Chapter 6
Joe did not run.
That was the thing he would think about afterward, lying awake, and he would never be able to explain it.
Every animal instinct in him said drop, and instead he stopped walking and turned around slowly with the gun rig hanging from his left hand.
Behind him, nine men were coming apart.
Doors. Boots on gravel. The high metallic clatter of eleven things happening at once, and a man's voice shouting a word that was not a word.
And in the middle of it, Arlan Crowe stood exactly where he had been standing, with his hands at his sides, looking up the mountain.
"HOLD," Crowe said.
He did not shout it. He put it out at about the volume a man uses to stop a dog.
Every one of them held.
Joe raised his own voice, and he did shout, and it came out of him like something tearing.
"PRUITT. STAND DOWN. STAND DOWN."
The canyon rang and went quiet.
Up on the bank, nothing moved. The blowdown sat there gray and dead and completely still, and no voice came out of it, and no second shot came either.
That was when the cold went through Joe.
Because Pruitt would have answered.
Pruitt was a man who said four words an hour and every one of them was useful, and if Pruitt had fired that shot he would have said something, because he would have had a reason and he would have wanted Joe to know it.
Joe turned back around.
Arlan Crowe was looking at him with those pale eyes and something was happening behind them very fast.
"That wasn't mine," Crowe said.
"I know it wasn't."
"You know that."
"I've been on the receiving end of you for forty minutes," Joe said. "If you wanted me down I'd be down."
Crowe absorbed that.
"It wasn't your blowdown either," he said.
"No."
"It came from high right. Two hundred feet above your man, maybe more. I watched the echo."
"You watched the echo."
"You can see it in the trees if the timber's cold enough," Crowe said. "That's a thing I learned on a road in 1991 and I have never had a use for it until this exact minute."
Joe's mouth was dry.
"Then there's a third party on this mountain," he said.
"Yes."
"And they just fired one round at a man standing in the open at twenty yards from you, with nine of your men and two of mine watching, and they missed."
"Did they?"
Joe stopped.
"What."
"Mister Henfry." Crowe reached up, took the reading glasses off his hat brim, and looked at them, and put them back.
"I've been shot at a number of times, and I will tell you that the men who miss at that distance do not put it past your ear. They put it in the gravel forty feet away, or they put it in the man next to you."
"You think that was on purpose."
"I think somebody just told both of us something," Crowe said, "and I think we're going to spend the rest of the week figuring out what."
He turned and walked back toward the flatbed, unhurried, and it took everything Joe had not to watch him go.
Instead he backed up eleven steps, over the chain, into cover behind the woodpile, with his hand finally finding the Ruger and the whole world narrowing down to the trees above his house.
The vehicles left at nine fifty one.
They pulled out slow and backed down the switchback and Joe watched the dust of them all the way to the county road.
Then he ran.
He went up the uphill bank on all fours, grabbing scrub oak, with the big rifle slung across his back and slapping his spine at every step, and he came up on the blowdown from the side, low, and he shouted Pruitt's name twice before he got to it.
"I'm here."
Pruitt's voice.
Joe came around the deadfall and found the man flat on his belly with the thirty aught six still shouldered and his face the color of a wet sheet.
"Are you hit."
"No."
"Pruitt."
"I'm not hit."
Joe dropped down next to him.
"Then what."
Pruitt lifted one hand off the rifle and pointed, straight up the slope, at an angle that made Joe's neck hurt.
"He walked past me," Pruitt said.
"What?"
"Thirty feet above me. Going left to right. I had my eye in the glass on Crowe and I heard the needles and I thought it was a deer, and I did not look, because you told me the one job was the road."
Joe followed the line of his hand.
Timber. Steep, dark, thick with blowdown and beetle kill, going up to the knob.
"Did you see him at all."
"After," Pruitt said. "After the shot. I rolled over and I got about a second and a half."
"And?"
"Long gun with glass on it. Pack. Something on his face."
"On his face?"
"Cloth, or a net, I don't know. Green." Pruitt swallowed. "And Mister Henfry, he wasn't running. That's the part. He fired one round at a man twenty yards from Arlan Crowe with eleven guns on the road and then he walked off up that hill at a walk."
Joe sat back against the deadfall.
"Which way."
"Northeast. Toward the saddle."
"Toward the Broken Y."
"Toward the Broken Y," Pruitt said, and his jaw worked. "Or past it."
They swept the slope for two hours.
Joe did not want to and knew he had to, because a man who did not look would spend the next four nights imagining a rifle in every tree.
