"Lieutenant, you can pop the box now," Woods said. "You're on Alan Carlson's place."
Valentine climbed into the passenger seat, an improvised upholstery job mummified in duct tape with a horse blanket tied over it. The door on the passenger side was missing, as well. ("The Quislings got a real bug about wanting to see all of you at checkpoints. Sucks to be me in the winter," Woods had explained.) The Wolf looked around. The truck had pulled around behind a little white house, between it and a well-maintained barn. The two-story frame house was screened from the road by trees and had the small, high-roofed look of a building trying to hide itself from the world. Three feet of foundation showed in the back, and the kitchen door could be reached only by ascending a series of concrete steps. The barn, on the other hand, looked like it wanted to take over the neighboring territory. It had grown smaller subbuildings like a primitive organism that reproduces itself by budding. An immobile mobile home stood beyond the barn, under the shadow of a tall silo. A garage with a horse wagon and an honest-to-goodness buggy parked side by side stood on the little gravel road that looped around the barn like a gigantic noose. Farther out, an obviously unused Quonset hut stood in an overgrown patch of brush, and a well-maintained shed completed the picture. Behind the house, cow-sprinkled fields ran to the base of a pair of tree-covered hills. Distant farms dotted the green Wisconsin hills.
The back door of the house opened, and a man in new-looking blue overalls and leather work boots stepped down the mini-staircase to the kitchen door. He fixed a nondescript red baseball cap over his sparse, sandy hair and turned to wave a boy out from the house. A young teen, in the midst of a growth spurt, judging from the look of his too-small clothes, emerged, as well. He had black skin and closely cropped hair and looked at the truck with interest. Carlson said a few quiet words to the boy, who scampered off to the road and made a great show of poking around in the ditch at the side of the road with a stick.
A golden-haired dog emerged from behind the barn and flopped down, panting in the shade with his body angled to observe the proceedings.
Woods jumped out of the truck and performed his trick with the tool locker again. At the sight of Gonzalez's wound, Carlson hollered back to the house. "Gwennie, one of them's hurt. I need you out here!"
"Mr. Carlson, I don't know what you've heard though this network of yours, but my name's David, and I want-," Valentine began.
"Introductions can wait, son. Let's get your man downstairs."
A red-haired woman came out of the house, moving with a quick, stocky grace. She wore a simple cotton shirt, jeans, and an apron that looked like it had been designed for a carpenter. She pressed two fingers expertly against Gonzalez's throat. Woods held the boy from Beloit in his arms. Valentine and Carlson each took an arm and helped Gonzalez. Gonzalez seemed groggy and drunk, and he mumbled something in Spanish.
They entered the house, skirting the tiny kitchen, and got Gonzalez into the basement. It was homey and wood paneled, with a little bed and some clothing that matched the kind the young teen watching the road was wearing. Mrs. Carslon put a finger into a pine knot on one of the wooden panels and pulled. The wall pivoted on a central axis near the knot. A small room with four cots, some wall pegs, and a washbasin was concealed on the other side.
"Sorry it's so dark," Mrs. Carlson said. "We're not electrified on this farm. Too far from Madison. But there's an air vent that comes down from the living room; you can hear pretty good what's going on above, as a matter of fact. Let's get the injured man down on the bed."
Carlson turned back to the stairs leading up to the main floor of the house. "Molly," he shouted, "bring a light down here!"
Mrs. Carlson extracted a short pair of scissors from her apron and began to cut away at Gonzalez's buckskins. "What's his name?" she asked.
"Injured man of average height," Valentine answered.
"Okay, Injured," she said insistently in his ear. "Can you move your fingers? Move your fingers for me. On your hurt arm."
Gonzalez came out of his trance, summoned by her words. A finger twitched, and sweat erupted on his brow.
"Maybe a break, maybe some nerve damage. I'm not a doctor, or even a nurse, you know," she said quietly to Valentine. "I'm a glorified midwife, but I do some work on livestock."
"We're grateful for anything," Valentine answered. "It looked to me like the bullet passed through."
"I think so. Seems like it just clipped the bone. There's a lot of ragged flesh for a bullet hole, though. Not that I've seen that many. I'm going to clean it out as best I can. I'll need some light, and some more water. Molly, finally!" she said, looking toward the open panel.
A lithe young woman of seventeen or eighteen, with the fine features of good genes fleshed out on a meat-and-dairy diet, stood at the entrance to the secret room. Her hair was a coppery blond and was drawn back from her face in a single braid dangling to her shoulder blades. She wore boyish blue overalls and a plain yellow shirt. The shapeless and oversize clothes made the curves they hid all the more tantalizing. She carried a lantern that produced a warm, oily scent.
"Dad, are you crazy?" she said, looking at the assembly suspiciously. "Men with guns? If someone finds out, even Uncle Mike can't help. How-?"
"Hush, Molly," her mother interrupted. "I need that lantern over here."
Valentine watched in admiration as Mrs. Carlson went about her business. Mr. Carlson held Gonzalez down as she searched and cleaned the wound. She then sprinkled it with something from a white paper packet. The scout moaned and breathed in short rasps as the powder went in.
"Doesn't sting quite like iodine, and does just as good a job," the woman said as she began bandaging. Valentine helped her hold the bandage in place as she tied it but found himself glancing up at the girl holding the lantern. Molly looked down at the procedure, lips tightly pursed, her skin pale even in the yellow light of the lantern.
Mrs. Carlson tied up the bandage, and Gonzalez seemed to sag even more deeply into the cot he lay on.
Ray Woods spoke up. "Hate to give you another mouth, but this boy Kurt here is on his way across the river. I'm not supposed to go out that far again for a few more days. D'ye think he could have a place here for a little while?"
"Of course, Ray," Mr. Carlson agreed. "Now you better be moving along."
He turned back to Valentine. "Now we can shake, son. Alan Carlson. This is my wife, Gwen. And you see there my eldest, Molly. We've got another daughter, Mary, but she's out exercising the horses. The lookout up the road is kind of adopted, as you might have guessed. His name is Frat, and he came up from Chicago about three years ago. On his own."
"Call me David. Or Lieutenant. Sorry to be so mysterious, but the less you know the better-for both of us."
"Well, Lieutenant, we have to get back to the upstairs. The other family who lives on the farm is the Breitlings. They don't know about this room. Same story: better for us and better for them to keep it that way. Their son is with Mary; he's just a squirt. Tom and Chloe are in LaGrange. I sent them there this morning when word came around about your little scrape. They're due back before dark. There's a chance, just a chance, that the house will be searched. If it happens, don't panic. So happens the local Boss is related to me, and we stay in their good graces in every way. Frat has a way of staring at our local goons; I think he makes them nervous. They never hang around long."
"Glad to hear it. You don't mind if we keep our guns, I hope?"