A
llison’s face was all
but hidden from him. Bandages covered the skin he’d touched with his lips countless times. Only her closed eyes were visible, and her mouth, dark with swelling and laced with black stitches. Hand and forearm wrapped in heavy gauze. Ethan touched her unbandaged hand and said her name, soft as a prayer. Her eyes opened and found his.
“Baby,” she said. The word came clumsily from her broken mouth.
“I’m here.”
“I did the best I could,” she said. “Maybe not so good. But the best I could.”
What was left of her hair had been cut down to jagged clumps by the nurses. The rest had burned away. He used to run his hands through it before she slept, or when she was sick, or anytime a comforting gesture seemed in order. One was in order now but he knew better than to touch.
“You did amazing,” he said, and his words came out clumsily too. That was no good. One of them should be able to speak. “I’m so sorry. It’s on me. They came because of—”
“No,” she said. “They came because of her.”
“I made a mistake. Should never have agreed to it.”
“She made the mistake. You were just part of it.”
He wasn’t ready to blame Jamie Bennett just yet. He couldn’t say that he was ready to forgive her either.
She rushes, and she makes mistakes,
Allison had said. Not wrong, that assessment. Not wrong at all. The one hundred percent guarantee that the men would not get to her witness, her promise that if they even moved toward Montana, she’d know about it? So much for that. Ethan hadn’t heard a word. He wondered for the first time if she was still alive.
“Do the police know about her?” he asked.
“Not yet. I was…struggling. Thoughts not clear. Everything was on fire.”
“I know.”
“What about Tango? I was thinking…” She started to cry then, tears leaking down only to be absorbed immediately by the bandages. “I was thinking that Tango couldn’t even try to run. The way we’ve got him standing, he couldn’t even try to—”
“The horse is fine.”
“You’re sure?”
He nodded.
“The house?”
He didn’t answer. Just held her hand and looked into her eyes. He hadn’t seen it yet, but he’d been told. The Ritz was destroyed. Their promised land, built together, their little triumph in the world, reduced to cold ashes and dripping water.
“Why’d she have to pick you?” Allison said.
“Don’t blame her. Blame me. She asked; she didn’t order. I should have said no. I should have done a lot of things different. But I’ll make right what I can, Allison. I’ll get the boy and—”
“Wait. Wait. What do you mean, you’ll get him? Where is he?”
Smart woman, his wife. Beat her, burn her, sedate her. Then slip up and hope she didn’t catch it. Good luck with that.
“He’s missing,” he said. He made himself continue to look into her eyes when he said that. It wasn’t easy.
“What?”
“Ran off in the night. When we were hiking down.”
“Which one was he?”
“Connor. I suppose I could be wrong. But I doubt it. The boys knew that…that someone had arrived, and trouble was here, and he was the one who ran.”
She looked away from him and down to the heavy wrapping around her wounded hand.
All for nothing,
she was surely thinking. All she’d gone through, and still the boy was gone. Ethan had promised to protect them both and had failed to protect either.
“Where do you think he went?”
To hide,
Ethan thought,
to run and hide because he was afraid of not only them, but me. He has no friends left in this world, or at least that is how he feels now.
But he said, “Maybe the escape route. He seemed to pay a lot of attention to those. He was the best one with the maps. With land navigation. Maybe the best with everything. So when he left us on the trail, he might have doubled back and tried to come down the other side of Republic.”
And into the fire,
he thought. He had no idea how much of it had burned. Maybe they’d gotten it under control by now. But with the way the wind was blowing…he had his doubts.
“What do they look like?” he said. “The men who came for him?”
“There are two of them.” She was speaking with an effort, and her words slurred. Lips pulling on the stitches. “Pale. Light hair. They speak strangely…not accents, just the way they say things. Like they’re alone in the world. Like it was built for the two of them and they’re lords over it. You’ll know what I mean if you ever hear them talking to each other.” She started to cry harder. “I hope you don’t hear them.”
“I won’t,” Ethan said. He was making himself watch her stitched lips move.
Somebody busted up her mouth pretty well.
Yes, somebody had. The hand he didn’t have on hers was opening and closing beside his leg, each fist tighter than the last.
“They don’t like to let you see them both at the same time,” she said. Her eyes were closed now. “It’s hard. They’re very dangerous. They smell like blood.”
He wondered about the drugs now, wondered if she even knew what she was saying. He wiped a hand over his mouth. Looked back at the closed door. When he spoke again, his voice was soft. He meant to tell her that he would ensure that a good group was handling it. He meant to tell her that he’d never leave her bedside. Not until they left together. Lord, how he meant to tell her those things.
“I’m going back to find him,” he said.
“No.
No,
E.”
She lifted her head off the pillow and stared at him. Thin plastic tubes dangling from one arm.
