It was his birthday. Thirty years old. A special birthday.
Still watching the boy, Dave pulled a toothpick from the breast pocket of his shirt, where he kept a small stash of them. The shirt was not flannel, nor was it checked. It was a plain blue button-up that he’d stolen off a backyard clothesline especially for today. He’d kept it hanging on the back of his door that morning until after the bloodshed and his mostly successful cleanup. He stuck the toothpick in his mouth and chomped. Then he pulled a twig from a nearby branch, put it in his pocket to replace the pick. Much better that way. Balanced.
He wore olive-green cargo pants. In the right cargo pocket, he had a hunting knife with a razor-sharp blade. In the opposite pocket: another. He reached both hands into their respective compartments and ran his fingers down the knives’ rubber grips. They were identical weapons, or nearly so, and although it wasn’t exactly a gun at each hip, Dave couldn’t help but compare himself to an old western cowboy.
The second knife was just a backup, something he had no intention of using or needing, but Dave liked knowing it was there. He’d never been a boy scout, never had that “be prepared” jargon brainwashed into him, but he’d never been a moron either and he never did anything half-assed.
He watched and chewed.
The boy’s mother had gone inside the house almost half an hour earlier, left her son to play. The kid had spent ten of those thirty minutes bouncing a ratty old tennis ball off the side of the house, and then he’d ventured across the back yard to the edge of the property (near Dave’s hiding spot, this was), where a tree house sat high in the branches of a fork-trunked oak. The fort looked so weathered and cracked that it must have been older than the boy himself.
Dave had noticed it before. He’d come here many times.
Weathered or not, the wooden rungs nailed to the tree’s trunk had held for the kid when he scurried up them and onto the main platform, which had itself now withstood almost twenty minutes of jumps, half-hearted karate moves, and the various re-positionings of a ten- or eleven-year-old boy who didn’t seem to know whether he wanted to sit, lie, or stand. The old platform hadn’t so much as creaked.
Dave grinned. Over the last six months he’d visited a lot of houses, and he’d watched a lot of boys, but he always came back here. The boy’s real name, he knew, was Zachary, but he never thought of him that way. Usually it was just the boy or the kid; occasionally, it was Georgie.
Now the boy moved again. Dave left the weapons in his pockets but removed his hands. He needed to focus on the kid.
From his place behind the thick tree trunk deeper in the woods, Dave watched the child back off the platform on his stomach and kick blindly for a rung nailed to the trunk about two feet down.
It wasn’t just the kid’s looks. Even his movements reminded Dave of Georgie. And on several occasions, Dave had noticed the double knots on the laces of the kid’s sneakers. Georgie (the original Georgie) had known how to tie a pair of sneaks so well you could only get them off with a pair of scissors.
The boy descended the irregularly spaced rungs with almost superhuman agility and pushed away from the trunk still five feet shy of the ground. When he landed, his knees bent and his arms flung out to his sides in a way that made him look like an alighting bird. He straightened himself up and headed back to the house.
Dave smiled and walked around his hiding tree. Today wasn’t just another day. It was time to stop watching. He moved, and the knives slapped against his thighs.
THREE
The pickup moved around the mountain roads like a sickly horse out for one last lap around the racetrack. It leaned around the corners, shuddered more than once to an almost complete standstill, jerked, bounced, and wobbled its way forward.
Mike Pullman rode it out of the Rockies the best he could, relying heavily on the brakes, cursing himself for continuing to put his life in the hands (or wheels) of such an untrustworthy hunk of junk. He’d realized only recently that the truck was on its last metaphorical leg, and he’d soon have to trade it in for something a little more surefooted, an SUV or a jeep. But, of course, it wasn’t that simple. He’d paid the truck off several years ago but hadn’t yet figured out how to bend his budget around the purchase of a new (or even a reliable used) vehicle.
Still, he had to get one, one way or another. A good set of snow tires and extremely careful driving had gotten him through one winter in the mountains, but they would never get him through another, assuming the truck somehow survived to see it.
The pickup’s front tires rolled onto a long stretch of flat road, and Mike eyed the interstate ahead. He let out a single short sound, a cross between a sigh of relief and a whoop of joy. The truck groaned as he accelerated, and one short-lived squeal came from a belt somewhere inside the engine compartment, but Mike was soon cruising. The mountains fell away behind him.
He’d driven the back roads in his usual silence, afraid that the distraction of the radio might make him miss a turn and slide into a ditch or, worse, off the unguardrailed edge of a cliff. But now that he’d reached relatively safe ground, he punched the power button on the dash and flipped through the radio’s presets until he found an oldies station playing some classic Rolling Stones.
He merged onto I-25, beating his hand against the steering wheel in rhythm with the tune, and reminded himself of a more important reason to get rid of this old clunker: Trevor. The choice to upgrade to a better vehicle wasn’t just the smart one or the practical one—it was the fatherly one. After all, any time he loaded Trevor in the truck, Mike was putting more than just his own life in danger; his son deserved better than to hurtle all around Colorado in a veritable deathtrap.
Before the breakup, Libby had sometimes hinted that they ought to get rid of the truck—leaving classifieds open on the coffee table, mentioning the great deals their friends had gotten on their used cars, that sort of thing—but back then the pickup had still been a dependable means of transportation, and she’d never gotten confrontational about it. He’d taken the truck with him when he left, and she’d kept the newer Honda. Since the divorce, she hadn’t said a word about the truck, but he knew she probably dreaded Trevor climbing into its cab the same way she would have dreaded him strapping himself into an electric chair or stepping inside a smoking gas chamber. Mike guessed she stayed quiet about it now only because, as divorcés, they sometimes had to choose their battles; for whatever reason, she’d let the issue of the truck slide.
Part of him, a very petty and illogical part, wanted to drive the pickup until it disintegrated, just to spite her. Fortunately, it was also a small, easy-to-ignore part.
He eased the truck up to sixty miles an hour and punched at the radio’s presets again when the Stones dissolved into a series of mind-numbing commercials.
Cars and trucks, motorcycles and eighteen-wheelers zipped by him on the left, the big rigs sometimes leaving his small truck shaking in their wake, but Mike hardly noticed. Since moving to the mountains, he’d traveled this stretch of road dozens, and possibly going on hundreds of times, and at this point he figured just about everyone in the state had passed him at least once. No big deal; he wasn’t usually in a rush, and he’d never been one to indulge in road rage. Let someone else lose control and wrap his skull around a mile marker—Mike would take his sweet time. Of course, the truck maxed out at about sixty-five, which meant his choice to drive slowly wasn’t really much of a choice at all.