The Dark Remains (21 page)

“That’s a lie,” Mitchell spat.

All the same, the words shook him. What if it were true? After all, Travis
was
alive. What if Travis had signed a contract with Duratek? Was that the reason he had not said where he was calling from?

The others must have noticed his reaction.

“Do you know something, Mr. Favor?” the black-haired man asked. “If you do, you should tell us now. You see, we can easily get a summons for a deposition. I am certain you know it is a crime to lie under oath. And you seem to be a lawful man, Mr. Favor.”

The other’s voice was calm and reasonable. And things were precarious on the ranch right now. There was no way they could afford a lawyer. And the fact was, Travis’s behavior
was
strange. He started to open his mouth.

The click of a revolver’s barrel stopped him. Davis had leveled his gun at the two men; the hammer was cocked.

“Here’s a little lesson in the law,” Davis said. “You two are trespassing.”

Mitchell nodded. He had been about to give himself to these wolves, but whatever power their smooth words had on him evaporated. He pumped the rifle and sighted along its length.

“On the count of three, Davis.”

“One,” Davis said.

The dark-haired man held out a hand. “Davis, Mitchell—you must listen to me.”

Mitchell adjusted his grip on the rifle. “That’s Mr. and Mr. Burke-Favor to you.”

“Two,” Davis said.

“It is not wise to—”

“Three.”

In perfect unison, two fingers pulled, two peals of thunder sounded. The men in dark suits ducked as bullets flew scant inches above their heads.

“Just in case you’re wondering,” Davis said, his grin back at full strength, “we weren’t really trying to hit you. That time. Mitchell?”

They lowered the aim of their guns.

The men in black started to back away. The pale one clenched a fist, his mouth twisting in a knot of rage. “You are both going to regret this.”

Despite the tightness in his gut, Mitchell found himself grinning as madly as Davis.

“Bullshit I will,” he said.

This time the gunshots sent the two men running. They heaved open the doors of their SUVs and scrambled inside. Engines roared, and the two vehicles bounced off down the rutted road, columns of dust rising into the sky behind them.

Mitchell lowered his rifle. Davis was watching him, eyes clear and bright as the new morning sky.

“I’ll get breakfast started,” Davis said, and headed inside.

By the time the sun had fully risen, the hired hands had shown up, gathering in the ranch house’s rambling kitchen. There were just three today—although during calving, or when they were tagging and branding, there could be as many as a dozen. Davis served ham and eggs while Mitchell brewed several pots of hot, strong coffee. Occasionally, some of the men joked that real cowboy coffee was made from mud and water, not French roast. Then again, every one of them took a minimum of three refills.

While they ate, Davis flicked on a small television on the counter to catch the weather report on the Denver
morning news. Mitchell would rather have listened to KCCR, the low-power Castle County radio station. He volunteered there one night a week, reading news and local advertisements just to keep his voice in practice. However, the hired men seemed to have formed a cult of worship around Anna Ferraro, the doe-eyed Channel 4 morning news anchor, so TV it was. They drooled into their eggs while they watched.

“It’s my turn to clean up,” Davis said when Mitchell started to wash out the frying pan.

Mitchell knew better than to argue. “I’ll get the boys going on the north fence line.”

The hired hands had already wandered outside, finishing their coffee. Mitchell helped them load the fence-mending equipment in the pickup, described what part of the fence to get started on, then told them he’d meet them later. There was room enough in the truck for him, but Mitchell felt like riding out to the fence line. Sometimes it was nice to forget cars, power tools, mortgages, and stock reports. When Mitchell rode across the ranch, letting the power lines slip out of view behind him, it wasn’t hard to imagine this was Colorado a hundred years ago. The wind and the sagebrush hadn’t changed.

But the world had. While things might have been less complicated a hundred years ago, they had been harder as well. What place would the world have held for him and Davis? All the same, there was a peace in riding. He sent the boys on their way, then turned and headed back into the ranch house for some sunscreen. Davis wouldn’t let him outside without it these days. Another concession to modernity, but cancer wasn’t pleasant in any century.