“Relax,” he said. “Please. Lie back down and—”
“Don’t leave me.”
“I won’t just yet. I’m right here. But he’s missing, Allison, and—”
“I don’t care!”
He was silent as she cried and then she said, “You know I don’t mean that.”
“I know. But Allison…we can’t let it all be for nothing. Can’t let them pass through you and get what they came for. I can’t allow that. We can’t.”
“No. Stay. I’ll be selfish now. I’m allowed to be selfish now, don’t you think?”
“It’s not selfish.” There was no choice to be made. She’d asked him to stay. “I’ll be right here. I promise.”
“Thank you. I love you.”
“I love you so much. And I’ll be right here.”
He held her hand until she slept, and then he shifted and held his own head in his hands. She was right. There was nothing left for him to do. Someone else would find the boy. Someone who could help him. Ethan wasn’t needed.
He got to his feet, watching her to be certain that she was asleep and would not hear him go, and then he let himself out of the room and went down the hallway and asked for a phone. He made two calls. The first was to Roy Futvoye. Ethan asked if the police had found the boy yet. They had not. He hung up and called the number Jamie Bennett had given him for just such a situation. Straight to voice mail. That was the design. Messages only.
For a moment he was speechless. How did you go about explaining all of this? Finally he said, “They’re here.” He thought that would be enough, almost. Let her figure out the rest. But he added, “The boy is gone. He’s missing. I’m in the hospital in Billings with my life…I, I mean my wife. Everything is gone to hell.” He stuttered to a stop then, thought about saying more, offering explanations (excuses?), but didn’t. Hung up the phone.
He went into the men’s room, urinated, and then went to the sink and looked in the mirror. He thought he should look as devastated as he felt. He didn’t, though. He looked just like the old Ethan. Steady. Maybe that was impressive. Maybe it was sad.
He washed his hands and then turned the water cold and splashed it over his face. The door opened beside him and he was aware of boots that entered the room but did not go to the urinals or to the stalls or to the sink. Whoever it was just stood there. Ethan looked in the mirror with his face still dripping and saw a man in jeans and a black shirt and a black jacket and Ethan’s own Stetson, the gift he’d refused to wear. Pale blond hair beneath it, down to the shirt collar. The man’s eyes were a chilled blue and the left side of his face was a scarlet swath of blisters that glistened with some sort of salve.
Ethan didn’t move. The water kept dripping off his face and the man kept staring and for a time nobody spoke.
“Shall we ride, Ethan?” the burned man said at last. He reached inside his jacket and Ethan was unsurprised to see the gun. Ethan’s own weapons were in his truck in the parking lot.
“She wasn’t part of it,” he said.
The burned man gave an elaborate sigh. “Of course not.
You
weren’t part of it.
I
wasn’t part of it. Once the world existed without any of us, and someday soon it will again, but today, Ethan? Today we’re all spinning along together. We’re all part of it.”
Like it was built for the two of them and they’re lords over it,
Allison had said, and Ethan thought of that and then, for the first time, thought of the second man.
“What are you here to do?” he said.
“I’d like to enlist your aid.” The man had read Ethan’s thoughts well, and he added, “I assume there are some ways to do that that are more convincing than others. I don’t suppose, for example, I’d get far by offering you money today. But your wife on the third floor, room three-seventy-three? Perhaps an offer concerning her would be more compelling. What do you say?”
“I’ll kill you for what you did to her. Both of you.”
The burned man smiled. “You know all the lines, Ethan. Very good. But I don’t have the time or the inclination to hear you say them all. You mention ‘both of you,’ so you know there are two of us. That’s going to be important for you to remember. Now, you and I are going to ride together for a time. It will be just us, understand? So the one you’re wondering about, where do you think he will be? This is what you do, to my understanding. An expert in lost-person behavior, I believe. So let’s consider the lost person in this scenario. Where do you expect you will find him?”
“Close to my wife.” The words were a bloodletting.
The burned man reached up and tipped his hat. Ethan’s hat. Then he opened the bathroom door and gestured with his gun. “After you.”
They walked out of the bathroom and down the hallway that smelled of disinfectant and then down a stairwell and out a side door into the daylight. It was warm now. Warm and windy.
“Go to the black truck,” the man said. They were walking close together, and when Ethan felt cold metal on his hand, he expected it was a jab with the gun. It was a set of car keys. He took them, then unlocked the doors. It was a Ford F-150, just like his. Different color, different trim, but the same motor under the hood.
“You’ll drive.”
Ethan got behind the wheel and started the engine. Everything in the truck was similar to Ethan’s, except the window tint on this one was very dark. And it smelled faintly of smoke and blood. He thought of the things he could do. Driving was control, after all. He could run them right through the glass doors and into the hospital. Could take them up onto the highway and off the side, bounce them down the mountain to their deaths together. The driver had total control.
