Chapter 4 - The Fire Line
“He’s baiting you,” Maggie said, her hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles were white. “He wants you reckless. He wants you charging into the brush blind so he can see your headlights from five miles away.”
“He doesn't know about the iPad,” I said, staring at the blue dot.
The pin had stopped moving.
It was stationary now, located three-quarters of a mile off Route 563, deep inside the Oswego River preserve. The terrain map showed nothing around it except a network of unpaved fire service roads and a small, abandoned cranberry bailing station that had been defunct since the mid-1970s.
“I know that bailing station,” Maggie said suddenly.
I looked at her. “How?”
“My first year as a state patrol recruit. 1991. We pulled three stolen tractor-trailers out of the old packing sheds back there. It’s an old cedar swamp with an elevated sand berm running through the middle. There’s only one way in for a vehicle—the old packing road off Oswego Lake. But there’s an old foot trail from the south along the rail bed.”
“Can the Explorer make the rail bed?”
“Not without tearing the oil pan off on the ties,” Maggie said. “We’d have to go the last mile and a half on foot.”
“Good,” I said. “He’ll be watching the road.”
Maggie pulled off Route 563 onto a narrow sand shoulder obscured by a dense thicket of black birch. She killed the headlights, shifted into park, and hit the interior light kill-switch.
Total darkness collapsed around us.
The silence of the Pine Barrens is different from the silence of the suburbs. It is an ancient, heavy silence, filled with the scent of wet sphagnum moss, decaying cedar needles, and iron-rich bog water. The trees here don't grow straight; they twist into grotesque, stunted shapes from decades of brushfires and nutrient-starved soil.
Maggie reached into the rear cargo area and pulled out a heavy nylon range bag.
She handed me a tactical flashlight with a red lens filter. “Preserves your night vision. Doesn't cast a beam visible from the air.”
Then she pulled out a second weapon—a short-barreled Remington 870 twelve-gauge shotgun with a tactical sling. She racked the slide back, inspected the green hull in the chamber, and slid it home with a satisfying, heavy *clack*.
“You remember how to clear a corner with this?” Maggie asked, handing it to me.
I took the shotgun. The weight was familiar, comforting in its brute mechanical certainty. “The Army didn't just teach me how to file logistics manifests, Sullivan.”
“Just checking, Sergeant Major.”
We stepped out into the night.
The sand road was damp, muffling our boots. I checked the phone. The blue dot was still pulsing, but the battery icon in the top right corner had turned red.
*Twelve percent.*
“We have twenty minutes before the signal drops,” I said.
We moved along the elevated embankment of the abandoned railroad track. The rusted steel rails were half-buried in sand and creeping cranberry vines, running like twin silver scars through the dark woods.
My thoughts kept returning to Daniel.
Five years ago, when Lena had brought Victor home for Christmas dinner, Daniel had sat on the back porch with a glass of rye whiskey, watching Victor carve the ham through the kitchen window.
*“Watch his elbows, Nora,”* Daniel had said.
*“His elbows?”* I had laughed, bringing him his wool scarf.
*“He doesn't lean on the table. He doesn't settle his weight. He stands like a man who is ready to run or throw a punch, even while he’s smiling at your potato salad. That boy isn't building a home with Lena. He’s establishing a base camp.”*
I had told Daniel he was being an overprotective father. I had told him that Victor was just nervous because he wanted our approval.
Now, Daniel was buried in the cemetery behind Saint Luke’s, and his daughter was tied up in an abandoned cranberry shed while her husband calculated the insurance return on her life.
*I should have listened, Daniel,* I thought, my fingers tightening against the checkered grip of the 870. *I’m listening now.*
A faint smell drifted through the pines on the north wind.
It wasn’t woodsmoke.
It was high-octane gasoline.
Maggie stopped dead ahead of me, her left hand going up in the universal patrol signal: *Freeze.*
Through the dense tangle of cedar branches fifty yards ahead, the skeletal, corrugated tin roof of the old bailing station caught the moonlight. Parked beneath the rotting overhang, its dark metallic paint coated in road grime, was the Land Cruiser.
Its brake lights were off.
The doors were closed.
May you like
Then, from inside the shed, came the sound of a child crying—a thin, terrified sob that was abruptly cut off by the sharp, heavy sound of a hand striking flesh.
***
