Force of Nature

19

Dusk came quickly on Teton Pass as Nate crossed the border from Idaho east into Wyoming. He had ruthlessly scoured Victor, Swan Valley, Driggs, and Tetonia for any sign of the assassins throughout the afternoon and into the evening. His only lead had come from the manager of the Rendezvous Motel in Driggs, a spindly old tattooed galoot openly wearing a shoulder holster, who said two men had checked out early that morning after a ten-day stay.

Their descriptions fit: mid-twenties, hard, businesslike, no small talk about the weather. The manager said he pegged them for mountain climbers or hunters based on the number of gear bags they possessed, but they’d claimed they were in the area to look for work in construction. Apparently, several multimillion-dollar resorts were being built on the Idaho side of the Tetons. The manager said the men were unusual in that they kept odd hours and were often gone the entire night. Also, they requested their rooms not be entered and made up during the day. The owner said they shared a late-model white Chevy Tahoe with Colorado plates. Their names on the register were Bill Wood and Tom James, and they paid seven days in advance with cash and daily after, as if they knew they might have to leave at any time.

Nate peeled off several twenties and gave them to the manager for the information and made him promise he wouldn’t clean the vacated rooms right away. The manager agreed with astonishing speed.

“Where are we going?” Haley asked, as they climbed the mountain. A heavy horizontal curtain of storm front reached across the sky from north to south, devouring the jagged range of mountain peaks as it came. From their elevation, they could see it coming, and it had no end in sight.

“Jackson Hole,” he said.

“Why?” she asked. She was apparently cried out and slowly coming back into the here and now. Throughout the day, while Nate drove from small town to small town and crept around mom-and-pop motels, she’d sat in the passenger seat of his vehicle and wept. He’d offered water and food, but she refused both. As with Alisha in the past, he marveled how her tears seemed to slowly expunge the tragedy from inside her, how it seemed to help her recover. He envied the phenomenon but could not imagine replicating it himself. His release, he knew, would come another way.

“Jackson is a choke point,” he said. “I don’t know which road they took to get back into Wyoming, but they’ll have to go through Jackson to get to the Bighorns. They may stop, or they might drive right through. But my guess is they think they’re home free. Their mission is accomplished, and it’s time to take a breather before they reconnoiter with their team leader. So they might not be looking over their shoulders right now.”

“Why not?” she asked. “Don’t they know we might be chasing them?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think they knew I was there, and I’m the primary target. If they knew I was in the house, they would have held off for a shot at me, or stuck around to hit me when I came out of the house.”

He explained that by approaching the compound from the back through the timber that morning, he likely couldn’t be seen from where the assassins had set up a mile away, facing the front of the house.

“A mile away?” she asked. “I don’t know much about guns, but isn’t that a little far?”

“No,” Nate said. “Not with the kind of weapon they used. You saw that hole in the window, didn’t you?”

She nodded.

“It was a perfectly round hole. It didn’t even shatter the glass. That round passed through the so-called bulletproof glass and through Oscar’s head and through the other side of the house. I’m pretty sure it was a fifty caliber round and the shooter has a specialized sniper rifle. We used them overseas. It’s accurate at two thousand yards. The shot that killed Oscar wasn’t even that far.”

“This is just so unbelievable,” she said. “All of it. I can’t believe this is happening.”

Nate said, “It is.”

“Why did they kill them all? It’s so cold-blooded.”

“Two reasons,” Nate said. “They thought our friends knew my secret, and if they were allowed to live, they’d leak it. Especially Oscar, since he had the contacts and his computer network. If Oscar decided to broadcast the information it would be around the world and back within a few minutes and it would destroy Nemecek and The Five.

“The second reason was to eliminate anyone who might help me out. War is still just a numbers game. It is cold-blooded, but that’s what it is. Kill more of them than they can kill of yours. And if possible, kill them all.”

“What are you going to do to them if we find them?”

“What do you think? Revenge is something I’m good at. I enjoy it for its purity.”

She shrunk away from him, shocked.

“And to further reduce their numbers,” he said. “Two can play at this game.”

Once they started climbing the mountains and Idaho was in his rearview mirror, he borrowed Haley’s cell phone and called the Teton County, Idaho, Sheriff’s Department.

“I need to report a murder,” he said to the dispatcher.

“Come again?” she said. He heard a slight click and knew the dispatcher had engaged the recording device.

“Two men using the names Bill Wood and Tom James murdered the Reverend Oscar Kennedy in his own home this morning with a sniper rifle. They’re also responsible for the deaths of Gabriel Cohen, Jason Sweeney, Mike McCarthy, and Aldo Nunez, all former Special Forces vets. And an innocent named Diane Shober. You know the names from the case files in your department, but these weren’t accidents. Wood and James stayed the last week at the Rendezvous Motel in Driggs, room eight. Make sure you get a forensics team there to collect hair, fiber, and DNA samples to help determine the true identities of the killers—”

“Please slow down,” she said. “Where are you calling from?”

“That’s not important,” Nate said. “You can listen to the tape afterward. What is important is that Reverend Kennedy’s body is taken care of and his family notified. He was a good man.”

“What is the name of the reporting party?” she asked.

“That is all,” Nate said, and closed the phone.

Haley shook her head. “That’s why you told the guy not to clean their rooms. So there would be DNA samples.”

“Right,” he said. “If they were there for ten nights, the room is crawling with their residue. The cops will find enough to positively ID the killers — provided their DNA is on file somewhere. Which may be a long shot. I don’t expect them to ID our bad guys right away, but they’ll send a car out to Oscar’s compound. I can’t stand the thought of his body unattended all night.”

“Neither can I,” she said, and her eyes again filled with tears.

After a few minutes, she reached toward Nate to retrieve her cell phone.

“No, sorry,” he said, and rolled down his window. He extended the phone outside and flipped it down and back under the back tires. The crunch sounded like a car door being closed.

“Hey!”

He said, “They can track us from the call I just made or at least figure out what cell towers sent it.”

“How am I supposed to function without my phone?”

He grinned wolfishly. “Welcome to life off the grid.”

They summited the mountain, and the lights of Jackson Hole splayed out beneath them in the valley.

Jackson in October was predictably empty. The throngs that packed the wood sidewalks in the summer were gone, and those wearing skiwear and fashionable snow boots were yet to come. It was the time of the year when the Mercedes, Lexuses, and BMWs of tourists and seasonal residents gave way to the muddy four-wheel-drive pickups of elk hunters, but in much smaller numbers. The town seemed to be resting and recovering, and many of the retail stores downtown were closed until winter and skiing resumed.

But not the bars. Nate located the white Tahoe parked at an angle on the side of the Wort Hotel. He drove past it, with Haley pointing out the Colorado plates, and kept on going.

“Aren’t you going after them?” she asked, confused.

“Yes.”

“Then where are we going now?”

“I’m taking you to the airport so you can fly back to North Carolina, or wherever.”

She sat back hard in her seat as if slapped, and crossed her arms over her breasts. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

“Sure you are,” he said. “Do you need money for the ticket?”

“I need you to shut up and turn around. I was there when these guys destroyed my world. I’ve got to see this through.”

He took a long look at her. In response, she set her jaw and tipped her head back. Her eyes caught and reflected passing lights. Lovely, he thought.

He said, “If you stay with me you’ll either get killed or wind up in prison. This isn’t a lighthearted choice.”

She waved his words away and clamped her hand back under her arm. “But I’ve made it. I’m sticking with you and seeing this through. I want to see the men who did this. I want to see them go down.”

He slowed the Jeep but kept it rolling down the highway. They were clear of the southern town limits, but the lights of the town sparkled in his rearview mirror. The National Elk Refuge was on his right, and he could see the first of the arrivals out on the moonlit pasture.

“If you stay,” he said, “you have to do whatever I tell you. This is my operation, and I’m good at these things. I don’t want or need your advice or your questions.”

She didn’t respond immediately. After a beat, she said, “Okay. But you have to understand I’ve never done anything like this before. Never. Cohen was trying to teach me how to use a handgun, but I didn’t like it.”

“I’m not letting you near a weapon,” Nate said. “And remember to fight against your first instinct.”

“My first instinct?”

“To talk,” he said. “When things get hot, I need you to listen to me and do what I tell you, and not yammer on. Repress that first instinct. Can you do that?”

“Of course,” she said, obviously insulted.

“Good,” he said, slowing down to begin a U-turn back to town, “because I think I like your company.”

As they drove, she shot her arms out and settled back in her seat. “I thought for a brief moment I liked yours,” she said, “then I found out what an asshole you can be.”

The Wort Hotel stood on the corner of Glenwood and Broadway in the heart of Jackson, and it stretched the length of the short block. Constructed of rough stone with eaves and gabled windows, it looked like a regal 1940s matriarchal ghost amidst the gussied-up faux-western storefronts. The Silver Dollar Bar had its entrance on Main, and as Nate and Haley cruised by, they could see men with cowboy hats at the bar and smaller groups of hunters sitting at tables. They didn’t slow down as they drove by.

“Did you see our boys?” she asked.

“No.”

Nate turned on Glenwood and passed the Tahoe and continued on across Deloney and backed into a dark alleyway and turned off his motor. From there, they could look out the front window and see the back bumper of the Tahoe jutting out into the street. There were fewer than ten other cars parked, and plenty of spaces. It was an entirely different feel from the busy summer and winter months.

“How can you be positive it’s the right car, or that the bad guys are inside?”

Nate shrugged. “I can’t.”

“Do you want me to go in the bar and look around?”

“No. They might recognize you. Those bastards were up there in the trees for days looking down at the compound through binoculars or a spotting scope. They might have seen you.”

“Oh,” she said, then hugged herself. “It creeps me out to think they were up there all that time. Just waiting for us to finally open the curtains.”

“Lots of patience,” Nate said. “But no surveillance is perfect. The longer it goes on, the more there’s a chance for a mistake. Like not seeing me come down to the house this morning.”

After ten wordless minutes, he could tell it was killing her not to talk. She squirmed in her seat, and took deep breaths that ended in long sighs.

Finally, she asked, “Have you thought about calling the sheriff again? Telling them you might have found the killers?”

He shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want them arrested. I want them dead. But not before I get some intel.”

After ten more minutes, she said, “So are you going to tell me what this is all about? Why those … men … are after everyone?”

“Maybe later,” Nate said, opening his door and swinging out. “One thing at a time.”

“I deserve to know,” she said. “Gabriel and all my friends …”

He looked up sharply. “Remember what I said about talking? I meant it.”

She sat back quickly as if he’d threatened her with a knife.

He said, “Stay here, be quiet, and keep your eyes open. If you see anything hinky, flash the headlights once.”

“Hinky?”

“You’ll know it when you see it.”

Nate rattled around through gear in the small back floor well and came out with an eighteen-inch crowbar and a two-foot length of stiff wire.

“Back in a minute,” he said, and walked across Deloney with the tool pressed to his thigh so it couldn’t be seen in silhouette. Dime-sized snowflakes sifted down through the orbs of streetlights and began to gather like goosedown in the cracks of the wooden walk.

He didn’t need the crowbar to get into the Tahoe, and he was grateful, because he feared setting off an alarm. A car alarm blasting in the quiet night would be a small disaster. He kept low as he cased the vehicle, looking in all the windows but not standing tall enough to be seen over the roof.

The front seat was uncluttered except for a sheaf of folded maps and documents crammed down between the driver’s seat and the console. The backseat was loaded with duffel bags and gear bags. Not unusual in a mountain location if the occupants were mountain climbers or trekkers.

The back compartment had a couple of suitcases, plastic tubs with lids, and a heavy blanket spread across the carpeting from one wheel well to another. The blanket didn’t lie flat, but was rounded down in the center. It was obviously covering something long and bulky.

Nate held the wire up to the light and bent the tip into an L shape. He made another bend about eighteen inches from the L. After checking the walks for passersby — there were none — he glanced down the street to where his Jeep was parked. He couldn’t see Haley in the passenger side because of the shadows, but she was not flashing the lights. Quickly, he stood and jammed the pointed tip of the wire through the rubber seal on the back window. He had to work the wire up and down until the pointed tip found the edge of the glass in the channel. With a shove and twist, the wire poked through the seal on the inside and he could see it on the other side of the glass.

The rubber seal squeaked as he raised the butt end of the wire and shoved it farther into the back compartment. No alarms went off. He pushed it until it reached the rear bend, then farther raised the back end. The L-tip bit down into the fabric, and he pulled the wire from left to right, drawing back the blanket, revealing the black heavy barrel of a rifle. He pulled it back far enough to see the bipod, legs folded, mounted to the undercarriage of the front stock and the blunt snout of the scope.

A Barrett M82A1M .50 sniper rifle, all thirty pounds’ worth. It shot 690- to 750-grain .50 caliber Browning machine-gun cartridges, each nearly five inches long. The murder weapon. Just as he’d guessed.

Nate tossed the crowbar and the wire back into the rear floor well and brushed snowflakes from his coat and sleeves before he climbed inside and shut the door.

“It’s them,” he said, describing the find.

“What if they’re staying for the night?” she asked. “I mean, it’s a hotel.”

“Then we wait until morning,” he said.

“I’m getting cold. It’s snowing.”

“Haley …”

“I know, I know.”

