Those Who Wish Me Dead (3 page)

B
y the time they
got back to the cabin, Allison had a fire going in the woodstove.

“You want me to start the generator?” she said. “Get the lights back on?”

“It’s fine,” Jamie said.

“Get you some coffee, at least?” Allison said. “Warm you up a little?”

“I’d take a bourbon or something, actually. If you have any.”

“Like I said—coffee,” Allison told her with a smile, and then she poured Maker’s Mark into a steaming mug of coffee and offered it to Jamie, who was still trying to get her jacket and gloves off, shedding snow that melted into pooled water on the floorboards in front of the stove.

“Now you’re talking. Thank you. It is
frigid
out there. You really stay here year-round?”

Ethan smiled. “That’s right.”

Allison offered Ethan a cup of coffee as well, and he accepted the warm mug gratefully, rotated it in his hands. Even through top-of-the-line gloves, the wind could find your joints. Allison’s eyes were searching his, looking for a reason this woman had blown in with the storm. He gave the smallest of headshakes. She understood that he still had no idea.

“Gorgeous place,” Jamie said, sipping the whiskey-laced coffee. “You said you guys built it yourselves?”

“Yes. With some help.”

“You give it a name? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with a ranch?”

He smiled. “It’s not a ranch. But we call it the Ritz.”

“Seems a little rustic for that.”

“That’s the idea,” Allison said. “That’s the joke.”

Jamie glanced at her and nodded. “Sorry about this, by the way. Crashing in during the night, during the storm. Invading the Ritz.”

“Must be important,” Allison said. She was wearing loose sweatpants and a tighter, long-sleeved top. She was barefoot, and Jamie Bennett had at least six inches on her. The storm didn’t concern Allison—she was old Montana, third generation, a rancher’s daughter—but Ethan had the sense that Jamie did, somehow. And not because she’d arrived in the middle of the night. Allison was used to those kinds of calls.

“It is,” Jamie said, and turned back to Ethan. “You still run the same summer programs?”

“Summers I work with kids,” he said. “I don’t do any training for anybody else until September. Summer is the kids.”

“That’s what I’m talking about.”

He raised an eyebrow. Ethan worked with probation and parole officers from around the country, took in kids who were facing lockup somewhere and brought them into the mountains instead. It was a survival course, yes, but it was a lot more than that. The idea had hardly originated with him; there were plenty of similar programs in the country.

“I’ve got a kid for you,” she said. “I think. I’m hoping you’re willing to do it.”

Inside the woodstove, a log split in the heat with a popping noise, and the fire flared higher behind the glass door.

“You’ve got a kid,” he echoed. “That means…you’ve got a witness.”

She nodded. “Nice call.”

He took a seat in front of the stove and she followed suit. Allison stayed where she was, leaning against the kitchen counter, watching.

“Why do you want him with me?”

“Because his parents are refusing traditional witness protection.”

“Nontraditional witness protection is what you do now, I thought.” Ethan remembered Jamie saying that she’d been with the U.S. Marshals but had left to go into executive protection. High-dollar private-bodyguard work.

She took a deep breath. “I’ve got to be very limited in what I tell you. Understand that? I’ll try to give you the best sense of it that I can, but it won’t be as detailed as you’d like.”

“Okay.”

“This boy is…he’s beyond a critical witness. I can’t overstate his value. But what I’m dealing with is a situation in which he and his parents have a pretty healthy distrust of law enforcement. With good reason, based on what they’ve seen. The boy is at risk.
High
risk. And the parents want to stay with the son, avoid the WITSEC program, and just generally control everything. Enter me, as you said. But…”

She stopped talking. Ethan gave her a minute, and when she didn’t pick back up, he said, “Jamie?”

“But I’m not doing too well,” she said softly. “I could lie to you, and I was about to. I was about to tell you that the family can’t afford me. That’s true enough. But Ethan, I would protect this boy for free if I could. I really mean that. I’d make it my only job, I’d…”

Another pause, a deep breath, and then, “They’re too good.”

