Those Who Wish Me Dead Read online

  That was when he heard one of their voices loud and clear for the first time: “Well, now. It would appear someone has been swimming. And chose to leave his clothing behind.”

  The voice was so mild that for a moment Jace couldn’t believe it came from one of the men who’d done the killing up there with the knife. It seemed impossible.

  There was a pause, and then the second man answered. “Clothes are one thing. But he’d also choose to leave his shoes?”

  “Seems like rough country,” the first voice agreed, “to walk without shoes.”

  The strangely serene voices went silent then, but there was another sound, a clear metallic snap. Jace had been around the shooting range with his dad enough to recognize that one: a round being chambered into a gun.

  The men circled the quarry rim, and down below them, pinned in the dark rocks, Jace Wilson began to cry.

  2

  The weather-alert radio went off just as they settled into bed, speaking to Ethan and Allison in its disembodied, robotic voice.

  Potent late-spring storm system will continue to bring heavy snow to area mountains.…Heaviest snowfall above seventy-five hundred feet.…However, several inches of heavy wet snow are possible as low as forty-five hundred feet before morning. Heavy wet snow on trees and power lines may result in power outages. Snow should taper off Sunday morning. One to two feet of snow expected with locally heavier accumulations on north- and east-facing slopes. Mountain roadways will become snow-packed and icy tonight and may become impassable in spots, including over Beartooth Pass.

  “You know what I love about you?” Allison said. “You’re leaving that thing on, even though we’ve been watching it snow for the past four hours. We know what’s happening.”

  “Forecasts can change.”

  “Hmm. Yes. And people can sleep. Let’s do that.”

  “Could get fun out there,” Ethan said. “Surely someone decided they’d take a quick hike this morning, ahead of the weather. And of course they wouldn’t need a map, because it was just going to be a quick hike, right?”

  Those were the kinds of decisions that usually drew Ethan into the mountains in the middle of the night. Particularly the late-season storms, when the weather had been temperate enough for long enough to lull people into a false sense of security.

  “May every fool stay indoors,” Allison said, and kissed his arm, shifting for a more comfortable position, her voice already sleepy.

  “Optimistic wish,” he said, pulling her close to his chest, relishing her warmth. The cabin had cooled quickly once they let the fire in the woodstove burn down. Beside them, the window rattled with a steady drilling of sleet. On the shelf above the bed, next to the weather-alert radio, the CB was silent. It had been a good winter—only one call-out. Winters were usually better than other seasons, though; most tourists stayed away from Montana in those months. Ethan didn’t like the feel of this storm. Last day of May, summer looming, a week of sunshine and fifty-degree weather just past? Yes, some of the fools Allison mentioned might have taken to the mountains. And once they got stuck, that radio above Ethan Serbin’s head would crackle to life, and his search-and-rescue team would assemble.

  “Got a good feeling,” Allison said into the pillow, fading fast the way she always did; the woman could probably sleep on the tarmac of an active airport without trouble.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. But just in case I’m wrong, turn off your radio. At least the fool frequency.”

  He smiled at her in the dark, squeezed her one more time, and then closed his eyes. She was asleep within minutes, her breathing shifting to long, slow inhalations he could feel against his chest. He listened as the sleet changed back to snow; the rattle against the glass faded to silence, and eventually he started to fade too.

  When the radio went off, Allison awoke with a groan.

  “No,” she said. “Not tonight.”

  Ethan got out of bed, fumbled the handheld unit from its base, and walked out of the bedroom and across the cold floorboards to the front window. It was fully dark inside the cabin. They’d lost power just after sunset, and he hadn’t bothered to use the generator; there was no need to burn fuel just to sleep.

  “Serbin? You copy?” The voice belonged to Claude Kitna, the Park County sheriff.

  “Copy,” Ethan said, looking out at the white world beyond the dark cabin. “Who’s gone missing, and where, Claude?”

  “Nobody missing.”

  “Then let me sleep.”