After twenty minutes, he noticed she was hugging herself and trembling from the cold. She’d obviously chosen not to complain, and he appreciated it, and he reached forward and started the motor. It took a while before dust-smelling heat — it was the first time he’d had to turn on the heat since winter — poured through the vents.

“Thank you,” she said.

The snow came straight down and had coated the streets and cars with a clean white inch. Falling snow haloed around the lampposts and turned pink in the neon red light from the Silver Dollar Bar sign. Nate checked the time and was surprised to see it was only 8:15. The tragic day they’d had, the stillness, the dark streets, and the smothering snowfall made it seem much later.

Haley said, “Maybe we could stay inside? Separate rooms, of course.”

Nate grunted. He liked the soft, husky tone of her voice. Despite what he’d told her earlier about talking, he found her voice attractive. Although she’d been sitting next to him nearly all day, he could feel her presence very strongly at that moment. He was tuned in to her every movement, every breath. Her dark hair shined blue with diffused ambient light from outside, like Superman in the comics. In the warm air of the heater, he could also catch a light whiff of her scent.

As the cab warmed up she had her eyes fixed on the windshield but said, “Gabriel told me about your loss. About your girlfriend getting killed.”

“She was more than that,” he said.

“You know what I mean. It must have been horrible.”

“It was. It is.”

“You don’t want to talk about it, right?”

“Right.”

After a moment, she said, “So we’ve both lost the people closest to us. What are the chances of that?”

He didn’t reply. But he found it more than interesting that she was thinking of the two of them that way. He’d been thinking the same thing but keeping it at bay because he was frightened of the possibilities.

“I’d like to get some sleep,” she said softly, “but I’m afraid if I close my eyes I’ll see Oscar’s body again. I’ll never be able to get that image out of my mind for the rest of my life.”

He nodded. “I’ve seen a lot of violent death. If you spend a lot of time in the natural world, there’s little else. I know there are wild animals that die of old age, but I’ve rarely seen one. There’s a point where you get like a hunter or a farmer — or a doctor — and you look at it almost clinically. Bullets are just chunks of metal thrown really fast through the air, and when they hit soft flesh they do terrible damage. You get used to it. But when it happens to a friend who was talking to you just a minute before — he’s there and then he isn’t, and all that’s left is meat — you never get used to that.”

He felt her eyes on him and almost didn’t want to look over.

“Your secret,” she asked. “You told Oscar, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“But no one else?”

“No, although a friend named Large Merle figured it out. He’s no longer with us. I tried to tell a good man I know, a game warden in Wyoming, but he didn’t want to hear it.”

She said, “Maybe I do.”

“Maybe you don’t,” he said, turning on the wipers to clear the windshield of snow that melted on contact.

“Not that it seems to matter,” she said. “Everybody you come in contact with seems to wind up ‘no longer with us.’”

Nate grimaced and closed his eyes for a moment. “You don’t need to remind me,” he said, thinking of Joe and Marybeth. Hoping they’d see and understand his message to them to get away fast. Hoping they were in the process of packing bags that very minute. Wondering if he shouldn’t step out from his self-imposed communications blackout and make an unsecured phone call to emphasize his concern.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That came out wrong. I didn’t mean …”

He grunted again and waved her words away with his hand.

She said, “I meant you might as well tell me, because the bad guys will think you did, anyway, and they’ll try to kill me, too.”

He looked over at her as if seeing her for the first time. God, she was lovely. She didn’t deserve to know him, he thought. She didn’t deserve to get hurt.

He said, “If I do—”

She cut him off. “Like I said, it doesn’t matter. So you might as well. Lord knows, we seem to have the time.” He liked the way she pronounced time as “tahm.”

After pausing for a minute, he said, “It’s very close to me right now. Telling Oscar opened it all up like it was yesterday. All these years, I’ve struggled to keep it somewhere in the back of my brain, in the reptile part. But I spent too many years alone, with too much time to fight it back constantly. So at times, it crawled over the wall and haunted me, and after I’d chased it back I’d sit around for days and consider all the implications. In a strange way, I think Nemecek has the same problem. I dealt with it by staying out of the world and doing what good I could do. Trying to make up for what I did in a very small way, although I know it isn’t possible. I kind of adopted this family named the Picketts, and I swore I’d protect them. I have, up until now. But I’m afraid of what could happen to them. Their only crime is trusting me.”

She shook her head sadly, and asked, “How does Nemecek deal with it?”

“By making me go away,” Nate said. “And everybody who knows or might know. That’s one of the tragedies about what happened to Cohen and the rest back in Idaho. They didn’t know, but he thought they might.”

She said, “Could you go to someone? Maybe someone in the government who would be sympathetic? Or maybe a reporter?”

“No,” Nate said. “I’ve given it a lot of thought over the years, but I don’t know who I can trust. Something has happened to make Nemecek double down, to want to take care of his problem: me. Until I know what caused him to come out from under his rock, I don’t know who I can trust.”

“You can trust me,” she said.

“Can I?”

“Your arrogance is off-putting,” she said, an edge creeping into her voice. “You ask that question but you assume I should trust you with my life. Maybe you’ve spent too much damn time alone.”

He turned to her, amazed. “Maybe I have.”

Then he noted movement in his peripheral vision and sat up straight.

“What?” she asked.

Through the wet-streaked windshield undulating with moisture, he could see two men emerge from the side entrance of the Wort. Even without seeing their features clearly, he could tell by their bearing and presence they were heading for the Tahoe. They were both tall and without paunches, and they moved with an athletic grace not entirely affected by alcohol. One wore a battered straw cowboy hat and the other a ubiquitous billed trucker cap, as if they’d gone to a western store and said, “I want to look like a local yokel.” Cowboy Hat loped down the wood sidewalk and extended his hand toward the car. At that moment, the interior lights of the SUV came on as he keyed a remote.

“Buckle up,” he said.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “We’re gonna do this, aren’t we?”

Nate reached over and grasped her hand. “Last chance to get out. This could get ugly.”

“Like I haven’t seen ugly,” she said.

20

Nate sat still in the running Jeep in the alleyway while the Tahoe backed out onto Glenwood. When he realized the SUV would be coming in his direction, he slipped the gearshift into reverse and backed as fast as he could without losing control and clipping the outside walls of the brick buildings on both sides. At the far end of the alley, he stopped.

“Get down,” he said urgently, as the Tahoe swung into the street and its headlights flashed on.

She hesitated for a half second until he reached over toward her, then obeyed. Their heads touched each other in the space between the two seats, and a wash of light from the headlamps of the Tahoe flashed through the cab.

He waited for a beat and said, “Okay.”

When he looked up, the Tahoe was gone.

He kept his lights off as he backed the rest of the way down the alley, and when his tires hit the pavement of the next cross-street he cranked on the wheel so they were pointed left.

Assuming the Tahoe driven by Cowboy Hat was going north on Cache Street, he turned right onto Millward, which ran parallel to Cache through a residential neighborhood. As he crossed Gill Avenue, Nate gestured up the empty street to Haley, who looked out her passenger window.

“We should see them now,” he said.

And they did. The white Tahoe cruised through the intersection headed north and disappeared from view.

Nate gunned his Jeep, keeping up with the Tahoe a block to his right. He turned right again on Mercill and paused until the Tahoe crossed their path and continued north.

He gave it a count of fifteen before nosing the Jeep up Mercill to turn left and give chase.

She said, “Nate — your lights?”

Thinking he didn’t realize they were off.

“Haley,” he hissed, “the thing about talking.”

She blew out an angry stream of air.

“But if the cops see us without our lights on …”

“There are no cops,” he said impatiently. “They’re all over the pass in Idaho, helping out the sheriff over there with a murder. That’s how these small towns work.”

“Oh. Clever on your part.”

“Now, please, no more fucking help or advice.”

She reached up and drew her closed fingers over her mouth in a zipping motion.

Nate and Haley retraced their earlier route toward the airport, although this time there was a single pair of distant taillights a half mile ahead of them on the road. Nate still drove with his lights out, faster than he should.

The heavy snowfall blanked out the stars and moon and made the night landscape two-tone: black above and dark purple below. He used the faint double set of tire tracks ahead to follow, as well as the distant taillights. He could see nothing in between.

“Watch for wildlife on the road,” Nate said to Haley. “Warn me if you see anything.”

The route from Jackson toward Grand Teton National Park was famous for grazing bison and elk alongside the two-lane highway.

“Okay,” she said, tentative. He knew she was frightened. He didn’t blame her. He gently pressed harder on the accelerator, beginning a long process of closing the gap between the Tahoe and the Jeep in the dark.

Jackson Hole airport was on their left. It was low-slung and obscured by the darkness and the storm, but several red warning lights shone through the snowfall. After they passed it, the darkness descended on them further. There were no houses and no lights. They were officially in Grand Teton National Park, headed north.

He’d been on the road many times before and tried to recall the landscape, the features, and the turns. The Gros Ventre Range was to his right, the Snake River Valley to his left, and beyond the river the jagged sawtooths of the Teton Range. The highway was on a flat bench skirting the river valley.

Nate guessed the Tahoe would continue to Moran Junction, then take U.S. 26/287 over Togwotee Pass via Dubois and on to the Bighorn Mountains.

Before the road crossed the river and wound through pockets of timber, there was a long straightaway of three to five miles. Long enough to make sure there was no one coming, or behind them. Long enough, if he gunned it, to make his move. He didn’t want them to leave the park and get as far as the junction, where the route over the mountains became narrow and heavily wooded. Plus, it would likely be snowing harder.

Nate pried the fingers of his right hand from the wheel and reached across his body for the grip of his .500. He drew it out of the shoulder holster and laid it across his lap.

He said to Haley: “Hold on, roll down your window, keep your eyes open, and duck when I tell you.”

He could tell she wanted to question him, but she swallowed her pride and cranked down the window. Cold air and whirling snow filled the cab.

“Here we go,” he said, flooring it. His rear tires fishtailed slightly, then gripped through the snow to the asphalt, and they shot forward.

The taillights ahead of them started to widen. His engine howled, but he doubted Cowboy Hat and Trucker Cap would hear him coming before he was on top of them. In his peripheral vision, he saw Haley dig back in her seat and grasp the handhold on the dashboard as if it would cushion an impact.

But just twenty feet before he plowed into the back of the Tahoe— he could suddenly see the smudge of white from its back hatch — Nate hit his headlights, clicked them to bright, and swung his Jeep to the left into the oncoming lane.

The brake lights on the Tahoe flashed quickly — no doubt Cowboy Hat was temporarily blinded — and Nate roared up beside the SUV so they were rolling down the road side by side.

“Duck!” he yelled to Haley.

She went down.

He extended his revolver straight out away from his body, aimed at the Tahoe, and looked over.

Cowboy Hat turned his face to him as well. He was blinking from the unexpected blast of light and his mouth was slightly open, as if he was about to say something. Nate saw a face that was chiseled by bone and fashionably stubbled. His view within the scope trembled crazily, but when the crosshairs paused for a half second on a spot between the brim of the cowboy hat and the man’s left eye, he squeezed the trigger. The roar of the gunshot was deafening inside the cab of the Jeep, and a four-foot ball of orange flame leapt between the two vehicles.

And just as suddenly, the Tahoe dropped away.

“Oh my God!” Haley screamed into her arms.

“Stay down.”

Nate pumped his brakes to slow the Jeep and prevent an icy skid in the snow, while at the same time noting the sweep of errant headlights in his rearview mirror as the Tahoe left the road.

After a three-point turn, Nate sped back to the scene. He found the Tahoe on its side in the sloped bottom of a sagebrush-covered swale, the top tires spinning in the air and the moist ground churned up behind it. Nate switched the Jeep into four-wheel drive and drove through the fresh gaping hole in the right-of-way fence, his headlights on the underside of the Tahoe. There was no movement from inside. The rear hatch had popped open in the rollover, and the gear bags, the suitcases, the plastic tubs, and the unsheathed Barrett rifle were slung across the snow.

He drove around the vehicle until his lights framed the dented hood. The inside of the front windshield of the Tahoe gleamed bright red, as if it had been painted with a large bucket of blood. He hoped the slug hadn’t taken off Trucker Hat’s head as well.

Keeping his lights on the Tahoe, Nate stomped on his emergency brake and leapt outside the Jeep with his weapon in front of him. Snow stung his eyes and gathered on his coat and hair. He could smell the sharp odor of leaking gasoline mixed with the sweet smell of crushed sagebrush.

As he approached the Tahoe, he heard a thump from inside, and suddenly there was a heavy-soled footprint in the blood on the inside of the windshield. Then another thump, and another footprint. A football-sized star of cracks appeared on the glass. He waited.

It took two minutes for Trucker Cap to kick his way outside.

Trucker Cap crawled out into the snow on his hands and knees. His face and clothing were covered in blood, and it took him a few seconds to realize headlights were on him, and that Nate stood between the headlights of the Jeep with his gun out.

“Oh, fuck me,” Trucker Cap said. “I didn’t think I’d ever get out of there. His head just … blew up.”

Nate kept his eyes on Trucker Cap as he called over his shoulder, “Stay down, Haley.”

From behind him, he heard her say indignantly, “I’m not a dog.”

He ignored her and gestured with the muzzle of his gun toward Trucker Cap. “Don’t move.”

“Are you the guy?” Trucker Cap asked. His voice was thick with shock as he stumbled to his feet. “Are you the guy who did this?”

