Those Who Wish Me Dead

1

On the last day of Jace Wilson’s life, the fourteen-year-old stood on a quarry ledge staring at cool, still water and finally understood something his mother had told him years before: Trouble might come for you when you showed fear, but trouble doubled-down when you lied about being afraid. At the time, Jace hadn’t known exactly what she was talking about. Today he did.

It was a sixty-five-foot drop from Rooftop to the water, and Jace had a hundred dollars riding on it-a hundred dollars that he didn’t have, of course-all because he’d shown a trace of fear. It was a stupid bet, sure, and he wouldn’t have made it if the girls hadn’t been there, listening to the whole thing and laughing. But they had been, and so now it wasn’t just a hundred bucks, it was a hell of a lot more than that, and he had two days to figure out how to pull it off.

Not everyone who tried Rooftop succeeded. They’d pulled bodies out of the quarry before, and those were older kids, college kids, maybe even divers, he didn’t know. He was certain none of them had been terrified of heights, though.

“What did you get yourself into,” he whispered, looking behind him at the cut in the wire fence that led out of the old Easton Brothers quarry and into his yard. His house backed up to the abandoned quarry property, and Jace spent hours there, exploring and swimming-and staying far from the ledges. The one thing he did not do in the quarry was dive. He didn’t even like to get too close to the drop-offs; if he edged out just for a quick glance down, his head would spin and his legs would go weak and he’d have to shuffle backward as fast as possible. Earlier in the day, though, all of his hours alone in the quarry had provided the lie he needed. When Wayne Potter started giving him shit about being scared of heights because Jace hadn’t wanted to climb the ladder that some maintenance worker had left leaning against the side of the school, allowing access to the roof, Jace had blown it off by saying that he didn’t need to climb a ladder to prove he wasn’t scared of heights because he did quarry dives all the time, and he was sure Wayne had never done that.

Of course Wayne called him on the bluff. Of course Wayne mentioned Rooftop. Of course Wayne had an older brother who would take them out there over the weekend.

“You’re an idiot,” Jace told himself aloud, walking down a gravel path littered with old cigarette butts and beer cans, out toward one of the wide slabs in the old quarry that overlooked a pool he was certain was deep enough for a dive. Start small, that was his plan. He’d get this jump down, which was probably fifteen feet, and then move on to the next pool, where the jump was a good bit higher, thirty feet at least. He looked across the water and felt dizzy already. Rooftop was more than twice that high?

“Just try it,” he said. Talking to himself felt good, out here alone, it gave him a little added confidence. “Just try it. You can’t kill yourself falling into the water. Not from here.”

Still, he was simply pacing the ledges, giving himself a good three feet of buffer, as if his legs might just buckle and send him sliding down the stone on his face, leave him floating in the water with a broken neck.

“Pussy,” he said, because that was what they’d called him earlier in the day, in front of the girls, and it had made him angry enough-almost-to start up the ladder. Instead, he’d used the lonely quarry to defend himself. In retrospect, he probably should have climbed the ladder.

Thunder cracked and echoed back off the high stone walls and the water, sounding deeper and more dangerous down in the quarry than it would have up on the road. The wind had been blowing hard ever since he got out of school, and it was really gusting now, swirling stone dust, and out of the western sky advanced a pair of pure black clouds, trapped lightning flashing within them.

Bad time to be in the water, Jace thought, and then he latched on to that idea because it gave him an excuse not to jump. “Wayne Potter is not worth getting electrocuted over.”

And so he started back, was almost all the way to the hole in the fence before he stopped.

Wayne Potter wasn’t going away. Come Saturday he’d be there with his brother, and they’d take Jace out to Rooftop and watch him piss down his leg and they’d laugh their butts off. Then Wayne would go back to school Monday and tell the story, assuming he hadn’t called everyone first. Or, worse yet, brought them to watch. What if he brought the girls?

It was that idea that finally gave him some resolve. Jumping was frightening, but not jumping in front of the girls? That was scarier still, and the price was higher.

“You’d better jump it,” he said. “Come on, coward. Just go jump it.”

He walked back fast, because dawdling only allowed the fear to build, so he wanted to go quick, get it over and done so that he knew he could do it. Once that start had been achieved, the rest would be easy. Just a matter of adding height, that was all. He kicked his shoes off, then pulled his T-shirt and jeans off and left them in a pile on the rocks.

As thunder boomed again, he squeezed his nose closed with his thumb and index finger-a baby thing, yes, but he was alone and didn’t care-and then spoke again.

“I’m no pussy.”

Since he was holding his nose, his voice came out high and girlish. He took one last look at the water below, shut his eyes, bent at the knees, and sprang off the ledge.

It wasn’t much of a drop. For all of his worrying, it ended fast, and it ended pain-free, except of course for the jarring shock of cold water. He let himself sink to the bottom-water didn’t bother him in the least, he loved to swim, just didn’t like to dive-and waited for the feel of smooth, cool stone.

It didn’t come. Instead, his foot touched something strange, an object that was somehow soft and hard at the same time, and he jerked back in fright, because whatever it was, it didn’t belong. He opened his eyes, blinking against the sting of the water, and saw the dead man.

He was sitting almost upright, his back against the stone, his legs stretched out in front of him. Head tilted sideways, like he was tired. Blond hair floating in the current Jace had created, strands rising off the top of the dead man’s head to dance in the dark water. His upper lip was curled like he was laughing at someone, a mean laugh, mocking, and Jace could see his teeth. There was a rope around his ankles and it was attached to an old dumbbell.

For a few seconds, Jace floated there above him, suspended not five feet away. Maybe it was because he was seeing it through the dim water, but he felt separated from the scene, felt as if the corpse down here had to be something imagined. It was only when he realized why the man’s head was leaning to the side that the terror he should have felt initially overcame him. The man’s throat was cut, leaving a gap so wide that water flowed through it like an open channel. At the sight, Jace began a frantic, clumsy churn back up. He was no more than fifteen feet down but still he was certain he wouldn’t make the top, would drown down there, his body lying forever beside the other corpse.

When he broke the surface he was already trying to shout for help, and the result was awful; he inhaled water and choked on it and felt as if he’d drown, was unable to get air into his lungs. He finally got a gasping breath in and spit out the water that was in his mouth.

Water that had touched the dead man.

He felt a surge of sickness and swam hard, only to realize he was angling in the wrong direction, toward the steep walls that offered no way to climb out. He panicked and spun, finally getting his eyes on some low rocks. The world echoed with more thunder as he put his head down and swam. The first time he tried to pull himself out, his arms failed, and he fell back into the water hard enough that his head went under.

Come on, Jace! Get out, get out, you’ve got to get out…

On the second try he made it, flopped up on his stomach. The quarry water was pouring off him and it was in his mouth again, dripping from his lips, and for the second time he thought of the way it had flowed through that gaping tear in the man’s throat. He gagged and vomited onto the rock, throat and nose burning, and then crawled weakly away from the pool as if the water might reach up for him, grab one leg, and pull him back in.

“Holy shit,” he whispered. His voice trembled and his entire body shook. When he thought he could trust his legs, he stood up uncertainly. The storm-front winds chilled the cold water on his skin and his soaking boxer shorts and he hugged his arms around himself and thought stupidly, I forgot to bring a towel. It was only then that he realized he’d also come out of the water on the wrong side of the quarry. His clothes were piled on the ledge across from him.

You have to be kidding me, he thought, looking around at the steep walls that bordered this side of the pool. It wasn’t easy climbing. In fact, he wasn’t sure that it was possible climbing. Nothing but vertical smooth stone above him. Farther down, below the pool, there was a drop-off that led to an area littered with brush and thorns. Going in that direction would be slow and painful with no shoes or pants. The fastest option was simple: get back in the water and swim across.

He stared at the pile of clothes, close enough he could throw rocks onto them easily. The cell phone was in the pocket of his jeans.

Need to get help, he thought, need to get someone out here, fast.

But he didn’t move. The idea of going back into that water…he stared into the murky green pool, darker than it had ever looked before, then suddenly lit bright by a flash of lightning, the storm sweeping in fast.

“He’s not going to hurt you,” he said, edging toward the water. “Not going to come back to life and grab you.”

Saying that made him realize something he hadn’t processed yet in his desperate attempt to get away-the man wasn’t going to come back to life, no, but the man also wasn’t far removed from life. His hair, his eyes, the lip curled back against his teeth…even the skin around the wound in the throat hadn’t begun to decompose yet. Jace wasn’t sure how long something like that took, but it seemed like it would go pretty fast.

Hasn’t been there long…

This time the thunder made him jump. He was staring around the quarry, eyeing the top ridges of the stone walls, looking for a watcher.

Empty.

Get the hell out of here, he instructed himself, but he couldn’t bring himself to swim for it. Couldn’t imagine being immersed in that water again, swimming right above the man with the dumbbell tied to his ankles and the lopsided head and gashed throat. Instead, he walked down toward the drop-off. There a ledge connected one side to the other: the pool he’d just been in, on the right side, and another one to the left. The drop to the left was the thirty-foot monster he’d intended to use as his practice for Rooftop. For some reason, the narrow ledge was home to plants, but only mean ones. Anything that grew in stone seemed to have thorns. He narrowly missed a broken bottle as he entered the weeds. With his first steps, the thorns began to rake his flesh, and he grimaced but pushed ahead slowly, warm blood mingling with cool water on his legs. The first drops of rain started to fall and the thunder boomed overhead and then echoed back through the quarry as if the earth wanted to respond.

“Ouch! Damn it!” He’d managed to step right on a thorn, and the sticker remained in the bottom of his foot, so his next step drove it in farther. He was standing on one leg and had just pulled the thorn out of his foot, blood rushing to fill the hole, when he heard the car motor.

His first thought was that it might be a security guard or something. That would be nice. That would be wonderful, because whatever hell he was going to catch for being in the quarry was worth it to get back out. For a long moment he stayed just like he was, balanced up on one leg, holding his bleeding foot in his hand, and listened. The engine came on and on, someone driving up the gravel road that was blocked by a locked gate.

Killer coming back, he thought, and now the frozen indecision turned to wild terror. He was standing in the middle of the ledge in the most visible spot in the entire quarry.

He turned and started to return to the place from which he’d come, then stopped. There was no cover there. The rock face was sheer; there wasn’t even anything to duck behind. He spun and headed in the other direction again, trying to plow through the weeds, indifferent to the thorns that raked him and left ribbons of blood along his chest, arms, and legs.

The engine was very close now.

He wasn’t going to make the other side. Not fast enough.

Jace Wilson gave one look at the water below, one quick attempt at picking a safe landing zone even though the water was too dark to show what waited beneath, and then he jumped. Talk about doubling-down on your fear-he was scared of heights, but of whoever was coming? That wasn’t fear. That was terror.

This time, the drop felt real, felt long, as if he’d started from a truly high place. He was thinking of rocks and pieces of twisted metal, all the junk that was left behind in these quarry pools, all the things his dad had warned him about, when he struck the water and tunneled down. He tried to stop himself early, but his velocity had been high and he sank even as he tried to rise, plunging all the way down. The pool wasn’t nearly as deep as he’d expected. The landing jarred him, his feet striking stone and sending a sparkler of pain up his spine. He pushed back off and let himself rise slowly. He didn’t want to break the surface with much noise this time.

His head cleared the water just as the sound of the engine cut out. The car had come to a stop. He swam toward a slab of limestone that jutted up at an angle, offering a narrow crevice that he was sure he could slip into. He’d just reached it when he chanced a look up and saw a man walking toward the water. Tall and broad-shouldered, with long, pale blond hair. His head was down, following the path, and he hadn’t seen Jace yet. The quarry had grown very dark as the thunderheads moved over, but in the next strobe of lightning, Jace saw the glistening of a badge and realized the man was in uniform.

Police. Someone had already called them, or somehow they already knew. Whatever had happened to get them here didn’t matter to Jace. They were here. Help had arrived. He let a long breath out and was filling his lungs to shout for help when he saw the others.

There was another police officer, also blond, his hair cut shorter, like he was in the military. He had a gun on his belt, and he was shoving forward a man in handcuffs. There was a black hood over his head.

Jace stifled his shout and went still, clinging to the rock with his feet and one hand. Trying not to move. Not to breathe.

The first cop waited until the other men reached him. He was standing with his arms folded over his chest, impatient, as he watched the man blinded by the hood stumble forward. The man in the hood was trying to talk and couldn’t. Just a series of strange, high noises.

Something’s over his mouth, Jace realized. He might not have been able to make out the words, but he got the meaning clear enough: The man was begging. He was scared, and he was begging. It came in whines and whimpers, like a puppy. When the first cop swung his foot out and upended the man in the hood, dropping him hard to the ground, blind and unprepared for the fall, Jace almost cried out, had to bite his lip to keep silent. The second cop, the one who’d brought the man down from the car, knelt and put a knee in his spine and jerked his head up by the hood. He leaned down and spoke to him, but it was soft, whispered. Jace could not hear the words. The cop was still talking to the man in the hood when he put out his hand and curled the fingers impatiently, waiting for something, and the first cop offered a knife. Not a pocketknife or a kitchen knife, but something like soldiers used. A fighting knife. A real knife.

Jace saw the man’s head jerk in response to one fast motion with the blade, and then saw his feet spasm, scraping the earth in a search for traction as he tried to lift his cuffed hands to his throat, tried to put back the blood that was spilling out from under the hood. Both of the cops grabbed him then, fast and efficient, taking hold of his clothes from the back, careful to stay away from the blood. Then they shoved him off the rock and he was tumbling, falling just as Jace had. He outpaced his own blood; a red cloud of it was in the air above his head when he hit the water.

At the sound of the splash, Jace finally moved. Now that it was just the two of them up there, no distractions, they’d be likely to look around. Likely to see him. He pulled himself in under the rock and squirmed into the darkness, trying to push back as far as possible, scrabbling at the stone with his fingers. He couldn’t get far. He’d be visible to anyone who was level with him on the other side, but that would require that person’s being in the water. Still, if they came down that far, his hiding place was going to turn into a trap. There would be nowhere to run then. His breath was coming in fast, rapid gasps, and he was dizzy and felt like he could throw up again.

Don’t get sick, don’t make a sound, you cannot make a sound.

For a few seconds all was quiet. They were going to leave. He thought that they were probably going to leave and he would get out of here yet, he’d get home today, despite everything.

That was when he heard one of their voices loud and clear for the first time: “Well, now. It would appear someone has been swimming. And chose to leave his clothing behind.”

The voice was so mild that for a moment Jace couldn’t believe it came from one of the men who’d done the killing up there with the knife. It seemed impossible.

There was a pause, and then the second man answered. “Clothes are one thing. But he’d also choose to leave his shoes?”

“Seems like rough country,” the first voice agreed, “to walk without shoes.”

The strangely serene voices went silent then, but there was another sound, a clear metallic snap. Jace had been around the shooting range with his dad enough to recognize that one: a round being chambered into a gun.

The men circled the quarry rim, and down below them, pinned in the dark rocks, Jace Wilson began to cry.

2

The weather-alert radio went off just as they settled into bed, speaking to Ethan and Allison in its disembodied, robotic voice.

Potent late-spring storm system will continue to bring heavy snow to area mountains…Heaviest snowfall above seventy-five hundred feet…However, several inches of heavy wet snow are possible as low as forty-five hundred feet before morning. Heavy wet snow on trees and power lines may result in power outages. Snow should taper off Sunday morning. One to two feet of snow expected with locally heavier accumulations on north- and east-facing slopes. Mountain roadways will become snow-packed and icy tonight and may become impassable in spots, including over Beartooth Pass.

“You know what I love about you?” Allison said. “You’re leaving that thing on, even though we’ve been watching it snow for the past four hours. We know what’s happening.”

“Forecasts can change.”

“Hmm. Yes. And people can sleep. Let’s do that.”

“Could get fun out there,” Ethan said. “Surely someone decided they’d take a quick hike this morning, ahead of the weather. And of course they wouldn’t need a map, because it was just going to be a quick hike, right?”

Those were the kinds of decisions that usually drew Ethan into the mountains in the middle of the night. Particularly the late-season storms, when the weather had been temperate enough for long enough to lull people into a false sense of security.

“May every fool stay indoors,” Allison said, and kissed his arm, shifting for a more comfortable position, her voice already sleepy.

“Optimistic wish,” he said, pulling her close to his chest, relishing her warmth. The cabin had cooled quickly once they let the fire in the woodstove burn down. Beside them, the window rattled with a steady drilling of sleet. On the shelf above the bed, next to the weather-alert radio, the CB was silent. It had been a good winter-only one call-out. Winters were usually better than other seasons, though; most tourists stayed away from Montana in those months. Ethan didn’t like the feel of this storm. Last day of May, summer looming, a week of sunshine and fifty-degree weather just past? Yes, some of the fools Allison mentioned might have taken to the mountains. And once they got stuck, that radio above Ethan Serbin’s head would crackle to life, and his search-and-rescue team would assemble.

“Got a good feeling,” Allison said into the pillow, fading fast the way she always did; the woman could probably sleep on the tarmac of an active airport without trouble.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. But just in case I’m wrong, turn off your radio. At least the fool frequency.”

He smiled at her in the dark, squeezed her one more time, and then closed his eyes. She was asleep within minutes, her breathing shifting to long, slow inhalations he could feel against his chest. He listened as the sleet changed back to snow; the rattle against the glass faded to silence, and eventually he started to fade too.

When the radio went off, Allison awoke with a groan.

“No,” she said. “Not tonight.”

Ethan got out of bed, fumbled the handheld unit from its base, and walked out of the bedroom and across the cold floorboards to the front window. It was fully dark inside the cabin. They’d lost power just after sunset, and he hadn’t bothered to use the generator; there was no need to burn fuel just to sleep.

“Serbin? You copy?” The voice belonged to Claude Kitna, the Park County sheriff.

“Copy,” Ethan said, looking out at the white world beyond the dark cabin. “Who’s gone missing, and where, Claude?”

“Nobody missing.”

“Then let me sleep.”

“Got a slide-off. Somebody trying to get over the pass just as we were about to shut it down.”

The pass was the Beartooth Pass, on Highway 212 between Red Lodge and Cooke City. The Beartooth Highway, as 212 was also known, was one of the most beautiful-and dangerous-highways in the country, a series of steep switchbacks that wound between Montana and Wyoming and peaked at over ten thousand feet. It was closed for months in the winter, the entire highway simply shut down, and did not reopen until late May at the earliest. The drive required vigilance in the best weather, and in a snowstorm in the dark? Good luck.

“Okay,” Ethan said into the radio. “Why do you need me?” He would roll with his team when someone was missing. A slide-off on the highway, or, as Claude liked to call the really nasty drops, a bounce-off, might require paramedics-or a coroner-but not search-and-rescue.

“Driver who thought it was a wise idea to push through says she was on her way to see you. Park service bumped her to me. Got her sitting in a plow truck right now. You want her?”

