C. Box - Cold Wind

Before they left the grassy plateau, Nate withdrew two one-hundred-dollar bills from his wallet, rolled them into a tight tube, and shoved it into one of the empty.500 brass cartridges. He jammed the brass into a crack in the first shattered target.

“So the rancher can buy some new posts,” he explained to Merle.

As they drove slowly down the mountain, Nate said, “Have you heard how Diane Shober is doing in Idaho?”

Shober had been relocated via the growing underground network after what had happened the year before in the Sierra Madre with Joe Pickett. Nate hadn’t kept in contact with her, or with his friends who took her in.

Merle said, “Changed her name and her hair color. She’s gained a little weight since she’s not running anymore. But from what I can tell, she’s settled in.”

Nate grunted approvingly.

“Learned to shoot,” Merle said. “She’s just waiting for the revolution, from what they tell me. Nate, what do you think? Will there be one? Will they come and try to take away our guns and our freedom?”

“Don’t know,” Nate said. “I’ve only got one thing on my mind right now and it’s not that.”

“I’m worried,” Large Merle said. “Everybody’s worried. But we ain’t gonna let it happen without a fight. What the bastards don’t really understand is what it means to have an armed citizenry.”

Nate grunted again.

“How you gonna get the fingerprint and DNA identification you mentioned?” Merle asked as they neared Nate’s Jeep.

“I know a guy in law enforcement,” Nate said, looking away. “I’m pretty sure he’ll help.”

“Is it the guy I’m thinking about? The one you had the falling out with over Diane Shober? The game warden?”

Nate looked over and silenced Merle with a look.

After a few beats, Merle said, “You want me to go down in the canyon and clean it up a little? Make it habitable again?”

“No.”

“So you aren’t coming back?”

Nate shook his head. “If an angry woman and two yahoos can figure out where I am, The Five wouldn’t have any problem. No, I’m gone from there.”

“Where are you gonna be?”

“For now,” Nate said, patting the holster and the weapon, “I’m going hunting.”

“Let me know if you need anything,” Merle said, pulling up next to the Jeep. “Money, ammunition, a home-cooked meal. Anything. Just let me know. And keep in touch.”

Nate looked over. “Why?”

Merle said, “In case we need you. If things turn real ugly, you know? Or if The Five decide to start taking out everybody from our old unit who’re still around. I know there aren’t many of us left, but as long as we breathe, we’re a threat to them.”

Nate nodded, said good-bye with his eyes, and climbed out of Merle’s Power Wagon.

As Large Merle rolled away, Nate got out of his shoulder holster and placed it on the hood of his Jeep. He withdrew the.500 WE and reached into his jeans pocket.

He’d braided the three-inch length of Alisha’s hair into a stiff bolt and tied one end of it to a supple leather jess he’d last used on his murdered peregrine. Nate took the loose ends of the jess and knotted them to the end of the muzzle of his weapon, just behind the front blade site.

He lifted the revolver and aimed it. The length of hair tilted slightly in the breeze. It would help when it came to gauging wind velocity for long-range shots. And it would remind him-as if he needed it-of the only thing he cared about right now.

Friday evening, Joe and Marybeth took Joe’s pickup to dinner at the Thunderhead Ranch. Missy had invited them, and Joe had been dreading the event all week. Lucy couldn’t join them because of play practice, and when they raised it with April, she said, “If I’m grounded, I’m friggin’ grounded .”

“Family events can be an exception,” Marybeth said.

“One of the problems with you people is you keep changing the rules,” April said, stalking back to her room and slamming the door.

Her favorite new phrase, besides “frigging” was now the accusatory you people .

Joe held the front door open for his wife. As she passed him, she said, “Marcus Hand better be as good as they say, because if he isn’t, April gains in power.”

“Ouch,” Joe said, flinching.

“I don’t want to do this,” Joe said, as they turned onto the highway.

“I know,” Marybeth said. “I can’t say I’m very excited myself. But my mother needs to know she’s got some support, Joe. Can you imagine how she feels?”

He bit his tongue and drove. If the woman had made any effort at all to befriend the locals or even show some respect for them, he thought, she might have a few allies.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Marybeth said.

“Can’t help it.”

He’d taken a shower and changed into jeans and a Cinch shirt, but his face still burned from being outside in the wind and sun all day. Mourning dove season had opened on the first, and he’d spent the last two days in the field checking hunters and limits. There was no other season where all a successful hunter had to show for himself was a small bag of the soft gray birds that would barely make a single meal-even though it was a tasty one. But because mourning doves migrated out of the area as quickly as they arrived, it was a furious few days of hunting and work and he’d not been able to pursue his investigation further.

Joe and Marybeth had not caught up because they’d been missing each other at home with his long days and her evening shift at the library.

As they turned off the highway and passed under the magnificent elk antler arches that marked the entrance to the Thunderhead Ranch, he said, “I guess this will give me the chance to ask Missy a couple of questions that have been nagging me since my talk with Bob Lee.”

“Like what?” she asked.

Joe chinned toward the north in the direction of the Rope the Wind turbine project. “The wind,” he said. “It blows.”

Dinner was served at the regal long table in the rarely used dining room. Jose Maria had been pulled from duty with the cows and dressed in a black jacket to serve ranch-raised beef tenderloin, asparagus with hollandaise, garlic-roasted sharp-tail grouse, and red-skinned new potatoes. Missy sat at one end picking, as usual, at tiny bits of food. She wore pearls and a black cocktail dress that showed off her trim figure and youthful legs, and Joe wondered if she could possibly be the same wan person he had seen in the courtroom.

Marcus Hand occupied the other end of the table. He wore a loose guayabera shirt over jeans and cowboy boots. His reading glasses hung from a chain around his neck. He ate huge portions and loudly enjoyed them and washed down each bite with alternate gulps of either red or white wine. Hand was well known as a gourmand, and he’d penned dozens of unapologetic essays about eating large quantities of rich food. In one piece Joe had read in a national magazine, Hand lamented that fried chicken was rarely offered in local restaurants and that elites should stop looking down on big eaters who enjoyed their food in quantity. Hand dismembered a grouse by pulling it apart and gnawed the meat off the carcass. Then he snapped the thighbones in two and sucked out the marrow.

Joe and Marybeth faced each other in the middle, shooting glances toward either end and exchanging puzzlement to each other when their eyes met. Joe had expected angst and gravity to accompany the meal, but not this. He couldn’t help but stare at the lawyer, who enjoyed his food with a kind of moaning passion that nearly made Joe feel like a voyeur.