“Who is?”

“The men looking for him.”

Allison turned away just as Ethan searched for her eyes.

“Then why me?” he said. “You’re better at it than me.”

“You can take him off the grid. Completely. And that’s where their weakness will be. If he’s around a cell phone, a security camera, a computer, a damned video game, I feel like they’ll get him. But here…here he’s just a tiny thing in a big wilderness.”

“We all are,” Ethan said.

“Right. It’s going to be your call, of course. But I was desperate, and it struck me. At first, a wild idea, this implausible thing. But then I looked into it a little bit more—”

“Looked into Ethan a little more?” Allison said. They both turned to her.

“That was part of it,” Jamie Bennett said evenly. “But it was more looking into the feasibility of the whole thing. We make him vanish for a summer. But he’s not in the situation the parents are so worried about, he’s not in some safe house in a new city, scared to death. I have a very good sense of the kid. What he likes, what he’d respond to, what would make him relax. He is not relaxed right now, I assure you. He’s very into adventure things. Survival stories. And that, of course, made me think of you. So I pitched it, told them about your background, and I think I’ve got them sold on it. So I came here to sell you too.”

“Shouldn’t it have run the other way, maybe?” Allison said. “Clearing the plan with us before selling the child and his parents on it?”

Jamie studied her for a moment and then gave a small nod. “I understand why you feel that way. But the reality is, I’m trying to minimize the number of people who know that this boy exists. If I’d told you and then the parents wouldn’t agree to it, there’d be people in Montana who’d been informed of the situation for no gain. That’s a risky approach.”

“Fair enough,” Ethan said. “But Allison raises a good point. It’s not just a matter of selling
me
on it, or the two of us. There are going to be other kids up here. Other kids who may be at risk if we do this. That’s my primary responsibility.”

“I will tell you, will assure you, that I would not consider doing this if I felt it put other children at risk. First of all, the boy is going to seem to disappear from the outside world before he arrives here. That much I’ve worked out carefully. I know how to make him vanish. I’d enter him in the program with a false identity. Even you couldn’t know who he was. And you wouldn’t try to find out.”

Ethan nodded.

“The second thing,” she said, “is that we know who we’re watching. We know who is threatened by him. If they move from…from their home base, I’m going to be aware of it. They aren’t sneaking up to Montana without me noticing. And the minute they move, you’ll have total protection for your entire group. For
everyone.
”

Ethan was silent. Jamie leaned toward him.

“And, if I may offer an opinion: This boy needs what you teach. It isn’t just about hiding him here, Ethan. The kid is damaged, and he’s trying to hold it together. He’s scared. You can make him stronger. I
know
that, because I’ve been through it with you.”

Ethan looked away from Jamie and over to Allison, but her flat stare revealed no opinion either way. His decision to make. He looked back at Jamie.

“Listen,” Jamie Bennett said, “I didn’t come out here on a whim. But I’m not going to pressure you on it either. I’m telling you the truth about the scenario and asking for your help.”

Ethan turned from her and looked out the window. The snow was still falling fast, and dawn’s light was far from arriving. In the reflection in the glass he could see Allison and Jamie Bennett waiting on him to speak. Jamie seemed more frustrated than Allison, because Allison understood that Ethan was not a man given to rapid decision-making, that he felt rushed decisions were often exactly what got you into serious trouble. He sat and drank his coffee and watched them in the reflection, trapped there in the lantern light with the snow swirling outside, part of that beautiful mystery of glass, of how, seen at the right angle, it could show you what lay both behind it and beyond it.

“You believe he will be killed if the situation is allowed to continue in its current fashion,” he said.

“I do.”

“What is your alternative plan? If I say no.”

“I’m hoping you say—”

“I understand what you’re hoping. I’m asking what you’ll do if I say no.”

“I’ll try to find him a program similar to yours. With someone who’ll take the child off the grid, someone who is qualified to protect him. But I won’t find one I trust as much, I won’t find one I can vouch for personally. That matters to me.”