“Coming to see me?” Ethan frowned. “Who is it?”

“A Jamie Bennett,” Claude said. “And for a woman who just drove her rental car off a mountain, I have to say, she’s not all that apologetic.”

“Jamie Bennett?”

“Correct. You know her?”

“Yeah,” Ethan said, confused. “Yeah, I know her.”

Jamie Bennett was a professional bodyguard. Since leaving the Air Force, Ethan had taught survival instruction as a private contractor, working with civilians and government groups. Jamie had been in a session he’d taught a year ago. He’d liked her, and she was good, competent if a bit cocky, but he could not imagine what had her driving over the Beartooth Pass in a snowstorm in search of him.

“What’s her story?” Claude Kitna asked.

Ethan couldn’t begin to answer that.

“I’ll head your way,” Ethan said. “And I guess I’ll find out.”

“Copy that. Be careful, now. It’s rough out here tonight.”

“I’ll be careful. See you soon, Claude.”

In the bedroom, Allison propped herself up on one arm and looked at him in the shadows as he pulled his clothes on.

“Where are you headed?”

“Up to the pass.”

“Somebody try to walk away from a car wreck?”

That had happened before. Scared of staying in one place, people would panic and set off down the highway, and, in the blowing snow, they’d lose the highway. It seemed like an impossible thing to lose, until you experienced a Rocky Mountain blizzard at night.

“No. Jamie Bennett was trying to get through.”

“The marshal? The one from last spring?”

“Yes.”

“What is she doing in Montana?”

“Coming to find me, is what I was told.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“That’s what I was told,” he repeated.

“This can’t be good,” Allison said.

“I’m sure it’s fine.”

But as he left the cabin and walked to his snowmobile in the howling white winds, he knew that it wasn’t.

The night landscape refused full dark in that magical way that only snow could provide, soaking in the starlight and moonlight and offering it back as a trapped blue iridescence. Claude Kitna hadn’t been lying-the wind was working hard, shifting north to northeast in savage gusts, flinging thick, wet snow. Ethan rode alone and he rode slow, even though he knew 212 as well as anyone up here, and he’d logged more hours on it in bad weather than most. That was exactly why he kept his speed down even when it felt as if the big sled could handle more. Of the rescues-turned-to-corpse discoveries he’d participated in, far too many involved snowmobiles and ATVs, people getting cocky about driving vehicles built to handle the elements. One thing he’d learned while training all over the world-and the lesson had been hammered home here in Montana-was that believing a tool could handle the elements was a recipe for disaster. You adapted to the elements with respect; you did not control them.

It took him an hour to make what was usually a twenty-minute ride, and he was greeted at Beartooth Pass by orange flares, which threw the surrounding peaks into silhouette against the night sky, one plow, and one police vehicle parked in the road. A black Chevy Tahoe was crushed against the guardrail. Ethan looked at its position, leaned up on one side, and shook his head. She’d come awfully damn close. Pull that same maneuver on one of the switchbacks and that Tahoe would have fallen a long way before it hit rock.

He parked the snowmobile, watching the snow swirl into the dark canyons below, lit orange by the flares as it fell, and he wondered if there was anyone out there in the wilderness whom they didn’t know about, anyone who hadn’t been as lucky as Jamie Bennett. There were tall, thin poles spaced out along the winding highway, markers to help the plows maneuver when the snow turned the road into a blind man’s guessing game, and on the downwind side of the road, the snow was already two feet high against them, three feet in areas where the drifts caught.

The passenger-side door of the plow truck banged open, and Jamie Bennett stepped out of the cab and into the snow before Ethan had cut his engine. Her feet slipped out from under her and she nearly ended up on her ass before she caught herself on the door handle.

“What frigging country do you live in that has a blizzard the last day of May, Serbin?”

She was almost as tall as him; her blond hair streamed out from under a ski cap, and her blue eyes watered in the stinging wind.

“They have these things,” he said, “called weather forecasts? They’re new, I guess, experimental, but it’s still worth checking them, time to time. Like, oh, before driving over a mountain range at night.”

She smiled and offered a gloved hand, and they shook.

“I heard the forecast, but I figured I could beat the storm. Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m keeping my positive mental attitude.”

That was one of the seven priorities for survival Ethan had taught in the course Jamie had taken. The first priority, in fact.

“Glad you’ve retained your lessons. What are you doing here, anyhow?”

Claude Kitna was watching them with interest, staying at a courteous distance but not so far away that he couldn’t overhear the conversation. Farther up the road, the headlights of another plow truck showed, this one returning from the pass gate, which would now be shut and locked, the Beartooth Highway closed to all traffic. They’d opened the pass for the first time that season just four days earlier. Last year, it had been closed until June 20. The wilderness was more accessible now than it had once been, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still the wilderness.

“I’ve got a proposition for you,” Jamie said. “A request. You may not like it, but I want you to hear me out, at least.”

“It’s a promising start,” Ethan said. “Any job that arrives with a blizzard has to bring good things.”

It was a joke then. There in the wind and the snow and the orange signal flares, it was only a joke. Weeks later, though, in the sun and the smoke, he would remember that line, and it would turn him cold.

3

By the time they got back to the cabin, Allison had a fire going in the woodstove.

“You want me to start the generator?” she said. “Get the lights back on?”

“It’s fine,” Jamie said.

“Get you some coffee, at least?” Allison said. “Warm you up a little?”

“I’d take a bourbon or something, actually. If you have any.”

“Like I said-coffee,” Allison told her with a smile, and then she poured Maker’s Mark into a steaming mug of coffee and offered it to Jamie, who was still trying to get her jacket and gloves off, shedding snow that melted into pooled water on the floorboards in front of the stove.

“Now you’re talking. Thank you. It is frigid out there. You really stay here year-round?”

Ethan smiled. “That’s right.”

Allison offered Ethan a cup of coffee as well, and he accepted the warm mug gratefully, rotated it in his hands. Even through top-of-the-line gloves, the wind could find your joints. Allison’s eyes were searching his, looking for a reason this woman had blown in with the storm. He gave the smallest of headshakes. She understood that he still had no idea.

“Gorgeous place,” Jamie said, sipping the whiskey-laced coffee. “You said you guys built it yourselves?”

“Yes. With some help.”

“You give it a name? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with a ranch?”

He smiled. “It’s not a ranch. But we call it the Ritz.”

“Seems a little rustic for that.”

“That’s the idea,” Allison said. “That’s the joke.”

Jamie glanced at her and nodded. “Sorry about this, by the way. Crashing in during the night, during the storm. Invading the Ritz.”

“Must be important,” Allison said. She was wearing loose sweatpants and a tighter, long-sleeved top. She was barefoot, and Jamie Bennett had at least six inches on her. The storm didn’t concern Allison-she was old Montana, third generation, a rancher’s daughter-but Ethan had the sense that Jamie did, somehow. And not because she’d arrived in the middle of the night. Allison was used to those kinds of calls.

“It is,” Jamie said, and turned back to Ethan. “You still run the same summer programs?”

“Summers I work with kids,” he said. “I don’t do any training for anybody else until September. Summer is the kids.”

“That’s what I’m talking about.”

He raised an eyebrow. Ethan worked with probation and parole officers from around the country, took in kids who were facing lockup somewhere and brought them into the mountains instead. It was a survival course, yes, but it was a lot more than that. The idea had hardly originated with him; there were plenty of similar programs in the country.

“I’ve got a kid for you,” she said. “I think. I’m hoping you’re willing to do it.”

Inside the woodstove, a log split in the heat with a popping noise, and the fire flared higher behind the glass door.

“You’ve got a kid,” he echoed. “That means…you’ve got a witness.”

She nodded. “Nice call.”

He took a seat in front of the stove and she followed suit. Allison stayed where she was, leaning against the kitchen counter, watching.

“Why do you want him with me?”

“Because his parents are refusing traditional witness protection.”

“Nontraditional witness protection is what you do now, I thought.” Ethan remembered Jamie saying that she’d been with the U.S. Marshals but had left to go into executive protection. High-dollar private-bodyguard work.

She took a deep breath. “I’ve got to be very limited in what I tell you. Understand that? I’ll try to give you the best sense of it that I can, but it won’t be as detailed as you’d like.”

“Okay.”

“This boy is…he’s beyond a critical witness. I can’t overstate his value. But what I’m dealing with is a situation in which he and his parents have a pretty healthy distrust of law enforcement. With good reason, based on what they’ve seen. The boy is at risk. High risk. And the parents want to stay with the son, avoid the WITSEC program, and just generally control everything. Enter me, as you said. But…”

She stopped talking. Ethan gave her a minute, and when she didn’t pick back up, he said, “Jamie?”

“But I’m not doing too well,” she said softly. “I could lie to you, and I was about to. I was about to tell you that the family can’t afford me. That’s true enough. But Ethan, I would protect this boy for free if I could. I really mean that. I’d make it my only job, I’d…”

Another pause, a deep breath, and then, “They’re too good.”

“Who is?”

“The men looking for him.”

Allison turned away just as Ethan searched for her eyes.

“Then why me?” he said. “You’re better at it than me.”

“You can take him off the grid. Completely. And that’s where their weakness will be. If he’s around a cell phone, a security camera, a computer, a damned video game, I feel like they’ll get him. But here…here he’s just a tiny thing in a big wilderness.”

“We all are,” Ethan said.

“Right. It’s going to be your call, of course. But I was desperate, and it struck me. At first, a wild idea, this implausible thing. But then I looked into it a little bit more-”

“Looked into Ethan a little more?” Allison said. They both turned to her.

“That was part of it,” Jamie Bennett said evenly. “But it was more looking into the feasibility of the whole thing. We make him vanish for a summer. But he’s not in the situation the parents are so worried about, he’s not in some safe house in a new city, scared to death. I have a very good sense of the kid. What he likes, what he’d respond to, what would make him relax. He is not relaxed right now, I assure you. He’s very into adventure things. Survival stories. And that, of course, made me think of you. So I pitched it, told them about your background, and I think I’ve got them sold on it. So I came here to sell you too.”

“Shouldn’t it have run the other way, maybe?” Allison said. “Clearing the plan with us before selling the child and his parents on it?”

Jamie studied her for a moment and then gave a small nod. “I understand why you feel that way. But the reality is, I’m trying to minimize the number of people who know that this boy exists. If I’d told you and then the parents wouldn’t agree to it, there’d be people in Montana who’d been informed of the situation for no gain. That’s a risky approach.”

“Fair enough,” Ethan said. “But Allison raises a good point. It’s not just a matter of selling me on it, or the two of us. There are going to be other kids up here. Other kids who may be at risk if we do this. That’s my primary responsibility.”

“I will tell you, will assure you, that I would not consider doing this if I felt it put other children at risk. First of all, the boy is going to seem to disappear from the outside world before he arrives here. That much I’ve worked out carefully. I know how to make him vanish. I’d enter him in the program with a false identity. Even you couldn’t know who he was. And you wouldn’t try to find out.”

Ethan nodded.

“The second thing,” she said, “is that we know who we’re watching. We know who is threatened by him. If they move from…from their home base, I’m going to be aware of it. They aren’t sneaking up to Montana without me noticing. And the minute they move, you’ll have total protection for your entire group. For everyone.”

Ethan was silent. Jamie leaned toward him.

“And, if I may offer an opinion: This boy needs what you teach. It isn’t just about hiding him here, Ethan. The kid is damaged, and he’s trying to hold it together. He’s scared. You can make him stronger. I know that, because I’ve been through it with you.”

Ethan looked away from Jamie and over to Allison, but her flat stare revealed no opinion either way. His decision to make. He looked back at Jamie.

“Listen,” Jamie Bennett said, “I didn’t come out here on a whim. But I’m not going to pressure you on it either. I’m telling you the truth about the scenario and asking for your help.”

Ethan turned from her and looked out the window. The snow was still falling fast, and dawn’s light was far from arriving. In the reflection in the glass he could see Allison and Jamie Bennett waiting on him to speak. Jamie seemed more frustrated than Allison, because Allison understood that Ethan was not a man given to rapid decision-making, that he felt rushed decisions were often exactly what got you into serious trouble. He sat and drank his coffee and watched them in the reflection, trapped there in the lantern light with the snow swirling outside, part of that beautiful mystery of glass, of how, seen at the right angle, it could show you what lay both behind it and beyond it.

“You believe he will be killed if the situation is allowed to continue in its current fashion,” he said.

“I do.”

“What is your alternative plan? If I say no.”

“I’m hoping you say-”

“I understand what you’re hoping. I’m asking what you’ll do if I say no.”

“I’ll try to find him a program similar to yours. With someone who’ll take the child off the grid, someone who is qualified to protect him. But I won’t find one I trust as much, I won’t find one I can vouch for personally. That matters to me.”

Ethan looked away from the window and back into Jamie Bennett’s eyes.

“You truly will not let the boy be pursued here? You believe you can guarantee that?”

“One hundred percent.”

“Nothing is one hundred percent.” Ethan got to his feet and gestured to the darkened room behind them. “There’s a guest bedroom in there. Take the flashlight on the table, and make yourself at home. We’ll talk in the morning.”

Jamie Bennett stared at him. “You’re not going to give me an answer?”

“I’m going to get some sleep,” Ethan said. “And then I’ll give you an answer.”

Alone in the dark bedroom, they spoke in whispers beneath the wailing wind and considered the best-case scenarios and the worst-case. There seemed to be many more options in the latter category.

“Tell me what you think, Allison. What you think.”

She was quiet for a time. They were facing each other in the bed and he had one arm wrapped around her back, her lean muscles rising and falling under his hand as she breathed. Her dark hair spilled across the pillow and touched his cheek.

“You can’t say no,” she said at last.

“You think we have to do it, then?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Clarify.”

She took a deep breath. “You won’t be able to say no. You’ll be watching every news story, searching for some kid who was killed or who disappeared. You’ll be calling Jamie asking for updates she won’t be able to give you. Your entire summer will be lost to wondering if you put him in harm’s way when you could have taken him out of it. Am I wrong?”

He didn’t answer.

“You also believe it,” she said. “And that’s a good thing.”

“Believe her story? Of course I do.”

“No,” Allison said, “you believe that this can help him. That when he goes back to the world to face it all down, he’ll be more ready than he was before he got here. Before he got to you.”

“I think it works,” Ethan said. “Some of the time, I think it works.”

“I know it does,” she said softly.

Allison had understood from the beginning. Or understood how it mattered to him, at least, and believed that he believed it worked. That was a critical starting point. Many people he spoke to about it got the theory of the program without the soul. Maybe that was on him. Maybe he’d not been able to explain it properly, or maybe it wasn’t something you could explain but, rather, something that had to be felt. Maybe you needed to be sixteen years old with a hard-ass, impossible-to-please father and facing a long stretch in juvie and knowing that longer stretches in worse places waited and then arrive in a beautiful but terrifying mountain range, clueless and clumsy, and find something out there to hold inside yourself when you got sent back. When the mountains were gone and the air blew exhaust smoke instead of glacier chill and the pressures that were on you couldn’t be solved with a length of parachute cord and an ability to tie the right knot with your eyes closed. If you could find that and hold it there within yourself, a candle of self-confidence against the darkness, you could accomplish great things. He knew this. He’d been through it.

So you learned to build a fire, his old man had said when Ethan explained the experience, unable to transfer the feeling to him. Yes, he’d learned to build a fire. What it had done for him, though, the sense of confidence the skills gave and the sense of awe that the mountains gave…those were impacts he could not describe. All he could do was show everyone: No trouble with the law since he was sixteen, a distinguished Air Force career, a collection of ribbons and medals and commendations. All of those things had been within the flame of that first fire he’d started, but how could you explain that?

“So you’ll do it,” Allison said. “You’ll agree to it in the morning.”

He offered a question instead of confirmation. “What don’t you like about her?”

“I never said I didn’t like her.”

“I’ll repeat the question. Hopeful for an answer this time.”

Allison sighed and leaned her head on his chest. “She drove her car off the road in a snowstorm.”

“You’re bothered by the fact that she’s a bad driver?”

“No,” Allison said. “I’m bothered by the fact that she rushes, and she makes mistakes.”

He was silent. Intrigued by the observation. It seemed unfair on the surface, critical and harsh, but she was only commenting on the very things he’d taught for so many years. Good decision-making was a pattern. So was bad decision-making.

“Just keep that in mind,” Allison said, “when you tell her that you’re going to do it.”

“So now I’m going to do it?”

“You were always going to do it, Ethan. You just needed to go through the rituals. That way you can convince yourself it’s the right choice.”

“You’re saying it’s not?”

“No, E. I’m saying that I truly don’t know what will come of it. But I know you’re going to say yes.”

They slept then, finally, and in the morning he told Jamie Bennett that he would take the job, and then they set about finding a tow truck to deal with the damaged rental. A simple mistake, he told himself, representative of nothing.

But he couldn’t help thinking, after Allison’s warning, that the first thing Jamie had admitted to him upon her disastrous midnight arrival was that she had heard the forecast and ignored it, convinced she could beat the storm.

Up at the Beartooth Pass, chains rattled and winches growled as they pulled that mistake free from the snowdrifts.

4

Ian was off duty when they came for him, but he was still in uniform and still armed, and usually that meant something to people. Badge on the chest, gun on the belt? He felt awfully strong in those situations. Had since the academy, could still remember the first time he’d put on the uniform, feeling like a damned gladiator.

Bring it the fuck on, he’d thought then, and the years hadn’t eroded much of that swagger. He knew better than to believe he was untouchable-he’d attended too many police funerals for that, and he’d shaken a few too many of the wrong hands and passed cash to too many people he shouldn’t have-but day by day, hour by hour, he still felt strong in the uniform. People took notice. Some respected you, some feared you, some flat-out hated you, even, but they sure as hell took notice.

The single most unnerving thing about the Blackwell brothers was that they didn’t seem to. The badge meant nothing, and the gun even less. Their pale blue eyes would just roll over you, taking inventory, showing nothing. Indifferent. Bored, even.

He saw their truck when he pulled in. That black F-150 with blacked-out windows, an illegal level of tint. Even the grille was black. He expected they were still inside, and he got out of the cruiser and took a deep breath and hitched up his belt, knowing they were watching and wanting to remind them of the gun, even though they never seemed to care. He went up on the porch and flipped the lid on the beer cooler. Ice had melted but there were still a couple cans floating around in relatively cold water, and he took out a Miller Lite and drank it there on the porch, leaning against the rail and staring at the blacked-out truck and waiting for them to appear.

They never did.

“To hell with it,” he said when the beer was done. Let ’em sit, if that’s what they wanted. He wasn’t going to walk down there and knock on the damn door like he was ready to do their bidding. That wasn’t how it worked. They’d come to him, like it or not.

He crumpled the can and tossed it in the recycling bin on the porch, which was so full the can just bounced off and fell to the floor. He ignored that as he went to the door and unlocked it, hating the uneasy feeling that came with having his back to their black truck. Then he opened the door and stepped inside and saw them in his living room.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing? You broke into my house?”

