After ten wordless minutes, he could tell it was killing her not to talk. She squirmed in her seat, and took deep breaths that ended in long sighs.
Finally, she asked, “Have you thought about calling the sheriff again? Telling them you might have found the killers?”
He shook his head.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want them arrested. I want them dead. But not before I get some intel.”
After ten more minutes, she said, “So are you going to tell me what this is all about? Why those… men… are after everyone?”
“Maybe later,” Nate said, opening his door and swinging out. “One thing at a time.”
“I deserve to know,” she said. “Gabriel and all my friends…”
He looked up sharply. “Remember what I said about talking? I meant it.”
She sat back quickly as if he’d threatened her with a knife.
He said, “Stay here, be quiet, and keep your eyes open. If you see anything hinky, flash the headlights once.”
“Hinky?”
“You’ll know it when you see it.”
Nate rattled around through gear in the small back floor well and came out with an eighteen-inch crowbar and a two-foot length of stiff wire.
“Back in a minute,” he said, and walked across Deloney with the tool pressed to his thigh so it couldn’t be seen in silhouette. Dime-sized snowflakes sifted down through the orbs of streetlights and began to gather like goosedown in the cracks of the wooden walk.
He didn’t need the crowbar to get into the Tahoe, and he was grateful, because he feared setting off an alarm. A car alarm blasting in the quiet night would be a small disaster. He kept low as he cased the vehicle, looking in all the windows but not standing tall enough to be seen over the roof.
The front seat was uncluttered except for a sheaf of folded maps and documents crammed down between the driver’s seat and the console. The backseat was loaded with duffel bags and gear bags. Not unusual in a mountain location if the occupants were mountain climbers or trekkers.
The back compartment had a couple of suitcases, plastic tubs with lids, and a heavy blanket spread across the carpeting from one wheel well to another. The blanket didn’t lie flat, but was rounded down in the center. It was obviously covering something long and bulky.
Nate held the wire up to the light and bent the tip into an L shape. He made another bend about eighteen inches from the L. After checking the walks for passersby-there were none-he glanced down the street to where his Jeep was parked. He couldn’t see Haley in the passenger side because of the shadows, but she was not flashing the lights. Quickly, he stood and jammed the pointed tip of the wire through the rubber seal on the back window. He had to work the wire up and down until the pointed tip found the edge of the glass in the channel. With a shove and twist, the wire poked through the seal on the inside and he could see it on the other side of the glass.
The rubber seal squeaked as he raised the butt end of the wire and shoved it farther into the back compartment. No alarms went off. He pushed it until it reached the rear bend, then farther raised the back end. The L-tip bit down into the fabric, and he pulled the wire from left to right, drawing back the blanket, revealing the black heavy barrel of a rifle. He pulled it back far enough to see the bipod, legs folded, mounted to the undercarriage of the front stock and the blunt snout of the scope.
A Barrett M82A1M. 50 sniper rifle, all thirty pounds’ worth. It shot 690- to 750-grain. 50 caliber Browning machine-gun cartridges, each nearly five inches long. The murder weapon. Just as he’d guessed.
Nate tossed the crowbar and the wire back into the rear floor well and brushed snowflakes from his coat and sleeves before he climbed inside and shut the door.
“It’s them,” he said, describing the find.
“What if they’re staying for the night?” she asked. “I mean, it’s a hotel.”
“Then we wait until morning,” he said.
“I’m getting cold. It’s snowing.”
“Haley…”
“I know, I know.”
After twenty minutes, he noticed she was hugging herself and trembling from the cold. She’d obviously chosen not to complain, and he appreciated it, and he reached forward and started the motor. It took a while before dust-smelling heat-it was the first time he’d had to turn on the heat since winter-poured through the vents.
“Thank you,” she said.
The snow came straight down and had coated the streets and cars with a clean white inch. Falling snow haloed around the lampposts and turned pink in the neon red light from the Silver Dollar Bar sign. Nate checked the time and was surprised to see it was only 8:15. The tragic day they’d had, the stillness, the dark streets, and the smothering snowfall made it seem much later.
Haley said, “Maybe we could stay inside? Separate rooms, of course.”
Nate grunted. He liked the soft, husky tone of her voice. Despite what he’d told her earlier about talking, he found her voice attractive. Although she’d been sitting next to him nearly all day, he could feel her presence very strongly at that moment. He was tuned in to her every movement, every breath. Her dark hair shined blue with diffused ambient light from outside, like Superman in the comics. In the warm air of the heater, he could also catch a light whiff of her scent.
As the cab warmed up she had her eyes fixed on the windshield but said, “Gabriel told me about your loss. About your girlfriend getting killed.”
“She was more than that,” he said.
“You know what I mean. It must have been horrible.”
“It was. It is.”
“You don’t want to talk about it, right?”
“Right.”
After a moment, she said, “So we’ve both lost the people closest to us. What are the chances of that?”
He didn’t reply. But he found it more than interesting that she was thinking of the two of them that way. He’d been thinking the same thing but keeping it at bay because he was frightened of the possibilities.
“I’d like to get some sleep,” she said softly, “but I’m afraid if I close my eyes I’ll see Oscar’s body again. I’ll never be able to get that image out of my mind for the rest of my life.”
He nodded. “I’ve seen a lot of violent death. If you spend a lot of time in the natural world, there’s little else. I know there are wild animals that die of old age, but I’ve rarely seen one. There’s a point where you get like a hunter or a farmer-or a doctor-and you look at it almost clinically. Bullets are just chunks of metal thrown really fast through the air, and when they hit soft flesh they do terrible damage. You get used to it. But when it happens to a friend who was talking to you just a minute before-he’s there and then he isn’t, and all that’s left is meat-you never get used to that.”
He felt her eyes on him and almost didn’t want to look over.
“Your secret,” she asked. “You told Oscar, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“But no one else?”
“No, although a friend named Large Merle figured it out. He’s no longer with us. I tried to tell a good man I know, a game warden in Wyoming, but he didn’t want to hear it.”
She said, “Maybe I do.”
“Maybe you don’t,” he said, turning on the wipers to clear the windshield of snow that melted on contact.
“Not that it seems to matter,” she said. “Everybody you come in contact with seems to wind up ‘ no longer with us.’”
