Any lingering fear that Alfred was setting them up disappeared when he stepped with his children into the light of the kerosene lanterns on the backs of the trucks. Worry etched the man’s face.
“This is your cousin Jacob,” Alfred said. “He is a servant of the Lord.”
“Is he the one God sent to rescue us?” the oldest girl asked.
“That’s right, Elizabeth.”
Jacob shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the next. “My friends are the ones risking their lives. I’m just driving the truck.”
He shook with the older three, who offered their hands with an earnestness matched by the awed expressions on their faces.
“You’re putting all the children in the motor home?” Alfred asked.
“That’s right, get them out of the cold and rain.” Jacob glanced over to see David arriving with Krantz’s satellite phone, then turned back to his cousin. “They’ve been through a lot. Why don’t you ride with them? We’ll want someone armed in there anyway, just in case.”
“Thank you for that.” Alfred nudged his children toward the line of kids climbing onto the Winnebago. “One more thing, cousin.”
Jacob took the phone and watched as David turned back to ripping away heirlooms from old ladies and toys from the arms of children.
“They’re all I’ve got left,” Alfred said. “I don’t care about possessions. I don’t lay up treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt. My children are my treasure.” His voice broke. “Like my wives.”
“I’m so sorry Alfred.”
“You’re my cousin. That means something.”
“We barely know each other,” Jacob said.
“You’re still my family,” Alfred said.
“So is everyone else around here. I have more brothers and sisters than most people have cousins and who knows how many cousins and second cousins. Hundreds. You do too, I’ll bet.”
“I know that,” Alfred said. “And I don’t make any special claim on you. But if something happens to me… could you look after my children? Keep them safe, bring them up right?”
“Alfred…”
“Please, I’m begging you.”
What could Jacob say to that?
Listen, Alfred, I’m already responsible for four kids of my own, plus my father’s widows, my younger sisters and brothers—a whole town of people who need me. I can’t take your kids, too. It’s too much.
But he thought about those earnest faces, looking up at him. Counting on him to get them out of this hell and somewhere they could climb into a warm bed at night, tummies full, enemies far away.
“Nothing is going to happen to you,” Jacob said. “We’re getting out of here and I’ll find you a home in Blister Creek. You will raise your own children.” He took a deep breath. “But yes, if anything happens to you—heaven forbid—I’ll make sure they are loved and taken care of.”
Alfred surprised him by embracing him. He was a tall, strong man, but he was trembling in Jacob’s arms.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Jacob said, pulling away. “We’ve got work to do.”
He checked Krantz’s phone the instant Alfred turned away. There were two calls, both from the same number and an unknown area code. Service had been down 90 percent of the time over the past few weeks, and he was surprised that the phone was
even on—although Krantz did have a charger for the car. He placed a call to the number.
“Took you long enough,” a woman’s voice answered from the other end. “Are you in Las Vegas yet?” A pause. “Krantz?”
“I’m sorry,” Jacob said. “This is Steve Krantz’s phone, but he’s not here.”
“Who is this? Jacob Christianson, is that you?”
He recognized her now, primarily from that suspicious edge in her voice. Agent Fayer was Krantz’s former partner in the FBI and on-again, off-again hostile to Jacob and Blister Creek, even though—or perhaps
because
—she came from a mainstream Mormon background herself.
“Agent Fayer?”
“Where is he?”
“Out. We’re trapped in Colorado City. He and Miriam are trying to clear the road.”
“Ah,” she said, in what came out more like a frustrating grunt than a word. “I tried to call earlier, when I got his message that you were headed for Vegas. Bad idea.”
“I’m beginning to see that,” he said, “but we’re committed now. We’ve got a bunch of refugees, there are revolutionaries or bandits of some kind holding the road—”
“Bandits is closer to the truth,” she cut in.
“—and what we need in Las Vegas, we
really
need.” He hesitated, unsure whether to push his luck with the FBI agent. “Any chance you’re calling to offer help?”
“Actually, I was calling to
ask
for help. I’m in a sticky… situation out here in L.A., and I thought Krantz could give me a hand.”
“Help out the FBI? You don’t have the resources?”