They didn’t answer, and he felt the first real chill. Shook it off and slammed the door behind him, trying to hold the anger. They worked for him. He needed to remember that in order to ensure that they would remember it as well.

“You boys,” he said, shaking his head, “are going to get your asses in trouble someday, you know that?”

Jack Blackwell was sitting on Ian’s recliner. Had it leaned back so he could stretch his legs out. He was the older of the two, a little taller, a little thinner. Neither of them had much in the way of visible muscle, but Ian had seen the strength in those rangy frames at work, had seen the vise-tight grips of their unusually large hands, the way those long fingers could turn into steel bands. Jack had hair like a damned Beach Boy, hanging down to his collar, so light that it looked bleached. Dressed in faded, rumpled clothes, most of the time in black. His younger brother kept a different look, as if it were important to him to be separate from Jack, even if he never moved far from his side. Patrick could have passed for a Marine, had hair that was cut with a razor and not scissors, wore shirts with crisp creases, boots that shined. He was standing between the living room and the kitchen, arms folded. He never seemed to sit.

Ian said, “Stupid damn thing to do, you know that? Risky. I get one neighbor who watches you dumb bastards letting yourself in here, one neighbor who calls out a patrolman, and we’ve got major issues then. Fucking stupid, that’s what this is.”

Jack Blackwell said, “He lectures a lot.”

Patrick Blackwell said, “I’ve noticed. Most times, it’s about intelligence. Lack thereof, rather. You noticed that?”

“I have indeed.”

This was their routine. Talking to each other as if they were alone in the room. Creepy fuckers. Ian had heard it before, and he never did like it.

“Listen,” he said, “it’s been a long day, boys. I don’t have time to serve as the straight man for your act. Tell me what in the hell you’re doing here, and then get the hell out.”

“Hospitality is lacking too,” Jack Blackwell said.

“Noticeably so,” Patrick agreed. “Man stood out there on his porch and enjoyed a cold beer without so much as offering us one.”

“Didn’t appear to be his last beverage either. So the opportunity for the offer is there, certainly. And still it hasn’t been made.” Jack shook his head, looking at his brother. “You think this goes back a while? The lack of manners?”

“You’re suggesting his parents are to blame? That it was learned behavior?” Patrick pursed his lips, giving the matter due consideration. “We can’t say that with any level of certainty. But it’s possible. It’s possible.”

“Hey, dickheads?” Ian said, and he let his hand drift down to his gun. “I’m not fucking around here. If you’ve got something to say, now’s the time. Otherwise, get out.”

Jack was still looking at Patrick, but Patrick was watching Ian. Patrick said, “If I didn’t know better, I could interpret his attitude as threatening. Got his hand on his gun, even. You see that?”

Jack turned and fixed his pale blue eyes on Ian. “I had not. But you’re correct. It’s a threatening posture.”

Ian decided he was done with them, and the feel of the gun in his hand helped build his confidence. He reached for the door, twisted the knob, and pulled it open.

“Get out.”

Jack Blackwell let out a deep sigh, then lowered the recliner’s footrest and sat leaning forward, head down, arms braced on his knees.

“The boy is still gone. You were supposed to have intel by now. A location.”

Ian closed the door. “I’m working on it.”

Jack nodded slowly, the gesture of a man both understanding and disappointed. A father hearing his troubled son’s excuses; a priest listening to the confession of a repeated sin.

“Your sources with the marshals, Ian, are not what they were promised to be.”

“A great deal of hype,” Patrick agreed, “but very little result.”

“The kid isn’t in WITSEC,” Ian said. “Trust me.”

“Well, he’s also not at home. Trust us.”

“I understand that. But I’m telling you, he didn’t enter the program. My sources aren’t overhyped. They’re every bit as good as promised.”

“That would seem hard to believe at this point, based upon the evidence.”

“Give it time.”

“Time. Sure. Do you understand how this situation troubles us?” Jack said.

Ian felt a dull throb building behind his temples, a pulse of frustration that usually led to someone bleeding. He was not a man who handled frustration well. He’d understood for a while now that he might have made a mistake with this alliance, but for all their strange quirks and bizarre behavior, the Blackwell brothers were good. They did professional work and they did not make mistakes and they kept a low profile. They were cold and they were cruel but he understood men who were cold and cruel and in the end all he cared about was whether they were good at their jobs. The Blackwell brothers were that, if nothing else. His patience for their attitudes, though, was fading fast.

“That kid,” he said, “is a problem for me too. All of this comes back to me in the end, you better remember that. Better remember who pays you for your work.”

“The lectures again,” Patrick said, and shook his head. “You hearing this?”

“I am,” Jack said. “Appears to be questioning our level of understanding. Yet again.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Ian said. “That shit, the talking-like-I’m-not-here shit? End it. I’ll lay this out for you once, okay? The kid is not with WITSEC. If he ever is, I’ll know about it. He’s not right now. So your job is to figure out where he is. And do it fast.”

“There were rumors afloat,” Jack said. “You recall those, Patrick?”

“Negotiations with prosecutors. Are those the rumors you’re thinking of?”

“Well, it wasn’t the Cubs’ possibilities before the trade deadline. So it must have been that, yes.”

Ian was listening to them and wondering why in the hell he hadn’t driven away as soon as he saw the truck. He’d always been in control of these two, in theory at least, but he’d never felt that control. Now he was seeing the mistake in this association. A wise man didn’t rent attack dogs; he raised them himself. Why? Because he’d never be able to fully trust them otherwise.

“Listen,” he said, “I don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about, with the rumors and bullshit. Nobody wants this done more than me. The parents know where the boy is, you can count on that.”

“Does the mother talk to us, Patrick? What do you think?” This from Jack.

“Anyone will talk to us with proper encouragement. Or so we’ve found over the years.”

“True. But do the parents say what we need them to say in the course of our conversation?”

“A far more difficult question. They have, after all, nothing but the boy. In such circumstances, even the most persuasive approach may not be effective. It would depend upon the depth of their affection.”

“My point exactly. The parents also have watchers now. Law enforcement support, a prosecutor who is determined to use that boy as a critical witness and who probably has conned them into believing the boy can be kept safe, and all the boy has to do is simply appear in court. You might remember that we were told by Ian here to leave the scene without the boy, that we couldn’t waste time on a kid who, quote, ‘might not even have seen a thing.’ And that allowed the parents time to seek help. I would say, and you may correct me if you feel it’s necessary, that the parents are a very poor opening option.”

“I would concur,” Patrick said. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Ian. Lord, they were pale eyes. Ian hated their eyes, their stupid verbal games, their general demeanor. Even when you tried to piss them off, you couldn’t. He hadn’t succeeded in rattling those flat monotones yet.

“Then find another option,” Ian said. “That was your job. Go do it. Get the hell out of my house and do it.”

“For how much?” Jack said.

Ian stared at him. “For how much?”

“Yes. What pay rate, Ian?”

“You expect me to pay you to kill a witness you left alive? Pay you to clean up your own damned mess?”

“The mess,” Jack said, still looking at the floor, “occurred while we were already in your employ. This mess is part of a previously existing mess. One that you paid us to clean up. For you.”

“I expected it done better.”

Jack glanced to his right, at Patrick, who was some ten feet away. He had drifted farther from his brother by a few steps.

“We’ve disappointed him, Patrick.”

“It seems that way.”

Jack turned to face Ian. Now both brothers were staring at him, two sets of those glacial gazes. Ian suddenly wished he hadn’t closed the door.

“The new mess is part of the old one, Detective O’Neil,” Jack said. “You own one, you own the other. Can you follow that? Consider us…” He waved a hand between himself and his brother. “There was one payment. There were two Blackwells. You got the one, you got the other. Are you with me here? Do you see the correlation?”

“I’ve got no money for you,” Ian said. His mouth was dry, and his hand was all the way over the pistol grip now. Neither of them had so much as blinked at that. He knew that they had seen it, and he wanted them to care. Why didn’t they care?

“If there’s no money in it,” Jack said, “then why on earth would we kill this boy?”

“You’re serious?”

Jack gave a patient nod.

“Because he can put you in fucking prison. Both of you. Get one, get the other, you tell me? Well, bud, he’s going to get you both. Get all of us. Me? At least I got a chance. But you two? He saw you two.”

“Your thesis, then, would be as follows: We kill for money, or we kill to protect ourselves. There are those who pay, and those who threaten. Correct?”

“Correct,” Ian said.

Jack looked at him for a long time and didn’t say anything. It was Patrick who finally broke the silence by saying, “And you, Ian, are no longer one who pays.”

The problem was that there were two of them. You tried to watch them both but they never stood together. There was always the distance. So one spoke and you looked at him and the other you could see only out of the corner of your eye. Then that one spoke and you’d look at him and now the other could be seen only out of the corner of your eye. Ian had been speaking with Jack, had been focused on Jack, had been looking at Jack with his hand on his gun, ready to pull it and fire. Then Patrick spoke, and Ian did what instinct told you to do-he looked in that direction.

He was facing the wrong way when the rush of motion came from Jack then, and by the time he spun back and drew the Glock, there was already a suppressed pistol in Jack Blackwell’s hand and it bucked twice and Ian was down on his knees in his living room with blood spilling rich and red onto the hardwood floors. He wasn’t going to die like that, without even getting a shot off, but now he was looking at Jack and there was Patrick on the other side, Ian saw him out of the corner of his eye, and when the shots came from that direction, Ian was facing the wrong way yet again.

You got one, you got the other.

Detective Sergeant Ian O’Neil was dead on his living-room floor when the Blackwell brothers left his house, making sure to lock the door behind them, and returned to their truck.

“He made some sense,” Patrick said as he slid behind the wheel. “That bit about reasons for killing? Money or threat? He was a convincing man.”

“He had his moments,” Jack said, putting the pistol into the center console and leaving the lid up until Patrick added his.

“All the same,” Patrick said, “I’d like to have been paid to find the boy.”

“Young Jace offers us no reward, that’s true. The risk, though…”

“Yes,” Patrick said, gunning the big V-8 to life. “The risk is substantial. And so I suppose we’ll have to find him.”

“I suppose we will.”

5

Don’t try to guess.

That had been Allison’s rule for the day. She had seen all of their files, she knew the boys by heart in some ways, and she hadn’t even met them yet.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said aloud when she fed the horse, Tango, her baby, a rehab horse. He’d been kicked and sustained a fracture that went almost the full length of his leg. The bone was broken but not shattered. If it had been, he would have had to be put down. Instead, there was hope, though he’d never be able to perform at the level he once had. He was now on the third month of his rehab-which meant that he hadn’t lain down in three months. Tango had been standing up for ninety-four consecutive days. He wore a bit connected to two tension bands that kept him from lying down. If he did get down, the chances that he’d destroy the leg were high, because he’d have to put a huge amount of force on the foreleg in order to push himself up again.

And so he remained standing. He betrayed no trace of pain or frustration or fatigue. Allison had been around horses her entire life, and she knew they didn’t have to lie down for sleep or to rest in the way that humans and many other animals did, but still it astounded her to see him there, day after day, so patient, so steadfast. So trusting.

She spoke to him while she groomed him, and he gave a series of low snorts and, in trademark Tango fashion, shot a streamer of snot onto her arm. This was a compliment. This was true affection.

“Two more weeks, big guy,” she said. That was all he had left wearing the bit. The foreleg should be fully healed by now, he’d taken walks and shown no trace of pain, but he hadn’t held a rider. She couldn’t wait to return to this horse. It was something to look forward to in a summer of unease.

Once she’d ridden horses for show. Fairs, competitions, bizarre Montana beauty pageants. Her mother had loved that world. Allison, not so much. The horse was always an afterthought to her mother-Allison’s wardrobe, her hair, her stance: that mattered most. After a while, you began to wonder which creature was really being trotted out for show.

She was still talking to the horse when the van pulled in, and there they were: six boys of the sort she’d met every summer and one who was on the run from a killer. They unloaded in front of the bunkhouse, a simple cabin with no electricity or running water. Allison was already scrutinizing them during introductions, couldn’t help it, don’t try to guess a laughable command now.

There was Drew, sixteen, from Vermont. Tall and sullen and wanting to be someplace else. Raymond, fifteen, from Houston. Dark eyes that darted around as if he were taking an inventory of all possible threats. Connor, fourteen, from Ohio, who stared at Allison’s breasts instead of her eyes when he was introduced and then blushed when he realized he’d been caught. Ty, fourteen, from Indiana, a smaller kid but knotted with muscle and puffed up to show it as much as possible. Jeff, fifteen, from Kansas, who stood behind the others and didn’t make eye contact with anyone when he introduced himself. Marco, fifteen, from Las Cruces, already stepping into the role of class clown, making a series of soft jokes about the “compound” that earned smiles from Bryce, fifteen, of Chicago, but they were nervous smiles.

Already she was handicapping them. Bryce looked uneasy and was trying hard to find a friend. Possible. Jeff and Drew both looked like they wanted to be on the first flight out, but Drew’s expression carried more attitude problems. Jeff just looked scared.

Probably Jeff, she thought, and then she realized Ethan was watching her and she smiled at him and turned away, chastising herself.

It doesn’t matter.

But it felt like it did. She was frustrated that they couldn’t know, even if the logic for the decision was clear.

“Remember those cows we saw in the road?” Ethan said. “The feared mountain cows? They belong to my wife here.”

“How do you just let them wander around in the highway?” the one named Raymond asked. “We had to honk to get them to move.”

“Lease on public lands is cheap,” Allison said with a smile. “What can I say? I like to save my dollars.”

“How in the hell-”

“Language,” Ethan said.

“Sorry. How do you get them back?”

“Cowboys do it,” Allison said.

“No shit? Actual cow-”

“Language,” Ethan repeated. “Raymond, are we going to have a problem with this?”

Raymond shrugged. A faint smile played on his face. Allison looked at him and thought, No, too confident, he’s not scared, and the right one will be scared. They were all white except for Marco, who was Hispanic. A big drug case, maybe, or some kind of border killings, one of those smuggling rings you read about, Allison thought, and then, right on the heels of that thought, You racist bitch, did you actually just think that? What are you turning into over this?

“Cowboys,” Raymond said, and he shook his head and laughed. “You gotta be kidding me.”

“Go on and get settled in the bunkhouse,” Ethan told the boys. “There are sixteen bunks in there and only seven of you, so there shouldn’t be much trouble finding a bed. We’ll meet at four by the campfire over there. Get some rest, relax. Enjoy those mattresses. Soon you’re going to be sleeping up there.”

He pointed to where Pilot Peak and Index Peak loomed against the gray sky, and the boys looked up. Judging by their faces, you’d think they were staring at menacing stone monuments to the memory of those who had perished in the mountains before.

“We climb them?” Connor said.

“No, dude, we take the escalator.” This from Marco, drawing laughs.

“We’ll do some climbing,” Ethan said. “But not on those bad boys. Not just yet. All right, get settled in, and then be at the fire at four sharp. We’re going to review all of the gear you need for the trail. Anything you don’t pack, you won’t be able to use, so I’d suggest you listen good.”

They hauled their luggage into the bunkroom. Most of them had suitcases or duffel bags; a few were already outfitted with backpacks. It was a small group, but that was intentional. Ethan’s permits and insurance allowed him to be the sole instructor only with groups of eight or fewer. Get above eight, as he sometimes did, and he had to have an extra instructor.

When the boys were in the bunkhouse and it was just the two of them, Ethan turned to Allison and said, “I think it’s Drew. Doesn’t talk like he’s from New England, which is supposedly his home, and definitely doesn’t want to be here, but he’s kind of curious about what we do.”

She stared at him in astonishment, and he smiled and said, “Baby? It’s human to wonder. We won’t try to find out, but be honest with yourself. It’s human to wonder.”

She shook her head and sighed. “I’d like to know.”

“No gain to knowing.”

“Maybe there is.”

“I don’t see it.”

She nodded.

“They have an hour,” Ethan said. “And I’d like them to get some space. They need to start feeling each other out.”

“You think you’ve got an hour till the first fight?”

“Let’s hope so,” he said, and then he took her hand and guided her inside the cabin.

They were in bed in the cabin, a stolen hour while the kids settled into the bunkhouse, and Allison lay there and traced the muscles in his chest with her fingernail and said, “Have you thought any more about it?”

“About what?” Ethan asked, and she took her hand away, rolled onto her back, and sighed, staring at the shadowed ceiling. Ethan missed the warmth of her immediately. A minute passed and then maybe five and finally she broke the silence.

“If someone comes for him,” she said.

“They won’t.”

“But have you thought about it?”

He paused. He didn’t know what she wanted to hear, but he decided to tell her the truth whether she wanted to hear it or not.

“Yes. And I think I’m ready if they come. But they won’t.”

“You could lose a lot, betting on that,” she said. “Could lose it all.”

“I won’t lose it all.”

“No? Something happens up there in the mountains, Ethan? Somebody takes a shot at one of those boys? You’re done, then. Everything you’ve built is done.”

“It won’t happen, Allison.”

She sighed again, and when he reached for her, she stayed motionless, unreceptive. The outline of her was visible in the dim room with the shades pulled and he could smell her hair and skin and he wanted to stop talking about this; their hours together in the summer were few and couldn’t be wasted on argument.

“I can help him,” he said, tracing the side of her breast and squeezing her hip. “Whichever one he is, I can help him.”

Long ago, when Ethan left the Air Force after years working as a survival instructor in every climate known to man and made his home in the Montana mountains, he’d had an idea of what he wanted to do with his skills. The Air Force trained survival instructors in every elite branch of the military; if an Army Ranger told you he was a survival instructor, it meant he’d been through the Air Force program; same for the SEALs, same for everybody, no matter what unit or how elite. Ethan had done well with those types because he understood something that needed to be understood. They were bad sons of bitches, they could kill you with any weapon known to man or with no weapon at all if necessary, and his job was not to impress them or try to match them; his job was to make them proficient in yet a few more areas of combat, known as SERE: survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. And in those areas? Ethan was as good as anyone got.

One of the things he learned, teaching those warriors, was that a survivor had specific skills, and almost all of them were between the ears, a convergence of cognitive prowess and emotional control. Some of the muscled-up types had trouble with that. Others didn’t. But in the attempt to instill those ideas, he became fascinated with the concept of whether someone could build a survivor mentality. Did you have to be born with it, carry it in some twisted strand of DNA, or could you learn it?

These were the things you had time to consider when you spent weeks in the desert, alone under a night sky so laden with stars it was hard to comprehend; or in the jungle, sleeping in a homemade hammock that kept you elevated from the insects that would otherwise devour your flesh; or in the Arctic, building a fortress out of ice blocks. What Ethan had decided, what he’d determined from years invested in the study and craft of survival, was that the gain could extend far beyond what he taught in the military. By now he’d helped teens from all around the country, in every circumstance imaginable, and he knew that he’d done good work, that he’d made a difference. You did the best you could, and you didn’t hold yourself responsible for the ones you couldn’t reach, because you couldn’t reach them all. You had to acknowledge that early, had to let yourself accept that some would falter despite your best efforts. He could not get his head around that with this summer’s special case, though. Whoever the boy was, Ethan wanted to make an impact. He believed that he could.

