Then it was over. The guns were lowered, and the stranger and the wolf—his brother—went away.
Ben started to get up. Hours must have passed, and he didn’t think he’d ever be able to stand again, he was so stiff with cold. He managed it, his muscles creaking, his hands shaking.
“I should have shot him,” Cormac said, clenching his rifle.
The pain of memories filled Cormac’s eyes. Now that he’d seen the kind of reaction he’d wanted, Ben wished he could make it stop. Cormac was the strong one.
“Come on.” Ben put his hand on Cormac’s shoulder to turn him around. “Let’s go home.”
They walked in silence until the house came into view. No lights were on. They hadn’t been discovered.
Off-handed, Cormac said, “Know how to shoot?”
Ben considered him. Something was different. He couldn’t say how. Cormac still had that cold, rigid stance that made everyone so careful around him. But Ben didn’t think times in the house would be so quiet and strained anymore.
“Course I do. Dad taught me.” Couldn’t live on a ranch with rifles and not know how to shoot. Everybody knew that.
“Maybe we could go hunting sometime.”
Ben looked sharply at him.
He shrugged. “You know, coyotes. Or deer or something.”
“Real hunting?”
“Yeah, sure. I mean,
Ben bit back a grin. Couldn’t let Cormac think he was excited or anything.
The moon set behind the hills.
GOD’S CREATURES
Cormac waited in the cab of his Jeep, watching each car that pulled into the rest area on I-25 north of Monument. So far, none of them looked like the one he was waiting for. A lot of truckers stopped here, with a few road-trippers thrown in, all shapes and sizes. McNeill would stand out, when he made his appearance.
Forty-five minutes after he was due, the aggressively souped-up pickup truck veered off the freeway and came up the lane. It had oversized tires, lights on the roll bar, a gun rack—empty for now—in the back window and a Confederate flag sticker on the bumper. McNeill was that kind of asshole.
Cormac stepped out of the Jeep; McNeill saw him and swerved to park a couple of spots down. The guy climbed out of his truck and dropped to the ground. He was tall and stocky, wearing worn jeans and a flannel shirt over a white tee. He shoved his hands in his pockets and pretended he wasn’t cold in the winter air, but he was shrugging and tense, trying to keep warm. Cormac waited for him.
“You’re supposed to be keeping your head down,” Cormac said flatly, prodding on purpose, knowing it would piss McNeill off.
“What? My head’s down.” He looked around, frowning, appearing smug because there weren’t any cops in sight. “What’s your problem?”
“Registration sticker on your plate’s expired. That’s like waving a flag at the cops,” Cormac said, nodding toward the back end of the truck.
“And I don’t give a fucking cent to an illegal government.” He pulled himself straighter, like he was daring Cormac to make a big deal out of it.
Yeah, McNeill was one of those. Didn’t seem to care that the cops wouldn’t get you on the weapons stockpiles or the conspiracy charges. They nailed you on back taxes and traffic violations. You covered your ass on the little things as the price of doing business. But that was why McNeill was a go-between and Cormac did the heavy lifting.
“What’s the job?” Cormac asked.
He’d gotten a call two days ago. A rancher he’d worked with before had had some trouble—Cormac’s kind of trouble. They both knew McNeill, who spent a lot of time traveling around the state, so he sent McNeill with the details you didn’t talk about over the phone and the down payment. McNeill didn’t know what exactly Cormac did. He probably assumed he was some kind of hit man.
Which was mostly true.
McNeill went back to his truck and returned with a manila envelope, which he handed to Cormac. He only took a brief look inside, finding a page of description and a business-sized envelope, thick with cash. There’d be ten hundred-dollar bills. He wasn’t going to count it out in the open, but he did pull out a bill and hand it to McNeill for payment.
“Thanks,” McNeill said, shoving the hundred in his pocket. “Good luck, man.”
Cormac had already turned back to the Jeep.
He arrived at Joe Harrison’s ranch in Lamar early the next morning. The old man was waiting for him on the front porch of the ramshackle house. The two-story building was probably close to a hundred years old. It needed a new roof and a coat of paint at the very least. But with a place like this, any extra money the family earned went right back into the ranch. The barns and fencing would get repairs before the house did.
“Thanks for coming,” Harrison said as Cormac left the Jeep, and walked down to shake his hand. The rancher was in his sixties, his face furrowed and weathered, tough as leather from spending his life raising cattle out here. The kind of guy who was more at home with barbed wire and baling twine than a comfortable chair and a TV set.
“Let’s take a look,” Cormac said.
Harrison opened a gate in the fence, and they rode in Cormac’s Jeep, straight across the prairie for about three miles. Harrison navigated by landmarks, pointing to show Cormac the way.
“There, it’s right there,” Harrison said finally, and Cormac stopped the Jeep.
Harrison led him to a spot where stands of scrub oak followed the contour of the hills, bordering the open plains. A carcass lay here, partly sheltered by the wind, flattening the grass. About a week old, Cormac guessed. The steer, a typical rust-and-cream-colored Hereford, had been savaged, its gut ripped open from sternum to tail, its face and tongue torn out, its throat flayed. Scavengers had been through since then—scraps of hair and bone radiated out from the remains. Most of what was left was leathery skin and hair over a ribcage and a leering, ragged skull.
“The second one’s about a mile that way,” Harrison said, pointing again. “And we had another one just last night.”
They returned to the Jeep and drove east a mile or so. Cormac didn’t need directions this time; he spotted the vultures circling overhead. When he pulled up near the spot, a pair of coyotes ran off, then hunkered down in the long grass, waiting to return to their meal in peace.
The other carcass had been dried out and picked over; it hadn’t smelled like anything. The rotten, bloody stink of this one hit Cormac as soon as he left the Jeep.
“The others looked just like this one?” Cormac asked Harrison, who nodded. The rancher winced, turning his face away from the stench.
This one had been gutted like the other. Savaged, but not eaten. Guts and organs spilled out, pink flesh glistened on bones. The scavengers had had a meal handed to them. The weather was too cold for flies, which would have been swarming.
This was why Harrison had called him. They weren’t dealing with a predator that killed because it needed to eat. This was a pure killer, and it was only a matter of time before it attacked someone. Cormac had seen this pattern before. A beast like this might start out with the best of intentions. It might flee to distant wilderness where it would kill a few rabbits or maybe a deer with no harm done. But then it would start to slide. It couldn’t stay away from civilization forever. It would still have the bloodlust, but it wouldn’t bother fleeing. Inhibitions would fail; it would struggle to keep from hurting anyone, but someday it would slip. It would attack livestock. Then it would finally give in to instinct and kill the human beings it hated because it was no longer one of them.
