Around three in the afternoon, Martin Franks flipped the blinker on his pickup truck and turned right off a state route south of Charlottesville, Virginia. Franks headed west. On the pickup’s navigation screen, he saw that the road ahead climbed into rural, forested country, and he started to whistle “Carry On Wayward Son.”
The ex–Special Forces operator liked this scenario. The rural ground. The woods. It brought back waking-dream images of the logger.
Places like abandoned farms, big tracts of timber, they tended to isolate people. That was always good, in Franks’s opinion. Fewer eyes meant more latitude in the games he liked to play.
Franks crossed a bridge above a stream lined with leafless hardwood trees. On the other side of the stream, he crossed a railroad track, and the road surface changed to hard-packed dirt and gravel.
Now it was up to chance, synchronicity, serendipity, three powers Franks was used to cultivating. Franks had once dated a beautiful young woman named Ella. She was his opposite in almost every sense, a pacifist given to hippie clothing who taught him the power of imagining what he wanted and then asking the universe for some sign that his vision was being seen and shared.
This unorthodox approach to life had saved Franks more than once when he was operating in Afghanistan. Every morning and every night on tour, he asked the universe for a warning if danger loomed.
Twice, he had been on the verge of walking into a Taliban ambush. The first time, a kid goat scampered out of hiding, blatting as if a dog were after it.
The second time, Franks had seen vultures flying above a village they were about to enter.
Both times he’d halted his team and waited and watched. In the first case, he saw human movement among the rocks where the goat had run from, and in the second, he’d realized that the carrion birds were there because Taliban fighters had already killed enough civilians in the village to attract them.
“C’mon,” Franks said to the sky and the universe beyond. “Give me a sign here. Tell me I was right to come up this road. Show me a worthy opponent.”
He passed a bungalow in a clearing. A young woman was hanging sheets in a raw wind. Her bundled-up little child, a toddler, really, was booting a little soccer ball.
Franks passed. He had a rule about killing women for sport. He wouldn’t do it. Especially young moms with kids.
He drove on and passed a steel building that housed a machine shop and several smaller homes before hitting a long stretch of forest. He kept hoping he’d see a car or a truck pulled over, and tracks going off into the trees.
That would make things easier. He had a pang of guilt knowing that he shouldn’t have been there at all, that he should have stayed hunkered down at the Mandarin Oriental, focused on his task for the next, what, fifty-six hours?
Franks had found over the years, however, that the closer he got to a commercial job, the more he felt compelled to hunt on his own, almost as if he were—
A Virginia State Police cruiser was pulled off the road just ahead. The lights were on but not blinking. Franks slowed as he passed by and saw a big Asian, late thirties, early forties, with a thick neck holding a coffee cup and a sandwich.
Franks smiled, waved. The trooper lifted his cup.
Franks glanced in the rearview, thinking, What’s he doing way out here? So far from the highway?
And then an idea hatched in his head, and the questions didn’t matter. Whistling, he drove around a bend in the road and turned around. He took off his sunglasses, rolled down the window, put his hand out, waved again, and pulled to a stop opposite the cruiser.
The trooper acted slightly annoyed, but he set his coffee cup and sandwich down and lowered his window.
“I’m sorry to interrupt dinner, sir,” Franks said. “But my nav system committed suicide this morning, and my cell’s not picking up data for Google maps, and I can’t figure out where the heck I am on the real map.”
Franks held up a Rand McNally atlas of the Eastern Seaboard, climbed out of the truck cab, and said, “Could you help orient me, Officer?”
“Sergeant,” the trooper said, opening his door. “Sergeant Nick Moon.”
“I appreciate it, Sergeant Moon,” Franks said, opening the atlas to Virginia and putting it on the hood of the cruiser.
Moon climbed out. Muscular, athletic, he wore a bulletproof vest, had a large black Beretta pistol in his holster, and outweighed Franks by twenty pounds.
“Where y’all from?” Sergeant Moon said.
“Born in Arizona, but the past couple of years I’ve been jumping between Wyoming and South Dakota.”
“Oil fields?”
Franks smiled. “I do emergency welding work. You know, fix what needs fixing.”
“Good money in that?”
“Enough that I don’t work winters. I travel all over, taking a look around at things while I have the freedom.”
“Sounds like a nice life,” the trooper said. “Nothing tying you down.”
“Not for the next six weeks,” Franks said. He gestured at the map. “Can you help?”
“Sure,” Moon said, leaning toward the map and squinting.
Franks glanced around and saw no cars, then he smashed his right elbow up into the trooper’s voice box.
Moon reeled backward and sideways, gagging as he hit the open cruiser door and fell to the ground. Franks was almost disappointed the trooper was down already, but he jumped forward to finish the drama.
He kicked Moon’s right hand as he struggled for his service weapon. Franks’s steel-toed boot broke several fingers. Moon gasped and choked. Franks stooped, reached for the trooper’s pistol, and had almost slipped it free of the holster when a meaty fist smashed into the right side of his face.
Franks staggered and went to his knees. He saw dots, felt woozy, but not enough to dull instincts honed for years in the Arizona desert and the bigger sandpit.
Through sheer will, he threw himself forward, scrambling to get out of range of Moon’s left fist, and spun to his feet. Franks’s right eye was swelling shut, and he tasted blood on his lips, but the fog of the blow to his head was lifting.
The trooper was still on his back, reaching across his body for the gun. Franks took one fast step and with his steel-toed boot kicked Sergeant Moon on the top of his skull. He heard a crunch. The trooper’s body went rigid.
Franks kicked him again, this time in the temple, and then a third time, this one to Moon’s exposed neck. He felt vertebrae snap. The trooper sagged, dead.
For four long, heaving breaths, Franks felt that shaky adrenaline clarity he always got after a challenging kill, that hyperconfidence that empowered him when he realized he’d cheated death again. But there was no time to linger. No time to revel in it.
After wiping his prints off the sergeant’s pistol, he reholstered it, picked up the road atlas, and crossed to his truck.
Franks took one last look at the tableau of Sergeant Moon’s death scene, committed it to sweet memory, and drove off. He didn’t look back and did not whistle a single note.