Mitchell stepped back into the house’s main room. Through the open door to the kitchen he could hear the clink of dishes and the low drone of the television. He spotted the sunscreen on the mantel above the room’s gigantic sandstone fireplace. The fireplace was dark and empty now, but winter wasn’t far off. Mitchell looked
forward to those days, when there wasn’t much work to do outside. He would sit by the fire, mending a saddle, while Davis set up his computer on the coffee table and worked on his newest book. He had published two romantic Western novels with a small California publisher, and was working on his third. They weren’t great literature, but they had what Davis liked to call hot bull-on-bull action. All Mitchell knew was that, when he read the unbound pages sitting there on the floor, it wasn’t always the roaring fire that made him sweat.

The sound of clanking dishes floating through the kitchen door ceased. A second later came the sound of Davis’s voice, not loud, but hard and sharp.

“Mitchell, get in here.”

Had a prairie rattler gotten into the house? It wouldn’t be the first time. Mitchell dropped the sunscreen and covered the distance to the kitchen in long, swift strides.

Davis stood by the counter, a dish towel in his hands. “Look,” he said.

Mitchell followed his gaze. Anna Ferraro’s voice trilled over video showing a half-constructed building. Given the river and the tall buildings in the background, it had to be near downtown Denver. Mitchell drew closer.

“… that work on the Steel Cathedral is proceeding ahead of schedule. With miles of reinforced girders and tempered glass, it will be one of the largest enclosed spaces in the state of Colorado when it opens next year. As you can see, in this footage taken yesterday, the building—which is meant to mirror the Rocky Mountains—is beginning to take shape. And, like a mountain, its designers are hoping that the Steel Cathedral will help bring people closer to—”

“There,” Davis said. “There he is again.”

The camera pulled back, revealing a park near the construction site. The park was nearly empty: a woman pushing a baby stroller, a pair of rollerbladers, that was it.

No, there was one other figure. He was tall, clad all in
black with a shapeless hat on his head. There was nothing remarkable about him, save for the heavy attire on a fine day. Then, almost as if he sensed the camera, the man turned around.

Mitchell drew in a sharp breath.

It can’t be him. Damn it, he doesn’t look the same at all
.

But despite the changes, there could be no doubt about it. The man in black was Travis Wilder.

The video ended, and Anna Ferraro’s blankly smiling face filled the screen again. Mitchell switched off the TV and looked up. Davis’s expression was unusually grim.

“If we saw this and recognized him, then you have to bet others in town did as well.”

Mitchell sighed. Davis didn’t need to say any more. If Duratek had come to their ranch asking about Travis, then they would be asking others as well. Travis was in danger, but this was out of their league. They needed help, and there was only one place Mitchell knew to get it.

“Call the sheriff,” he said, and Davis reached for the phone.

“Good morning, Mitchell,” Castle County Sheriff’s Deputy Jacine Fidelia Windom said into the chunky black receiver.

As always she spoke with crisp inflection. Jace did everything in her life with precision. Her honey-brown hair was cut in a short, even line just above her shoulders, and her khaki uniform was as neat and sharp-creased as a newly unfolded road map. Even her features
had a preciseness about them: small but not delicate, regularly spaced in the oval of her face.

The main room of the county sheriff’s building was quiet. Jace had come in early to catch up on paperwork. There was something satisfying about the act of stamping papers, sorting copies into appropriate piles, and filing each in the exact place it belonged. Where there was order there was reason, comfort, and safety; without it the world would be an endless, churning ocean of chaos.

When she came in, she had found Deputy Morris Coulter clutching a cup of coffee in big hands and muttering to himself in a clearly failing effort to stay awake for the remaining hour of his shift. Jace had relieved him, then poured a cup of the coffee Morris had brewed and sat down to work. She figured she had more than an hour to herself before Sheriff Dominguez came in. Fifteen minutes later, the phone rang.

“What can I help you with, Mitchell?” she said, picking up a pen in a small hand just in case. It behooved one to stay a step ahead in life.

