Chapter 8 - The Ridge on Fire
The black smoke rose in a tight, oily column against the belly of the clouds, spreading out at three thousand feet into an anvil of sulfur and burning cedar.
“The cabin,” Harmon said, his hand dropping to the butt of his service revolver. “He’s fired the outbuildings first. He’s cutting off the trail.”
Down in the creek, Sarah Cho had stabilized Aunt Greta’s neck with an improvised cervical collar made from a rolled wool car blanket and duct tape. “Deputy, you cannot leave this woman here alone,” Cho yelled over the rush of the water. “She’s hypothermic. Her pulse is eighty and thready. If her core temp drops another two degrees, she goes into ventricular fibrillation.”
Harmon looked at Greta, then looked up the mountain toward the smoke. The muscle in his jaw jumped once, twice, a thirty-year habit of county obedience fighting with the dead eyes of Mary Hanley in that photograph.
“I have an emergency blanket in the truck bed,” Harmon said, his voice tearing in his throat. “And the radio in the Chevy is patched to the state police repeater. I’ll key the mic to the emergency channel and leave it locked on broadcast so the troopers can triangulate the signal.”
“Go,” Cho told him, her small hands holding Greta’s chin steady with iron determination. “Take Piper. Find that little girl. I’ll keep Greta alive until the medevac finds the truck.”
I didn't wait for Harmon to help me. I clawed my way back up the mud bank, my sneakers slipping in the wet clay, using the roots of the hemlocks to haul myself over the shoulder. My hands were black with silt and grease, my scrubs torn at the thighs, but I felt a strange, cold lightness in my chest—the kind of absolute, terrifying clarity that comes when you realize there is nothing left to lose.
Harmon slammed the driver’s door of his Chevy, threw the transfer case into four-wheel-low with a brutal, mechanical crunch of gears, and mashed the gas pedal before my door was even latched.
The truck lunged up the logging road, its tires throwing rooster-tails of wet gravel twenty feet into the brush.
The North Mountain road wasn't a road anymore; it was an abandoned skid trail, built in the seventies to haul forty-ton loads of virgin timber down to the valley railhead. It climbed at an eight-percent grade through a series of narrow, washed-out shelf cuts that hung over the canyon like rotting scaffolding. Every hundred yards, a fallen alder or a granite boulder forced Harmon to put two wheels into the ditch, the Chevy’s undercarriage scraping over the stone with a sound like iron teeth on bone.
At the two-mile mark, we hit Clint’s first blockade.
He had felled a seventy-foot white pine straight across the road, its green boughs tangled with the telephone lines he had ripped down from the poles with his winch.
Harmon didn't brake. He dropped the truck into second gear, hit the steel bumper against the center of the pine trunk at twenty miles an hour, and pushed.
The Chevy’s frame screamed. The tires spun on the wet shale, smoking and spitting blue rubber, until the pine snapped with a sound like a three-inch cannon shot, rolling sideways into the ravine and clearing three feet of clearance on the uphill side.
We squeezed through, the side mirror tearing off against the shale face with a sharp *twang*.
Through the clearing, the cabin came into view five hundred yards above us.
It was an old three-room hemlock structure built on dry-stacked granite footings, surrounded by three rusted steel equipment sheds and a fifteen-hundred-gallon above-ground fuel tank mounted on timber cribbing.
The machine shed was already fully involved, thirty-foot sheets of orange flame roaring through the tin roof, sending showers of glowing sparks into the wet needles of the surrounding cedars. Parked thirty feet from the front porch, its driver’s door open and its tires slashed with an axe, was Tony’s blue Subaru wagon.
And standing on the covered porch of the cabin, holding an iron fire-axe in one gloved hand and a three-gallon plastic fuel jug in the other, was my brother.
Clint had stripped down to his flannel work shirt, his sleeves rolled to the elbows, his bare forearms smeared with soot and black grease. He looked wild, his graying hair wild with rain, his heavy face twisted into that terrible, grinning mask he wore when he was winning a bar fight at the Legion hall.
Beside him, tied to the porch railing with a piece of half-inch yellow polypropylene rope, was seven-year-old Bria.
She wasn't crying anymore. She was sitting on the wet cedar boards with her knees pulled to her chest, her little pink winter coat covered in ash, staring at the burning shed with the dead, blank eyes of a child who had seen the bottom of the world.
“Clint!” Harmon bellowed, throwing his door open before the Chevy had even stopped rolling. He leveled his twelve-gauge Remington across the hood, the twin barrels pointing straight at Clint’s chest. “Drop the axe! Step away from that porch!”
Clint didn't drop the axe. He swung it into the porch post with a savage, one-handed stroke that buried the blade two inches into the spruce, leaving it vibrating between him and the child.
Then he lifted the red fuel can and poured a gallon of gasoline across the threshold of the front door.
The vapor hit the cold air with an immediate, sickening shimmer.
