LITMIR.BIZ

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its knees.

      The last pulse of oxygen to the ram’s brain enabled the creature to maintain its balance, kneeling atop the ridge as the slope below exploded with motion. The ewes and lambs scattered, regrouped, and galloped as one, parting around the kneeling ram and disappearing over the serrated ridge.

      The shooter lay three hundred yards down the ridge, his eye to his rifle’s scope. He’d seen the ram shudder and envisioned the poof of fur as the slug plowed into the animal precisely where he’d intended. The bighorn remained upright on its knees, but the gunman knew the ram was finished. More than once, though, he’d known as much only to be proven wrong.

      Bullets were odd things. A slug could plow into a creature dead-true, only to nick a rib and spin sideways through the lungs, bypassing the heart despite the outward perfection of the shot. In such a case, the mortally wounded animal might cover half a mile or more during a final, all-out run as its undamaged heart pumped and its lungs bled out.

      Not this time.

      The dawn breeze swallowed the clatter of the departing herd’s hooves as the ram toppled off the ridge and rolled down the steep face of the mountain into a granite-walled couloir. The falling ram set off a cavalcade of loose scree, its heavy body a brown raft afloat in the gray river of rock. The bighorn slid fifty yards down the couloir to where the pitch of the face lessened. The flowing gravel streamed to a stop and the animal came to rest, half-buried, in the deep shade of the north-facing ridge.

      The shooter shouldered his rifle and side-hilled off the ridge into the drainage and across the face of the mountain to the dead ram. He stood over the animal. The scent of blood and musk filled the air. The ram’s tongue draped from its mouth. Its big eyes, round as marbles, stared up at him, milky and unseeing.

      The curl of the ram’s heavy horns rounded well past full. The shooter took a firm grip on one of the curls and tugged the ram down the drainage and into the forest, the animal’s body sliding behind him on its slick coat. Grunting with effort, he wound between tree trunks and ducked beneath low branches until he reached a small opening in the woods. He pulled a hacksaw from his rucksack, cut through the ram’s neck just at the back of its skull, and lowered its severed head into doubled plastic trash bags.

      The shooter settled the bagged head of the ram in his pack and set off downhill through the trees toward Fall River Road in the valley below. He left the bighorn’s body to rot, confident in the knowledge that, within a few weeks, nothing of the ram but an unidentifiable scattering of picked-over bones would remain in the small meadow, deep in the forest below the summit of Mount Landen.

TUESDAY

ONE

      Rosie’s cry jolted Chuck Bender awake. He blinked, blurry eyed, and sat up, focusing on his six-year-old stepdaughter sprawled before him, her arms and legs jerking in violent spasms, her eyes rolled back in her head.

      Rosie had been asleep in her twin bed in the cabin’s tiny back bedroom, her forehead warm to the touch but her breathing calm and steady, when he, too, had drifted off, chin to chest, slumped in a ladder-back chair cadged from the kitchen table.

      Chuck checked his watch. 2:30 a.m. He’d dozed for no more than fifteen minutes, but a different Rosie now lay before him.

      Janelle hurried into the bedroom, a damp washcloth clutched in both hands.

      Rosie cried out a second time. Only the whites of her eyes showed between her fluttering eyelids. Her arms and legs thrashed, spilling the sheets to her waist.

      “Rosie. M’hija,” Janelle whispered, her voice laced with fear. “Darling girl, my darling girl.”

      She crouched at the side of the bed and put the cloth to her younger daughter’s forehead. Chuck leaned forward and mindlessly kneaded Janelle’s shoulders, his gaze fixed on Rosie.

      Janelle turned on him. “You fell asleep.”

      Stung, Chuck lifted his hands from her shoulders. “She fell asleep. Finally. I thought we were in the clear.”

      “You thought wrong.”

      He pressed his palms together between his knees. Rosie’s fever had built until midnight. When, finally, it had receded, he’d figured they had simply to last out the night, that Rosie would be better by morning.

      But what did he know about childhood illnesses? What did he know about children at all, for that matter?

      He reached past Janelle and caught the nearest of Rosie’s convulsing arms. He pressed it gently to the bed. The soft skin of her bicep was blotchy and scalding to the touch. Her fever was back, fiercer this time. As soon as he released her arm, it lashed about.

      “More Tylenol?” he asked Janelle.

      She put the back of her hand to Rosie’s cheek. “Too soon. We already gave her two doses.”

      “Some ibuprofen? Isn’t that allowed?”

      Janelle shrugged, her back stiff.

      On the opposite side of the small room, eight-year-old Carmelita rolled over in her matching bed and settled back to sleep.

      Chuck stared at Rosie, his every muscle tense. He was twelve months into parenthood, still a newcomer to the world of sleepless nights and sick little girls. “The doctors’ offices are all closed,” he said. “The only thing open at this hour will be the emergency room.”

      “Then let’s go.”

      He hesitated. “Yeah.”

      Janelle skewered him with a hard look over her shoulder. “Don’t tell me you’re worried about money.”

      Chuck pushed himself back in his seat. “With our deductible, we’ll get slaughtered.”

      Janelle’s voice shook. “This is not a baby-medicine type of thing, Chuck. Not anymore.”

      “It’ll pass,” he said, his voice revealing his uncertainty. “Won’t it?”

      “She’s having some sort of a seizure. I’ve never seen her like this. Nunca. Neither of the girls.”

      Rosie’s eyes were closed now, but her arms and legs continued to stir.

      Chuck ran a hand over the top of his head, passing his fingers through his short hair. “You’re right.”

      Relief flooded Janelle’s face.

      He looked into her frightened eyes. “She’s my darling girl, too,” he said.

      Minutes later, gravel pinged off the undercarriage of the pickup as Chuck sped down the two-track from the cabin, familiar after seven weeks with the narrow, descending drive through the trees to the flat valley floor a mile south of downtown Estes Park. He slowed as he left the forest and turned onto the gravel road behind two massive log buildings—Lodge of the Rockies and, next door, Mills Conference Center. The matching, three-story, historic structures faced onto the open greensward at the center of the Y of the Rockies resort complex.

      A glance in the rearview mirror showed Rosie slumped in her seat, strands of dark hair stuck to her sweaty forehead.

      Rosie was her grandfather Enrique in miniature: short, stocky, and—normally—full of life, with thick, wiry hair and round, rosy cheeks. Carmelita sat opposite her little sister on the rear seat, her head against the side window of the truck, her eyes half-closed. Carmelita was thin and delicate like her mother, with Janelle’s heart-shaped face and long, straight hair.

      Dread coated Chuck’s insides like heavy syrup. He swallowed grit from his throat as he fishtailed around the near side of the conference center. He slung the truck east onto the main road leading out of the resort, only to be greeted by a car rocketing down the open slope from the Y of the Rockies entrance two hundred yards ahead.

      Chuck

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