The barn smelled pleasantly of decades of horses. Hay and manure lingered in the air. The dirt floor was packed down to the consistency of cement. A series of empty stalls lined both walls of the barn. Obviously, the owners hadn’t brought the guest horses to the ranch yet for the season. In the rear of the barn was a closed-up tack room.
“Are you Nate Romanowski, the falcon guy?” a harsh male voice asked from inside one of the closest stalls.
“I am,” Nate said. “Where are your problem birds?”
“Oh, they’re here,” the voice said.
“Where?”
“Keep lookin’.”
Nate lowered the flashlight until the beam illuminated the lantern-jawed face of an old man wearing bib overalls and a crumpled straw hat. Nate could see only his face and the top of his shoulders above the uppermost rail of the stall.
“Who are you?” Nate asked.
“John Wells. I’m the caretaker.” He paused. “I’m the man who gets you out of our way.”
Then, raising his voice, the man said, “Now, son.”
The muzzle of a shotgun suddenly poked out from between two planks of the stall. Nate heard the unique snick sound of two safeties being thumbed off simultaneously.
He thought: Ambush.
Nate instinctively crouched and reached under his left arm for the handgrip of the weapon that wasn’t there.
With a heavy boom, an orange fireball erupted from the hayloft over the old man’s head, followed closely by the discharge of Wells’s shotgun.
Nate staggered back. The flashlight dropped from his hand. He’d been hit. It was as if he’d been whacked in the chest several times with a baseball bat by someone swinging for the fences. There was a hot stinging sensation in his cheek and on the right side of his neck.
Wells fired again.
Nate went down. His mind was sharp and he knew what had happened. Two men had fired on him with shotguns likely loaded with double-ought buckshot. Each shell contained at least eight pellets that were the equivalent of .33-caliber bullets. Most of the pellets had ripped into his flesh.
He thought that, in the past, he would have drawn his weapon and taken out Wells before the first shot, and then put down the other man above him in the hayloft.
But now, he was flat on his back. His arms and legs were dancing to their own rhythm. He could smell gunpowder in the still barn and his own hot blood coursing through hay on the floor.
Outside, Liv screamed.
He thought: I tried to tell you.
Through what seemed like a tunnel, he heard the old man say, “Get down out of there, boy. We got to get the hell out of Dodge.”
“That wasn’t so hard,” the son said with a surprised laugh. “I thought the guy was supposed to be tough.”
“He don’t have that gun of his,” the old man said.
A moment later, heavy footfalls thundered by Nate toward the open door.
—
LIV HAD FROZEN momentarily at the sound of the first shot. It seemed so loud and harsh in the quiet mountain air. She was too stunned to react when the woman reached out of the Suburban and grabbed a handful of her scarf and pulled her close. Kitty was remarkably strong, given her appearance.
There were two more heavy booms from inside the barn, but Kitty had cinched the scarf tight and pulled most of it inside the vehicle. She rolled up the window to secure the scarf—and Liv—in place.
Liv screamed, but she couldn’t twist away. Kitty had hardly moved, but she’d taken action. Now her hawklike eyes raked Liv’s face with smug triumph through the dirty passenger-side window.
In Liv’s peripheral vision, she saw two big and rough men run toward the Suburban from the barn door. They each carried a long gun.
Nate wasn’t with them.
9
That night in Billings, Marybeth Pickett tossed aside a magazine she’d been scanning in the waiting lounge of the ICU and rubbed her eyes. She’d realized she’d read the magazine before—twice—and she wished she’d thought to bring the charger for her iPad. Before it ran out of power, she’d answered a dozen library-related emails and had updated Joe, Sheridan, and Lucy on April’s condition, like she had every few hours since they’d arrived on Friday.
April had looked peaceful as the propofol was administered via IV, Marybeth told them. Her shallow breathing and severely reduced vital signs were normal responses to a drug-induced coma. One of the doctors compared the procedure they were doing to April to a bear hibernating in the winter. Her metabolism and heartbeat slowed drastically as the beeps on the monitor came farther apart. Marybeth had held April’s limp hand and massaged her knuckles while she slept. Her daughter’s total lack of response was troubling and upsetting, but that was normal, too.
The worst thing, she’d told her family, was how impotent she felt. There was nothing she could do now. She couldn’t really comfort April, but she wrote that she’d feel horribly guilty leaving the hospital. What if she was gone when April suddenly showed improvement? Or if April’s condition rapidly deteriorated? Marybeth couldn’t stomach the thought of her daughter somehow realizing she was alone in a strange room and in a strange city, even though she knew rationally it was unlikely April would be able to think those thoughts.
Marybeth stood and paced. The hospital at night was a lonely and spooky place. The waiting lounge was empty except for her, and the low hum of medical equipment throughout the floor was like emotional white noise. She looked up every time a nurse or doctor walked down the hall and she’d come to recognize most of them. She knew their shifts, their speech patterns, and the way they walked. She’d gotten to know a couple of the staffers, particularly the night nurse. But Marybeth felt she could never get comfortable, that she was in the facility with nothing to do or offer while the outside world spun on.
This was her new self-contained world. It was horrible.
—
SHE’D BEEN SHOCKED to learn from Lucy and Joe about the apprehension of Tilden Cudmore. Unlike Joe, she knew the man personally—she’d met him several times at the library.
Cudmore was an unpleasant man who spent a good deal of time in the library to get on the Internet, read newspapers, and harass patrons. His body odor was the subject of pained jokes among the staff, and his sour smell lingered even after he’d left the building. He loved getting into political arguments with people, and Marybeth had been pulled out of her office several times to intervene. It was also suspected that he used the men’s room to shave.
She’d heard there were library users who steered away from the building if they saw his Humvee in the parking lot.
There was something clearly off about him, she thought, but she’d never gotten a vibe from him that he was a predator. A nutcase, yes. A paranoid schizophrenic, possibly.
She’d told Joe she would not have even thought of Cudmore in relation to April’s attack.
That she’d misjudged the man so completely gnawed at her. Marybeth was perceptive when it came to judging others and to assessing potential threats, especially when it concerned her children. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t picked up on anything with Cudmore.
—
ALL THE DOCTORS could tell her was that it could be days, it could be weeks, it could be months. Marybeth had a long meeting with the hospital bookkeeper that morning and it had been both frustrating and fairly traumatic. Long-term care for April would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. No one knew how much. Marybeth made several calls to their insurance company and received few answers.
“Things are so crazy right now,” one of the insurance staffers told her. “They change the rules on us every week. We don’t know which end is up. So at the moment, I can’t tell you for sure what we can cover and what we can’t.”