“Help me, not the FBI. I could even use Agent Kite,” she added, in a tone that sounded like she was trying to gag down a piece of raw tripe.
Krantz had taken the fall after the Kimball massacres last summer, but Agent Haley Kite—now known in Blister Creek as Sister Miriam—had voluntarily dropped out after infiltration turned to indoctrination. Fayer and the rest of the FBI considered her a dangerously unhinged lunatic. The woman must be desperate to ask for Miriam’s help.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Fayer said, “and it’s as tough for me to ask as it is for you to agree. What’s in it for you, you’re wondering?”
“That’s not exactly what I was thinking,” Jacob said. “Anyway, it’s a moot point unless we can get out of here alive. Any hints about who we’re dealing with here?”
“Some gunrunner to Mexico,” she said. “The guy had a little success in the Southwest, now thinks he can run the whole operation down there if he can intimidate the locals.”
She had to be talking about Alacrán.
“If we can get the situation in SoCal straightened out,” Fayer added, “we’ll come take care of him. But it’s ugly here at the moment, and you’ll have to look after yourselves.”
“Any suggestions?”
The last of Alfred’s people were loading into the back of the trucks and crawling beneath tarps to get out of the elements. The rain was turning to sleet. Trost climbed into the cab of the flatbed truck, and David stood next to the pickup, giving Jacob a significant look as he prepared to turn off the last lantern. They needed to be ready to pull out at the first sound of gunfire.
“Tell those two not to underestimate this guy,” Fayer said. “He got his hands on some military hardware. Anti-tank guns, mortars, machine guns, that sort of thing.”
“That would’ve been helpful to know an hour ago. Miriam and Krantz are long gone by now.”
“Then maybe you should have picked up the phone.”
He felt defensive and worked to fight that feeling down. “They went in like a kill team. We’re supposed to follow them, guns blazing, as soon as we hear shooting.”
“It might work. Depends on how many men they’ve got. You know how organized crime works. Hit ’em hard enough and they’ll go looking for weaker prey.”
“Hey!” David said in a sharp tone. He pointed to his wrist.
Jacob looked at his watch. It was 11:26 p.m.
“Got to go,” Jacob said. “We’ll be in touch.”
“Stay alive, Jacob. And don’t kill off my old partner. Krantz is a good guy, in spite of this cult-dabbling stuff. Your sister is a lucky woman.”
“I’ll tell Steve you called. Take care.”
Jacob stuffed the phone into his jacket and made his way to the pickup. He scraped his boots on the running board, shook the water from his hat, and climbed behind the wheel. A woman and four young children crammed into the backseat and up front a young girl and her toddler brother squeezed between David and the passenger-side door. More people weighed down the truck bed.
“That was Fayer?” David said. “Don’t tell me she wants to join us, too.”
“Not so far, no.”
“Only a matter of time. I’ll bet Blister Creek is starting to look pretty good right about now.”
“We’ve got enough former FBI agents kicking around,” Jacob said. He raised his eyebrows. “Unless you’re looking to pick up another wife.”
David snorted. “Can you imagine the sparks between those two? How long before one of them smothered the other in her sleep?”
“About five minutes after they smothered you for throwing them together.”
The brothers stared through the windshield at the rain and sleet sloshing down. It was quiet except for the drumming on the roof and the sound of a baby nursing in the backseat.
David glanced at his watch. “Eleven thirty exactly. You think we’ll hear the gunfire, right?”
“There will be multiple shots. And grenades.” Jacob glanced over to see a pinched, worried look on his brother’s face. “Miriam knows what she’s doing. And she’s a strong woman.”
“I know. Strong enough for both of us. If she wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here.” David hesitated. “But it’s not always easy being married to someone so… certain. Not at a time like this.”
“No marriage is easy,” Jacob said, “but you might consider how hard one marriage is before you jump into a second.”
“Believe me, I have. But they’re determined. All I can do is go along for the ride.”
“
They
?” Jacob said. “You mean you have someone picked out already?”
David glanced at the child to his right, who was looking up at him with a curious expression. He opened his mouth to say
something, but a gunshot interrupted. It was a single snap from a rifle.
