LITMIR.BIZ

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not his.

      Tomas stopped the SUV a mile or so short of Lake Kachess at a spot where yet another road wandered away from the one he was on. The intersection created a small clearing that was barely big enough for him to swing the 4-Runner in a tight circle without running the risk of getting stuck. When he turned off the engine, he was dismayed to realize that his prisoner was awake and moaning. Miguel had told him she was out for good, but clearly that wasn’t true.

      Shaking his head, Tomas punched the button that unlocked the hatch, then got out and walked through swirling snow to the back of the vehicle. Opening the cargo bay, he reached in and grabbed the tarp-wrapped bundle. As he pulled it toward him, the woman inside struggled and tried to roll away. Grabbing for her a second time, his hand caught on what was evidently a cowboy boot, one that came off in his hand. It surprised him and bothered him somehow. He didn’t want to know she wore cowboy boots. He didn’t want to know anything about her at all.

      When he finally had her free of the floorboard, he let her drop to the ground. The force of the fall knocked the breath out of her. For a brief moment she was quiet, then she started moving and struggling once more. The mewling sounds coming from under the tarp were aimed at him in a wordless plea that was clear enough.

      “Please don’t do this. Please. Please. Please.”

      Tomas didn’t want to do it, either. But it was too late to stop; too late to turn back. Tomas knew that if he failed or wavered, Lupe and the boys would become Miguel’s next target.

      Tugging at the end of the tarp, he dragged her away from the road and into the shelter of a second growth tree. Then he went back for the tire iron. Several blows to the head from that rendered the woman senseless. He knew what he was supposed to do then. Tomas had the needle-nose pliers there in his pocket. But he also knew, as Miguel did not, that pulling her teeth was something Tomas could not do.

      When his boys had lost their baby teeth—their loose baby teeth—Lupe had been the one who did the honors. The very idea of removing hers … Instead, he went back to the car and retrieved the gas can, poured the liquid over the now still tarp, and lit the match. He had to light more than one because it took more than one before the fumes finally ignited.

      When they did, he moved back out of reach, crossing himself and uttering a quick prayer as the flames roared skyward through the swirling snow. In the flickering firelight, he looked down and noticed that while he was wrestling her out of the SUV, the cowboy boot had come to rest in the snow near the back bumper. Reaching down, Tomas picked it up and was about to toss it into the raging fire when he noticed that something had been taped to the instep. Peeling off the tape, he pulled out a small rectangular piece of stiff paper. It was blank on one side, but the other side revealed the smiling photo—a school photo, no doubt—of a dark-haired boy not that much older than his own sons.

      Tomas looked back through the eddying snow. The tarp was fully engulfed now. So was the woman. The odor of burning gasoline was giving way to something else. He quickly tossed the boot into the flames, but for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to part with the photo. Slipping that into the pocket of his shirt, he turned and clambered back into the SUV.

      As Tomas drove away, he wondered where and how he’d get rid of the 4-Runner. It had to be somewhere far away from surveillance cameras. He couldn’t afford to be seen anywhere near it, and not just because it was a stolen vehicle.

      Now it was a matter of life and death—his as well as hers.

      

       MARCH

       LAKE KACHESS

      KEN LEGGETT wasn’t what you could call a warm and fuzzy guy. For one thing, he didn’t like people much. It wasn’t that he was a bigot. Not at all. It wasn’t a matter of his not liking blacks or Hispanics or Chinese—he disliked them all, whites included. He was your basic all-inclusive disliker.

      Which was why this solitary job as a heavy-equipment operator was the best one he’d ever had—or kept. In the spring he spent eight to ten hours a day riding a snowplow and uncovering mile after mile of forest road that logging companies used to harvest their treasure troves of wood from one clear-cut section of the Cascades after another.

      Once the existing roads were cleared, he traded the snowplow for either a road grader, which he used to carve even more roads, or a front-end loader, which could be used to accumulate slash—the brush and branches left behind after the logs had been cut down, graded, and hauled away.

      As long as he was riding his machinery, Ken didn’t have to listen to anyone else talk. He could be alone with his thoughts, which ranged from the profound to the mundane. Just being out in the woods made it pretty clear that God existed, and knowing his ex-mother-in-law, to say nothing of his ex-wife, made it clear that the devil and hell were real entities as well. Given all that, then, it made perfect sense that the world should be so screwed up—that the Washington Redskins would probably never win the Super Bowl and that the Seattle Mariners would never win the World Series, either.

      The fact that Ken liked the Mariners was pretty self-explanatory. After all, he lived in North Bend—outside North Bend, really—and Seattle was just a few miles down the road. As for why he loved the Redskins? He’d never been to Washington—D.C., that is. In fact, the only time he’d ever ventured out of Washington State had been back in the 1980s, when his then-wife had dragged him up to Vancouver, B.C., for something called Expo. He had hated it. It had rained like crazy, and most of the exhibits were stupid. If he wanted to be wet and miserable, all he had to do was go to work. He sure as hell didn’t have to pay good money for the privilege.

      As for the Redskins? What he liked about them most was that they hadn’t bowed to public opinion and changed their name to something more politically palatable. And when he was watching football games in the Beaver Bar in North Bend, he loved shouting out “Go, Redskins!” and waiting to see if anyone had balls enough to give him any grief over it. When it came to barroom fights, Little Kenny Leggett, as he was sometimes called despite the fact that he was a bruising six-five, knew how to handle himself—and a broken beer bottle.

      So here he was sending a spray of snow flying off the road and thinking about the fact that he was glad to be going back to work. Early. A whole month earlier than anyone had expected. When winter had landed with a knock-out punch early in November, everybody figured snow was going to bury the Cascades with record-shattering intensity. The ski resorts had all hoped for a memorable season, and that turned out to be true for the wrong reason—way too little snow rather than too much.

      That first heavy snowfall got washed away by equally record-shattering rains a few days later. For the rest of the winter the snow never quite got its groove back and had proved to be unusually mild. It snowed some, but not enough for skiers really to get out there. And not enough for the bureaucrats to stop whining about it, either. In fact, just that morning, on his way to work, Ken had heard some jerk from the water department complaining that the lack of snowfall and runoff might well lead to water rationing in the Pacific Northwest before the end of summer.

      Yeah, Ken thought. Right. That makes sense, especially in Washington, where it rains constantly, ten months out of twelve.

      Ken glanced at his watch. The switch to daylight saving time made for longer afternoons, but it was nearing quitting time, and that meant he was also nearing the end of that day’s run. His boss wasn’t keen on paying overtime, and Ken wasn’t interested in working for free, so he needed to be back at the equipment shed by the time he was supposed to be off duty.

      It was a long way back—a long slow way—and the thermos of coffee he had drunk with his lunch had run through the system. After turning the plow around in a small clearing, he set the brake. Then, shutting off the engine, he clambered down and went to make some yellow snow.

      After the steady roar of equipment, the sudden stillness was a shock to his system. He knew that old saying about if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it …

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