“Guilty as charged.” She slammed the bag into the tailgate. She’d added all of the dead man’s weapons, which was not an insignificant arsenal. He had four shotguns, two rifles, three pistols, and plenty of ammunition for all of them. There’d been three hundred dollars in cash as well. Cash and guns were good-always useful, obviously, but she’d also thought they would appease Doug, the necessary spoils of the war he believed in.
It wasn’t working. He hadn’t even helped her search the house. He’d spent his time in the living room, standing in front of the corpse as if he didn’t understand what had happened.
“We could’ve tied him up, just as you said. It wouldn’t have changed anything. We’d still have had two days. The only difference now is you’ve made us a date with the electric chair. That’s all you did.”
She didn’t bother to tell him that after she’d killed the deputy, that date had already been arranged. Instead, she tossed another bag into the Yukon, turned to face him, and tried to find a last reserve of patience. It was like sifting through sand in search of water.
“We’ve been working toward this moment for nine months,” she said.
“Not this moment. This was never a moment I dreamed of!”
“Everyone else is in motion. Every…one…else. We’re already running behind. The world will change in the next twenty-four hours, and where do you want to be when it happens?”
He stood with his jaw slack, breathing through his mouth. A car passed on the road below the house, the headlights throwing fast shafts of light through the trees, and though it drove on without slowing, it was a reminder that police might be patrolling nearby. They were wasting time, and meanwhile another band of followers was gathering with Eli, where she belonged.
“I suppose we can wait here,” she said. “We can sit down and talk through all of this. Discuss what was planned and what was necessary. Argue the semantics of warfare. But I’d rather not be having a fucking philosophical debate when the police arrive.”
He shook his head. His hands opened and closed at his sides-tightening into fists, relaxing, tightening. The only way he could express himself, through his hands. She had warned Eli of this. Doug Oriel was a physical titan, and a mental child.
“It’s time to run,” she said. “I’m going, with or without you. You want to head south while I go north, take the red truck and give it your best shot. You’ll be in jail before noon, and I’ll be operating as planned.”
“Nothing is as planned.”
The dogs had stopped barking and howling and now paced their fence lines uneasily. She was sure they had smelled their owner’s death in the air and were curious about their own fates. How pathetic, that through smell alone they were farther along in understanding than Doug was.
She turned from him and jerked open the Yukon’s driver-side door. “Last chance for a ride.”
She had the engine running before he moved. Even then, he was hesitant-he looked all around him in a great, confused circle, as if searching for some other path, and finding none, he put his head down, walked to the Yukon, opened the passenger door, and climbed in beside her, his hands still clenching and unclenching. They were large hands, and she remembered the way the dead man who’d owned this car had looked at them and thought that it would be wise to watch them herself.
She backed out of the dead man’s driveway and turned onto the country road, heading north.
“We’ll get some distance between us and this place and then we’ll make contact with Eli,” she said.
Doug didn’t answer. One of his knuckles popped as he tightened his right fist.
Janell drove on.
39
The road to Cooke City was filled with ghosts.
Mark was used to traveling with them, had become accustomed to that since Lauren was killed, but there were more of them now. He was in the Sunlight Basin, carving through country he’d once known so well, and the faces of men and women who had probably been dead for years rose smiling in his mind. Also in the mix, all too often, was Lynn Deschaine, her face just above his own in the dark, her body pressed tight to him, her racing heart pounding against his chest.
The Chief Joseph Scenic Byway links Cody, Wyoming, with the northeast gate of Yellowstone, just a few miles from Cooke City, Montana. It crosses through the Shoshone National Forest and the Absaroka Mountains. The Beartooth range looms to the north and the Absaroka range falls behind to the south and the Clark Fork of the Yellowstone River winds along through the low country-if a vertical mile up can be considered low country-and then the road begins to climb again, and seeing it in the daylight, many people would consider it the most beautiful drive in the West, at least if they hadn’t driven the Beartooth Highway up and over the top.
Tonight, none of the grand country was visible beyond the reach of the headlights, and the road mocked Mark. He’d come here to settle the score for the family member who had been taken from him, but instead, he was driving the old roads in search of the family he’d left behind willingly, and he felt as if the mountains were laughing at him now. Even the route he had to take felt predestined, promised.
They never met, he thought. Never spoke. There cannot be overlap, not between my mother and Lauren, between this place and that one.
But already he knew the latter was false. Cassadaga, Florida, connected to Lovell, Wyoming. The place where Mark’s future had died was bridged to the past he’d left behind. And if that connection was possible, why not more?
She went to Cassadaga on a case. Went for Dixie Witte. That was all. It had nothing to do with my past.
Somewhere, a missing Homeland Security agent might have disagreed.
It was still dark when he arrived in Cooke City, and the temperature was at least fifteen degrees colder than it had been in Red Lodge. The traces of snow that were visible on the peaks down there lay in drifts on the ground up here. He drove slowly into town and Miner’s Saloon came into view, the sign that had been over his mother’s shoulder in the surveillance photos sent to Lynn Deschaine.
He parked in front of the saloon and cut the engine and the headlights. He turned on the cell phone just for the hell of it and saw the expected-no trace of a signal. Mark was, for the moment, at least, very securely off the grid.
He stepped out of the car and into the bracing cold and walked down the road to see what had changed in the town.
The answer: not much. There were a few new buildings, but for the most part, things were the same. They had a fire station now. That was impressive. Mark wondered if they had any firefighters. The summer before Lauren was killed, a forest fire had done some serious damage just beyond the town, ravaging the base of Mount Republic and chewing through the forest along Pilot Creek. Arson, apparently. People died. He’d read about it and looked at the photographs, and that was one of the few times he’d discussed the place with Lauren at any length.
At the end of the town the road curled away toward Silver Gate, just two miles farther on, but he knew that it would be as silent as Cooke City. It was the dead season, after the snowmobiling and before the Yellowstone summer tourists. Anyone who’d seen Mark’s uncle in the past few months was sound asleep, and the way to get cooperation wasn’t by banging on doors in the middle of the night.
He stood at the edge of town feeling very small, powerless. Night in the mountains could do that to you, reminding you of your place in the world and laughing at any sense of self-importance. Tonight it was worse. Mark didn’t feel just powerless; his entire understanding of the world had been ripped away from him.
His ignorance of the phrase rise the dark appears genuine based on his interviews with police investigators in his wife’s homicide.