“I’ll kill you for what you did to her. Both of you.”
The burned man smiled. “You know all the lines, Ethan. Very good. But I don’t have the time or the inclination to hear you say them all. You mention ‘both of you,’ so you know there are two of us. That’s going to be important for you to remember. Now, you and I are going to ride together for a time. It will be just us, understand? So the one you’re wondering about, where do you think he will be? This is what you do, to my understanding. An expert in lost-person behavior, I believe. So let’s consider the lost person in this scenario. Where do you expect you will find him?”
“Close to my wife.” The words were a bloodletting.
The burned man reached up and tipped his hat. Ethan’s hat. Then he opened the bathroom door and gestured with his gun. “After you.”
They walked out of the bathroom and down the hallway that smelled of disinfectant and then down a stairwell and out a side door into the daylight. It was warm now. Warm and windy.
“Go to the black truck,” the man said. They were walking close together, and when Ethan felt cold metal on his hand, he expected it was a jab with the gun. It was a set of car keys. He took them, then unlocked the doors. It was a Ford F-150, just like his. Different color, different trim, but the same motor under the hood.
“You’ll drive.”
Ethan got behind the wheel and started the engine. Everything in the truck was similar to Ethan’s, except the window tint on this one was very dark. And it smelled faintly of smoke and blood. He thought of the things he could do. Driving was control, after all. He could run them right through the glass doors and into the hospital. Could take them up onto the highway and off the side, bounce them down the mountain to their deaths together. The driver had total control.
“She’ll be just fine,” the burned man said, “for exactly forty-eight hours. After that, I’m afraid it’s an altogether different situation. Now, do you think you can find the boy in that amount of time?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ve nothing to worry about.”
“What if they’ve found him already? Then I’ve got plenty to worry about.”
“I didn’t say you had to be the first to find him, Ethan. I just said you need to find him.”
And so he drove away, riding with the burned man, and behind him the hospital faded in the rearview mirror, and in it his wife slept secure in Ethan’s promise that he’d be there when she woke.
21
It was just past noon when they sighted the first group of searchers. Jace had tried to sleep, but he didn’t like having his eyes closed. It was as if he thought they might appear without a sound, and he’d open his eyes to find them standing in the door, Hannah Faber already dead, the rest of it just a matter of time…
Then Hannah said, “Connor, the police are coming,” and he stood up from the narrow cot to join her at the window.
There were four men walking up the hill, just as Jace had a few hours earlier. Two of them were in uniform.
“Can I look?” he said. He wasn’t going to be convinced they were police until he saw their faces. He’d seen the men dress like police before.
“Sure,” Hannah said, passing him the binoculars.
For a moment all he saw was sky and peaks, and when he lowered the glasses he dropped them too far and was looking at the tall grass that lined the slope below the tower. Finally he found the men and held his breath as he took in their faces.
Strangers.
Every one of them.
“Okay,” he said to Hannah, still staring through the binoculars. “Okay, I think they’re all safe. I don’t know them, at least, and that’s good. They’re not the two I saw.”
“Good. Let’s go down to meet them, then.”
“All right.”
He paused for just a few more seconds because he was curious to see if Ethan was with them. They’d tracked him over rough country so easily that he thought Ethan might have been their guide. He lifted the binoculars up so he could see over their heads and beyond, and he saw that they were not alone.
There was another man behind them, and it wasn’t Ethan, and he wasn’t moving with the group. He was trailing them.
Jace’s mouth went dry and he reached up with his index finger and fumbled with the knob that changed the focus. Hannah was still talking when the zoom clarified.
It was one of them. The one who looked like a soldier. The one who’d cut the throat of the man with the bag over his head. He wore jeans and a jacket and a baseball cap and he carried a rifle. He was a good distance behind the group of searchers. They had no idea he was there.
“Come on,” Hannah said, her hand light on his arm. “Let’s go down and-”
“He’s watching them.” His voice trembled, but he didn’t lower the glasses.
“What? Who is?”
“I can see only one of them. Maybe they didn’t come together. I thought they’d both be here. But it’s him. It’s definitely him.”
He lowered the binoculars because his hands had begun to shake. “He’s not far from us.”
He could tell that she didn’t believe him. Or didn’t want to. But she said, “Let me look.”
He handed over the binoculars. “Look behind them.”
Her silence told him that she saw the fifth man too. She stayed where she was for a long time and watched him and then she said, “You’re sure it’s him.”
“I’m sure.”
“Connor, they’re going to come up here. Those men are going to come up here.” Now her voice was showing the first signs of panic. Beginning to sound more like his own.
“I know it. I told you this was how it would happen. You can’t get away from them. Nobody can.” He took three steps back from the window, the farthest he could retreat in the last place he had to run, and then he sat down on the floor.
Hannah said, “Connor? We’re going to figure this out. He won’t get to you.”
He didn’t even look up when he answered. “They’ll get to me. They won’t stop, and there’s two of them. They’ll get to me in the end.”
“Let’s get moving,” Hannah said. “Let’s go, kid, we’ve got to go.”
He watched her blankly as she moved around him and grabbed the hatchet. She looked at his pack, went to it, and opened it and began to rifle through. “Do you have anything in there? Any kind of…weapon? A knife, at least?”
“I wasn’t allowed to. I was supposed to be a bad kid, remember?”
“Listen, we know the men are not on the trail to Cooke City. So we can make it back down to Cooke City and we can-”
He shook his head. “It’s better for everyone else to just let them get me. You can leave. I’d like you to tell my mom and dad what happened. Please find a way to tell them that I didn’t-”
“Shut up!” she screamed. “And damn it, get up!”
She tried to tug him to his feet. He fought free of her and scrambled back until he was sitting beside her cot.
“You can go. I’m not going to.”
They were interrupted by a voice then. Faint and echoing. The trace of a shout. Hannah turned from him and grabbed the binoculars again.
“They’re close, aren’t they?” Jace said.
“Yes.” She was silent for a moment, then said, “I’m going to go down and talk to them.”
“And say what? He’ll kill them too. Then you, and then me. He’ll kill us all.”
“No, he won’t. He’s just following them, Connor. He’s following them because he hopes they will find you. And that’s not going to happen. Because I’m going to tell them you’re already on the trail to Cooke City.”
“What?”
“They’re going to believe me,” she said. “I’ve got no reason to lie. I think they’ve probably followed a few trails before. I think they know that you came this way. So what I tell them is going to matter. If I pretend I didn’t see you, they might be suspicious. But if I tell them that I did, I can get them moving fast. I’ll say, You know, I did see him, and I thought it was strange that he was alone.”