made a point of telling Joe he would stay and watch over everything. Wacey had seemed unnerved.
Wacey.
'Shit,' Joe said, finally looking at the road and jerking the truck back in his lane after it had wandered. 'Sheridan was right after all. There are monsters out there.'
***
When dawn breaks over the Bighorns, it breaks hard and fast and with cascades of bright sunlight gushing over the mountains like a broken dam. A shaft of sunlight burst through the windshield of the pickup. Joe pulled over in a stand of mountain ash about a half a mile from his house. He shut off the motor and stuffed the keys in his pocket.
'Get out,' he told Vern. 'We're going to walk the rest of the way. I don't want him hearing us drive up. Shut the door easy.'
Vern started to walk down the road bed, and Joe waved him into the ditch on the shoulder. Joe holstered his pistol and pulled his shotgun from behind the seat. He pumped a shell into the chamber. In his slippers, Vern gingerly stepped down from the road into the ditch. Frosted reeds in the ditch lit up with morning sun, and Vern's feet crunched through a skin of ice.
'This water's cold,' Vern said.
Joe nodded and motioned with the shotgun for Vern to start walking.
'I look like a clown,' Vern mumbled. Already his sweatpants were wet from the frost. A red 'O' from the muzzle of Joe's revolver was still visible on Vern's nose.
'You are a clown,' Joe said. 'Now stay in the ditch and don't say anything when we get close. The
only way to keep your life is to help me find my daughter.'
Vern moaned. 'Then we're through, right?'
'Then we're through.'
Neither told the other what they meant by that.
***
Sheridan untwisted herself from beneath the horse blanket. The sun was coming up. She was surprised to see that the blanket was covered with frost. She stood and tried to rub some feeling into her legs, arms, and face. She was no longer hungry-she was beyond that. The night had been long and terrible. She was dirty and she felt featherlight. Everything hurt. There seemed to be scratches, bruises, or imbedded thorns all over her body.
She could finally see what was around her, but she knew he could, too Rather than crawl on top of the boulder where she might be seen, she pushed her way through the juniper bushes on the side of it again. She tried not to rustle the bushes too much.
Wacey was not in the backyard. That meant he either was in the house or was already stalking her. She couldn't believe she had actually fallen asleep. She hoped she hadn't slept too long.
Then beyond the house, up Bighorn Road, something caught her attention. It was the glint of morning sun reflecting off of the glass of a windshield. It was a green truck way down the road, a green truck just like her dad's and parked in some trees. And in the foreground, between the house and the truck, there was movement in the ditch. Two men, walking in the tall weeds. The first man was big in a long flowing robe. Behind him was her dad!
Sucking in her breath, Sheridan scrambled out from around the boulder and started to run down the mountain.
Wacey stood at the broken kitchen window sipping from a cup of coffee that he had just brewed. When he saw a flash of color on the mountain, he stepped back and picked up his binoculars from the table. He focused.
Sheridan Pickett, blond hair streaming in the sun, was racing down the hill like her pants were on fire.
'Damn.'
He had been beginning to believe that maybe she wasn't up there after all, that maybe what he'd heard crying in the night was a cougar or a coyote. They sounded the same as kids sometimes.
The next business would not be pleasant at all. But like burning the Miller's weasels, it needed to be done. Boy, he thought, he had sure sunk low. He had gone from killing three heavily armed hunters to shooting an unarmed woman. Now he was waiting for a seven-year-old. Strangely, it wasn't all that hard to do. He would make a damned good sheriff, he thought. He had a good understanding of the criminal mind.
Wacey placed the cup on the table. He started to reach for the .30-06 but decided that if she saw him come out with a rifle now, she might turn and run right back up the mountain. He didn't feel like chasing her or possibly missing her with a long shot. She was remarkably fast for a girl her age--especially one with glasses, he thought. Instead, he would wait until she got to the backyard. Then he would step out and run her down. He knew of a sump hole at the base of Wolf Mountain where some hunters had once trailed a wounded elk. The animal had gotten caught in the sump and sunk out of sight, much to the hunters' dismay. It would be a perfect place to throw a body. He would weight her down with rocks.
He waited until she ran through the back gate before he stepped out on the porch.
When she saw him, she froze in place. Her green eyes were so huge. He tried his best smile on her as the screen door slammed behind him. What he didn't understand was why those eyes had moved off of his face toward the side of the house. He followed them.
'Wacey,' Vern said in his deep voice, 'it's over, buddy. Our deal is done and we had better get the hell out of Dodge while we still can.'
Wacey turned toward him, confused. Vern looked like he just got out of bed and had walked all of the way from Saddlestring.
