Famous (24 page)

The muleskinner opens his wallet, collects
the pint of busthead he bought at a bodega in Silverton, and
swallows the remaining mouthful, whiskey crashing into his empty
stomach like iced fire.

He wades through waist-deep snow to the
mercantile, bangs his shop-mades on the doorframe. Inside, the
lamps have been extinguished and the big stove squats dormant in
the corner, unattended by the usual constellation of miners
jawboning over coffee and tobacco. He calls for the owner as he
crosses the board floor, moving between shelves, past stacked
crates and burlap sacks bulging with sugar and flour.

“Jessup? It’s Brady! You in back?”

The twelve burros crane their scrawny necks
in his direction when Brady emerges from the merc. He reaches into
his greatcoat, pulls out a tin of Star Navy tobacco, and shoves a
chaw between lips and gums gone blackish purple in the last
year.

“What the hell?” he whispers.

When he delivered supplies two weeks ago,
this little mining town was bustling. Now Abandon looms listless
before him in the gloom of late afternoon, streets empty, snow
banked high against the unshoveled plank sidewalks, no tracks as
far as he can see.

The cabins scattered across the lower slopes
lie buried to their chimneys, and with not a one of them smoking,
the air smells too clean.

Brady is a man at home in solitude, often
days on the trail, alone in wild, quiet places, but this silence is
all wrong—a lie. He feels menaced by it, and with each passing
moment, more certain that something has happened here.

A wall of dark clouds scrapes over the peaks
and snowflakes begin to speck the sleeves of his slicker. Here
comes the wind. Chimes clang together over the doorway of the merc.
It will be night soon.

He makes his way up the street into the
saloon, still half-expecting Joss Maddox, the beautiful barkeep, to
assault him with some gloriously profane greeting. No one’s there.
Not the mute piano player, not a single customer, and again, no
light from the kerosene lamps, no warmth from the potbellied stove,
just a half-filled glass on the pine bar, the beer frozen
through.

The path to the nearest cabin lies beneath
untrodden snow, and without webs, it takes five minutes to cover a
hundred yards.

He pounds his gloved fist against the door,
counts to sixty. The latch string hasn’t been pulled in, and
despite the circumstance, he still feels like a trespasser as he
steps inside uninvited.

In the dark, his eyes strain to adjust.

Around the base of a potted spruce tree,
crumpled pages of newspaper clutters the dirt floor—remnants of
Christmas.

Food sits untouched on a rustic table, far
too lavish to be any ordinary meal for the occupants of this
cramped, one-room cabin. This was Christmas dinner.

He removes a glove, touches the ham—cold and
hard as ore. A pot of beans have frozen in their broth. The cake
feels more like pumice than sponge, and two jagged glass stems
still stand upright, the wine having frozen and shattered the
crystal cups.

Outside again, back with his pack train, he
shouts, turning slowly in the middle of the street so the words
carry in all directions.

“Anyone here?”

His voice and the fading echo of it sound so
small rising against the vast, indifferent sweep of wilderness. The
sky dims. Snow falls harder. The church at the north end of town
disappears in the storm.

It’s twenty miles back to Silverton, and the
pack train has been on the trail since before first light. They
need rest. Having skinned mules the last sixteen hours, he needs
it, too, though the prospect of spending the night in Abandon, in
this awful silence, unnerves him.

As he slips a boot into the stirrup, ready to
drive the burros down to the stables, he notices something beyond
the cribs at the south end of town. He puts George forward, trots
through deep powder between the false-fronted buildings, and when
he sees what caught his eye, whispers, “You old fool.”

Just a snowman scowling at him, spindly arms
made of spruce branches. Pinecones for teeth and eyes. Garland for
a crown.

He tugs the reins, turning George back toward
town, and the jolt of seeing her provokes, “Lord God Amighty.”

He drops his head, tries to allay the
thumping of his heart in the thin air. When he looks up again, the
young girl is still there, perhaps six or seven, apparition-pale
and just ten feet away, with locomotive-black curls and coal eyes
to match—so dark and with such scant delineation between iris and
pupil, they more resemble wet stones.

