Monks closed his eyes in relief-Mandrake had made it. There was no telling about Marguerite, but that was another worry he couldn’t afford right now.

“Look, my name’s Monks, I’m a doctor,” he said to the logger. “I’ll give the sheriffs the whole story when they get here. But those people up there are going to try to escape. There need to be roadblocks, and for Christ’s sake, get that helicopter moving. Somebody might get killed.”

He decided not to add that the somebody might be his son.

The driver finished speaking to the sheriffs, then hooked the handset back on the dash.

“They say they’ll do it, but you better be right.”

“I’m right,” Monks said. “I wish to hell I wasn’t.”

Unexpectedly, the driver said, “You look like you could stand to warm up. Come on, hop in.”

Monks walked around to the truck’s other side and swung himself up onto the running board, then into the cab. It was more like a den than a vehicle. The passenger seat was torn out, replaced by a crate of worn mechanic’s tools. The driver handed him a greasy brown duck jacket to put on top, and Monks squatted on that, finding a place for his feet amidst a pile of ropes, come-alongs, saw chains, rigging shackles, a battered metal Thermos, and a plastic lunch cooler. The smell wrapped him like a blanket, a combination of diesel fuel, solvent, tobacco, and, most of all, man.

“Chew?” the driver said, offering a foil packet of Red Man.

Monks shook his head. “Thanks for stopping. Sorry to trouble you.”

“Hell, I’m glad to be in on this. Them people up there-they kept to themselves and never caused any problems, but everybody had a bad feeling about them. They hunted you?”

“I’ve just been in a gunfight with them. I shot a man in the ankle.”

The driver’s face turned cautious again, or maybe skeptical. “Where’s your gun?”

“I’ll get it,” Monks said wearily. He climbed out of the truck and walked to where he had stashed the rifle. He walked back, holding it high over his head with both hands, in a clear position of surrender. Still, when he got close to the truck, he saw that the driver was holding a pistol, barrel braced on the window ledge-not exactly aimed at him, but ready. It was a large-caliber revolver, a.357 or.44 Magnum.

“Go ahead, take it,” Monks said, handing the rifle butt first up to the window. The driver gripped it and pulled it into the cab. It might have strengthened his belief in Monks’s story, or convinced him that Monks was not only crazy but dangerous. The pistol disappeared from sight, but Monks was sure it was still close at hand. The driver did not invite him back inside.

Monks watched for the helicopter that, finally, he knew was coming. Within ten minutes, he could feel its distant vibrations, quickly rising into a deep staccato drumbeat. It sped across the gray gap of open sky like a faraway hawk yawing with the wind, heading up into the mountains that Monks had fled.

The radio’s speaker squawked. The driver picked up his handset again.

“The hell-after all that rain?” Monks heard him say, his voice loud with disbelief. He swiveled in his seat to stare down at Monks.

“They’re saying that camp’s on fire,” the driver said.

23

“Dr. Monks? Time to wake up.”

The voice dimly penetrated Monks’s veil of sleep. He tried to open his eyes, but they were crusted shut. He knuckled at them until he managed to pry the lids apart, and sat up.

His immediate take was that he was in a nightmare conjured from some medieval vision of hell. The sky around him was dark, but beneath it a field of glowing embers stretched into the distance, flaring into flames and spouting small volcanoes of sparks. Misshapen, humpbacked figures prowled the outskirts, expelling hissing bursts of liquid onto the fires.

Then Monks remembered, groggily, that he was in the backseat of a Forest Service firefighters’ van, looking at what was left of Freeboot’s compound-the place known locally as the Harbine camp. The humanoids were a hastily mustered hotshot crew, not used to being called out this time of year, dressed in protective gear and spraying flame retardant. Two water trucks with fire hoses stood by.

The next thing that came into his mind was good news that he had learned from the sheriffs: Mandrake had been stabilized at the hospital in Willits, and he would soon be moved to a larger facility that specialized in juvenile diabetes. He had, in fact, contracted a viral infection that had weakened him severely and might have turned to pneumonia. But indications were good that he was going to recover.

The only thing that they would tell him about Marguerite was that she also had been picked up and was being questioned.

“It’s getting toward dawn,” his awakener said, standing in the van’s open door. “We’ll be wanting you to walk us through it as soon as it’s light.”

Monks recognized him as a walrus-mustached Mendocino County sheriff lieutenant named Agar who had been in charge of the several-hour grilling that Monks had gotten yesterday evening. The deputies hadn’t believed his story at first, and there had been no sightings of Freeboot or his followers in spite of roadblocks. It had even been hinted that Monks might have started the fire. But after he pulled up his pants legs to show them his savaged shins, they had started to come around.

He had told them that his son was with the group, that he feared that Freeboot would take revenge on Glenn, and he had passed up the offer of a warm bed to drive up here with them last night, hoping and dreading that there might be some sign of Glenn. But the fire was still a football-field-sized inferno that could blister skin from twenty yards away. Monks had watched it helplessly for a while, then borrowed a sleeping bag and crawled into the van. He was aware that crashing after extended meth use tended to be immediate and deep, and sleep had slammed down on him like a collapsing brick building.

“So I’m Dr. Monks now?” he said to Agar. “You sure?” His identity was another thing that the hard-faced deputies had been skeptical about.

Agar smiled. “Pretty sure. We’ve checked around, and we haven’t found anybody else pretending to be you, at least not yet.”

“Can’t imagine why anybody’d want to be,” Monks muttered.

“What’s that, sir?”

“Nothing. There any coffee around?”

“Right over there at the roach coach.”

Monks climbed stiffly out of the van. He saw that TV news crews had arrived during the night, and had set up cameras and equipment behind a yellow tape that the deputies had strung up, a safe distance from the fire.

“They’re foaming at the mouth to get hold of you,” Agar said. He watched Monks, gauging his response. Like most older cops that Monks had dealt with, Agar was on the beefy side, polite, and professionally bland-a characteristic that sometimes disguised shrewdness, and sometimes not. Agar was one of the shrewd ones.

“I’m not making any public statements until I talk to my lawyer.” Monks didn’t know if that made any sense, but it seemed to work for other people, at least on television.

Agar nodded approval. “We’ll keep them away.”

Monks followed the deputy to the “roach coach,” a catering truck set up for the firefighters. Its open side panels displayed urns of coffee and hot water, trays of sweetrolls and doughnuts, and a steam table with scrambled eggs, bacon, and sausage. His belly reminded him that he had hardly eaten in the last couple of days. He decided that he’d better fuel up while he had the chance. He filled a styrofoam cup with black coffee-predictably weak, but hot. The powdered eggs and greasy bacon tasted pretty damned good.

He stood off to the side, eating and watching the pageant around him, while the sky slowly lightened. The firefighters were starting to sift the ashes now, wading around in the areas that had cooled enough, searching debris and scattering embers with rakes. Several leather-jacketed deputies paced the perimeter or talked on radios.