Page 2 of Hell and Gone
I’m sorry. I wish—
“It’s time for debts to be settled,” the man growled. “It’spasttime.”
His hand came down on Banshee’s hindquarters. She squealed and lurched, bolting forward in a wild gallop through the trees out to open range.
Carson twisted on the end of the rope, his empty legs kicking and searching for purchase as the air punched out of him and didn’t return. He kept his eyes open as long as he could, drinking in the country and the setting sun bathing the meadows in spilled paint, in all the pastel colors man had ever named. A thousand regrets flashed through his mind, days and nights he’d never live, dreams he’d spun out under the big sky that would never unfurl from his mind. His life had seemed open once, unburdened, a wild emptiness ready to be filled with every daring thought he’d ever had.
As the darkness closed in, one thought rang through his mind, one thought sharper, harder edged, more filled with regret than all the others. It was the beginning, he realized, of it all. Of everything.
I wish I’d never met you, Law.
Chapter 2
All rootless thingsare grabbed by the wind, and so was Everett Dawson.
Gusts tumbled down the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, battering his pickup truck. The engine growled, chewing miles of asphalt beneath the humming tires. Ahead of him, prairie stretched from horizon to horizon.
Shadows loomed on his left. Mountains jutted for the sky, jagged teeth screaming at the sun like a drowning man gasping for air before he was pulled beneath the waves. Pine and cottonwood draped over the peaks, ash and poplar and elder scattered up and down the lower slopes. They seemed unbowed, unmoved, even in the punishing Montana winds.
Everett stared hard at the mountains. Google told him they were haunted, filled with the rage of an old Native American woman who’d gone crazy after a vision quest went wrong. As punishment from her gods, she’d roamed the hills for the rest of her life, her mind broken, her rage unchecked. Outlaws and then bootleggers used to hide in the mountains, undoubtedly using—probably even creating—the legend of the old woman for cover.
He slapped his blinker down, signaling a left turn. There was no one on the highway. There hadn’t been for hours.
He pointed his truck at the range, letting the engine open up as he floored the accelerator along the last flat stretch of road before the foothills swallowed up the asphalt. False dusk fell over him, and he pushed his sunglasses onto his forehead as the mountain’s peak eclipsed the sun.
The radio, already scratchy and fading in and out ever since he’d turned off the state highway an hour before, fell away. Soft static filled the cabin, mixed with the rumble of his engine. The wind died. Everything was still in the mountain’s shadow.
His truck began the climb.
Everett Dawson arrived in the Crazy Mountains.
Chapter 3
Lawrence Jackson droppedthe corpse on the front desk of the Timber Creek Sheriff’s Office. “Now, will one of youfinallytake this situation seriously, for God’s sake!”
The young deputy manning the front desk, so fresh he still had pimples dotting his jawline and the shine hadn’t rubbed off his badge yet, flew back, tipping his chair over as he scrambled away. “What thefuck?” His tan cowboy hat rolled off his head and hit the ground, right before his ass did.
“You,” Lawrence growled. “You graduated high school up in Lone Pine last year, yeah? Go’n get me a real deputy!”
The kid scowled as he slowly picked himself up, grabbed his hat, and shoved it on his head. He didn’t move.
“Now!” Lawrence barked. “Or should I leave this here with you?” He rocked the corpse toward the kid. Bloat had started to set in, and the man’s face was hideous and disfigured, mottled with ugly purple and violent green turning black, the color of rot sinking deep into dead flesh. Deep rope cuts ate into the corpse’s neck.
The deputy scrambled away, running into a desk and a rolling chair before tearing to the back office and leaving Lawrence alone.
Sighing, Lawrence relaxed his hold on the dead body and straightened him out, lying the corpse on his back as best he could. He tried, and failed, to make it seem like he was resting, only closing his eyes. Napping.
The frozen face, twisted in panic, and the ravaged throat screamed the lie.
His heart squeezed, and he ran his fingers down the side of the cold face. He couldn’t look at the neck, at what had been done.
“What the fuck is goin’ on?” a deep voice boomed from the back of the bullpen.
Lawrence snapped up his gaze and met the stormy eyes of Sheriff Darby Braddock.
Darby Braddock was a bear of a man, sixty years old, as old as the mountains themselves, the young kids joked. He laughed at the kids’ jokes and then whipped their asses at each of the county’s high schools in annual Wrestle the Sheriff matches. Even with a full head of silver hair and deep lines creasing his face, Braddock was strong as an ox. Timber Creek and the Crazy Mountains were his, and he’d kept the law there since he was a deputy fresh out of school at the ripe young age of seventeen.
Lawrence had grown up in Braddock’s shadow. Braddock had watched him at his first school rodeo, cheering the school team on. He’d been there when Lawrence was suspended from high school for fighting, and then there again when Lawrence dropped out. “This isn’t the path you wanna take, son,” Braddock had warned.
