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Mills began, “you have other pilots.”
    Thunder shook the night, and Gareth glanced toward its source. “None who can fly in stuff like this. Or would.”
    Mills looked down the makeshift runway as the last of the flares was stamped out, just the blackening trail of his touchdown and rollout leading back toward the trees. In daylight it could be seen as a field, one where sugar beets had grown some time ago, but long gone fallow now. Gareth Dean Hoag owned it, and the hundred twelve acres around it. Rotten land, the locals said it was. But Gareth had seen some value in it. It and the barn big enough to park a plane in.
    “Did they spell my name right this time?” Mills asked. “Big D, big V?”
    Gareth nodded. “But that picture they got still doesn’t do you justice.”
    “Good. Make it harder for the federales .”
    “You were lucky tonight, number five. But you need to be careful. Especially now.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I got another deposit coming up,” Gareth explained. “Special things after that. I don’t want to lose you.”
    “Skunky or Lane could take it,” Mills suggested, but Gareth shook his head. The two who’d put out the flares joined them now, Nita Berry and Lionel Price, Gareth’s ‘other’ halves.
    “You can get in and out of anywhere,” Gareth told him, and Mills knew he should be pleased. But what he was was tired. “Better than anyone.”
    “I always told you so.”
    The night exploded and lit them with white hot radiance. Gareth cast a joyous face to the raging sky. “Soon, number five. Big things are coming soon.”
    “He shits you not,” Lionel said. Nita tucked her hand in Gareth’s front pocket and agreed with a nod.
    Mills wiped his eyes, the night spitting hard at him now, at them all now, a squall line moving through, a harsher piece of the storm upon them.
    “Big things,” Gareth repeated, laughing now as the heavens dumped on them.
    *   *   *
    Troopers Jimmy Nance and Kyle Callahan of the New York State Police were cruising down Roseland Road toward the coffee shop at the Pembry Lanes, the former extolling to his rookie partner of three weeks the utter magnificence of the Lanes’ lemon meringue pie and how fantastic it was with a good cup of coffee, when the sweep of their unit’s headlights lit up the front of the town post office.
    “Ho-ly Moses,” Trooper Kyle Callahan exclaimed calmly from behind the wheel, slowing the dark blue Chevy Caprice to a stop at the curb as his partner put a spotlight on the building. “Ain’t teenagers got nothing better to do on a Friday night?”
    “You call it in,” Nance instructed as he swung the passenger side door open. “I’ll have a look-see at what the fine young citizens of Pembry have cooked up this time.”
    And cooked up was a darn good way to put it, Nance thought as he stepped from the warmth of his cruiser and took his flashlight from its place on his Sam Browne. The last time the kids from Hollister High had gotten some beer and stupidity in them at the start of a weekend, two dumpsters and an empty shed had gone up in smoke. And though there was nary a hint of smoke or flame coming from inside the Pembry Post Office, there was going to be damage inside. Oh, yes. That Jimmy Nance could tell quite plainly as he got to the top step and shined his flashlight on the twin glass doors that let into the building.
    “Hooligans,” he commented, shaking his head and playing the light over the display that had been plastered upon the inside of the glass. “Where the hell are your parents when you’re pulling this crap?”
    “Someone’s gonna call the postmaster,” Callahan said as he reached his partner’s side. He took his own flashlight in hand and added its beam to the mix. “Creative little buggers.”
    “It don’t take much creativity to photocopy your teet, Callahan,” Nance said, and illuminated one of the three dozen or so pieces of paper taped to the inside of the glass doors, each a