"No point in a barn fire to cook a weenie," Harris said.

UNDERWOOD TOOK THEM around the town, and they put azimuth lines from GPS markers through intersections of the highway, crossing at the fire. "Don't see another damn thing out there," Virgil said, scanning the darkness.

"There isn't anything else out there," Harris said. "You couldn't pay me five hundred dollars to camp out in there. No telling what you'd run into."

"Maybe even a crazy killer," Underwood said. "Friday the 13th, huh?"

"Never saw it," Harris said. "But that's the general idea."

THEY WERE ALL CRANKED when they landed. Virgil and Harris left Underwood to put the plane away, and after warning the pilot to keep his mouth shut, went roaring off to the sheriff 's office. The sheriff and a couple of deputies were waiting for them, with a USGS topo map, and Virgil and Harris used a yardstick to draw out their lines.

"Not bad," the sheriff said, his finger on the map where the lines crossed. "Man, that's not more'n a mile from where the kids thought they saw him. Gotta be him."

"What time are you putting the chopper up?" Virgil asked.

"Sunrise is just about six o'clock-so, about six o'clock." Sanders looked at his watch. "Seven hours. You'll want to be on the ground, up in Deer River, by five at the latest. We'll put you in a boat."

"Who's in the helicopter?" Virgil asked.

"Me and the pilot," the sheriff said. "I'm paying for it, so I get the ride."

"He'll probably shoot you down," Virgil said.

"You just want the ride," Sanders said; and he was right. And he clapped his hands, once, and said, "Hot damn. This is something. I mean, I hate to say it, but I'm having a pretty good time right now. Wasn't having a good time this morning." He turned to one of the deputies. "I'll call you up if we spot him, and you get on to Jim Young, get his ass up to Deer River. I'll put down on the track up there, and I want a picture of me getting out of the helicopter."

And he said to Virgil: "Politics. He's the local newspaper guy."

"Gotcha," Virgil said.

THAT NIGHT VIRGIL THOUGHT about God some more, and about the Deuce, that lonely spark of fire out in the middle of a swamp, a single twisted soul believing itself safely wrapped in nature, with no idea of what was coming in the morning.

23

VIRGIL WENT BACK to the truck and got a black nylon emergency jacket. August in Minnesota-chilly in the morning this far north, and this early in the day.

A river rat named Earl, drafted by Sanders, had just backed his eighteen-foot Alumacraft jon boat down the boat ramp into the water. Virgil would be riding with him, and with a cop named Rod. Rod was messing nervously with his AR-15, and kept looking downriver, where they expected the helicopter to show up. Two more jon boats were already in the water, and there were more both upriver and down.

"You going with your handgun?" Rod asked Virgil.

"Haven't decided," Virgil said.

Rod asked because he could see Virgil didn't have a long gun, and assumed his pistol was under his jacket; actually, it was under the front seat of the truck. All the guns were making Virgil nervous: they were heading into a swamp, without much visibility in some places, and six boats full of cops with rifles, converging on a central point from three different directions. Sanders's chief deputy was as nervous as Virgil, and worked back and forth through the deputies, talking about fire discipline.

Virgil went back to the truck again, looked back down the ramp, at all the deputies, at four cop cars and three trucks with trailers, watched Earl park his trailer, and thought that maybe the best idea would be to lie low in the boat; though lying low in a jon boat would shake your bones to pieces. The low, flat-bottom craft were fine when moving slow in flat water, but were no damn good in heavy chop; or in a heavy firefight, for that matter.

He thought about it some more, and finally pulled out his pump twelve-gauge, loaded three shells, and put seven more in his jacket pocket. If that wasn't enough, fuck him.

WAITED SOME MORE, in the mild stink of mud and rotting fish. One of the deputies borrowed a paddle and fished a plastic bag out of the water and threw it in a trash can. Somebody looked south and asked, "Wonder what they're doing down there?"

Then the chief deputy called, "Saddle up. Sheriff's on the way."

They all bustled down to the boats, climbed aboard, and the guys on the motors fired them up, quiet four-strokes, and eased out onto the lake, looking south. A minute later they heard the chopper, and then saw it, fairly high, coming fast, then slowing. And the shoulder radios went off and Rod said, "They got him! He's right under the chopper."

THEY ALL TOOK OFF, three boats carving long wakes in the smooth water, Rod holding his rifle straight up like a movie-poster commando, while Virgil sat on a cushion in the bow, back to the incoming wind. Rod, his fair face reddening with the cold wind, listened to his radio, and then shouted, "He's running for the trees, he's running for the trees."

The swamp was actually the remnants of a series of Mississippi oxbows, some of which could still be seen from the air, as long, curling cutoff lakes, separated from one another by wild rice flats, cattails, and brush. There was one big hunk of trees south of the flats. If the Deuce got into them, he'd be hard to dig out, especially if people were shooting at one another.

That had to be a ten- or fifteen-minute paddle, though, if he was still where he had been the night before. Sanders's flotilla was no more than two or three minutes away…

They crossed the lake, running hard-hard for a jon boat, anyway-and cut into a channel that wrapped around in a hard curve. Earl stayed with the speed, though, familiar with the territory, juked once for a snag, and blew into an intersecting channel that Virgil thought might be the river, though it was only forty or fifty feet wide.

The chopper was drifting south, away from them, but they were coming up quickly. Virgil risked standing up for just a second, couldn't see much-but could just see the tops of trees to the south.

Rod shouted, "He's cutting through the grass, he's back in the weeds…"

More noise, and Virgil looked back, saw the downriver boats coming up on them; now five boats running along, over a few hundred yards.

"Gotta be close," Rod shouted.

Another fifteen seconds and Rod shouted at Earl, and pointed, "Right there, right there…"

The chopper was probably no more than fifty or sixty yards ahead of them, and Virgil could hear a loudspeaker, but couldn't hear what was being said over the chop of the helicopter. Two more boats came in from the north, and Earl put them up against a bank of cattails; they drifted for a minute, then Virgil saw a small channel with flowing water, opening through the cattails. It wasn't more than eighteen inches wide.

"Can we push through there?" Rod asked.

"Tough," Earl said. He killed the motor, popped a pole mounted in brackets under the left gunwale, stood up, and pushed the boat back into the weeds. They got thirty feet, and that was it. "Too much drag," Earl said.

"Could we walk through it?" Rod asked.

"Nope. You might find shallow spots, but you'd be up to your neck every two minutes," Earl said. He started poling them back out, and Rod talked into his radio, and then said, "Back north-there's an open channel north. Shit, some guys are already going in, we're gonna miss it."

They got back out, and Earl fired up the motor, and they started north up the channel, and another boat backed out of the weeds and fell in behind them; Virgil could see more boats up ahead that had gone on while they tried to push into the cattails.