“I’m not. Look, whatever it is—”
“Shut up,” Clint said, gesturing with his Colt. “Go inside slowly and try not to do something stupid.”
Parker cautiously climbed the step and reached out for the door Clint held. Clint followed. The warmth of the house enveloped him, even through his coat and balaclava.
Behind them, Juan said, “What about the dog?”
“Shoot it,” Clint said.
“Jesus God,” Parker said, his voice tripping.
A few seconds later there was a heavy boom and simultaneous yelp from the backyard, and Juan came in.
Paul Parker sat in the passenger seat of the pickup and Clint sat just behind him in the crew cab with the muzzle of his Colt kissing the nape of his neck. Juan drove. They left the highway and took a two-track across the sagebrush foothills eighteen miles from town. They were shadowed by a herd of thirty to forty pronghorn antelope. It was late October, almost November, and the grass was brown and snow from the night before pooled in the squat shadows of the sagebrush. The landscape was harsh and bleak and the antelope had been designed perfectly for it: their brown-and-white coloring melded with the terrain and at times it was as if they were absorbed within it. And if the herd didn’t feel comfortable about something — like the intrusion of a beat-up 1995 Ford pickup pulling an empty rattletrap stock trailer behind it — they simply flowed away over the hills like molten lava.
“Here they come again,” Juan said to Clint. It was his truck and they’d borrowed the stock trailer from an outfitter who got a new one. “They got so many antelopes out here.”
“Focus,” Clint said. He’d long since taken off the mask — no need for it now — and stuffed it in his coat pocket.
Parker stared straight ahead. They’d let him put on pajamas and slippers and a heavy lined winter topcoat and that was all. Clint had ordered him to bring his keys but leave his wallet and everything else. He felt humiliated and scared. That Clint Peebles and Juan Martinez had taken off their masks meant that they no longer cared if he could identify them, and that was a very bad thing. He was sick about Champ.
Clint was close enough to Parker in the cab that he could smell the lawyer’s fear and his morning breath. Up close, Clint noticed, the lawyer had bad skin. He’d never noticed in the courtroom.
“So, you know where we’re going,” Clint said.
“The Engler place,” Parker said.
“That’s right. And do you know what we’re going to do there?”
After a long pause, Parker said, “No, Clint, I don’t.”
“I think you do.”
“Really, I—”
“Shut up,” Clint said to Parker. To Juan, he said, “There’s a gate up ahead. When you stop at it, I’ll get Paul here to come and help me open it. You drive through and we’ll close it behind us. If you see him try anything hinky, do the same thing to him you did to that dog.”
“Champ,” Parker said woodenly.
“Ho-kay,” Clint said.
Juan Martinez was a mystery to Parker. He’d never seen or heard of him before that morning. Martinez was stocky and solid with thick blue-black hair, and he wore a wispy gunfighter’s mustache that made his face look unclean. He had piercing black eyes that revealed nothing. He was younger than Clint, and obviously deferred to him. The two men seemed comfortable with each other and their easy camaraderie suggested long days and nights in each other’s company. Juan seemed to Parker to be a blunt object; simple, hard, without remorse.
Clint Peebles was dark and of medium height and build and he appeared older than his fifty-seven years, Parker thought. Clint had a hard, narrow, pinched face, leathery dark skin that looked permanently sun- and windburned, the spackled sunken cheeks of a drinker, and a thin white scar that practically halved his face from his upper lip to his scalp. He had eyes that were both sorrowful and imperious at the same time, and teeth stained by nicotine that were long and narrow like horse’s teeth. His voice was deep with a hint of country twang and the corners of his mouth pulled up when he spoke, but it wasn’t a smile. He had a certain kind of coiled menace about him, Parker thought. Clint was the kind of man one shied away from if he was coming down the sidewalk or standing in the aisle of a hardware store, because there was a dark instability about him that suggested he might start shouting or lashing out or complaining and not stop until security was called. He was a man who acted and dressed like a cowpoke, but he had grievances inside him that burned hot.
Parker had hoped that when the trial was over he’d never see Clint Peebles again for the rest of his life.
Parker stood aside with his bare hands jammed into the pockets of his coat. He felt the wind bite his bare ankles above his slippers and burn his neck and face with cold. He knew Juan was watching him closely so he tried not to make any suspicious moves or reveal what he was thinking.
He had no weapons except for his hands and fists and the ball of keys he’d been ordered to bring along. He’d never been in a fistfight in his life, but he could fit the keys between his fingers and start swinging.
He looked around him without moving his head much. The prairie spread out in all directions. They were far enough away from town that there were no other vehicles to be seen anywhere, or buildings or power lines.
“Look at that,” Clint said, nodding toward the north and west. Parker turned to see lead-colored clouds rolling straight at them, pushing gauzy walls of snow.
“Hell of a storm coming,” Clint said.
“Maybe we should turn back?” Parker offered.
Clint snorted with derision.
Parker thought about simply breaking and running, but there was nowhere to run.
It was a standard barbed-wire ranch gate, stiff from disuse. Wire loops from the ancient fence post secured the top and bottom of the gate rail. A heavy chain and padlock mottled with rust stretched between the two. “You got the keys,” Clint said, gesturing with his Colt.
Parker dug the key ring out of his pocket and bent over the old lock. He wasn’t sure which key fit it, or whether the rusty hasp would unsnap. While he struggled with the lock, a beach-ball-sized tumbleweed was dislodged from a sagebrush by the wind and it hit him in the back of his thighs, making him jump. Clint laughed.
Finally, he found the right key and felt the mechanism inside give. Parker jerked hard on the lock and the chain dropped away on both sides.
“Stand aside,” Clint said, and shot him a warning look before he put his pistol in his pocket and leaned against the gate. The way to open these tight old ranch gates was to brace oneself on the gate side, thread one’s arms through the strands until the shoulder was against the gate rail, and reach out to the post and pull. The move left Clint vulnerable.
Parker thought if he was prepared to do something and fight back, this was the moment. He could attack Clint before Juan could get out of the pickup. He felt his chest tighten and his toes curl and grip within his slippers.
Clint struggled with it. “Don’t just stand there,” Clint, red-faced, said to Parker through gritted teeth. “Help me get this goddamned thing open.”
Parker leaned forward on the balls of his feet. He considered hurtling himself like a missile toward Clint, then slashing at the man’s face and eyes with the keys. He could tear Clint’s gun away, shoot Clint, and then use it on Juan. That’s what a man of action would do. That’s what someone in a movie or on television would do.
Instead, the lawyer bent over so he was shoulder to shoulder with Clint, and his added bulk against the gatepost was enough that Clint could reach up and pop the wire over the top and open it.