“You ready?” Lincoln says suddenly.

“Fuck, no! Listen, I know where you are, believe me. But you’re crazy if you want to just bust into that house. We don’t know shit yet about what we’re facing. You’re better off setting it on fire and shooting them as they run out.”

He turns to me, his eyes glinting in the moonlight. “Like the old cowboy movies, right? I bet there’s a can of gas back at one of those houses we passed.”

“There’ll be dogs, too.”

He grimaces.

“This is the country, Lincoln. You can’t assume nobody saw us walking in here.”

“All the more reason to move now.”

I grab his arm. “Wait—”

The door to the house has opened. First through is a wiry figure that even from this distance I recognize as Snake Knox. The mere sight of him starts my heart pounding. Next through is another male figure, probably Alois, and then a woman.

“They’re leaving,” Lincoln hisses, panic in his voice.

I grip his arm tighter. “Stay still, goddamn it. Let’s see.”

I breathe a little easier when the trio walks past the truck and heads across the grass, on a line that will take them about forty yards to our left. A faint but steady flicker tells me Snake is using his cell phone. Behind him, the woman lights a cigarette and starts puffing away. The orange eye bumps up and down as they walk.

“Must be going to the main house,” Lincoln whispers. “We could take them right now.”

“Would you please calm the fuck down? You don’t want a shootout on open ground, without cover.”

“I’ll be smoking that bitch’s cigarettes in two minutes.”

“You charge them now, you’ll do it alone.”

“We don’t have to charge them. Use your rifle to take out the blond kid. Keep firing as they scramble. I’ll go get Snake. Kill the woman if she turns to fight. If not, let her go till we’ve got Snake under control.”

“You’re not going to kill him?”

“I’m going to have a word with him first.”

I’m hearing Lincoln’s tone more than his words, and he doesn’t sound like a man using objective judgment. “I’m no sniper, okay? Especially not at night. And you’re not, either.”

His jaw flexes angrily as the three figures recede, then disappear into the main house nearer the road.

“So what’s your plan, genius?” he growls.

The best course of action seems obvious to me. “They just made it easy, actually. Let’s just go into the dependency and wait for them. They’re bound to come back.”

Lincoln watched the trio vanish like a hunter being forced to let prize game walk in and out of his sights. But he says, “Okay. Let’s go.”

“Crawl or run?”

“Let’s run it. I’m tired of crawling.”