Strange Country

by Deborah Coates

  “What the hell?” Ole said.

  Boyd turned around. There was nothing behind him, just empty floor and two six-foot tables. In the corner between the window on the north side and the door at the front of the room was a shadow that didn’t seem right, didn’t seem as if it should be there, given where the lights and the American flag and the podium sat. But it was just a shadow. Couldn’t be anything else.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s fine.”

  Ole was still frowning and Boyd intended to say that he was fine again and that he’d head out now to talk to Teedt and help gather more information about Prue’s sister, about whether she or a daughter or even some other relative might be the killer when he heard voices in the outer office. They were loud enough that it was possible to hear, “… Look, I don’t really have time.”

  And, “Well, you can’t just…”

  Ole rose ponderously to his feet and opened the door. “What’s going on out here?”

  Brett Fowker and a new night dispatcher Boyd didn’t recognize swept into the room as if Ole’s words had been an invitation. Brett, dressed in a sheepskin jacket, a brown felt cowboy hat, and deerskin gloves, ignored Ole and said to Boyd, “There’s something wrong with your phone.”

  “No, there’s—” Boyd reached into his inside pocket and took out his phone. He’d used it when he and Gerson were shot at. So he knew it was fine. But when he looked at it, it said there were five voice mails.

  Damn.

  He’d muted it. To avoid the shooter.

  “Hallie called me,” Brett continued. “She says she’s been trying to call you and she wanted me to try. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t come all the way to town when it’s fifteen degrees just to deliver a message, but my experience is that if Hallie’s bothering to call, it’s kind of important.”

  That was Boyd’s experience too. “What did she say?” he asked. It would be quicker than listening to the messages.

  “She said she’s at the Bolluyt ranch. She thinks she’s found the shooter.”

  “Oh yeah.” The dispatcher, who’d been standing by the door, spoke. “She called a little bit ago,” he said. “I got busy.”

  Ole looked like he might actually, literally, explode. “You got busy?” he said.

  “A little busy,” the dispatcher said, taking two steps backwards.

  “Listen, son—”

  “We need to go,” Boyd said.

  “She said she’d wait for you,” Brett told him.

  “Something will happen,” Boyd said. “It always does.”

  “Yeah,” Brett agreed glumly. “That’s why I came.”

  “I’ll come with,” Gerson said.

  “Take my car,” Ole said. “I’ll send Teedt after you. And I’ll run dispatch,” he said, eyeing the dispatcher with a look that made him back up another step.

  “Do we know where Tel Sigurdson is?” Boyd asked.

  “Deputy Peres called in about five minutes ago. He says that Mr. Sigurdson just went into the house for dinner,” the dispatcher said.

  “Well, hell,” said Ole. “Not that I thought it was him, but it would have made things simpler.”

  Boyd didn’t bother to point out that almost nothing the last six months had been simple, but he knew he didn’t need to. He was rapidly learning that Ole understood a lot more about the last six months than he was willing to admit.

  “I’ll look for relatives of Stalking Horse or Shortman or whatever the hell they call themselves,” Ole said. “Someone’s shooting people. In my county. And we’re going to figure out who that is. And stop them.”

  Boyd was already out the door, heard this behind him as he went. The spot of cold, whatever it was, was with him, like a circle of liquid ice just at knee level. When he looked down, something like a shadow seemed to keep pace with him. He didn’t know what it was and he didn’t worry about it. At least not yet. It wasn’t hurting him and it wasn’t stopping him, and right now that was enough.

  It would take twenty minutes to get to Bolluyt’s ranch. Probably take Teedt another fifteen or twenty to come in, get his gear, and follow them. Hallie was out there now, right now.

  He hoped she was all right.

  * * *

  Hallie’s left leg was cramping. She ignored it. It was harder to ignore the way the tips of her ears burned with cold, the weight of the shotgun dragging her arm down. She still had the phone to her ear. “He’ll bring everyone,” she said to the voice on the other end of the line.

