by C. J. Box
The Driver circled the group of men, as if returning to the car, then he suddenly wheeled and jabbed a finger into the chest of a wavy-haired man and said something harsh. The wavy-haired man stumbled back a few feet, obviously surprised. As if a signal had been given, both the Ball Cap Man and a tall, dark man stepped back, and stood shoulder to shoulder with the Driver, facing down the wavy-haired man, who pitched his beer bottle aside and held his hands out, palms up, in an innocent gesture.
“Annie …” William pleaded.
She saw the Dark Man pull a pistol from behind his back, point it at the Wavy-Haired Man, and fire three times, pop-pop-pop. The Wavy-Haired Man staggered backwards until he tripped over the fire pit and fell into the mud.
Annie caught her breath, and her heart seemed to rush up her throat and gag her. She felt a sharp pain in her arm, and for a second she thought that a stray bullet had struck her, but when she glanced down she saw it was William’s two-handed grip. He had seen what happened in the campsite, too. It wasn’t like television or the movies, where a single shot was a deafening explosion and the victim was hurled backwards, dead, bursts of blood detonating from his clothing. This was just a pop-pop-pop, like a string of firecrackers. She couldn’t believe what had just happened, couldn’t believe it wasn’t a prank or a joke or her imagination.
“Annie, let’s get out of here!” William cried, and she started to backpedal blindly, toward the creek.
At the water’s edge, she looked over her shoulder, realizing they had lost the path and could go no farther.
“No,” she yelled at William. “Not this way. Let’s get back on the trail!”
He turned to her panicked, eyes wide, his face drained of color. Annie reached for his hand and tugged him along, crashing back through the brush toward the path. When they reached it, she looked back toward the campsite. All three men stood over the Wavy-Haired Man, firing pistols into his body.
Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.
Suddenly, as if Annie’s own gaze had drawn him, the Driver looked up. Their eyes locked, and Annie felt something like ice-cold electricity shoot through her. It burned the tips of her fingers and toes and momentarily froze her shoes to the ground.
William screamed, “He sees us!”
SHE RAN like she had never run before, pulling her brother along behind her, yelling, “Stay with me!”
They kept to the trail that paralleled the lazy curves of Sand Creek. The stream was on their left, the dark forest on their right. Wet branches raked her face and tugged at her clothing as she ran. She could hear her own screams as if someone else was making them.
Pop-pop. A thin tree in front of them shook from an impact, and half-opened buds rained down. The men were shooting at them.
William was crying, but he was keeping up. He gripped her hand so tightly she could no longer feel her fingers, but she didn’t care. Somewhere, she had lost a shoe in the mud, but she never even considered going back for it, and now her left foot was freezing.
How far were they from the road? She couldn’t guess. If they got to the road, there was the chance of getting a ride home with someone.
William jerked to a stop so suddenly that Annie was pulled backwards, falling. Had one of the men grabbed him?
No, she saw. His fly rod had been caught between the trunks of two trees. Rather than let go of it, he was trying to pull it free.
“Drop it, William!” she cried. “Just drop it!”
He continued to struggle as if her words hadn’t penetrated. His face was twisted with determination, his tears streaming.
“LET GO!” she screamed, and he did.
She scrambled back to her feet and as she did she saw a shadow pass in the trees on their right. It was the Ball Cap Man, and he had apparently found a parallel trail that might allow him to get ahead so he could cut them off.
“Wait,” she said to William, her eyes wide. “We can’t keep going this way. Follow me.”
She pushed herself through heavy wet undergrowth, straight at the path she had seen the Ball Cap Man running on. She hesitated a moment at the trail, saw no one, and plunged across it between two gnarled wild rosebushes, pulling William behind her. This time, she didn’t need to prompt him to keep running.
They were now traveling directly away from the river through heavy timber. Annie let go of her brother’s hand, and the two of them scrambled over downed logs and through masses of dead and living brush farther into the shadows. Something low and heavy-bodied, a raccoon maybe, scuttled out of sight and parted the fronds in front of them.
