The Big Dark Sky (40)

He headed toward the main house. As he crossed the blacktop lane, he heard low thunder. Although the sky remained cloudless, he looked up, but then glanced toward the distant purple mountains in the west. The fulmination swelled. He felt rumbling underfoot, and he turned his attention to the east. When he saw the source of the sound, he stood astonished for a moment—and then, seized by a sense of imminent danger, he broke into a run.





32


Colson Fielding was frozen by shock. His father was dead on the ground, and Colson should have been stricken hard by grief, but he was instead given entirely to terror as he stared into the muzzle of the pistol, the two shots echoing in memory, echoing and echoing, so that at first he couldn’t hear what the killer was saying to him. Slowly he raised his attention from the single black eye of the gun to the bottle-green eyes of Asher Optime, which was like meeting the stare of a robot. The murderer’s face was blank, no twist of anger in it, no trace of a wicked smile, as if killing Colson’s father meant nothing to him, meant less than stepping on an ant.

Optime’s voice at last penetrated. “Drop the walking stick, boy, take off your backpack, do it now, or I’ll shoot you in the foot and spend the afternoon watching you slowly bleed to death.”

Into the wild rush of terror came a current of shame. Colson despised himself because he began to shake violently and because he did as he was told, with no further hesitation, with no thought of striking out or making a run for it. Murder was what jacked up the pace of action movies, it was how you scored high in video games, by killing bad guys, but it wasn’t supposed to be something that could happen to you in real life. He felt as though he might throw up or embarrass himself by pissing his pants; he did neither, but even if he had done both, it wouldn’t matter, the mortification wouldn’t matter, as long as he was allowed to live.

“Take off your utility belt, boy, throw it on the backpack, turn out your pockets, drop the contents on the ground.”

While he did as told, he heard himself saying, “Mister, please, please, please.” He hated himself for pleading, for the tremor in his voice, but he did not stop. The killer took such pleasure in his captive’s humiliation that he focused on Colson’s eyes and on his lips as they formed the pleas, not on his hands. Not on his hands.

Thrown to the ground, Colson’s wallet fell open to a photo of his mom and dad, taken two years ago on vacation in Coeur d’Alene. The killer retrieved it, considered it, and then tucked it in a jacket pocket.

Satisfied that every demand had been met, he shoved the pistol in the hip holster under his denim jacket.

In that instant, Colson was given a chance to act. He could have charged Optime and tried to knock him off his feet. He wasn’t able to move. Cold sweat slicked his face, his hands, drooled down his spine into the small of his back, into the crack of his butt. His knee joints seemed to be coming loose. He swayed and thought he would collapse.

The killer used one foot to get a boot toe under Colson’s father and kick-shoved him hard a few times, until the corpse flopped over, facedown in the dirt.

For some reason, seeing his dad’s body treated like garbage, Colson thought of his mother, of how she loved his dad, how his dad loved her, and grief slammed him at last, not as much for his own loss as for hers, for how devastated she would be when she got the news. His chest ached as if grief were a cancer in his ribs. He was hardly able to draw a breath, and with this anguish came a first inchoate spasm of rage, raw anger directed at the killer, but also at himself and at God.

Optime bent down and slipped the shotgun off the dead man’s shoulder. He checked the breach and chambered a round and checked the breach again.

“Slugs,” he said. He looked at Colson. “You know, boy, this would put a hole through you as big as a fist.”

Colson didn’t so much as glance at the muzzle. He’d had enough of looking down gun barrels.

Meeting his captive’s eyes, the killer kicked the corpse again, and then once more, with a contempt that clearly gave him pleasure.

Colson said, “You sick bastard,” but that weak rebellion was such a pathetic attempt at atonement for his failure to act that he felt smaller and more helpless than ever.

As though he could read his captive’s mind, Optime said, “Your daddy is nothing now. He never was anything. Neither are you. You’re pestilence and filth. You breathe out poison.” With the shotgun, he gestured past Colson. “Let’s go to church.”

The suggestion was so odd that Colson didn’t at first realize Optime literally meant what he said.

“Church,” the killer repeated. “At the end of the street.”

“You can’t just leave him laying there.”

“Your daddy isn’t a him anymore, boy. Your daddy’s just an it, a worm farm waiting to happen. Now get a move on. There’s someone I want you to meet.”





33


If they had not been announced by the thunder of their hooves, Wyatt Rider might have thought that the elk were a hallucination. The throng approaching wasn’t merely an antlered bull and its cows with a few spotted calves. More bulls than Wyatt could count galloped up the lane and through the meadows to both sides of the blacktop, and with them came several times more cows than bulls, as well as numerous calves. He estimated there were as many as two hundred, and though they were not in a stampede that might trample him, they were coming fast, with determination. Getting out of their way seemed to be wise.