Beside him in their bed, his wife was still silent.

“Allison? Please.”

She turned back to him then, rolling onto her side. Ran one hand up his arm and then held the side of his face, propping herself up on an elbow. Looking into his eyes.

“I’d feel better if there was more help,” she said. “If you’d gotten a few people in here, just for these weeks. Reggie, maybe. He’d be good.”

“Reggie’s in Virginia. He’s got his own thing.”

“Someone, then. So it’s not just you out there, alone.”

“You know the agreement I made on this. I have to be alone.”

“You’re taking them into the mountains tomorrow. The first morning, and you’re taking them up?”

“It’s how it will need to go this summer. Not bad, just different. I want my usual patterns disrupted. Just in case.”

“You should have demanded someone else come along.”

“I love you,” Ethan said.

“That’s sweeter than saying end of discussion. Even if it means the same thing.”

“I love you,” he repeated.

She leaned down and kissed him, then rested her forehead against his, and her lips grazed him when she spoke.

“I’ll let it go. I won’t speak of it again. You don’t need it, and Lord knows, I don’t need to beat my head on the chunk of granite that you like to call your opinion.”

“Nasty tone, Miss Montana.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Sorry. I know you were only the runner-up.”

Usually he could get a rise out of her with this, could turn anger to laughter. This afternoon, though, she was silent. He took her in his arms, pulled her on top of him, and still something was wrong. Tensed muscles where loose ones belonged. He put his hands on her sides and pushed her back, and now it was his turn to search for eye contact in the darkness.

“What’s wrong?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I just have a bad feeling. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to worry about him. Whichever one he is. But it’s more than that. I just…something doesn’t feel right. I’ve been restless. Uneasy. Like something’s on the way.”

He laughed at her then, something that he would recall over and over in the days to come, the serious weight of her warning and how melodramatic it had sounded to him there in the darkened bedroom with her body pressed to his and the cabin full of warmth and wood smoke.

“You’ve been back to the folklore books?” he said. They were a favorite of hers, and she’d spoken countless times of her envy of those with the gift of premonitions, which was always a source of amusement to him, both that she believed in it and that she desired it. “What do you see, baby? Shade of the moon, shadow of a spider, the way the cat holds his tail?”

“No,” she said. Her voice soft. “Nothing like that. But I feel it, all the same.”

“I haven’t gotten killed in these mountains yet,” he said. “And it won’t happen this year.”

She was silent.

“Baby?” he said. “It…won’t…happen.”

“All right,” she said. “All right.” But her tone was still heavy and somber. He touched the side of her face gently and she kissed his palm and said it a third time. “All right, Ethan.”

He meant to ask her more then, because she was so serious. Not that she would have had answers for a feeling that rose from someplace inexplicable or primal or, hell, maybe mystical, for all he knew. She slid her hands down his chest and over his stomach and found him, though, and then any questions that were on his lips faded, first within her cool palm and then within her warmth, and later she was asleep on his chest and he didn’t want to disturb her, but he had to be out at the fire to meet the boys, so he slipped out quietly.

They did not speak of her unease again before he entered the mountains.

6

Jace Wilson was dead.

He’d perished in a quarry, and Connor Reynolds needed to keep that in mind. The hardest part of the new name wasn’t remembering to identify himself by it; it was reacting when other people called him by it.

“Connor? Yo? Connor? You, like, coherent, dude?”

They were on the first trail day when the loud kid, Marco, started talking to him, and Jace was focused on the countryside around them, in awe of the sheer size of it. The distances were staggering. He’d hiked a lot in Indiana and thought he was familiar enough with the idea. There, though, you’d come up over a ridge and look ahead to the next point in the trail and then it would be maybe five, ten minutes until you were there. Up here it would be an hour, an exhausting, sweating-and-gasping hour, and you’d stop for a water break, turn around, and realize you could still see the place you’d started from. It looked like you weren’t gaining any ground at all.

They were walking in a shallow gulch with mountains looming high on each side, and he didn’t mind looking at the peaks from down here. He’d been unnerved at the start, fearing they were going out on some sort of mountain-goat trail where a fall would be your death-even the highway had felt like that; he’d had to pretend he was asleep to keep from watching the switchbacks, with all the other kids awake and talking and laughing about it-but so far the trail hadn’t been bad. Had been, honestly, pretty cool. And he felt safer out here, which was strange. Up in the mountains, he had the sense that nobody was going to sneak up on them. Certainly not on Ethan Serbin, who seemed to notice every out-of-place pine needle. So he was feeling pretty good, pretty secure, and then the loud kid started calling him by his new name, and he didn’t respond.

By the fourth time Marco yelled the name, they were all watching him. Even Ethan seemed interested. Jace felt a panicking sensation that he’d blown it already, they were onto him, and he’d been reminded time and again that this was the only way it could go bad up here in the mountains. If he let anyone know the truth, let anyone know he wasn’t who he was pretending to be, that was when the men from the quarry would arrive. He thought of them now and heard their voices in place of Marco’s and as the panic rose, it brought with it the realization that he had to explain this somehow, come up with a reason he was ignoring this kid. He couldn’t just say he was distracted or hadn’t heard him. It wasn’t enough. He had to play his role.

“If I wanted to talk to you,” Jace said, staring right at Marco, “I would.”

Marco pulled his head back, eyes wide. “The fuck? Hey, man, I-”

“Stop it!” Ethan Serbin thundered. “Both of you, stop talking. Now. And you’re going to owe me for the language, Marco. You’ll enjoy that once we get back to camp. Hope you like gathering firewood. You can call the logs whatever you’d like.”

“Man, this kid-”

Ethan held a hand up, silencing him. Everyone was still staring at Jace, and he felt exposed but tried to keep a tough expression, tried to look like what he was supposed to be: a problem kid with a bad attitude, worse than the rest of them. If he was the worst, they’d leave him alone.

“Connor? What’s your problem today? Is there a reason you feel the need to disrespect your friends?”

Got to stick with it, Jace told himself, even though he hated acting the part in front of Ethan Serbin, who had this powerful way of showing disappointment through silence that reminded Jace of his dad. And Jace had to please his dad, because his father worked long hours and he worked in pain and he took pills to help but they never did. Jace had learned early that the more he did on his own, the more problems he fixed by himself, the better. It wasn’t that his dad was mean, or angry all the time. It was that life hadn’t been kind to him, so Jace tried to be.

So while the Jace half of him said, Please, Ethan, the Connor half of him said, Give him what he thinks you are, and Jace was smart enough to listen to that half.

“He’s not my friend. We’re not up here because we’re friends. Or because we want to be. Everybody knows that.”

It sounded good to him, sounded right. Fit the part, fit the part. That had been his dad’s advice. Of course, a key element of fitting the part was remembering your own name.

“All right,” Ethan Serbin said. “It’s not your choice. I remember being deployed in more than a few places that weren’t my choice either. And in a survival scenario, Connor? You think it’ll be your choice if a plane goes down? Will that be anybody’s choice?”

Jace shook his head.

“So we work with what we have,” Ethan continued. “That’s true with the elements, the weather, supplies, all of it. Certainly, it’s true with your companions. You work with who you have. Not friends yet? Fine. Maybe you will be. Maybe not. But one thing we can’t tolerate-because in a different situation it could get us killed-is disrespect. You keep disrespecting Marco, then how’s he going to look at you when you need him? When you’ve got a broken leg and need him to haul your butt out of here? You think you’re going to wish you’d shown him a little more respect then, a little more courtesy?”

Jace shrugged, trying to look sullen and unimpressed.

“I think you will,” Ethan said. “And when the two of you work together to get all of our firewood tonight, him for his language, you for disrespect, maybe you’ll consider that.”

“Maybe,” Jace said, still trying to show just enough attitude to get by. Ethan looked at him for a long time, and then he turned away.

The rest of them were all watching Jace, and Jace knew the look in their eyes and knew what it meant. He had seen it on Wayne Potter’s face enough times. He was a target now, not just of the men from the quarry, but of the boys he was supposed to spend the summer with. All because he couldn’t remember his own fake name.

“All right,” Ethan Serbin said, “time for somebody to tell me where we are.”

Ethan would do this often enough, stop abruptly and challenge their awareness of the land around them, but this time Jace had the sense that he was doing it to draw the attention of the others away from him, as if Ethan, too, knew that trouble was brewing.

“No maps, no compasses,” Ethan said. “Tell me which way we’re facing.”

They were facing a mountain. Behind them was a mountain. To their left and right, more mountains. Which direction? This should be easy enough. Jace looked for the sun-was it rising or descending? That would tell him east or west.

“What are you doing, Connor?” Ethan asked.

“Nothing.”

“What were you looking at?” Ethan said patiently.

“The sun.”

“Why?”

Jace shrugged again, still not willing to give up the attitude, and Ethan looked disappointed but didn’t press him.

“Connor’s instinct is the right one,” he said.

“Good little Boy Scout,” Marco whispered.

Yes, it would get bad from here.

“The sky will reorient us when we’re lost,” Ethan was saying. “At night, you’ll use the stars, and during the day, the sun. But right now, I suspect Connor is a little confused. Because where is the sun, guys?”

“Straight up,” Drew said.

“Exactly. We know that it rises in the east and sets in the west, so those times of day are easy. But right now? High noon? How do we know which way we’re facing?”

Nobody had an answer.

“The shadows will tell us,” Ethan said. He lifted his hiking stick, a thin pole with telescoping sections to change the length, and drove the tip into the dirt so that it was sticking straight up out of the ground. “Drew, grab a stone and mark the shadow. The very end of it, the tip.”

Drew dropped a flat stone where the shadow faded into dust.

“Two things we know are always true,” Ethan said. “The sun will rise in the east, and it will set in the west. You could be having the worst day of your life, everything about the world might have just imploded on you, but, boys, the sun will still rise in the east and set in the west. And an object placed in the sun is going to make a shadow. You each have a shadow right now.”

Jace felt an uneasy chill. No, they didn’t each have just one shadow right now. Jace had his own, and he also had two others. They were out there somewhere in the world, and they intended to catch him.

“In the Northern Hemisphere, that means that shadows move clockwise,” Ethan said. “So give the sun just a little time. We’re going to wait on that shadow to move.”

They stood around and sipped some water and waited on the shadow to move. Eventually it crept away from the stone and found the dusty earth beside it. Ethan ate some trail mix and stared at the ground patiently while everyone else fidgeted or gave up and sat down. Jace stayed on his feet, watching the shadow.

“Okay,” Ethan said at last. “Drew, mark it again, with another stone.”

Drew laid a second stone beside the first. They were nearly touching. Ethan pulled his hiking pole from the dirt and laid it across the stones, then knelt and withdrew a long-bladed knife from its sheath on his belt. He laid the knife across the hiking stick so that the tip of its blade was at right angles to the hiking stick.

“Take a look now,” he said. “What does this setup look like to you?”

“A compass,” Ty said. “Four points, four different directions.”

Ethan nodded in approval. “And we know what about the sun? It will never lie to us about what?”

“How it’s moving,” Ty said. “East to west.”

“Exactly. We watched it move just a little bit, not enough to tell us much if we’d just stared up at it, but by using the shadows, we have one stone marking the general east, and another marking the general west. Those directions give us the others, of course. So somebody tell us which way we are facing.”

“North,” Jace said. The knife blade pointed north.

“You got it. Now, this is hardly as precise as a compass, but it will give you the cardinal directions. And if you ever put your stick in the ground and don’t see a shadow at all, that means the sun is due south. You might not see the shadow, but it is still telling you the directions.”

They began hiking again, and the incident with Marco was gone from Jace’s mind; he was hiking along and thinking of the men from the quarry and comparing what he remembered of them with what he knew of Ethan Serbin. He thought that if anyone had a good chance against those two, it was probably Ethan. The problem, as Jace saw it, was simply a matter of numbers: two against one. The odds would be in his hunters’ favor if they came. But maybe out here in his element, Ethan Serbin was good enough that it evened the odds. Maybe he’d see them coming, be aware of them before they were aware of him, and that would turn things in Ethan’s favor. If it came to that-and Jace had been promised that it wouldn’t-he felt that he should probably tell Ethan who he was. His only instruction was to be Connor, but if the men from the quarry arrived, instructions wouldn’t matter. He’d need to be part of the team then, he’d need to help Ethan work with-

When Jace’s feet went out from under him, he had his head up and his hands gripping the pack straps. He wasn’t prepared, and he fell forward onto the rocks, a little cry coming out, not from pain but from surprise. By the time Ethan and the others looked back, he was already down, and nobody up front had seen what had happened: Marco had tripped him.

“You all right?” Ethan said.

“Yes.” Jace was back on his feet, brushing the dirt off and trying to show no pain. It hadn’t been a bad fall, and ordinarily he would have been able to catch himself without really going down, but the weight of the pack was new and threw off his balance, so he’d landed hard. There was a warm wet pulse below his knee that had to be blood. His ripstop pants hadn’t torn, though, so the bleeding was hidden from Ethan’s eyes.

“What happened?”

Ethan was already looking past him, back to those kids in the rear of the line, Marco and Raymond and Drew.

“Just tripped,” Jace said, and now Ethan’s eyes returned and focused on him.

“Just tripped?”

Jace nodded. Marco was standing right behind him; he had made a big show of helping him up and then hadn’t stepped back, was so close Jace could smell his sweat.

“All right,” Ethan said, turning away and starting to walk again. “We have our first man down. Let’s talk a little about how we walk, and how we land when we fall. That second part is the most important. Remember that the pack doesn’t affect just your balance, it affects how hard you go down, so if you can, try to-”

Marco whispered, “Stay on your feet, faggot,” into Jace’s ear as they marched along, and Raymond and Drew laughed. Jace didn’t say a word. His right calf was warm with blood, and drops of it showed now on his boot.

Your own fault, he told himself. You can’t even remember your name.

He kept his head down and counted the drops of blood as they appeared on his boot, and with each fresh drop, he reminded himself of his new name.

Connor. Connor. Connor. I am Connor, and I am bleeding, I am Connor, and I am alone, I am Connor, and two men want me dead, I am Connor, and Jace is gone, Jace is gone for good.

I am Connor.

7

They watched through a modified gun sight as the boys hiked, watched them in silence and marked their course on the map, then took their bearing and heading.

“That’s the basics,” the bearded twenty-something-year-old named Kyle said. “Of course, if it’s smoke, you’ve got a lot more to report. Not just the bearing.”

Hannah Faber straightened and stepped away from the Osborne fire-finder and nodded, wetting her lips and looking at the door of the fire-tower cab and wishing that Kyle would walk out through it and leave her here alone, wishing he could grasp that if there was anything she did not need coaching on, it was Wildland Fire 101. His words washed over her: he had worked for the forest service for two years and was tired of the grunt labor they offered him and had thought this would be relaxing, a chance to maybe do some writing, he knew he had a novel in him or maybe a screenplay but sometimes poems seemed best…

All of this poured out of him as asides as he took her on a tour of the place, which certainly didn’t need much commentary. Bed here, table there, woodstove. Check, check, check. The closer he got to her and the more he talked, it seemed as if she could actually feel the nerves fraying inside her, peeling in overstretched threads, not much left. Fire season. It was back and it was close. She wanted to be alone.

He’ll be gone soon, she told herself. Just make it through a few more minutes.

Kyle had stopped talking and was eyeing her pack, and that annoyed her. Sure, it was only a backpack, but it held the contents of her life, and Hannah had grown awfully private about her life in the past ten months.

“Some damn serious boots you brought to sit up here,” Kyle said.

Tied to the back of her pack was a pair of White’s fire-line boots. To those who laid trench lines and swung Pulaskis, they were the stuff of legend. She’d tried to save some money the first year by buying cheap boots, only to have them blow out within two months, and then she followed the lead of the experienced crew members and bought the White’s. The pair on her pack was brand-new, waiting for action they would never see. She knew it was stupid to have brought them, but she couldn’t leave them behind.

“I like nice boots,” she said.

“I’ve heard women say that. Usually talking about a little different look, though.”

She managed a faint smile. “I’m a little different woman.”

“You spend a lot of time in this area?”

“Been up a few times,” she said. “Let’s get to it, shall we? You were going to talk me through the radio protocol.”

Then it was on to the radio, his eyes away from her pack and from the fire boots. Finally they moved to the topographic maps on a chart table.

“When you see smoke, you call it in. So your first job is to see it, obviously, and then you have to give them the right position. That’s where this little thing comes in.” He indicated the Osborne again, which was essentially a round glass table with a topographic map underneath it. On the outside of it were two rings, one fixed and one that rotated. The rotating ring carried a brass sighting device, just like a gun sight.

“Harder to demonstrate with no active fire,” Kyle said. “That’s why we used that camping group or those Boy Scouts or whoever they are. Think you can find the mountain they were hiking beneath on your own?”

She found it again. Immediately.

“Good work,” Kyle said. “Now comes the harder part. Try to guess, without using the map, what distance they are from us.”

Hannah stared out the window and off to the south, locating the peak above the group, and while she didn’t look at the map, the map was in her mind. She studied the mountain, let her eyes trace a creek running down from it, and said, “Seven miles.”

“Seven?” Kyle smiled. “You like to be precise, right? Well, you’ll like Ozzy, then.”

“Ozzy?”

He shrugged. “You get bored up here, you start nicknaming shit, I don’t know. Point is, it will let you be a lot more precise. Here.” He rotated the bezel of the table and lined the brass sight up with the group of hiking boys again. She knelt and peered through, taking the boys in as a whole, not wanting to focus on any particular one-she couldn’t have the memories that might shake loose, absolutely could not revisit those memories here, in front of him.

“Okay. Got them.”

“Great. That was fast. Now pretend they’re not a group of kids but a fire. Something in there could burn you. You’re flustered, you’re scared, something out there is dangerous. You’re pointing at a hundred and sixty-one degrees, see that? So now you know it’s at a hundred and sixty-one degrees from your tower. Now look at the map and show me where you think it’s burning.”

She studied the topographic map, its gradients showing elevation changes, and found the most visible peak near the blaze, then worked down and pointed with her index finger.

“Around there?”

“Pretty close. Actually…wow, that’s real close. An inch is two miles on that map. Use the ruler there and tell me how many inches it is from us.”

It was just a shade under three and a half inches. Seven miles.

“Damn,” Kyle said softly. “Good guess.”

She allowed a smile. “I’ve watched some smoke in the past.”

“In towers?”

“No.”

“Where, then?”

“Hotshot crew.”

He tilted his head. “And now you want a tower?”

