Chapter 1: GREENSHIRTS

DONE DONE AND done. The end of a long—very long—night.

And of her first case.

Weary Agent Marian Decker shoved back from her desk. Stretched her arms. Arced her neck. Above her, the iron dark Quonset ceiling. Pleasing to eyes bleary from hours and hours of harsh lamplight radiating off page after page of multiple Reports of Investigation. Now, finally, one after another, all complete, typed in triplicate, bound and squared, cross-stacked one on the other, neat as new white sheets.

Earlier in the day—by now the previous day—once within sight of paperwork’s end, she’d forced herself to go late and long. She’d prodded Lamie—her deputy from state and a woefully inept paper-pusher—to do the same. Get it done. Why not? Weeks they’d been at it, round the clock cat-napping, all day, every day, day after day. And more than a few nights. And before that, six months surveillance in the field, day in day out tracking Rusty Sikes up and down and all over the greater Yellowstone. And after that, the trial itself. . .prolonged, delayed, drawn out. . .and all that followed by the back-log aftermath of bureaucratic house-cleaning. While every five minutes fielding another ‘urgent’ call for another status update, for district, for Denver, for even—more and more—Senator Mollitor himself.

Decker exulting into the black of the ceiling. The dark before the dawn. All wrapped up. All behind her. The satisfaction of a conviction. Her first. Now for relief, renewal, relaxing. Now time for time off.

She turned to her partner, but he was off in back, brewing another pot. His desk covered still in sheaves of unfinished casework. . .even though—being from state—he had little of it compared to her, the endless burden,its stringent paper trail of federal regulations and requirements. Poor old Lynne Lamie. Just not tenacious with write-ups the way he was with bushwhacking in the field. Out there he had all the quick gaited footwork of the endangered big horns he was brought in to protect.

Returning, Lamie acknowledged her only in a long sigh, lifting his dime store reading glasses to rub his eyes, cracking his arthritic knuckles. Agent Decker, realizing it better to leave him be, quietly announced her leaving, and left. Out the door. And then, once out the door, she stopped short.

Sunrise.

Brisk tips of dawn light sharpening the peaks above the valley. Catching her so by surprise made it especially transfixing. She stood, taking it in, inhaling the freezing night-hardened air, its colloidal mix full of nostril stinging, pine tinctured forest, its cold crackling noise so intense that she didn’t hear, from inside the office, the brang-brang of the telephone. And when it did, when it finally registered, her first thought? Reed.

Reed? At this hour? After all this time? Crushing the initial impulse, to go back and answer, she didn’t. It wasn’t. And if it was, she didn’t care. And he could wait. Could reach her at home. When she was rested, and ready.

She hurried on to her truck. For now, for her at least, it was time off time. Time to be alone.

Quite alone. Reed still back in New York.

SHE WHOOPED JUMPING into the cab. Despite her sturdy wool uniform, the freezing vinyl stung the backs of her thighs. She shivered, pumping the cold engine to life, shivering in tune with it. With everything around her, all of it bracing for winter and the certain, impending snow.

As the cab warmed, she heard the Quonset door slam. Heading out her way, Lamie, now at his quick foot pace, overtaking the cloud of his own breath and the glint of the shield on his hat.

About the telephone call, Decker presumed. Regretting she hadn’t pulled out while she still had the chance. Her stomach flinching. Say, what if it was Reed. What did he want? Did he have a show? Did she actually care, after all?

She smoother her fact in the gulf of heat rising from the vents. Closed her eyes. Thought back to her youth, how she remembered this, exactly like this, how it came so all of a sudden, the first high country cold snap. Counting the years since then. Since she graduated, class of ‘72. Twelve years. A long time away.

She rolled down her window. Lamie trotted up. Then. . .just stood. Took off his hat. Toed the frost-coated gravel. Looked at the sky, looked at the ground. Ran fingers through his bristle of gray hair. Repositioned his hat. His way of saving face, working for a woman. Making her be the one to have to ask.