They found the spot in forty minutes.
It was a shelf of rock behind a fallen fir about two hundred and eleven feet above the blowdown, and it had a view of the entire road from the second switchback down to the county line, and it was the single best position on that mountain and Joe had never once been on it.
There were pine needles pressed flat in the shape of a body.
There was a divot in the moss where a bipod had sat.
There was one brass case, and Joe crouched over it for a long moment before touching it.
"Two twenty three?" Pruitt said.
"No."
Joe picked it up with two fingers.
The case was long and bottlenecked and heavier than it should have been, and the headstamp was stamped clean and deep, and he turned it in the light and read it.
"Three oh eight," he said. "Match brass. Nosler."
"Is that bad?"
"It's expensive," Joe said. "It's what somebody buys when they reload for accuracy and they care about it more than money."
He put the case in his shirt pocket.
Then he looked around the shelf again and something wrong finally resolved itself.
"Pruitt."
"Yeah."
"There's only one case."
"He fired once."
"He fired once today," Joe said. "But look at the needles. Look how they're packed down. That's not one morning. That's somebody who has laid on this rock for days."
He put his hand flat on the moss.
"And he policed his brass every single time except this one."
Pruitt got very still.
"He left it on purpose," he said.
"He left it on purpose."
They went back down.
Colby was still in the ditch, exactly where he had been told to be, an hour after everyone had left.
Joe had to call his name twice before the kid came up out of it, and when he did his hands were shaking so badly he could not get the shotgun's safety back on.
"I didn't shoot," Colby said.
"I know."
"I almost did. When the shot came I almost."
"But you didn't," Joe said. "Colby. Look at me. You did the one thing I asked you to do, and it was the hardest thing anybody did this morning, and I will say that in front of everybody in that house."
Colby started crying and tried to pretend he was not, and Joe put a hand on the back of his neck and walked him up the hill.
Imogen came out the mudroom door before they were halfway across the yard and Joe saw her count them, one two three, and then saw her shoulders drop.
Nobody spoke until everyone was inside and the door was shut.
Then Bill Tandy said, "Whose shot?"
"Nobody's," Joe said.
"Son, a bullet came out of a gun."
"Not Crowe's. Not mine. Not Pruitt's."
The room went quiet in a way that had weight to it.
"There's a fourth party," Joe said. "One man, maybe more. Set up on a rock shelf two hundred feet above my rifleman, with a scoped bolt gun in three oh eight and match ammunition and something over his face, and he has been laying there for days, and he watched the entire negotiation this morning,
and at the end of it he put one round past my ear and then walked away at a walk."
"Why," said Delores.
"I don't know."
"Was he trying to kill you?"
"He wasn't trying to kill me," Joe said. "If he was trying to kill me I'd be dead. It was the easiest shot on that mountain."
"Then what was it?"
Joe put the brass case on the table.
Everyone looked at it.
"It was a sentence," he said.
Imogen picked it up and turned it over.
"What's the sentence?"
"That's the problem," Joe said. "There's about four of them and they're all different."
He pulled out a chair and sat down hard.
"It could be, I can kill you any time I want. It could be, don't trade with that man. It could be, I'm watching both of you and neither of you owns this road."
He rubbed his eyes. "Or it could be somebody who hates Arlan Crowe very much and wanted him to see a man walk toward him and then flinch, to find out if I'd flinch."
"You didn't flinch," said Hazel.
"No."
"So what does he know now?"
"He knows I didn't flinch," Joe said. "And I don't know if that's good."
They sat with it.
Then Imogen set the case down and said, "Tell us the rest of the meeting."
So he did.
He told them all of it, in order, without editorializing, the way he had learned in twenty six months of writing things on cards. The nine men instead of eleven. The offer. The fuel and the primers and the antibiotics and the ketamine and the filing cabinet.
The daughter.
"Merrit," Imogen said. "That's her name."
"Nine years old. Diagnosed at four. Eleven vials in a hole in the ground at fifty two degrees."
Imogen's face did not move at all, and Joe knew her well enough to know that she had already gone somewhere else entirely and was doing math in a part of her head he would never have access to.
"Type one," she said.
"He didn't say."
"Diagnosed at four, it's type one. There's no other realistic answer." She sat down across from him. "Long acting and short?"
"That's what he said."
"Then somebody's been managing her well. That's a basal bolus regimen and it takes attention. That's not a man who's guessing."
"He's not a man who guesses about anything."
Imogen pressed her fingers against her mouth.