Page 102 of South of Nowhere

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Colter found Dorion and Tam Olsen in the command post. He parked and joined them.

“How is he?”

“He’ll live,” his sister told him. “Working again? They don’t know. The doctor said ‘most use’ of his leg. Ed liked to get out into the field. He was never good with desk work.”

Colter noted that Olsen’s face was particularly troubled. She was a soldier, yes, but army engineers were construction professionals for the most part; violence and gunplay rarely knocked.

“That’s where it happened?” Colter asked. He nodded to caverns on the hillside where the CP sat, about three hundred yards west.

“That’s right. He was getting those kids out of there.” Dorion, rarely bitter, muttered, “It was all a lark for them. And my friend took a bullet to save them from getting their asses drowned.”

Olsen asked, “He was only shot once?”

“That’s right.”

“I heard three. He missed twice, I guess.”

Dorion said, “No, there was just one. The others were echoes.”

“The valley, the hills,” Colter said. Then he did something they ought to have done an hour ago: he pulled the rope to release the flap of the tent. Protecting them from the sniper.

If he was shooting at one investigator, why not more?

His sister asked, “What’re we up against here? You don’t talk much about your jobs. You been involved in anything like this?”

He thought for a moment. “Ashton’s death. It was about a lot more than just that. But the truth stayed a complete mystery until a long time later. This reminds me of that. Not the facts, but the…” He sought for a word. “Tone.”

He then turned his attention from the levee and from Gutiérrez’s shooting. “We have another wrinkle. The woman whose fiancé drove here from Reno?”

“John Millwood?”

“It’s a domestic. He’s abusive and she engineered the whole thing to escape from him.”

He explained about Fiona Lavelle’s plan.

“Fake her own death?” Olsen said. “Sounds like the plot of a bad thriller flick.”

“Her idea was to buy some time. Probably hoped he’d move on from her.”

“He won’t,” Olsen said. “They never do.” Spoken from experience, darkly.

“She’s where?”

“Hiding out in an old silver mine.”

“He suspect anything?”

“No, he believes the accident was real and county deputies and I are looking for her. He’s in a motel in Fort Pleasant. I left her with chocolate, jerky and beer. And she’s writing the great American novel. Or the great something kind of novel. She’s got my number if there’s a problem.”

And there were plenty of dangerous-looking rocks at her disposal.

“We’ll deal with that situation later.”

Olsen asked, “Gutiérrez’s shooter, was it—?”

“Bear,” came a woman’s voice behind them.

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