Virgil parked the Tahoe out front. Sundown was about 8:40, and it was fully dark by 9:15. Virgil had worn his pale straw cowboy hat getting out of the truck, and Holland would wear it going back out.

As soon as it was dark enough, Virgil and Jenkins snuck out the back and down to Jenkins’s rented Toyota and left for the East Chain. Virgil called Zimmer, who said his patrol cars were all set. “We hid them. Nobody’s going to see them unless they go looking off-road.”

“We’ll call your nine-one-one line if we need help,” Virgil told him.

—

The farm they’d targeted was owned by Don and Donna White. Zimmer knew them—not well, but well enough that they would recognize his voice. He would call them a few minutes before Virgil and Jenkins arrived at their farm to avoid scaring them and to vouch for the state cops. When they pulled into the farmyard, the Whites were waiting at the side door.

“The sheriff told us not to turn on the porch light,” Don White said. “I got some stuff to show you.”

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.