Quiet, big, and deadly, then, Farkus thought. He’d been around too many of those types in his life, and he didn’t much like them. He shifted uncomfortably from boot to boot.

“Three guys—that wasn’t the deal,” Farkus said.

“He’ll be good to have along.”

“But three guys means a three-way split, is what I’m sayin’.”

“So?”

“I’m doing this for the money, Kyle. I don’t have any hard feelings toward Butch.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” McLanahan said, and sighed. “This ain’t about the money. And don’t call me Kyle. Call me Sheriff.”

Farkus nodded toward his mobile home. “It’s about the money for me, Sheriff.”

“I told you already, this is big money. Federal money. They’ve got lots of it.”

“So how much are we talking about?”

“I don’t have figures”—McLanahan drew the word out sarcastically—“but a shitload of it, that’s for sure. The Feds are the only folks who have any these days, don’t you know. It’ll be enough that you won’t ever have to worry about when the next disability check comes in the mail so you can fill your tank.”

Farkus considered pulling out. But what was his choice? There were few jobs, and he didn’t want one, anyway. He liked being a free man, and busting his butt was for losers. And this was free government money. They wouldn’t even miss it.

“Okay,” Farkus said.

“Then let’s get the map out,” McLanahan said. “I want to make sure you’re familiar with the terrain before we waste our time going up there.”

While the ex-sheriff unfurled the map on the hood of the pickup, Sollis got out of the truck without a word and bent over the side of the pickup into the bed. Farkus heard the sound of latches being thrown, and soon Sollis was holding a heavy and polished long bolt-action rifle with a black-matte scope. Farkus watched out of the corner of his eye.

“What’s he up to?” Farkus whispered to McLanahan.

“The map,” McLanahan said impatiently. “Pay attention to the map.”

Farkus tried to concentrate on the features of the map McLanahan was holding flat on the hood with his bearpaw hands. The layout of the canyons did look vaguely familiar. He bent close and found the confluence of Otter and Trapper Creeks. To the north of the confluence was a series of sawbladelike peaks. He was pretty sure he remembered them.

“This is where we camped,” Farkus said, jabbing the location with his fingertip.

McLanahan marked it with a pencil stroke and said, “That’s where we’re going to be. If Butch is familiar with the camp, it’s odds-on likely where he goes.”

Farkus nodded.

“I don’t see any roads going up there,” McLanahan said.

“There were no roads. Butch likes to hunt in the wilderness, not in places you can drive to. He’s crazy that way, like I told you.”

As they were going over the map, Farkus kept stealing looks toward Sollis, who had jacked a cartridge into his rifle and was now at the rear of the pickup. He’d rested his rifle on the top of the corner of the bed walls and was leaning down, looking through his scope at something in the distance.

“So I think we’re set,” McLanahan had said, rolling up the topo map and sliding a rubber band over the roll.

As Farkus opened his mouth to speak, the air was split by the heavy boom of Sollis’s rifle. Farkus jumped and looked up. In the sandy hills past the municipal dump, a plume of dirt rose in the air, leaving two black spots.

“What did you shoot at?” Farkus asked Sollis, alarmed.

“A black cat,” Sollis said, ejecting the spent brass. “Eight hundred yards. Cut it right in two.”

“That was my cat,” Farkus had said.

“Not anymore,” Sollis said, fitting the rifle back into its case.

—

THE HUGE DARK western slope of the Bighorns filled the front window of the pickup as they got closer, and the road got worse. Farkus leaned over and pressed his mouth to the gap in the open window so he could breathe fresh air and fight against the nausea he felt from being jounced around in the backseat. When he closed his eyes, he tried to picture the rough country he’d hunted with Butch Roberson the year before, but from the other direction. McLanahan seemed to think it was easy, but it wasn’t. There were granite ridges and seas of black timber, and he remembered at times trying to look up through the trees to see something—anything—he recognized. A unique-shaped peak, a rock wall, a meadow, or a natural park—anything that stood out so he’d know where he was. He remembered stumbling back into the elk camp at the confluence of the creeks one night near midnight, four hours late, because he’d been turned around in a box canyon, and although he had a compass and GPS, he’d convinced himself that the instruments were wrong but he was right. Butch Roberson had been happy to see him, but concerned about the possibility of him getting lost again.

From that night on, they’d hunted together, which was a nice gesture on Butch’s part, Farkus thought.

And now he was back. If it weren’t for that substantial federal reward money . . .

—

MCLANAHAN APPARENTLY figured out how to make Jimmy Sollis open up, Farkus thought drearily: ask him about his rifle.

“It’s a custom 6.5x284,” Sollis said, “equipped with a Zeiss Z-800 4.5x14 Conquest scope . . .”

Jimmy Sollis was over six-feet-four, Farkus guessed, two hundred twenty pounds. He had olive-colored skin, black hair, a smooth almost Asian face with small, black wide-set eyes and a flattened nose. He spoke in a flat tone with no animation at all, and he enunciated every word clearly, as if he were transcribing them on stone.

“I shoot a 140-grain Berger bullet at just over three-thousand-feet-per-second muzzle velocity,” Sollis said. “I’ve taken the eye out of a target at fourteen hundred yards, and I can hit a man shape at eighteen hundred. I prefer a bench-rest, of course, but I’ve got a bipod setup that cuts down on the distance in favor of portability . . .”

Farkus tuned out. He’d never enjoyed the weaponry talk so many men loved, and it was Greek to him. If the conversation was about dry flies, streamers, or nymphs, Farkus was all over that. But gun porn? It made him tired.

Nevertheless, Farkus tried not to think of Butch Roberson at the other end of that Zeiss Conquest scope. And he thought about his stray black cat, cut in half, eviscerated, bleeding out in the sand.

—

THE SMELL OF HORSES and leather combined with the pine dust and dried mulch from the forest floor as McLanahan, Jimmy Sollis, and Farkus rode from where they’d parked the horse trailer at the trailhead into the trees. McLanahan led, trailing a packhorse with bulging panniers, with Farkus in the middle and Jimmy Sollis last. Sollis also trailed a horse, but the horse wasn’t laden with anything other than an empty saddle and several coils of rope. McLanahan had explained to Farkus that the horse was for bringing Butch Roberson down from the mountain, either in the saddle or his body lashed across it.

Farkus hadn’t been much help when it came to saddling the horses or gearing up, and both McLanahan and Sollis gave him a few dirty looks. Farkus had explained he was no horseman, and the time he’d spent in the saddle had been among the worst time in his life. Besides, he said, he was there to help guide them, not to be a wrangler. For revenge, he thought, they gave him a sleek black gelding with crazy eyes that looked like the devil himself. His name was Dreadnaught. And when he climbed onto Dreadnaught’s saddle and the mount crow-hopped and nearly dumped him before looking back with what seemed like an evil leer, Farkus knew it was a matter of time before something bad happened.

Before departing, McLanahan had packed the panniers with food, camping gear, electronics, and dozens of items—radios, body armor, gear bags—stenciled with TSCSD, or Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department. Things he’d “borrowed” when he cleared out, Farkus guessed. The ex-sheriff told Farkus to leave his old hunting rifle behind and instead gave him a Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle chambered for .223 with a thirty-round magazine. When he noted the TSCSD tag on the rear stock, McLanahan waggled his eyebrows as if to say, Yes, so what?