Chapter 13
Hudson swung down from the saddle and stood for a second, letting his gaze travel along the ridgeline. Nothing moved, but a feeling lingered anyway.
“Hudson?”
He turned. Sarah was waiting for him at the cabin door, her cheeks pink from the cold.
Aside from their own tracks, the snow around the cabin was undisturbed. No vehicle was concealed behind the woodshed. Nothing moved. His body relaxed exactly one percent.
He joined her and ducked inside. The cabin was one room. Compact kitchenette. A jar of coffee and powdered creamer on the counter. Single bed. An armchair angled toward the lake.
Someone had pinned photographs above the kitchen counter. Fish. More fish. One of Nora holding up a trout nearly as long as her arm, laughing so hard the photograph had caught her with her eyes closed.
Hudson touched the edge of the photograph. She looked happy.
He opened the stove door and pressed two fingers to the ashes. Cold. He exhaled and turned, facing the bunk neatly made with green wool blankets. No blood or signs of struggle. No sign Cord had left in a hurry or unwillingly.
Just gone. Same as everywhere else.
“Anything?” Sarah asked, breath fogging in the cold that had followed them in.
“Notebook. A photograph.” He held up the small leather-bound thing he’d found tucked under the mattress, the photograph slipped inside its back cover like a man hiding something precious in the one place he thought no one would look.
Nora again, smiling at the camera, captured in a moment that had nothing to do with lies or false names.
“He’s been here recently.” He slipped the photograph carefully back into the notebook.
“But he’s not here now.” Sarah paced the cabin, her flashlight beam glancing off the walls and exposed rafters.
“No.” He turned the notebook over and flicked through it.
Wednesday 0540
Thursday 0330
Friday 2210
“What is it?”
Hudson blew out a breath. “Lists. Times. Distances. Somebody keeping track of something?”
He closed it. “Without context, it could mean anything.”
All this way. And at the end of it, a cabin that held nothing except proof a man had once been happy before his old life caught up with him.
A waste of time.
Except.
He glanced back at Sarah, already turning for the door, hat pulled low against the wind. The sound of her laughing, loud enough that Captain’s ears had flicked back at her. Somewhere between Bon Jovi and Wyatt singing in the Pacific, he’d stopped thinking about the case.
There had only been Sarah.
He pocketed the notebook and joined Sarah outside. The lake lay white and wind-scoured beneath the mountains, the surface unbroken except for long shadows thrown by blue-black spruce.
The ridge rose above it all, dark against the winter sky.
Light slanted off the frozen lake. Walking behind her toward the horses, he let himself have one full second of it. Sarah. The morning. Whatever it had been.
Something flashed high on the ridge. A hard glint where there shouldn’t have been one.
Hudson moved.
The fraction of a second between recognition and consequence.
His shoulder drove into Sarah’s waist and took them both into the snow.
A round punched into the snow where she’d been standing.
A beat later, the report cracked across the lake, its echo reverberating back off the mountains, deafening and strange in the cold air. He rolled them behind a frozen rise.
Sarah went taut under him, twisting and reaching for her gun.
“Stay down. Don’t look up.” His voice dropped to a register not quite his own—the old one, the one that belonged to rooms he didn’t talk about. He had her covered, his weight over her, already checking the tree line below the ridge for a second muzzle flash.
Wind left to right. No follow-up movement. The shooter hadn’t relocated.
“I’m not going anywhere, but I can shoot from down here as well as you can.” Her voice was muffled, and her heartbeat hammered against his forearm.
The second shot struck closer. Snow kicked up four feet to their left.
The horses screamed. Captain reared, jerking his lead rope taut, and Bon Jovi went sideways in a panic. The ties gave, and both animals broke for the tree line at a dead run, stirrups flapping.
“Hudson—”
“I see it.” He couldn’t move off her until he understood the angle, the distance, and what kind of shooter could put two rounds that close without hitting either of them.
“Talk to me, Hudson.”
“North ridge.”
“One shooter?”
“I think so.”
She wriggled under him. “You think or you know?”
His gaze swept the tree line again. “One firing point doesn’t mean one shooter.” His eyes kept moving, searching for the spotter he hoped wasn’t there. One rifle and one glint didn’t mean only one set of eyes.
“Okay. What’s the angle?”
“Long shot. Six hundred yards plus.”
“Which means?”
“Which means if he’s that far out and still landing rounds this close, he’s good.”
Trained. No lucky bastard or local yokel with a hunting rifle.
The horses were gone. Sarah’s gaze flicked toward where they’d disappeared.
“East of here, there’s an old avalanche gully,” she said. “No cover getting there, but the bank will break his line of sight once we’re inside it.”
Hudson followed her line of sight. “I see it.”
“It’s sixty yards. Maybe less. Can we reach it before he reacquires us?”
“If he already has our range? No. But that’s good.”
Sarah turned her head. “Good, Hudson?”
“If he wanted us dead, we’d probably already be dead.”
Even though snow had worked its way into her collar, her gun was ready in her hand, her eyes entirely unafraid. It should have reassured him. Instead, he wanted to move her somewhere bullets couldn’t reach.
“We need to move.”
“Okay.” She tensed underneath him.
Assessment burned through his brain. The shooter. Distance. No horses. Limited cover. Cold.
Sarah.
Whatever happened next, it wasn’t reaching her without going through him first.