She nods.
“Where’d they all go to? Can you show me?”
She takes another step back, reaches into her gray woolen cloak. The single-action Army is a heavy sidearm, and it sags comically in the child’s hand so she holds it like a rifle, Brady too surprised to do a thing but watch as she struggles with the hammer.
“Okay, I’ll show you,” she says, the hammer locked back, sighting him up, her small finger already in the trigger guard.
“Now hold on, wait just a—”
“Stay still.”
“That ain’t no toy to point in someone’s direction. It’s for—”
“Killin. I know. You’ll feel better directly.”
As Brady scrambles for a way to rib up this young girl to hand him the gun, he hears the report ricocheting through the canyon, finds himself lying on his back, surrounded by a wall of snow.
In the oval of gray winter sky, the child’s face appears, looking down at him.
What in God’s—
“It made a hole in your neck.”
He attempts to tell her to stable George and the burros, see that they’re fed and watered. After all the work they put in today, they deserve at least that. Only gurgles emerge, and when he tries to breathe, his throat whistles.
She points the Army at his face again, one eye closed, the barrel slightly quivering, a parody of aiming.
He stares up into the deluge of snowflakes, the sky already immersed in bluish dusk that seems to deepen before his eyes, and he wonders,
SNOWBOUND
DESCRIPTION: For Will Innis and his daughter, Devlin, the loss was catastrophic. Every day for the past five years, they wonder where she is, if she is—Will’s wife, Devlin’s mother—because Rachael Innis vanished one night during an electrical storm on a lonely desert highway, and suspected of her death, Will took his daughter and fled.
Now, Will and Devlin live under different names in another town, having carved out a new life for themselves as they struggle to maintain some semblance of a family.
When one night, a beautiful, hard-edged FBI agent appears on their doorstep, they fear the worst, but she hasn’t come to arrest Will. “I know you’re innocent,” she tells him, “because Rachael wasn’t the first…or the last.” Desperate for answers, Will and Devlin embark on a terrifying journey that spans four thousand miles from the desert southwest to the wilds of Alaska , heading unaware into the heart of a nightmare, because the truth is infinitely worse than they ever imagined.
1
In the evening of the last good day either of them would know for years to come, the girl pushed open the sliding glass door and stepped through onto the back porch.
“Daddy?”
Will Innis set the legal pad aside and made room for Devlin to climb into his lap. His daughter was small for eleven, felt like the shell of a child in his arms.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked and in her scratchy voice he could hear the remnants of her last respiratory infection like gravel in her lungs.
“Working up a closing for my trial in the morning.”
“Is your client the bad guy again?”
Will smiled. “You and your mother. I’m not really supposed to think of it that way, sweetheart.”
“What’d he do?” His little girl’s face had turned ruddy in the sunset and the fading light brought out threads of platinum in her otherwise midnight hair.
“He allegedly—”
“What’s that mean?”
“Allegedly?”
“Yeah.”
“Means it’s not been proven. He’s suspected of selling drugs.”
“Like what I take?”
“No, your drugs are good. They help you. He was selling, allegedly selling, bad drugs to people.”
“Why are they bad?”
“Because they make you lose control.”
“Why do people take them?”
“They like how it makes them feel.”
“How does it make them feel?”
