“Coming to see me?” Ethan frowned. “Who is it?”
“A Jamie Bennett,” Claude said. “And for a woman who just drove her rental car off a mountain, I have to say, she’s not all that apologetic.”
“Jamie Bennett?”
“Correct. You know her?”
“Yeah,” Ethan said, confused. “Yeah, I know her.”
Jamie Bennett was a professional bodyguard. Since leaving the Air Force, Ethan had taught survival instruction as a private contractor, working with civilians and government groups. Jamie had been in a session he’d taught a year ago. He’d liked her, and she was good, competent if a bit cocky, but he could not imagine what had her driving over the Beartooth Pass in a snowstorm in search of him.
“What’s her story?” Claude Kitna asked.
Ethan couldn’t begin to answer that.
“I’ll head your way,” Ethan said. “And I guess I’ll find out.”
“Copy that. Be careful, now. It’s rough out here tonight.”
“I’ll be careful. See you soon, Claude.”
In the bedroom, Allison propped herself up on one arm and looked at him in the shadows as he pulled his clothes on.
“Where are you headed?”
“Up to the pass.”
“Somebody try to walk away from a car wreck?”
That had happened before. Scared of staying in one place, people would panic and set off down the highway, and, in the blowing snow, they’d lose the highway. It seemed like an impossible thing to lose, until you experienced a Rocky Mountain blizzard at night.
“No. Jamie Bennett was trying to get through.”
“The marshal? The one from last spring?”
“Yes.”
“What is she doing in Montana?”
“Coming to find me, is what I was told.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“That’s what I was told,” he repeated.
“This can’t be good,” Allison said.
“I’m sure it’s fine.”
But as he left the cabin and walked to his snowmobile in the howling white winds, he knew that it wasn’t.
The night landscape refused full dark in that magical way that only snow could provide, soaking in the starlight and moonlight and offering it back as a trapped blue iridescence. Claude Kitna hadn’t been lying-the wind was working hard, shifting north to northeast in savage gusts, flinging thick, wet snow. Ethan rode alone and he rode slow, even though he knew 212 as well as anyone up here, and he’d logged more hours on it in bad weather than most. That was exactly why he kept his speed down even when it felt as if the big sled could handle more. Of the rescues-turned-to-corpse discoveries he’d participated in, far too many involved snowmobiles and ATVs, people getting cocky about driving vehicles built to handle the elements. One thing he’d learned while training all over the world-and the lesson had been hammered home here in Montana-was that believing a tool could handle the elements was a recipe for disaster. You adapted to the elements with respect; you did not control them.
It took him an hour to make what was usually a twenty-minute ride, and he was greeted at Beartooth Pass by orange flares, which threw the surrounding peaks into silhouette against the night sky, one plow, and one police vehicle parked in the road. A black Chevy Tahoe was crushed against the guardrail. Ethan looked at its position, leaned up on one side, and shook his head. She’d come awfully damn close. Pull that same maneuver on one of the switchbacks and that Tahoe would have fallen a long way before it hit rock.
He parked the snowmobile, watching the snow swirl into the dark canyons below, lit orange by the flares as it fell, and he wondered if there was anyone out there in the wilderness whom they didn’t know about, anyone who hadn’t been as lucky as Jamie Bennett. There were tall, thin poles spaced out along the winding highway, markers to help the plows maneuver when the snow turned the road into a blind man’s guessing game, and on the downwind side of the road, the snow was already two feet high against them, three feet in areas where the drifts caught.
The passenger-side door of the plow truck banged open, and Jamie Bennett stepped out of the cab and into the snow before Ethan had cut his engine. Her feet slipped out from under her and she nearly ended up on her ass before she caught herself on the door handle.
“What frigging country do you live in that has a blizzard the last day of May, Serbin?”
She was almost as tall as him; her blond hair streamed out from under a ski cap, and her blue eyes watered in the stinging wind.
“They have these things,” he said, “called weather forecasts? They’re new, I guess, experimental, but it’s still worth checking them, time to time. Like, oh, before driving over a mountain range at night.”
She smiled and offered a gloved hand, and they shook.
“I heard the forecast, but I figured I could beat the storm. Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m keeping my positive mental attitude.”
That was one of the seven priorities for survival Ethan had taught in the course Jamie had taken. The first priority, in fact.
“Glad you’ve retained your lessons. What are you doing here, anyhow?”
Claude Kitna was watching them with interest, staying at a courteous distance but not so far away that he couldn’t overhear the conversation. Farther up the road, the headlights of another plow truck showed, this one returning from the pass gate, which would now be shut and locked, the Beartooth Highway closed to all traffic. They’d opened the pass for the first time that season just four days earlier. Last year, it had been closed until June 20. The wilderness was more accessible now than it had once been, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still the wilderness.
“I’ve got a proposition for you,” Jamie said. “A request. You may not like it, but I want you to hear me out, at least.”
“It’s a promising start,” Ethan said. “Any job that arrives with a blizzard has to bring good things.”
It was a joke then. There in the wind and the snow and the orange signal flares, it was only a joke. Weeks later, though, in the sun and the smoke, he would remember that line, and it would turn him cold.
3
By the time they got back to the cabin, Allison had a fire going in the woodstove.
“You want me to start the generator?” she said. “Get the lights back on?”
“It’s fine,” Jamie said.
“Get you some coffee, at least?” Allison said. “Warm you up a little?”
“I’d take a bourbon or something, actually. If you have any.”
“Like I said-coffee,” Allison told her with a smile, and then she poured Maker’s Mark into a steaming mug of coffee and offered it to Jamie, who was still trying to get her jacket and gloves off, shedding snow that melted into pooled water on the floorboards in front of the stove.
“Now you’re talking. Thank you. It is frigid out there. You really stay here year-round?”
Ethan smiled. “That’s right.”
Allison offered Ethan a cup of coffee as well, and he accepted the warm mug gratefully, rotated it in his hands. Even through top-of-the-line gloves, the wind could find your joints. Allison’s eyes were searching his, looking for a reason this woman had blown in with the storm. He gave the smallest of headshakes. She understood that he still had no idea.
“Gorgeous place,” Jamie said, sipping the whiskey-laced coffee. “You said you guys built it yourselves?”
“Yes. With some help.”
“You give it a name? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with a ranch?”
He smiled. “It’s not a ranch. But we call it the Ritz.”
“Seems a little rustic for that.”
“That’s the idea,” Allison said. “That’s the joke.”
Jamie glanced at her and nodded. “Sorry about this, by the way. Crashing in during the night, during the storm. Invading the Ritz.”
“Must be important,” Allison said. She was wearing loose sweatpants and a tighter, long-sleeved top. She was barefoot, and Jamie Bennett had at least six inches on her. The storm didn’t concern Allison-she was old Montana, third generation, a rancher’s daughter-but Ethan had the sense that Jamie did, somehow. And not because she’d arrived in the middle of the night. Allison was used to those kinds of calls.