Jacob started the truck before the echo died, but in that split second before his engine and the other two vehicles in the road drowned the sound, he heard the answering call of several other weapons: the hollow snap of pistols; another rifle, this one higher pitched; and then, most chillingly, the rattle of a machine gun.
Most of those shots, Jacob realized with growing fear, could only be coming from the enemy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Eliza rode next to Elder Smoot as thirty riders trotted toward the Ghost Cliffs. He tried to send her back with his daughter and the teenage boys, but she insisted on staying at the front of the formation where the decisions would be made once they encountered Malloy and his men. Or at least she assumed that’s what Smoot was planning; he wasn’t telling her anything.
When they crossed the canal half a mile short of the Ghost Cliffs, five more riders came from the ranch road that cut between the cliffs and the sandstone maze of Witch’s Warts—Ernest Griggs and four of his sons.
Griggs was a bit of a loner, the kind of guy who missed church as often as not, although his wives and children formed a faithful knot in the pews. He always had good reasons for missing church, some ranch emergency or other, but Eliza’s father had frequently pointed out that Griggs’s cows never had a difficult birth on a
Saturday morning, and he never had to track a troublesome mountain lion killing his lambs on a Monday. Jacob, unlike Father, didn’t hassle people for missing a meeting or two; as a result, Eliza couldn’t remember seeing the man since the funerals earlier in the summer.
But here he was, ready to go with his sons, their rifles strapped in holsters and twelve-inch hunting knives sheathed at their sides. Ready to fight to the death for the church and community.
The riders milled in the middle of the road while Smoot and Griggs shared information. Horses snorted steam from their nostrils and kicked up slush. Eliza muscled her mount through the crowd to get to Smoot’s side.
Griggs was telling him that twenty more men were on their way from the east side of the valley, mostly Youngs and Harrisons, but also Nelson Potts and his boys. But they were coming by horseback, so it might be another twenty minutes.
Griggs had spent some of his precious fuel driving out with horse trailers. Deciding their mounts were fresher, Smoot ordered the man and his boys to ride up the switchbacks.
“You’re the first defense,” Smoot said, “but you don’t have to stop them by yourself. Snipe at them, do some damage, and then ride around the reservoir to safety.”
“I don’t understand,” Eliza said when Griggs was gone and the main body set off again at a trot. “I thought you were trying to stop Chip Malloy from stealing our supplies, but that’s not what this is about, is it?”
“By the time I found out what was afoot, it was too late to stop him. He was going to drive off with that grain and it would have taken a small army to stop him. With the Lord’s help, we could have done it. But when I prayed for help, a better idea came
into my mind. Malloy had four, five trucks? How much could he really take out anyway?”
“A fraction,” she said. “He couldn’t do it in one trip.”
“Exactly. And that’s all we’re going to give them. They’re not getting back into our valley.”
“But are you sure they’re coming back?”
“Positive. I got word from Salt Lake that they were moving all the grain. Every last bushel. And the beans and rice, too.” Smoot slapped his hat against his saddle to clear the slush from the brim. “And that’s going to take multiple trips. So I’m going to do what should have been done in the first place.”
“We were caught unaware last time,” she said. “It was nobody’s fault.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But it won’t happen again, not on my watch. This time we fight.”
Eliza didn’t point out that it wasn’t actually his watch. Jacob had left her in charge, and that meant
she
should be the one making the decisions, not Elder Smoot. What would it take to save the food supplies, an all-out battle? They’d never win. Or recover from the battle.
So Eliza had no choice but to stop the bloodshed before it started.
What she needed was some of her own allies out here. Sister Rebecca, for one. Carol Young.
Where was Fernie? She’d have reached the house long ago, and while she wasn’t exactly capable of galloping through the valley in her modified saddle, she was more than capable of organizing others to do it on her behalf.
By now Eliza had expected either horses or trucks to appear
behind them, ridden or driven by cooler heads than Elder Smoot and his army. That is, by women.
But so far, nothing.
“What if Malloy—or whoever replaces him—doesn’t come back right away?” Eliza asked Smoot. “Are you planning to stay out here all night in the cold and snow?”