So Cold the River(141)

He wouldn’t make the same mistake now. The dead couldn’t remember you, and Josiah wanted this son of a bitch to remember him. Long may he live and remember. That was Campbell’s instruction. Shaw had wanted to tell tales about the family? Wanted to exploit the Bradford name? Let him tell this story.

Josiah dropped to one knee beside Shaw, felt through his pockets. No weapon, but there was a phone. Two phones, in fact; one looked already ruined by water. Josiah set both of them on the ground and smashed them with the butt of the shotgun while Shaw lay at his feet and moaned, writhing. Josiah knelt again, took him by an ear, pulled his head back, and looked down into the faltering eyes.

“You ever heard a dynamite blast? Up close, in person?”

Shaw’s lips moved but no words came. His eyelids fluttered, then jerked open again when Josiah twisted his ear.

“Picture a full case of it going up, with fifteen gallons of gasoline to help it along. Think you got an idea of what that’ll sound like? I hope you do, because you’re not going to be there to listen. Won’t hear the sound itself, but you’ll hear plenty about it. Might start hearing it in your dreams. I’d imagine you will. When they take her bones out of the fire, you won’t be able to stop imagining just what it was like. Be imagining for a long time, I expect. Enjoy that.”

He slapped Shaw’s head back down and straightened up, walked over to the wife, wrapped his hand in her long dark hair, and jerked her to her feet. Danny made another sound of disapproval, and Josiah turned the gun barrel toward him.

“Back up the trail, Danny boy. We’re going back up the trail. You walk ahead now. I’ve got a sense you can no longer be trusted to stand behind me.”

“Damn it, Josiah, leave her here. Leave her with him. Ain’t no reason to take this thing any farther. We’ll get in my car and get you out of this town. Wherever you want to go, man, we can get you there.”

“That’s where you’re confused,” Josiah said. “You think I want to go somewhere else. That’s not the case. I just got home.”

He moved his finger onto the trigger and tilted his chin up the trail, spitting a stream of tobacco juice in its direction.

“Start walking. We got a piece of work left to do.”





58


THERE WAS NO WORD of Josiah Bradford or his pickup truck. Anne sat alone in the cold basement that smelled of trapped moisture and dust and scanned the shortwave bands, trying to stay hopeful, trying not to remember the sound his palm had made on that poor woman’s face.

Nothing came in to reward her hope.

There were plenty of reports—she couldn’t remember a day with this level of activity, in fact—but they were all storm-related. The damage in Orleans was severe. Just to the north, in Mitchell, line winds had brought down trees and blown windows out of buildings, and in the tiny speed bump town of Leipsic, there were reports of a fire that started when a power line came down on a pole barn. The second tornado, in Paoli, had scattered a cluster of trailers, some probably with people inside.

Urgent problems, sure, but what held Anne’s attention now were not reports of damage to the north and east, but those of clouds to the south and west. They were accompanied by savage lightning that had been missing in the day’s first round—a school nine miles away had been struck—and the area beneath the storm was being raked with nickel-size hail. Two spotters whom Anne knew and trusted called in observations of a beaver’s tail, a trailing cloud formation that indicated a supercell with rotation.

Even more alarming, though, were the reports from spotters just outside this new storm. In regions around it, the storms that had been building were dissipating. That might please the novice, but it was anything but a good sign, suggesting that the energy from those outlying storms was being absorbed by the larger front. Feeding it.

The storm was moving swiftly to the northeast. Right back into Anne’s valley.

She made contact with the dispatcher again, was informed curtly that Detective Brewer still had no sign of the truck.

“Tell him to make another drive through that area. He’s out there.”

The dispatcher said she’d ask him to make another pass.


The world would not hold still. Eric blinked and squinted and tried to find steady focus, but it kept shifting, the trees and the earth and the sky undulating around him. Frequently the dark woods were lit with flashes of lightning, and thunder crackled in a way that made the ground seem to tremble, but there was no rain.

He ran his tongue over his lips and tasted blood, tried to sit up and felt a bolt of pain in his collarbone. He reached for the head wound but his shaking hand could not find it, sending his fingers rattling over his face like a blind man searching for recognition.