I picked up a pen. "What are your cousins' names, again?"

"Dirk Colson and Royce Colson. They would be brothers. Both of 'em."

"Okay, Fred." I wrote the names down. "And how old?"

"My age or so," he said. "Are you gonna help 'em, Mr. Houseman?"

"Of course."

Mike followed Goober and me as we drove back along the track of the chase toward the Borglan farm. We left John at the accident scene, to help the wrecker with any possible traffic control as they pulled Goober's car out of the ditch.

About a quarter mile from Borglan's farm drive, just around a curve screened from the farm by a low, tree-covered hill, Goober told me to stop.

"Here's where I let 'em off," he said.

"Look here on the right," I said to Mike, over the radio.

Mike turned on his right alley light, and I squinted through the window on Goober's side. Although the ditch was filled, you could just make out faint depressions in the snow, from inside the barbed-wire fence line, up and over the hillside. Filled in almost completely by the new snow, the tracks would have escaped all notice if they hadn't been pointed out to us. There could have been two sets. It was hard to tell.

"Right there?" I asked Fred.

"Yeah… ooh, shit, I wish they'd of come back…"

"And you were to pick 'em up here, too?"

He began to rock again. "I didn't, I didn't screw it up. I was here!"

I picked up my mike. "Delivery and pickup point," I said. I began to move down the road, toward Borglan's lane. "Let's just go on in, Five," I said.

It took us about three minutes to negotiate the lane at the Borglan place. It wound to the right, then back to the left, among the stark and leafless trees.