C. Box - Force of Nature

Nate tossed the crowbar and the wire back into the rear floor well and brushed snowflakes from his coat and sleeves before he climbed inside and shut the door.

“It’s them,” he said, describing the find.

“What if they’re staying for the night?” she asked. “I mean, it’s a hotel.”

“Then we wait until morning,” he said.

“I’m getting cold. It’s snowing.”

“Haley…”

“I know, I know.”

After twenty minutes, he noticed she was hugging herself and trembling from the cold. She’d obviously chosen not to complain, and he appreciated it, and he reached forward and started the motor. It took a while before dust-smelling heat-it was the first time he’d had to turn on the heat since winter-poured through the vents.

“Thank you,” she said.

The snow came straight down and had coated the streets and cars with a clean white inch. Falling snow haloed around the lampposts and turned pink in the neon red light from the Silver Dollar Bar sign. Nate checked the time and was surprised to see it was only 8:15. The tragic day they’d had, the stillness, the dark streets, and the smothering snowfall made it seem much later.

Haley said, “Maybe we could stay inside? Separate rooms, of course.”

Nate grunted. He liked the soft, husky tone of her voice. Despite what he’d told her earlier about talking, he found her voice attractive. Although she’d been sitting next to him nearly all day, he could feel her presence very strongly at that moment. He was tuned in to her every movement, every breath. Her dark hair shined blue with diffused ambient light from outside, like Superman in the comics. In the warm air of the heater, he could also catch a light whiff of her scent.

As the cab warmed up she had her eyes fixed on the windshield but said, “Gabriel told me about your loss. About your girlfriend getting killed.”

“She was more than that,” he said.

“You know what I mean. It must have been horrible.”

“It was. It is.”

“You don’t want to talk about it, right?”

“Right.”

After a moment, she said, “So we’ve both lost the people closest to us. What are the chances of that?”

He didn’t reply. But he found it more than interesting that she was thinking of the two of them that way. He’d been thinking the same thing but keeping it at bay because he was frightened of the possibilities.

“I’d like to get some sleep,” she said softly, “but I’m afraid if I close my eyes I’ll see Oscar’s body again. I’ll never be able to get that image out of my mind for the rest of my life.”

He nodded. “I’ve seen a lot of violent death. If you spend a lot of time in the natural world, there’s little else. I know there are wild animals that die of old age, but I’ve rarely seen one. There’s a point where you get like a hunter or a farmer-or a doctor-and you look at it almost clinically. Bullets are just chunks of metal thrown really fast through the air, and when they hit soft flesh they do terrible damage. You get used to it. But when it happens to a friend who was talking to you just a minute before-he’s there and then he isn’t, and all that’s left is meat-you never get used to that.”

He felt her eyes on him and almost didn’t want to look over.

“Your secret,” she asked. “You told Oscar, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“But no one else?”

“No, although a friend named Large Merle figured it out. He’s no longer with us. I tried to tell a good man I know, a game warden in Wyoming, but he didn’t want to hear it.”

She said, “Maybe I do.”

“Maybe you don’t,” he said, turning on the wipers to clear the windshield of snow that melted on contact.

“Not that it seems to matter,” she said. “Everybody you come in contact with seems to wind up ‘ no longer with us.’”

Nate grimaced and closed his eyes for a moment. “You don’t need to remind me,” he said, thinking of Joe and Marybeth. Hoping they’d see and understand his message to them to get away fast. Hoping they were in the process of packing bags that very minute. Wondering if he shouldn’t step out from his self-imposed communications blackout and make an unsecured phone call to emphasize his concern.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That came out wrong. I didn’t mean…”

He grunted again and waved her words away with his hand.

She said, “I meant you might as well tell me, because the bad guys will think you did, anyway, and they’ll try to kill me, too.”

He looked over at her as if seeing her for the first time. God, she was lovely. She didn’t deserve to know him, he thought. She didn’t deserve to get hurt.

He said, “If I do-”

She cut him off. “Like I said, it doesn’t matter. So you might as well. Lord knows, we seem to have the time.” He liked the way she pronounced time as “tahm.”

After pausing for a minute, he said, “It’s very close to me right now. Telling Oscar opened it all up like it was yesterday. All these years, I’ve struggled to keep it somewhere in the back of my brain, in the reptile part. But I spent too many years alone, with too much time to fight it back constantly. So at times, it crawled over the wall and haunted me, and after I’d chased it back I’d sit around for days and consider all the implications. In a strange way, I think Nemecek has the same problem. I dealt with it by staying out of the world and doing what good I could do. Trying to make up for what I did in a very small way, although I know it isn’t possible. I kind of adopted this family named the Picketts, and I swore I’d protect them. I have, up until now. But I’m afraid of what could happen to them. Their only crime is trusting me.”

She shook her head sadly, and asked, “How does Nemecek deal with it?”

“By making me go away,” Nate said. “And everybody who knows or might know. That’s one of the tragedies about what happened to Cohen and the rest back in Idaho. They didn’t know, but he thought they might.”

She said, “Could you go to someone? Maybe someone in the government who would be sympathetic? Or maybe a reporter?”

“No,” Nate said. “I’ve given it a lot of thought over the years, but I don’t know who I can trust. Something has happened to make Nemecek double down, to want to take care of his problem: me. Until I know what caused him to come out from under his rock, I don’t know who I can trust.”

“You can trust me,” she said.

“Can I?”

“Your arrogance is off-putting,” she said, an edge creeping into her voice. “You ask that question but you assume I should trust you with my life. Maybe you’ve spent too much damn time alone.”

He turned to her, amazed. “Maybe I have.”

Then he noted movement in his peripheral vision and sat up straight.

“What?” she asked.

Through the wet-streaked windshield undulating with moisture, he could see two men emerge from the side entrance of the Wort. Even without seeing their features clearly, he could tell by their bearing and presence they were heading for the Tahoe. They were both tall and without paunches, and they moved with an athletic grace not entirely affected by alcohol. One wore a battered straw cowboy hat and the other a ubiquitous billed trucker cap, as if they’d gone to a western store and said, “I want to look like a local yokel.” Cowboy Hat loped down the wood sidewalk and extended his hand toward the car. At that moment, the interior lights of the SUV came on as he keyed a remote.

“Buckle up,” he said.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “We’re gonna do this, aren’t we?”

Nate reached over and grasped her hand. “Last chance to get out. This could get ugly.”

“Like I haven’t seen ugly,” she said.