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  In the wintry light he saw O’Hara sprawled and motionless. Crimson pooled beneath him, soaking the floorboards.

  “Goddamn it,” Robert said.

  Brown curtains bobbed lightly on the breeze blowing through the open window next to the bed. Aside from O’Hara, the room was empty. When he thrust his head out the window, the alley behind the building was empty too.

  Robert swore again, bitterly, turned and ran past Finney, who was slumped and bloody against the wall. “Hold on, Tom.”

  Finney didn’t answer.

  There was no sign of Jamie in the hall. That showed reassuring good sense, and Robert was relieved as he limped hurriedly down the narrow passage and back to the front of the building.

  Arthur from the Montana Standard was fairly dancing with excitement on the pavement in front of the house. “By God, what a story! What’s the name of this gunman?”

  “Never mind that. Where’d he go?”

  “Thataway.” Arthur pointed down the street, where a green sedan had all but disappeared into the now heavily falling snow. “There were two women in that car he grabbed.”

  God almighty. It just kept getting worse and worse.

  Robert looked around. A crowd had already gathered on the sidewalk behind them. Well, that was bound to happen, and maybe in this case it wasn’t such a bad thing. He scanned the ring of bystanders. “I need a doctor. I’ve got two men down in the apartment next to the cellar entrance and an injured woman upstairs.”

  “The doctor just went up,” Arthur said.

  Well, that was something anyway. Robert realized that the face he had been instinctively searching for was not among the growing crowd.

  His heart sank still lower. He turned back to Arthur. “Where’s the kid?” he demanded.

  “Who?”

  “The red-haired kid. Works for the Bolt Daily Banner. He followed us inside. Where did he go?”

  “Kid? You mean Jameson?” Arthur pointed down the street, now empty of all but snow flurries. “He and that damned cub who’s supposed to be my photographer took off after your bird.”

  Chapter Two

  “Boy, oh boy, oh boy!” shouted Whitey over the roar of the car engine. His face was flushed, his eyes shining. “Boy, what a scoop!”

  “Watch it. He’s all over the road,” James shouted back. The windshield wipers scooted ice crystals across the glass, obscuring his view of the gray Chevrolet Fleetline ahead of them for long, long seconds.

  He registered the fact that the sedan was fishtailing back and forth over the ice-slick road, but in his mind, he was reliving the events at the Knight’s Arms. Was Robert okay? Had he been hit? He’d said no, but he’d probably say that anyway.

  At first, he and Whitey had hung back as they trailed Braun east on Gold to Wyoming Street, then down Front and out Harrison Avenue. The Chevrolet had been moving at a moderate clip past tall granite hotels, brick apartment buildings—the sides of buildings painted with enormous advertisements for beer and cigars and candies—past shop windows where decked-out mannequins gaily celebrated Christmas morning. They were not sure if Braun knew he was being followed, although it seemed likely he’d be watching for that very thing.

  After they turned onto Marcia Street, the Chevrolet began to pick up speed, and once they reached the largely empty stretch of Kaw Avenue, the driver threw open the throttle and the race was on.

  They flew past garages and small clapboard bungalows and empty lots—many, many empty lots—and in the distance the snow-covered hills studded with headframes, a reminder that at heart, Bolt was still a mining town.

  “She,” Whitey replied. “One of those dames is driving.”

  That yanked James’s attention back to present circumstances.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Yes, indeedy.” Whitey sounded jubilant. “What do you think set Braun off?”

  That was the question all right. James had arrived at the top-floor apartment seconds after Robert and his men had raced downstairs; however, Jean McDuffy, Mrs. Mileur, Mrs. Weber, and the Boswells hadn’t really been able to shed much light on the motive behind the attack. But then, even after two years on the crime beat, the reasons for most killings and attempted killings didn’t make sense to him.

  James shook his head. “His lady friend said she turned down his Christmas presents.”

  Whitey threw him a startled look. “He shot her just for that?”

  “He didn’t shoot her. He shot her sister. Wounded her. I think he figured if McDuffy was refusing his presents, she might be getting ready to go to the cops.”

