“But it didn’t last,” Mark said.
Larry shook his head. “She was living with him down in Cody and I was working on this property, fixing up the cabins, and she brought Pate up, said he wanted shooting lessons. He had top-of-the-line equipment for a man who didn’t know how to use it. At least five thousand in the rifle and scope. He wasn’t much of a shot, but he asked all kinds of questions about range and impact. What he wanted to shoot at was metal.”
“What do you mean?”
“The questions he had were about different rounds and their damage at point of impact. He had these things he wanted to use as targets, like big ceramic canisters. Looked like electrical equipment, insulators maybe. He didn’t even want me to tell him how to shoot, he wanted me to do the shooting so he could see how these things blew up with different rounds at different distances. I said, ‘Okay, let’s set the bullshit aside, chief, and you tell me what you’re really after.’ And the weird bastard looks at me with this smile like a pedophile in an amusement park and says, ‘I intend to remind people about the true nature of power.’ That’s exactly what he said, word for word. I remember it because it was strange and the look on his face when he said it chilled me to the bone.”
Mark said, “He wants to shut the electrical grid down. I have no idea why.”
“Here’s the bullshit he’s slinging, and it’s bullshit your mother has bought: Spirits talk to him. Spirits of the mountains and of the old Indian chiefs. You know how much that pisses me off, listening to a white man claim that?”
“It’s smart,” Mark said. “It’s exactly what Mom would want to hear.”
“You got that right,” Larry admitted. “The last time I saw your mother, she told me about how he’d go up into these caves in the Pryor Mountains and wait for the spirit voices to tell him…Markus? What’s the matter?”
Mark hadn’t moved, but his face must have changed plenty. “Nothing’s the matter. I just had a bad experience with caves.”
An understatement. He could see Ridley Barnes standing in water a few hundred feet underground. Ridley, whose corpse had never been found, saying, She doesn’t want you yet. Saying, When things go dark, you’re the one who will have to bring the light back.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Mark said.
“What doesn’t?”
“You say it like Mom’s buying the con. She’s usually selling it.”
“Give her points for both this time. She’s still peddling the stories, but they’re chapters in a bigger one now, and Pate writes that. She can draw in a different type for him. People who wouldn’t trust him, or at least not trust him easily…they believe in Violet. Always have. You know how she does that.”
“What’s she getting out of it?”
Larry looked away and made a drinking motion with his hand and then a plunging motion with his thumb, and Mark felt a sick, impotent rage as he remembered the syringes he’d taken from his mother and the bottle she’d had in her hand on one of the last days he’d ever seen her, the day he’d gone out into a howling snowstorm and found her passed out in a drift, near death, her flesh tinted the blue of a pale winter sky.
“Of course.”
“She got clean for a bit,” Larry said, somehow always able to rise to his sister’s defense. “She really did. After you left. That knocked her sideways, son. When you left, she got clean and dry and held on for a long time. But then…”
“Right,” Mark said. “But then.” He shook his head. “You mentioned the Pryor Mountains. You think Pate is up there?”
“No idea.”
“Well, I’m going to need some ideas. I’m not the only one looking for him either. The police are too by now. But I need to get there first.”
“Why?”
“Because I think the man who killed my wife is with him. She wrote three words in her notebook on the day she was killed that didn’t make sense to anyone I knew. It makes sense to everyone around Eli Pate, though. Rise the dark. I suppose it’s referring to the moment, this attack they’re planning. The man who told his cell mate he killed Lauren is supposed to be up here with Pate. I just need a shot at him, Uncle.”
Larry said, “You came up here to kill a man?” His voice steady. Unfazed.
“Yes.”
“Then you should know this: After my first go-round with Pate, I went looking for your mother to get her the hell away from him. Scott Shields had left by then, gone back to Alaska, and she and Pate were living in a campground. Couple bikers, guy with an RV, a few tents. You said something about preppers earlier? That’s what this group felt like, sure. And they protect him well.”
He got to his feet and pulled his undershirt off and Mark hissed in a breath and nearly turned away. Larry’s torso was wrapped with ribbons of scars, raised and red. Though the wounds had closed, the flesh would never look right again.
“That’s from a whip,” Larry said quietly. There was anger in his voice, but also shame. “They chained my hands to the tow hitch of an old Jeep and my feet to a cinder block and they whipped me like a dog. Why? Because they’d heard me telling your mother what I thought of Eli Pate. They told me that disrespect-that was the word they used, disrespect-wouldn’t be tolerated.”
Larry regarded his own wounds in silence for a few seconds, then said, “The most important lessons are the ones that leave scars, boy. That’s what your grandfather used to say, whether we’d gotten a lip split in a fight or been thrown by a horse or whatever. The most important lessons leave scars.”
He pulled his shirt back on.
“So that was the last time I saw Pate’s crew. Saw your mother once more. She came up here looking for me, wanted to apologize, she said, but it was more warning than apology. She knew what it would mean if I went back at them, and she knew I had the inclination to try.”
“Why?”
Larry looked at Mark as if he’d asked why he needed oxygen.
“They whipped me, Markus. Tied me down and whipped me. The hell do you mean, why?”
“Tell me where to find him,” Mark said.
“You don’t want to find him. It’s not worth it.”
“They shot my wife twice in the head and left her in a ditch,” Mark said. “Don’t tell me it’s not worth it.”
“You go after Pate, the same thing might happen to you.”
“So be it. I’m not concerned about this being my last ride.”
“And I’m not supposed to be concerned about it being mine either?”
“Just tell me how to find him. I don’t need you to come along.”
“Oh yes, you do. Because he isn’t going to be easy to find, son! This boy is the type you need to flush out of the deep weeds.”
“Tell me where to start, then. Who to ask.”
“You’re not going to find Pate by asking, Markus. And you’re going to need me riding with you, or you’ll be dead before you get started.”
“Then ride with me. Please.”
Larry let out a long breath and opened the stove door and poked at the dying fire. When the flames were licking upward again, he closed the door, set the poker aside, sat down, and said, “I would’ve liked to know you got married. That would have been a nice thing to hear. Anything from you would have been nice to hear.”
“I’ll give you all the apologies you want, but right now isn’t the time.”
“The hell it isn’t! You just showed up at my door and asked for my help killing a man. Don’t tell me what you’ve got time for and what you don’t.”