“You’re off your reservation, Neil,” Clint shouted, his voice hoarse over the roar of the burning shed. “This is private property! This is Callahan land! You don't have a badge, and you don't have a warrant!”
I stepped out from behind the passenger door of the Chevy.
I was holding the olive-drab ammunition box in both hands, the heavy steel cold against my ribs.
“It’s not your land, Clint,” I said.
My voice wasn't loud, but the wind shifted at that second, carrying the words across the gravel clearing through the roar of the fire.
Clint’s eyes found mine. The grin on his face faltered, his thick eyebrows knotting together as he saw the box.
“Where did you get that?” he demanded, taking a half-step toward the steps.
“Dad’s box,” I said, walking slowly past Harmon’s front bumper, my boots crushing the wet pine needles. “The one you’ve been looking for since September of twenty-eighteen. The one you thought Lucille burned in the trash barrel behind the shop.”
“Shut your mouth, Piper,” Clint growled, his hand tightening on the plastic handle of the fuel jug.
“I have the photographs, Clint,” I said, stopping twenty feet from the porch. “I have the pictures of Mary Hanley with her jaw wired shut. I have the receipts Lucille signed. And I have Dad’s codicil. The original is in the vault at First National, and the Spokane County Superior Court has already verified the signature.”
Clint looked at Harmon. Then he looked down the mountain, where the faint, rhythmic wail of state police sirens was finally drifting up through the timber from the highway six miles below.
“You think those troopers give a damn about Mary Hanley?” Clint snarled, his voice rising into that thin, frantic register of a man realizing the ice has cracked behind him. “Mary Hanley took the money! She signed the release! Lucille handled it!”
“Lucille didn't handle Rowan,” I said, stepping closer. “Rowan is in Spokane, Clint. His cast goes from his knuckles to his shoulder. Dr. Vance took thirty-two high-resolution photographs of the finger marks on his neck before they took him to surgery. You’re not facing a misdemeanor in Blackwood County anymore. You’re facing aggravated child abuse, witness tampering, and attempted murder.”
“He fell!” Clint roared, kicking the empty fuel jug down the porch steps. It bounced into the mud, rolling to a stop against my shoe. “The little bastard looked me in the eye and told me ‘no’! In my father’s house!”
“It was never your father’s house,” I said, pulling the certified copy of the codicil from my jacket and holding it up where the orange light of the fire illuminated the black ink. “Dad left the house to Greta. He left the timber to me. And he left you one dollar and the kitchen timer.”
Clint went dead still.
His eyes traveled from the paper in my hand to the fire roaring behind him, then down to little Bria, who had begun to whimper against the railing.
“Tony!” Clint screamed, turning toward the dark interior of the cabin. “Tony, get out here!”
The screen door didn't open.
From the dark mouth of the front room, Tony Callahan stepped onto the threshold.
She was holding Clint’s deer rifle—a customized .30-06 with a heavy synthetic stock and a four-power Leupold scope. Her face was swollen on the right side, a dark, plum-colored knot closing her eye where Clint had hit her in the dining room, but her hands on the checkering of the stock were completely, terrifyingly steady.
She had the rifle pointed at the small of Clint’s back.
“Tony,” Clint said, his voice dropping into that low, dangerous purr he used to make women small. “Put the gun down and get Bria in the truck.”
“The truck has no tires, Clint,” Tony said. Her voice didn't shake. It was the quietest, coldest sound I had ever heard come out of a human throat. “You slashed them with that axe two hours ago.”
“I told you to put it down!” Clint yelled, taking a step toward her.
Tony didn't yell back. She pulled the bolt back and slammed it home with a sharp, oily *clack-clack* that echoed off the burning logs of the shed.
A live three-inch cartridge dropped into the chamber.
“You touched Rowan,” Tony said, her eye fixed on Clint’s spine through the iron sights. “And then you brought my baby up here to burn her so nobody would find out what you did to my sister.”
“Tony, listen to me—”
“I’ve been listening to you for seven years, Clint,” she said. “Every time you hit the wall, every time you took the checkbook, every time you told me I was nothing without your father’s name. You’re not your father. You’re just a small, stupid bully who’s scared of an old woman in Spokane.”
Clint looked at the rifle barrel six inches from his kidneys. Then he looked at Harmon, who had the twelve-gauge leveled at his forehead.
Then he looked at me.
“Piper,” he whispered, the arrogance finally draining from his face, leaving only the soft, yellow lard of a coward who had run out of people he could hit. “We’re brother and sister. We’re Callahans. You can't let them take the company. If the company goes down, the whole family goes with it.”
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“The company died five years ago, Clint,” I said, my voice as hard as the concrete at the bottom of the cellar stairs. “Dad just forgot to bury it.”
Down on the trail, the blue and red lights of three Idaho State Police cruisers crested the final switchback, their sirens winding down into a low, menacing growl as they fanned out across the mud clearing, their high beams pinning Clint against the burning logs like a moth against a lantern.