Nate could see his bright teeth through the gore on his face.

“I told you not to move,” Nate said, and lowered his revolver and blew Trucker Cap’s right knee away. The man shrieked and fell straight down in a heap, moaning and writhing in the snow.

“You’re going to answer a couple of questions,” Nate said, approaching the wounded man, hoping Haley had obeyed and wasn’t watching what was going to happen from the Jeep behind him. “I’m not asking you to answer questions,” he said. “I’m telling you what’s going to happen.”

Trucker Cap groaned from pain and rolled to his back. He grasped his shattered knee with both hands, and blood pulsed out from between his fingers.

“You should have known this was coming when you went after my friends,” Nate said.

Nate thought of what Haley had said earlier: Like I haven’t seen ugly.

He quickly closed the gap to the man and rolled him over with his boot. As he did, Trucker Cap’s jacket hiked up and Nate saw the grip of a .45 Heckler & Koch semiauto tucked into this belt. He snatched it out and tossed it over the top of the Tahoe.

“Any more weapons?”

“God, no,” Trucker Cap moaned. His eyes were closed tightly.

Nate dropped to one knee next to Trucker Cap and patted the man down with his free hand through his clothes. His hand came away sticky with blood, and he wiped it clean in the snow before reaching back and gripping Trucker Cap’s left ear. He gave it a vicious twist, and the man’s eyes shot open.

“I’m going to bleed out,” the man said.

“And what’s the downside?” Nate asked. Then: “Three things, or I rip your ear off.”

Trucker Cap’s eyes narrowed on Nate’s face.

“One: how many operatives were on your team? Two: why is Nemecek coming after me now?”

Trucker Cap’s mouth twisted into a defiant leer. “Why should I tell you? I heard what you did over there, you fucking traitor. When he gave us a chance to come after you, we jumped on it, you son-of-a-bitch.”

Nate ripped his ear off and tossed it over his shoulder like an apple core. Trucker Cap howled, and Nate waited for the man to catch his breath. While he did, he reached across the man’s face and grasped his other ear.

Nate said, “Everything Nemecek told you is wrong, but it doesn’t surprise me, and I don’t have the time or inclination to convince you otherwise. But now I know how he convinced good men to go rogue with him. Now back to the three things….”

Trucker Cap said, “But you only asked two.”

“Oh,” Nate said, “the third. I want you to make a call when we’re done here. If you do exactly what I say, you might survive this. If you don’t, I’m going to pull you apart with my bare hands until you’re begging me to kill you. Got that?”

Nate became aware that Haley must have watched, because behind him he could hear her sobbing.

21

At the same time, 360 miles to the east, Marybeth Pickett left her counter at the library, walked back behind the new acquisitions display to the business office, and picked up the hand microphone and made an announcement: “The library will close in ten minutes.”

As she cradled the mic, her own voice echoed through the near-empty building and sounded severe and tinny. The acoustics in the old building were awful. To complete the protocol for closing the building, she doused the lights and quickly turned them back on so patrons who were wrapped up in whatever they were doing — or wearing earbuds — would get the word. It was 8:50 p.m.

She didn’t like closing the building at night and wished she hadn’t made a deal with the other senior librarian to switch shifts. Part of the negotiations for coming back to work was her insistence that her shift conclude by three so she could be home when the girls got out of school. But once a month or so, she traded shifts for the sole reason of maintaining a good working relationship with her colleagues.

Both Lucy and April were at home — they’d sent texts asking if they could heat up some frozen pizza — and Joe was still out in the field and hadn’t communicated his whereabouts or when he’d be getting back to their house on Bighorn Road. She was anxious to hear from him how the multiple investigations were going. Three homicides and three missing-persons cases within the span of a week had unnerved every local she’d talked with. Things like that didn’t happen here, she knew, and never all at once. Although someone driving through the town of Saddlestring would see a sleepy community hugging the banks of the Twelve Sleep River as winter approached, they would have no idea that the people who lived there were filled with anxiety and it felt on the streets and in the shops like the wheels were coming off the place. The weekly Saddlestring Roundup had a story in it just that day featuring residents who said they were openly carrying weapons and locking their doors at night for the first time in their lives.

The pressure growing on Sheriff Kyle McLanahan to restore order was immense and more than a little unreasonable, she thought. Locals directed a hefty part of their fear and frustration toward him, and talked about the incompetence of the department. Several of the small business leaders who gathered for morning coffee at the Burg-O-Pardner — Marybeth’s former clients who were struggling in the down economy and barely holding on as it was — discussed circulating a recall petition for McLanahan if he somehow won reelection. Although she’d never liked McLanahan and wanted him to lose, Marybeth thought most of the criticism recently to be over the top and unfair. Though, she thought, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.

The old county library was a wholly different place at night, Marybeth thought. It was an original Carnegie library built in the 1920s, and added on to. Outside, the classical Greek architecture, columns, and scrollwork were impressive in the floodlights that shone back on it. But inside, the high ceilings and corners weren’t lit well, and sounds carried in odd ways, like her announcement had. It was too cool in the winter and too warm in the summer, and the ancient boiler sometimes shuddered with enough force to rattle the windows and scare children in the children’s section. At night, the original hardwood floor produced moans and squeaks she never heard in the daytime. The layout of the building was outmoded and crowded, with high shelving that prevented her from seeing who was at the study tables or reading area in the back of the building from her counter.

Outside, clouds had been drawn over the moon and stars. She could see from the wet windows it was spitting snow. The valley was due for the first serious winter storm of the season, and she hoped it didn’t roll in until later that night, after she was home safely. After Joe was home safely. The closeness outside and the water-streaked windows added to the overall gloom of the building — and her mood.

She listened for the sounds of books being snapped shut or patrons gathering up their possessions on their way out, but it was quiet inside. Marybeth walked over to a side window and looked at the parking lot. There was only one car besides her own — a dark new-model crossover she didn’t recognize. So there was at least one person still in the building, maybe more.

Marybeth usually noted and greeted each patron as they entered, but she’d been busy all night with library work as well as her own project. At the time the patron entered, she guessed, she’d been entranced in reading accounts of the murder in Colorado Springs on the Internet on the website of the Colorado Springs Gazette. About the unidentified victim found in Nate Romanowski’s father’s home. According to the sheriff, there were no suspects yet, but they were hoping the analysis on the forensic evidence obtained might shed light on the identity of the victim or the killer. Neighbors were quoted saying what neighbors always said, that Gordon Romanowski was a friendly man who kept to himself and would never be capable of such an act, as far as they knew.

She was curious about Nate’s father. She wondered what he looked like and how he’d raised such a son. Nate himself had rarely mentioned his family, and had made only one passing reference to his father years ago that she could recall. He’d said, after observing Joe with his daughters, “So that’s how it’s done.”

She was also drawn to a separate story on the newspaper website that appeared unrelated to the body found in the Romanowski home but that set off alarm bells within her: two unidentified male victims had been found as the result of a rollover on Pikes Peak Road. Unrelated but similar in Marybeth’s mind to the “accident” in Montana years before involving a vehicle remarkably similar to Nate’s Jeep.

She checked the clock behind her and went back, once again, into the business office. “The library will close in five minutes,” she said, and again blinked the lights.

She hoped the driver of the crossover would appear and go out into the lot for his car. Marybeth didn’t enjoy going back into the library to roust patrons, because she never knew what she’d find. Once, it was a couple of teenagers she knew making out under a study table, partially undressed. Sometimes it was a homeless old man sleeping in one of the lounge chairs in the reading area and she’d had to wake him up. Once, she’d found an ancient sleeping ranch hand with his sweat-stained cowboy hat lowered over his face. When she awakened him, he jumped up wild-eyed and hollered: “Close the damned gate, Charlie! The fucking horses are getting out!”

There was a creak from the shadows beyond the stacks, and she looked up but could see no one.

“Hello?” she asked.

There was no response.

“Oh, please,” she whispered, “it’s time to go.”

There were myths that the old library building was haunted, but she didn’t believe in ghosts. Lucy told her the library was now a stop on the Halloween night “Ghosts of Saddlestring” tour the chamber of commerce sponsored. According to Lucy, the story recounted on the tour by Stovepipe — the county court bailiff who volunteered to lead the ghost tours — was about a workman who’d died from an accident while the building was under construction. Because the man who died was an ornery Swede and the foreman a resentful Norwegian, the body was left where it lay and the walls were built up around it. Now, according to Lucy via Stovepipe, passersby sometimes heard Swedish wailing from inside the library late at night. Marybeth had laughed off the story at the time and said, “Swedish wailing? How would they know?”

But now she thought about it. And felt foolish for doing so.

Then she heard another creak from the stacks of books.

She took a deep breath and walked out from behind the counter. She’d need to find whoever was still inside the building.

Several times over the last year, Joe had driven into town and waited for her to come outside after the late shift. She’d told him it wasn’t necessary. Tonight, though, she wished he was out there.

Before leaving the desk, she retrieved her purse from under the counter. Clutching her cell phone in one hand and a small container of pepper spray Joe had pressed on her years before in the other, she went to find the last remaining patron. Joe had once tried to talk her into carrying a gun in her purse and she’d disagreed with him, saying it was dangerous and unnecessary. Now, though …

She assumed the last remaining patron would be at the tables. But there was no one in the study area or reading lounge. On the way to the back she’d glanced down the aisles between shelves of books and hadn’t seen anyone loitering. She pushed open the door to the women’s restroom and called, “Hello?” No response. She leaned in, glanced for shoes beneath the stalls, shut the lights out, and did the same with the men’s. Both were empty.

Marybeth took a deep breath and walked from one side of the building to the other, methodically checking each aisle of shelves for the owner of the vehicle outside. She speculated that perhaps the driver wasn’t even in the library — that he or she had simply parked his or her car in a public lot and walked elsewhere or was picked up. It seemed unlikely, though, since there were no retail stores open in the neighborhood and the Stockman’s Bar was four blocks away, with plenty of parking available on the street.

There was no one in the aisles.

As she walked back up to the front counter, she defied her inner librarian and called out, “Is anybody still in the library? I’m ready to turn out the lights and lock up.” Her voice sounded weak to her. “Hello? Is anyone here?”

From the front of the building, she heard a man clear his throat.

She froze for a moment, squeezing hard on both the phone and the pepper spray. At least she thought she’d heard a man. But it might be that damned boiler….

He stood at the checkout counter with his back to her as she approached. The man was tall, with light hair, wide shoulders, and long legs. He wore a heavy brown suede leather jacket that looked expensive.

“May I help you?” she asked. “We need to close up the building.”

The man swiveled his head toward her, and she instantly felt a chill. He was pale, with sharp, close-set blue eyes and high cheekbones that looked sculpted. What was striking about him were his full red lips. His mouth was set in a slight, bemused smile.

“I think you can,” he said softly. There was a twinge of a Southern accent. He held up a stack of three or four books.

She bustled around the end of the counter, putting it between them. She felt his eyes on her as she casually moved the hand with the pepper spray behind her back. As she bent over to sit in her chair and slid close to the counter, she placed the phone on her desk and the spray can on her lap where he wouldn’t be able to see it. She tried not to appear rattled.

“I’d like to check these out,” he said. “But I can’t seem to find my library card.”

“I can’t issue you a new one right now,” she said, “but we can have it done tomorrow for a five-dollar replacement fee.”

“Five dollars?” he asked, amused. “That’s just highway robbery.”

She looked up at him. He seemed to be playing with her, and she tried to make him know she wasn’t entertained. “You can check out the books with a temporary voucher, provided you’re a county resident. But you’ll need to find your card or get a new one as soon as possible.”

“Or what happens to me?” he asked, smiling with his mouth.

“What happens to you?” she repeated.

“Yeah. Do I get thrown in jail? Does the sheriff come to my house and lock me up?”

She felt the hairs prick up on the back of her neck and her forearms as she said, “No. You can’t check out any more books.”

“What if these are the only books I’ll ever need? Then what?”

She looked back at him, exasperated. “I really don’t have time for this,” she said. “We need to close the library.”

She reached out for the three books, and he handed them to her. As she took them, he kept a grip on them for a second, then released. His smile never wavered.

“Please,” she said.

She quickly scanned them. The Art of War by Sun Tzu, The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, and Falconry and Hawking by Phillip Glasier. She paused before she scanned the last book.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

“No.”

She’d seen a copy of the book before. Nate had given it to her daughter Sheridan when she first showed interest in becoming an apprentice.

“It’s kind of dated,” he said, “but the basic foundation hasn’t changed for thousands of years. So how dated can it really be?”

“I have no idea,” she said, scanning the book. She had trouble meeting his eyes again. How could that book be a coincidence? She turned to the side to face her computer monitor.

“What’s your name, please?” she asked, calling up the database of county residents who had library cards.

“Bob White,” he said, chuckling. “Just like the bird.”

She entered the name. “There’s a Randall White and an Irene White but no Bob. Do you go by Randall?”

“I’m surprised,” he said, but his tone wasn’t. He said, “There must be some kind of mistake.”

She turned back to him and shrugged.

“Maybe you can try again,” he said. “Maybe you entered the wrong name.”

“I don’t think I did.”

“Try it again,” he said. “Just for grins.”

