C Box: Blue Heaven

She inched forward, parting the grass. She could feel the approach of the vehicle from the ground beneath her, a vibration that made her feel more like an animal than a girl.

She saw an antenna, then the top of a cab of a pickup, then a windshield. She raised her head.

It was a new-model red pickup with a single occupant. Whooping, she scrambled to her feet and pulled William along with her, and they stood in the road.

At first, she wasn’t sure the driver saw her. He was going slowly, and staring out into the trees off to the side instead of at the road. But just as she began to step back toward the shoulder, the pickup slowed and she recognized the driver as Mr. Swann. Mr. Swann had once dated their mother, and although he was much older than she, and it didn’t work out, he had not been unkind to them.

As Swann stopped and leaned over and opened the passenger door, Annie Taylor began to weep with absolute relief, her hot tears streaming down her face.

“Whoa,” Mr. Swann said, looking them over, “are you two all right? Did you get lost out here?”

“Will you please take us home?” Annie said through her tears.

“What happened?”

“Please take us home,” William said. “We saw a man get killed.”

“What?”

As William climbed into the truck, Annie heard another motor. She looked up the road where it curved to the right and could see a vehicle coming, glimpses of it flashing through the trunks of the trees.

It was the white SUV.

“Get on the floor,” she yelled to her brother. “It’s them !”

“Annie, what’s going on here?” Swann asked, frowning.

“They want to kill us!” Annie said, hurtling inside and shutting the door behind her. She cowered with William on the floor of the pickup.

“Oh, come on now,” Swann said.

“Please, just drive,” Annie said, her voice cracking. “Please just drive ahead.”

Swann slid the truck back into gear, and she could feel it moving, hear the gravel start to crunch.

“Maybe I should just stop them and ask them what’s going on?” Swann asked. “I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding.”

“NO!” Annie and William howled in unison.

She looked up at Swann as he drove, saw the confusion on his face. What if the men in the SUV waved Swann down to talk? It wasn’t unusual on these back roads to see two vehicles stopped side by side as the drivers exchanged information and pleasantries.

“Please don’t stop,” Annie said again.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Swann said, “but it has you two scared to death, that’s for sure.”

Swann pursed his lips and looked ahead. She wished she could see how close the white SUV was, and what the men inside were doing. Instead, she wrapped her arms around William and watched Swann.

“They want me to stop,” Swann said, not looking down.

“Don’t. Please.”

“If I don’t stop, they’ll wonder why.”

Annie felt another imminent, choking cry, and tried to stifle it.

The pickup slowed. She tried to push William down even farther into the floor, and herself as well. She could feel his heart beating, fluttering, where her hand held his chest. She closed her eyes, as if by not seeing the men they couldn’t look in and see her .

“Afternoon, Mr. Singer,” Swann said as he rolled his window down.

“Afternoon,” Singer said. Singer was the Driver, Annie guessed. Mr. Swann knew him.

Singer said, “Hey, did you see some kids anywhere along the road?”

“They yours?” Swann asked.

“No, not mine. Mine are grown and married, you know that. I don’t know who they are. Me and my two compadres here were fishing and horsing around down on the river, and we scared a couple of kids. We were target shooting, and we didn’t know they were there. We think they might have thought they saw something they didn’t.”

“Target shooting?”

“Yeah, we try to get out every couple of months to stay sharp. Anyway, we want to make sure those poor kids know we meant no harm.”

Annie cracked an eye to look at Swann. Don’t do it , she wanted to shout.

“Scared ’em pretty good, eh?” Swann said.

“I’m afraid so. Anyway, we want to find them and let ’em know everything’s okay.”

“Is everything okay?” Swann asked.

Singer didn’t respond.

“It will be when we find those kids,” another man said with a trace of a Mexican accent. Annie guessed it was the Dark Man with the mustache.

“So you haven’t seen them?” Singer asked again.

Swann hesitated.

Annie closed her eyes again and tried to prepare to die. She didn’t hear the bulk of the conversation that followed because it was drowned out by the roar of blood in her ears, although she did hear Swann say someone had come up behind him and was waiting for him to go.

“Yes,” Singer had said, “you had better go home now.”

She couldn’t believe her luck-their luck-when she realized the truck was moving again.

“I think you kids should stay down,” Swann said.

Annie asked, “Where are you taking us?”

“My place is just up the road, and I need to make a call.”

“Why aren’t you taking us home?”

“Because I don’t want to run into those boys again,” Swann said. “I know them from back on the force, and that story they just told me doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“That’s because we’re telling you the truth,” Annie said, feeling the tears well up in her eyes.

“Maybe,” Swann said. “Keep your heads down.”

Friday, 4:40P.M.

JESS RAWLINS was doing groundwork with his new horse Chile in the round pen near the corral when a new-model Lexus emerged from the timber on the southern hill and drove down the access road toward his ranch house. It caught him by surprise because he was concentrating so fully on his horse, a fourteen-hand three-year-old red dun. He had fallen into a kind of hyperalert trance, mesmerized by the rhythmic sound and cadence of her hoofbeats. Jess had forgotten how much he loved the sound of hoofbeats, the solid soft pounding rhythm of them, how he could feel them through the ground as the eleven-hundred-pound animal trotted, how the sound lulled him, took him back. A few moments before, when he was lunging her to the right, he’d picked out the sound of a series of sharp rapid-fire percussions along with the thump of her hoofbeats, a snapping sound that alarmed him for a moment before he realized they were from far up the valley and had nothing to do with the gait of his horse. He had stopped her suddenly, and she had turned nicely into an abrupt stop, facing him like she was supposed to, looking at him with both eyes, breathing hard, licking her lips with compliance. He listened and heard no more pops in the distance.

If the wooded valley he lived in was indeed a saddle slope, his house and outbuildings were located just under the pommel. From there, he could see anyone coming down from the state highway toward his ranch. At dusk, he often watched mule deer graze their way to the valley floor to drink at the stream.

He kissed the air and sidestepped to the right, and Chile responded instantly with the correct lead, trotting in a circle to the left on the end of the lead rope Jess held loosely in his left hand. In his right was a stiff coil of rope used to signal the mare, keep the invisible pressure on her to keep moving in a nice smooth stride. Sometimes, to get her attention, he whapped the rope against the leg of his Wranglers. Mostly, though, all he had to do was raise it to get her moving. He had never hit her with it. As Chile circled, Jess stayed on her left flank. Jess was falling madly in love with this horse, a short, stout, heavily muscled little mare with a kind eye and two white socks. People who watched horse races and thought horses should be aquiline and sleek would find Chile ugly. Jess didn’t. She was a classic foundation quarter horse, a cow horse. In his peripheral vision, he noted the slow progress of the car.