“You put a fright in me,” he says. “What are
you doin out here all alone?”

She backpedals.

“Don’t be scart. I ain’t the bogeyman.” Brady
alights, wades toward her through the snow. With the young girl in
webs sunk only a foot in powder, and the muleskinner to his waist,
he thinks it odd to stand eye to eye with a child.

“You all right?” he asks. “I didn’t think
there was nobody here.”

The snowflakes stand out like white confetti
in the child’s hair.

“They’re all gone,” she says, no emotion, no
tears, just an unaffected statement of fact.

“Even your Ma and Pa?”

She nods.

“Where’d they all go to? Can you show
me?”

She takes another step back, reaches into her
gray woolen cloak. The single-action Army is a heavy sidearm, and
it sags comically in the child’s hand so she holds it like a rifle,
Brady too surprised to do a thing but watch as she struggles with
the hammer.

“Okay, I’ll show you,” she says, the hammer
locked back, sighting him up, her small finger already in the
trigger guard.

“Now hold on, wait just a—”

“Stay still.”

“That ain’t no toy to point in someone’s
direction. It’s for—”

“Killin. I know. You’ll feel better
directly.”

As Brady scrambles for a way to rib up this
young girl to hand him the gun, he hears the report ricocheting
through the canyon, finds himself lying on his back, surrounded by
a wall of snow.

In the oval of gray winter sky, the child’s
face appears, looking down at him.

What in God’s—

“It made a hole in your neck.”

He attempts to tell her to stable George and
the burros, see that they’re fed and watered. After all the work
they put in today, they deserve at least that. Only gurgles emerge,
and when he tries to breathe, his throat whistles.

She points the Army at his face again, one
eye closed, the barrel slightly quivering, a parody of aiming.

He stares up into the deluge of snowflakes,
the sky already immersed in bluish dusk that seems to deepen before
his eyes, and he wonders,
Is the day really fading that fast, or
am I?

SNOWBOUND

Forthcoming June 2010 from Minotaur
Books

DESCRIPTION: For Will Innis and his daughter,
Devlin, the loss was catastrophic. Every day for the past five
years, they wonder where she is, if she is—Will’s wife, Devlin’s
mother—because Rachael Innis vanished one night during an
electrical storm on a lonely desert highway, and suspected of her
death, Will took his daughter and fled.

Now, Will and Devlin live under different
names in another town, having carved out a new life for themselves
as they struggle to maintain some semblance of a family.

When one night, a beautiful, hard-edged FBI
agent appears on their doorstep, they fear the worst, but she
hasn’t come to arrest Will. “I know you’re innocent,” she tells
him, “because Rachael wasn’t the first…or the last.” Desperate for
answers, Will and Devlin embark on a terrifying journey that spans
four thousand miles from the desert southwest to the wilds of
Alaska , heading unaware into the heart of a nightmare, because the
truth is infinitely worse than they ever imagined.

Excerpt from Snowbound…

1

In the evening of the last good day either of
them would know for years to come, the girl pushed open the sliding
glass door and stepped through onto the back porch.

“Daddy?”

Will Innis set the legal pad aside and made
room for Devlin to climb into his lap. His daughter was small for
eleven, felt like the shell of a child in his arms.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked and
in her scratchy voice he could hear the remnants of her last
respiratory infection like gravel in her lungs.

“Working up a closing for my trial in the
morning.”

“Is your client the bad guy again?”

Will smiled. “You and your mother. I’m not
really supposed to think of it that way, sweetheart.”

“What’d he do?” His little girl’s face had
turned ruddy in the sunset and the fading light brought out threads
of platinum in her otherwise midnight hair.

“He allegedly—”

“What’s that mean?”

“Allegedly?”

“Yeah.”

“Means it’s not been proven. He’s suspected
of selling drugs.”

“Like what I take?”

“No, your drugs are good. They help you. He
was selling, allegedly selling, bad drugs to people.”

“Why are they bad?”

“Because they make you lose control.”

“Why do people take them?”

“They like how it makes them feel.”

“How does it make them feel?”

He kissed her forehead and looked at his
watch. “It’s after eight, Devi. Let’s go bang on those lungs.”

