The average home had enough food for a week. Mercy’s cabin could keep them fed and warm for months.
Beans, bullets, and Band-Aids.
The three Bs of prepping.
But there was more to Mercy. She also believed in charity, helping those who were less fortunate. Many of his uncle’s supplies had gone to families in town. Mercy could mend a fence, build a shed, and even do some engine repair. Her cabin was stuffed with books that taught medical skills, electronics, tactical skills . . . subjects he assumed could always be looked up on the web. But what if the web was gone?
He even kept a GOOD bag in his truck now. Get Out of Dodge.
Small changes.
“You couldn’t have stopped the shooter, Truman. Don’t drive yourself crazy imagining what you would have done differently. I know you totally exposed yourself to check on those two men. You went above and beyond what is expected of anyone.”
Then why don’t I feel any better?
“Am I too cautious? Does it affect my work?” he asked.
“Too cautious? You?”
“I ran back to get the fire extinguisher the night Officer Madero died instead of getting her away—”
“Stop it!” she ordered, and he slammed the door on the horrific memory of responding to a car fire nearly two years ago. The guilt had nearly ended his career in law enforcement.
She put both hands on his cheeks and pulled his face close to hers. Her pupils were huge, and anger hovered around her. “You know you’re exhausted and not thinking straight. You need sleep. Your perspective will be better tomorrow.”
His mind had started to slide down a pessimistic narrow tunnel. One where he second-guessed every decision he’d ever made. He recognized the dreaded slippery path but still struggled to break out. She’d seen his spiraling mind-set and knew he needed to snap out of it.
“Sleep,” she ordered. “No more discussions. We’ll talk about it all you want tomorrow. Now come to bed.”
She didn’t need to ask twice. He shed his jeans and shirt as she lay down and then slid in beside her. At the touch of her cool skin, every cell in his body relaxed. She snuggled up to him and rested her hand against his cheek. More stress evaporated.
He closed his eyes and felt himself drifting away. “I needed to be next to you.”
“Then you got your wish,” she said against his neck. Her lips pressed into his skin.
“I missed you, Mercy.”
“I missed you too.”
“Don’t leave town for a while, okay?” he muttered, struggling to form words as he felt himself sucked deeper into sleep.
“I’ve got no vacation plans.” Humor filled her words. “Are you sure you don’t need something for the pain?”
“Absolutely. Everything’s perfect now.”
FOUR
Officer Ben Cooley was covering the night shift.
To be fair, it wasn’t a night shift in the true sense. Usually that meant actually driving to a job with a crappy shift from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. Eagle’s Nest simply had one officer on call from midnight to 8:00 a.m. He didn’t mind taking the shift—they all had to cover it at least once a week—but usually he got to sleep in peace. Not much happened in the middle of the night in his quiet town, and getting paid for sleeping in his bed wasn’t a bad deal, but lately fires had been on everyone’s mind.
Sure enough, at 4:00 a.m., a little more than twenty-four hours after the fire and shooting on Tilda Brass’s property, he got a call that suspicious persons were snooping around Jackson Hill’s outbuildings. Hill was out of town, but a neighbor had seen someone where there shouldn’t be any people. Nothing was on fire, but knowing a young prepper family had already lost supplies and that Jackson was a known prepper, Ben pulled his old bones out of bed.
His wife of fifty years was still sound asleep. As was his custom when leaving to work, Ben kissed her tenderly on the cheek and told her he loved her. Then he got dressed and wished there were a coffee drive-through between him and the call. Instead he heated up the leftover coffee in the pot, poured it into a travel mug, and got into his patrol vehicle. He blinked hard as he headed out of town, trying to get the sleep out of his eyes. He called the dispatch center and flirted with Denise for a few seconds as he let her know he was en route to the call. He knew all the dispatchers at the Deschutes County 911 center. Over the years they’d come and gone, but Denise had been around for a good five years and always laughed at his jokes.
“Busy night?” he asked.
“We’ve taken just over five hundred calls in the last twenty-four hours, so technically that’s a slow day for us.”
Ben couldn’t imagine. Feeling guilty, he quickly got off the call so she could help someone else and turned his concentration to the dark road. He’d been a cop in Eagle’s Nest for over thirty years. In that time a lot of things had changed, and a lot were still exactly the same.
Fights between spouses? Exactly the same. Couples still got drunk and tried to beat the hell out of each other.
Drug abuse? Not much change. The only change was in which drug was popular at the moment.
Drunk driving? Not much change. Even with the big push for awareness over the last several decades, he still pulled over too many drunks each week. Although he’d noticed they were older than they used to be. Perhaps the younger generations were getting the message not to drink and drive.
He still loved his job. He didn’t want to do anything else. He liked talking to people and he liked helping his neighbors. Most folks in the area respected his badge. There’d always been a few who didn’t, and in the past he could knock respect into their heads, but that was frowned upon these days.
Besides, he didn’t have the strength he used to. Didn’t have a lot of what he used to. His joints hurt most of the day, and his back had given him grief for the last ten years. His doctor bitched at him to eat better and get more exercise, but Ben didn’t see the point in eating boring food and visiting a gym for what he had left of this life. One of the perks of being a human being was eating delicious food. And if it was delicious, that meant his doctor was against it. Ben would rather enjoy his meals than try to please his doctor. His wife was an incredible cook. He patted his bigger-than-it-should-be belly. A badge of honor.
He turned off the two-lane highway onto the narrow road that eventually led to the Hill home. A person lurched out of the darkness and into his headlights, waving their hands for him to stop.
“Franklin Delano Roosevelt!” Ben swore. His car skidded as he braked hard.
A moment later he recognized Jim Hotchkiss. The neighbor who’d called in the prowler.
Ben lowered his window. “You waiting for me, Jim?”
“Yep. Took you long enough.” Jim was wearing his usual overalls and a heavy canvas coat. The thin man had lost most of his teeth a few decades back and rarely wore his dentures.
Ben put on a patient face. “Came as fast as I could. What’d you see?”
“Two men poking around Hill’s three outbuildings. With the fires of the last few weeks, I thought I’d let you confront them first instead of me just scaring them off.”
“See any weapons?” Ben asked.
“Too far off. Too dark. And there might have been more than two people, but I saw two for certain.”
“Head back home, okay?”
Jim looked out at the highway. “You got some backup coming?”