She listened carefully to the deep, musical, slightly twanging voice on the other end of the line. It wasn’t often that she spoke to Davis or Mitchell Burke-Favor as the two were occupied most of the time by their ranch south of town, although she did listen to Mitchell’s radio show if she happened to be at the sheriff’s station on a Wednesday night. As long as she had known them, the two men had run a good operation. They were polite to their neighbors and kept their hired hands in line. Castle County could use a few more citizens like that.

She adjusted the phone in the crook of her shoulder and wrote in a blocky shorthand on the pad of paper. “So two men came to your ranch early this morning?”

Affirmation from the other end of the line.

“Did you know them prior to their coming?”

Hesitation, then a negative.

“And can you describe these men to me, Mitchell?”

Jace started to jot down notes as the voice on the other end continued. Then, carefully, she set down the pen and pushed the pad of paper away from her.

“I see. And did these men from Duratek tell you what it was they wanted?”

Jace only heard two words before Mitchell’s voice was drowned out by a roaring that seemed to rush through the wire and into her ear.

Travis Wilder
.

Jace knew that sound. It was the roar of the ocean she dreamed about at night—the great, roiling sea that was neither solid nor liquid, neither dark nor light. The dream had first come to her as a girl in sixth grade, precisely one year after the day she wheeled her pink bicycle into the garage, had noticed an oddly swaying shadow, and had looked up into the swollen, violet face of her father.

She had still been standing there—clutching the handlebars of her bike, gazing at her strong, handsome father, who had hanged himself from the rafters at the age of thirty-six in a place where he knew his daughter would be the first to find him—when the door to the garage opened and she heard her mother’s scream.

For most of her life Jace had had the dream rarely, only after a particularly unsettling day. And those were rare enough—for her entire adult life, from junior college to truck driving to law enforcement, had been an ordered series of steps as easy to manage as the files on her desk.

Then things had changed, and all her logic, all her preparation, was nothing against what would be. For the last two months, the dream had come to her nearly every night. Ever since Maximilian Bayfield perished in the blaze that consumed the Mine Shaft Saloon. Ever since Travis Wilder had vanished.

She still had the newspaper clipping from last June, the first one to bear a headline about the new Black Death. That Max had had the disease there could be no doubt; all
the symptoms had been evident. But the newspapers had been wrong on one account. It was not a plague of “unknown origin.” Jace knew exactly where it had come from.

I was just wondering if you’d seen Max today
, Travis had said to her that day at the Mosquito Café. The last day she had seen him. The last day of Maximilian’s life.

Marriage and kids had been next on the checklist of Jace’s life, and Maximilian had been healthy, cute if not handsome, smart for certain, and—perhaps most importantly—gentle of nature. Love was one thing Jace was pretty sure had been removed from her list that day in the garage, but she had cared for Maximilian. And she had been able to do nothing for him.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it, Jace?
Travis had said.

He had seemed so genuinely concerned. For a moment her heart had softened. Then she had steeled herself. Whatever he might feel, this was his fault. The John Doe who had been immolated at the saloon was the carrier who had brought the plague to Castle City. It was because of the man’s touch that Maximilian had fallen sick. And the madman in black had come here looking for Travis. While Jace didn’t know the true cause of the sickness, she did know that it had come with Travis Wilder.

Nothing makes much sense these days
, she had said to Travis that day in the café. And she had not seen Travis Wilder or Maximilian Bayfield again.

The roaring in her ears phased back into words.
Deputy Windom?
It was Mitchell’s tinny voice coming through the phone.
Deputy Windom, are you still there?

A spasm coursed through Jace. She sat up straight in the chair.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m here, Mitchell.”

Even as she spoke, her mind raced, fitting together the pieces of what Mitchell Burke-Favor had said. Then, like the papers on her desk, everything fell into place.
Wherever he had gone, Travis Wilder was back. And she knew where he was.

A pause on the line, and a hiss of static. He was waiting for an answer. She licked her lips.

“I’ll give your report to the sheriff, Mitchell.” Lies were not so difficult if one spoke them with the authority of truth. “Don’t worry. We’ll keep an eye out for these men and make certain they don’t harass anyone else. Of course. And you’re welcome. Tell Davis hello for me.”