The narrow dirt utility road was less than a mile in from the main road, closer than Toby had thought. We came out of the trees and went east, pounding along as the road cut through the woods, striding in tandem and feeling the cold air cut into our throats. There were foot tracks and fresh tire tracks in the snow, but the tire tracks didn’t necessarily belong to Charlie’s Town Car. They could have been anything. Pike said, “I see it.”

The road broke out of the little section of woods and cut across flat white fields of pumpkins and squash and winter truck. Half a mile farther down the road, there was an orange wind sock flapping in the wind and a utility shed and a corrugated-metal hangar. If the wind sock wasn’t orange, we would never have seen it against the snow. A couple of Piper Pawnee crop-dusting planes were next to the hangar, tarped and tied down, as winter-dead as the leaves.

The black Lincoln Town Car was parked by the utility shed and people moved between the planes.

We hadn’t come out of the woods in time. Charlie DeLuca had them.

Chapter Thirty-eight

Thirty-eight

Pike and I picked up our pace, running on either side of the road, our breath great white plumes in the snowy air. We ran hard until we drew close, then we throttled back, trading speed for quiet as we moved up to the hangar. The shadow shapes we had seen when we came out of the woods were gone.

Charlie’s Town Car was parked at a skew outside the corrugated-metal hangar, already collecting little pockets of snow on the windward side. The two Pawnees were on the field side of the hangar, and, before them, a couple of rusted water mules used for aviation gasoline and pesticides. Somewhere upwind, Karen Lloyd yelled and there was a single sharp pop, pistol, but the wind and the snow carried away the sound.

Pike said, “They’ll be in the hangar or in the fields behind the planes.”