The name was unfamiliar to Joe. “Look,” he said. “I know this cabin shouldn’t be here. This is national forest, and there shouldn’t be any private dwellings. The private land is all in the valleys. Aren’t you worried forest rangers will find you and make you leave?”
She stared at a spot near Joe’s head, as close as she would get to eye contact.
Terri said, “I told you—the brothers protect me. They wouldn’t let that happen. This is my cabin. These are my things.” As her voice rose, she gestured by jabbing her right index finger into the palm of her left hand on the word my. “No one has the right to make me leave if I don’t want to leave.”
Said Joe, “So why are you here?”
“I’m here to wait out the storm. I’ll go back when it finally passes. And that’s all I’m going to say about it.”
“What storm?”
“That’s all I’m going to say.”
“About this storm . . .”
“You keep asking me questions. Look, I’m here to try to reassemble my life,” she said. “I don’t put my nose into anyone’s business, and I expect the same from others. Including you,” she said, again jabbing her finger into her palm. “Especially you.”
“I understand,” Joe said.
Wade suddenly sat up straight and lifted her chin to the ceiling. “Hear that?” she whispered.
Joe shook his head.
“There’s someone on the roof,” she said softly.
8
HE LOOKED UP WHEN HE HEARD THE SOUND. THE CEILING was constructed of adjacent rough-cut pine planks. The wood looked green and soft and showed evidence of recent repair work on the structure. As he stared, one of the planks bowed slightly inward, then another did the same about a foot away. Fine dust from between the planks floated down and sparked in the light of the lantern. There was someone heavy up there. A board creaked loudly enough that whoever was on the roof froze for a moment. More dust filtered down through the light.
Joe rocked forward, his leg screamed silently, and he reached out and touched her hand. He mouthed, “Where’s my gun?”
Her eyes glistened with tears, and she shook her head as if she didn’t want to be involved.
“My gun,” he whispered.
Again, she bit her lip and shook her head, but when she did so she inadvertently revealed a tell with an unconscious glance toward the trunk under her bed.
He raised one finger to his mouth to urge her to stay quiet and scuttled across the rough floor and his makeshift bed to the trunk. He slid it out and unbuckled the hasps with his back to her so she couldn’t protest. When he raised the lid, he found the Glock and his belt on top of folded piles of worn clothes. Despite the situation in front of him, Joe felt a twang of deep sadness for whatever situation had brought her here to live like this.
He worked the slide of his handgun and ejected a live cartridge. Another was in the magazine. So he still had two rounds. When he looked up at her she seemed distressed, as if she wished she had taken the bullets. He nodded to thank her for not taking them and let the magazine drop and loaded the loose cartridges again and jacked one of them into the chamber. Two shots, he thought. Just two shots.
They both jumped when there was deep voice outside the door. “Terri, do you have company in there?”
Joe recognized the voice as Camish. The smart one. Which meant Caleb was on the roof. Which also meant that he wasn’t dead and certainly wasn’t wounded badly enough to take him out of production. Unless, Joe wondered, there were somehow more of them. The idea of more than two Grim Brothers gave him a sudden spasm in his belly.
He caught Wade’s eye, asked in a whisper, “Is it possible there’s more than the two brothers?”
She shook her head. He thanked her with his eyes for the answer, and she looked away as if feeling guilty for a new betrayal.
“Terri?” Camish repeated. “I know you heard me.” His tone wasn’t unkind. In fact, Joe thought, it was resigned, like a father’s voice when he had to reluctantly reprimand a child.
“Not now,” Terri said loudly toward the door. “Leave me alone.”
“Oh, Terri, it doesn’t work like that. We know he’s in there.” Again the sad, reprimanding tone.
“Please,” she said. “Come back later. Come back tomorrow.”
“You mean after he’s gone?” Camish asked, and Joe detected a slight chuckle. “You want us to come back when he’s gone? That’s a crazy notion, Terri. He really hurt my brother. And you know the situation. We can’t let him go. You know that.”
“I don’t want any violence,” Terri said toward the door. “I told you before I don’t want violence. You promised. You promised me.”
Camish said, “Yes, we did. We promised you. And there’s no need for any violence at all. We just want that government man inside your place.”
Joe thought, Government man?
Then he looked at her and saw nothing other than torment. Her hands were knotted into white-knuckled fists and her shoulders were bunched and her mouth was pursed into a shape that reminded him of a dried red rose. She was in agony, and it was because of him. He felt sorry for her, grateful she’d displayed kindness and humanity toward him, and he wanted to save her.
He wanted to save himself as well.
Camish said, “Then we have no choice, do we?”
She asked, “No choice to do what?”
Joe thought, They’re going to burn us out.
Then Camish said, “Let the fumigation begin!”
Fumigation?
Suddenly, the cabin filled with acrid, horrible steam. Joe looked at the door at first for the origin, then realized it was coming from the wood stove. Terri sat back in her chair and buried her face in a napkin to try to avoid the foul-smelling steam that reeked of meat and animal fat and sulfur.
Joe recognized the odor from his youth, shook his head, and whispered, “Caleb is urinating down the chimney pipe.”
She looked at him with undisguised alarm.
He motioned for her to get down on the floor by motioning with his open hand.
“I can’t . . .” she said, glancing toward the closed door and Camish outside.
“Get down,” Joe hissed. “I don’t want you hurt.”
He didn’t want to threaten her with the gun to make her respond. Not after what she’d done for him. But she seemed frozen, conflicted. He said, “GET DOWN.”
Too loudly, he thought. Caleb no doubt heard him on the roof. Which resulted in a strong stream coursing down the red-hot chimney, a giggle from Camish outside, and a thick plume of horrible steam inside the cabin.
Joe angrily ignored it all and thought of Blue Roanie and Buddy and noted two particular ceiling planks bending downward from Caleb’s boots and visualized him up there, legs spread on either side of the chimney, aiming down the hot pipe, smiling at his brother outside and letting loose.
Joe raised the weapon, calculated the height and stance of his target on the roof, acknowledged that the last time he’d shouted a warning it had resulted in an attack on him, aimed the muzzle at what he guessed would be Caleb’s chest, and squeezed the trigger. . . .
The .40 Glock barked, but not where he’d aimed, because Wade screamed “No violence!” and launched up at him from the floor and hit him clumsily with her shoulder in his wounded thigh. The impact threw him back and the slug thudded into a log chest-high inside the cabin.
It was as if her action had somehow downshifted the pace of the confrontation into slow motion, as if time had slowed down for Joe Pickett. Not that it aided him necessarily, but he suddenly felt like the almost incapacitating terror of the situation had been stripped away as well as the fog of uncertainty, and he could see things clearly as they happened, even if he could do nothing to prevent them.