She’d said too much. Her pride had reared up, but it had been a mistake to mention the crew, because now Kyle understood. He’d listened to enough radio traffic to understand the food chain. When the regular-hand crews got into a blaze they couldn’t handle, the hotshots would roll, and the only ones higher up on the food chain than them were the smokejumpers. Bunch of guys parachuting in behind walls of flame. Cheaters, Hannah had said to Nick once, watching them descend. We had to walk our asses in here.

Nick had laughed hard at that. He’d had a beautiful laugh. At night, she went to sleep hoping that his laugh would come to her in her dreams instead of the screams.

It never did.

She kept her eyes away from Kyle’s when she said, “Yeah, the fire line is more than I can handle these days. So, listen, when I see the fire, I call it in, and what else?”

“Hang on,” he said. “Hang on. You’re Hannah Faber, aren’t you? Were you at Shepherd Mountain last year?”

“There were a lot of fires last summer,” she said. “I was part of some of them.”

He must have sensed her desire to short-circuit the conversation, because he ducked his head and spoke briskly. “You’d report the distance and heading. That way, when they send a plane out for a look, they can pinpoint it easily. Then you use this breakdown to clarify for them.”

He showed her a clipboard that contained checklists of information for each sighting-the distance, the bearing, nearby landmarks, and then three categories of information about the smoke:

Volume: small, medium, large

Type or character: thin, heavy, building, drifting, blanket

Color: white, gray, black, blue, yellow, coppery

“You report all that,” he said, “and then you sit back and listen to them sort it out.”

“No bad ones yet?”

“None. Late-season snow helped. But it melted fast, and it’s dried out since then. Temperatures started climbing, and the wind started blowing. No rain. If that holds, they think it’ll be a busy season. Lately the winds have been up. Trust me, you’ll feel that. This thing seems solid until the wind starts to blow. Then it’ll sway on you pretty good. So if the weather keeps on like this? Yeah, it’ll be busy. Supposed to be a run of storms early next week. If those develop, it could be trouble.”

He was right. You would think rain would help, but thunderstorms were trouble. They were sitting on top of the world here. Lightning didn’t have to travel all that far to make contact. And when it made contact with dry timber…

“Could be a busy summer,” Hannah said. Her heart was beginning to hammer now. He was standing too close to her, making the small room feel smaller. She wet her lips and took a step back. “Listen, I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve had a long walk out here and-”

“You want me out?”

“No, I’m just saying…I’m good here. I understand it, you know? And I’m tired.”

“Okay,” he said. “Guess I’ll get on the trail, then. You’re sure I didn’t rush you too much? I was supposed to show you all of the-”

“I’ll figure it out. And I love it up here already.”

He gave a wry smile. “Get through a night before you say that, okay?”

She ignored that and returned to the Osborne, peered through the gun sight and, because there was no smoke on the peaks, located the group of hikers once again. She watched them plod along and she pretended that they were fire.

8

Connor Reynolds was a different kid than Jace Wilson, and as the days passed, that began to take on a certain appeal.

The kid he had to pretend to be now was the kind of kid he’d always wanted to be. Tough, for one. Fearless, for another. Jace had spent his life trying to be good and fearing the trouble that would follow if he slipped up. His parents had split when he was so young, he hardly remembered it. Two years later came the accident, a chain on a forklift letting go, a pallet falling, his dad earning a life of eternal pain in a few quick seconds because of somebody else’s mistake. He still had a job at the same warehouse, a foreman now, but the pain followed him and so did the mistake. His obsessiveness with procedure had seeped into Jace, who knew he came across to people as a nervous kid-double-checking locks, insisting on using seat belts in the third row of a friend’s parent’s SUV, reading the instructions on a model-plane kit five times before he even opened the bag of parts. He knew how he seemed to people. The kind word was cautious. The mean one (real one?) was scared.

But Connor Reynolds was not scared. Connor was supposed to be a bad kid. There was a kind of freedom in that. You could say what you wanted, act how you wanted. Jace tried to embrace it without pushing it. He didn’t want to draw attention, and, truth be told, he didn’t want to get his ass kicked. After the initial flare-up with Marco, Jace had kept his distance and given him enough respect to appease him, evidently. He tried to do it without showing any fear, though. Kept his sullen stares and silence. The longer he wore them, the better he felt.

He was glad to be out of the camp and on the trail too. He always felt better on the trail, felt like he was vanishing, every trace of Jace Wilson disappearing, nothing left but Connor Reynolds. Today, Ethan was telling them about bears, and everyone was listening, even the loudmouths like Marco, because all of them were scared of bears. It almost made Jace laugh. If the other boys had had any idea who might be following them, they wouldn’t have given a crap about any bears.

“When we come into a blind curve or a dark area, one of these thick stands of trees, or when we break out of them and into a meadow, we want to advertise our arrival,” Ethan was saying. “Talk a little louder, give a few claps, make your presence known by sound. They’re more eager to avoid us than we are to avoid them, believe it or not. They’ll have no problem with us hiking through their territory, assuming we understand them. That’s our job. In this situation, understanding them is largely limited to one word: surprise. We do not want to surprise the bear, because then he will not have the chance to react with his true personality. He’ll turn aggressive even though he’d prefer to be passive, because he will feel that’s what we’re forcing him to do. So we make a little noise to advertise our presence in the right areas, and we pay attention to our surroundings so we don’t go into areas that we should avoid.”

“All our surroundings look the same to me,” Ty said.

“They won’t in time. And it requires all of your senses. All of them. You watch, of course, you keep scanning the landscape. Drew, back there, he’s key, because he’s guarding the rear for us. He’s got to turn around and double-check for us now and then.”

Drew seemed to puff up at that, and Jace wondered if he realized that being the guy in the back also meant you were the first guy the bear ate.

“We have to listen,” Ethan said, “because the last thing we want to run into is a tangle between bears, and if that’s happening, we should be able to hear it. We have to use our sense of smell-”

“You can probably smell bears at, what, two miles? Three miles?” This was from Ty, another of the jokers, contending with Marco, and he said it seriously but while winking at Connor, who gave him dead eyes in response. Jace Wilson would have laughed, but Connor Reynolds wasn’t a laugher.

“I cannot smell bears,” Ethan said, “but I can smell crap. That helps. Sometimes, you see, a bear takes a crap in the woods. I’ll let you check it out as soon as we find one, Ty. I’ll give you plenty of inspection time.”

Now Jace really wanted to laugh, and the rest of them did laugh, but he stayed silent. He’d decided that was Connor Reynolds-strong and silent. And fearless.

“I’m also interested in the smell of something rotten,” Ethan continued. “A carcass gone bad. If I can smell it, you better believe a bear can-they actually can detect odors from over a mile away-and we need to stay far from that, because what smells nasty to us smells like a free meal to them. No hunting required. Bears are lazy; they appreciate free meals. We’ll be talking a lot about this once we set up camp and store the food.”

“That’s three senses,” Jeff said. He was one of the few who’d dared to express any real interest so far; the rest were maintaining their wilderness-camp-is-bullshit attitudes, for the most part. “And if I have to taste one or touch one to know it’s a bear, I’m a pretty huge dumb-ass.”

The rest of them burst into laughter, and even Ethan Serbin smiled with them.

“I won’t argue that point, language aside,” he said. “But you might taste a few berries along the trail. Might see a thicket of berries and try one and think, Dang, these taste pretty good. Remember-if it tastes good to you, it does to the bear as well. Be more alert, because you are in a feeding ground.”

“What about touch, then?” Jeff asked.

“Feel the wind. Always, always, always be aware of that wind. Because bears rely mostly on their sense of smell, and if you are downwind of them, you’re going to be able to get pretty close before they can smell you. What else is wind taking away from them?”

“The sound of us,” Jace said, and regretted it immediately. He wanted to avoid all attention, but sometimes out here he got caught up in things despite himself. This was the sort of thing he loved, which was where the whole idea had come from. All the survival books, the adventure stories, the way he’d taught himself how to tie more than thirty knots with his eyes closed-his parents thought that they could hide him up here and have him be happy. And, he had to admit, there were moments when they were almost right.

Then the voices of the men in the quarry would return.

“Exactly,” Ethan said. “We always need to be aware of which way the wind is blowing. That’s a help with bears, but it’s critical to everything we do. We set up camp based on the way the wind is blowing, we anticipate weather changes based on what the wind does, we build our fires with the utmost respect for the wind. If you do not respect the wind in the backcountry, you will not last long.”

It was interesting, hearing all of the things that Ethan Serbin held in his mind. Jace was paying attention all the time, because if the killers came for him, he wanted to be ready. They’d come expecting Jace Wilson, the scared kid, and they’d run into somebody new: Connor Reynolds, who could make it on his own in the woods, who could outlast them. Connor Reynolds, a survivor. That’s who he was now.

Montana was better than the safe houses, better than being surrounded by people who knew you were in danger. That just fed the fear. They’d thrown every distraction they could at him, from movies to music to video games, and none of them worked, because none of them could pull his mind away from those memories, a dead man’s hair fanning out in the dim quarry waters, a knife tugging through the muscles of a throat, and, above all, a pair of oddly musical voices discussing where Jace might be and whether they had time to find him and kill him.

This was better. He hadn’t believed that it would be, because he’d be out here without anyone he knew, but he’d been wrong. Montana was better because it forced distraction. Video games and movies hadn’t been able to claim his mind. Out here, the land demanded his mind leave the memories. He had to concentrate on the tasks of the moment. There were too many hard things to do for any other option.

Connor Reynolds marched along the trail, and Jace Wilson rode secretly inside of him, and both of them were safe.

There were times, in the first week, when it felt like any other summer to Ethan. Or better, even. A good group of kids, by and large. He watched them and enjoyed them and tried not to think too much about the one who was there to hide. He’d heard nothing from Jamie Bennett, and that was good. Things were going smooth on her end, and he expected them to remain smooth on his.

They spent the first five nights at camps in five different meadows within a mile of their base. This was not the way it usually went. In a standard summer, the boys always slept in the bunkhouse, not on the trail, during the first week, allowing them some time to adjust and, hopefully, form bonds-sometimes they did, often they did not. Every day they went into the mountains, but every night they returned.

Not this summer. This summer they returned briefly by day and were back into the dark mountains by night because Ethan refused to be lulled into complacence by any promise of security he had been given. He believed Jamie Bennett, and he believed the summer would pass without incident. But he’d been tasked with being prepared and he did not take that lightly.

In an ordinary summer, he’d have more boys and a second counselor out here, and his route and campsites would be known to the county sheriff and shared with Allison on a GPS tracking device. This summer, he’d instructed the sheriff to speak to Allison if he needed to reach Ethan, and he’d turned off the computer tracking on his GPS. It still had a messaging function, allowing him to reach her through short text messages, but even his wife would be unaware of his precise location.

During those first days, they discussed first aid, studied with topographic maps and compasses, did all of the classroom work that Ethan knew they’d forget the instant they were in trouble on the trail. You couldn’t replicate the wilderness, though Ethan did try. His favorite exercise was a game he called the Wilder-a mispronunciation of an archaic word that was supposed to be pronounced “will-der.” Over the years he’d given up on saying it correctly, because the altered version felt right.

He explained the origin of bewildered. The word that described that sense of confusion and disorientation did not come from a term meaning “incomprehension” or “surprise” but from the same root word as wilderness. Those who were lost in a frightening and foreign land were the bewildered. Or they had been, back when wilderness was so common as to demand its own words for the experience of being lost in it. The word had been hijacked by civilization, of course, as everything had been. You could now say you’d been bewildered during a text-message exchange. But the term could be traced back to the verb wilder. That was the act of intentionally leading people astray, of causing them to become lost and disoriented.

When he started the game, Ethan would pick one of the boys and say, “All right, you’re the wilder for the day. See what you can do.”

The boy’s job was simple: Lead the group off trail in whatever direction he chose, for whatever reason he chose. Keep on going until Ethan brought it to a stop. Then Ethan would turn to the others, who were generally pissed off and irritated by the route that had been chosen-it was far more fun to be the wilder than to follow him-and he’d ask them to lead the way back.

This would begin with bungled efforts involving the maps and compasses. It rarely led anywhere good. They’d progress day by day, learning to read the terrain as they went, learning to create a mental archive of key landmarks, points of change. Learn little tricks, such as the rule that almost everyone, when faced with the choice between climbing and going downhill, went downhill. This was unwise, because hiking through a drainage was a hell of a lot more difficult than walking a ridgeline, but it was the standard choice of inexperienced woodsmen.

The game was useful prep for Ethan as well, useful for the real search-and-rescue calls, because he had the chance to watch how the boys reacted to the unfamiliar, to watch the mistakes in live action, and to understand the reasons for them. In the course of a game he demonstrated all the critical mistakes he had seen over the years, showed them how simple slips could become deadly, and taught them how to recover from the mistakes they made. Anticipate and recover, anticipate and recover. If you could do the first well, you were ahead of most people. If you could do both well? You were a survivor.

Some of the boys loved it. Some rolled their eyes. Some bitched and moaned the entire way. That was fine. The lessons were being ingrained, slowly but surely. Today they’d been at it for four hours straight, stumbling through the brush and learning fast just how difficult this country was to traverse when you got off trail, and they were thoroughly worn out when they got to the campsite he’d selected.

“Burning daylight,” he said. “We have to get shelters up.”

Groans in response; the kids were stretched out on the ground, sucking air.

“We’re all tired,” he said. “But we don’t rest right now. Because, of the priorities of survival, shelter is number three. Positive mental attitude is number one. We understand that. But without shelter, gentlemen? Without shelter, you’re going to be corpses. Proper shelter will keep you alive. Anyone remember the chain? The order of our priorities?”

The wind was beginning to push a little harder as the sun went down, putting a nice chill in the air, and he could see that the last thing any of them wanted was a lecture. That was fine, though. They had to remember these things.

“Jeff?” Ethan said, going right at one of the quiet boys, forcing him to engage.

“Food,” Jeff said.

“No.” Ethan shook his head. “Food is last, in fact. Ask most people to rank things you need in a survival situation, and they’ll say water first, and food second. But the reality is, your body can go a hell of a long time without food, and it can go awhile without water. Certainly, it can go long enough for you to die by other means.”

He unfolded one of the small sheets of ten-mil plastic they had all been given. A painter’s drop cloth, essentially. The best portable emergency shelter that ever existed.

“Positive mental attitude, wilderness first aid, shelter, fire, signal, water, food,” he said. “Obviously, you need to deal with medical problems immediately. But then we need shelter. With shelter, we can stay warm and dry, or cool and dry, while we prepare to deal with the rest of our needs. With shelter, the environment is no longer in control.”

They began the shelter-building lesson then, and he watched them regard their thin sheets of plastic with skepticism. But when he used the parachute cord to create a center-pole line and then stretched the plastic over it, they began to see the classic tent shape and started to understand. He used the button technique to make an anchoring device; this involved placing a small rock or even a squeezed handful of soil at a corner of the plastic, looping the plastic around it with a slipknot, and tying it off to a stake, which would hold that corner of the sheeting in place.

“Anyone have an idea why we’d do that instead of simply cutting a hole in the plastic and tying it off that way?” he asked.

Connor got it. Connor was one of the few in the group who was paying attention wholeheartedly. Good with his hands too, mechanically inclined; his shelter actually demonstrated proper angles, while some of the others looked like downed parachutes that had been stuck in the trees.

“If this was really all we had,” Connor said, “we wouldn’t want to risk cutting it up. It’s harder to put it back together. This keeps us from needing to.”

“Exactly. I learned this one from an Air Force instructor named Reggie. Stole it and claimed it as my own. All of the good stuff I stole from somebody else.”

A few of them smiled. They were getting a little energy back. It was hard work just walking up here, far harder than they’d anticipated. The backpacking was arduous, and in addition, they were camping at nine thousand feet; for many, it was their first experience with thin air. You’d take a deep breath, intending to fill your lungs, and realize with confusion that you seemed to have filled only about a quarter of your lungs.

He watched as they built their shelters, offering advice when it was needed and lifting his head and scanning the forested hills when it wasn’t. They gathered more firewood, and then Ethan took them down to collect water from one of the creek runoffs. Once they’d filled all of their water containers, he passed out chlorine dioxide tablets, a single-stage purifier, and they measured out the water and dropped in the appropriate number of tablets and recorded the time.

“Safe to drink in four hours,” he said.

Raymond regarded the dissolving tablet in the container, unscrewed the top of his own water bottle, and sniffed.

“Smells like chlorine, dude.”

“It’s a form of chlorine, dude.”

“I’m supposed to drink pool water? No, thanks.”

“You want to drink the stream water instead?”

Raymond eyed the stream skeptically, the water running over green algae and carrying mud and silt down to the creek.

“Don’t really like my options, man. But I don’t want to drink any chlorine.”

“Fair enough. Now, there’s always a chance you’ll find some cryptosporidia in these creeks. Unlikely, up here so high, but you never know.”

“Crypto-what?”

“It’ll give you mud butt,” Ethan said affably. “But if you don’t mind that, I’m sure the rest of the group won’t.”

“Mud butt?”

“You’ll crap your pants,” Ethan said. “But again, it’s up to you.”

“I’ll take the chlorine,” Raymond said.

Ethan smiled. “Not a bad choice.”

They dined on MREs, the military-developed “meals ready to eat.” The combat component of the food intrigued some of them, at least, and they were impressed by the way you could pour just a few ounces of water in the plastic pouch, fold it over, and then, after the chemical reaction did its magic, you had a hot meal. Most of them gave unkind reviews to the cuisine, but all of them ate. It had been a hard walk and they were hungry.

“Good day?” Ethan asked.

“Long day,” Drew answered. He had flopped on the ground and was lying there, exhausted, and most of them had matched his posture, staring at the fire through fatigued eyes. They’d hiked just over ten miles to get here, crossing out of Montana and into Wyoming. It didn’t seem so much, ten miles in a day, until you added in the elevation changes and the terrain and the pack.

“We climbing again tomorrow?” Marco asked.

“For a bit. Then we get to go down. But in the morning, we have some up yet to handle.”

They all groaned in unison. The groaning faded to conversation of aching legs and blistered feet, and Ethan leaned back against a rock and stared at the night sky as the boys talked and the fire crackled. A nearly full moon left the tops of the surrounding peaks and pines clearly silhouetted and then melted into shadow at the creek basin below. Behind them, the moon picked up the slope clearly, and so the climb away from the place they were now and the places they had been seemed less foreboding, because it was illuminated. But that was merely a tease of the moonlight, because they still didn’t know what was ahead.

For a moment, though, as the boys began to fall asleep, Ethan felt as if he could see it all.

9

A chain saw was a beautiful tool.

When it worked. And in Claude Kitna’s experience, the damned things didn’t work too often.

A mechanically inclined man, Claude took personal umbrage at his chain-saw failures. Probably because he knew the reason for them damn well and just didn’t want to admit it. He’d never purchased a new model; he’d always bought them used, to save some dollars, and he should have acknowledged to himself along the way that a man rarely sells something that works problem-free, and if he does, he surely doesn’t sell it at a discount.