She didn’t want to but had no good reason to refuse other than reluctance to turn her back on him again. But if it would move things along and get him out of there …

While she tapped the keys he said, “So where is your husband these days? Still out investigating?” The last word simmered with sarcasm and she mistyped “W-h-i-t-e” and had to delete and rekey. It wasn’t unusual for patrons to ask about Joe. The location of the game warden was valuable information in a hunting and fishing community. But the question was tinged with malice, and was too familiar from someone she’d never met.

“No, he’s on his way here now,” she lied.

“He is, is he?” he chuckled. He obviously didn’t believe her, and she felt her neck flush.

Then: “What about your kids? Are they home?”

A chill rolled through her. She couldn’t type. She swiveled in her chair and stared at him.

“Why are you asking about my family?” she whispered.

“I guess I’m just neighborly. I’m a neighborly guy.”

“You need to leave,” she said, dropping her right hand below the counter and gripping the pepper spray. “You have no idea who you’re talking to. You do not talk about my family,” she said, her eyes flashing.

“Who are you?” she asked, terrified that she already knew.

“Bob White. Like the bird. I already told you that.”

“I could call nine-one-one right now,” she said.

He nodded. “Yes, you could, Marybeth. And we could both wait here in embarrassed silence until they arrived.”

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. When he used her name, she felt as if she’d been slapped.

“Your name tag,” he said, gesturing toward her breast.

She felt her face flush.

“What I’m really interested in,” he said, leaning forward on the counter so his face was two feet away, “is falconry. They call it the sport of kings, you know. It’s an ancient art with almost religious overtones.” He tapped the book as he talked. “I understand you’re acquainted with a master falconer. I’d love to talk with him and, you know, pick his brain.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

He shook his head slightly, as if disappointed.

“Please,” she said, her mouth trembling. “Just leave.”

A low hum suddenly came from the breast pocket of his leather jacket, and she saw a split-second look of irritation in his eyes. He rose off the counter and pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked the caller ID.

He stepped back away from the counter until he was in an aisle of shelving. Close enough to keep an eye on her but far enough not to be overheard. Or so he thought. Due to the strange acoustics in the building, she could clearly hear him when he raised the phone to his mouth and said, “Yes?”

Beneath the counter, out of his view, Marybeth reached down and opened her own phone. She kept her chin and eyes up, though, so he couldn’t sense what she was doing. Opening her phone, she opened up her “favorites” screen. Joe’s number was at the top, and she pressed send. Quickly, and without looking down, she keyed the speaker button and turned down the volume of his voice message. It was good to hear his recorded voice, even briefly, before she dialed it down. When the prompt came to leave a message — she had the cadence memorized and knew without hearing it — she increased the volume all the way. She was now recording on his phone, wherever it was. And he’d hear what happened in the library if anything did.

The man who called himself Bob White listened to his phone without responding. But even at that distance and in the poor light, she could see him stiffen.

“But not our target?” His voice was clipped and angry.

Then: “I don’t care. We can talk about it when you get here.”

After a minute more of holding the phone up to his ear, the man closed it without another word and dropped it into his pocket. He hesitated for a moment, then strode back toward her out of the shadows. His head was tilted slightly forward, and his eyes pierced into her from under his brow. She felt her heart beat faster.

He turned sharply toward the door to the parking lot, as if changing his mind from his original intention. Over his shoulder, he said, “You can keep the books. I’ve already read them.”

He walked toward the doors swiftly, retrieving his phone and raising it to his face. Before he pushed his way out, he covered the speaker and looked back over his shoulder.

“It was a real pleasure to meet you, Marybeth Pickett,” he said through clenched teeth. “I look forward to the next time.”

And he was gone.

She waited until he was clear of the vestibule before running to the doors herself and throwing the locks. Even though she was sure she’d attended to all of them, she double-checked each. Through the glass, she could see him backing out of his space and turning toward the exit onto Main Street.

She was shaking so badly she had to concentrate to punch the three numbers on the handset back at her desk. When Wendy, the dispatcher, answered, Marybeth said, “This is Marybeth at the library. A man was just here….”

And after she hung up, she picked up her cell phone and said, “Joe, I hope you heard that. It was him. Get home now. I’m calling the girls to tell them to lock everything up and stay inside. Joe, he knows too much about us.”

22

Joe Pickett didn’t receive the message, because at 9:30 he was miles away from the highway, on the side of a mountain, grinding his departmental pickup down a brutal and narrow two-track in the falling snow. He was looking for an abandoned line shack deep in the timber that might or might not contain the remains of Alice Thunder. By the time he neared the shack, he was quietly fuming.

Heavy wet snowflakes shot through the beams of his headlights like meteors. Luckily, the road was knuckled with protruding rocks so the traction on his tires was sound, but they made for painfully slow progress and a ride similar to being caught inside a tumbling clothes dryer.

“We’re getting closer,” Luke Brueggemann said, the GPS unit glowing in his lap. “That is, if those hunters who found the body gave the sheriff the right coordinates.”

Joe leaned forward and tried to see the sky through the top of the windshield. “I don’t like this snow right now,” he said. “We’ve got to get in, check out that line shack, and get out. I don’t want to get stuck back here on the dark side of the moon.”

“I think I’ve heard that story,” Brueggemann said, grinning.

“There’s not much funny about it.”

“It’s kind of a legend among the trainers,” Brueggemann said, referring to the time Joe had been handcuffed to his steering wheel by a violator, who escaped during a blizzard. “In fact, there’s probably more case studies of things you’ve gotten into than any other game warden.”

“Is that so?” Joe said, not knowing whether to be angry or impressed.

“Seems that way.”

“How far until we reach the line shack?”

Brueggemann held the GPS up and traced the contours on the screen. “A mile, maybe.”

“Good. I’ve got a lot of patience, but I’m just about ready to call Cheyenne and ask them to cut us loose from this investigation. I’ve never done that before, but we’re doing nothing out here except burning fuel and calories.”

“So you don’t think we’ll find her body?”

“Look around us,” Joe said. “We’re forty miles from the res. Do you really think a nice middle-aged lady like Alice Thunder would end up here?”

“I don’t know her.”

“I do,” Joe said. “This is a wild-goose chase.”

“But we’re gonna check out the shack first, right?” Brueggemann asked.

“Of course. But first thing tomorrow morning — provided we can get out of here tonight — I’m calling Cheyenne.”

“Does that mean we’re going to get to do real game-warden stuff?” the trainee asked. “Like checking out hunters and finally visiting all those elk camps?”

For the past day and a half, they’d been assigned to Sheriff McLanahan through an agreement reached between the governor’s office and the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department. To both Joe Pickett’s and Sheriff McLanahan’s chagrin, County Attorney Dulcie Schalk had gone over the sheriff’s head and pulled together a multiagency effort that involved local, county, state, and federal law enforcement personnel. In addition to the state DCI and the Bureau of Indian Affairs investigators, Schalk had also commandeered state troopers and had borrowed deputies and investigators from adjoining counties, over the sheriff’s objections. But characteristically, McLanahan claimed credit for the effort to the Saddlestring Roundup and described it as “a show of force not seen since the Johnson County Range War.” Despite McLanahan’s frequent interviews with radio journalists and television stations from Billings to Casper and the impressive coordination effort spearheaded by Schalk, no progress had been made on either the three missing-persons cases or the triple homicide.

Because of Joe’s familiarity with the vast and empty corners of the county — and to keep him out of the way — McLanahan had assigned him the job of following up on far-flung anonymous tips and unsubstantiated sightings of Bad Bob Whiteplume, Alice Thunder, or Pam Kelly. All the leads had gone nowhere. Bad Bob was reportedly seen in Las Vegas and in the crowd of a Denver Nuggets basketball game. The Feds got those to follow up on. But when someone called in that they’d witnessed Bad Bob rappelling down the steep walls of Savage Run Canyon, it fell into Joe’s bailiwick. Joe and his trainee had driven as close to the rim of the canyon as they could and hiked the rest of the way, to find no evidence of Bad Bob or anybody else.

Pam Kelly had been reported lurking around the corrals of a neighboring ranch, but when Joe and Brueggemann got there, the mysterious person turned out to be a barmaid from the Stockman’s Bar. She explained haltingly that she was “moonlighting”—performing an erotic dance routine for three Mexican cowhands in the bunkhouse for money. They drove her back to her car.

The anonymous report from hunters said that they’d seen a body matching Alice Thunder’s description at a remote line shack on the other side of the Bighorn Mountains — for which they’d provided GPS coordinates — but it looked to be another dry hole.

For the past two nights, Joe hadn’t returned home until after ten. He’d barely seen Lucy or April. Each night, despite his exhaustion, he’d booted up his computer and checked the falconry website. There wasn’t a single entry on the kestrel thread. Nate seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. And for the first time he could recall, Marybeth hadn’t been able to provide any information from her legal and extralegal research into John Nemecek.

On the way up the mountain to check out the line shack, Luke Brueggemann tried to hide the fact that he was trading text messages with his girlfriend. He’d turn his shoulder to Joe to keep his phone out of view while pretending to be enthralled by something outside his passenger window while he tapped messages by feel.

“You’re not fooling me,” Joe had said as they neared the summit. Storm clouds from the north had marched across the sky and blacked out the stars and moon. “I can see the glow of your phone.”

“Sorry.”

“Luke, I’ve got teenage daughters. I know every texting trick in the book. I even know the one where you look right at me with a vacant expression on your face while you text under the table.”

Brueggemann looked away, obviously embarrassed. He said, “I told you, this is tough on her.”

“It’s going to get tougher,” Joe said, slowing the pickup, “because once we leave the highway you’ll lose your cell signal. We won’t even be able to use the radio for a while.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Consider it tough love,” Joe said. “For the both of you.”

Joe didn’t know the area well, because he rarely patrolled it. The mountainside had burned in a forest fire twenty-five years before, and the surface of the ground between the new six- to eight-foot pine trees was still littered with an almost impenetrable tangle of burned logs and upturned root pans. The slope was so crosshatched with debris even the elk steered clear of it, thus there were few elk hunters for Joe to check. And although the topo map he’d consulted showed several ancient logging trails through the mountainside, the first two trails they’d found were blocked by dozens of fallen trees.

The third, which of course was the most roundabout route to the abandoned line shack, was passable only because the hunters who’d reported the body had cleared it painstakingly with chainsaws.

“Less than a half mile,” Brueggemann said.

It was snowing hard enough that it stuck to the hood of the pickup and topped outstretched pine boughs like icing.

Joe said to Brueggemann, “The chance of there being a body way in here, and that body belonging to Alice, is slim to none. But that’s not the way we approach it. We approach this like a crime scene. We’re professionals, and we take our job seriously. Don’t touch or move anything. Be cautious, and keep your eyes open and your ears on.”

Brueggemann sat up straight and looked over at Joe, wide-eyed.

“When we get there, grab my gear bag from the back,” Joe said. “Find the camera. We may need to take some shots.”

After a beat Brueggemann said, “I gotta ask. What’s a line shack, anyway?”

Joe was surprised. “You really don’t know?”

“I guess not.”

Joe said, “Cowboys built them back when all of this was open range. It’s a shelter against sudden bad weather, or if the ranch hands got caught in the middle of nowhere toward dark. None of them are very fancy, and most of them are in bad shape these days. But they saved some lives back in the day, and we’ve found more than a few lost hunters in remote line shacks.”

“Ever find any bodies?” Brueggemann asked.

“Nope.”

They almost missed it. Joe was taking a slow rocky turn to the left through the trees when his headlights swept quickly across a dark box twenty yards into the timber.

“Any time now,” Brueggemann said, his eyes glued to the GPS.

“You’re a little late,” Joe said, reversing until the beams lit up the old structure.

The heavily falling snow didn’t obscure the fact that the line shack was a wreck. It was tiny — barely ten by ten feet — and made of ancient logs stained black with melting snow. The roof sagged, and there was no glass in the two rough-cut windows on either side of the gaping door. A dented black metal stovepipe jutted out of the roof at a haphazard angle.

“What a dump,” Brueggemann said.

“Yup,” Joe said, swinging out of the cab. He dug his green Game and Fish parka out from behind the bench seat. It had been back there, unused, for the last five months, and he shook the dust off. His twelve-gauge Remington WingMaster shotgun was behind the seat as well, but he decided to leave it. He reached inside the cab for the long black Maglite flashlight, which was jammed between the seats. He clicked it on and shined it toward the line shack. He choked the beam down so it peered into the open windows, but all he could see were interior log walls.

“I’ve got the camera,” Brueggemann said, tossing the evidence bag into the cab of the truck.

Joe took a step toward the line shack, then stopped. He turned and got his shotgun.

“You think you’re going to need that?” Brueggemann asked.

“Probably not.”

The snow crunched under their boots as they approached the line shack. Joe held the flashlight with his left hand and carried the shotgun in his right.

“Why a shotgun?” Brueggemann asked. “What’s wrong with your service pistol?”

“Nothing,” Joe said, “except I can’t hit a damned thing with it.”

Brueggemann chuckled. He said, “I knew that. I just wanted to hear you say it.”

“You’re starting to get on my nerves,” Joe said. “Now, get behind me.”

The heavy snow hushed the rumbling of the running motor of Joe’s pickup as he neared the front of the line shack. He swept the beam left to right and back again, covering the front of the structure as well as the roof and several feet to each side. Because of the snowfall, any boot prints that might have been there were hidden.