  “I’ll be ready,” the voice told her.

  But she couldn’t watch Hallie and be ready for Boyd and the other deputies, Hallie thought. The trick was figuring out when the shooter was watching and when she wasn’t. Guessing wrong would be the last mistake Hallie would make.

  “I’m sorry you got involved. None of this really has to do with you,” the voice said. “But I know Laddie called you before he died. I know you have a stone. And I know you can get the rest of them.”

  “If you let me call him,” Hallie said, “I can ask him to leave the stones somewhere. I can get them for you. No one has to get hurt.”

  The voice laughed. “You won’t come back.”

  “If I tell you I’ll come back, I’ll come back.”

  “No one keeps their word. No one. Ever.”

  “You don’t know me,” Hallie said.

  “I don’t have to,” said the voice. “I’m the one with the rifle.”

  * * *

  Boyd was a mile from the Bolluyt ranch, approaching from the east, when something hit him hard in the arm.

  “Stop.”

  He swerved hard right and stopped. Gerson grabbed the dashboard. She looked at him, her eyes wide in the dim glow from the dash lights. “Are you all right?” she said.

  “Did you hear that?” he asked.

  “Hear what?”

  Boyd shoved the car into park. He wasn’t going any farther until he figured out what was going on, what had spoken to him, grabbed his arm back at the sheriff’s office, what the cold and shadows were. Because it could be figured out.

  It had to be.

  He didn’t have the stones with him. But he’d handled two of them. Was this related? Had the stones affected him permanently? And if this was an effect of the stones, what exactly was it?

  “She’s waiting,” the voice said.

  It didn’t sound familiar. Didn’t sound like a voice he’d heard before. And yet there was something familiar about it. Something he almost remembered or the sense of a place he’d been.

  “I thought,” Gerson said tentatively, “there was some urgency here.”

  “Just. Wait,” Boyd said. She was right. There was urgency. A hell of a lot of urgency. But if he didn’t understand this, didn’t understand whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, didn’t understand how it affected Hallie, they’d fail and it wouldn’t matter whether they arrived on time or not.

  “I can hear you,” Boyd said. It felt as though he was talking to the empty air in front of him. “Who are you? What are you trying to tell me?”

  The cold came again and he noticed that Gerson moved even though she’d said she couldn’t see or feel anything. “Is there…” She hesitated, watching Boyd closely. “Is there something here?”

  “Something,” Boyd said, still reluctant to guess what that something was.

  “You have to choose,” the voice said. Like the dream he’d had right after Prue was killed.

  “Choose what?”

  The voice seemed to be laughing. “Choose to see,” it said.

  “See what?” Boyd said. Because he would do it, if he knew what it was. There was no time for games.

  “See everything.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You need to remember how you died.”

  * * *

  “When I say move, move.”

  The voice, a new one, not from the phone at all—seemed to come out of nowhere, out of nothing—almost made Hallie leap forward.
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  “What the hell?” She said it like something less than a whisper, like the slightest breath of air, something the person with the rifle wouldn’t hear, something she hoped the disembodied voice would.

  “When I say move, move.”

  The voice repeated the words, and she thought they might be in her head. It was so familiar, that voice, tantalizingly familiar, though she couldn’t place it.

  Her phone beeped. That familiar sound that said her battery was dying. “My phone’s going out,” she said, though she hadn’t heard that other voice, the voice with the rifle, for several minutes.

  No answer.

  “Move now?” she said to the voice in her head, the one she knew she should recognize, but didn’t.

  “Not yet.”

  * * *

  “I didn’t die,” Boyd began.

  But he knew it was a lie. He’d chosen the lie.

  “Is that what you choose?”

  Was it? “You need to remember how you died.” But he did. Or, Hallie had told him. Which amounted to the same thing.

  “Who is this?”

  “You know.”

  How would he know? How would he—

  “Maker?”

  A sound in his head like huffing laughter.

