Headlights(81)

Then she goes silent. Tension snakes through the car again. “What is that?” she asks, with a deadly calm.

I look where she does.

At the card that’s just slipped out of my leather jacket pocket onto the center console. A six of spades with a fox drawn on it. The one I stole from her cabin.

I clear my throat. “I should have told you,” I say.

She stares at me.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Are you serious? You’re—”

Again, her voice a little different. She’s holding her mouth in a strange way as she’s speaking.

“Are you hurt?” I ask. “Do we need to—”

She’s staring at me like I am the worst thing she’s ever seen. And my eyes catch …

Her hand that’s fallen open on her lap.

And—

The ribs. Daphne and me at Linger Eatuary.

The old photographs of the bodies.

A snowflake falls. Then another. As my head spins. As I realize what I’m seeing, what …

Wolf depredation.

Veneered or fake canine.

Josie on the ground.

The shadows.

Theo Wharton and—

SHE KNOWS.

Teeth marks.

The snow starts falling in a flurry now, dancing before us.

Do you get it yet? Theo Wharton had said. The same words from my dream.

The words Hannah Lawrence spoke to me, in a dream, on a mountaintop.

The strange way she’s holding her mouth.

You’ve met the boogeyman, Father Sky said.

We drive into the snow, my hand bleeding, the world rapidly turning white.

And I don’t know what to do, what to think or feel. Because— The tooth in Hannah Lawrence’s hand, the one she’s holding there. The veneer that just came out of her mouth.

It’s a canine.





IV

YOUR SWEET LOVE





1



Sometimes snow is a gentle thing that slowly blankets the land, softening the world around you and filling it with wonder.

And sometimes it’s an assault. Flurries multiply, thicken, until your vision is white, until the world is muffled then silenced then suffocated then smothered by a force greater than any of us.

Is it the Bad Decision?

Bad Feeling. Bad Decision. Snow coming down hard.

Leaving with Hannah. Fighting the FBI to flee with her.

Hannah’s canine veneer in her hand.

It’s her. She’s the one.

The road stretching in the growing dark. Colorado canyons, mountains, rivers. A hawk soars over us in the snow, and I can almost feel that I see us from its vantage point, red car on long gray road in the white. Soaring higher and higher as we grow smaller below. A finite red point in a sea of blinding white, our headlights barely penetrating.

Time stretching, memories, music playing, almost feeling as though the car is moving of its own volition. As if we are being led forward in some elaborate game. Every player and piece and move leading us toward some great inevitable future.

We are completely blind to it.

By the time we get to Grand Lake, I’m having trouble seeing.

By the time we hit Estes Park, I’m scared we’re going to crash. I haven’t been going any particular direction, or not meaning to anyway. Just away from Yampa. From the others.

Hannah Lawrence did all of this. And Father Sky …

The tires slip on the fresh snow, no chains. I need to pull over, need to sort this all out, get somewhere safe.

It’s after eight. We need a room somewhere. I squint through the snow and just make out the edges of signs. GAS, FOOD. HOTEL.

I see a sign, take the turn, head up a drive past an unattended guard stand.

We pull up into the parking lot, can barely see. We step out of the car into the whipping cold and snow. I grab the duffel bag, shove the files and knife in it. Grab my cowboy hat. I’d rather have left the knife and the car somewhere else, not where we’re staying, but we just have to get inside. We just have to figure this out. The chill bites my skin. Adrenaline. A humming in my ears. It’s impossible to see beyond a faint outline of the building.

We walk around to the front of the hotel.

Hannah and me.

She pulls her jacket in tight around herself. She doesn’t have enough layers for this weather, even with the puffer. Neither do I. Neither of us prepared because we never thought we’d be here right now.

Hannah Lawrence. Who ate those bodies. Who very well might have killed all those people, organized it somehow.

My ears are ringing.

Every body. Every drainage ditch. Years. Years of my life studying this case, working this case, unable to find …

Hannah.

Hannah.

Hannah.

Do you get it yet?

Ask her. She knows.

You’ve met the boogeyman.

A white stately sprawling hotel with a red roof comes into view in the pummeling snow. Light glowing out from the windows. American flags attached to the building above the columns whip wildly in the wind. The snow pelts us as we take the steps up to the front porch and then the two French doors.

The red welcome mat below our feet says THE STANLEY HOTEL.

We open the doors against the wind, and as soon as we step inside, they slam shut behind us, a few small flurries settling down to the red thick patterned carpet below our feet. To our right is a vintage green, yellow, and black Stanley automobile with a fake Colorado vanity license plate that says, in red scratchy letters, REDRUM. In front of us a round entry table like the one at Whileago Manor, holding an elaborate flower arrangement. Behind it is a grand wooden stairway, carpeted in the same red and white as the rest of the lobby, patterned green wallpaper lining the walls, and the thick carved dark-stained wood framing everything, stretching in beams across the ceiling. Sconces glow against the wood, and an old brass elevator reflects the light.