Page 104 of Three-Inch Teeth

“Nate, I …” Joe started to say, when Nate shook his head sharply and retreated around the back of the truck to the other side.

Joe peered into the back of the pickup and the first thing he saw in the beam of his headlamp was a set of massive open steel jaws less than a foot from his face. Inset along the jaws were long yellow grizzly teeth stained with dried blood.

He cried out and dropped as if his legs were cut out from under him. His glimpse of Dallas Cates, balled up and still in the front of the bed, registered almost as an afterthought.

Joe heard the pickup roar to life and a cloud of exhaust from the tailpipe choked him. Nate had obviously shoved the dead driver aside in the cab and started the truck.

He pulled himself back to his feet and caught a glimpse of the back of Nate’s head through the gore-streaked rear window and slider.

“Nate!” Joe called as the vehicle sped away. “Nate, stop!”

*

JOE TURNED WHEN the porch lights came on at the front of his house, and Sheridan stepped out holding her rifle and watching the taillights of the pickup blink out as it rocketed through the trees.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yup.”

“Are we safe from Dallas?”

“Yup.”

“Who is the dead man?”

“Said his name was Lee Ogburn-Russell.”

“Was it Nate?” she asked.

“Yup.”

“Does he know?”

“I’m pretty sure he does, honey.”

Marybeth shouldered through the door holding Kestrel against her breasts. The little girl was crying.

“The gunshots upset her,” she said.

Joe nodded dumbly. He had trouble unseeing the steel jaws, the three-inch teeth, Dallas’s body, and Nate’s terrifying face in the light of his headlamp. Joe slid on the safety of his shotgun and turned toward his pickup.

“Where are you going?” Marybeth asked.

“I’m going to find Nate.”

“Are you going to bring him back?” she asked.

“Not if the sheriff is here,” Joe said over his shoulder.

*

WHEN JOE ARRIVED at the former Cates compound, he found Dallas tied to a pole once used by his father and brothers to hang game animals. His hands were bound behind his back. Dallas’s broken body was glowing pink from the taillights of his pickup positioned fifteen feet away. A red-dot laser hovered above his right eyebrow. Cates was conscious but badly hurt, with bullet wounds in both of his shoulders and his upper left thigh.

Joe pulled his truck in front of the pickup and climbed out, deliberately leaving his shotgun inside the cab.

He sidled up to the side of the pickup’s topper, where an oblong slider was open, and he peered inside.

Nate sat on a metal tractor seat with his hands gripping the controls and his thumb poised over a red button on the right joystick. He looked straight ahead out the back of the pickup over the top of the telescopic scissor jib. Nate didn’t acknowledge that Joe was standing right next to him.

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