“Delta.”
“What flight number?”
“I have no fucking idea.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” he asked.
“Why should I?” she asked. “I guess I didn’t realize you planned to torture me. That you didn’t trust me.”
“Oscar told me you’d been there the whole time.”
“Oscar… must have forgotten,” she said. “It was before everything started to happen. Or maybe,” she said, a lick of flame reentering her tone, “maybe Oscar was in on it, too. Maybe you should drive back to Idaho and break his fingers and pull his goddamn ears off if you can find what’s left of his head.”
He released her ear and slipped his weapon back into the shoulder holster.
“I had to be sure,” he said, and turned back and put the Jeep into gear.
“Are you sure now?” she asked, then followed it with a sharp slap across his face. He flinched but didn’t retaliate.
“I think so,” he said.
Her words reminded him of his own father, and how he’d left him in Colorado Springs. Nate wondered where Gordo had taken his new family, his stepmother and two half sisters he barely knew. The thought flooded him with remorse for uprooting them, and he hoped someday he’d be able to make things right. Gordo had made him what he was, for better and worse. Nate no longer resented him for that, and he hoped to tell Gordo all was forgiven. Then Nate shook his head to clear the thought away. The task ahead of him left no room for sentimentality.
The lights of Dubois emerged through the snowfall ahead. It was a small, sleepy mountain town of barely a thousand people surrounded by closed guest ranches, hunting lodges, and working ranches, and rimmed by the Absaroka and Wind River Mountains.
Nate slowed before he reached the town limits, looking for activity ahead, a roadblock or law enforcement presence. He saw nothing unusual.
Finally, she said, “What else did you learn from that man back there in Jackson?”
“Enough,” Nate said. “The playing field isn’t close to even, but at least it’s not as stacked against us as it was before. Now I know there are more operators where Nemecek set up his headquarters.”
“How do you know he wasn’t lying?” she asked. “How do you know he wasn’t just telling you what you wanted to hear, or making something up you’d believe?”
“I know the difference,” Nate said. “He lied at first. He lied through all of his fingers being broken back. He was a tough guy.”
“What you did to him,” she said angrily, “it was awful. Savage.”
“I let him live,” Nate said. “I called the hospital with his phone when I could have let him bleed out or freeze. I could have finished him off. Now I’ve got a broken Special Forces operator out there who may someday come back at me.”
“But what you did to him…”
“Means to an end,” Nate said. “Torture works. It always has. That’s why they call it torture.”
“You looked like you were enjoying yourself.”
“I told you not to watch.”
“I finally turned away,” she said, “but by then I’d seen too much. In ten minutes I went from kind of trying to like you to hating your fucking miserable guts.”
He shrugged.
“That’s all you’re going to say?” she said, eyes flashing. “‘Means to an end’?”
“Look,” he said, “that guy back there was a Peregrine. I went through the same training. He’s been waterboarded, sprayed in his open eyes with pepper spray, and dropped off in both jungles and deserts with no weapons or food. He wasn’t going to just tell me what I wanted to know unless he was convinced I wanted to kill him slowly. If there was a shadow of a doubt in his mind, he wouldn’t have talked.”
She thought about that for a moment, then said, “But he talked.”
“It took a while,” Nate said. “A lot longer than I’d hoped. Not until I started on his second hand, and even then he held back. For a while.”
“It’s just so inhuman,” she said. “I always knew Gabriel had seen things and even done things overseas, but he never talked about them. Now I think I hate him, too.”
“Don’t,” Nate said. “Cohen was like that poor son-of-a-bitch back there in the trucker cap. He was doing what he was hardwired to do and what he thought was right. It’s been going on for thousands of years, but you’ve had the wealth and comfort to go soft. Our whole country has. If it weren’t for men like those two, you’d see a lot more savagery, but you’d see it in the streets.”
He said, “They protect you from knowing what’s out there, and there’s no appreciation for them. No gratitude.”
“Don’t paint me like that,” she said defensively. “I know there’s violence in the world. I know there are people who want to kill us. I’m from a military family,” she said. “But I don’t have to enjoy what you did.”
“And I hope you never do,” Nate said, “or your world would turn into mine.”
They passed under a huge retro neon trout struggling on a fishing line that marked a closed sporting-goods store.
“I’m looking for a pay phone,” Nate said.
“They still have those?” she asked.
He ignored her. “I need to call a buddy of mine. He’s in big trouble, but he doesn’t know it.”
As they backtracked through town and Nate located a public phone mounted on the side of a sleeping grocery store, she said, “For a while there, it seemed like something was happening between us, didn’t it?”
He looked over, not sure how to respond.
“I’d like to say it ended back there,” she said, looking away.
“But it didn’t,” Nate said.
“I’m not so sure now.”
“Bad timing, I guess.”
“It always is,” she said, and sighed.
24
Joe felt a punch of panic in his gut when he saw the strange vehicle parked in front of his house through the cascading snow. It was a half hour from midnight: no one should be visiting. Worst-case scenarios corkscrewed through his mind, and he instinctively reached over and touched the shotgun-propped muzzle-down on the bench seat-to make sure it was there.
His anxiety level had climbed each time he’d tried to call Marybeth’s cell phone as he roared down the mountain, only to get her voice-mail message. She was either on her phone or the phone was turned off. The message he’d left was: “I’m on the way.” While he’d dropped off Luke Brueggemann at the hotel, he’d speed-dialed the house phone, but all he got was a tinny recording announcing that the number he’d called wasn’t “in service at this time.”
As he neared his home, he recognized the SUV as belonging to Deputy Mike Reed, and breathed a sigh of relief. Not until that moment did he realize how tightly he’d been gripping the wheel.
Nevertheless, he carried the shotgun with him as he skipped up the snow-covered porch steps and threw open the front door.
“Whoa, there, buckaroo,” Reed said when he looked up from a cup of coffee and saw the weapon. “Just us friendlies here.” He was seated on the couch in full uniform.
Joe lowered the weapon and propped it in the corner of the mudroom before entering the living room. He could hear Marybeth talking in the kitchen on her cell phone-the reason he couldn’t reach her earlier. He shook snow