Ethan looked away from the window and back into Jamie Bennett’s eyes.

“You truly will not let the boy be pursued here? You believe you can guarantee that?”

“One hundred percent.”

“Nothing is one hundred percent.” Ethan got to his feet and gestured to the darkened room behind them. “There’s a guest bedroom in there. Take the flashlight on the table, and make yourself at home. We’ll talk in the morning.”

Jamie Bennett stared at him. “You’re not going to give me an answer?”

“I’m going to get some sleep,” Ethan said. “And then I’ll give you an answer.”

Alone in the dark bedroom, they spoke in whispers beneath the wailing wind and considered the best-case scenarios and the worst-case. There seemed to be many more options in the latter category.

“Tell me what you think, Allison. What
you
think.”

She was quiet for a time. They were facing each other in the bed and he had one arm wrapped around her back, her lean muscles rising and falling under his hand as she breathed. Her dark hair spilled across the pillow and touched his cheek.

“You can’t say no,” she said at last.

“You think we have to do it, then?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Clarify.”

She took a deep breath. “You won’t be able to say no. You’ll be watching every news story, searching for some kid who was killed or who disappeared. You’ll be calling Jamie asking for updates she won’t be able to give you. Your entire summer will be lost to wondering if you put him in harm’s way when you could have taken him out of it. Am I wrong?”

He didn’t answer.

“You also believe it,” she said. “And that’s a good thing.”

“Believe her story? Of course I do.”

“No,” Allison said, “you believe that this can help him. That when he goes back to the world to face it all down, he’ll be more ready than he was before he got here. Before he got to you.”

“I think it works,” Ethan said. “Some of the time, I think it works.”

“I know it does,” she said softly.

Allison had understood from the beginning. Or understood how it mattered to him, at least, and believed that
he
believed it worked. That was a critical starting point. Many people he spoke to about it got the theory of the program without the soul. Maybe that was on him. Maybe he’d not been able to explain it properly, or maybe it wasn’t something you could explain but, rather, something that had to be felt. Maybe you needed to be sixteen years old with a hard-ass, impossible-to-please father and facing a long stretch in juvie and knowing that longer stretches in worse places waited and then arrive in a beautiful but terrifying mountain range, clueless and clumsy, and find something out there to hold inside yourself when you got sent back. When the mountains were gone and the air blew exhaust smoke instead of glacier chill and the pressures that were on you couldn’t be solved with a length of parachute cord and an ability to tie the right knot with your eyes closed. If you could find that and hold it there within yourself, a candle of self-confidence against the darkness, you could accomplish great things. He knew this. He’d been through it.

So you learned to build a fire,
his old man had said when Ethan explained the experience, unable to transfer the feeling to him. Yes, he’d learned to build a fire. What it had done for him, though, the sense of confidence the skills gave and the sense of awe that the mountains gave…those were impacts he could not describe. All he could do was show everyone: No trouble with the law since he was sixteen, a distinguished Air Force career, a collection of ribbons and medals and commendations. All of those things had been within the flame of that first fire he’d started, but how could you explain that?

“So you’ll do it,” Allison said. “You’ll agree to it in the morning.”

He offered a question instead of confirmation. “What don’t you like about her?”

“I never said I didn’t like her.”

“I’ll repeat the question. Hopeful for an answer this time.”

Allison sighed and leaned her head on his chest. “She drove her car off the road in a snowstorm.”

“You’re bothered by the fact that she’s a bad driver?”

“No,” Allison said. “I’m bothered by the fact that she rushes, and she makes mistakes.”

He was silent. Intrigued by the observation. It seemed unfair on the surface, critical and harsh, but she was only commenting on the very things he’d taught for so many years. Good decision-making was a pattern. So was bad decision-making.

“Just keep that in mind,” Allison said, “when you tell her that you’re going to do it.”

“So now I’m going to do it?”

“You were always going to do it, Ethan. You just needed to go through the rituals. That way you can convince yourself it’s the right choice.”

“You’re saying it’s not?”