They left the roar of the river behind them, and it got quieter in the forest. At one point they heard a shout below them, somewhere in the trees, one of the men shouting, “Where did they go, goddammit?”
“Did you hear that?” William asked.
She stopped, leaned back against the trunk of a massive ponderosa pine, and nodded.
“Do you think they would shoot us if they found us?”
She implored him with her eyes not to talk.
William collapsed next to her, and for a few minutes the only sound in the forest was the steady dripping of the trees and their winded breath. Even as she recovered from exertion, the terror remained. Every tree looked like one of the men. Every shadow looked momentarily like a man with a gun.
She looked down at her brother, who had his head cocked back on the trunk, his mouth slightly open. His clothes were wet and torn. She could see a cut oozing dark blood where a bare knee was exposed by an L-shaped rip. His face was pale white, streaked with dirt.
“I’m sorry I brought you here,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“They killed that man,” William said. “They shot him and shot him again.”
She didn’t say, They’ll do the same to us. Instead: “If we keep going in this direction, we should find the road.”
“What if they’re already up there?”
She shrugged, sighed. “I don’t know.”
“How will we get home?”
“I don’t know.”
“They just kept shooting him,” he said. “I wonder what he did to make them so mad?”
THEY DIDN’T SEE the road so much as sense an opening in the canopy ahead. Annie made William squat down in the wet brush, and they remained still for a few minutes, hoping to hear the sound of a car or truck.
“We’re like rabbits,” he said, “just sitting here scared.”
“Shhh.” She thought she heard a motor. “Stay here.”
She pushed through the low brush on her hands and knees. She could no longer feel her bare foot, which was cut and bleeding. The grass got thicker as it neared the road, and she crawled on her belly to the edge of it. For the first time since the initial pop, she felt a twinge of relief.
Then she felt a tug on her pant leg, and gasped.
“It’s just me,” William said. “Man, you jumped.”
She hissed, “I told you to stay back there.”
“No way,” he said, crawling up next to her. “What are we doing?”
“We’re going to wait until we hear a car,” she said. “When it gets close, we’re going to jump up and try to get a ride to town.”
“What if it’s the white car?” he asked.
“Then we keep hiding,” she said.
“I thought you heard something.”
“I thought I did. Maybe not.”
“Hold it,” William said, raising his head above the grass, “I hear it too.”
ANNIE AND WILLIAM looked at each other as the sound slowly rose, the baritone hum of a motor spiced by the crunching of gravel beneath tires. The vehicle was coming from the wrong direction, from town instead of toward it. But Annie figured that if someone was likely to stop for them, they would be just as likely to turn around and take them home. And if the vehicle was coming from the direction of town, it was unlikely it could be the white SUV.
She inched forward, parting the grass. She could feel the approach of the vehicle
from the ground beneath her, a vibration that made her feel more like an animal than a girl.
She saw an antenna, then the top of a cab of a pickup, then a windshield. She raised her head.
It was a new-model red pickup with a single occupant. Whooping, she scrambled to her feet and pulled William along with her, and they stood in the road.
At first, she wasn’t sure the driver saw her. He was going slowly, and staring out into the trees off to the side instead of at the road. But just as she began to step back toward the shoulder, the pickup slowed and she recognized the driver as Mr. Swann. Mr. Swann had once dated their mother, and although he was much older than she, and it didn’t work out, he had not been unkind to them.
As Swann stopped and leaned over and opened the passenger door, Annie Taylor began to weep with absolute relief, her hot tears streaming down her face.
“Whoa,” Mr. Swann said, looking them over, “are you two all right? Did you get lost out here?”
“Will you please take us home?” Annie said through her tears.
“What happened?”
“Please take us home,” William said. “We saw a man get killed.”
“What?”