  “Go to the cops about what?”

  “The sister said he was a chicken thief and a hophead.”

  In these days of sugar books, ration boards, and night courts, stealing food—especially chickens—was a serious offense. Chickens, with their ability to rapidly reproduce—as well as supply eggs—were a valuable commodity.

  Even so, James wasn’t surprised at Whitey’s, “He’d just skip, wouldn’t he? Why’d he want to kill her?”

  “True love?”

  Whitey laughed and then gave another whoop as the Chevrolet, still at least a mile ahead of them, nearly slithered off the road.

  The fleeing car righted itself, spurted forward once more, and Whitey said, “That dame can drive.”

  Yes, she could, and the Christmas lights, rooftops, and gallows frames of Bolt were rapidly falling into a soft and fleecy-white distance. A quick look in the side mirror offered no comforting sign of pursuit.

  James’s heart seemed to shrink. Robert must surely have been hit. He knew Finney had taken one to the shoulder and one to the arm. And O’Hara… O’Hara had not answered when Robert had called out to him. Maybe dead. Maybe dying. Maybe they were all dying. What other reason could explain Robert letting a murderous scoundrel like Braun go on the lam?

  Not Rob. Don’t let it be Rob. Don’t let him have come home just to die like that…

  Even as the awful thought took shape, the sedan seemed to lose traction and skid a little. James gripped the side of the door as Whitey swore and eased up on the accelerator. James glanced at the speedometer and saw the needle fall to ninety, so come to think of it, maybe there was a reason Robert and his men hadn’t caught up with them yet.

  And as fast as they were traveling, Whitey’s Buick Roadmaster sedan couldn’t touch that fastback Chevy.

  Yeah, assuming Whitey didn’t kill them both, it would be worth having a word with the McDuffy woman. There had to be something more behind Braun’s attempted murder and subsequent flight.

  “He must be desperate,” Whitey observed. “What are we going to do when we catch him?”

  “Are we going to catch him?” James hadn’t considered that a possibility. His plan had been simply to follow, observe, and report. That was the job of a newsman, after all. His job until he could make Uncle Sam see it differently.

  “Hell yes!” Whitey’s pale eyes were aglow with determination. “Do you have a gun?”

  “No. Not on me.” He’d been sitting in the Scandia Bar, killing time, when Boswell had burst in to phone the police. Nothing like a little murder and mayhem to jolly up an otherwise dreary day.

  Whitey swore. “Me neither.”

  “How old are you?” James asked, faintly amused.

  “Eighteen.” Whitey grinned. “Just got my greetings yesterday. Best Christmas present ever.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. I was afraid our boys would wrap up the party before I could get in there.”

  “The party’s not over yet,” James said stoically.

  Yesterday—Christmas Eve felt like a lifetime ago—James and pretty much everyone else in the country had listened to President Roosevelt announce that Eisenhower would command the Allied invasion of Europe in the coming year.

  Four years and counting. No, the party was not over.

  Thirty minutes outside Bolt and they were already in wild country. A breath-robbing expanse of white empt
iness broken here and there by the soft brown forms of distant bison, the arrowhead-sharp scatter of pines, the broken wooden teeth of sagging cattle fence, but mostly just sky and snow for as far as the eye could see.

  God’s country.

  And God help you if anything went wrong, because out here there was no one else to ask for help.

  The Buick hit another patch of black ice, and James held his breath, gripping the door handle once more as Whitey fought for control.

  The roadster straightened out, and James expelled a long sigh. “You can drive all right,” he acknowledged.

  “Thanks.” Whitey threw him a sideways look. “And you can write. That ‘Murder of a Bootlegger’s Bride’ story was a dilly. Was it all true?”

  “Hell yes!”

  “Good. Earl says you’re the only sonofabitch left in Montana worth reading.”

  James laughed. “That’s a compliment coming from Earl.”

  “No kidding. He went to Harvard, you know.”

  “I know. He taught journalism at Bolt High School my sophomore year.”