“She’ll be just fine,” the burned man said, “for exactly forty-eight hours. After that, I’m afraid it’s an altogether different situation. Now, do you think you can find the boy in that amount of time?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ve nothing to worry about.”
“What if they’ve found him already? Then I’ve got plenty to worry about.”
“I didn’t say you had to be the first to find him, Ethan. I just said you need to find him.”
And so he drove away, riding with the burned man, and behind him the hospital faded in the rearview mirror, and in it his wife slept secure in Ethan’s promise that he’d be there when she woke.
I
t was just past noon
when they sighted the first group of searchers. Jace had tried to sleep, but he didn’t like having his eyes closed. It was as if he thought they might appear without a sound, and he’d open his eyes to find them standing in the door, Hannah Faber already dead, the rest of it just a matter of time…
Then Hannah said, “Connor, the police are coming,” and he stood up from the narrow cot to join her at the window.
There were four men walking up the hill, just as Jace had a few hours earlier. Two of them were in uniform.
“Can I look?” he said. He wasn’t going to be convinced they were police until he saw their faces. He’d seen the men dress like police before.
“Sure,” Hannah said, passing him the binoculars.
For a moment all he saw was sky and peaks, and when he lowered the glasses he dropped them too far and was looking at the tall grass that lined the slope below the tower. Finally he found the men and held his breath as he took in their faces.
Strangers.
Every one of them.
“Okay,” he said to Hannah, still staring through the binoculars. “Okay, I think they’re all safe. I don’t know them, at least, and that’s good. They’re not the two I saw.”
“Good. Let’s go down to meet them, then.”
“All right.”
He paused for just a few more seconds because he was curious to see if Ethan was with them. They’d tracked him over rough country so easily that he thought Ethan might have been their guide. He lifted the binoculars up so he could see over their heads and beyond, and he saw that they were not alone.
There was another man behind them, and it wasn’t Ethan, and he wasn’t moving with the group. He was trailing them.
Jace’s mouth went dry and he reached up with his index finger and fumbled with the knob that changed the focus. Hannah was still talking when the zoom clarified.
It was one of them. The one who looked like a soldier. The one who’d cut the throat of the man with the bag over his head. He wore jeans and a jacket and a baseball cap and he carried a rifle. He was a good distance behind the group of searchers. They had no idea he was there.
“Come on,” Hannah said, her hand light on his arm. “Let’s go down and—”
“He’s watching them.” His voice trembled, but he didn’t lower the glasses.
“What? Who is?”
“I can see only one of them. Maybe they didn’t come together. I thought they’d both be here. But it’s him. It’s definitely him.”
He lowered the binoculars because his hands had begun to shake. “He’s not far from us.”
He could tell that she didn’t believe him. Or didn’t want to. But she said, “Let me look.”
He handed over the binoculars. “Look behind them.”
Her silence told him that she saw the fifth man too. She stayed where she was for a long time and watched him and then she said, “You’re sure it’s him.”
“I’m sure.”
“Connor, they’re going to come up here. Those men are going to come up here.” Now her voice was showing the first signs of panic. Beginning to sound more like his own.
“I know it. I told you this was how it would happen. You can’t get away from them. Nobody can.” He took three steps back from the window, the farthest he could retreat in the last place he had to run, and then he sat down on the floor.
Hannah said, “Connor? We’re going to figure this out. He won’t get to you.”
He didn’t even look up when he answered. “They’ll get to me. They won’t stop, and there’s two of them. They’ll get to me in the end.”
“Let’s get moving,” Hannah said. “Let’s go, kid, we’ve got to go.”
He watched her blankly as she moved around him and grabbed the hatchet. She looked at his pack, went to it, and opened it and began to rifle through. “Do you have anything in there? Any kind of…weapon? A knife, at least?”
“I wasn’t allowed to. I was supposed to be a bad kid, remember?”
“Listen, we know the men are not on the trail to Cooke City. So we can make it back down to Cooke City and we can—”
He shook his head. “It’s better for everyone else to just let them get me. You can leave. I’d like you to tell my mom and dad what happened. Please find a way to tell them that I didn’t—”
“Shut up!”
she screamed. “And damn it,
get up!
”
She tried to tug him to his feet. He fought free of her and scrambled back until he was sitting beside her cot.
“You can go. I’m not going to.”
They were interrupted by a voice then. Faint and echoing. The trace of a shout. Hannah turned from him and grabbed the binoculars again.
“They’re close, aren’t they?” Jace said.
“Yes.” She was silent for a moment, then said, “I’m going to go down and talk to them.”
“And say what? He’ll kill them too. Then you, and then me. He’ll kill us all.”