  “Got a slide-off. Somebody trying to get over the pass just as we were about to shut it down.”

  The pass was the Beartooth Pass, on Highway 212 between Red Lodge and Cooke City. The Beartooth Highway, as 212 was also known, was one of the most beautiful—and dangerous—highways in the country, a series of steep switchbacks that wound between Montana and Wyoming and peaked at over ten thousand feet. It was closed for months in the winter, the entire highway simply shut down, and did not reopen until late May at the earliest. The drive required vigilance in the best weather, and in a snowstorm in the dark? Good luck.

  “Okay,” Ethan said into the radio. “Why do you need me?” He would roll with his team when someone was missing. A slide-off on the highway, or, as Claude liked to call the really nasty drops, a bounce-off, might require paramedics—or a coroner—but not search-and-rescue.

  “Driver who thought it was a wise idea to push through says she was on her way to see you. Park service bumped her to me. Got her sitting in a plow truck right now. You want her?”

  “Coming to see me?” Ethan frowned. “Who is it?”

  “A Jamie Bennett,” Claude said. “And for a woman who just drove her rental car off a mountain, I have to say, she’s not all that apologetic.”

  “Jamie Bennett?”

  “Correct. You know her?”

  “Yeah,” Ethan said, confused. “Yeah, I know her.”

  Jamie Bennett was a professional bodyguard. Since leaving the Air Force, Ethan had taught survival instruction as a private contractor, working with civilians and government groups. Jamie had been in a session he’d taught a year ago. He’d liked her, and she was good, competent if a bit cocky, but he could not imagine what had her driving over the Beartooth Pass in a snowstorm in search of him.

  “What’s her story?” Claude Kitna asked.

  Ethan couldn’t begin to answer that.

  “I’ll head your way,” Ethan said. “And I guess I’ll find out.”

  “Copy that. Be careful, now. It’s rough out here tonight.”

  “I’ll be careful. See you soon, Claude.”

  In the bedroom, Allison propped herself up on one arm and looked at him in the shadows as he pulled his clothes on.

  “Where are you headed?”

  “Up to the pass.”

  “Somebody try to walk away from a car wreck?”

  That had happened before. Scared of staying in one place, people would panic and set off down the highway, and, in the blowing snow, they’d lose the highway. It seemed like an impossible thing to lose, until you experienced a Rocky Mountain blizzard at night.

  “No. Jamie Bennett was trying to get through.”

  “The marshal? The one from last spring?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is she doing in Montana?”

  “Coming to find me, is what I was told.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “That’s what I was told,” he repeated.

  “This can’t be good,” Allison said.

  “I’m sure it’s fine.”

  But as he left the cabin and walked to his snowmobile in the howling white winds, he knew that it wasn’t.

  The night landscape refused full dark in that magical way that only snow could provide, soaking in the starlight and moonlight and offering it back as a trapped blue iridescence. Claude Kitna hadn’t been lying—the wind was working hard, shifting north to northeast in savage gusts, flinging thick, wet snow. Ethan rode alone and h
e rode slow, even though he knew 212 as well as anyone up here, and he’d logged more hours on it in bad weather than most. That was exactly why he kept his speed down even when it felt as if the big sled could handle more. Of the rescues-turned-to-corpse discoveries he’d participated in, far too many involved snowmobiles and ATVs, people getting cocky about driving vehicles built to handle the elements. One thing he’d learned while training all over the world—and the lesson had been hammered home here in Montana—was that believing a tool could handle the elements was a recipe for disaster. You adapted to the elements with respect; you did not control them.

  It took him an hour to make what was usually a twenty-minute ride, and he was greeted at Beartooth Pass by orange flares, which threw the surrounding peaks into silhouette against the night sky, one plow, and one police vehicle parked in the road. A black Chevy Tahoe was crushed against the guardrail. Ethan looked at its position, leaned up on one side, and shook his head. She’d come awfully damn close. Pull that same maneuver on one of the switchbacks and that Tahoe would have fallen a long way before it hit rock.