So instead she looked into the new light streaming through the windshield. Lower down the valley a slice of sunrise lighting up the eastern slopes. High up, west, a storm-shroud of dark-blue clouds—big with snow—enveloped the peaks. Poised to avalanche down on town, which from this vantage looked like a handful of helpless buildings nested here and there between the aspen and cottonwoods and lodge pole, like big game, all bedded down along the banks of the silver-skinned Broadwater. Hibernating, everything was hibernating, animate and even inanimate, body and mind metabolizing more and more slowly, all one big organism shutting down, saving up to weather the dead season.

Lamie shielded his eyes, following hers.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said.

“What is?”

“Oh just shove it, Lynne; you know what I meant.”

“And here I thought you was in such a rush off home.”

“I am. Doesn’t mean I’m in such a hurry I can’t smell the roses.”

“Roses?”

“Ah, you wouldn’t understand. How it feels, being back after all this time. How if makes you. . .feel good. Just remembering it all.”

“Yeah, well. Maybe so, but I guess while you were so busy remembering it all, you clean forgot this.”

He tossed it through the window her gun belt, her M1911, swaddled in its sorrel leather holster, barrel-end peaking out, hot from hanging near the furnace and now metal sweating from the cold.

“And while you’re at it, you might also remember my saying better not to take this truck?”

His tone unusually imperative, reminiscent of her instructors back at the forensics training. But Decker letting it go. They worked best together when she overlooked his sometime attitude not being boss which he was definitely not, since the operation was federal, and he was only on loan from state. Biting a lip now and then made for a stronger partnership. And without Lamie’s skills she knew she wouldn’t have had got such a quick first conviction. For the cold-blooded killing of big horn sheep and bald eagles, Lamie and Decker, together, had nailed him and nailed him good.

“Look. I get your worry about the truck, Lynne. But don’t over-blow it.”

“Gal, you don’t know these people. . .like I told you a hund’erd times; this truck makes you too good of a bull’s eye.”

He rapped the door. He meant the outsized U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service emblem on it.

“Lynne, here’s the thing. . .” Decker cutting him short, hoping to avoid another rant about how this rash of recent big game killing was more than just a few local kids and really was a large operation connected somehow to the mountain of narcotics flowing into the state. “I have to have 4-wheel drive today. How far you think I’ll get in my Civic once this snowstorm hits?”

Lamie looked away, considering it. For Decker, a small success.

“We put in a lot of hours and got our man. I think we can ease up for a day or two.”

“That’s how come you’re so la-di-dah this morning? Our one measly conviction? Don’t you get how much more there is to come.”

La-di-dah?

“Whatever. I’ll see you day after tomorrow.”

She put the truck in gear.

“Marian, alls I’m sayin is use your head. . .don’t get cocky.”

“What? Me, cocky?”

She smiled at him, all prim and lady-like. Then, instinctively, she frowned.

“Who was that who just called?”

“Called?”

“Was that Reed on the phone?”

“Oh, that. No. Sorry, Marian. I know how much. . .”

“Then who was it?”

“Calm down, now. It wasn’t anything you need to. . .”

“Who was on the phone, Lynne?”

Lamey blew into his hands.

“Some park ranger. At the game warehouse.”

Decker took the truck out of gear.

“They found more illegal kill, didn’t they?”

Lamey didn’t answer. Her hands now vice-like gripping the steering wheel.

“A lot?”

Lamie looked at his hands.

“Fuck!”

The force of her swear blotted the windshield with steam.

Chapter 2: BE PREPARED

TIRED, HUNGRY, RATHER cold, Russell Nye knelt on clumps of frozen dirt and knobbled-up manure. Alone out in the hunting camp’s weathered horse shed; all the others up in the main cabin, waiting for midnight. He hummed, tunelessly, lashing gear to the outfitter’s buck. Outside of the weak throw of a kerosene lamp hung from a rafter, it was pitch black. A near infinity of dark. The cracked timber walls invisible. The shed cavernous beyond its small size. In its limited penumbra, only Nye’s shadow on the ground, and two others, black haloes of two pack horses he’d cut out for his business afterwards. Who for now chomped leisurely at the pile of cold feed. Their muzzles, hot and breathy, jeweled the hay with beads of moisture.

