"So the places to look are the Quonset hut, the barn, and the house. I've been in the house, one room, anyway, didn't look like much."

"I've been in that. There's a basement…haven't seen it. The shed is what I'd like to get a peek at. If they're moving drugs through, in bulk, that's dangerous stuff. They might want to keep it outside the house."

"Are you thinking about going in?" Virgil asked.

"I'm more thinking about watching for a few hours. See if anything isn't right. Look for dogs. See if there's any security stuff. See if we can smell anything. Look for any precursors."

"Didn't see any dogs when I was out there," Virgil said.

"That's good; that's the best thing. Most people don't know it, but dogs can see almost as well at night as they can in daylight. Burglar alarm won't hunt you down, like a dog will."

THE DARKNESS DEEPENED as they got away from the lights of town, and as the clouds spread overhead; then they crossed the top of a low hill and Stryker slowed and killed the lights. They were on gravel, creeping along, the lightning nearly overhead, with Stryker staring at a GPS screen. Then he said, quietly, "We're there."

"Can't see a damn thing," Virgil said.

"I left a rock out here," Stryker said. He'd put a couple of strips of black gaffer tape over the interior and door lights, and he said, "Be right back." He shifted into Park, climbed out of the truck, and using a penlight, walked down the road. He was back in fifteen seconds, climbed back in the truck. "We're right there…"

He shifted into Drive, rolled forward thirty feet, then hooked through the ditch and powered blindly up a low rise, and then down the other side. He stopped once, got out, walked, flicked the light a couple more times, then pulled ahead and again turned blindly to the left, drove another thirty feet. In the illumination of a lightning stroke, Virgil saw that they were about to plow a stand of sumac. "This is it."

"What is it?"

"Used to be a farmhouse. The Miller place. Abandoned and dangerous. The fire department came out a couple of years ago and burned it down for training, filled in the hole where the root cellar was. But there're still the windbreak trees that used to be around the house. We're back in what used to be the side yard, so there won't be any reflections off the car, if somebody comes down the road."

VIRGIL GOT HIS SHOTGUN, and Stryker popped the back hatch of the truck and took out a long gun of some kind. In another flash of lightning, Virgil saw that it was an M-16-style rifle, and Stryker had loaded an extra-capacity magazine.

"Is that semiauto? Or full?"

Stryker racked a round into the chamber. "Semiauto's for people who shoot prairie dogs."

USING THE PENLIGHT, they walked back out to the road, and then single file along it. There was enough lightning that they could navigate by the flashes, and Stryker's GPS homed them in on the Feur place. They were making noise, Virgil thought, crunching along on the gravel, and with the zzzzziitttt sound of their nylon rain suits, as their legs crossed and their arms worked, but it was nothing in the wind.

Four hundred yards out, they crossed the ditch again, and eased over an old barbed-wire fence. Stryker was talking quietly, almost muttering: "Go slow and watch your footing. There's a lot of rock around. This used to be pasturage; the plowing land was on the other side of the road."

And they stumbled a few times, closing in. The wind was coming up, not howling, exactly, but strong, and gusting. There were lights at the house-night-lights, Virgil thought-and a bright sodium vapor light above the loft door on the barn, and another on a pole in front of the machine shed. The pole light shook and trembled in the wind. They found a spot, a hundred yards out, in a cluster of thistles, and sat and watched, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour. Nothing changed in the houses or outbuildings.

Then the rain came, spattering through the weeds, and they could hear the change in pitch when the main front hit the road in front of Feur's place, another note when it hit the steel buildings, and a few seconds later, it was on them. A minute after that, a second-floor light came on in the farmhouse, and then another, the second one from a small window directly below the peak of the house. "Taking a leak," Virgil said to Stryker. Another minute, and the bathroom light went out, then the other. Back in bed.

The rain was beating on them now and they sat on their feet, heads down, hands in their side pockets, dry, but not especially warm. Another half hour, and then Stryker nudged Virgil and said, "Might not be a bad time to look at the machine shed."

"Lead the way."

They crawled and duckwalked in, moving quickly between lightning strikes, freezing with every flash. Five minutes after they left their watch post, they came up behind the machine shed. At the side door, Virgil tried the knob. Locked: no give at all. They put their heads together to block as much light as they could, waited for a lightning flash, and then Stryker hit the button on the penlight.

And Virgil said, "Uh-oh." Medeco locks, and almost new. "I didn't even know you could get these things out here."

"What?"

"Medecos. Look at this door," Virgil said. "This thing has got some heft to it; steel, I think."

"We're not getting in?"

"We're not getting in," Virgil said.

"So…"

"So let's go sit some more."

THEY MOVED BACK, slowly, a little of the stress leaking away; they couldn't find their original spot, but found another just as wet. "So they got steel doors and great locks. That makes it a little more interesting," Stryker said. Twenty minutes later, sputtering in the rain, he said, "I'm starting to feel like an asshole."

Another twenty minutes, and the main slab of thunderstorm had passed, and the wind had shifted, and they were able to sit with their backs to it.

Stryker said, "We knew it'd probably be a waste of time."

"Yeah, but after you come out here…you kinda expect something to happen, because you made the effort."

"Don't work that way, grasshopper," Stryker said.

"Sun comes up at five-thirty, more or less," Virgil said.

"We should be out of here twenty minutes before that."

Virgil looked at his watch: "Not yet three."

"So we sit for two hours. Maybe get some sleep."

"Not gonna sleep out here…"

THE RAIN STOPPED, the wind dropped, and the lightning rolled away to the east. Virgil had given up hope of getting anything useful when he saw headlights bouncing up the road to the south. As far as he knew, Feur's was the only place out this way. He nudged Stryker, who was head down, and maybe sleeping. Stryker's head popped up. He saw the lights and said, "Who's this?"

"Early riser," Virgil said.

They were both stiff, and they stood up, their bodies obscured by weeds even if somebody had night-vision goggles, and stretched, and watched as a pickup truck slowed, pulled into Feur's yard, and then slowly backed up to the machine shed.

The driver got out and walked over to the house, skirting a puddle in the middle of the drive, and then stood on the porch, waiting. Lights came up, and a minute later, the driver was let into the house. "Let's go see who it is," Stryker said.

Back through the weeds, on their knees, and duckwalking, down to the back of the machine shed, then up along the side. The driver had parked only a couple of feet from the main door.

"Take a chance?" Virgil asked.

"The lights are on the other side of the house…I think they'd be paying attention over there."

"Cover me, then."

Stryker snuggled down with the machine gun, and Virgil crawled along the ground next to the door, behind the truck. Missouri plates. He heard a rattling, and froze. Nothing. He fumbled in his pocket, found a pen, wrote the number in the palm of his hand, and then again on his forearm.