He pushed the door open, taking the wreath off its nail. He didn’t have the heart to take the decorations off the wreath. He put the wreath on the rough wooden table in the kitchen. The kitchen was clean, its waxed hardwood floor spotless. He’d salvaged the flooring from an old abandoned farmhouse in the valley. The cabin’s living room had an almost feminine sensibility, everything well-scrubbed and orderly. He was a neat freak. The fire in the potbelly wood burner made the living room feel cozy. The big Christmas tree by the small bulletproof windows made it homey, too. He made a mental note to take the Christmas tree down when he got back from his hunting trip.
He walked to the back of the cabin; a small hallway separated the living room from the one bedroom. In the hallway to the bedroom was a long row of gun cases. He walked to the first, unlocked it and took out his .30-30. “The gun that won the West,” his father had told him when he was a kid. He threw the lever back. The magazine was clear and smelled of Hoppe’s oil, a smell he loved. He walked back to the table, laid the rifle down, went back to the hallway.
He crouched in the hall, pulled open the trap door and looked down into the bunker he’d hand-dug—some areas having to be dynamited to clear rocks. It had taken him six years to dig and blast out the space for the bunker, which was twice the size of the cabin. He’d spent whole days with nothing but a miner’s style hat with its puny light showing the black earth as he hand-dug the bunker’s two escape tunnels that ran for over a hundred yards, and ended at the county road.
He hit the light switch on the wall and saw the crude hand-hewn stairs leading down to the lit-up bunker. The bunker held seven bedrooms, two fully-functioning bathrooms, and more rooms that held the bulk of the armory, with tens of thousands of rounds of ammo and more weapons. The redoubt was equipped with a state-of-the-art “control room” as well as a kitchen, larder and dining room. He’d installed a fully-ventilated power plant with a thousand-gallon reserve of diesel fuel. At the very back were the two escape-tunnel entrances, the tunnels laid with tracks for caisson-like carts that could be ridden or filled with equipment and pushed should the bunker need to be abandoned during an attack. The bunker even had its own gravity-fed water system that came straight off the Sierra behind the cabin. Every time he opened the hatch cover, he felt proud of what he’d accomplished.
He took the steps down into the brightly lit bunker designed to comfortably hold a dozen of his close friends.
I’m sure now, sure that it’s coming. I know it, you feel things like that. Feel them in your heart, not your head. We’re there.
He came back up the stairs with two boxes of .30-30 ammunition and closed the trap door. He went to the cabin’s kitchen table and picked up his rifle. Of all the rifles he owned—and he had scores just in the cabin’s top-floor gun lockers—this was his favorite. He’d gotten it as a gift from his father when he turned thirteen. Still the best kind of brush gun there was, and perfect for deer hunting in the Sierras.
He slung it over his shoulder and looked at the Christmas tree. He’d kept the lights on, but now it was time to turn them off. He hated that. It would be the last time he would turn off this year’s Christmas tree. It was beautiful. He’d taken a picture with his new iPhone and put it in his computer scrapbook. He had twenty trees in his scrapbook, with comments, things he wanted to add, new lighting schemes.
He stood for a moment and took it in, found his favorite ornaments. A Santa Claus his mother had made, a gold ball with glitter he’d made in the fourth grade that said 57 on it. There was a crystal reindeer he’d ordered from Germany. Ornaments his sister—who’d married well— had sent him from a fancy store in San Francisco. The glass reindeer caught the electric light and projected a beautiful rainbow.
Christmas this year had been good. He’d spent hours and hours reloading, adding to his ammo stash sitting across from the tree. He had more than ten thousand rounds of ammo for the FAL NATO-issue machine gun alone.
He crossed the room and remembered Thanksgiving morning, going out to the field with the snowmobile and racing along. He’d spotted the tree he’d cut months before. He went that morning before going to the Colliers’ for dinner and chopped it down and brought it back to the cabin. He’d even worn the Santa cap he’d bought at the CVS pharmacy in Nevada City.
Phelps reached down and pulled the plug. The Christmas tree’s lights went dark. It was always painful, he thought, but he reminded himself that it was February. Time to move on.
Outside, riding his snowmobile, rushing into the wilderness, his .30-30 strapped to his back, Chuck thought how sad it was that people didn’t love winter. He thought they should. We should love all the seasons because the seasons are God. Not their god, the bible thumper’s God. But the God I know is out here. Maybe God would forgive me for what I did over there. I was good at killing people. Maybe too good. Some things you get real good at, he thought. Things you shouldn’t get good at.
It started to snow hard as he entered the Emigrant Gap wilderness area.
CHAPTER 4
Quentin realized that it had stopped snowing. He reached for the switch and turned off his windshield wipers. The white snow-covered world outside his patrol car seemed distant. He’d ridden back from breakfast in a kind of daydream, and it was Patty Tyson’s fault. Seeing her had set something loose in him. Their breakfast date had upset his emotional gyroscope; he’d left the Denny’s excited, but wobbly. It had upset his routine, his balance. Stopped snowing and he hadn’t even noticed … Would they have an affair? He wondered how he’d be at affairs now.
Not a kid anymore. Still, I’m not dead. She is attractive.
He felt the smooth-warm steering wheel, and without meaning to, felt the warm plastic bumps. He let his fingertips travel over several of them and wondered what it would be like to make love to Patty Tyson. Pretty damn good, probably.
The dirty snow-splattered green and white patrol car pulled off the two-lane county road, rocking a little as it left the asphalt and pulled onto the rough gravel road that led, a half-mile down, to his family’s ranch.
The patrol car passed along the pine trees his great-great-grandfather had planted at the turn of the century. They were massive now, sixty feet, their trunks part of the fence that ran up to the two-story Victorian ranch house, and a barn, both painted white. The five hundred-acre ranch had been in Quentin’s family since the 1890s. Snow flocked the trees and made the empty snow-carpeted paddocks on either side of the lane look like a picture postcard of a high-Sierra ranch.
“Hey Sheriff, I’m twenty-four fifty here at Blue Canyon.”
Quentin slowed his patrol car to a crawl and took the radio call. “Calvin. What’s up, over?”
“It’s about Chuck Phelps, Sheriff, over.”
“Let’s leave Chuck the hell alone. This thing with the B and B will blow over, over,” Quentin said. He was tired of hearing about Chuck Phelps and his quarrelsome neighbor.