He was done but for tying off his sawed-off shotgun. He momentarily forgot where he put it, hanging on a post. He stood up and mumbled a streak of convict enriched profanity. Nye’d neither eaten nor slept in the two days since he’d been at the penitentiary. A last visit with Jimmy Windy Boy. The day before his execution. So he was excruciatingly tired. Aching in every goddamn muscle and joint, nook and cranny. Even his shadow hurt. His body twitched with random ticks. Even the dead cartilage of his frostbit left ear—what was left of it—flashed with pain. When, normally, it never had any feeling at all.

He shifted leg to leg, shaking it all out. He spit, and cussed another streak: What a goddamn string of bullshit, this hare-brain request of Jimmy’s. And why even do it? Jimmy’d never know. Not now. Not him being dead as a doornail. Wasn’t worth it. Not all this terrible hunger and no sleep? It goddamn got to a guy. Exactly, Nye recalled clearly, how Jimmy said it’d do.

He went on though, humming. The palomino mare nickered politely for him to stop. The younger buckskin raised his head, barn-black eyes open expectantly. Nye patted the flat of his forehead how he liked, but he liked the hay more, and went back to it. Nye’s thoughts went dream-wandering again. . .he came to when he sensed both horses go stock still. He turned his good ear to listen. No wind. No creaking walls. Not even the ticking of the cold low pressure air. Peaceful and quiet as a night in prison.

But still. The two tails had stopped switching; the four ears flicked. And flicked again. Seconds later Nye heard it too. Muffled, far-off. Step-step. Step-step. Something on its way, its mass reaching the corral, cracking the icy clods of dirt, hay, and horseshit underfoot.

Nye patted the palomino mare’s forehead how he had done the buckskin, even-steven, and breathing in her horse perfume, he pulled himself into her warmth. Stroking her neck, something like sleep rolled over him, a reverie and the sibilant chatter of vaporous strangers, leading him into, and out of, a jumble of quick dreams of perfect sense. . .

“Son of a. . .Nye. . .made it back after all. . .damn time.”

The voice like a blowtorch popping on, burning off the quietude.

“. . .not going with us. . .”

The palomino reared a bit. Nye’s leather-sheathed arm looped quickly over her neck. A load of time seemed to pass, with some kind of question frozen in the air, but, had he answered? A second voice echoed in¾“I told you I would, didn’t I?”¾which Nye realized had been his own.

“I kind of wondered since your visit to Deer Lodge; maybe Bar Heart duties don’t count for you anymore?”

Nye stretched, and said, “Gimme a fuckin break, Choke. I just. . .this’s the first time I spoke with anyone since. . .”

Except to himself, of course.

Darryl Choke Swann clomped within the limits of the lantern; its cold light glazed the swath of purpled birthmark stain on his face. Making it look like a dark slick of blood oozing down his scalp spreading over the left side of his face down onto his neck.

“For a strapping handsome kid, Choke, you sure are butt-ugly lookin’ at times.”

Swann smacked the flat of his hand on the buckskin’s flank.

“We aren’t using horses tonight, Nye. I told you that.”

Nye, with minimal exasperation, made clear he was aware of that. “These two-re only for my own thing.”

“Oh yeah. You’re little journey up to Medicine Wheel for Jimmy Windy Boy.

“An after we do this number on the greenshirt house you’re so hot to do.”

Nye hoped young Swann would let it go about the horses; and if not, Nye didn’t give a shit. Fuck him if he did; fuck him if he didn’t; either way Nye would do what he had to do. And besides, most likely the kid had only come by to puff himself up a little, how he’d do from time to time. Boss around his trophy outfitter. His very own ex-con.

“So Nye. How’s all your boyfriends doing?”

