Chapter 13
thirteen
The goat had opinions about his exam and was making them known.
Bear wrapped both arms around its neck, braced a knee against its flank, and pinned it to the steel table while Lila worked the wound on its shoulder. His phone buzzed against the counter. The screen lit at the edge of his vision, and every muscle in his body went wrong at once.
Solace High.
“I need thirty seconds,” he said.
Lila looked up from the suture. “Hold position.”
He held position. Held it through ninety more seconds while she closed the last of it and started wrapping. The goat had stopped fighting and gone aggrieved, letting out periodic complaints that bounced off the exam room walls. Bear kept his hands where they were. Kept his eyes on the phone.
When Lila reached for the gauze tape, he peeled off his gloves.
“I have to take this.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He pushed through the exam room door into the hall, pressing call back before it shut behind him.
The secretary’s voice was careful. “Mr. McKenna. Thank you for calling back. We have a situation with your son.”
He only vaguely heard her through the rushing pump of his blood in his ears.
Logan had left the cafeteria during third period. Hadn’t shown for fourth, fifth, or sixth. His backpack was still on the chair. His lunch tray was still on the table.
He hung up, ducked back into the exam room long enough to say “I have to go,” and yanked his jacket off the hook. Lila opened her mouth. He was out the door before she got the word out.
He drove home doing ten over with both hands on the wheel and his jaw locked. The Bitterroots stood white and still against the sky to the west. He glowered at every stoplight, every slow car ahead of him, every mile between the clinic and Maple Street. His mind ran the same loop on repeat.
Logan’s backpack still on the chair.
Logan’s lunch tray still on the table.
He turned onto Maple and screeched to a halt in the driveway, flying out the door before the truck finished rocking.
Inside, he went through the house room by room. Logan’s bedroom first. Star Wars comforter. Paperback face down on the nightstand. Nikes shoved half under the bed frame.
“Logan?”
Bathroom. Empty.
Kitchen, where the cereal box still sat beside the mugs.
“Logan.”
Basement, cold and smelling of old concrete, where he’d been stacking lumber for the porch repair. King padded behind him through every doorway, head swinging, nose working, his big body filling the narrow hall.
He came back through the kitchen and out the front door, phone in his fist.
Think.
Logan had forty-three dollars.
No bag— the backpack was at school. He was wearing his hoodie, the gray one—
Bear stopped.
The gray hoodie was on the couch. He’d walked past it coming in. Which meant Logan had left without it, in his usual long-sleeved Nirvana shirt and jeans.
It was forty-five degrees out and dropping.
He went back inside, pulled King’s orange tracking harness off the nail by the back door, and crouched on the kitchen floor. King came to him without being called and held still while Bear buckled the harness. Bear picked up Logan’s hoodie from the couch and held it out.
A long shot. King was mediocre at tracking on a good day.
It was what he had.
“This is Logan,” he said. “Find Logan.”
They went east.
Past the school, where King didn’t stop at the front doors, the parking lot, or the football field, where a few kids were still running track.
Past the park at Birch and Third, where the playground equipment threw long shadows across the grass.
Past the corner of Main, where the pharmacist flipped his sign to closed and didn’t look up at the six-foot-seven man in a barn jacket walking east with a Leonberger the size of a small horse on a tracking harness.
Bear kept his eyes on King and let him work, silently praying that this would be the one time King remembered his training and didn’t get stubborn about it.
The dog moved with purpose, nose to the pavement, tail low.
The Conoco came into view at the edge of town, where the highway straightened out, and the mountains pulled back from the road.
It had two pump islands, a glass-front store, and a hand-painted banner in the window advertising a Friday special on fountain drinks.
King pulled hard toward the nearest island and started working it in tight circles, nose dragging the asphalt between the pumps.
Bear stood back and watched him work.
The circles tightened.
Then King sat.
He looked up with his big amber-brown eyes, and Bear knew.
The scent was there, and then it wasn’t, buried under diesel exhaust and tire rubber and every car that had cycled through since Logan stood here. Sometime in the last several hours, his son had been on this pump island, and King could not tell him anything else.
Bear crouched beside him and put one hand flat on the dog’s back. He looked east.
The highway opened toward Missoula, sixty miles of two-lane that widened to four past the county line, and from Missoula you took I-90 east toward Billings, and from Billings the interstate ran straight and flat all the way to Denver.
Forty-three dollars.
No bag.
A Nirvana shirt in forty-five-degree weather.
He’d been trying to get through to Logan for weeks. He’d watched and waited and stayed close without crowding, trying to let the kid come to him at his own pace.
But he hadn’t seen this coming.
His mind went sideways and landed somewhere he hadn’t meant to go— Greta at her kitchen table with a photo of a girl who’d been sixteen when she walked into the dark and didn’t come back.
Fifteen years of flyers. Fifteen years of unanswered leads.
A case the sheriff’s department had filed under runaway and never reopened.
He straightened and stared up the highway.
Christ. What if his son had hitched a ride with someone? And what if that someone turned out to be dangerous?
No. No, he didn’t think Logan would do that. For all of the kid’s anger, he wasn’t stupid.
So he was still somewhere in town. He could be tracked by the better-trained dog.
There was only one person he knew who had a well-trained dog and knew how to find someone in the dark, and she lived across the street…
He turned and ran back to Maple. King loped at his side, paws thumping the pavement.
Greta opened the door before he finished knocking. She must have watched him come steamrolling up Maple. “What’s wrong?”
He gave it to her straight. “Logan is missing. King lost his scent at the Conoco.”
She swore and turned back into the house.
He stood in the doorway, King panting hard beside him, and listened. The jangle of Atlas’s working harness coming off the hook. The scrape of boots. The zip of her SAR vest. He’d watched her gear up before, but this was different.
She came back to the door in under ninety seconds. Atlas was in full gear at her left knee, his orange harness a match for King’s, his whole body pitched forward, all but vibrating to get on with the job.
“How long since the school lost him?” she asked, pulling the door shut behind her.
“Three, maybe four hours.”
She nodded. Said nothing else.
He was grateful for that more than he had words for, so he didn’t try.