  “Yep. Taught you everything you know, according to Earl.”

  James laughed again.

  “We’d make a great team, you and me,” Whitey said.

  James shot him a quick, uncertain look.

  Whitey said breezily, “When I get back from feeding lead to the Heinies, we ought to team up.”

  “Sure, like Abbott and Costello,” James said.

  Whitey chuckled, then sobered. “You think the chief is dead?”

  Once again, the fear inside James expanded, hardening, crystalizing like those snowflakes mounting on the glass. He said numbly, “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t think so,” Whitey said staunchly. “If the Japs couldn’t finish him off, I don’t believe some hopped-up chicken thief could drop him.”

  James wished he could be as sure. His first week on the Bolt Daily Banner had taught him that the only thing more unpredictable than people was fate itself.

  “He’d have to get reinforcements,” James said. He felt better talking it through, because of course Robert wouldn’t go racing off like he and Whitey had. Robert was smart and careful. Which was why at twenty-nine, he was the youngest police chief ever appointed by Bolt’s city council. The fact that Robert wasn’t already on their tail would surely be because he would be busy contacting the county sheriff and the highway patrol. He’d be organizing a manhunt, not haring after Braun by himself.

  “Arthur will already have filed his story,” James observed.

  “Not much of a story yet!”

  More of a story than the pair of them had right now. If they did manage to catch up to Braun, well, that might be different. Depending on a whole lot of things, they might even manage to get Braun to tell them his tale. There was precedent for such things in this corner of the West.

  Inevitably, his thoughts returned to Robert. He had sounded like he was in pain, but still energetic, still forceful. He had said he wasn’t hit.

  When this was over—if Rob really was okay—James was going to try to talk to him, ask him what had changed things between them after Joey’s funeral. He’d been trying to work up the nerve for nearly a year. Seeing Rob today, feeling the way his heart pounded against his breastbone just watching Rob’s car pull up, he knew he had to at least try.

  Partly it had to be that Rob had recognized the thing in him that made him different from Joey, well, from pretty much everyone. Everyone but him and Rob. Because that…irregularity was in Rob too.

  If Rob could see it in James, James could also see it in Rob.

  At least, he was pretty sure. Even as a boy, Rob had not been easy to read. Which was to say, he was direct in all his dealings, but he did have a kind of reserve. People said he was a private man. And that was true.

  He wasn’t going to invade that privacy. And maybe that was the trouble. Maybe he’d inadvertently done something to make Rob think he was going to be stupid or a problem. He never would. He just wanted… Just Rob’s friendship would be everything. With Joey gone, he was so lonely. It had meant so much that Rob had been kind, had made a little time for him after Joey had enlisted. Even being Rob’s surrogate kid brother was so much better than being shut out completely.

  “Where do you think this skunk’s headed?” Whitey interrupted James’s thoughts. “Yellowstone?”

  “There’s a lot of nothing between here and Yellowstone.”

  Whitey threw him a wondering look. “You think he’ll try and hide out somewhere?”

  “It’s what I’d do.” No, what he’d do was make a run for Canada. But Braun was definitely traveling south, following the Madison River into largely deserted country. Whitey’s nearly invisible brows shot up. “I guess there’s a lot of national forest and parkland he could hole up in. What’s he going to do with the women, though?”

  James didn’t answer. Braun had been ready to shoot one woman that day, and she was someone he knew and maybe even cared about.

  Reading his silence correctly, Whitey said hopefully, “He could let them go. It’s not like we don’t already know who he is.”

  “True.”

  “They’re just going to slow him down.”

  “Yes.”

  “We don’t know he’s killed anyone yet. Not for sure.”

  “No.”

  He was pretty sure O’Hara had been killed. The silence when Rob had called out to him had raised the hair on the back of James’s neck. Braun had been willing to kill three police officers, and that did not bode well for anyone. Braun had to know that killing a cop made him a walking dead man. But he’d figure they would have to catch him first.