“Say again?”

“Your prison pals. They’re all okay?”

“Them? Happy as meadowlarks. ‘Bout how you’d expect for a bunch of greaseball inmates.”

“And that one you’re so thick with?” A break in Swann’s voice. “What’s his name, Jimmy Windy Girl?”

Nye gave him a look. “Pretty funny there, Choke. Awful goddamn funny.”

“Surprised you didn’t spend the night.”

Swann was the kind of young turk who needed more than anything to get his lights punched thoroughly out the back of his head. But that was one favor someone else would have to do him. You don’t exactly go pulp the guy who sponsored you right out of the halfway program, no matter how much shit he’s full of. And, kind of like with Jimmy, you could tell the kid had savvy. And was likeable enough. For being so young. And ugly.

Before he tied off his home-made adze to the pack, Nye made a show of it, fussing with a stray thread of dried gut unwinding from the handle. But despite his best efforts Choke was completely without interest.

“Some war-club,” was all he ventured.

“Have you know there’s a university paleontologist thinks this is a goddamn masterpiece. Calls it a maul-head adze. He borrowed it once for presenting a science paper he’d wrote on stone age tool making.”

“You made it yourself?”

“Damn right I did.”

A younger arrow-head collecting Nye, even before prison, had taught himself the craft of making his own artifacts. And once inside, they attracted the interest of the paleontology department at university. The chair, impressed, persuaded the warden to allow Nye to continue. Careful supervised, of course, given their potential as weapons. Nye thought Swann ought to at least appreciate his craft. How he flaked a a keen edge on simple piece of obsidian, grooved its middle with a flint chisel—homemade itself—girdled it with a fork of live bog-birch branch, and lashed it tight with strips of elk hide. Chunked out the butt end into a hammer. Primitive but effective. What Nye liked about it, was imagining it being exactly the survival tool it would take to survive. Way back when. Whack your cave man enemies. Whack the outsized wildlife: mammoth, saber-tooth, sloths, ancient rhinoceroses. And to imagine even being in a cave man’s head, sitting at his flake site. What filled his thoughts? What he talked about? And the women, what did they do? What were they like? Could a modern-type man measured up enough for them to take him in.

Choke Swann had no interest of course.

Nye, about finished up, hoisted the saddle to set on the back of palomino, but he fell short. Swann chortled.

“What the hell’s wrong with you? Big ass guy like you. You should throw on a saddle easy as a feather pillow.”

Even the mare snorted.

“Cause I’m so goddamn weak from not eating, is all.”

Nye heaved again, this time muscling it all the way on. He threaded the cinch and pulled it hard, pulling the big horse off a step as he did.

“That’s more like it,” he crowed.

“Cause you’re totally out of it, is why.”

“Yeah, thanks for the update, shithead.”

Swann fell silent a while, standing sentry-like, the only motion his eyelashes flicking away the first of a few snowflakes. Ultimately he couldn’t contain himself.

“So after we do over the ranger station, you’re still planning to go through with this Jimmy Windy Boy trip?”

“Less you got any more nighttime festivities in mind.”

“Nope.” Swann grinned. “I know a has-been like you has got to do what he’s got to do.”

“Has been, huh?” Nye rubbed his lips. “Yeah, maybe so.”

“I’m just fucking with you, Nye. You know that.”

“Still, sooner or later, though, you’re right. I’ll end up a rheumy scraggly snaggle-toothed wheeze-bag like my old man, joints all out’a joint, teeth soft as marshmallow, calluses like cantaloupes.”

“You maybe. For sure not me.”

“Yeah? An why’s that?”

“I’m pretty sure I won’t last that long.”

“Oh, that right? You clairvoyant now?”

“Just how I feel about it is all.”

“Hell. All young guys feel like that.”

Nye untied the horse’s reins from the rail. He yawned and yawned again.

Swann sneered.

“Look at you, falling half asleep the middle of every sentence. You ought to be in bed.”