Now Claude was working with a battered five-year-old Husqvarna that he’d snagged over the winter for just a hundred bucks, which was such a good deal that he’d talked himself out of breaking down and buying a new one. First cut of the summer, and he was already turning the air blue over the thing.

There was good firewood in the ridge above his cabin, where a few hardwoods had died the previous summer, some sort of blight. He’d waited until there was a good dry week and he had a day off and then he loaded the chain saw into the back of his ATV and went on up to get to work, figuring he’d have at least four cords, his winter taken care of before summer even ended.

On the third cut, the blade had pinched and nearly stuck, and he’d checked the bar oil and everything looked fine, so he went back at it, the harsh whine of the chain saw the only sound on the mountain, everything still and baked by the sun, a beautiful afternoon for some outdoor work.

The next time the blade caught, he shut the engine down fast, but not fast enough-the chain pulled right off the bar. That set him to swearing, and by the time he had the carburetor cover off and realized the chain-tensioning screw was gone entirely, he was truly in foul spirits. He was hunched over the chain saw, still wearing his ear protection, and he had no idea that he wasn’t alone until he saw the shadows.

Two of them, man-shaped but not man-size, because the slope faced west and so at this time of day, the sun spread the shadows out large, turning them into a pair of giants. When he pivoted to find the source, he saw two strangers of nearly equal size standing about ten feet apart. Similar-looking too, both men blond-haired and blue-eyed and square-jawed. They were on his land, and he was doing nothing wrong, but there was something about the way they stood and studied him that brought a sense of authority to them, and as he took off his ear protection, he found himself asking, “Everything all right, fellas?” instead of saying, Who in the hell are you?

“Seems to be struggling with the chain saw,” the one with longer hair said, and Claude was just about to acknowledge the obvious truth of it when the other one spoke.

“He surely seems to be, yes. Not much progress made yet either.”

Claude blinked at them. That was a hell of a strange way of talking.

“Can I help you?” he said.

“With any luck,” the long-haired one said. “Would you be Claude Kitna?”

“That’s my name and this is my property. Now who are you?”

The man looked over the mountainside as if the answer were hidden in the rocks.

“I see no need to hide a name,” he said. “Do you?”

Again, Claude was about to answer when the second man spoke.

“There’s no harm in it.”

They were some sort of strange, no doubt about that. Claude wiped a greasy palm dry on his jeans, wishing he’d brought his weapon and his badge, though he wasn’t exactly sure why.

“I’m Jack,” the first man said, “and this is my brother, Patrick. Now we’re all acquainted.”

“Terrific,” Claude said. “And I’m the sheriff here. Maybe you weren’t aware of that.”

“We certainly are.”

“All right. What are you doing on my land?”

He couldn’t see his house from this spot on the ridge. Surely they’d driven up, but he didn’t recall hearing an engine. With the ear protection in and the chain saw whining, though, it was possible he’d missed it. That was the only reason they’d been able to just appear out of the woods like that, two huge and silent shadows.

“You’re police, as you mentioned,” the one named Patrick said. “Have many accident calls down along that highway, Two-Twelve? A nasty stretch of road.”

“Imposing,” his brother agreed with a nod. Claude didn’t like either of them, but he felt like he needed to pick one to focus on, because they stood an odd distance apart and circled around a little as they talked. He chose the young guy, the military-looking one.

“You put your car off the road?”

“No, sir. We remain firmly planted on the asphalt, thank you.”

“You got a funny way with words,” Claude said.

“I apologize.”

“Don’t need an apology. Also don’t need my time wasted. Now, tell me what in the hell you’re doing here.” Claude straightened up, the chain-saw blade in his hands. It made for a piss-poor weapon, just a long, oily string of teeth that weren’t even particularly sharp and didn’t do much damage unless they were buzzing. As blades went, this one wasn’t much use once you had it removed from the motor. Couldn’t stab with it, couldn’t slash with it. All the same, he wanted something in his hands.

“We have an interest in a car that ran into some trouble on Two-Twelve during the last snow,” the longhair, Jack, said. “A rental. Hertz, I believe.”

Claude could see her then, the tall woman with the lead foot, and he had a sudden, sure sense that this had turned into a dangerous day.

“Lot of accidents on Two-Twelve in the snow,” he said. “And I don’t discuss the details with anyone who hasn’t got a badge.”

“Should we show him a badge?” Patrick said.

“We certainly could. I’m not sure which variety would impress him most, though.”

“That’s the problem with our collection. I’ve told you this before.”

“I’ve heard the argument. All the same, I like to hold on to them.”

The men were far enough apart now that Claude had to turn his head to see one or the other; he couldn’t keep them both in sight. His palms were sweating, and the sweat mixed with the grease on the chain-saw blade and made it slippery. He wiped one palm on his jeans and tightened his grip.

“Gentlemen, I’m going to ask you to leave my property. If you have a question about a car accident, I don’t give a shit if you’re Hertz adjusters or FBI agents, you’ll direct it through headquarters. Am I understood?”

“Her car was on the road overnight,” the long-haired one said. “And she didn’t spend those hours in the snowdrifts. You know where she went, Claude?”

Somehow, Claude knew that repeating his instruction wasn’t going to be worth anything. So instead he answered the question.

“I have no idea. Might check the hotels.”

“I think you do have an idea. The tow-truck driver remembers you calling someone to come get her. A man on a snowmobile? The tow-truck operator was quite certain you’d know who that was.” The long-haired one took a breath and lifted his right index finger, tilting his head as if he’d just recollected some forgotten detail. “By the way-he’s dead.”

“Oh, yes,” the other one said. “He is indeed. Excellent thought, Jack. It was incumbent upon us to notify the authorities of his passing.”

“Consider it done, Patrick.”

Claude felt himself begin to tremble then. Like a damn dog. Something gone so wrong in the world that he’d literally begun to shake? What in the hell was the matter with him? He took a shifting step sideways to stop the tremors. He’d seen plenty of hard men, never once had to keep himself from shaking in their presence, not even when he was young and green. These two, though…

They aren’t joking, he thought. Roger is dead, and they’ve done it, and they aren’t scared of telling you this. The idea of consequence isn’t a notion with which they are familiar.

When the one called Jack removed a semiautomatic handgun from a holster at his spine, Claude let the chain-saw blade fall free and lifted his hands. What else was there to do?

“Come on, now,” he said. “Come on.”

“Pick that blade back up and pass it to my brother.”

Claude looked toward his house, not so far away but screened by all those pines. And empty too. There was no help coming, but still, to be so close to home and yet so helpless felt wrong.

“Nobody’s going to save you today,” the one with the gun said, reading Claude’s thoughts. “Now, pick up that blade and pass it to my brother.”

When Claude bent to retrieve it, he knew what he had to do. Go down swinging, by God. He’d be damned if he’d simply stand here with his hands in the air and let a pair of boys like these do what they wanted to him. Claude Kitna had lived too many proud years to end them like that. The chain-saw blade wasn’t much but it was what he had, and if he moved fast enough…

In his mind, it played out better. He was going to lunge upward and whip the blade at the son of a bitch’s face, and it was likely the trigger would be pulled then, but at least he’d have the man on his heels. If he missed with the shot, and Claude got the gun, things could change mighty fast. It was going to be a matter of speed, and though he was no longer a young man, he wasn’t an old one either, not a man without a burst left in him. Claude bent slow and gathered the blade from one end and then moved, sudden as a panther, whipping it backward and then lashing it forward.

Only the blade didn’t lash with him. It stayed back, the free end caught in the other man’s fist. Claude didn’t want to let go, it was the only weapon he had, and so he hung on and stumbled after it, right into the man’s foot, and tripped and fell on his ass, and this time he lost the blade. Claude was down then, unarmed, staring up at them, the two giant shadows turned to two average-size men but now twice as menacing.

“The man on the snowmobile? What was his name?” The long-haired man with the gun was speaking, and his brother looked disinterested, studying the chain-saw blade and blowing on it to clear bits of dust. There was blood pooling in his palm but he didn’t seem to care.

“I ain’t saying it,” Claude told him. He made sure he looked right into the son of a bitch’s face, right into his arrogant blue eyes. “Not ever. Not to the likes of you.”

“‘Not to the likes of you.’ Very good, Claude. Very tough. Do you prefer to be called Sheriff? I can respect your authority if you wish. Is that the reason this isn’t going well? Is it a perceived lack of respect?”

“Leave now,” Claude said. “Just go on down the road and whatever this is, take it with you. It’ll be trouble otherwise.”

“Trouble has arrived, you are correct. Trouble will leave with us, you are also correct. But Sheriff? Claude? We won’t be leaving until we have what we’ve come for. So put any notion of our leaving without it far, far from your mind. Focus on reality here. Reality is standing before you and reality has a gun. So you focus on that, and then we’ll try again. Tell us the man’s name.”

“Go to hell.”

The long-haired man smiled and said, “Ethan Serbin. That’s his name.”

Claude was puzzled. All of this, the threats and the violence against an officer of the law, for what? A name they already knew?

“There you go,” he said. “You’re smart boys. Don’t need any help from me.”

“Ethan Serbin,” the long-haired one said, “usually has a group of boys on his property. Troubled boys, delinquents. The kind that the local sheriff would have to be aware of. The boys are gone, they are in the mountains, it seems, and considering that these boys have had struggles with the law…”

He paused and his brother picked up seamlessly. “It would seem the law would want to keep track of them. Our understanding, Claude, is that you’re aware of the routes they take.”

Ordinarily, he was. Ordinarily, their understanding of the world would have been accurate. But the world was different this summer, for reasons Claude didn’t understand. Ethan Serbin had refused to give him a detailed itinerary, had simply told him that any questions should be directed to Allison. It was unusual, but Claude trusted Ethan as much as any man he’d ever known, and so he’d let it ride. If he needed to reach him, he’d go through Allison. It wasn’t so difficult.

Now, though…

“Where are they?” the long-haired one said.

“I honestly do not know.”

“We’ve been told otherwise, Claude. And, contrary to your perception of me, I prefer to be an honest man. I suspect you’re of the same breed, so we’re compatriots, you and me. We’re honest men. Maybe guided by different stars, but I believe it is safe to say we share an appreciation for the truth. So let me share some truth. I could wait for Mr. Serbin to reappear. I could go into the woods and search for him. I could do any number of things, but, Claude? Sheriff? I am short on time and patience. You know the routes he takes. I’m going to need that information.” He paused and gave Claude a long, measured stare before saying, “There’s my truth. What’s yours?”

“I don’t know where he is.”

The long-haired man let out a sigh and exchanged a look with his brother, and then they advanced on Claude like wolves on a downed elk, prey so easy it hardly piqued their interest. Claude thought he got himself upright before the blackness came. He was pretty sure he’d cleared the ground at least.

10

The sun was still visible above the mountains when Ethan Serbin handed Jace a knife called a Nighthawk. It was all black except for a thread of silver along the razor-sharp edge of its eight-inch-long blade. Ethan wore it on his belt at all times, but now it was in Jace’s hand. It looked like a twin of the one he’d seen pulled through a man’s throat not that long ago. He was afraid his hand was shaking, tried hard to steady it.

“You hold the knife by the blade when you’re passing it to someone,” Ethan said.

“By the blade?”

“That’s right. Using the underside, just like this, keeping the dull portion in your palm. You don’t ever want to point the blade at the person you’re giving the knife to. That’s how an accident happens. You keep control of it until you’re sure he has control, right? So take it by the bottom, like this, so your palm and fingers aren’t near the sharp edge. Then you pass it over, and say, ‘Get it?’ Wait for the other person to say, ‘Got it.’ Then you let your hand fall away and say, ‘Good.’ You wait on all three-get it, got it, good. Because if anyone pulls too fast or gets sloppy, people get cut. We don’t want people getting cut.”

Jace glanced at the rest of the group and saw all the boys watching with interest.

“All right,” Ethan said. “Let’s do this.” He passed the knife over. “Get it?”

“Got it.”

“Good.”

Ethan let his hand fall away from the knife and then the Buck Nighthawk was in Jace’s control. The feel of the knife gave him a strange sense of power. Let’s see Marco try something now. He wanted one of his own, on his belt just like Ethan’s.

Ethan said, “Do you remember what you’re doing with the fire?”

“Yeah.”

“Then get to it.”

Jace sat on his knees in the dirt and cut strips of tinder from a piece of something that Ethan called pitch wood, carefully selected because the waxy substance inside the timber acted almost as a burning fuel, helped your flame catch and hold. He cut a series of long, thin curls of tinder and then, at Ethan’s instruction, he turned the knife sideways and scraped, creating a shower of small shavings. The rest of his fire materials were gathered and ready; all he needed to do was spark the flint and get his tinder to start burning.

He knew it wasn’t going to start, though. He’d watched Ethan do it, the whole thing looking effortless and easy, but he knew it really wasn’t. He would spark the stupid fire-steel tool for an hour and nothing would happen and then Marco would make some wiseass comment and everyone would laugh and Ethan would take his tools back.

“Get that bundle a little tighter,” Ethan said. “Think of it like a bird’s nest.”

Jace formed the tinder into a cluster with his hands, and then Ethan said, “Give it a shot.”

“Want somebody else to do it?”

“What?”

That had sounded too much like Jace Wilson, too nervous, and so he tried to find Connor again and said, “Why do I have to do all the work? I made the kindling, let somebody else do the rest.”

“No,” Ethan said, “I’d like you to do it, thanks. If you’re ever alone in the woods, Connor, you’re not going to be able to share the workload.”

Jace wet his lips and picked up the Swedish fire steel, a tool with a thin tube of magnesium and a metal striker. He braced the striker with his thumb and pushed down and sparks showered as soon as he began, but nothing caught. The sparks died in the air, just as he’d known they would.

“You’ve got to hold it lower,” Ethan said. “All the way down against the tinder. Brace it on that platform piece, that’s why we have one. And don’t flick at it. However fast you want to go, make yourself do it at half that speed. Think of yourself in slow motion. The tool will do the work for you; it’s not a muscle move, it’s a control move. Yes, just like that. Again. Again.”

Jace was aware of all the eyes fixed on his failure and he was starting to hate Ethan for it, was looking for something Connor Reynolds could come up with to stop it, a bit of bad attitude, maybe even some real anger…

He jerked his hand back in surprise as the tinder caught and a wisp of smoke began to curl.

“Okay,” Ethan said. “Now, when you give it air, be real gentle. Real light.”

Jace lowered his face to the tinder and blew gently and the flame grew and spread, and now the larger pieces were burning, and Ethan told him to add his sticks. He had a brace piece at one end and a series of pencil-lead-size pieces to be added first, leaning against the brace at a forty-five-degree angle. Once those caught, on to the pencil-size, and then the finger-size. He jumped to the second stage too fast, and the smoke began to come thicker and darker, the sign of a fire fighting death, and Ethan said, “This is where you use your brace.”

Jace took a free end of the brace piece and lifted it gently. Ethan’s design wasn’t the tepee style Jace had seen before but more of a ramp, everything angled over the flame and toward the brace. When Jace lifted the brace, the fire that he’d been threatening to smother from above received immediate oxygen from below and the flame caught and grew and crackled.

The sound of it got attention. Everyone in the group murmured a little, impressed.

“We all get to try it?” Drew said.

“Yes. Nice work, Connor. It’s a fine fire. May I have that knife back?”

Jace took it by the bottom of the blade, offered Ethan the handle, and said, “Get it?”

“Got it.”

“Good.”

The Nighthawk was gone from him then, and Ethan was moving on, but Jace didn’t care. He was staring at the flames. He lifted the brace piece again, gave it another gust of air, and couldn’t keep from smiling.

I can make fire, he thought.

When Claude woke, the sun was hot on his face and his arm ached worse than his head, though that pain was powerful too. He blinked and saw nothing but a harsh golden sun and a cobalt sky and for a moment the pain was forgotten, because he believed they were gone, that they’d moved on and left him there.

He tried to sit up and discovered that his arms were bound back over his head, and then he was concerned but still not scared because at least the two strangers were gone. This situation he could deal with somehow; with the two of them, he’d have had no chance.

“Seems to be among the living again,” a gentle voice said from behind him, and that was when the fear returned, icy prickles bubbling along his flesh.

“The waking dead,” a second voice said, and then they rose and again Claude saw only shadows as they returned to him. He was aware for the first time of the smell of wood smoke and the soft poppings of a small campfire.

They circled around in front of him. The one called Jack had the gun back in its holster, but the one called Patrick was still holding on to the chain-saw blade. Steam rose from the oil and grease trapped in the links, wisps of black smoke. It had been in the fire.

“We’ll take that location now,” Jack said. “Where Serbin has the boys. We’ll take it from you.”

Claude tried to move, scrabbling his boots in the dirt. They’d bound his hands back against one of the trees he had felled, and there was no chance of moving its weight.

“I’ll give it to you,” he said. His voice was a high fast rasp. “I’ll tell you.”

The man looked down at him and shook his head.

“No, Claude,” he said. “You misunderstood me. I said that we were going to take the name from you now. Your chance to just give it away is gone.”

The one with the smoking chain-saw blade approached from the right and Claude tried to kick him but missed, and then the long-haired one grabbed his boots and held his feet down as the other wrapped the hot string of saw teeth around Claude’s arm. His skin sizzled on the metal and the smell of burned hair and flesh rose to him as he screamed. The one holding his feet had steady, unblinking blue eyes. They never changed expression. Not even when his brother began to tug the blade ends back and forth, back and forth.

They’d gone through all of the muscle and arteries and half the bone in his left forearm before Claude screamed Allison Serbin’s name loud enough to satisfy them.

The blackness came again and this time it would not leave, he could not clear himself from it, he just faded in and out, and the fade-out was better, because the pain was numbed some then. Not enough, but some. He knew that he was going to die here on the hill above his own home, on a sunlit, blue-sky day, and he was less troubled by that than by what he’d just done, how he had given them what they wanted. He could feel his own blood warm and wet on his back, pooling beneath his arm and then running down the slope, and he hoped that it would pump faster, empty his body swifter.

Bring it to an end.

Their voices came and went in the blackness.

“I’m in favor of it. Would take a fine crime-scene team to determine he died anything but a fool’s death, and I suspect they do not have such a team in this area.”

“Does it matter how he died?”

“Time might matter. What this man Serbin hears and when he hears it might matter.”

“True enough. Of course, if you do that, the whole hillside goes up. Awfully dry. Good breeze blowing and taking it up the mountain, into all that timber.”

“Might provide quite a distraction, then.”

“Another fine point. You’ve won me over, brother. But you’re assuming we’ll have no need for him again.”

“I’ve seen lying men and I’ve seen honest men. In that last moment, when he said the wife was the only one who knew? He had the characteristics of an honest man. In my assessment.”

“I concluded similarly.”

