“You go down into the storm cellar.
You lock the iron bar from the inside.
There’s three gallons of well water in the glass jugs behind the lard press, and a sack of salt pork.”
Leonard’s eyes widened.
“What about you?”
“I’m going out to talk to the neighbors,” Clara said.
“Ma, they have machine guns!
They’ll shoot you before you clear the pump-house!”
“They won’t shoot,” Clara said, her fingers curling around the grip of the revolver inside her coat.
“They don’t have the coordinates.
And Thorne’s too smart to blow up the only woman who knows where Jesse put the ditching powder.”
She didn’t kiss him.
She didn’t touch his cheek.
She had closed his father’s eyes twelve years ago without shedding a single tear, and she wasn’t going to start now for the son who had sold his own grave for thirty pieces of paper.
She waited until she heard the heavy oak door of the cellar slam shut beneath the floorboards, followed by the slide of the heavy iron bar into its brackets.
Then Clara Vance walked out onto the back porch.
The searchlights hit her like a physical blow, blinding her through the thick lenses of her glasses.
The wind caught her black wool shawl, whipping the fringe against her throat.
*”Halt right there!”* the bullhorn crackled from the drive. *”Hands above your head, Mrs.
Vance!”*
Clara didn’t raise her hands.
She walked down the three steps, her heavy work shoes crunching into the dry dirt of the yard, and stopped by the concrete mouth of the old well-head.
She reached into her pocket, not for the gun, but for the tarnished silver plumb-bob.
She held it up between two fingers, letting it spin slowly in the high-beam headlights.
The tactical men in the mesquite froze, their rifle barrels dipping slightly as they waited for the command from the woman by the Suburban.
Thorne stepped forward, walking past the cattle guard until she stood twenty paces away, her flannel coat fluttering in the draft.
Her face was calm, professional, the face of a woman who had never lost a case or missed a dividend.
“You have the alignment film, Clara,” Thorne said, not using the bullhorn now.
Her voice carried clearly across the yard.
“I have it,” Clara said.
“Bring it here,” Thorne said.
“And the boy comes out.
We have a medical transport waiting at the highway.
We’ll take him to a private facility in Fort Worth.
Nobody goes to the federal penitentiary tonight.”
Veronica stepped up behind Thorne, her eyes glittering with a triumphant, malicious hunger.
“Give her the coordinates, you old cow!
You think you can hold out against fifty federal agents?
It’s over!
The company’s liquidated!
The land is condemned!”
Clara looked at Veronica.
Then she looked at Thorne.
Then she looked down into the dark, round hole of the cistern beside her foot—the sixty-foot shaft that Jesse had hand-dug through the caprock in 1962, the shaft that led straight down into the primary limestone fissure forty feet above the caliche pit.
“You’re right, Veronica,” Clara said, her voice dropping into a dry, terrible rattle that made the hair on the back of Thorne’s neck stand up.
“It is over.”
Clara didn’t throw the plumb-bob into the well.
She dropped the empty silver casing into the grass.
And from her other pocket, she pulled out not the synthetic film, but the small, green plastic bottle of road-fusee pellets that Jesse had kept in the barn to burn out yellowjacket nests in the summer.
She twisted the cap with her thumb.
A bright, magnesium-white flare hissed to life between her calloused palms, sputtering blue-and-white sparks three feet into the evening air, illuminating her face—the hollow cheeks, the pale, granite eyes, the thin, unyielding line of her mouth—in a blinding, theatrical glare.
Thorne’s face went dead white.
“Fall back!”
Thorne screamed, turning toward the Suburbans, her professional composure shattering into raw, hysterical panic.
“FALL BACK!
SHE’S GOT THE DETONATOR LINE!
GET TO THE HIGHWAY—”
“Jesse was a surveyor, Thorne!”
Clara shouted into the teeth of the rising gale, her voice echoing off the tin roof of the barn like thunder over the Brazos.
“He never laid a charge without a secondary burn-string in the casing!”
She held the spitting white flare directly over the open mouth of the cistern.
Down in the black depths, forty feet below the limestone cap, a low, guttural whistle began to rise—the sound of methane and petroleum vapors drawing through the fissures, pulled toward the oxygen of the open well-head like water through a siphon.
Veronica screamed, stumbling back toward the lane, her hands clawing at the gravel.
The men in the black vests broke ranks, diving into the mesquite, their rifles clattering against the limestone ruts as the drivers of the three Suburbans threw their transmissions into reverse, tires smoking against the cattle guard.