“I oughta. And you too. Why’re you here yourself, lame brain? At least go out once or twice. Get yourself laid. Take the goddamn edge of you for a change.”

“Since when are you a psychiatrist?”

“Insomniac is all. But even a half wit like me can see you’re cranked up tighter than a come-along. Least you might ease up off all the dope; that can’t help much.”

“Doesn’t help at all. You can see yourself what it does for those other fuckups. All the crack those idiots do.”

Nye yawned again. “At least they got sense enough to all be in their little cribs resting up. Like anyone with half a brain would do.”

This time Swann laughed. Then stepped back into the door. Stood there, hands into his pockets, tilting his head up, like about to lick the thick hood of storm clouds blackening the night sky. The stained side of his face had a dark hue. As though worried the sun might not never rise. Or maybe more worried that that it would. Either way clearly wasn’t going to make him any happier.

“Your Indian boyfriend, he gets executed at dawn, right?”

Nye gave him a hard glare. Meaning, that was out of bounds. Not for any punk like Choke Swann to discuss. Never mind it was true enough. In a few hours, Jimmy would get the chair, and he’d be up there too, all one with the sky and storm and his Great Fucking Spirit.

Point made, Nye gave up another yawn, a paroxysm that welled up out of his feet and broke out of his lungs in an audible gasp.

“Listen to me, Choke. This ride up to Medicine Wheel? Just a thing I promised I’d do for him. Last request kinda thing. Me doing this for a cop-killing Indian turned medicine man ain’t a thing to be jealous about.”

Swann picked some dry skin from his lip.

“I don’t give a fuck. Just make sure you stop sleepwalking on me till we get this done.”

“Worry not,” Nye scoffed. “I jailed so much time, I got enough sleep to last me forever. What the hard part is is this not eating. I’m ‘bout to chew down my own tongue.”

Swann spit, glancing up again. Nye looked himself.  Black silk sky brooding with impending snow. Then led his horses out the corral. Put new hay in the rick. He wanted them good and fed when they got back from Swann’s dirty work and head out on his own.

BACK INSIDE, SWANN stood holding the sawed-off shotgun Nye had left hanging on the stall post. His mouth wore a nasty boy smile.

“A sawed-off? You kidding me? This is what, about a .16 gauge?”

“More like .12 by now. With the rebore.”

“Nice how it molds to your hand. Real nice.”

“What’s more funny,  how when you get a piece in your hand, you all of a sudden turn all happy.”

Nye had seen this before, Swann abruptly popping out of whatever sourpuss state he was in, coming back to—Nye believed—his true nature. That reminded Nye of himself at that age.

Swann hefted the shotgun one hand then the other, testing the patterned grip carved into the stock. Ran a finger down the steel muscle of the over-under barrels, cut down to half their length. Felt their smooth insides.

“Did you make this too?”

“Nope. Gunsmith outside of Granite City.”

“I got to wonder what your parole officer might think, though. He finds you with hardware like this? Where you been keeping it?”

“It got confiscated once I got sent up. Fuck if I know how, but this gunsmith got his hands back on it. I got word this son of a bitch had it right out on display. So I went over, stopped in, started asking him this’n that about it. All real inter’sted. So he’s going on and on, telling me, like how he must of done to hundreds of customers, how you just wouldn’t believe all the criminal shit big bad Russell Nye had done with it.”

Nye took the shotgun himself, rather enjoying it, Choke Swann grinning like his face was about to break.

“This gunsmith, he clearly had got to believing himself way too much. I admired it some more, then pointed out to him those initials there. R.N. ‘Now ain’t that funny, those’re my initials too.’ The guy smirking at me like what kind of first class capital-A asshole was this, then did this double take, then near jumped out his own back door. Figured I must of come to blow his fucking-A head off. Fell all over himself, how he’d only just been holding it safe for me, so on and so on. Said he’d give me a real low price on it.”

“So you bought it?”

“Hell no I didn’t buy it. I took it. He was lucky that’s all I took, too.”