“Anybody home?” Joe asked, feeling more than a little silly.

He heard Brueggemann’s breath behind him, and was grateful he didn’t giggle.

As he got close to the line shack, still sweeping the light across the windows, he saw something that surprised him: a glimpse of brightly colored cloth on the cluttered dirt floor inside.

“There might be something,” he said over his shoulder.

“Really?” Brueggemann asked, surprised.

Rather than enter the sagging open door, Joe moved to the left to the broken-out window.

Joe took a deep breath of cold air and inhaled several large snowflakes that melted in the back of his sinus cavities. Then he stepped forward and thrust the Maglite through the window frame toward the floor, slowly moving it up and down the length of the body wrapped in a blanket. The beam swept across the partially exposed skull, the matted hair, the gaping eye sockets where the flesh had been eaten away by rodents and insects.

“Want to look?” Joe asked Brueggemann.

“Is it her?”

“Not exactly,” Joe said, stepping aside and handing his trainee the flashlight.

On the way out of the forest toward the highway, Luke Brueggemann said, “Jesus, who would do something like that? Wrap a dead deer in a blanket and leave it in a line shack? What in the hell could they have been thinking?”

Joe shrugged.

“That’s just sick, man,” the trainee said.

“It happens,” Joe said. “My guess is some hunter shot an extra deer than he had permits for, and decided to dump it. Why he’d wrap it in a fake Navajo blanket — I don’t know. I hate it when hunters waste a life and all that meat. It makes me furious. Luckily, it doesn’t happen very often.”

“I wish we could have found the bullet,” Brueggemann said. He’d watched Joe perform the necropsy with equal measures of curiosity and disgust. But because of the deteriorated condition of the carcass, the fatal wound couldn’t be determined. “I’d like to figure out who did that and ticket their ass.”

“We’ll never know unless someone fesses up,” Joe said. “Sometimes it takes years to solve a crime like that. But we’ve got the photos, and we’ll write up an incident report for the file. One of these days we may solve it. Someone talking in a bar, or telling the right person about it — that’s when we can cite them. And you’d be surprised how many of these miscreants show up and confess. Crimes against nature eat on some of these guys the way nothing else does.”

“It’s a puzzle,” Brueggemann said, withdrawing his cell phone and glancing at the screen.

“What’s even more of a puzzle,” Joe said, “is how those hunters saw a deer carcass in a blanket and thought it was Alice Thunder. There seems to be something strange in the air right now. The missing people and that triple homicide have everyone looking over their shoulders and seeing things that aren’t there, I think.”

When his trainee didn’t respond because he was concentrating on his phone, Joe said, “We’re still a few miles away from getting a signal.”

“I can wait.”

“You’ll have to.”

The snow had accumulated so quickly they couldn’t see their entry tracks in the rough two-track on the way out. The big rocks in the road made them pitch back and forth inside the cab like rag dolls.

“I’ll be glad to get back on asphalt,” Brueggemann said.

“Uh-oh,” Joe said, as his headlights lit up a dead tree that had fallen across the road in front of them, blocking their progress. Luckily, the tree didn’t look too large to push aside.

“When did that happen?” Brueggemann asked.

Joe said, “Heavy snow brings down those old dead trees. Try and push it out of the way. If that won’t work, I’ll get the saw out of the back.”

The trainee hesitated for a moment, as if preparing to argue, but apparently thought better of it. “It’ll just take a minute,” he said, pulling on leather gloves.

While Brueggemann walked toward the fallen tree, his back bathed in white headlights, Joe withdrew his own cell phone to check messages. No bars. He glanced to the bench seat and realized Brueggemann had absently left his there. Joe wondered if Brueggemann’s smart phone picked up a signal yet, and picked it up to check.

There was no signal yet, but the darkened screen hinted at the text thread underneath. Joe glanced up to make sure Brueggemann’s back was still to him — it was, as his trainee lifted the tree and walked it stiffly to the side — before tapping a key to light up the screen. Although Joe had no business looking at the extended text thread, he was curious. But the phone was locked and a password was required for access. He lowered the phone back to the seat, ashamed of his attempted spying.

Out on the road, Brueggemann stepped aside and brushed snow from his sleeves and signaled for Joe to drive forward. When he drew up alongside, Joe stopped for his trainee to crawl in. He noted that the first thing Brueggemann did when he swung inside was to immediately retrieve his cell phone from the seat and drop it in his breast pocket.

“Thank you,” Joe said.

“The pleasure is mine,” Brueggemann said sarcastically. “It’s snowing like a motherfu—” He caught himself before the curse came out. “Like crazy,” he said instead.

“It is,” Joe said. “But we’re not that far from the highway now, and we should be fine.”

“Late, though,” his trainee said, looking at his wristwatch. He seemed to be in a hurry to get back to his motel. Probably to talk to his girl. Joe wondered what her name was.

After being tumbled about the cab on the two-track, it felt like heaven to drive onto the snow-covered highway again, Joe thought. He turned right and began to climb toward the summit.

After shifting out of four-wheel-drive low, he snatched the mic from its cradle. They were now back in radio range. Since they were participating in the task force, the under-dash radio unit was still tuned to the mutual aid channel that included all the law enforcement agencies.

“This is GF-48,” Joe said. “We investigated the lead and it’s negative. We’re heading back to the barn now.”

“Roger that, GF-48,” the dispatcher said. The signal — and her voice — crackled with static. “I’ll inform the county sheriff’s department.”

“It was a dead mule deer wrapped in a blanket,” Joe said, and glanced to Brueggemann, who smiled.

“Roger that. A dead deer.”

“GF-48 out,” Joe said. As he leaned forward to cradle the mic, the dispatcher came back. “Joe, have you been in touch with your wife yet?”

Concerned, Joe said, “Negative. We just regained radio contact.”

“Better call her,” the dispatcher said.

“Right away.”

To Brueggemann, Joe asked, “Do we have cell service yet?”

The trainee looked at his phone and shook his head and said, “Must be the snow.”

There was an untracked foot of it on the summit of the mountain, and Joe used the reflections of the delineator posts to make sure he kept the pickup on the road. As they finally began to descend, he felt the vibration of an incoming message on his cell phone in his pocket. At the same time, Brueggemann’s cell phone chirped with received text messages.

As both men reached for their phones, the radio chatter increased in volume and was filled with distant voices.

Brueggemann reached forward to turn down the volume when Joe recognized the fast-clipped exchange of officers somewhere involved in a tense situation.

“Hold it,” Joe said to Brueggemann. “Something’s going on, and I want to hear what it is.”

They listened as Joe drove. One of the speakers identified himself as a Teton County sheriff’s deputy. The other was a Wyoming highway trooper. The third was the local dispatcher in Jackson Hole. Snatches of the conversation popped and crackled through the speakers of Joe’s pickup radio.

… One dead at the scene of the rollover …

… transporting a second victim now to Saint John’s …

… the vehicle is a Chevy Tahoe, Colorado plates, VIN number …

“Where’s Saint John’s?” Brueggemann asked Joe.

“Jackson,” Joe answered quickly, imploring his trainee to be quiet.

… need to alert the emergency room doctors that the victim is in bad shape … claims he was tortured and it sure as hell looks like it …

“Tortured!” Brueggemann yelped.

“Please,” Joe said, “I can’t hear.”

… The dead one at the scene appears to be male, late twenties to early thirties, no identification … massive head wound …

… The staff at Saint John’s has been informed….

… snowing like hell here … not sure if there are other victims around … can see tire tracks but no other vehicles …

… cannot send additional units because our personnel is currently across the border in Idaho …

… Idaho! We need them here….

… Teton Pass is closed because of the storm….

… We need an evidence tech on the scene ASAP. The snow is covering the tracks and we’re gonna lose the chance of figuring out what happened….

… Requesting once again any possible backup or assistance on the scene …

“Jesus,” Brueggemann said. “What do you think happened?”

Joe shook his head as if he didn’t have any idea, and raised his phone to listen to Marybeth’s message that had been left two hours before.

When he heard it, he felt his insides go ice cold. Despite the road conditions, he punched the accelerator.

“Jesus!” Brueggemann said. “What are you doing?”

“I’ve got to get home,” Joe said through clenched teeth.

23

Nine miles west of Dubois, after summiting and descending the Absaroka Mountains, Nate slowed his Jeep and turned right on an untracked dirt road that led to a wide ribbon of ink that serpentined through the snow. The inside of the cab smelled of burned dust from the heating vents, hot tears from Haley, and the musky congealing blood that covered his flesh and clothing. The grille of his Jeep was packed with wind-driven snow from the drive over, and melting rivulets coursed down his headlights.

He wheeled parallel to the bank of the Wind River and parked behind a thick stand of willows, concealing the location of the Jeep from anyone behind them on the highway. He cut the headlights before opening his door and swinging his legs out.

“Do you want me to keep the motor running and the heat on?” he asked Haley.

He couldn’t see her face well in the soft glow from the dome light. It had been nearly two hours since she’d spoken to or even looked at him. She’d spent the whole of the trip over Togwotee Pass staring out the front windows in unsettled silence, her head tilted slightly forward, her hair hanging down over her face. Her cheeks were wet with tears, but she’d rarely sobbed, as if she’d been too proud to make a sound and reveal herself. Instead, she gripped the safety bar across the dashboard as if holding on for dear life.

He’d spent the whole of the trip deconstructing what he’d done to Trucker Cap, and analyzing the information he’d tortured out of him.

“Haley …”

She mumbled something that was snatched away by the muscular flow of the river behind him.

“What?”

“I said I don’t give a fuck what you do, you fucking monster!” she shrieked, her mouth twisted into rage, her eyes wide and rimmed with red.

Nate leaned back on his heels and waited a full minute before walking to the back of the Jeep for his duffel bag. He left the engine running and said, “I told you not to watch.”

Falling snowflakes disappeared on contact with the icy surface of the river, leaving tiny one-ring disturbances. Curls of steam rose from the flow into the even colder air and vanished like ghosts. As Nate shed his shoulder holster and hung it over a willow branch, he heard a beaver slap its tail on the surface upriver and the gloop sound of the creature diving deep. What little filtered moonlight there was marked the sides of the current with accents of light blue.

His clothing crackled as he peeled it off, because blood had dried through to his skin. He tossed each item into the middle of the river so it would float downstream, undulating in the current and over rocks, ending up who knew where: the Fitzpatrick Wilderness Area, Crowheart, or back home on the Wind River Reservation. Maybe his wretched clothing would be trapped beneath the heavy ice for the winter, washing the blood away, diluting the dissolving blood and fluids with startlingly clean and cold mountain water.

Snowflakes landed on his bare skin like icy fly bites.

The river itself was so cold it burned his skin and made him gasp. He waded in above his knees until the current upset his balance and his feet slipped on the smooth tops of the river rocks and he sat backward and went under. The tumbled silence underneath was awesome.

For twenty long and silent seconds, he bounced along the riverbed on his back and butt, naked feet out ahead of him, arms out to the side, eyes closed. As the river cleansed his flesh and the cold numbed all feeling, he briefly forgot about the blood that flowed from ripping a man’s ears off, the muffled pop from twisting his victim’s nose sidewise until the nostrils looked up at his cheek, the dull, dry cracking sounds of fingers being snapped back one by one, the undignified screaming, the unholy crunch of shinbones being stove in.

And when he emerged from the Wind River howling and trembling and thirty yards from where he’d left his duffel bag of clean dry clothes upstream, he fought back the depraved and exhilarating sense of yarak that had engorged him until he’d have to summon it back again.

She was still staring at the snow-covered windshield when he climbed back into the Jeep. He’d found an old pair of jeans in his duffel as well as a dark green wool tactical sweater from the old days to wear. He closed the car door and sat in silence for a few minutes, letting the heat from the vents warm his body until his muscles stopped quivering.

Then he turned to her and swiftly reached out and with his right hand grasped her ear through her dark hair. At his touch, her hands fluttered briefly in her lap like wounded birds. He drew out his .500 with his left hand and pressed the gaping muzzle against the white flesh of her neck just below her jawbone.

“This is how it starts,” he said.

She still wouldn’t look at him, but her eyes welled with tears. She said, “Do whatever you have to do, Nate. Torture me like you tortured that man back there. I’m sure once you get started you’ll get me to say whatever you want me to say, but it won’t be true.”

“How did you hook up with Cohen?” he asked.

“You should believe me when I tell you he hooked up with me,” she said. “The man was relentless. Why would I throw my life away to go off in the middle of the mountains in Idaho and live like a hillbilly with a bunch of other men? There’s only one reason people do such things. It’s called love, Nate. Maybe you’ve read about it.”

He gripped her ear with more pressure and said, “Haley, the man back there told me there was a young and beautiful operator on the team. He didn’t know her name except by code. I’m thinking she was the one that got to Merle a month ago. I didn’t ask him to identify you in person, but now I want you to tell me something. Did you ever leave Camp Oscar?”

“I can’t believe you’re asking me this,” she said. He could tell she was trying hard not to let her lips tremble and betray her emotions. “If he said it was me, he was lying. He couldn’t even see me in the Jeep. The headlights were on him, and we never made eye contact.”

“Did you ever leave Camp Oscar?”

After a beat, she said, “Yes. And yes, it was two weeks ago.”

He increased the pressure but didn’t twist.

