The men at the logging camp weren't random. They were organized, funded,purposeful.They had vehicles and generators and a boss. Drug runners, I'm certain. Probably meth or fentanyl. The Catskills have been crawling with these outfits for years—small teams running distribution routes through the mountains, using logging roads and old railroad grades to move product between upstate labs and the city.
I knew that. It's part of why I chose the cabin I did: it's remote enough that the drug runners and I could coexist without crossing paths, a predator-to-predator understanding.Stay off my land and I stay off yours.
That arrangement, apparently, has expired.
The snowmobile itself isn't proof of anything. It could be me deluding myself. But I know it isn't. I don't believe in fucking coincidences. And some things are too neatly arranged to be an accident.
Twenty years ago, Yelena died on a back road outside Saratoga Springs.
Four days ago, someone snuck up to my cabin and disabled my trail camera.
This morning, two men grabbed Caroline off a bench in Pike Hollow and drove her to a logging camp full of drug runners who knew my name and my history, and were waiting for a boss who wanted to know what I'd told her.
That boss is on his way. And whoever he is, he didn't stumble onto my mountain by accident.
He came looking forme.
The same way I've been looking for whoever killed Yelena.
Because it's them. I'm almost sure of it now. Maybe not the same individuals—twenty years is a long time and men in this line of work don't tend to age gracefully—but the same machinery. The motherfuckers that ran my wife off the road are back.
I close my eyes. The room in my mind rattles on its hinges. Something within it ishowling.
As if she can hear the wails, Caroline murmurs and turns her face deeper into my chest. Her breath is warm through the wool of my sweater. I drop my chin to the top of her head and hold her tighter.
She came up this mountain looking for answers about her father. Instead, she found me in all my bloody, gory messiness. I threw her out, and they grabbed her, and if I'd been even a few minutes slower on my guilt trip back down?—
I don't finish the thought. Certain calculations, once completed, cannot be uncompleted, and I need to stay operational.
The fire's last coal winks out. The cabin goes fully dark except for the faint blue glow of moonlight through the curtains. I sit in that darkness and hold her while I wait for morning. Not that I need that long to reach my decision. I already know what we have to do, for better or worse.
When dawn breaks…
We're leaving this cabin and we're not coming back.
Dawn is a slow affair.
I watch it seep through the curtain—first a dull gray, then a sickly amber, then the cold white of a mountain morning. My legs went numb hours ago and my lower back is a solid block of cement. But Caroline is still asleep, Wolf is still draped across her lap, and neither of them has moved, so neither have I.
Finally, I have no choice but to wake her.
"Caroline."
She stiffens. Her hands fist in my sweater and her breathing goes ragged for a few seconds before she opens her eyes and remembers where she is.
"It's me," I reassure her. "You're in the cabin. You're safe."
She blinks up at my face. "What time is it?" she mumbles.
"Early. But we need to move."
That wakes her the rest of the way. She pulls back, which puts her face about six inches from mine, close enough for me to see the crust of dried tears on her cheeks and the bruise purpling along her jaw where someone hit her. My jaw tightens.
"Move where?"
"There's a place further up the mountain. It's an old mining hut, about four miles north and a thousand feet higher. It's off every map I've ever seen, and the trail to it hasn't been maintained in fifty years."
"Why can't we stay here?"