Nye slipped it back in its sheath, when Swann stopped him, his smile now a thin crease.

“You aren’t taking it with us?”

“This? What for? Like you just said yourself, parole board’s got quirks about fellas like me packing around toys like this.”

“They’ll have a truck-load more than that, once we get done. But they aren’t going to. Because they won’t be there. No greenshirts, no nobody. So bring along tonight. Might come in handy.”

“Handy? For what?”

“Give that bitch a real scare.”

“How? She ain’t going to be there either. Is she?”

Swann looked at him. “What if she was?”

“Oh I get it. Which case maybe I might use it to waste her, and there you go. Another scapegoat to feed to the Feds, just like you did with that little shit Rusty Sikes.”

“C’mon Nye, it’s a tossup which you hate worse, greenshirts or women. She’s both. Why not throw a good scare into her.  Blam blam. ‘Oh dear, there he goes again. Another endangered species gone extinct.”

Nye handed the shotgun back to Swann.

“I got you an even better idea, Choke. You like it so much, go on and keep it then.”

“Keep it?”

Nye had to grin. “Look at this kid. Goddamn dawn’s early light blazing in his baby blues. I mean it, kid. You can have it.”

Swann weighed the gun in his hands again, then gave it back.

“Nye, just bring it and let’s get going. Snow’s already starting.”

“Whatever you say. But I meant that. About taking the shotgun. I do owe you one, Choke.”

“Owe me one? One what?”

“For setting me up here. With Bar Heart. Lot better than any pump-jockey gig the half-way program would’ve given me.”

“Nye, you don’t owe me. More we owe you. The way you’ve been knocking down game? I had even one more of you, I could get rid of all those jerk-offs. . .come on, let’s move it. You think we got all night?

Nye shrugged and yawned, a big one, and recalled the year before, a bitter January day, when he got called down to the visitation cells. Where up to then Nye had never been. Fifteen years and no visitors, then out of nowhere, slouched down in a plastic chair, Nye found himself across the table from some young guy he’d never seen before, who right away started in with a good line of bullshit: “Fucking freezing in here.”¾“Yeah, they gotta keep the meat cold.”¾“Yeah? So how’s it going?”¾“Couldn’t be goddamn better.”¾“Food’s okay?”¾“Oh shit yeah; four stars.” And so on. The visitor didn’t give his name or say what he was doing there, and Russell Nye didn’t ask. And didn’t care. He knew all he had to know: whoever he was, this kid was O.K.

And he was. He came back again, and again. Each time like the first, until one time, he let it come out. That with Nye’s length of of time served and good behavior, maybe if some were to make a little push here or there, the parole board just might see its way to give him a shot at the outside. Especially if an employer out there had a job all lined up for him. Nye looked at him. —“Yeah, such as?”¾“Such as outdoors work.”¾“Highway Department shit?”¾“Fuck no. Way better. Back country stuff, great hours, good pay; real good pay. Mull it over at least.”

There was nothing to mull. Though any hare-brain would know there was more to it—some hard-on with an axe to grind, some nut job pulling this kid’s chain for some fucked up reason or another, maybe even some moron’s idea of a good joke—whatever it was didn’t matter. What mattered was that if somebody somewhere was offering to put a convict like Nye on their payroll, Nye was willing to let them.

And just like the kid had hinted, parole did come up, and thanks to whatever strings someone somewhere had pulled, less than a year later Nye was out and working. For that kid. Darryl Swann. No questions asked. Never once.

A guy could have done a whole lot worse.

A convict couldn’t have done better.

NYE SHOOK HIS head, bringing his brain back into gear. He noticed Swann still with him, lost in thought too, staring into the lamp-lit frost-cloud of his breath. Listening or ignoring the voices of the other outfitters coming down from the bunk house.

“Here come the clowns.”

Swann kicked one boot then the other against the gate, dislodging the muck on the bottom.

“Hell with them. The question is, are you ready, or what?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be. And you know a big dump of snow is gonna fall on us, Choke.”

