When he stepped outside and locked the door behind him, the sun burned at its apex, and the emptiness of the vast landscape that it illuminated made him uneasy. This area lay near the western end of the portion of Montana that was well-named “Big Sky Country.” As blue as a gas flame, the heavens were intimidating, more daunting than the immensity of land below them. No less than when dark and stippled with stars that were trillions of miles away, the day sky oppressed him with evidence of infinity; it inspired a fear—wrong though he believed it to be—that he was insignificant, that no man or woman ever born was of consequence in the shoreless ocean of time and space.
Suddenly, though he had only a moment earlier stepped outside, he wanted—needed—to be in the confines of a house, safe within a room defined by walls. Though he never took a drink before dinner, he wanted one now, the warmth of whiskey to dispel the chill that pierced deeper than flesh and bone, that sleeted through his spirit. He was a man without a family, his parents having proved to be a pair of cruel predators with whom he’d never been able to identify except as the moral agent of their destruction. A relationship that might have led to marriage had eluded him. He was alone, resigned to a busy professional life and a private life of solitude, accustomed to loneliness, although not comfortable with it. However, in this moment, in this uninhabited vastness, he inhaled the vacancy, took it in through every pore, and his heart knocked hard with fear of his fate.
He headed toward the main house. As he crossed the blacktop lane, he heard low thunder. Although the sky remained cloudless, he looked up, but then glanced toward the distant purple mountains in the west. The fulmination swelled. He felt rumbling underfoot, and he turned his attention to the east. When he saw the source of the sound, he stood astonished for a moment—and then, seized by a sense of imminent danger, he broke into a run.
32
Colson Fielding was frozen by shock. His father was dead on the ground, and Colson should have been stricken hard by grief, but he was instead given entirely to terror as he stared into the muzzle of the pistol, the two shots echoing in memory, echoing and echoing, so that at first he couldn’t hear what the killer was saying to him. Slowly he raised his attention from the single black eye of the gun to the bottle-green eyes of Asher Optime, which was like meeting the stare of a robot. The murderer’s face was blank, no twist of anger in it, no trace of a wicked smile, as if killing Colson’s father meant nothing to him, meant less than stepping on an ant.
Optime’s voice at last penetrated. “Drop the walking stick, boy, take off your backpack, do it now, or I’ll shoot you in the foot and spend the afternoon watching you slowly bleed to death.”
Into the wild rush of terror came a current of shame. Colson despised himself because he began to shake violently and because he did as he was told, with no further hesitation, with no thought of striking out or making a run for it. Murder was what jacked up the pace of action movies, it was how you scored high in video games, by killing bad guys, but it wasn’t supposed to be something that could happen to you in real life. He felt as though he might throw up or embarrass himself by pissing his pants; he did neither, but even if he had done both, it wouldn’t matter, the mortification wouldn’t matter, as long as he was allowed to live.
“Take off your utility belt, boy, throw it on the backpack, turn out your pockets, drop the contents on the ground.”
While he did as told, he heard himself saying, “Mister, please, please, please.” He hated himself for pleading, for the tremor in his voice, but he did not stop. The killer took such pleasure in his captive’s humiliation that he focused on Colson’s eyes and on his lips as they formed the pleas, not on his hands. Not on his hands.
Thrown to the ground, Colson’s wallet fell open to a photo of his mom and dad, taken two years ago on vacation in Coeur d’Alene. The killer retrieved it, considered it, and then tucked it in a jacket pocket.
Satisfied that every demand had been met, he shoved the pistol in the hip holster under his denim jacket.
In that instant, Colson was given a chance to act. He could have charged Optime and tried to knock him off his feet. He wasn’t able to move. Cold sweat slicked his face, his hands, drooled down his spine into the small of his back, into the crack of his butt. His knee joints seemed to be coming loose. He swayed and thought he would collapse.
The killer used one foot to get a boot toe under Colson’s father and kick-shoved him hard a few times, until the corpse flopped over, facedown in the dirt.