  He parked the snowmobile, watching the snow swirl into the dark canyons below, lit orange by the flares as it fell, and he wondered if there was anyone out there in the wilderness whom they didn’t know about, anyone who hadn’t been as lucky as Jamie Bennett. There were tall, thin poles spaced out along the winding highway, markers to help the plows maneuver when the snow turned the road into a blind man’s guessing game, and on the downwind side of the road, the snow was already two feet high against them, three feet in areas where the drifts caught.

  The passenger-side door of the plow truck banged open, and Jamie Bennett stepped out of the cab and into the snow before Ethan had cut his engine. Her feet slipped out from under her and she nearly ended up on her ass before she caught herself on the door handle.

  “What frigging country do you live in that has a blizzard the last day of May, Serbin?”

  She was almost as tall as him; her blond hair streamed out from under a ski cap, and her blue eyes watered in the stinging wind.

  “They have these things,” he said, “called weather forecasts? They’re new, I guess, experimental, but it’s still worth checking them, time to time. Like, oh, before driving over a mountain range at night.”

  She smiled and offered a gloved hand, and they shook.

  “I heard the forecast, but I figured I could beat the storm. Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m keeping my positive mental attitude.”

  That was one of the seven priorities for survival Ethan had taught in the course Jamie had taken. The first priority, in fact.

  “Glad you’ve retained your lessons. What are you doing here, anyhow?”

  Claude Kitna was watching them with interest, staying at a courteous distance but not so far away that he couldn’t overhear the conversation. Farther up the road, the headlights of another plow truck showed, this one returning from the pass gate, which would now be shut and locked, the Beartooth Highway closed to all traffic. They’d opened the pass for the first time that season just four days earlier. Last year, it had been closed until June 20. The wilderness was more accessible now than it had once been, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still the wilderness.

  “I’ve got a proposition for you,” Jamie said. “A request. You may not like it, but I want you to hear me out, at least.”

  “It’s a promising start,” Ethan said. “Any job that arrives with a blizzard has to bring good things.”

  It was a joke then. There in the wind and the snow and the orange signal flares, it was only a joke. Weeks later, though, in the sun and the smoke, he would remember that line, and it would turn him cold.

  3

  By the time they got back to the cabin, Allison had a fire going in the woodstove.

  “You want me to start the generator?” she said. “Get the lights back on?”

  “It’s fine,” Jamie said.

  “Get you some coffee, at least?” Allison said. “Warm you up a little?”

  “I’d take a bourbon or something, actually. If you have any.”

  “Like I said—coffee,” Allison told her with a smile, and then she poured Maker’s Mark into a steaming mug of coffee and offered it to Jamie, who was still trying to get her jacket and gloves off, shedding snow that melted into pooled water on the floorboards in front of the stove.

  “Now you’re talking. Thank you. It is frigid out there. You really stay here year-round?”

  Ethan smiled. “That’s right.”

  Allison offered Ethan a cup of coffee as well, and he accepted the warm mug gratefully, rotated it in his hands. Even through top-of-the-line gloves, the wind could find your joints. Allison’s eyes were searching his, looking for a reason this woman had blown in with the storm. He gave the smallest of headshakes. She understood that he still had no idea.

  “Gorgeous place,” Jamie said, sipping the whiskey-laced coffee. “You said you guys built it yourselves?”

  “Yes. With some help.”

  “You give it a name? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with a ranch?”

  He smiled. “It’s not a ranch. But we call it the Ritz.”

  “Seems a little rustic for that.”

  “That’s the idea,” Allison said. “That’s the joke.”

  Jamie glanced at her and nodded. “Sorry about this, by the way. Crashing in during the night, during the storm. Invading the Ritz.”

