Chapter 13 - Blood in the Blizzard
The kitchen door didn't open; it exploded.
The sound of splintering pine cracked through the cabin like a hunting rifle firing inside a hallway. Daniel dropped the letter back onto the open iron trunk, his boots skidding across the bedroom rug as he lunged for the hallway door.
"Miller!" Daniel yelled.
A second sound followed: the wet, heavy thud of a man hitting the floor, accompanied by the high-pitched shriek of breaking glass.
Daniel sprinted into the kitchen.
The back door had been kicked off its hinges. The heavy cedar planks hung sideways, dangling by one twisted strap of wrought iron, while snow blew directly across the stove in a blinding, horizontal sheet.
Standing in the frame was not a stranger.
It was Eric.
Daniel’s younger brother was breathing through his teeth, his face white with rage and coke-sweat, his designer down jacket ripped open at the shoulder where he had caught it on the fence wire down by the gate. Behind him stood two men Daniel didn't know—thick-necked, broad-shouldered men wearing grease-stained Carhartt coats and yellow construction hardhats, holding four-foot iron pry bars.
Clyde Miller was on his back against the base of the kitchen cabinets, blood leaking from a split across his cheekbone where the swinging door had caught him across the temple. The old man was blinking hard against the crimson haze running into his eyes, his Colt three feet away from his outstretched fingers, half-buried under a drift of snow blowing across the linoleum.
Richard Harper was pressed flat against the wall behind the refrigerator, his face gray with pure, gut-churning terror.
"Eric!" Richard screamed. "Eric, what the hell did you do? What did you bring them here for?"
Eric didn't look at his father. His eyes, rimmed with dark, sleepless circles, settled instantly on Daniel. In his right hand, Eric held an aluminum tire iron he had pulled from the back of his truck.
"You thought you were slick, didn't you, Danny?" Eric spat, stepping over the threshold, his boots tracking thick brown road muck across Evelyn’s clean floor. "You took the seven-hour drive back to Boulder like a good little schoolboy. You pretended you were above it. Then Collins flags the corporate account in Denver because six million dollars just got earmarked against the Harper estate balance."
"Eric, put the bar down," Daniel said, keeping his hands low, his eyes tracking the two heavy-set men behind his brother. "Grandma’s in the hospital. The storm is sixty below zero at the pass. What are you doing?"
"I owe Finch’s brokerage two hundred and eighty thousand dollars, Danny!" Eric screamed, his voice cracking into a ragged, hysterical sob that bounced off the pine timbers. "He’s calling the note at eight o’clock tomorrow morning! If the basin deed isn't transferred to Finch Energy before the land office opens in Cheyenne, they take my house. They take Sarah’s car. They take everything, Danny!"
"That's your debt, Eric," Daniel said, his voice dropping into a register of cold, terrifying calm he hadn't known he possessed. "Not Grandma’s. Not mine. And not this land’s."
"The check was fake!" Eric shrieked, swinging the tire iron in a short, vicious arc that whistled through the freezing air. "Dad said it was fake! We all laughed! Why the hell did yours clear? Why did the manager pull *you* into the office?"
"Because he didn't laugh," Richard’s voice came from the corner, thin and broken.
Eric turned his head, glaring at his father with pure disgust. "Shut up, old man. You’re the one who told me Walter died broke. You’re the one who told me the old woman was living on nine hundred dollars a month of social security while you were taking second mortgages to pay for your country club memberships."
"Eric," Richard whispered, his eyes wide with an agony that had nothing to do with the cold. "Listen to me. Walter didn't have money in a bank. He had the municipal water contract from 1922. The whole county’s water runs through the high basin. If Finch gets the basin, he turns off the taps for eighty ranches between here and the Montana line."
One of the men behind Eric—a man with a scarred jaw and the cold, flat eyes of an industrial strikebreaker—stepped into the kitchen. He didn't look at Eric, and he didn't look at Richard. He looked at Daniel.
"We ain't here for a family reunion," the man said. His voice was gravel ground beneath a truck tire. "Finch sent us for the iron box under the old man’s bed. We take the box, we leave the keys to the truck, and you boys can sort out who pays the funeral costs when the old lady drops."
The man took one step forward.
Daniel didn't back up. He reached behind his back, his fingers wrapping around the handle of Grandpa Walter’s two-pound splitting hatchet that had sat in the kindling bucket beside the woodstove since the day Daniel was twelve years old.
He brought it out, not raising it high like a movie hero, but keeping it tucked against his forearm, the honed carbon steel edge catching the yellow light of the kitchen bulb.
"The box is open," Daniel said quietly. "And you aren't leaving this kitchen with it."
The scarred man laughed—a short, wet bark of amusement. He raised his pry bar two inches.
"You're a schoolteacher, kid. You don't have the stomach to butcher an elk, let alone—"
*BANG.*
The sound inside the four walls of the log cabin was deafening. It felt like an artillery shell had detonated inside an oil drum.
A chunk of pine the size of a fist blew out of the doorframe three inches above the scarred man’s ear, showering his Carhartt collar with white splinters and hot resin.
The kitchen went dead, tomb-silent, except for the high, whining ring in Daniel’s ears.
On the floor beside the cabinets, Clyde Miller had dragged his bulk onto one elbow. The Colt .45 was held in both of his massive, shaking hands, the hammer already back for a second strike, gray smoke curling out of the five-and-a-half-inch barrel like a ribbon of silk.
The blood was running thick down Miller’s neck, soaking the collar of his sheepskin vest, but his eyes were wide, clear, and utterly pitiless.
May you like
"The next one goes through your belt buckle, son," Miller whispered, his voice cutting through the ringing silence like a razor through leather. "Drop the iron. Now."
***
