Chapter 1 #2
Suzette’s eyes focused on Sierra’s face with obvious effort. “We were hiking. Following the trail toward the creek. Then we heard—” She shuddered. “A gunshot. Close. Really close.”
“Where exactly?”
“Maybe a quarter mile from here? We were near that old ranch house when we heard it. Roland said we should go back, but then we saw someone in the trees. A man.”
Sierra’s blood turned to ice. “What did he look like?”
“I don’t know. Like a hunter, maybe? He had a rifle. He was with another man. They were arguing and…then when he saw us, one of the men took off. And so did we.”
“Why’d you run?”
“Too many movies?” Suzette made a face. “Instinct, maybe. When we heard the gunshot, Roland grabbed my hand and we took off through the trees. But the terrain was so rough, and it was getting dark. Roland tripped on a root and went down hard. I heard his leg snap.” Suzette’s voice broke.
“I managed to get him here, but he’s been in and out of consciousness all night. ”
Sierra processed this information while splinting Roland’s leg.
“This man you saw,” Jackson said. “Did he follow you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I kept looking over my shoulder, but it was getting dark. Every shadow looked like someone watching us.”
Sierra keyed her radio. “Base, this is Sierra. We need immediate helicopter extraction for one broken leg, possible concussion. Also requesting law enforcement support. Hikers report encountering armed individual in the area.”
“Copy, Sierra. Sheriff’s deputies are en route to your location.”
They worked to stabilize Roland for transport.
“What house is she talking about?” Jackson asked.
“Oh, it’s the old Wallace house,” Sierra said. “It’s on Jenkins land, but near the creek that forms the boundary between the Jenkins land and the national forest. And our land is right next door. Paige, help me get him on the stretcher,” Sierra said. “We need to move before that weather hits.”
Dark clouds were building over the western peaks, and the wind was picking up. They had maybe two hours before the storm arrived.
As they carried Roland down the mountainside, Suzette walking beside them, Sierra couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being watched. The hair on the back of her neck prickled every time they passed through a stand of trees or around a bend in the trail.
“There.” Suzette suddenly stopped, pointing to an opening in the pine trees. And through them, across the river, Sierra spotted the road that ran between her property and the Jenkins place. “That’s where we saw him.”
And the old Wallace place. The house commanded a clear view of the entire valley below, including the trail system and the distant ranch lands.
The yellow single-story frame house sat in a clearing surrounded by towering cottonwoods and scrub oak, weathered but still solid after decades of mountain winters.
A covered porch ran across the front, supported by simple wooden posts, while a lean-to addition stretched along one side.
The metal roof showed patches of rust, and several windows were boarded up with plywood, but the structure looked sturdy enough.
The place had that abandoned look of a homestead where the family had simply walked away one day and never come back.
Really, they had, according to…
“Yeah, no one lives there now,” she said, and made a mental note to ask Detective Martinelli to swing by. Not that trespassers mattered—no one was coming home to claim it.
The ambulance was waiting just ahead, in the trailhead parking lot. Jackson greeted his coworkers, then helped load Roland into the ambulance.
“You okay?” Jackson said as the ambulance drove away.
She’d been staring at the house, of course. She’d only visited once, and that had…that had gone badly.
“I’m fine. I need to get into town and pick up Huck.”
Paige walked up with her German shepherd, Rex, at her side. The K-9 handler’s radio crackled in her hand. “Police want to debrief you and your team. Can you come in?”
Sierra keyed the mic, her eyes still fixed on the hills above her ranch. “Copy, base. We’re on our way.”
She turned away from the house. The memories. The trauma. The sense that someone might be watching her—
Rex suddenly went rigid, his ears pricked forward. A low growl rumbled in his chest.
“What’s he alerting on?” Jackson asked.
Paige studied her dog’s body language. “Something’s wrong. Rex, show me.”
The German shepherd trotted toward a rocky outcrop behind them, about thirty yards from the old house, on the Blackwood side of the road, where another abandoned mine shaft cut into the hillside.
This one was smaller than where they’d found the hikers, barely wide enough for a man to crawl through.
Rex stopped at the edge of a shallow gully that ran alongside the mine entrance, his hackles raised.
“There.” Paige pointed. “In the wash.”