“My father is dying back in North Carolina,” she said. “I flew home to see him. Then I flew back.”

Nate said softly, “That would have been the third week of September?”

“Yes,” she said. “Right now I can’t think straight. Cohen took me to the airport on a Monday night….”

“September seventeenth,” Nate said.

“Okay. I got back Friday.”

“The twenty-first.”

“If you say so.”

“Merle was gutted on September twentieth,” Nate said. “So you had time to find him, get close, and murder him. Or did you just set him up so one of the operators could get to him?”

She blew out a quick, frustrated breath. More tears. “That whole week I was either at my parents’ house in Rocky Mount or at Nash General Hospital seeing my dad.”

She laughed bitterly. “I assured my dying father I knew what I was doing out here. That I’d found a good man and I was safe. That gave him some comfort, and I didn’t know I was lying at the time.”

She tried to turn her head toward Nate, but the grip on her ear prevented it.

She said, “I wasn’t in Wyoming. In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever even been here. If this is what it’s like, I never want to come back.”

“I never said Merle died in Wyoming.”

“Oscar told me. He knew because you contacted him. Think about it, Nate.”

Nate said, “I can check on that story pretty easily.”

“Do it,” she said, pleading. “Please do it. I flew from Idaho Falls to Salt Lake City and on to Raleigh, where my mom picked me up.”

“What airline?”

“Delta.”

“What flight number?”

“I have no fucking idea.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” he asked.

“Why should I?” she asked. “I guess I didn’t realize you planned to torture me. That you didn’t trust me.”

“Oscar told me you’d been there the whole time.”

“Oscar … must have forgotten,” she said. “It was before everything started to happen. Or maybe,” she said, a lick of flame reentering her tone, “maybe Oscar was in on it, too. Maybe you should drive back to Idaho and break his fingers and pull his goddamn ears off if you can find what’s left of his head.”

He released her ear and slipped his weapon back into the shoulder holster.

“I had to be sure,” he said, and turned back and put the Jeep into gear.

“Are you sure now?” she asked, then followed it with a sharp slap across his face. He flinched but didn’t retaliate.

“I think so,” he said.

Her words reminded him of his own father, and how he’d left him in Colorado Springs. Nate wondered where Gordo had taken his new family, his stepmother and two half sisters he barely knew. The thought flooded him with remorse for uprooting them, and he hoped someday he’d be able to make things right. Gordo had made him what he was, for better and worse. Nate no longer resented him for that, and he hoped to tell Gordo all was forgiven. Then Nate shook his head to clear the thought away. The task ahead of him left no room for sentimentality.

The lights of Dubois emerged through the snowfall ahead. It was a small, sleepy mountain town of barely a thousand people surrounded by closed guest ranches, hunting lodges, and working ranches, and rimmed by the Absaroka and Wind River Mountains.

Nate slowed before he reached the town limits, looking for activity ahead, a roadblock or law enforcement presence. He saw nothing unusual.

Finally, she said, “What else did you learn from that man back there in Jackson?”

“Enough,” Nate said. “The playing field isn’t close to even, but at least it’s not as stacked against us as it was before. Now I know there are more operators where Nemecek set up his headquarters.”

“How do you know he wasn’t lying?” she asked. “How do you know he wasn’t just telling you what you wanted to hear, or making something up you’d believe?”

“I know the difference,” Nate said. “He lied at first. He lied through all of his fingers being broken back. He was a tough guy.”

“What you did to him,” she said angrily, “it was awful. Savage.”

“I let him live,” Nate said. “I called the hospital with his phone when I could have let him bleed out or freeze. I could have finished him off. Now I’ve got a broken Special Forces operator out there who may someday come back at me.”

“But what you did to him …”

“Means to an end,” Nate said. “Torture works. It always has. That’s why they call it torture.”

“You looked like you were enjoying yourself.”

“I told you not to watch.”

“I finally turned away,” she said, “but by then I’d seen too much. In ten minutes I went from kind of trying to like you to hating your fucking miserable guts.”

He shrugged.

“That’s all you’re going to say?” she said, eyes flashing. “‘Means to an end’?”

“Look,” he said, “that guy back there was a Peregrine. I went through the same training. He’s been waterboarded, sprayed in his open eyes with pepper spray, and dropped off in both jungles and deserts with no weapons or food. He wasn’t going to just tell me what I wanted to know unless he was convinced I wanted to kill him slowly. If there was a shadow of a doubt in his mind, he wouldn’t have talked.”

She thought about that for a moment, then said, “But he talked.”

“It took a while,” Nate said. “A lot longer than I’d hoped. Not until I started on his second hand, and even then he held back. For a while.”

“It’s just so inhuman,” she said. “I always knew Gabriel had seen things and even done things overseas, but he never talked about them. Now I think I hate him, too.”

“Don’t,” Nate said. “Cohen was like that poor son-of-a-bitch back there in the trucker cap. He was doing what he was hardwired to do and what he thought was right. It’s been going on for thousands of years, but you’ve had the wealth and comfort to go soft. Our whole country has. If it weren’t for men like those two, you’d see a lot more savagery, but you’d see it in the streets.”

He said, “They protect you from knowing what’s out there, and there’s no appreciation for them. No gratitude.”

“Don’t paint me like that,” she said defensively. “I know there’s violence in the world. I know there are people who want to kill us. I’m from a military family,” she said. “But I don’t have to enjoy what you did.”

“And I hope you never do,” Nate said, “or your world would turn into mine.”

They passed under a huge retro neon trout struggling on a fishing line that marked a closed sporting-goods store.

“I’m looking for a pay phone,” Nate said.

“They still have those?” she asked.

He ignored her. “I need to call a buddy of mine. He’s in big trouble, but he doesn’t know it.”

As they backtracked through town and Nate located a public phone mounted on the side of a sleeping grocery store, she said, “For a while there, it seemed like something was happening between us, didn’t it?”

He looked over, not sure how to respond.

“I’d like to say it ended back there,” she said, looking away.

“But it didn’t,” Nate said.

“I’m not so sure now.”

“Bad timing, I guess.”

“It always is,” she said, and sighed.

24

Joe felt a punch of panic in his gut when he saw the strange vehicle parked in front of his house through the cascading snow. It was a half hour from midnight: no one should be visiting. Worst-case scenarios corkscrewed through his mind, and he instinctively reached over and touched the shotgun — propped muzzle-down on the bench seat — to make sure it was there.

His anxiety level had climbed each time he’d tried to call Marybeth’s cell phone as he roared down the mountain, only to get her voice-mail message. She was either on her phone or the phone was turned off. The message he’d left was: “I’m on the way.” While he’d dropped off Luke Brueggemann at the hotel, he’d speed-dialed the house phone, but all he got was a tinny recording announcing that the number he’d called wasn’t “in service at this time.”

As he neared his home, he recognized the SUV as belonging to Deputy Mike Reed, and breathed a sigh of relief. Not until that moment did he realize how tightly he’d been gripping the wheel.

Nevertheless, he carried the shotgun with him as he skipped up the snow-covered porch steps and threw open the front door.

“Whoa, there, buckaroo,” Reed said when he looked up from a cup of coffee and saw the weapon. “Just us friendlies here.” He was seated on the couch in full uniform.

Joe lowered the weapon and propped it in the corner of the mudroom before entering the living room. He could hear Marybeth talking in the kitchen on her cell phone — the reason he couldn’t reach her earlier. He shook snow off his parka and hung it on a peg.

“It doesn’t look like it’s letting up much outside,” Reed said to Joe.

“Nope.”

“Road okay?”

“Hasn’t seen a plow, if that’s what you’re asking,” Joe said.

“I’m not surprised,” Reed said. “I don’t think the county road and bridge guys were ready for an October blizzard. No one was. The heavy snow knocked down some tree limbs south of town and took out the phone lines, too. They’re just now getting them fixed. The phone company didn’t have crews ready. You’d think they’d all just moved to Wyoming or something.”

Joe nodded, relieved by the explanation for not being able to reach his wife.

“So you found a dead deer in a cabin instead of a missing Indian woman?” Reed asked. When Joe looked up, Reed patted his handheld radio, from which he’d obviously been monitoring the transmissions.

“Yup.”

“What a waste of time,” Reed said, chuckling bitterly.

“That’s how it goes these days,” Joe said in the same tone. Then: “Have you heard anything more about that situation in Jackson with the rollover?”

“Not for a while,” Reed said. “I think we had a window there in the storm where we could hear them. But it’s closed now. I haven’t heard anything but static in that direction.”

Joe nodded, then said, “Be right back.”

He walked down the hallway and cracked open Lucy’s door. She was in bed. Her blond hair shimmered in the bar of light from the open door, and she turned over with her back to him and moaned in her sleep. Joe eased the door shut and went across the hall to April’s room. It was locked. He rapped on it with a knuckle.

“What?” she asked, her voice shot through with outrage.

“You okay?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“No reason,” Joe said, turning back down the hall. Behind him, he could hear her voice trail off. Something about being grounded without a cell phone, practically a prisoner in her own home …

Situation normal, he said to himself.

He returned to the front room. Tube yawned and padded down the hall on his heels.

Joe stopped inside the threshold and squinted at Reed.

“Mike, why are you here?”

Reed chuckled, lowered his coffee cup, and said, “Your wife called and told me what happened at the library when the lines went down. I thought I might just come up here and check on her and kind of hang out until you got home. Just to make sure this Bob White guy — or whoever he is — didn’t decide to come by for another visit.”

“Thank you,” Joe said. He was touched.

“Don’t mention it,” Reed said. “To be honest, it feels kind of nice to get out of the office for a while. McLanahan is going crazy. He’s lashing out at everyone like Hitler in his bunker during the last days of Berlin. I don’t mind getting away from that.”

Marybeth peeked out at Joe from the kitchen. She held her cell phone to her ear and gestured with a “just a minute” finger in the air.

“Did you locate the guy who spooked Marybeth?” Joe asked Reed.

The deputy shook his head. “He was long gone, unfortunately. We’re circulating his description and the make of the vehicle she saw in the parking lot, though. If we get an identification I’ll let you know right away. This town isn’t big enough to hide in very long.”

“I know,” Joe said. “But it’s a hell of a big county.”

“Joe,” Reed said, “let us handle it if we find him. I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to be there. I’ve seen that look in your eye before.”

“Hmph.”

“Do you have any idea who it was?” Reed asked, shooting Joe his sidelong cop stare.

“Not for sure,” Joe said.

“Marybeth told me it might be a guy named”—he glanced at his notebook—“John Nemecek. We ran the name and came up with absolutely nothing. No priors, no record of any kind. We don’t even know where he’s from.”

“That sounds about right,” Joe said.

Reed said, “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

Joe thought about it for a few seconds and came clean. “Nate told me this John Nemecek might be after him. Apparently, they served together in Special Forces. I don’t know much more than that, but it’s possible Nemecek had something to do with all that’s been going on around here.”

Reed didn’t blink, and continued to deadeye Joe. “So you’re all but admitting Romanowski offed the Kellys and Ron Connelly.”

Joe said, “I don’t want to go there. But this Nemecek might be the key to everything.”

“How long have you suspected this?”

“From the start. But I’ve got no proof at all. I’ve never seen the guy, and I don’t know anything more about him than what Nate told me before he flew the coop. I’m not about to take my suspicions to McLanahan or Dulcie until I’ve got some kind of solid proof.”

“Still, you should have said something before now,” Reed said. “We might have found this guy sooner.”

Joe shook his head. “I don’t have any evidence, Mike. I’ve only got a suspicion. And I don’t want McLanahan to botch it by overplaying his hand.”

Reed put his coffee down and looked away, a thoughtful expression on his face. “I understand,” he said. “I could see the sheriff announcing this guy’s name in the press as our suspect so it looks like we’ve made some progress in the investigation, and drive this Nemecek underground. And if we didn’t find him right away, McLanahan would hang you out to dry and say you’ve been withholding evidence. He desperately needs a scapegoat.”

“I’ve played that role before,” Joe said.

“I know.”

Joe turned, walked past Marybeth in the kitchen, and found a six-pack of Coors in the refrigerator. He twisted the cap off a bottle.

“Want one?” he asked Reed when he returned.

“I want one so bad I could die,” Reed said. “But I’ll have to pass.”

“Sorry,” Joe said, recalling Reed’s problems with alcohol a few years before. “I forgot.”

“So what’s next?” Reed asked, gesturing with both hands to include the whole of it all.

“I might go over their heads,” Joe said.

“You mean McLanahan and Dulcie Schalk?”

“Yup.”

“To who? The governor?”

Joe shook his head. “He can’t help me. But there’s a guy named Chuck Coon in the FBI in Cheyenne. I’ve worked with him a few times. He’s by the book all the way, but he might be interested in this, and he’ll have better resources to find out something about Nemecek — or rule him out.”

“McLanahan’s not going to like that,” Reed said, obviously savoring the prospect.

“Too bad,” Joe said. “When this guy — whether he’s Nemecek or Bob White or both — approached my wife, he made it personal. I’m going after him with both barrels.”

“And you think the Feds might know about him?”

Joe took a long drink and lowered the bottle. “Feds can find out about other Feds easier than we can.”

Reed sat back. “‘Other Feds’? Nemecek is a government guy?”

“Used to be,” Joe said. “I don’t know his status right now. He used to be in Special Forces with Nate.”

