“Well, first of all, while one of them was shootin’ at me like Wild Bill Hickok, another one charged me. I hit him with a right cross to the throat that would have stopped an elephant. I didn’t have time to stick around and check the guy’s pulse, but he didn’t seem to be doin’ much moving.”

“Three dead and no bodies,” Stone murmured thoughtfully. “Not your everyday case.”

“They’re out there,” Lou said, gazing out the window and trying not to feel hopeless.

“We should have left a breadcrumb trail,” George added.

“We’ll find him, George,” Lou said, somewhat buoyed that they hadn’t seen anything that meant this could not be the road. “We’ll find him.… Wait! Stone, up there! Up ahead!”

Stone slammed on the brakes. Twenty feet ahead on the right was a gnarl of tread marks.

Lou clambered out of the cruiser, cringing when his ankle bore weight.

“What do you have?” Stone asked as he and the others approached.

Lou pointed at the disrupted ground ahead. “This is it. We were here.”

“You sure? Could just be farm machinery,” Stone said, climbing out with the others and panning the area with his flashlight.

“Mighty small machine,” George said. “I wish we had brought my car out here with us so we could compare, but these tracks are bald in the same places my tires are bald.” He got low to the ground and felt around the depressions in the road, then nodded authoritatively, as if he actually could tell.

With renewed tension, the group climbed back into the cruisers. The fog lights were turned off, and they slowly rolled ahead. They had gone a quarter mile or so when Lou exclaimed, “Look! Look at the corn over there.”

The fields on both sides of the road, for as far ahead as they could see, were mown flat. The six of them stepped out into the cool early morning and listened. Nothing but the heavy white noise of humming insects and swishing stalks of corn, where such stalks remained.

“This has been threshed,” Lou said.

“What does that mean?” Stone asked.

“It means someone flattened these fields.”

Stone scanned the area with his flashlight. It looked like the model of a nuclear winter.

“This is where these gunmen attacked you?” he said.

“I’d bet on it,” Lou said, excited at last. “We didn’t pass any other fields that had been cut down like this. It’s a huge cover-up.”

“I agree,” Cap said.

Lou limped into the field.

Was it possible this wasn’t the place?

He inhaled deeply, tasting the air, and then inspected a handful of chopped-up stalks and leaves. “This field looks like it was very recently cut,” he said. “These plants haven’t decayed any, and you can still smell diesel in the air.”