“Oh no shit?” Swann zippered his jacket. “That’s only the whole goddamn idea, Nye. To cover up our visit. Leave all the greenshirts standing around with the thumbs up their ass and no evidence in their pockets.”

The palavering outfitters outside grew raucous.

“Hey in there; we ever gonna get going?”

“Swann, if you want to party up, it’s goin fast.”

“Fuck him, I’ll take his share.”

Swann muttered something and walked out into the black beyond the shed doors. Taking the sawed-off with him, Nye noticed.

He killed the lantern, and followed out. The rustle of voices had subsided with Swann’s arrival, but in the intermittent flashes of match-fire, Nye could discern the various black shapes of the outfitters moping around in the blacker silhouettes of frozen beargrass.

“Darryl, what’s Nye’s up to packin up the two best horses you got.”

“None’a you little baby-shits’ business, that’s what I’m up to,” Nye barked, ending that line of discourse. He joined the circle; silence followed. A low fire in the glass bowl under-lit the young faces as they passed around the new crystallized crack they all raved all about. The quiet was punctuated by a snort from Jim Jess, who was vacuuming up thread-like lines of blow on the pickup hood. He was old style.

The outfitters couldn’t keep quiet long.

“So Nye,” someone ventured out of a doped-up haze, “how’d it go on your visit over to the pen?”

“Pen?” Nye said, knowing without seeing it was Bob Gummer’s kind of sass, a lipping-off outfitter with a mouth so stuffed with chew that Nye, back when he started, thought Gummer was his nickname.

Jess told Gummer to lay off. “Can’t you see Nye’s got his prison lips on?”

“Can’t see a fuckin thing, tell you the truth.”

They all laughed. One of them, Divish, fired up the crack bowl again, making his crinkled teeth gleam like radioactive Chiclets. All coked up, he looked even sillier than usual. They all did, every one of them. The boys, Nye thought; you just had to love em.

“Divish, didn’t you read somewhere about some wild-ass Indian kid that kilt a highway-patrol a few years back? About how they’re finally gettin around to execute him.”

“Yeah. I figured that’s the one Nye went to see.”

“Tell you what; I bet that’s why he’s gettin them horses packed up, cause he’s gonna ride all the way over an break him out before they throw the switch.”

“Yeah. Imagine how that would be, Nye bringing a Indian like that on board?”

“It’d be great.” Darryl Swann’s voice cut the black for the first time. “Then I’d have two real outfitters and wouldn’t need all the rest of you.”

The half dozen outfitters concealed the two pickups in the north slope timber and stood a hundred yards from a log and stone ranger station. They made no sound as Swann swept the building with binoculars. He cursed them, in a raging whisper, for being nearly useless in the dark.

“Don’t look like there’s anybody home all right,” Divish said, voice hushed.

“What about that guy that lives with her?”

“I heard he was back east.”

Swann told them to hush the fuck up. “Nye? What do you say? We go for it?”

“Whatever we do, don’t put it on me, cause I don’t give a damn.”

Nye yawned. He didn’t say so, but he never understood this plan in the first place, and he was tired and hungry as hell and still had a long day’s journey ahead of him. He really didn’t give a damn.

Swann shook his head, muttering, “Easy for you to say, but I don’t have much choice about it.”

Nye didn’t know what that meant, not having a choice about it, but he didn’t bother to ask.

Swann motioned to one of the party to bring up the can of gasoline; the others to grab axes and wrecking bars, then flipping the sawed-off by its handle, he started out. There seemed to be no question that the rest would follow. And they did.

He was a commanding presence for such a young squirt, Nye was thinking, just as a howling wolf-like animal catapulted from the yard, and leapt out of the starlit black, attacking the front most human.

Panicking, Swann fell back but doing so, raised the sawed-off shotgun instinctively and fired.

The attacking dog jerked backward and fell instantly dead.







(to read more please contact the author: matt.ellison22@gmail.com)