CHAPTER 8 #2
The whine hit the back of my teeth first.
Only someone who has lived with the alarm's carrier can name it right.
The pressure sits above what a human ear will register, on a shelf inside a skull only a man who has built the shelf can hear.
I had built mine two years ago. Celia's palm on my chest went tight a full second before her ears had anything to work with, because my body had already begun the pre-tension her hand could read.
My phone buzzed against my hip. Three short, two long, three short. The pattern I set two years ago when I still hoped nothing would ever come.
I was upright before my mouth finished the word.
“Stay.”
Mine. Interior. Directed at the ridge and the aspen line and the seven hundred yards of dry grass. At what I was running toward the alarm to protect.
Winchester off the east wall. Eight seconds to the utility hall. Round chambered from the standing tube. Three spare rounds into the shirt pocket. Kimber Warrior onto the belt clip at the small of the back. The Ruger was already in the boot.
I came back to the bedroom doorway with the rifle low across my ribs. She was sitting up. Flannel closed at her fist. Her mouth was open.
“Celia. Remington on the floor beside the bed. Load it. Do not follow me. Do not open the door for anyone whose voice you do not know.”
“Luke —”
“Say you understand.”
“I understand.”
I went.
The porch door hit the frame behind me softer than I meant.
The ridge trail is a game trail more than it is a trail.
I took it at a working walk with the Winchester up and the wind stripping my hair back from my temples and the taste of hot metal in my mouth again.
Sharper now. My body had been reaching for a thing and had the thing pulled out of its hand.
Two hundred yards northwest. I went to the ground behind the leaning ponderosa where I had planted the second alarm coil.
Scope up. Ground was as it had been at six in the morning — no fresh boot, no cut brush, no piece of thread on any branch that had not been there before.
I moved on my belly to the aspen line. Nothing.
I moved to the switchback drop-off. Nothing.
I waited fifteen minutes on my belly.
Nothing.
I circled east on foot and then south along the ridge shoulder and back down through the game trail.
An hour and change. Still nothing. Wind through the pines and the tick of grasshoppers in the dry grass and the far cry of a red-tail on a thermal above the aspen.
Nothing that was not the mountain's own inventory.
At eight at night I keyed the handheld and told the empty channel that alarm three had probably been broken by a mule deer.
I believed none of it. I said it into the channel anyway because saying it put it on the paper record. Paper records were their own kind of perimeter.
A mule deer breaks a coil at chest height. This one had tripped at the shin. That detail never reached the channel.
I came down the game trail with the Winchester on a two-hand carry and the boots slow on the shale and the whole west shoulder of the ridge going the color of a struck match.
At the last switchback I stopped and stood a full minute and did not think about what I had left standing in the bedroom.
I thought about it very carefully. Then I walked the last hundred yards.
A quarter past nine at night. I walked through my own door with the rifle in my hand.
The kerosene lamp on the mantel was lit. She had trimmed the wick to a short flame. The great room smelled like the wick and the cold woodstove and the raspberry jam in the cupboard.
She was in the leather chair. My gray flannel on.
Buttoned right this time, all the way to the throat, one hand fisted at the collar holding it closed.
Her hair had dried. The Remington 870 leaned against the chair leg on the side of her right hand, safety on, chamber empty, magazine full, exactly the way I had set it out at half past nine in the morning.
I put the Winchester back in the rack. Safed the Kimber. Placed it on the utility-hall shelf where I could reach it in one step from the couch. Turned back.
She had not moved.
I waited for her.
She said it quiet, dry, without heat.
“You loaded it in your sleep.”
“I never went to sleep.”
Her mouth moved at one corner. Not a smile. The muscle a smile would use in a different woman on a different night.
“For what it's worth,” she said. “I'm on the pill. Just — in case that ever matters.”
I nodded once. I did not say the thing back that would have been the honest thing to say.
She stood. The flannel came halfway down her thigh again. She did not look at me for the length of time it took her to cross to the stairs.
She stopped with one hand on the newel post. The Remington stayed leaning against the leather chair. She had considered it, then decided not to carry it up. That was a choice. I clocked the choice and left it unnamed.
“Goodnight, Luke.”
“Goodnight.”
She went up. The bedroom door did not close all the way. It never had. The frame had settled, and the latch would not seat. The mattress took her weight. Then a long stretch of the quiet a woman makes when she is deciding not to say another thing.
I took the couch.
Ten at night. Winchester within reach against the arm of the couch.
Kimber Warrior on the utility-hall shelf.
Ruger in the boot on the rug at the foot of the couch.
Kerosene lamp low on the mantel — she had left it burning for me.
The alarm net had gone flat and stayed flat.
The whine was still in my back teeth. It would stay there through the small hours. It always did.
I turned the signet ring on my pinky twice. My own count.
I could hear her upstairs not sleeping.
Four more nights on the couch, I thought, in the flat interior voice I used when I was doing arithmetic against my own preferences.
Then, because I could not help it:
Three.