She sighed but she didn’t argue. She never
tried to get out of it.

He stood up cradling his daughter and walked
over to the redwood railing.

They stared into the wilderness that bordered
Oasis Hills, their subdivision. The houses on No-Water Lane had the
Sonoran Desert for a backyard.

“Look,” he said. “See them?” A half mile
away, specks filed out of an arroyo and trotted across the desert
toward a shadeless forest of giant saguaro cacti that looked
vaguely sinister profiled against the horizon.

“What are they?” she asked.

“Coyotes. What do you bet they start yapping
when the sun goes down?”

After supper, he read to Devlin from A
Wrinkle in Time. They’d been working their way through the
penultimate chapter, “Aunt Beast,” but Devlin was exhausted and
drifted off before Will had finished the second page.

He closed the book and set it on the carpet
and turned out the light. Cool desert air flowed in through an open
window. A sprinkler whispered in the next door neighbor’s yard.
Devlin yawned, made a cooing sound that reminded him of rocking her
to sleep as a newborn. Her eyes fluttered and she said very softly,
“Mom?”

“She’s working late at the clinic,
sweetheart.”

“When’s she coming back?”

“Few hours.”

“Tell her to come in and kiss me?”

“I will.”

He was nowhere near ready for court in the
morning but he stayed, running his fingers through Devlin’s hair
until she’d fallen back to sleep. Finally, he slid carefully off
the bed and walked out onto the deck to gather up his books and
legal pads. He had a late night ahead of him. A pot of strong
coffee would help.

Next door, the sprinklers had gone quiet.

A lone cricket chirped in the desert.

Thunderless lightning sparked somewhere over
Mexico, and the coyotes began to scream.

2

The thunderstorm caught up with Rachael Innis
thirty miles north of the Mexican border. It was 9:30 p.m., and it
had been a long day at the free clinic in Sonoyta, where she
volunteered her time and services once a week as a bilingual
psychologist. The windshield wipers whipped back and forth. High
beams lit the steam rising off the pavement, and in the rearview
mirror, Rachael saw the pair of headlights a quarter of a mile back
that had been with her for the last ten minutes.

Glowing beads suddenly appeared on the
shoulder just ahead. She jammed her foot into the brake pedal, the
Grand Cherokee fishtailing into the oncoming lane before skidding
to a stop. A doe and her fawn ventured into the middle of the road,
mesmerized by the headlights. Rachael let her forehead fall onto
the steering wheel, closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath.

The deer moved on. She accelerated the
Cherokee, another dark mile passing as pellets of hail hammered the
hood.

The Cherokee veered sharply toward the
shoulder and she nearly lost control again, trying to correct her
bearing, but the steering wheel wouldn’t straighten out. Rachael
lifted her foot off the gas pedal and eased over onto the side of
the road.

When she killed the ignition all she could
hear was the rain and hail drumming on the roof. The car that had
been following her shot by. She set her glasses in the passenger
seat, opened the door, and stepped down into a puddle that engulfed
her pumps. The downpour soaked through her black suit. She
shivered. It was pitch-black between lightning strikes and she
moved forward carefully, feeling her way along the warm metal of
the hood.

A slash of lightning hit the desert just a
few hundred yards out. It set her body tingling, her ears ringing.
I’m going to be electrocuted. There came a train of earsplitting
strikes, flashbulbs of electricity that lit the sky just long
enough for her to see that the tires on the driver side were still
intact.

Her hands trembled now. A tall saguaro stood
burning like a cross in the desert. She groped her way over to the
passenger side as marble-size hail collected in her hair. The
desert was electrified again, spreading wide and empty all around
her.

In the eerie blue light she saw that the
front tire on the passenger side was flat.

Back inside the Cherokee, Rachael sat behind
the steering wheel, mascara trailing down her cheeks like sable
tears. She wrung out her long black hair and massaged the headache
building between her temples. Her purse lay in the passenger
floorboard. She dragged it into her lap and shoved her hand inside,
rummaging for the cell phone. She found it, tried her husband’s
number, but there was no service in the storm.