  In all the time they had been driving, they had not passed a single other car. And ahead of them, the Chevy was slowly but surely growing smaller and smaller. They hit another rough patch in the wide road, tires chewing over what felt like a mosaic of gravel and rocks.

  Way up ahead, the speck that was Braun’s car disappeared around a bend in the road.

  It was hard to know if he had a destination in mind or was just taking every byway that caught his eye.

  “Snow’s getting heavier.” James peered at his watch. Just after three, but the light was already failing. Sunset should be around five, but the lousy weather was hastening nightfall.

  They were going to lose Braun, sure as hell, but not for lack of Whitey’s trying. He was pushing the Roadmaster way past what she could safely do on this terrain and in this weather.

  On they went.

  The nearly threadbare tires hissed wetly in the slush as they seemed to skate around the bend in the road. He did not hear the shot. Not then. Time froze. The windshield splintered apart, and James’s face stung as shards of glass and snow flew everywhere. A split second later came the BANG.

  “Shit,” Whitey yelled.

  James heard the shot still ringing off the tall trees and snowy hillside, had a fractured glimpse of wet black road and the gunmetal-gray Chevrolet sedan pulled crosswise, before the picture spun out of view as they skidded across the highway.

  Whitey was swearing and fighting for control of the wheel as brakes and tires squealed in pained protest.

  James was thrown sideways and then forward. He grabbed for something to hold on to, fighting not to be hurled through the broken windshield.

  BANG.

  The second shot must have hit one of the tires because the front of the Roadmaster slammed down, wheel hub or fender scraping horrendously on the worn asphalt, red sparks flying up past the hood.

  He was dimly aware of women screaming in the distance, the spill of glass from the dashboard, the smell of oil and burning rubber and snow, and the sickening tumble of black trees and white snow as the car flipped onto its side and continued its slide across the icy road toward the rocks.

  Chapter Three

  “Looks like he’s going to pull through…”

  Robert was on the radio with his assistant chief—and brother-in-law—Bart Donnel
ly, when he spotted the wrecked Buick, an unexpected jolt of macabrely festive evergreen in the snowy twilight.

  He barely had time to register this new and greater fear, because Jamie was jogging down the glistening black highway toward him. For an uncanny moment Robert felt he was watching the gawky, loose-knitted boy Jamie transform midstride into a handsome, assured man. Gone were the blue jeans and ski sweaters and knitted scarves. Jamie wore gray worsted trousers, a navy wool flannel shirt beneath a brown leather jacket, and boots. This is who he will be.

  No. Wrong. This was who Jamie was.

  One thing had not changed. He had lost his hat.

  He was waving both arms to flag Rob down.

  “Thank Christ,” Robert muttered. “Hang on, Bart. I found the Whitehall kid’s car. No sign of our suspect.”

  Rob slammed the radio down. He’d been half-sick with worry, so naturally, the sight of the unharmed and doubtless unrepentant subject of all that fear and remorse was pretty damned infuriating.

  After all those months of managing to shut Jamie Jameson out of his thoughts, here he was, popping up again like a goddamned long-legged jack-in-the-box, practically the only thing Robert had been able to think of for the last two hours.

  He yanked the wheel and screeched to the side of the road, ignoring the wrench of pain in his leg as he jumped out of the car.

  “What the hell do you think you were doing?” he shouted. His breath hung like smoke in the pine-scented air, as though he really was breathing fire.

  Jamie stopped a foot or two out of reach, which was probably a good thing because Robert had to fight the nearly overpowering desire to haul him into his arms and hug him and…and reassure himself that Jamie was not hurt—before he murdered him.

  It took him a second or two to hear what Jamie was saying.

  “…you’re not hurt! Whitey’s arm is broken, but we’re all right. He’s driving a four-door Chevy Special Deluxe. Braun, I mean. He still has the women with him. They seemed to be okay. They sounded okay.”

  Jamie’s eyes were wary, trying to gauge the extent of Robert’s anger. The reddish glints in his hair and the thread of crimson trickling from a cut in his scalp seemed like the only color in the winter landscape. His voice, rushed and breathless, the only sound in all this hushed and silent world.