“You’ve made that clear. We’ll stop at my house. We’ll also start from there.”
“Allison set that on fire, so it’s probably not ideal.”
“Don’t say her name again, you son of a bitch. Don’t say it.”
“You prefer ‘Mrs. Serbin’? I thought we were past needless formalities.”
Ethan focused on peaks, still snowcapped, in the distance. Formidable rock faces that were friends. If he could remain calm, he would soon be surrounded by them.
“I’ll stop in town and make a call,” he said. “You want to walk in with me and shoot me down if I say the wrong thing, you can. You want to stay in the truck, keep that burned face of yours away from questions, you can do that too.”
“You’re very gracious, Ethan. But I’m well aware of my options. I trust you to go in alone. You’ll have your chances to cause trouble for me, but you’ll remember the way your wife looked in the hospital today. You’ll remember that, and remember who’s at her bedside.” He paused, shrugged, and said, “Or you’ll let her die. I’ve been wrong about a man’s character before. Perhaps I will be again.”
Ethan parked in front of the Cooke City General Store. It had stood there since 1886 and Ethan imagined that over that many years many an evil man had surely passed by it but doubted any like the one who rode at his side.
“I’ll walk down to the right,” he said. “To Miner’s Saloon. I can use a phone there and nobody will be listening. There’s a phone on the far end of the bar. The right-hand side. I’m going to walk to it and make a call. You’ll probably be able to watch me through the window. Nobody will see you, not with this tint.”
“You have my trust, Ethan.”
“Am I on a clock?”
“By all means, take your time.”
His tone was light, mocking. That was fine. Stay cocky, stay fearless, and Ethan would piss on his corpse.
Ethan walked down the sidewalk to Miner’s and pulled open the door without so much as glancing back at the truck.
“Ethan, man, didn’t expect to see you in here! I heard about…the fire.” This was from the bartender. Ethan figured the man had stopped himself from saying Allison’s name because he didn’t know what might have happened. Ethan looked up and nodded and said, “She’s fine. I’ve just got to make a call. Sorry.”
“Of course.”
He called Roy Futvoye. Said that he was back in town and wanted to know if the searchers had had any success.
“I’m afraid not. They spoke to someone who thought she’d seen him, one of the fire lookouts, but they haven’t found him yet.”
“Where are they?”
“Coming down toward the Soda Butte now.”
The Soda Butte was the stream that ran on the south side of town, parallel to the Montana-Wyoming line. That meant they’d made a loop of it, expecting that Connor had broken free and then tried to get back to civilization. It would have made sense to them, because they probably figured he wanted help or at least wanted to get back to familiar terrain. They did not understand his fears yet, and that was good. Another advantage. Ethan did not expect to find Connor on a highway, or even a trail. Not so soon. He had food, he had water, and he had terror. He would have searched for a good place to hide.
“No sign of him beyond that tip?”
“None. But that one sounded valid. She gave a good description, and the timeline was right. Maybe he dropped his pack and picked up the pace, got out to the road faster than we thought he would.”
“Maybe,” Ethan said. “So your team is going to come out for the night?”
“They’re out. We’ll send a fresh group. Luke Bowden stayed back.”
“What?”
“You know Luke, he doesn’t like it when he loses a trail. Damned bloodhound. I guess he wasn’t happy with the way they lost the kid’s prints at the fire lookout. He decided to backtrack and see what he could find.”
“Get him out of there,” Ethan said. His tone changed enough that the bartender glanced his way.
“Why?”
Because Luke might actually find the kid, Ethan was thinking, but he said, “Because people shouldn’t run searches solo, Roy. You know that.”
“He’s just back-trailing. Nothing’s going to happen to Luke-”
“Things can happen to anybody,” Ethan said, and it came out too close to a snarl. He swallowed and said, “There’s something wrong with this kid, you realize that. Don’t let anybody go wandering around alone.”
Especially somebody who may beat me to him. Especially somebody with a radio.
“I’ll advise him,” Roy said, but his voice had changed now as well. “Ethan, you okay? You know something more than you’re telling me?”
“I know I’m shaken up, Roy. It’s been that kind of day. Listen, I’ve got to go. I’ll check back in soon. Thanks.”
Ethan hung up. He looked at a man sitting at the bar eating a steak and considered the knife he was using. It would be nice to have a knife. But the burned man wouldn’t miss that. Ethan thanked the bartender and walked outside into that warm wind. Knowing he had to hurry now. His own clock was speeding up, and the burned man didn’t even know it yet.
When Ethan opened the door, the burned man looked at him casually, the pistol in his hand.
“Send for the National Guard?”
“You’ll know soon enough.”
“I have the patience for my own wit. Not yours.” His voice was dark and he tilted his head so that some of the burns fell into shadow and said, “What’s the word?”
“No luck yet. If we’re lucky, we’ll catch him coming up to the road. If we aren’t, then we’ll have to go back to the place where I lost him, and I’ll have to start tracking.”
“You don’t think we’ll be lucky, though.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s too afraid of you to stay on a trail.”
“Thinking like the lost person. Good for you. And an accurate assessment, I believe. His approach in the past has been to hide and then run.”
“And you couldn’t get him yourself. You should have called me then.”
The burned man looked at him and smiled.
“Starting to appreciate my wit?” Ethan said.
“No. I was just thinking of how your wife looked with her hair on fire.”
24
The woman named Hannah had saved him, at least temporarily, and that was great, but it didn’t mean he could let her rush him. And she was rushing him now. Telling Jace to get up and get moving, telling him to leave the pack behind because they’d move faster without the extra weight, telling him that if they went fast enough, they’d both be riding out of the mountains on a helicopter by the end of the night.
“Slow down,” he said. “We need to slow down.”
“Hon, that is exactly what we cannot do. It is time to hurry. I know you’re tired, but-”
“We have a goal,” Jace said, “but we do not have a plan.”
It was funny; if an adult had said this to Hannah, it would have made perfect sense to her, but those same words coming from a kid apparently meant there was something wrong with the kid. Hannah stared at him as if he’d just told her that he wanted to ride out of the mountains on a unicorn.
“It’s what Ethan says.”
“Ethan, your survival instructor?”
“Yes. The one I was with until last night.”
“That’s terrific, Connor. That’s great. But I’m pretty sure if Ethan were here right now, he’d tell you that we need to hurry.”
“That’s the exact opposite of what he would say. Panic kills. You rush and you make mistakes. You’re trying to rush me.”
She laughed. The exasperated, I-am-done-listening-to-you sound his mother made during arguments. “I’m trying to rush you, yes. You arrived at my door with a killer behind you, and now I would like to hurry the hell out of here.”
“Two killers,” Jace said. “We haven’t seen the other one.”