Chapter One

Whippoorwill, whippoorwill!

Whippoorwill!

Nathaniel and Riley Hannacker heard the bird call out in the trees and they both froze — because it wasn’t in the trees and it wasn’t a bird.

It wasn’t even a very good imitation of one, but it was the best Joe-Joe could do. It wasn’t like the little boy, the son of one of Nate’s cousins, had had much practice. In all the months they’d paid him two bits a day to sit beside the lane on the bank of Possum Creek fishing, he’d only twice sounded an alarm. Both false alarms, of course, but it was his job to alert Nate and his grandson if anybody, anybody at all came down Stedman Lane.

And it was their job, their duty, to “carry the word,” to let anybody else who might be out in the woods engaged in a similar activity know that “the law’s in” — or at least might be — and they were about to be ambushed.

When Riley looked the question at Nate, Nate nodded and Riley lifted his chin and let out a cry. It couldn’t rightly be called yelling. It was a high-pitched yodel with words in it that carried for miles. The words were unintelligible if you didn’t already know what they were. Nate knew.

“Fire in the hole!”

It was a phrase adapted generations ago from their coal mining brothers, of course, where it was used to indicate that the fuse on a powder charge had been lit and it was about to explode.

In the world of moonshining, it meant the same thing that carefully spaced shotgun blasts did, but Nate had not brought his shotgun with him today. Didn’t really need it the way Riley could yell. That particular skill was a source of pride among moonshiners and Riley’s was the best Nate’d ever heard. He’d swear you could hear that boy’s voice from Callison County all the way to the Tennessee line.

Nate glanced at the pipe on the still. There was smoke trailing up into the sky from it, but not very much. It’d be hard to see on a hazy day like today, and even harder to determine where it was coming from. It wasn’t often a still was discovered by following the smoke from it anyway. If the law found a still, it was because they’d followed the moonshiner to the location and were just waiting until enough alcohol had been produced to justify a bust — enough so the case would hold up in court.

Nate certainly wasn’t concerned for himself. He’d been busted before and reckoned he’d be busted again. But Riley was another thing entirely. If the alarm was a for-real this time, they both knew what to do … slip into the trees and vanish. And they would, too, but Nate did sorely hate the thought of abandoning this still. The location was perfect. The stream ran strong all year, the water in it as clear as the spring where it gushed out of the rock. The old pot still had produced thousands of gallons of good brew for — what? Six, eight years now?

They had just removed the cover and Riley was standing on a barrel above the top of the still, stirring the beer steadily with a mash-stick to prevent scorching or sticking as the beer heated. Once it was boiling vigorously, they’d fit the big copper cap over the opening and seal it, sending alcohol-rich steam into the worm — the copper coil — to condense.

“What do you think, Papa?” Riley asked.

An alarm came so seldom, you couldn’t help being startled by it, even if the chances there was really anything to be worried about were almost zero. Nate dropped the dead chestnut tree branches he was feeding into the fire box and hurried as fast as he could on his gimp knee to the spot on the far side of the waiting barrels to a break in the trees where a slice of the road was visible. The spot on the stream bank where Joe-Joe was fishing was directly below them — at the bottom of the four hundred-foot rock bluff north of where Nate had placed his still. There was no access to the top of Stedman Ridge from there, unless you were a spider. Stedman Lane, a four-mile stretch of broken asphalt and potholes that nobody even lived on anymore, angled along the base of the knob.

Nate couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen traffic of any kind on Stedman Lane. From the break in the trees, he’d be able to see if anybody actually turned off the lane onto the barely visible logging road that hadn’t been used for that purpose in maybe fifty years. And even if they did, it’d be nigh on impossible for them to locate the little path that forked off the logging road halfway up the knob.

Drawing on a lifetime of caution, though, it was second nature. He never turned off the logging road onto the lane without stopping to use a tree branch to remove the imprint of the truck tires in the dirt. He never left the logging road and turned toward the trail from the same spot twice in a row, so the weeds wouldn’t get permanently bent over. There remained a space of fifty yards of grown-up grass and weeds beyond the logging road before the shadow of the trail emerged in the undergrowth. And there existed no path of any kind from the trail where he left the truck parked to the site where his pot still sat couched under a limestone overhang.

He and his still hands — mostly just Riley as soon as he was old enough — hauled the bags of sugar, cakes of yeast and bushels of corn to the still on their backs. The kegs of finished product were strapped together and lowered by a winch to the creek, where Nate could drive out through the water in his truck and load them up, leaving no sign to mark his passage on the rocks.

A horn sounded before Nate made it to the break in the trees.

Beeeeep! Beep, beep, beep. Beeeeeep.

Then a black pickup truck drove into view, moving slowly along Stedman Lane, the horn blasting in long, then short beats, and a song Nate didn’t know — something about an Eskimo named Quinn — blasting almost as loud from the rolled-down windows.

“You tell Willie Ray you’d be out here?”

“No sir!” Of course, Riley knew better than that.

Where a still was located, that was something you didn’t talk about to anybody! But most of the shiners had a reasonably good idea where stills other than their own were located. Relationships would wear thin quick if they were all out here tripping over each other in the woods. Nate knew the Taggarts were working a couple of locations in the knobs out by the Sisters of Loretto Motherhouse.

The insistent beeping of the truck horn continued as the truck drove slowly down the potholed lane, trailing the Eskimo song behind it through the muggy air like a lazy tail on a kite, getting fainter as the truck drew away from the creek.

“He’s looking for me,” Riley said. “Why else would he be out here honking his horn?”

Nate could think of no other explanation.

“Something’s bad wrong or he wouldn’t have come.” Riley kept stirring, but his focus was on the sound of the beeping horn. “Something’s happened.”

Nate couldn’t imagine what could be wrong enough to send Riley’s best friend out looking for him, but it was important. Had to be. Important and bad. You didn’t go out beating the bushes looking for somebody to tell them good news.

“You go on now,” Nate said, crossing back behind the line of barrels. “I got this. You go find Willie Ray. Take the truck, then leave it in the trees by the falls.”

Nate could see the boy wanted to argue, knowing as he did how hard it was for one man to keep the operation running at this stage, while the beer had just started to boil. But he said nothing, just climbed down off the barrel and handed his grandfather the stick.

Then the boy — young man! — took off through the trees at a loping gait, tall, slender and agile. Nate watched him go — a blond young man not heavy enough for football when he was in school, though he’d certainly filled out since. He’d played round-ball, though, had been a star shooting guard his senior year when the Callison County High School Wildcats were edged out by the Covington Catholic Colonels in the first round of the state championship basketball tournament.

Nate picked up the tree branches he’d dropped on the ground, shoved them into the fire box and climbed up onto the barrel where Riley had been standing to stir the beer, lost himself in the rhythmic activity, freeing his mind to worry about what had sent Willie Ray Taggart out looking for Riley.

“Something’s bad wrong,” Riley’d said, and the words had echoed in Nate’s mind, bounced around in there like it was an empty whiskey barrel. That’s what his older brother had said all those years ago, the day Mama’d poked the tiger. Wasn’t anything else she could have done, of course, but that’s what had started it all. She took on three federal agents — and one of them a McClusky — single-handed. Well, except for the mob.