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“We’re just being careful.”

“You had damn well better be careful.” I spoke loudly so Skarda’s crew could hear. “We’re moving to the cabin now. How ’bout we all err on the side of caution, okay?”Advertisement

“Okay,” said a voice.

“Don’t start nothing, won’t be nothing,” said the other.

“Really,” I said. “You’re talking smack?” I lowered my voice. “Any last words, Dave?”

“Dammit, Jimmy,” he said. “Don’t screw around.”

“I won’t,” he said.

How the hell do you get yourself into these things? my inner voice asked. You should be home watching the Twins on TV.

Too late now, I told myself.

“Here we go,” I said out loud.

I eased Skarda away from the Cherokee and pushed him forward in a straight line toward the square of light. We walked slowly more for fear that I would trip over something than fear itself. I saw nothing, heard only the sound of crickets and wind rustling the leaves of invisible trees. When we reached the deck stairs, I turned so that my back was to the cabin and Skarda was directly in front of me. Together we climbed the wooden planks sideways. When we reached the light at the top of the stairs, I turned Dave so that he was shielding my body while I slid along the wall to the door. I opened the door, backed across the threshold. Once inside, I spun Skarda around so that he was now facing the cabin and I was behind him again. A woman sitting at a small kitchen table caught my eye. She smiled at me, but that was meant only as a distraction. An old man dressed in a Che Guevara T-shirt was standing just inside the doorway. Long hair as gray as roadside slush fell to his shoulders. He was bracing the wooden stock of a 16-gauge double barrel against his shoulder. The business end was pointed at my head.

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“Drop your gun,” he said.

Instead, I quickly reached up with my empty hand and angled the barrel away so that it was pointing at the wall. At more or less that same time, I used the muzzle of Glock to violently rap the fingers the old man had curled around the shotgun where the stock met the trigger mechanism. He howled in pain, and I pulled the double barrel from his grasp.

“Damn hippie,” I said.

The old man folded his fingers into a fist and shoved them under his armpit as if that would somehow ease the pain. Skarda turned toward him.

“Dad,” he said. There was genuine concern in his voice.

I brought the Glock up and pointed it at Skarda’s head. The old man moaned and said, “He broke my hand,” and I pointed the gun at him. “Why did you hurt him?” the woman asked, so I pointed the gun at her. She was still sitting at the table, her chair turned so that she could leave it in a hurry. I couldn’t see her hands, so I told her, “Let me see your hands.” She brought them up and rested them on the tabletop. They were empty.

Skarda went to the old man. His hands were still cuffed behind his back, so there wasn’t much he could do. “Let me see,” he said.

The old man uncurled his fingers and flexed them cautiously. They might have been bruised—hell, I hoped they were bruised—but they were unbroken.

“Is he all right?” asked a quiet voice. Only it wasn’t the woman sitting at the table. This voice belonged to a woman who had poked her head around the doorway that led to a room in the back of the cabin.

“Come into the light,” I said.

She stepped through the doorway and into the room, moving cautiously as if threatened by life’s sharp edges. She was young, no more than twenty-one I guessed, with golden hair that reached halfway down her back, a fetching figure, and smooth, milky-fresh skin colored with the tint of roses, skin I’ve seen only on northern girls. Yet it was her eyes that I found most remarkable. They were warm and wide open and so honest that meeting them made a fellow regret his long-forgotten sins. She would have been quite beautiful if not for the expression of despair on her face and the bruise under her chin.

“Are you Josie?” I asked.

“I’m Josie.” I turned my head toward the woman sitting at the table while keeping the Glock pointed at Skarda and the old man. “What are you going to do?” she asked. Her eyes were tired, and her voice was filled with tension. She was about thirty-five, with hair that didn’t know if it was red or brown. Her face was angular and clean-lined with a dusting of freckles across her nose and cheeks. She wasn’t pretty, yet no one would have called her plain.

“Call your friends into the cabin,” I said. “Tell them to leave their guns outside.”

“Why should I?”

“Because you’re an adult, not a child playing cops and robbers.” I gestured at the old man. “Because I could have done a lot worse than rapping his knuckles.” pqdm.com