As William climbed into the truck, Annie heard another motor. She looked up the road where it curved to the right and could see a vehicle coming, glimpses of it flashing through the trunks of the trees.
It was the white SUV.
“Get on the floor,” she yelled to her brother. “It’s them!”
“Annie, what’s going on here?” Swann asked, frowning.
“They want to kill us!” Annie said, hurtling inside and shutting the door behind her. She cowered with William on the floor of the pickup.
“Oh, come on now,” Swann said.
“Please, just drive,” Annie said, her voice cracking. “Please just drive ahead.”
Swann slid the truck back into gear, and she could feel it moving, hear the gravel start to crunch.
“Maybe I should just stop them and ask them what’s going on?” Swann asked. “I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding.”
“NO!” Annie and William howled in unison.
She looked up at Swann as he drove, saw the confusion on his face. What if the men in the SUV waved Swann down to talk? It wasn’t unusual on these back roads to see two vehicles stopped side by side as the drivers exchanged information and pleasantries.
“Please don’t stop,” Annie said again.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Swann said, “but it has you two scared to death, that’s for sure.”
Swann pursed his lips and looked ahead. She wished she could see how close the white SUV was, and what the men inside were doing. Instead, she wrapped her arms around William and watched Swann.
“They want me to stop,” Swann said, not looking down.
“Don’t. Please.”
“If I don’t stop, they’ll wonder why.”
Annie felt another imminent, choking cry, and tried to stifle it.
The pickup slowed. She tried to push William down even farther into the floor, and herself as well. She could feel his heart beating, fluttering, where her hand held his chest. She closed her eyes, as if by not seeing the men they couldn’t look in and see her.
“Afternoon, Mr. Singer,” Swann said as he rolled his window down.
“Afternoon,” Singer said. Singer was the Driver, Annie guessed. Mr. Swann knew him.
Singer said, “Hey, did you see some kids anywhere along the road?”
“They yours?” Swann asked.
“No, not mine. Mine are grown and married, you know that. I don’t know who they are. Me and my two compadres here were fishing and horsing around down on the river, and we scared a couple of kids. We were target shooting, and we didn’t know they were there. We think they might have thought they saw something they didn’t.”
“Target shooting?”
“Yeah, we try to get out every couple of months to stay sharp. Anyway, we want to make sure those poor kids know we meant no harm.”
Annie cracked an eye to look at Swann. Don’t do it, she wanted to shout.
“Scared ’em pretty good, eh?” Swann said.
“I’m afraid so. Anyway, we want to find them and let ’em know everything’s okay.”
“Is everything okay?” Swann asked.
Singer didn’t respond.
“It will be when we find those kids,” another man said with a trace of a Mexican accent. Annie guessed it was the Dark Man with the mustache.
“So you haven’t seen them?” Singer asked again.
Swann hesitated.
Annie closed her eyes again and tried to prepare to die. She didn’t hear the bulk of the conversation that followed because it was drowned out by the roar of blood in her ears, although she did hear Swann say someone had come up behind him and was waiting for him to go.
“Yes,” Singer had said, “you had better go home now.”
She couldn’t believe her luck—their luck—when she realized the truck was moving again.
“I think you kids should stay down,” Swann said.
Annie asked, “Where are you taking us?”
“My place is just up the road, and I need to make a call.”
“Why aren’t you taking us home?”
“Because I don’t want to run into those boys again,” Swann said. “I know them from back on the force, and that story they just told me doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“That’s because we’re telling you the truth,” Annie said, feeling the tears well up in her eyes.
“Maybe,” Swann said. “Keep your heads down.”
Friday, 4:40 P.M.