“No, he won’t. He’s just following them, Connor. He’s following them because he hopes they will find you. And that’s not going to happen. Because I’m going to tell them you’re already on the trail to Cooke City.”
“What?”
“They’re going to believe me,” she said. “I’ve got no reason to lie. I think they’ve probably followed a few trails before. I think they know that you came this way. So what I tell them is going to matter. If I pretend I didn’t see you, they might be suspicious. But if I tell them that I did, I can get them moving fast. I’ll say,
You know, I did see him, and I thought it was strange that he was alone
.”
She was trying to convince herself that this was a good plan, but Jace was picturing the rifle in the man’s hands. Picturing the way it would happen, wondering if you heard the shot or just felt it. Or did you feel anything at all? He supposed that depended on where you were shot.
“You think it hurts much?” he said.
“What?”
“Getting shot. Or will I even feel it?”
She turned back to him. “You won’t feel it.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“You won’t feel it, because it’s not happening.”
He lowered his head again. She didn’t know. She hadn’t seen them, she hadn’t run from them, hadn’t changed her name and gone to hide in the mountains only to look through binoculars and see one of them after all this time and over all these miles. She was like his mother—she believed there was a way to fix it all. But the only way to fix it all was to go back in time.
“I’m going to go down and get them,” she said. “When I do, you get under the cot, all right? Hang the blankets down a bit. Enough so nobody can see you.”
“They’ll see the radio,” he said. “That will get their attention pretty fast.”
“Right. Damn it.” She looked at the radio, took a breath, and said, “I’ll go to them, then, and I will keep them from coming up here. Connor, you stay right where you are. I’m going out there and you better not let me down. When I come back, I’ll be alone, and they’ll be gone.”
Then she walked outside and closed the door behind her.
Ethan drove out of the hospital and then out of Billings, took 90 and went west through the flat farm country where the railroads ran parallel to the highway. Neither of them spoke. He left 90 and got on 212 and headed southwest, away from the train tracks that had brought civilization to this place and toward the mountains that had fought it. Ethan was thinking of the way Allison’s lips had looked with those stitches. Torn so badly the doctors had to literally sew her flesh back together, all because of a man’s fist. Likely the man beside him. Ethan could smell him and he could see him and he could reach out and touch him, but he still could not stop him. It was the most impotent feeling of his life. He was willing to pay the price for killing this man. Willing to die in the truck beside him if it meant he had protected the right people.
Only the second man prevented this. Allison had said that she hoped Ethan wouldn’t ever hear the two of them talking to each other. Now he wished desperately that he might.
They passed two police cars as they entered Red Lodge, but neither stopped. The burned man regarded them with casual interest. On the other side of Red Lodge, the road began to climb; the big truck’s engine growled louder now. Onto 212 again, headed into Wyoming, over the Beartooth Pass, and then curling back into Montana. The mountainsides fell off beside them on the left, long, stunning falls, and climbed just as steeply on the right.
“I am curious about one point,” the burned man said. “It’s of no consequence, so you may lie about it if you wish, but I hope that you won’t.”
Ethan drove and waited. On the switchbacks above them, a motor home was lumbering down. He drifted as far right as the road allowed, hugging the corner, tight against the mountain.
“Did you leave the boy behind because you knew who he was?”
“No. I wasn’t told which one he was.”
“Which one. So you were told that he would be present, but you were not given his identity? Not even the false identity?”
“That’s right.”
“So you were operating without concern over his identity until last night, when you received word of the events at your home.”
The events at his home. Ethan gripped the steering wheel harder and nodded.
“This was from your wife? The signal she issued?”
“Initially.”
“She is brave and she is smart. Better than I’d expected, certainly. I mean, look at my face.” He lifted a fingertip to his blistered flesh and grimaced. “She ruined it. And you haven’t even seen my side. There’s still birdshot inside of me. No, your wife is not so bad.”
“Fuck you,” Ethan said.
The burned man nodded. “Of course. Now, if you’ll continue to indulge me, I’m curious about the situation that awaits us. You now know which boy it is, but you did not last night. This means that you discovered the reality of him when he ran away. Am I correct?”
Ethan squeezed the steering wheel and imagined it was the son of a bitch’s throat. He was glad the mountain road was so demanding. It forced his eyes to stay ahead, forced his hands to remain on the wheel.
“You’re correct,” he said.
“And when did you notice his absence?” Every question so formal, like they were in a courtroom.
“Middle of the night. When we were hiking down.”
“So you can’t show me exactly where you lost him?”
“I can get you to the point last seen.”
“The point last seen?”
“It’s how you start,” Ethan said. “When someone is lost. You go to the point last seen, and then you think. You try to think as that person would have when he was there.”
“Marvelous. I’m glad we have an expert along. It’s a tremendous bit of good luck. To the point last seen, then. There we’ll see how good you really are.”
On up the mountain they went.