Patrick Lee - The Breach

Through the sheer curtain across the living-room window, Travis sees that he was close to right: they are seated, holding each other, though they've squeezed into one of the big recliners instead of the couch.

He knocks, and sees the man's shape turn. A moment later Travis sees his face through the little window in the door as he approaches across the laundry room. The man's eyes are blood red from crying. Behind him, the dining-room table is covered with flowers and somber cards.

The man does not even look through the door before opening it-he expects someone else, anyone else-and when he finds himself face to face with Travis, he flinches angrily. His eyes narrow. A tear spills from the left one.

Looking into those eyes, Travis expects the man to turn from the door, stride into the next room, return with his shotgun and open fire. If it happens, Travis will not try to run. He knows he deserves it, for the misery he has brought to these people.

But Emily Price's father does not turn away. Behind him in the house, her mother calls out to ask who's there, her voice stretched and ruined by her own tears.

She gets no answer.

Mr. Price holds his glare on Travis and says, "What do you want, Detective?"

Travis hears the contempt behind the last word. He knows he deserves that, too.

"What have the police told you?" Travis says.

The man's eyes harden. "Why don't you go ask them? They trust you, right?"

Travis says nothing. He waits for the answer.

"They're not going to charge anyone," Mr. Price says at last. Hate and despair and torment become a unified whole in his voice.

"Why not?"

"No evidence. They didn't even find her body. Just her car. But they said there was so much-" The man falters. For a moment he seems incapable of saying more. Then: "There was enough blood, her blood, that a girl her size couldn't have sur-"

His voice gives out then, of its own accord. He looks down. His lower lip shakes.

Through the tremors, Mr. Price says, "She didn't do anything to them. This is all you. It started with you."

Travis manages a nod. He steps closer and speaks softly. "It's going to end with me."

Mr. Price looks up at him.

"I wasn't here tonight," Travis says. "Can you agree to that, Mr. Price?"

Emily's father only stares. Seconds pass. He knows what Travis is saying. He knows what he means to do. For a moment he actually considers his response, as if there's any real choice. But then, because Emily was his only daughter, because she took her first awkward steps into his arms, because when she was a teenager she used to fall asleep resting against his shoulder on the couch during The Tonight Show, and because three times today he's gone into her bedroom and pressed her pillow to his face to breathe in whatever fading trace is left of her there, he nods.

"Okay," Travis says.

Mr. Price closes the door, and Travis turns away, back into the night and the fog, and his hand goes unconsciously to the.32.

Travis ran the last thousand yards to the highway. His knee joints felt like they were riding on glass chips instead of cartilage. Through the front windows of the Brooks Lodge and Fuel Depot he saw half a dozen patrons, maybe the regulars watching a baseball game on the TV above the serving counter. It was eight o'clock at night, the sunlight slanting long and red from the northwest.

He stopped at the road, a hundred feet from the restaurant. Paige was stirring in his arms, jostled by the run but unable to regain consciousness. Her breathing had developed a rattle in the past two hours. Sometimes she took a deep breath and sounded like she was choking for a second before getting past it.

Travis studied the patrons as well as he could at this distance. They looked harmless enough-to the extent he could judge it.

There was every reason to expect trouble from Paige's enemies here, the one place where their arrival could have been predicted-and predicted well in advance. The only advantage the town offered was its limited size: there was simply no place where the enemy could have set up a stakeout without attracting attention. No sprawling parking lots to conceal a van. No residential side streets, either. The one place in town where a person might sit for a few hours without drawing looks was the restaurant in the lodge, but if the hostiles' reinforcements were anything like the ones Travis had seen at the camp-foreign nationals armed with halting English-then blending in that way would be off the table as well.

Granted, they probably had the connections to send someone who didn't stick out so much, and they'd had a day and a half now to do it, but even at that, Coldfoot was just not a place where outsiders lingered. Truckers heading north to Prudhoe Bay might stop for a meal, and the occasional van full of tourists might spend the night, but nobody hung around. Coldfoot was a stop on a long road that went to exactly one place. It was nobody's endpoint.

No, if there were watchers here, they were in concealment high above town. Travis swept his eyes over the encircling ridges; there were so many pine and alder groves it wasn't worth scrutinizing any one in particular. Either they were there, or they weren't. If they were, then trouble would arrive long before help, and it would simply have to be dealt with. The 9mm pistol from the hostiles' camp, the only weapon he'd brought along, felt reassuring in his back waistband, his shirt draped loosely over it.

He crossed the highway and jogged the last distance over the gravel lot, past his own Explorer, two Jeeps, and a yellow Land Rover. When he was thirty feet from the building, a big guy in a John Deere hat inside saw him coming, looked confused for a second, and then ran to shove the door open and meet him.

"What happened?" the man shouted.

Behind him, the others had forgotten the ball game and were on their feet, staring through the windows as Travis ran up.

He had the abridged version of the story well rehearsed, and the stress in his delivery would simply be genuine.

"I found her in a valley west of here," he said, hearing his own voice for the first time in twenty hours and finding it convincingly ragged. No doubt his appearance matched it.

The big guy held the door aside as Travis stepped through, and the gathered patrons reacted as one to the sight of Paige's arm; it couldn't have been much worse if he'd brought a corpse into their midst. A blonde woman who'd come from behind the counter-Molly, according to her shirt-choked down most of a scream, stepping back and knocking over a wire newspaper stand.

Then everyone was talking, a short woman with her hand on her mouth, her eyes going from Paige to Travis and narrowing, maybe judging, the big guy in the hat coming around from the door now, reacting hard at the sight of the clamps, asking what in the holy fuck they were "This is how I found her," Travis said over them all. "She hasn't spoken, I don't know who the hell did this. I don't know anything, just call it in, okay? How fast can the cops and paramedics get up here?"

That last bit was for the locals' benefit only-he had no intention of waiting around for police or anyone else, or entrusting her to their protection even if they somehow arrived before whoever Tangent sent.

But it worked. Any suspicion aimed at him vanished. Molly was already rounding the counter, picking up the phone and dialing something longer than 9-1-1.

"Gonna be five, six hours for the cops," the big man said. "There's no highway patrol on the Dalton. Medevac chopper out of Fairbanks, figure ninety minutes at least. Had a trucker come in here having a heart attack, couple years ago, took that long for them to make the flight."