JESS RAWLINS was doing groundwork with his new horse Chile in the round pen near the corral when a new-model Lexus emerged from the timber on the southern hill and drove down the access road toward his ranch house. It caught him by surprise because he was concentrating so fully on his horse, a fourteen-hand three-year-old red dun. He had fallen into a kind of hyperalert trance, mesmerized by the rhythmic sound and cadence of her hoofbeats. Jess had forgotten how much he loved the sound of hoofbeats, the solid soft pounding rhythm of them, how he could feel them through the ground as the eleven-hundred-pound animal trotted, how the sound lulled him, took him back. A few moments before, when he was lunging her to the right, he’d picked out the sound of a series of sharp rapid-fire percussions along with the thump of her hoofbeats, a snapping sound that alarmed him for a moment before he realized they were from far up the valley and had nothing to do with the gait of his horse. He had stopped her suddenly, and she had turned nicely into an abrupt stop, facing him like she was supposed to, looking at him with both eyes, breathing hard, licking her lips with compliance. He listened and heard no more pops in the distance.
If the wooded valley he lived in was indeed a saddle slope, his house and outbuildings were located just under the pommel. From there, he could see anyone coming down from the state highway toward his ranch. At dusk, he often watched mule deer graze their way to the valley floor to drink at the stream.
He kissed the air and sidestepped to the right, and Chile responded instantly with the correct lead, trotting in a circle to the left on the end of the lead rope Jess held loosely in his left hand. In his right was a stiff coil of rope used to signal the mare, keep the invisible pressure on her to keep moving in a nice smooth stride. Sometimes, to get her attention, he whapped the rope against the leg of his Wranglers. Mostly, though, all he had to do was raise it to get her moving. He had never hit her with it. As Chile circled, Jess stayed on her left flank. Jess was falling madly in love with this horse, a short, stout, heavily muscled little mare with a kind eye and two white socks. People who watched horse races and thought horses should be aquiline and sleek would find Chile ugly. Jess didn’t. She was a classic foundation quarter horse, a cow horse. In his peripheral vision, he noted the slow progress of the car.
The Lexus crawled down the access road, the afternoon sun gleaming off
the windshield and the chrome grille, the car slowing even more as it neared a cow and calf in the meadow, as if the driver expected the cattle to bolt across the road. There was only one way into the Rawlins Ranch from the state highway, and the road ended at the ranch house.
Jess Rawlins was tall, stiff, all sharp angles: bony elbows and knees, prominent hawklike nose, pronounced cheekbones. The only thing soft about him, his wife Karen told him once, were his eyes and his heart, but not in a good way.
When the Lexus parked between his house and the barn and the driver’s side door opened, Jess shot his first glance over while Chile circled. The man who climbed out was slim, well built, with thick blond hair and a bristly mustache. He was wearing khakis and a purple polo shirt that draped well on his frame. He looked like a golfer, Jess thought. No, worse. A Realtor.
Jess brought the coil of rope down sharply, and Chile stopped. Like all horses, it didn’t take much to convince her to stop working. Jess liked the way she looked at him, though, waiting for the next command. Sometimes, horses could stare with contempt. Chile, though, respected him. He respected her back. He thought, We are going to have a long relationship, Chile and me.
Jess waited for the man to approach the round pen. Then he heard it again, two distinct pops from far up the valley. Gunshots. Not an unusual sound at all in North Idaho, where everyone had guns.
The man—his name was Brian Ballard, Jess recognized him from his photo in the real estate pages of the newspaper—appeared not to hear the gunshots. Instead, he stopped on the other side of the railing and put a tasseled loafer on the lower rail and draped his arms over the top rail. As he did it, Jess’s eyes slid from Brian Ballard to the Lexus and saw the profile of the passenger inside for the first time. It was her, all right.
“How’s it going, Mr. Rawlins?” Ballard asked with false good cheer. “I see you’re training a horse there.”
“Groundwork,” Jess said. “I have to hand it to the new breed of horse trainers out there who stress groundwork above all. They know their stuff, and they’re right.” He looked over at Brian Ballard: “What do you want?”
Ballard smiled and his eyebrows arched and his mouth pursed. He was uncomfortable, despite the smile. “I don’t know much about horses. I’m allergic to them.”
