CHAPTER 22
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Almost six in the morning. Wind eighteen out of the southwest, dry the way a fire wants dry. Anvils to the south again. Ten days since the storm, and already the country had dried back to tinder.
I was at the kitchen table with the Kimber Warrior in three pieces on a square of oil-blackened cloth when Celia came down the hall.
Up since four. Perimeter cameras. Ridge coil. Motorola paired to the ridge repeater. All green. All quiet. All lying, or all telling me the truth for the last time before the day cracked open.
She was in one of my gray T-shirts under her canvas jacket, jeans, boots on, hair up in a low twist with a pencil through it.
She crossed to the propane range and set the kettle over the flame the way she had every morning for seven weeks.
Reached for the French press. Scooped. Poured.
She did not look at the table where I was assembling my father's country in metal.
I removed the magazine, locked the slide back, checked the empty chamber, released it, reinserted the full magazine, and set the safety.
The Kimber Warrior went back on the cloth.
The Winchester leaned against the table within reach.
The Ruger stayed in my boot. The unregistered Custom II remained below the plank.
“Coffee's up.”
“Thanks.”
She poured two mugs. Mine went into my right hand and stayed there. Hers stayed on the counter and did not move.
I turned the signet on my pinky. Once. Cold. Six years cold.
Boyd is on this mountain before ten a.m. Beau has teams on the switchback and the north ridge. Sula dispatch is forty-two minutes down mountain. Marta is alone with a rosary and a Sunday breakfast she has laid out for two.
I drank the coffee standing.
“I'm walking Marta up. Twenty minutes, tops. Bolt the door behind me. If you hear anything before I get back, safe room, take the Marlin. I'm taking the Winchester.”
“I'm coming.”
“No.”
“Then I am going with you.”
Her eyes were level with mine the second time.
I understood the pressure of the argument the way I understand which fence post is going to give in the winter — no proof, all pressure.
She was not going to sit inside four walls a mile and a half from where she thought I might die, because I had spent twenty minutes in June explaining the perimeter to Celia, who had held me together last night under a ninety-watt bulb while she put six sutures through my forearm and had not let her hand shake.
“On Judy. Behind me. And you carry Warren's rifle down the trail with you.”
She did not smile. She said, “Okay.”
I turned the signet once more. The only tell I had that had ever cost me anything.
Utility hall. Rug back. Plank up. My mother's birthday — three turns right, past, back — the dry silver dust of the tumblers falling into place.
I lifted the Kimber Custom II by the grip and slid it into the leather holster inside the canvas jacket.
Filed serial. Kesler had put it in my hand the week I bought this land. The one without paper. Just in case.
Plank down. Rug back. Safe closed with the crucifix and the passport and the file still inside it. Not yet. Not until Boyd was accounted for.
When I came back into the kitchen, the Marlin 336 leaned against the doorframe, sling coiled on top, beside my Winchester.
She had brought Warren's rifle out of the utility hall and staged both long guns while I was in the safe.
The Remington stayed racked for the cabin.
Two weapons, in silence, in the order I would have laid them.
“Long guns to the porch,” I said.
“On it.”
She was three steps ahead of me on the porch by the time I got the door. I stopped in the frame and set my palm flat against the jamb at the height of her heart. I did not touch her. I did not need to.
Copper's ears were up in the barn three hundred and forty yards south. Judy was saddled in the yard beside him. She had done that too. Before dawn. Had done my horse without asking whether tonight was the night I might not need him.
We rode down the switchback at a fast walk. The mountain smelled of scorched grass and pine resin and something else on the far side of the ridge that had not been there yesterday. She kept Judy behind Copper. Rifle butt against her thigh. Neither of us spoke.
A little after six, we reached the main-house kitchen.
Marta was at the north window with a canvas bag packed at her feet, rosary in one hand, hot bread just out of the oven under a towel on the counter. She looked at Celia. At me. At the two long guns.
Her mouth thinned. She did not gasp. She did not cross herself. She said one line low in Spanish under her breath — Que Dios nos ampare a los tres — and picked up the bag.
God shelter the three of us.
I went to the north window myself. The switchback was visible for a quarter mile before it took the curve into timber. Nothing on it. Yet. I set the fear down only long enough to pick up the next task.