“And you think the FBI can find something on him? You might be giving them too much credit,” Reed said.

“Maybe.”

Reed nodded toward the kitchen and lowered his voice. “You’re married to a tough lady, you know. My wife would have fallen apart if that guy showed up at her office.”

“She’s tough, all right,” Joe said. “Do you know what she’s doing in there right now?”

“I gather she’s calling airlines and hotels,” Reed said. “I think you’re all going on a little vacation. And I think it’s a damned good plan, myself.”

“Vacation?” Joe said. “How are we going to afford that?”

AFTER REFILLING Reed’s cup and asking him to stay around a little longer, Joe ducked into his office and booted up the computer. Marybeth was still occupied, although when he heard her read her credit card number to the agent on the other end of the line, he assumed she was about done.

He was pleased to find out the phone company had restored service and he could both use the house phone and access the Internet. He sat down and opened the browser and scrolled through the bookmarks and clicked on the falconry website. His scalp crawled when he saw there was a single new entry:

Joe pushed his chair away from the monitor and rubbed his eyes. Nate was often obscure when he spoke, and there were times after they talked when Joe wondered what his friend was trying to say. But this seemed extremely clear.

In the other room, he heard Marybeth close her phone. She was in his office within fifteen seconds. She eased the door shut behind her and leaned back against it.

“Thank God you’re home,” she said. “I hate it when I can’t reach you.”

“Likewise,” he said, then told her what they’d found at the line shack.

“You got my message, though?” she asked.

He stood up and closed the gap and wrapped his arms around her. She was stiff at first, but then welcomed the embrace and burrowed her face into his shoulder. Her hair smelled good. She said, “He scared me, Joe. And what bothered me the most was how confident he was. He didn’t really threaten me, or say anything that we could use against him. There was no mistaking his intent, and who knows what would have happened if he hadn’t gotten that call.”

“Any idea who called him?”

“No. But it made him change his plans.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be reached,” Joe said, stroking her back. “I wish I could have been there. But I’m very glad Mike came here.”

“Me, too. He’s a good man.”

Then: “Joe, he knew us. And he seemed to know you wouldn’t show up even when I told him you were on the way.”

Joe stopped stroking her and asked, “Really? He knew my location?”

“I don’t know about that for sure, but he knew you were in the field and wouldn’t show up to interrupt him.”

“That’s no good,” he said. “He must be keeping close tabs on the sheriff’s office.” His mind leapt. And he couldn’t help but suspect Mike Reed in the other room, even though Reed had never given Joe a reason not to trust him. But he instantly wished he hadn’t told Reed so much.

Marybeth stepped back and looked up at Joe. “This man, Bob White or John Nemecek, whoever he is, just oozed creepiness. I honestly had no doubt he would have hurt me if he didn’t get that call. I don’t have any doubt he will go after our girls if it would help him get what he wants.”

“Which is Nate,” Joe said.

Her eyes flashed as she said, “Which is why we’re leaving this place for a while. I can’t put my girls at risk any more than they are now. Or you, Joe. I refuse to let a member of our family get hurt.”

She said it with such vehemence that there was no point in arguing, Joe knew.

“Nate agrees with you,” he said, handing her the printout.

She read it and handed it back.

“You didn’t tell me you were in touch with him,” she said, hurt.

“I haven’t been,” Joe said. “This is the first communication he’s sent since he left.”

“I thought we didn’t keep secrets from each other,” she said.

“We don’t, and I’m sorry. But I didn’t want you to get any more involved than necessary.”

She glared at him, and he eventually looked away.

“We can talk about this later,” she said. “Right now, Nate and I are on the same page. I booked us on the first flight out tomorrow morning.”

“To where?” Joe asked with no enthusiasm.

“Saddlestring to Denver to Los Angeles,” she said.

“Los Angeles?” Joe said incredulously. He’d never been there and didn’t have any desire to see it. But Marybeth had lived there for a few years while growing up, and she was somewhat familiar with the city.

She said, “I can’t think of a better place to get lost, can you? I don’t know anyone there anymore, and no one knows us. Maybe we can take the girls to Disneyland.”

“Disneyland …” Joe repeated, shaking his head.

“Do you have a better idea?”

Joe thought, Find Nemecek and take him down. But he said, “Nope.”

“Then let’s start packing. I’ve booked us into a Holiday Inn in Anaheim. It’s one of those places with a package deal that gives discounts to Disneyland and caters to young families. It’s so boring, no one will even want to try and find us.”

Joe cringed.

She said, “I’ll wake the girls up. Tomorrow, as we’re boarding that plane and not before, I’ll call the schools and let them know Lucy and April will be missing some classes. And I’ll tell Sheridan what’s going on. I’ve got some sick leave built up at the library I can take, and I know you’ve got plenty of time coming because you never take any days off.”

Joe screwed up his face and crossed his arms over his chest.

“What?” she asked, her voice rising.

“How are we going to afford this?” he asked.

“We’ll figure something out,” she said, and started to leave the room. “Don’t forget, my mother left us money for the girls.”

Joe groaned at the mention of Marybeth’s mother. “That’s for their college,” he said. After all, he’d negotiated the deal with Missy several weeks before, as her price for leaving without him revealing what he knew about her. Money had shown up in their college funds via wire transfer. It had been an act of pure extortion, and Joe was proud of it.

Marybeth said, “They’ve got to get to college first, Joe.”

He didn’t argue with that logic.

“I’m going now,” she said. “I’ve got to get the girls up and help them pack.”

When he didn’t follow, she turned back to him and locked his eyes with hers. “Joe, I know what you’re thinking.”

He didn’t say yes or no but let her continue.

“What I’m telling you is we need to leave,” she said. “All of us. I looked into that man’s eyes and I saw no empathy at all. Not even a spark. It was like looking into the eyes of one of Nate’s falcons. He’s capable of anything, and he’ll do anything to get to Nate. Our family means nothing to him except as bargaining chips. We can’t let him use us as bait to lure Nate here to his death. Do you understand me?”

Joe didn’t respond. It made perfect twisted sense, he thought. The man at the library had set the trap.

“I bought four tickets,” she said, opening the door. “Your name is on one of them.”

She started to reach for the door handle but stopped short. Turning, she gestured to a stack of books on Joe’s desk. He followed her finger. He hadn’t noticed them previously.

She said, “I don’t know if it means anything at all, but those are the library books he brought to check out. They could have been chosen at random for an excuse to engage me, but my intuition tells me they mean something to him.”

Joe picked the books up one at a time and frowned. The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Falconry and Hawking by Phillip Glasier. And The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. Joe felt his neck get hot.

“What?” she asked. “Do they mean something to you?”

“I’ve seen them all before,” he said. “At Nate’s place. They read the same books. It was our man, all right.”

Joe sat down heavily at his desk and reread the message from Nate on the screen. There was no other way to take it than Nate wanted them to hit the road.

He looked through the three books again. Both The Art of War and Falconry and Hawking seemed too specialized and unrelated to provide much insight. But The Looming Tower? Joe opened it and turned straight to the index, looking for the names Nemecek or Romanowski. He found neither. But he agreed with Marybeth: something in the book had meaning to them. But where to start?

He rubbed his face and tried to think of alternatives to leaving — some kind of action he could take to try to help Nate and protect his family — but there were simply too many unknown variables. He felt impotent, useless, and cowardly.

When Joe tried to figure out how White/Nemecek knew so much about his family, his whereabouts, and the investigation, there were few people he could rule out. There were dozens of people privy to the proceedings: deputies, dispatchers, reporters, administration, maintenance, visiting state and federal agents, even McLanahan’s coffee group that met every morning at the Burg-O-Pardner. He could rule out only the sheriff himself, because without solving either the murders or the missing-persons cases, the man was circling the drain of his own career. He’d do whatever he could to stop the spiral by making arrests, Joe knew.

He leaned back in his chair and sneaked a long look at Mike Reed in the other room. Reed thumbed through a hunting magazine and sipped the last of his coffee on the couch. The man was affable and good-natured. By all rights, he should be the next sheriff. And although he certainly wanted to win the election, could he possibly be predatory enough to assist a killer so his opponent would go down in flames? Joe couldn’t conceive it.

Who else would know?

Then he thought about the password-protected text thread on Brueggemann’s phone.

When Lucy entered his office rubbing her face from sleep, she said, “Mom said we’re going on a trip.” She didn’t sound happy about it.

“That’s the plan.”

“What about my play?” she asked. “I can’t let everybody down. I’m the lead. This really means a lot to me, and Mom doesn’t even want to talk about it. I mean, I could stay with Heather until you got back.”

Joe didn’t have a good answer. “Maybe we’ll all be back in time.”

“But I’m the lead,” she said again. “If I’m not here they’ll give the part to Erin Vonn or somebody else.”

“I’m sure they’ll take you back,” Joe said, not sure about it at all.

“Mom won’t even tell me why we’re leaving.”

“For your safety,” Joe said. Lucy rolled her eyes in response.

“I have a life of my own, you know,” she said, folding her arms in front of her and striking a pose very much like Marybeth had a few minutes before. “You and Mom treat me like your property.”

Joe said with some sympathy, “You’ve got to get a few more years on you before it’s otherwise.”

“You sound just like her,” she said, meaning Marybeth.

“We’re a team.”

“Yes,” she said, her eyes flashing. “An evil team trying to destroy my life.”

“That’s a little dramatic, isn’t it?” he asked, stifling a smile.

“I’m in drama!” she cried. “That’s the point!” But her anger was diffusing.

Joe said, “Before you pack, I need your help. I don’t understand how Facebook works, and I know you’re an expert. You spend more time on it than you do sleeping or eating.”

She rolled her eyes again, and said, “Thanks, Dad.”

“Everybody around your age is on it, right?”

“Yes. Everybody.”

“Everybody in college, right?”

“Yeah.”

He said, “What I’d like you to do is use your laptop to find the page or the profile or whatever it is for Luke Brueggemann, my trainee. See if there are any comments from his girlfriend, if he has one. See if he’s sharing things about his new assignment.”

She asked him how to spell the name, and he did.

“I may not find much,” she said. “It depends on how much he’s got his profile set up to share. I’m not his friend or anything.”

“Just find whatever you can,” Joe said. “Let me know what you find.”

She sighed, and said, “At least we’re going to Disneyland. I can’t believe it.”

“Neither can I,” Joe said.

It was midnight when the house phone rang. As always, Joe ignored it. He was talking with Mike Reed and waiting for Lucy to come back and tell him what she’d dug up on Brueggemann and his girlfriend.

Marybeth came into the living room holding the handset, and the moment he saw her face he knew something momentous had happened.

She handed him the phone with concern in her eyes. “You’ll want to take this,” she said.

As he reached for it, she said, “In your office.”

She followed him back in and again closed the door behind them. “It’s Nate,” she whispered.

“Where are you?” Joe asked immediately, careful not to use his name.

“We can’t talk long,” Nate said. The connection was clear, but from the airy tone of it, Joe assumed Nate was speaking from somewhere outdoors. Maybe a pay phone, he thought.

“Gotcha,” Joe said. “Where …”

“No,” Nate said. “We can’t go there right now. Our friends might be listening.”

“Right.”

“It’s time to fly,” Nate said. “Take the entire nest. Don’t think about it, and don’t play hero. Just go.”

“I understand,” Joe said, glancing up at Marybeth, who nodded.

“The threat is on top of you right now.”

Joe hoped he didn’t have to respond to Nate in falconry terminology. Instead, he said, “Yup.”

“At least three of the Peregrines are still out there,” Nate said. “One may be a young female.”

“Only three?” Joe asked, wondering how many men Nate had taken out of the game.

“At least,” Nate said. “But there could be more I don’t know about. Leave them to me.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Nate laughed bitterly. “So far, so good. But the cost has been too high and the collateral damage has been heavy.”

Joe thought, So many questions. He said, “Is there any way we can talk more?”

“No,” Nate said, no doubt measuring the time of the call and trying to end it quickly. Joe wanted to tell him it didn’t matter: If the call was being traced, it was already too late. But he didn’t dare say it.

“Just remember,” Nate said, “these creatures won’t return to the fist no matter how much you’ve done for them. They kill, they eat, and they move on. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“They might be right next to you, but you can’t trust them. Just get away now.”

And he hung up. Joe listened to the dial tone for a moment, then cradled the phone and picked it back up and dialed star sixty-nine. The phone rang on the other end, but no one picked it up.

“He’s gone,” Joe said.

“Is he okay?” Marybeth asked.

“I guess he is.”

“What did he say?”

Joe tried to recall the conversation verbatim, and repeated it.

She frowned. “The only thing I understand is he wants us to go. That I got. What was the rest about?”

Joe said, “He thinks Nemecek has someone inside. And so do I.”

He stood and said, “I’ve got to go out for a while.” Marybeth stepped aside, puzzled. “Where are you going?”

“Out,” he said. “I’ll ask Mike to hang around until I get back.”

He told her his suspicions and her eyes widened and she raised her balled fist up to her mouth.

She said, “I won’t even tell you to be careful,” she said. “Because if you don’t, I’ll kill you.”

He handed her the copy of The Looming Tower. “You might want to look through this,” he said. “You’re a much faster reader than I am. See if you can find anything that might relate to Nate, or Nemecek. Maybe you can find something about their old unit, or something they might have been involved in.”