Sierra’s heart hammered as she approached the depression. At first, she saw only rocks and scattered debris washed down from the hillside. Then her eyes focused on what didn’t belong—a boot. Attached to a leg that wasn’t moving.
“Oh no.” Jackson scrambled down into the gully.
A man lay crumpled in the rocky bottom, his body twisted at an unnatural angle. He wore work clothes—jeans, flannel shirt, worn leather boots. His gray hair was matted with blood, and his face—
Sierra’s knees nearly buckled. “Tom. Tom Hendrick. He owns the ranch two sections over from ours. His family’s been ranching these hills as long as we have.”
“Don’t touch anything,” Jackson said. He was already pulling out his phone.
Sierra stared at Tom’s body, her mind racing. The position told a story—he’d been running when he went down, maybe trying to reach the cover of the mine shaft? Dark stains spread across his flannel shirt, and she could see the ragged hole where a bullet had torn through his chest.
Jackson hung up. “Police are sending a team. We need to secure the area and wait for them.” He looked at Sierra. “We got this from here. Go get Huck.”
“Thanks.” She shoved her hands into her pockets, unable to shake the image of Tom’s body crumpled in that rocky wash.
There was a killer in the hills. And it was dangerously close to her backyard.
Not for the first time, she wanted to stand, hands to the heavens, and scream.
And hope that somehow, she might be heard.
This was a bad idea. Rowan “Hammer” Wallace knew it in his gut. And his gut was never wrong.
He gripped the steering wheel of his Ford F-150 as the highway curved down from the mountain pass, revealing the Renegade valley spread out below him like a postcard from his past. The town had grown since he’d left—a lot.
Sure, he’d kept to his side of town—the original core of Renegade, now called South Eagle, once a sleepy ranch community of thirty thousand, a forgotten corner just outside and to the southeast of larger Renegade.
But now the city sprawled across the valley floor and beyond, even to the far ranchlands to the south.
The modest high-rise downtown rose from the center, but along the foothills to the north, new developments climbed the slopes in terraced subdivisions.
Million-dollar homes dotted the mountainsides to the west, their glass facades catching the afternoon sun.
To the south, the sprawling campus of what looked like a tech company, all modern glass and steel, gleamed in the afternoon sunlight.
And what looked like a college area to the southwest.
“Look at that,” Mack said from the passenger seat, pressing his face to the window. “It’s nearly as big as Colorado Springs.”
Luca Saxon leaned forward from the back seat. “Mountain towns always blow up like this. Rich folks from Denver discover them, property values skyrocket, and suddenly you’ve got Starbucks where the feed store used to be.”
Some things were exactly as Hammer remembered though. The mountains still dominated the skyline, their granite peaks catching clouds that promised snow. The Redbank River still wound through the valley, though now it was lined with bike paths and pocket parks instead of cattle fencing.
Saxon wasn’t wrong.
“We grew up on the outskirts—near the original settlement of Renegade.” Hammer got off the highway and headed toward old Main Street. “It was all pickup trucks and ranch hands, a Western Mayberry. Sort of its own pocket community.”
Thankfully, the bones of the old town were still here.
The original Renegade community bank, the central brick schoolhouse, the street lanterns that lined a storybook street.
The courthouse sat on its corner lot, red brick and white columns exactly as he remembered.
The hardware store still bore the same hand-painted sign, though it now shared a block with a yoga studio and an organic coffee roaster.
“There.” Mack pointed ahead. “At least some things haven’t changed.”
The Renegade Café occupied what had once upon a time been a soda fountain, complete with a long counter, round stools, and a jukebox in the corner.
Red neon in the windows, hand-painted menu boards, and a sign that read World Famous Chicken Fried Steak in the same font Hammer remembered from twenty years ago.
Hammer pulled into a parking space directly in front, his truck looking out of place among the Subarus and BMWs that lined Main Street.
“You look like you’re about to face a firing squad,” Saxon said, cutting through Hammer’s thoughts. “It’s just lunch.”
“In a town where everyone thinks I’m dead.” Hammer’s voice carried the controlled edge that made rookie firefighters step back and listen. “Where I’ve been dead for the better part of three years.”
Mack shifted in his seat, still protecting the ribs that had been crushed in that bus rollover in Alaska six weeks ago. “Nobody’s gonna recognize you. You were eighteen when you left. You’re built different now.”
Saxon snorted. “Built different. That’s one way to put it.”