  Boyd closed his eyes. He remembered the moment when he’d come back to himself, like a badly done film splice—one instant he’d been in Pabby’s yard, the next in the Uku-Weber parking lot with the sound of an explosion he didn’t remember ringing in his ears. He pictured the details of that moment—the burn of cold wind across his cheekbones, the ache of a bruised hip, black smoke, the smell of it like acid, like burnt oil, like the end of time. Something lurked at the edge of his memory, something white and cold, something that expanded until it hurt like a burst of flame, like dying. Like this was it, all over again.

  He remembered.

  At the end, when the walls between the worlds fell, Travis Hollowell had killed him. Hallie had stood there as Hollowell did it and watched. She’d stood there. And watched. And hadn’t saved him.

  Hallie had told him. All of it. He’d sworn it didn’t matter, but he’d meant it was just words, not a real thing that had actually happened to him.

  And now it wasn’t. He had died. She had watched.

  But he was here. He wasn’t dead. And if he wasn’t dead, he hadn’t died. He couldn’t have died.

  Except. Hallie had died.

  And she was here.

  She had never run from it, dying or being here, either one. But then, Hallie never ran from anything. She’d died in Afghanistan and she knew it. She saw ghosts, she accepted that there were ghosts, and she accepted that she saw them.

  Until this moment, Boyd would have said he didn’t run from things either. He knew his duty, and it was a matter of honor to him, that he did his duty, that he didn’t retreat, that he did what had to be done.

  Except this time.

  When he hadn’t.

  “Most people choose not to know,” Maker said. “They don’t even know they’ve chosen.”

  “I know,” Boyd said. “I’ve always known.”

  “Not this.”

  He’d died. Not almost died. Died. He’d seen Death. He’d seen everything—ghosts and reapers and black dogs. And then he’d forgotten. Deliberately, apparently. Because he couldn’t handle it? Because he didn’t want to know?

  No.

  He knew.

  “I choose,” he said.

  “Good idea,” Maker said. And suddenly Boyd could see the harbinger, on the seat between himself and Gerson.

  * * *

  “I’m going to count to ten,” the voice in Hallie’s ear said.

  “It’s Laddie, isn’t it?” Just like that, she knew whom that voice belonged to. “What are you doing here? What are you? Ghosts don’t talk.”

  “To ten,” the ghost or Laddie or something that sounded like Laddie said, ignoring Hallie’s questions. “And then you move. One…”

  Hallie took a breath and let it out slow. She was putting her faith—her life—in the hands of a disembodied voice in her head. A disembodied voice that sounded like a dead man’s. It might not be the craziest thing she’d done; she’d done a lot of crazy things. But it was close.

  “Five.”

  Something howled.

  “Not yet,” the voice said. “When I tell you. Eight. Nine. Ten.

  “Move.”

  Hallie moved.

  35

  Hallie was cold in a way that made it seem as if it was impossible to ever be warm again. She was wrapped in a blanket, sitting in one of the sheriff’s cars with the heater going full blast, and she was still cold. It wasn’t shock, because she knew shock. It was cold, being in one position in below-zero temperatures for too long, and even if her body was warm enough, even if she was no longer in danger of freezing to death, she was still cold.

  Laddie’s ghost was gone, for which she was thankful, because that would have made her even colder. A part of her wished he were there, though, wished she could talk to him now, when she wasn’t cramped and cold and trying her damnedest just to stay alive. She wanted to tell him she was sorry. She wanted to tell him his dogs were okay. She wanted to tell him good-bye.

  The driver’s-side door opened, and Boyd entered and sat, looking out the front windshield first and then at Hallie. Blue and red lights flashed a hundred yards away at an angle from where they were sitting so that Hallie could see the lights and Boyd’s face in profile, both at the same time. One set of lights pulled away as she watched, drifting disembodied across the blackness, bouncing as the ambulance crossed uneven frozen ground.

  “How is she?” Hallie asked.