She took the book and eyed him warily. “You mean when I take a break from packing and organizing the girls?”

He nodded. “Yup.”

“I’ll see what I can find,” she said.

As Joe reached for his coat, he noticed Lucy standing in the mudroom, a look of annoyance on her face.

“Did you forget something?” she asked.

He paused as he pulled on his parka, and it came to him. “Oh, Brueggemann on Facebook. I did forget.”

“Just as well,” she said. “He doesn’t have a page. There was nothing to find.”

Joe paused while he took it in.

“It’s weird,” she said. “Everybody has a Facebook page. But not him.”

“I don’t,” Joe said, reaching for his shotgun.

“I mean everybody young,” Lucy said.

“Oh, thanks.”

25

Seven miles north of Crowheart on U.S. 287, past midnight, Nate Romanowski broke the long silence and said to Haley, “There’s an airport in Riverton with a commuter flight to Denver in the morning, where you can connect to wherever you want to go. I’ll give you money for a ticket.”

“Keep your money,” she said. “I don’t need it, and I’m not going anywhere.”

He shook his head and sighed.

“You’re stuck with me, dooley,” she said, her jaw set defiantly.

When he didn’t respond, she turned her head and looked out at the darkness and falling snow. “Where are we?”

“Out of the mountains,” he said. “If you could see anything, you’d see the Wind River Mountains to the west.”

“Okay.”

Nate gestured to the left. “Crowheart Butte is out there. On the other side is Bald Mountain. The road goes between them.”

They’d not encountered a single oncoming car for two hours.

“How do you know?” she asked. “I can’t see a thing anywhere.”

“I can feel it,” he said.

She snorted. “And how does one acquire this skill?”

He shrugged. “It comes from experience. Climbing trees, burrowing into the dirt, watching clouds go over. You’ve just got to open yourself up and not clutter your mind with thinking. Have you ever skied with your eyes closed?”

“Of course not.”

“Try it,” he said. “All of your senses open up. You can feel the terrain through your feet, and smell how close you are to the trees. You don’t have to go fast. Just try it sometime. The contours of the slope and the surroundings become clear even though you can’t see them with your eyes. It’s like being in a dark room. As you walk around it, you discover how big it is, where the tables are, how thick the carpet is. Sometimes, you can hear your own breath and your beating heart.”

“You sound kind of nuts,” she said.

“My friend Joe Pickett says the same thing.”

“Maybe we’re right,” she said.

“Maybe. But test it out,” he said softly. “Close your eyes. Crowheart Butte will come to you. You’ll know where it is….”

After a few minutes, she opened her eyes. “I’ve got nothing,” she confessed.

“Practice,” he whispered.

The highway cut through a vast carpet of foot-high sagebrush that gathered clumps of snow in the palms of its upturned, clawlike branches. But it wasn’t yet cold enough on the valley floor for the road to ice up.

“You said you wanted to ride this out until we found the guys who killed Cohen and the others,” he said. “We found them and put them down. Now you can go home and spend some time with your dad.”

“I already did that,” she said. “I said goodbye. Now I’m committed to riding this out.”

“You’re sure?” he asked.

“You don’t sound that disappointed,” she said.

“Remember the rules,” he said. “I can’t guarantee your safety. And I can’t promise you won’t see something much worse than what you saw back there.”

She hesitated, and for a moment he thought she might reconsider. Instead, she said, “Just drive. You said you know where this Nemecek is located, right?”

“Yes.” He nodded. “Unless that guy back there was lying or somehow tipped off Nemecek. But I don’t think so, given the circumstances.”

She cringed at the word circumstances and said, “You made that poor man back there make a call on his cell. What was that about?”

“I told him to call his team leader and tell him they’d lost Oscar and you. That you broke out of the cabin sometime during the night and they didn’t know where you went. That you were on the loose and they were coming back to reconnoiter.”

Haley looked over, puzzled. “Why?”

“So it would throw a huge kink in Nemecek’s operation. The idea was to eliminate all the operators in Camp Oscar so they wouldn’t be able to help me. But if two of you got away, Nemecek would need to figure out how to track you down before you went to the cops or the media. It throws his timetable off and threatens the entire operation.”

“Did Nemecek buy it?”

Nate said, “It appears so. He got real quiet and told our operators to meet him at his command post.”

“Is it possible Trucker Cap told him something in code? That Nemecek will be expecting you?”

Nate shrugged, “Unlikely, but possible. I was right there with him, and I could hear both sides of the conversation. Nemecek got very calm and cold. That’s how he reacts to pressure. He doesn’t scream or threaten, he just goes dead. That’s when he’s the most dangerous.”

“So why tip him off that his plan went screwy?” she asked. “Why not just let him think everything is sailing along?”

Said Nate, “It’s a diversion. I want him to coil up for a while and stew in his own juices. If he’s trying to figure out what his next move will be, that family in Saddlestring might have a chance to get out of there before he turns on them. And it could give me the opportunity to get close enough to him to do some damage.”

“Then let’s go get him.”

Nate snorted.

“What?”

“If only it was that easy.”

“What do you mean?”

Nate took a few moments, then turned to her.

“He’s got me right where he wants me, but he doesn’t know it yet. He doesn’t need to send operators to flush me out or set up traps. I’m delivering myself straight to him.”

She gestured that she didn’t quite understand. “If we surprise him, won’t you have the advantage?”

“Yes,” Nate said.

“But what?” she prompted.

“I’m very good at this,” he said. “But John Nemecek is better. He’s my master falconer, and I’m his apprentice. I don’t expect to get out of this alive.”

Haley slowly covered her mouth with her hand in alarm.

He slowed the Jeep and edged it to the shoulder of the highway. A double reflector emerged from the dark, indicating the mouth of a two-track road that exited onto the highway. He turned on it and drove over a cattle guard and continued over a hill. On the way down the other side, the headlights illuminated an ancient wooden barn that stood alone on the edge of an overgrown field. The roof of the barn had fallen in years before, and the open windows gaped wide and hollow like eye sockets on either side of the rotting half-open barn door.

Haley sat in silence, but he could feel her eyes probe the side of his face, obviously wondering what his intentions were.

He stopped in front of the barn and kept his headlights on. Light snow sifted through the air.

“You’ve fired a gun,” he said, killing the motor but keeping the lights on.

“Yes,” she said, hesitating. “I used to go grouse hunting with my dad, but I didn’t like shooting them. And Cohen took me out to the range a couple of times, but I’d rather read a book than shoot.”

“Can you hit anything?”

She shrugged.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Get out.”

Nate found an aluminum beer can in the opening of the barn — there were dozens more inside, and he guessed the structure was a meeting place for wayward ranch hands — and speared it aloft on a nail that stuck out from the weathered wood on the barn door. It was eye level, fifty yards from the Jeep.

While Haley stood in front of the vehicle shuffling her feet and hugging herself against the cold, Nate drew out the Ruger Mini-14 Ranch rifle and handed it to her. He showed her how to load a round into the chamber by pulling back on the breech-bolt feeder, where the safety was located underneath, and how to raise it to her shoulder so the stock rested against her cheek.

“It’s called a peep sight,” he said, touching the small steel ring near the back of the action. “Look through it until you can see the front sight, which is a single blade.”

“Okay, I see it,” she said.

“Find the front sight in the middle of the circle. Exactly halfway up, and centered in the circle from side to side.”

“Okay.”

“When you aim, think of a pumpkin sitting on a post. The post is the top of the front sight. Put that beer can right on top of the front sight, remembering to make sure it’s in the center of the back circle. Make sense?”

It took her a few seconds, then she grunted.

“Keep both eyes open and squeeze the trigger.”

He stepped back. He was impressed that she held the rifle firmly and the barrel didn’t quiver.

The boom was sharp and loud, and the muzzle spit a tongue of orange flame.

“Wow,” she said.

“You missed,” Nate said. “High and to the right of the can by an inch. That means you flinched just as you pulled the trigger. Now breathe normally, don’t hold your breath, and do it right this time.”

“I was close.”

“You don’t get extra credit for trying and missing,” he said. “Instead, you get killed.”

“You can be an asshole sometimes,” she said as she raised the rifle again.

“Relax,” he assured her. “Pumpkin on a post.”

The second shot ripped the bottom of the can away.

“Do it again,” he said.

She fired until she’d emptied the thirty-round magazine and the air smelled sharply of gunpowder. Hot spent shells sizzled in the snow at their feet.

Nate said, “Twelve direct hits, nine near-misses, seven bad shots because you flinched. Overall, not so bad. Just remember: breathe, relax, both eyes open.”

She grinned and handed the rifle back to him. “Pumpkin on a post,” she said.

He nodded while he loaded fresh cartridges into the magazine and rammed it home. “Haley,” he said, “you’re a very good beer-can shooter. In fact, you’re a natural, as long as you remember all the steps. But I want to tell you something important, and I need you to listen carefully.”

His tone made her smile vanish, and she looked up at him openly.

“Knowing how to shoot is a small part of killing a man. Too many of these damned gun nuts think it’s all about their hardware, but it isn’t. It’s about keeping things simple.”

She nodded, urging him on.

“Don’t shoot unless you have a fat target. Aim for the thickest part of the target. Don’t try a head or neck shot — aim for the mass of his body. That way, if you flinch a little you still hit something vital. And don’t assume one shot will do it. That only works in movies or unless I’m shooting. Keep pulling the trigger until the target goes down. Then shoot him a few more times and run like hell. Got it?”

“Got it,” she said. “I just hope I won’t have to put all this advice into action.”

“Me, too,” Nate said, sliding the rifle back beneath the seat.

When he turned she was there, right in front of him. She reached up with both hands and pulled his head down and kissed him softly. He could taste her warm lips along with melting flakes of snow. His hands rested on her hips, and he could feel her fingers weave through his hair.

As he reached around her to pull her closer, she gently pushed him away.

“Thank you for teaching me that,” she said.

“Thanks for the kiss.”

They held each other in their eyes for a long tense moment. He could feel his heart beat.

“I don’t know why I did that,” she said, grinning and turning away.

“I do,” he said, and turned her around so she was facing him. He reached down and grabbed her hips again and launched her up onto the hood of the Jeep. She collapsed back on the hood until her head was propped up against the windshield, and she looked at him with heavy-lidded eyes. Snowflakes landed on the warm sheet metal on both sides of her and dissolved into beads of moisture and he stepped up on the front bumper next to her.

“Let me get a blanket from the back,” he said.

“Hurry,” she begged, and he felt her fingers trail off his shoulders as he rolled away.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said, looking down at her shoes while she cinched her belt. Fresh snow — larger flakes now but more infrequent — tufted her hair and shoulders.

“Whatever it was, I hope you think it again,” Nate said, folding the blanket.

“Too much has happened,” she said, still not looking up. “My nerve endings are exposed, I guess. My force field is worn out. My reserve has been blown away. I’ve never …”

“Stop talking,” he said.

“It’s different for you,” Haley said. “In one day you kill a guy, torture another guy, and get the girl. This must seem like fucking Christmas to you.”

“Only the get-the-girl part,” he said.

She finally looked up and smiled. “Well, I guess that’s kind of a nice thing to hear.”

They were back on the highway and no more had been said since they left.

“Since it’s very unlikely we’ll be around much longer,” Nate said, “you should know something about me. And when I’m done telling you, there won’t be any hard feelings on my part if you want to get dropped off at the airport. In fact, I wouldn’t blame you.”

She reached over and touched his arm and turned to him, waiting.

Nate couldn’t meet her eyes. He said, “Because of me, thousands of people are dead. Maybe tens of thousands.”

She gasped, and her fingertips left his sleeve for a moment as she recoiled. Then, surprisingly, she touched him again.

“Tell me,” she said.

After they crossed the border of the Wind River Indian Reservation, Nate told Haley about growing up, moving around, discovering his interest in falconry, and meeting Lieutenant John Nemecek at the Air Force Academy. And the six brutal months of training to become a full-fledged member of Mark V, a secret and off-the-books Special Forces unit comprising the best special operators from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. As with the other members of the Peregrines, Nate didn’t know how many men were involved, or most of their real names. Eight-man teams were assembled for specific tasks based on their skills, sent overseas to kill, cripple, and destroy targets, then broken up when they returned. Although all the operators assumed Nemecek reported directly to superiors high in the government, it was never clear who gave the orders or even which branch or federal agency had ultimate authority. It wasn’t their business to know.

Peregrines operated under false identities in foreign countries, and got in and got out. Their assignments were highly choreographed and impeccably planned, and rarely failed. Nate was sent to South America, Eastern Europe, Africa, island fiefdoms in the Pacific, and the Middle East. None of his teams ever lost or left a man. There were only two missions that weren’t completed successfully. Once, when their target — a Central African warlord — was tipped to their presence and the team immediately evacuated, and another instance where a team member got too intimate with locals and inadvertently blew their cover. None of the other Peregrines from that mission ever saw or heard from the operative again.

The one constant in all the operations and planning for all the Peregrines was the man who’d recruited and trained them: Lieutenant John Nemecek.

“He is the greatest falconer I’ve ever seen,” Nate said to Haley. “He’s flown every species of raptor imaginable, from kestrels to golden eagles.”

Haley said, “I’m confused. What does falconry have to do with thousands of people getting killed?”

Nate drove on for a full minute before he said, “Everything.”