Chapter 3 - Footprints in the Gully
The wind had teeth. When Warren stepped out from the shelter of the cabin’s porch, the gale caught him sideways, driving dry, needle-sharp ice pellets against his cheeks. The temperature had dropped another ten degrees since sunset; the snow was no longer powder, but a hard, crusty surface that crackled like broken glass under his boots.
He didn't use a flashlight. In the dark, a beam of light is a target painted on your chest. He moved by muscle memory, keeping his left hand grazing the rough bark of the hemlocks as he circled wide around the back of the root cellar toward the old logging ramp where the silver pickup had parked.
The tracks were fresh, partially filled with the swirling drift, but distinct enough to read. Heavy tread—mud-terrain tires, thirty-three-inch BFG KO2s. Expensive. The kind of rubber put on trucks owned by men who spent their weekends drinking craft beer in mountain lodges rather than cutting pulp for a living.
Warren knelt beside the tire impression, pressing his gloved thumb into the compacted snow. The tread pattern was sharp, the rubber still warm enough to have melted a microscopic layer of ice beneath the crystals.
Less than twenty minutes ago.
He rose silently, melting into the shadow of an overgrown spruce that leaned out over the dry creek bed. Below him, the gully ran dark and deep toward the old mine tailings. Through the roar of the wind, he caught a sound that didn't belong to the mountain—the muffled, rhythmic thunk of a car door closing, followed by the metallic click of a heavy latch.
"I'm telling you, the old man's safe-deposit box is still in the floorboards under the pantry," a voice drifted up from the gully, thin and reedy, carried on an eddy of wind. "The county probate lawyer hasn't even filed the inventory yet because the office in Brierfall burned its records back in '94."
"Shut your mouth, Vance," a second voice snapped. This one was lower, harder, edged with the kind of casual malice that comes from having money and no conscience. "The Navy guy showed up on the bus today. I saw him getting off with that canvas bag. If he’s anything like Silas, he’s got a head full of stubborn granite and he won't take a buyout."
"So what?" the first voice—Vance—whined. "He’s one guy. Fifty-two years old, probably broken down with a bad knee from the service. We go in tonight while he's sleeping off the bus ride, turn the place upside down, grab the papers for the timber rights, and leave the door open for the frost. By morning, he'll look like another frozen drifter who tried to shortcut the pass."
Warren’s hand slid down to the grip of the Sig at his back. His breathing didn't change—slow, deep, diaphragmatic.
Two of them. One talker, one planner. The planner was the one driving the silver Ram.
"And the dog?" Vance asked after a moment's hesitation. "The bitch broke her chain and got loose from the pine three days ago. If she’s wandering around the hollow, she might make noise when we hit the porch."
"Let her," the second man said. The sound of a Zippo lighter snapping open cut through the wind, followed by the faint orange flare of a cigarette illuminating a sharp, clean-shaven jawline and a pair of wraparound sunglasses worn in the dark. "A starving dog makes easy bait. If she attacks, we put her down. If she doesn't, she freezes by morning anyway. Move your feet, Vance. The wind's coming around from the north, and I want this wrapped before midnight."
The two figures detached themselves from the shadow of the loading ramp, moving up the bank toward the back trail that led directly to Silas’s cabin. The leader—the one called the driver—led the way, carrying a heavy iron pry bar in his right hand, his coat unzipped to allow access to a shoulder holster beneath his fleece vest.
Warren didn't wait for them to reach the clearing. He stepped out from behind the spruce, blocking the narrow path between two granite boulders.
"You missed the turnoff for the pass," Warren said.
The two men froze. The driver—taller, broader, his breath pluming white in the moonlight—stopped five feet away, the pry bar lifting slightly as his eyes adjusted to the bulk of Warren's coat and the cold, flat stare fixed on his face.
"Who the hell are you?" the driver snarled, his hand drifting toward his shoulder. "Get off the trail, old man. This is private property."
"Is it?" Warren asked, his voice entirely conversational. "Because Silas Vale was my grandfather. And as far as I know, he never sold the timber rights to a city boy in a leased truck."
The driver’s eyes narrowed. Underneath the flickering moonlight, Warren recognized the face now—or at least the family lines of it. Dale Vance, son of old Arthur Vance who had run the Brierfall timber mill into bankruptcy back during the housing crash before skipping bail for Montana. Dale had inherited his father's expensive tastes and none of his work ethic, trading in county politics for land speculation funded by out-of-state developers who wanted to turn Northstar Hollow into a gated resort community for snowmobilers.
"Warren," Dale said, his lips pulling back in a tight, ugly grin. "I heard you were back. Thought you were still rotting in some VA hospital down south with a piece of shrapnel in your lung."
"Word travels fast in Brierfall," Warren said. "Almost as fast as a silver pickup on a bad road."
"Listen to me, Navy," Dale said, taking a half-step forward, his weight balanced on the balls of his boots, the pry bar coming up to a horizontal guard. "That land doesn't belong to you. Your grandfather owed the bank three years of back taxes, and my group holds the lien. You can take your duffel bag, catch the morning bus back down to the valley, and I'll make sure there's five thousand dollars in cash waiting for you at the depot. You try to fight us on the title, and you'll find out how hard an old man can fall on an icy floor."
Warren didn't move. He didn't blink. He looked past Dale’s shoulder at the second man—Vance’s skinny, twitchy cousin—who was fumbling nervously inside his coat pocket for something heavy and metallic.
"Five thousand dollars," Warren repeated softly. "Inflation’s a bitch, Dale. In my day, a bribe used to buy more than a bus ticket and a sandwich."
"That’s my final offer," Dale spat, his patience wearing thin as the wind whipped his jacket around his knees. "Take it or leave it in a pine box."
"I'll leave it," Warren said.
And before Dale could swing the iron bar, Warren moved.
It wasn't the slow, heavy motion of a fifty-two-year-old man with a scarred lung. It was the explosive, compressed violence of a predator that had spent decades learning how to end a fight before the other guy realized it had started.
He closed the five-foot gap in two strides, ducked inside the arc of the heavy pry bar, and drove his left palm upward into the hinge of Dale’s jaw with a sickening crack of bone and cartilage. Dale’s head snapped back, his eyes rolling up into his skull as his knees turned to water. He dropped like a felled hemlock into the snow, the pry bar clattering against the granite stones.
The second man—Vance’s cousin—shrieked, pulling a snub-nosed .38 revolver from his pocket with shaking fingers, trying to level it at Warren’s chest.
He never got the barrel clear of his wool coat.
Warren’s right hand caught the cylinder of the revolver, jamming the mechanism with his thumb while his left boot heel drove straight into the man’s kneecap with a dry, splintering pop. The man went down screaming, clutching his shattered leg as he rolled into the drift.
The gully fell silent again, save for the wind howling through the hemlocks and the heavy, ragged breathing of the two men lying in the snow.
May you like
Warren stood over them, his face impassive, his breath coming in slow, rhythmic clouds. He reached down, plucked the snub-nosed .38 from the snow, popped the cylinder to dump the rounds into his palm, and tossed the empty frame into the deep brush.
"Tell your developers in Seattle," Warren said quietly, looking down at Dale, who was groaning and spitting blood into the red-stained snow, "that Northstar Hollow is closed for construction."
