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Collier watched Evan canter and then gallop, practicing jump after jump. Collier was allowed to ride the horses on occasion, so he knew just how beautifully Evan rode. It was early, not yet hot, but Evan had already taken his shirt off. A thin sheen of sweat covered his perfectly proportioned torso.

After a moment Collier saw a figure appear on the balcony of the Wilmot home. It was Dale Wilmot himself, wearing a bathrobe. He stared down at his son for a long time. Evan couldn’t see his face. But he didn’t need to. It was evident in every motion of Wilmot’s body—a sense of pride and accomplishment. This is mine. My land, my house, my timber, my view . . . my perfect son.

The rage spilled through Collier like a fountain of acid. No matter what he did, no matter what he achieved, no matter where he went in life, there would never be a father who would look at him the way Wilmot looked at Evan. Never.

Collier had a chemistry lab set up in the garage. He had started it in elementary school and over the years accumulated a decent supply of beakers and test tubes, pipettes, jars of chemicals, a small centrifuge, a Bunsen burner, and an autoclave. If he wasn’t working on schoolwork, he was performing chemistry experiments. Always an unhappy child, Collier found something in the lab that approached joy. The sense of power as the chemicals coalesced and changed. The exactitude, care, and precision that was so unlike the messiness of life. All of the giggling phoniness of the girls, the cruelty of the PE coaches, the idiocy of the school administrators, the stupidity of the boys—all of them playing by rules he couldn’t fathom. His childhood had been one misery after another.

But he understood the chemicals. If it was possible, he even loved them. The drip-drip of titration, the sensitivity to temperature and pressure, the dance of catalyst, ofñ€† reactant, and reagent, the beauty of the arrows that said this plus this yields this.

After watching Evan ride the horse for nearly an hour, Collier went into the garage and worked for six hours straight. To produce what he produced—without causing an explosion, without poisoning himself on the waste gases, without ruining the batch and producing some placid beaker of worthless sludge—required total concentration.

In the end, the chemistry worked perfectly. But everything else had fallen apart.

He concocted a poison to put in the horse’s feed bag. He’d practiced on other animals over the years, but this one was specifically designed to cause the horse a maximum of pain. The dose, too, had been precisely calculated. Just enough to kill the horse. But not enough to do it quickly.

He had soaked the oats in the poison, then put the feed bag in the stall. The horse had sniffed at the bag, and for a moment Collier had thought the horse wouldn’t eat it, that something about the odorless chemical would alert the sensitive nose of the horse.

But then the horse had begun eating, crunching away on the oats until they were gone. Minutes later the horse fell and began to twitch and scream.

As the horse writhed on the ground, he felt a power coursing through him and settling in his loins. He found himself standing there, mesmerized by his handiwork, thrilling with his newfound strength. The horse kicked and thrashed while Collier smiled, swelling with pride.

And then, he’d heard a noise. Turning around, he saw Wilmot standing silently in the doorway, a look of horror on his face. Collier’s eyes flicked toward the beaker of colorless liquid on the gatepost, then to the horse, then to Wilmot, then to the beaker again.

Collier froze, expecting Wilmot to leap into the stall, maybe start beating the crap out of him. Instead the man spoke in a quiet, measured voice that only seemed to underscore his rage.

“Get your things,” he said. “And get the hell out of here.”

Collier ran as fast as he could out the barn’s double-wide entrance.

His mother was sewing a torn garment when he stumbled back into the house. “What the hell did you go and do now?”

By way of answer, he had gone into the garage, locked the door, and smashed every beaker and pipette and test tube while his mother howled at him through the door. “What the hell’s wrong with you, you disgraceful little snot?”

Afterward, he’d shoved past her, packed his few belongings in an old army rucksack that he’d bought the previous summer down at the Army Navy down in Coeur d’Alene. He’d saved twenty-seven hundred bucks from his job at the Pack ’n Save. Enough to set him up down in Boise for a while.

That had been six years ago. In the meantime, he found his way to West Virginia, where he met Verhoven and began using his considerable chemistry talents to cook meth for him. He hadn’t seen Mr. Wilmot or Evan until the day Wilmot walked in unannounced at Verhoven’s packing store where Collier worked during the day in the back office handling the ordering and accounting. Evan had been hurt, Wilmot explained, and he needed Collier back at the house. Collier’s mother was dead, and hispasñ€† own life numb and meaningless, but Wilmot’s arrival was like a second chance, a new lease on the family he’d always wished he’d had.

Gideon's War and Hard Target

Poisoning the horse had been the height of stupidity. What...

He should have poisoned Evan.

Amalie sat in the Jeep, listening to the whirring of the heater. It seemed like Mr. Collier had pinched her. But now, looking back, she realized there had been something in Mr. Collier’s hand when he opened the door to the car, something that had stung her on the hip. For some reason, though, she was feeling a little confused. So she sat and waited patiently as Mr. Collier slammed the door and circled around to the driver’s side.

He started the Jeep and began to drive.

As the trees passed outside, it became very warm inside. With the warmth she began to relax. I’ve been so tense, she thought to herself. The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve been tense.

But for all her worrying, nothing really bad had actually happened. Sure, Christiane had gotten sick. But people got the Konzo at home, too. It was one of those things that just happened. And now she was being treated by an American doctor. Back in Kama, there were no doctors at all. You had to take the boat forty kilometers downriver to see a doctor.

Soon Amalie began to feel a deep calm running through her, a sort of peace that she had only felt a few times in her life. She realized that she was very tired. She’d been working too hard, hadn’t she? So tired.

She could feel the sleep coming from a great distance, like a downpour on the horizon, the first blessed rain after the long dry season. She imagined flashes of lightning amid the dark boiling clouds, great winds whipping and tearing at the trees.

And then the black storm washed over her. And with it, came peace.

11

ANDERSON, WEST VIRGINIA

I prefer to work in a chair,” Lorene Verhoven said. “Maybe I’m lazy, I don’t know, but I get tired feet when I stand for too long.”

Ervin Mixon was himself sitting in a chair. Unlike Lorene Verhoven, he was secured at his wrists, feet, neck, and chest by black duct tape. His mouth, too, was covered by duct tape so he was unable to speak. The chair sat in a dark concrete bunker of a room. He was familiar with the room. It was the place where Jim Verhoven’s people cooked their meth—a cheerless but carefully built space that had been designed by John Collier. Forty feet belowground, you could yell until your throat bled and nobody would ever hear you.

He had been here for several hours, entirely alone. Until Lorene showed up.

“Jim gave me this chair. It’s made by Steelcase, and you can roll around on it.” Lorene demonstrated, pushing off with her feet and propelling herself across the polished concrete floor. “Isn’t this fun?”