  Prue’s sister. An impossible thing, but there it was. She’d identified herself when they arrested her, still, she looked more the age she’d been when she disappeared than that of someone twenty years older. Hallie believed her, though, even if she hadn’t figured it all out yet.

  Hallie still wasn’t sure how Boyd and Ole had found her, how they’d managed to get a bead on Shannon Shortman without her seeing them. She’d been set up somewhere in the middle of an open empty field. How had they known?

  “She’ll be fine,” Boyd said.

  “Good,” Hallie said. She thought she probably meant it.

  Boyd turned in his seat to look at her. There was something in the way he looked, something more than had been there that morning even. Hallie couldn’t quite identify it, couldn’t even tell if it was about her or about something else.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I’m cold,” she said.

  He took her hand. He looked at it, then looked her square in the eyes. “I remember,” he said.

  Hallie was aware that her heart skipped half a beat. “Remember what?” Though she knew and even though they’d talked about it, even though she’d told him in as much detail as she could, she still knew that this was different, what he said now was what mattered.

  “I remember that I died,” he said.

  “It was the only chance,” she said. “I thought it was the only chance,” she corrected. Maybe there were other ways to kill a reaper, but she didn’t know—hadn’t known—them.

  “I didn’t think it would make a difference,” he continued. “Knowing.”

  Hallie waited. Before tonight, she’d been afraid of this too. And she wasn’t anymore. She’d done what she had to do. The only choice she’d seen at the time. Boyd was right. Had been right all along. How he felt about it was up to him.

  “But it does,” she said.

  He pressed her hand. “And it doesn’t.”

  “I’m sorry.” She didn’t actually say that often, not to be polite or to grease the wheels of social interaction. She usually wasn’t sorry. But she said it about this and probably always would. “You know that you’re not less important to me than the world,” she said.

  That made him grin. “But not more important?”

  “Well … no.”

>   And yes.

  In all the ways that mattered to her, just her, he was a thousand times more important than the world. And yet, he wasn’t. Whom was she going to sacrifice? Her father? Brett? Taylor County? South Dakota? She couldn’t sacrifice the world. But she couldn’t sacrifice Boyd either. She could only do the best she could. If it came up again. Which, maybe, they would finally get lucky and it wouldn’t.

  They sat in silence for several minutes. Hallie wasn’t actually sure they were okay. But she was too tired and too cold to ask, pretty sure it would be obvious if they weren’t. “How did you find me?” she asked after a while.

  “That’s a funny story,” Boyd said.

  Before he could say more, someone tapped loudly on Hallie’s window.

  “Jesus!”

  She said it like an explosion, half-turned and her fists raised when Ole opened the back door and climbed in. He was too big for the space and it took him a minute, three curse words and a lot of groaning, before he was finally situated to his satisfaction.

  “I hope we don’t transport anybody weighs more than about seventy-five pounds in this thing,” he said. Then, “You okay?” he asked Hallie.

  “I’m fine,” she said, which everyone in the car knew wasn’t entirely true, but they accepted it because that’s how you went on.

  “Damnedest thing,” Ole said, though not like he really thought it was the damnedest thing, more like he was sure someone somewhere would think that. “We knew where she was, but it was basically the middle of an open field and we couldn’t get near her. Couldn’t get a clear shot. Didn’t dare get any closer. Knew where you were too, but obviously couldn’t get to you. Then you moved and she stood and, well, you know, it all worked out.” He nodded as if agreeing with himself. “Still. It was the damnedest thing.”

  “Which part?” Hallie felt compelled to ask.

  “The part where you moved for no apparent reason,” Ole said, like that was what he’d gotten in the car to say in the first place.

  “Laddie told me to,” Hallie said.

  Ole nodded again as if it were just the sort of answer he’d expected.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but Laddie Kennedy’s still dead, right?”

  “His ghost,” Hallie said.

  Boyd shifted, looking at her, his head tilted slightly to one side, like she’d surprised him. He put his hand on her knee. “I thought they didn’t talk to you.”