What they were discussing, Claude had no idea. He was distracted by wondering what had happened to his arm. The pain suggested it was still part of him, but he had trouble believing that it was. If he was strong enough, he could move it, and that might tell him whether the arm remained, but moving seemed a terrible idea; he wanted to hold on to the blackness longer, where the pain was less. He tried to find it again and could not, because the sun was too hot. The sun was keeping him conscious, and he hated it, oh, how he hated it. What he’d give for a single cloud, something to block out that heat.

But the sun came on stronger, relentless, and with it came the smell of smoke, and he realized then that the sun had somehow set the mountain on fire, and he thought that was one hell of a thing, because in all of his years in this country, he’d never encountered a day so hot as to set the earth to smoking. Someone should do something about that. Someone should make a cloud.

The mountain crackled around him as the sun strengthened, and Claude Kitna squeezed his eyes shut tight and moaned low and long and prayed for a cloud as the world turned to fire.

11

Hannah didn’t trust her eyes. She’d sighted the smoke late in the afternoon and promptly went to the binoculars, certain it was a trick of the light or maybe some backpacker’s campfire, nothing more. She’d already sighted one campfire and found the same boys who had been in various spots around the mountains for nearly a week. Scouts or something. When she saw the second fire, all she was expecting to find with the binoculars was the same group, but when she glassed the hillside above the tree line, she saw a steady column of smoke, growing and thickening, too much for a campfire.

Still, she didn’t call it in immediately. She lowered the binoculars and blinked and shook her head. For days she had watched the empty mountains for fresh smoke and had seen none, and there had been no storms and no lightning, nothing to give her cause for suspicion.

But there it was.

She lifted the glasses again as if the second viewing might prove her wrong; she felt like someone on a ship in ancient times who, sighting land after many months at sea, was afraid that it was an illusion.

It was not. The smoke was there, and it was spreading, and Hannah Faber had her first chance to help.

She was nervous going to the radio; the simple protocol suddenly felt infinitely complex.

Get it together, Hannah. Get it together. This is your damn job, they’ll do the rest, all you have to do is tell them where the hell it is.

That was when she realized she didn’t know where it was, that she was rushing to the radio without first identifying the location. She went to the Osborne, rotated the bezel, put her eye to the gun sight, and centered it up with the smoke. Looked at the map and got her bearing. This one wasn’t far off at all. Five miles from her tower.

Too close, too close, get the hell out of here.

She shook her head again, chastising herself. It was the first flare-up, and they’d get it under control fast. Nothing was coming this way.

Easy to say, hard to believe. She was supposed to be removed from it up here. She was supposed to be far from the flames, supposed to-

“Supposed to do your damn job,” she said aloud, and then she went to the radio and keyed the mike.

“This is Lynx Lookout. Do you copy?”

“We copy, Lynx.”

“I’ve got smoke.”

She felt as if it were a stunning proclamation, a real showstopper, but the response was flat and uninterested.

“Copy that. Location?”

She recited the location and bearing, told them the volume was small, the character was thin but building, the color gray.

“Copy that. Thanks, Lynx. We’re on it.”

“Good luck. I’ll keep watching.”

Keep watching. What an impotent thing to say, and do. Once she’d have been putting on the Nomex gear and the White’s fire boots; once she’d have been strong and tanned and ready to take it on-the whole world afire couldn’t scare her. Now…

I’ll keep watching.

“Hurry up, guys,” she whispered, watching the gray plumes grow, seeing the first tongues of orange in the mix now, and she wondered how it had started. There on a ridge so close to the road; how had it started?

Nick would say a campfire. There’d been no lightning, she’d watched for it every night and had not seen any, and so the source was likely humans. It was an odd place for a campfire, and a dangerous one. She looked at the map and traced the contour lines and saw what it might do. It could burn up off that ridge and find open grasses and scorch through them and then hit the high forest, pushed by the wind. If it did, it would run into the rock, and in its quest for fuel, it would climb sidehill and find the gulch that waited, lined with dry timber. And then they’d be fighting it low. Down in a basin rimmed by steep slopes.

Some of the best friends she’d ever had died trying to outrun a burning wind in a basin like that.

She didn’t like the way those contour lines looked. There was plenty of fuel in the gulch below the place where the fire had begun to burn, and, dry as it was with this early drought, the flames would be moving fast.

The first crew got there within thirty minutes, and they encountered more than they’d bargained for. The wind was pushing the fire upslope, toward a stretch of dry jack pine, and the reports over the radio were grim and surprised.

“We can get a pump truck to the bottom, but no higher. It’s climbing pretty well.”

“So trench it and bladder-bag it,” Hannah said. She wasn’t on the air, they couldn’t hear her, but she hoped they’d somehow sense her advice and take it. If they got up high enough, they should be able to contain it. With the truck soaking the bottom of the hill and a proper trench cutting it off from climbing toward any more fuel, they’d be fine. It would be hot, hard work, though, and the sun would be setting soon, and then it would be just the crew and the firelight and the wind. The wind was the great enemy, the most menacing and most mysterious. This she knew as well as she knew her own name.

They didn’t hear her advice but they followed it anyway, and she listened as they sent a trenching team a half a mile farther up the mountain, where they could cut the blaze off from the next stretch of forest and hopefully leave it to burn out in the rocks.

“It will go sidehill, guys. It will have no choice, and the wind will help it, and then you’ll have to fight it at the bottom.”

That was what they probably wanted. The fire would be bordered by creeks and road and rock there, and they would believe they had it sequestered. Unless the wind had different plans.

Her first fire with Nick hadn’t been all that different from this one. A wooded windblown hillside. She was on her second summer then and had a sophomore’s cockiness-been there, done that, seen it all, though of course she hadn’t. Rookie bravado, sophomore cockiness, and veteran’s wisdom. The three stages she’d come to know. She suspected that some sort of law required wisdom and loss to be partners. At least, they always seemed to ride together.

She’d loved Nick from the start. In the way it wasn’t supposed to happen, the way you weren’t supposed to trust. Love at first sight was a fairy tale. Tough girls rolled their eyes at it. And she’d meant to, she had absolutely meant to, but the really special thing about love was that it scorned your attempts to control it. That was a great thing. Sometimes.

Rule number one for a woman on the fire line: you had to outwork everyone.

Rule number two: when you did, you’d be considered less of a woman because of it.

That had been infuriating in the first summer. Fighting fires was a male-dominated world-weren’t they all, though?-but she hadn’t been the lone woman. There were three on the crew, but she was the only rookie. The jokes came early and often, but she was cool with that, because, frankly, that seemed to be the way it went. Boys being boys. Giving each other shit over any perceived weakness, circling wolves settling pack order, and her weakness, as they saw it, was readily apparent: the extra X chromosome. So you took the jokes and you gave them back and then you went to work, and here’s where it mattered-would you live up to the identity that the jokes created, or would you forge a new one? You couldn’t be the joke, there was no respect to be found there, no room for softness among crew members for whom fatigue was often the starting point and not the finish line. When you erased the jokes, though, when you matched the guys’ work or exceeded it, a fascinating thing happened-apparently, you lost your femininity. Now the jokes came out of respect, and the tone was altogether different. Once your nickname was Princess; now it was Rambo.

All of this wasn’t to say she had had bad relationships with the boys of summer. On the contrary, they were some of the best friends she’d ever had, or would ever have-if there were no atheists in foxholes, then there were no enemies on the fire lines. But dating someone on the crew was different. It was like giving something back that you’d worked hard to earn. She’d made a rule before the second summer, a sophomore’s rule, the unyielding kind that broke the minute you applied it: The fire line was work. End of story.

And so of course there had been Nick. And of course he hadn’t been just on the crew; he’d been the boss.

That was the summer she wore makeup to a trench line, the summer of the cosmetology-school jokes, the summer of the happiest days and nights of her life. She’d become certain of the invalidity of her own rule-it didn’t have to be all work. You could work with someone you loved, even on the most dangerous of tasks.

She no longer believed that. On the witness stand, pointing at the topographic map and the photos and explaining how it had all happened, she knew that her rule had not been invalid. You fought fires as a crew. Lived and died as a crew. And if you were in love with one person on that crew, just one? All your best intentions didn’t mean a damn thing. Love always scorned your attempts to control it.

She sat in her tower now with her feet up and her eyes on the wispy smoke over the mountains and she spoke to the radio without keying the mike, spoke as if she were out there with them. A constant stream of chatter. She was warning them to watch out for widow makers-burning limbs that dropped from above without warning-when the pump truck reported a victim.

Hannah lifted her hands to her face and covered her eyes. Not already. Not on the first fire of the season, the first she had called in. She felt as if the death had come with her, somehow, as if the death had followed her back. A certain wind chased Hannah, and it was a killing wind.

Fifteen minutes after they announced the victim, they came back with more:

“I think we’ve got a campfire source. Appears to be a fire ring here, stones, and the fire must have jumped it and gotten into the trees that were brought down. Look like fresh cuts too. Only seeing one DOA. Can’t tell if it’s male or female. Burned up pretty good. We’ve secured the body and what’s left of an ATV and, I believe, probably a chain saw.”

There was your source. Someone had been felling timber and decided to keep a fire going while he did it, then left it untended, in the wind. Oblivious to the risk.

“Stupid bastard,” Hannah whispered, thinking of those who were walking into the flames right now for some foolish mistake, thinking of all that might be lost just because someone wanted to roast a hot dog.

It felt strange, though. Somehow, it felt off. She’d spotted the smoke around four and the sun had been high and hot, hotter than it had been all summer. Nobody would have needed or wanted a campfire for warmth. And it was late for lunch and early for dinner, and it didn’t sound as if the victim had been camping, anyhow, not with an ATV and a chain saw. He’d been working, probably. And what person doing sweaty work on a hot afternoon wanted a campfire?

There was something off with the fire source, no question. But the first task was putting the blaze out fast enough so they could figure out what the real story was. Until those flames were gone, nobody was concerned about determining their source.

The tower swayed more as the sun descended, the wind freshening at dusk.

12

As the boys sipped water and stretched aching legs beside the campfire, Ethan sent Allison a short text on his GPS messenger:

ALL FINE. WE ARE ALONE IN THE WOODS.

He put the GPS away then and let his eyes drift as he scanned the rocks and forested hills and the high mountains beyond. Empty. He had told the truth: they were alone. They had hiked all day beneath a high hot sun and a cloudless sky, and if you’d told people that only a few weeks ago, the Beartooth Pass had been closed with two feet of snow, they’d have laughed in your face.

No one was out there.

Not yet, at least.

And what if they come?

He’d asked himself that question the night Jamie Bennett had arrived and every waking hour since. What if they came, these men who were trained killers?

I’ll handle it. I’ve had my share of training too.

But he hadn’t. Not that kind. He didn’t end up in the Air Force by mistake. The son of a Marine who didn’t leave the combat overseas quite as well as he should have, Ethan had grown up pointed toward the military, and enlisting was the same sort of free-will decision that the sun made when it chose to set in the west. All his father had wanted was another Marine-a fighter, not a teacher. His old man hadn’t been impressed when Ethan tried to explain that he was teaching military personnel how to have what he called a survivor mentality.

“There are two kinds of men in war,” his father had said. “The killing kind, and the dying kind. If you’re the dying kind, you won’t survive shit. If you’re the killing kind, you will. It’s already in there. You’re teaching woodcraft, and that’s fine. But if they’re the dying kind, all your tricks won’t save ’em.”

Ethan shook himself back into the moment, back into watching, which was his job; killing wasn’t. The smoke from their campfire wasn’t heavy, the wood had been properly selected, but only a few miles out, someone else had one as well, the smoke visible above the ridgeline. It seemed like a lot of smoke. Ethan watched it for a while and wondered if a campfire had gotten away from someone. With this wind, it was certainly possible.

“You guys see that?” he said. “That smoke?”

They were tired and uninterested, but they looked.

“We’re going to keep an eye on it,” he said. “That one could turn into something.”

“Turn into something? You mean, like, a forest fire?” Drew said.

“That’s exactly what I mean. These mountains have burned before. They’ll burn again someday. Now, all of you look at the smoke and then look at your maps and tell me where it’s burning and what it means to us. First one to do that, I’ll build his shelter myself.”

Jace cared, and maybe that was a problem. The caring had started with the fire, when he struck two pieces of metal together and made a spark that made a flame that made a campfire. His vision of Connor Reynolds as a boy who did not care began to vanish. His bad attitude was disappearing even when Jace tried to keep it in place, because this stuff was pretty cool. It was real, it mattered in a way most things you were taught didn’t-this stuff could save your life.

He didn’t know what Connor Reynolds was running from up here, but back behind Jace were men who intended to take his life, and he began to think that maybe Connor should pay a little more attention. For the both of them.

Now Ethan had laid down a challenge, and while Jace really didn’t care about winning the shelter-he enjoyed building them, and they were improving with each night’s effort-he did want to be the first to place that column of smoke accurately. This was the sort of thing that most people couldn’t do. The sort of thing that could save your life.

He looked up at the mountains and down at the map and then back up again. To his right was Pilot Peak, one of the most striking landmarks in the Beartooths, easy to find. Move along from that and there was Index, and the fire wasn’t in front of either of them. Keep rolling and there was Mount Republic and beyond that Republic Peak, and now he began to get it. They were supposed to hike to Republic Peak, then claim the summit-that was what Ethan called it, at least-and hike back down the way they’d come. On every trip, though, Ethan gave them an escape route. Jace enjoyed those, even if the rest of the boys thought the idea was corny. The other kids didn’t know about the need for escape routes yet.

The smoke wasn’t between their camp and Republic Peak, but it seemed to be coming from the back side of Republic Peak. Connor traced the contour lines that lay to the west of the peak-they fell off in a tight cluster, indicating a steep and fast decline, toward Yellowstone National Park, and then those to the north were more gradual, spaced apart. A creek wound down from near the glacier that lay between Republic Peak and its nearest cousin, Amphitheater.

“It’s burning by our escape route,” he said.

Everybody looked up with interest, and Jace was proud to see it on Ethan Serbin’s face as well.

“You think?” Ethan said.

Jace felt a pang of uncertainty. He looked up at the mountains, wondering if he’d gotten it wrong.

“That’s what it looks like,” Jace said. “Like if we had to use the escape route and come down the back side of Republic, going backcountry, the way you were talking about, we’d run right into it. Or pretty close.”

Ethan watched him in silence.

“Maybe not,” Jace said, and now he was searching for the Connor Reynolds attitude again, shrugging and trying to act as if he didn’t care one way or the other. “Whatever. I don’t mind building my shelter, I don’t need you to do it.”

“You don’t? Well, that’s too bad because I was about to start on it.”

“I got it right?”

“Yes, you did. If that fire actually is spreading, which is how it looks right now, it’s going to be spreading pretty close to our escape route.”

13

The horses woke her.

A whinny in the night, answered by another, and Allison was awake quickly. She was a deep sleeper usually, but not since Ethan had gone into the mountains. She had no fear of being left alone on the property; most of her life, she’d been alone on the property. Some days she wanted to send him into the mountains just to be alone again.

This summer, though, the ill winds had blown through her mind daily. She tried to adopt Ethan’s amused disregard for such things, but she couldn’t. You could offer the heart all the instruction you wanted. The heart was often hard of hearing.

She was a different woman this summer, and not one she cared to be. She was a fearful woman. In the corner of the room, leaning against the wall near her side of the bed, was a loaded shotgun. On the nightstand where usually a glass of water and a book sat, she had her GPS, the one Ethan would text her on if something went wrong. Only a single message received today: they were alone in the woods. That was all he would say, and she knew that, but still, she’d taken to looking at the GPS far too often, and though she knew well that the horses had woken her and not the GPS, she checked it anyhow. Blank and silent.

Bastard, she thought, and hated herself for it. How could she think that? Her own husband, the love of her life, and that was no joke, better believe he was the only love she’d encounter in this life, at least the only one that would run so deep. Deeper than she’d believed was possible.

And still she cursed him now. Because he’d made a choice, and he hadn’t chosen her. The resentment had plagued her ever since Jamie Bennett left Montana, the deal made. How could you resent a man who’d agreed to protect a child?

Jamie was reckless, and he knew it. She appealed to his ego, and he let her. I warned him, and he laughed…

Stop it. Stop those thoughts.

She rose, considered picking up the shotgun for a moment, then dismissed the idea. There was no need for a weapon, or for her resentments. Ethan had made the right choice; the only danger was with him, and she should be thinking of him instead of herself. She would go as far as the porch and see what there was to see. If there appeared to be real trouble in the stable, then she’d return for the shotgun. Occasionally you heard of problems with mountain lions and livestock, the sort of thing that happened when you offered up perfectly good prey in the homeland of a perfectly good predator, but in all her years there, the horses had never been bothered by one.

They also rarely woke her in the night.

She crossed the living room in the dark. A dull orange glow came from behind the glass door of the woodstove, remnants of a nearly extinguished fire. She hadn’t been asleep long. Just past midnight now. Between the living room and the porch was a narrow storage room, the washer and dryer crammed inside, rows of shelves surrounding them. She found a battery-powered spotlight by touch and then pulled a heavy jacket off the hook beside the door. Summer, sure, but the night air wouldn’t admit to such a thing, not yet. In the pocket of the jacket she put a can of bear spray. You never knew. One year they’d had a grizzly on the bunkhouse porch; another time one had inspected the bed of Ethan’s pickup after a garbage run. If a grizz was out there now, the pepper spray would be far more useful than the shotgun.

She went out into the night, and the breeze found her immediately and pushed its chill down the collar of her jacket. She walked to the far edge of the porch, leaving the door open behind her. Fifty yards away, in the stable, the horses were silent again.

She knew the shadows that lay between the cabin and the barn from years of night checks. In what should have been a stretch of open ground, every tree cleared from it long ago, something stood, black on black.

Allison lifted the spotlight and hit the switch.

A man appeared, halfway between her and the stable, and though he blinked against the harshness of the light, he seemed otherwise untroubled by it. He was young and lean and had bristle-short hair and eyes that looked black in the spotlight. The glare had to be blinding, but he did not so much as lift a hand to block it.

“Good evening, Mrs. Serbin.”

This was why she had the shotgun. This was why it was kept loaded and propped near the bed and now she had walked away from it because for too long she had lived in a world where a shotgun was unnecessary.

You knew, she thought, even as she stared at him in silence. You knew, Allison, somehow you knew he was coming, and you ignored it and now you will pay.

The man was advancing toward her through the narrow beam of light, and his motion induced her own, a slow backward shuffle on the porch. He did not change his pace.

“I’d like you to stop there,” she said. Her voice was strong and clear and she was grateful for that. “Stop there and identify yourself. You know my name; I should know yours.”

Still he came on with that carefree stride, his face a white glow and his eyes squinted nearly shut. Something was wrong with that. His willingness to accept the glare, to walk directly into it without taking so much as a side step, that wasn’t right. She’d caught him in the beam and for some reason he was embracing it. Why?