  “Must be important,” Allison said. She was wearing loose sweatpants and a tighter, long-sleeved top. She was barefoot, and Jamie Bennett had at least six inches on her. The storm didn’t concern Allison—she was old Montana, third generation, a rancher’s daughter—but Ethan had the sense that Jamie did, somehow. And not because she’d arrived in the middle of the night. Allison was used to those kinds of calls.

  “It is,” Jamie said, and turned back to Ethan. “You still run the same summer programs?”

  “Summers I work with kids,” he said. “I don’t do any training for anybody else until September. Summer is the kids.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  He raised an eyebrow. Ethan worked with probation and parole officers from around the country, took in kids who were facing lockup somewhere and brought them into the mountains instead. It was a survival course, yes, but it was a lot more than that. The idea had hardly originated with him; there were plenty of similar programs in the country.

  “I’ve got a kid for you,” she said. “I think. I’m hoping you’re willing to do it.”

  Inside the woodstove, a log split in the heat with a popping noise, and the fire flared higher behind the glass door.

  “You’ve got a kid,” he echoed. “That means…you’ve got a witness.”

  She nodded. “Nice call.”

  He took a seat in front of the stove and she followed suit. Allison stayed where she was, leaning against the kitchen counter, watching.

  “Why do you want him with me?”

  “Because his parents are refusing traditional witness protection.”

  “Nontraditional witness protection is what you do now, I thought.” Ethan remembered Jamie saying that she’d been with the U.S. Marshals but had left to go into executive protection. High-dollar private-bodyguard work.

  She took a deep breath. “I’ve got to be very limited in what I tell you. Understand that? I’ll try to give you the best sense of it that I can, but it won’t be as detailed as you’d like.”

  “Okay.”

  “This boy is…he’s beyond a critical witness. I can’t overstate his value. But what I’m dealing with is a situation in which he and his parents have a pretty healthy distrust of law enforcement. With good reason, based on what they’ve seen. The boy is at risk. High risk. And the parents want to stay with the son, avoid the WITSEC program, and just generally control everything. Enter me, as you said. But…”

  She stopped talking. Ethan gave her a minute, and when she didn’t pick back up, he said,
“Jamie?”

  “But I’m not doing too well,” she said softly. “I could lie to you, and I was about to. I was about to tell you that the family can’t afford me. That’s true enough. But Ethan, I would protect this boy for free if I could. I really mean that. I’d make it my only job, I’d…”

  Another pause, a deep breath, and then, “They’re too good.”

  “Who is?”

  “The men looking for him.”

  Allison turned away just as Ethan searched for her eyes.

  “Then why me?” he said. “You’re better at it than me.”

  “You can take him off the grid. Completely. And that’s where their weakness will be. If he’s around a cell phone, a security camera, a computer, a damned video game, I feel like they’ll get him. But here…here he’s just a tiny thing in a big wilderness.”

  “We all are,” Ethan said.

  “Right. It’s going to be your call, of course. But I was desperate, and it struck me. At first, a wild idea, this implausible thing. But then I looked into it a little bit more—”

  “Looked into Ethan a little more?” Allison said. They both turned to her.

  “That was part of it,” Jamie Bennett said evenly. “But it was more looking into the feasibility of the whole thing. We make him vanish for a summer. But he’s not in the situation the parents are so worried about, he’s not in some safe house in a new city, scared to death. I have a very good sense of the kid. What he likes, what he’d respond to, what would make him relax. He is not relaxed right now, I assure you. He’s very into adventure things. Survival stories. And that, of course, made me think of you. So I pitched it, told them about your background, and I think I’ve got them sold on it. So I came here to sell you too.”

  “Shouldn’t it have run the other way, maybe?” Allison said. “Clearing the plan with us before selling the child and his parents on it?”

  Jamie studied her for a moment and then gave a small nod. “I understand why you feel that way. But the reality is, I’m trying to minimize the number of people who know that this boy exists. If I’d told you and then the parents wouldn’t agree to it, there’d be people in Montana who’d been informed of the situation for no gain. That’s a risky approach.”