“Celia. Take Marta up now. Copper's the steadier — Marta rides him, you ride Judy behind. Ridge trail, do not stop. Beau's people are in the switchback already. I need to spot the road from the ridge shoulder.”
I did not say the other thing, which was: someone is coming up the ranch road too, or Beau's radio would not have gone tight at oh-five-twenty.
Celia did not argue. She took Marta's arm. They went out the mudroom door together. Marta with the rosary bumping the wooden crucifix against her apron buckle as she walked. Celia with the Marlin slung across her back and her right hand at Marta's elbow.
Marta was slow at the horn. Celia was patient. Neither of them looked back at the house. They rode north up the switchback, Copper first, Judy behind, the way you cross an open field when you are not sure it is empty.
I turned away at the first bend.
Winchester off my shoulder. Kimber Warrior at my belt. Kimber Custom II inside the jacket. Ruger LC9 in the boot.
The sentence I had thought every morning since the night the power failed and Celia came down the stairs in the dark: if I lose her tomorrow I already had her once. I had thought it was going to steady me. It had not, on any of the days I had counted since.
I went out through the porch and up the ridge shoulder on foot.
Twenty to seven in the morning. Ridge shoulder above the main house, six hundred feet above the ranch road. Winchester across my forearm, glass on the last mile of dirt where it snakes past the mailbox and up to the barn.
Black Chevy dust plume. Coming in slow.
Two silhouettes on the ridge above the switchback moving parallel with the plume — dressed local, canvas, the color of the sage they pushed through. Beau's. I knew the way Beau's guys move by now.
Three suppressed pops came up from three-quarters of a mile down the switchback. A pause the length of a held breath. Nothing more.
Two men down. Beau had closed the pincer. Grady. And one more. The name would come later.
Then the smoke.
Wrong color. Magnesium-white. Nothing a house makes burning down natural. It came out of the study window on the west side of the main house, one lick and then a plume.
The shape in my chest reversed direction. I was running before I had told it to.
Near seven, I reached the main-house mudroom.
The horses stood blown at the mudroom rail.
Celia had made the second bend when Beau's clipped warning broke over the Motorola — upper trail compromised, take hard cover — and the magnesium-white plume rose behind them.
The main house was closer than the cabin.
She turned both horses, brought Marta through the mudroom, and met the intruder inside seconds before I reached the threshold.
The great-room doorway was white with the wrong kind of light.
Fire from the study threw shadow forward across the Persian rug the way a headlight throws shadow forward across a road.
Celia was in front of the propane fridge with her arms out, back to Marta.
She had put the housekeeper behind the fridge — the closest thing to a wall in the room.
She had listened to me tell her in June the fridge weighed six hundred pounds and nothing went through it a person would survive, and she had used it as a wall.
Dark blue tactical on the far side of the great room, black balaclava, suppressed subcompact rising as he turned. Not Boyd's face. Boyd would not wear a balaclava. Boyd would come up in a wool blazer at ten in the morning. One of Boyd's on the door.
One second, only one: the one without paper.
Kimber Custom II out with my left. One round. Center mass.
He went down. His weapon discharged reflex-fired on the way — a round that struck the elk head over the mantel and knocked it sideways off its plaque. The elk hit the floor with a dull thud, glass eye rolled loose across the boards.
The elk. Get the woman. Get both women.
A little before seven.
Fire had climbed the study curtain. Marta had the rosary out, lips moving. Celia had already gone. She had gone the second the man went down. She was at the study door with the fire extinguisher between her hands, pin between her thumb and forefinger.
“Celia — ”
She yanked.
The ring came free with a small dry crack — metal against palm — and her hand jerked and she did not stop.
Nozzle at the base of the flame. Chemical-white foam smothered the desk and the curtain and the file drawer that was what Boyd had wanted burned in the first place.
Fire down to a smolder inside twenty seconds.
She stood. Her left palm was wet and black and her wrist was steady and she did not look at it.
That was the woman I had married.
Marta had not moved from behind the fridge. Rosary in her hand. Her lips still moving. She said one line under her breath — Ay, mi hija — and looked at Celia's palm.
Oh, my daughter.
Celia looked at the palm now. Turned it up to the light once. Skin was pink and rising. Not deep. The kind of burn you carry for a decade under a wedding band on the other hand.
“Long guns,” she said.
“Long guns.”