“Stop there,” she said again, but now she knew that he would not. Her options rolled through her mind fast because they were few. She could wait here and he’d come on until he’d joined her on the porch and whatever had brought him here in the night would be revealed. Or she could turn and run for the door, close and lock it, and get the shotgun in her hands. She knew that she could make it before he caught her.

He knows I can too. He can see that.

But still he walked without hurry, squinting against the spotlight.

She knew then. Understood in an instant. He was not alone. That was why he was not hurried and it was why he did not wish her to move the light away from him.

She pivoted and headed for the door only to stop immediately. The second man was already almost to the porch. Far closer to the door than she was. He’d come from around the other side of the cabin. Long blond hair that glowed near white in the beam. Boots and jeans and a black shirt unbuttoned almost to midchest. Pistol in his hand.

“Be still,” he said. He had a doctor’s bedside tone. A professional soother.

She stood where she was as he walked toward her from the front and the other one reached the porch at her back. No way to face them both. At once, she was relieved that she had not taken the shotgun. She could shoot only one of them at a time, the way they were positioned, but that was still more shooting than they likely wanted, and if they’d thought she was a threat, they might have fired first. Right now, they did not think that, and in their perception of her as harmless, she was being given one last valuable tool: time. How much of it, she did not know. But there was some, and she needed to use it now, and use it right.

She thought of the bear spray, and then she lifted her hands into the air. To reach for it was to admit it was there. The bear spray was of little comfort in the face of a gun but it was what she had and she intended to keep it. Keep it and earn more of what these men could grant: time. Whether it was hours or minutes, whether it was seconds, her hope lay in buying more.

“What do you want?” she said. Voice no longer so strong. “There’s no need for a gun. You can tell me what you’d like.”

“Hospitable,” the long-haired man said. “That is a pleasant change from others we’ve encountered.”

“It certainly is.”

“A calm woman, all things considered. Middle of the night, you know. Strangers.”

“Strangers with guns. Very calm, I’d say. Unusually so.”

They were talking around her as they advanced, conversational as two men on a road trip making observations about the scenery. It chilled her more than the sight of the gun had.

“What do you want?” she repeated. They were almost upon her, one at the front and one at the back, and it was harder now to keep her hands in the air; she wanted to bring them down and throw a punch, wanted to run, wanted to drop to the porch floor and curl up and protect herself from their impending touches.

But none of those options would buy her time. She kept her hands in the air, though they were shaking now.

“May we step inside, Mrs. Serbin?”

The one facing her, just inches away, asked the question, but he wasn’t looking her in the eye. His gaze was covering her body, and she had the sense that he was inventorying her in every way. There was violation in his stare and also threat assessment. She wore black leggings, nothing over them, her boots loose along the calf, and when she’d lifted her arms, the jacket had pulled back to reveal the long-sleeved T-shirt she’d been sleeping in. There was no place on her body, under the jacket, to hide a weapon, and that was evident. The oversize jacket hid the bear spray well. She had a feeling that they would take the jacket, though. That, too, was only a matter of time.

Out in the stable, one of the horses whinnied again. A high keening sound. The moon was visible now, clean white light. Would things have been different if it had been out when she opened the door? Would she have seen enough to step back inside? Could a cloud change your life?

“Yes, I think we’ll go inside,” the man behind her said. He reached out and pushed her hair back over her shoulder, one fingertip on her skin, and that was when she dropped her hands and screamed and then his arm was around her, drawing her body hard against his, pinning her arms to her sides. The spotlight fell to the porch floor and bounced. He’d wrapped her up in such a way that her hands were pressed up near her face, useless.

The man in front of her had watched the brief flurry of resistance without reaction. Heard her scream and did not blink. He stood still while the other one held her, and for a time there was no sound but the horses stirring, unsettled by Allison’s scream. The spotlight beam shot crookedly into the night sky, illuminating half of his face.

“Still hospitable?” he said at last.

The grip around her felt like a steel band and there were tears threatening, pain and fear mixing. She blinked the tears back and forced herself to look directly at him when she nodded. She didn’t say a word.

“Marvelous,” he said. He drew the word out slow and looked away from her, taking stock of the grounds a final time, the stable and the pasture and the empty bunkhouse and the garage beyond. She had a feeling they’d inspected the property thoroughly before approaching the house. She didn’t like that measured surveyor’s stare. He saw too much, missed too little. It was the way Ethan took in a place. It wasn’t a quality she wanted to see in a man like this.

When he was satisfied with his assessment, he made the smallest of nods and the other one shoved her forward, through the door and into the living room, without loosening his hold.

“I believe I’ll give myself a tour,” the long-haired one said.

“One of us probably should,” the other answered. Allison could feel his breath on her ear. Could smell his sweat and a heavy odor of stale, trapped smoke. Not cigarettes. Wood smoke.

He held her in the center of the room and did not speak while the other one took a patient stroll through her home. He unplugged phones and lowered window blinds and talked while he moved, and the one holding her answered.

“Quite an empire they have here.”

“Beautiful place.”

“They like mountain landscapes, did you notice?”

“Seems to be the favored artwork, yes.”

“Strange, living in a place like this. Why do you need the paintings, the photographs? Just look out the window.”

“Gifts, I suspect. What do you give someone who lives in the mountains? A photograph of the same mountain that person sees every day. It doesn’t make sense, but people do it all the same. Like that man who raised the dogs. Remember him? The bloodhounds.”

“Pictures of bloodhounds all over the place. Even though the real deal was right there.”

“Exactly. I’m telling you, they are gifts. No one has any imagination these days.”

The grip on Allison hadn’t loosened a fraction, though the man who held her spoke easily. Another smell mingled with the wood smoke, but it took her a minute to confirm what it was. Or accept it.

He smelled of blood.

The long-haired one faded from sight but she could hear his boots as he moved through the rooms behind them. Then he reappeared and crossed the living room. He had a hat in his hand. A black Stetson, wide-brimmed. Ethan’s hat, one that he’d never worn. He hated the cowboy look, but people had their assumptions.

“I like this,” the long-haired man said. “Very Wild West.” He put the hat on and inspected himself in the reflection from the glass door. He smiled. “Not a bad touch.”

“Not bad at all,” the short-haired one said.

“Is it your husband’s hat?” He turned to face Allison.

“It was a gift,” she said. “He doesn’t like it.”

They laughed at her then. “Excellent,” the long-haired one said. “That’s excellent, Mrs. Serbin.” He wandered away again, still wearing the hat, and entered her bedroom. He’d picked up the spotlight when they came inside and was using it rather than the overhead lights. She watched the beam paint the walls and then come to a stop on the shotgun. He went over to it and lifted it with one hand and opened the breech. When he saw the shells inside he snapped the breech shut and returned to the living room, carrying the spotlight in one hand, now turned off, and the shotgun in the other, held down against his leg. The pistol was in a holster at his back.

“Oh my,” he said, easing onto the couch, stretching his legs out in front of him, and leaning the shotgun against the cushion. “It’s been a long day, hasn’t it?”

“Productive, though.”

“True.” The longhair gave a heavy sigh, chest rising and falling, staring at the woodstove. He looked at it for a long time before glancing back at them. “You good?”

“Just fine.”

“Do you think she needs to be held?”

“I suppose we could give her a chance now that you’ve completed the tour.”

The long-haired one fixed his eyes on Allison’s. Cold empty blue. “What do you say, beautiful? Can we take that chance?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then. We get our first test of your honesty.”

The iron grip was gone, as if it had never existed. She was free again. The one who’d held her stepped back after releasing her. She hadn’t seen his face since he’d walked toward her in the spotlight. The two men never stood together.

The long-haired man said, “Do you know why we’re here?”

She shook her head. Immediately, he sighed again and turned from her and ran a hand over his face as if he were exhausted.

“Mrs. Serbin.” The words were heavy with disappointment.

“What?”

“You know. You do know, and you just lied, and that, at this point in the night…” He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “It’s not what we need. It simply will not do.”

“My brother’s had a long day,” the one behind her said. “I’d warn you that he’s a less patient man when he’s tired. You’re not expected to know him as well as I do, so I’ll give you some insider perspective. He’s worn down right now. It’s been a trying day. For us, and for others.”

She wanted to turn and see him, but looking away from the one on the couch seemed risky. He had the only pistol she’d seen but surely the other one was armed too. My brother, he’d said. She wondered where they were from. They spoke without accent. Flat affect. Someplace in the Midwest. Someplace near the center of hell. They had not taken her jacket from her and so she still had the bear spray, but what use it might be she couldn’t imagine now. Cause them some pain, but that would only anger them more. Blinding them in a cloud of poison and running through it for the shotgun? It would never work.

“Tell me, then,” Allison said.

That brought a tilt of the head and an almost amused stare from the man on the couch. “Tell you?”

“Yes. Why are you here?”

For a long time he looked at her and did not speak. Then he said, “I believe your husband is in the mountains. Leading a group of boys. Troubled boys. Very honorable thing to do. Because if you don’t stop the trouble in a boy early? Well, then. Well.”

“It simply won’t stop,” his brother said. “Once trouble takes hold, Mrs. Serbin? It won’t stop.”

The man on the coach leaned forward and braced his arms on his knees. “Do you know which boy it is?”

Allison shook her head. “I don’t.”

“This time I believe you. But it’s irrelevant. Because we know which one he is. So we don’t require that information from you. What we require is his location.”

She knew what was coming now as if a map had been drawn for her. They wanted the boy and they wanted to move with speed. The thing she had wanted to take from them, time, was the very thing they could not afford to grant. There were other ways to find Ethan, but not faster ways, not for them. So they intended to travel via shortcuts. She was one of those.

He commenced rubbing his face again with a gloved hand. Somewhere behind Allison, his brother shifted, but still she did not turn. Let him move. She couldn’t watch them both, so there was no point in trying. They would ask her for Ethan’s location now, and when she did not tell them, it would go bad fast. She saw that on the map but she also saw that the destination was the same no matter which route she took. There were detours available to her but no exits.

So it would go this way, then. They would ask and she would answer and they would be done with her. Or they would ask and she would not answer and they would not be done with her.

“We’re going to need to catch up with your husband,” the man on the couch said. “I assume you realize that by now.”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell us where we might find him? Remember that he, personally, is of no interest to us.”

He was willing to try one tactic, at least, before resorting to more direct means. Willing to pretend. She would now hear that no harm would come to Ethan if she told them where he was, and no harm would come to her. His heart wasn’t in it, though. At some point he had looked at her and an understanding had transpired between them. He would not waste his efforts on a lost cause, and convincing her that she had any hope of safety was a lost cause. She knew that they were here to kill a boy because that boy had seen them, and now she had seen them. All of this lay unspoken between them. And what it meant.

“He will be,” she said.

That earned a raised eyebrow. “You think?”

She nodded. “You won’t just take the boy. Not from Ethan.”

“But we’re going to have to.”

“It won’t go easy for you.”

He seemed pleased by that prediction. “Sometimes it doesn’t.”

He left the couch and leaned down on one knee and reached for the woodstove. Opened the door and let smoke out into the room. A few embers clung to life. There was a basket of kindling beside the stove and he took a handful and began to build a fire.

“The technique has been good to us today,” he said.

“It has,” his brother answered. “Cold in here too. A cold night.”

The flames caught the fresh fuel and grew and he added a log then and sat back and watched the fire take hold. There was an iron rack of tools on the wall-ash broom and dustpan, poker, tongs. He ran his fingertips over all of them as if undecided on the best option and then let his hand float back to the tongs. Removed them from the rack and dipped the business end into the flame and allowed the iron to soak in the scorching heat.

“Please,” Allison said, and he looked up at her as if with genuine surprise.

“Pardon?”

“Please don’t.”

“Well, you’ve had your opportunity to cooperate. Surely you can’t blame me for the consequences of your own decisions, your own actions?”

“You’ll spend your life in prison for this,” she said. “I hope the days are long for you there. I hope they are endless.”

He removed the tongs from the fire and smiled at her. “I don’t see anyone here to arrest me, Mrs. Serbin. In fact, it is my understanding that your sheriff is dead. The law has changed with our arrival, do you see? You are now in the jurisdiction of a new judge.”

“This is the truth,” his brother acknowledged, and then the deep red glow of the iron tongs was approaching Allison and she spoke again.

“There’s a GPS.”

He seemed almost disappointed. As if he’d expected her continued resistance and had not thought she would be so easy to break.

“Cooperation,” he said. “Marvelous.” That word again, said slow, as if he liked the flavor. “Where is this GPS?”

“Nightstand. By the bed.”

His brother moved without a word and quickly returned with the GPS in his hand. He was studying it.

“Does it track them or does it just have the planned route?”

“Tracks them.”

The one by the fire rose and hung the tongs back on the wall. Allison prayed that he would come closer, join his brother in looking at the GPS, finally be close enough that she would have a chance to get them both with one shot of the bear spray.

He didn’t. He walked to the end of the couch, the two men still well separated, and said, “Show us where they are.”

She reached for the device. Her hand was trembling. The man who smelled of smoke and blood handed her the GPS and she tried to make it look as if she fumbled it on the transition, tried to hide the way her thumb came down on the red emergency button, the one that issued the distress signal. You couldn’t just tap it, though; the emergency responders didn’t want to be inundated with accidental SOS calls. You had to hit it three times in succession.

She’d hit it twice before the first punch came, and as she fell she hit it the third time and then dropped it as a kick caught her high in the stomach and hammered the air from her lungs and left her curled in a ball of agony, trying to choke in a breath as blood flowed from her shattered nose and torn lips.

“Emergency signal,” the man who’d struck her said, not even looking at her, his attention back on the GPS. “She just called for a rescue.”

“Can you stop it?”

“I don’t know. I’ll see.”

Allison writhed on the floor and tried to suck in air, but all that came was the taste of hot copper. She wanted to reach for the bear spray but first she needed to breathe, and her hand went to her stomach instead of her pocket, a reflex action-touch where it hurts. The long-haired man bent and grabbed her by her hair and dragged her backward, fresh pain flooding in even as she drowned in what was already there.

“She should hope,” he said, “that the rescue team is very fast.”

He dragged her close to the fire and dropped her on the floor and then knelt to take the tongs from the rack. His brother was still looking at the GPS, trying to abort the signal. Allison rolled onto her shoulder and found the bear spray and withdrew it. There was a plastic guard on the trigger. She snapped that off with her thumb, and at the sound of the breaking plastic, the long-haired one turned back. When he spotted the pepper-spray canister, she saw something unsteady in his eyes for the first time. Saw all of the anger he kept wrapped behind the cloak of cold calm. It was there for a flicker and then gone. The cloak returned, and with it a menacing amusement. A smile spreading beneath that frosted stare.

“Very good,” he said. “Pepper spray. Very good. But Mrs. Serbin? As proud as I am of you for the effort, you’re pointing it the wrong way.”

The muzzle of the spray canister was facing away from him, back toward Allison herself.

She spoke to him through a mouthful of blood. “No, I’m not.”

She closed her eyes then and depressed the trigger, aimed not at his face but at the open door of the woodstove just behind her head, and the living room seemed to explode. A cloud of fire rolled out of the stove and over her and the flames caught her jacket and hair and then found her flesh.

She willed herself to keep holding the trigger down. Keep spraying. Keep feeding it. Knowing even in the agony the thing that she had known from the start: the pepper spray was not weapon enough to fight these men.

Fire might be.

The flames rolled across the living room and drove them away from her, pushed them back toward the front door. The canister exploded in her hand then, and new needles pressed into her nerves. The shotgun was just to her left, still leaning against the couch, still loaded. She rolled to it and when she grabbed the metal barrel, it seared her palm, but she was hardly aware of the pain. Her right hand didn’t respond the way she wanted it to, didn’t seem to respond at all, so she braced the butt of the gun against her stomach and dropped her left hand to the trigger. The flames rose in a wall before her but she could see twin shadows on the other side of it. The cabin was bathed in scarlet light. She pulled the heavy trigger back with two fingers of her left hand.

The shotgun bucked wildly and she dropped it, which was bad because she had wanted both shots, but she was on fire now and that thing that she had treasured-time-was no more.

Roll, she thought. Roll, roll, roll.

Common sense. A child’s knowledge. If your clothes were on fire, you rolled to put them out.

But what did you do when everywhere around you was more fire?

She had no answer for that, and so she continued to roll, out of the scarlet and into the black.

They stood in the yard and watched the cabin burn.

“You’re bleeding pretty well.”

Jack looked at his side. Against the black shirt, the blood was hard to see; it was just added shine. He removed the shirt. A scattering of birdshot. Small-gauge shotgun, smaller load.

“It’ll stop.”

“I’ll go back for her.” Patrick lifted his pistol and gestured at the cabin. “Don’t know if I hit her or not. I was walking backward, she was rolling. I’ll go finish it.”

“I think she finished it herself. And if she didn’t? Well, we’ll come for her again. Not now. Time to ride.”

“I’d like to know it’s done.”

“I’d like to be gone when they answer that distress call. Somebody will. And you know how I feel about this highway.”

“I do.” Patrick was staring into the burning house.

“You’re displeased, brother. I understand. But I’m shot. Let’s head out.”

They walked together into the darkness and away from the orange light. The truck was a half a mile away and they covered the ground swiftly, not speaking. Jack’s breath came heavy and uneven but he did not slow his pace. When they reached the truck, he handed the keys to his brother.

“Right or left?” Patrick asked.

“We go right, we have to go through the gates into Yellowstone. It’s the only way.”

“Yes.”

“I’d expect there are more police in the park. More places to close the highway too.”

“Left is longer. All those switchbacks. Even driving fast, we’re on the road for a good while.”

Jack nodded. “As I said, I don’t care for this highway. We’ve found ourselves in the only part of the country that has just one damned road.”

“Call it, and call it fast.”

“Left.”

Patrick gunned the motor to life and turned on the lights and swung out of the gravel and back onto the asphalt. On the hill above them, the firelight flickered through the pines.

“Havoc,” Jack said. “We are leaving havoc in our wake. Could be trouble.”

“We’ve never left one standing before. Not like this.”

“I doubt she’s standing.”

“We don’t know. We need to be sure.”

“She set herself on fire, and the fire is still burning.”

“Regardless, they may know we’re coming now. Serbin and the boy.”

“They may.”

“We could leave. Call it off,” Patrick said.

“You’d consider that?”

Silence filled the cab and rode with them for a time.

“Yes,” Jack said at length. “That was my feeling on it as well.”

“We came a long way for him.”

“We did. And we came in good health. Now I’m burned and bleeding. That leaves me even less inclined to call it off. Leaves me, in fact, completely unwilling to do so.”

“Understood.”

“This will bring him down, you know. Out of the mountains. He’ll have to come back for her, and he will have to bring the boy with him.”

“Yes. And the boy will vanish again quickly. They’ll move him fast.”

“It would seem we should be there, then.”

“It certainly would.”