When making any long road trip, Dana and Mary Potter liked to travel around the clock. One would sleep while the other drove. Switching off every two hours and gassing up every four, they could cover close to eighteen hundred miles in a single day.
Indeed, they’d left Texas as fast as they dared, crossing on back roads into New Mexico in a stolen truck with stolen plates before any word of the assassinations surfaced in New York, Washington, or El Paso County.
But by the time they’d made the Colorado line, around five that afternoon, the news was full of the killings, with new, shocking developments almost every minute, very little of it coming out of the Lone Star State, which was exactly how they wanted it to stay.
The roads were dry. They made good time. Wyoming had come and gone before midnight. But the weather had turned sour south of Billings, Montana. Wind, snow, and bitter temperatures had plagued them in the long hours before dawn.
Shortly after daylight on Saturday morning, the storm intensified to near whiteout conditions. A prudent couple would have pulled off the road in Lewistown or Malta and waited it out.
But Mary wanted to be home, and her husband wanted as swift an escape as possible. And the storm wasn’t a bad thing when it came right down to it.
No one would be looking for assassins in a blizzard on Montana’s desolate Hi-Line highway. A killer could drive right by you, and you’d never know it because you’d be keeping your eyes on the white-knuckle road.
So the Potters had driven on toward Glasgow in northeast Montana, listening to the news coverage on the satellite radio. Word of President Larkin’s retaliatory cyberattack on the other nations had shocked them both.
“I want to get home, Dana,” Mary said in a fretful voice. “Before the world goes all to hell on us. My God, what have we done?”
He got angry. “We did a job to save our son’s life. That’s what we did.”
She got angrier. “They’re saying we may have helped start World War Three!”
“I’m a professional. You’re a professional. I did a job, and so did you. And we did it for a noble purpose.”
Mary said nothing, just stabbed off the radio. “I want to call home.”
“No sat phone,” he said firmly. “Radio silence until we’re in the…”
On the GPS navigation screen in the truck’s central console, he saw what he was looking for and slowed, feeling the trailer slide a little behind him before he came to a full stop and turned north onto Frenchman’s Creek Road.
The gravel road had not been plowed. They spun and almost jackknifed the trailer in nine inches of snow. But before they could go in the ditch, Potter wrestled the pickup and trailer back to the middle of the road.
When he was a full mile north of the Hi-Line, he stopped in a spot out of the wind, and they donned wool hats, quilted Carhartt parkas, and heavy leather mitts lined with sheep fleece. Both of them had already changed into insulated bib overalls and boots at the last gas stop.
While Mary saddled and fed the horses grain, he chained up all four tires and changed the stolen Wyoming plates for Montana tags. Despite their heavy clothes, they were cold to the bone when they climbed back in the pickup and started north again.
An hour later, the road doglegged and dropped down beside Frenchman’s Creek itself. The vague outlines of a ranch house and barns appeared through the snow.
Potter stopped and used binoculars to look at the windows for lights inside.
“She’s still in Arizona, right where she should be this time of year,” he said after a few minutes.
“Let’s get it over with, then,” Mary said. “We’ve got a cold ride ahead of us.”
They rolled into the ranch yard. Potter saw no tracks anywhere.
He stopped near a shed between the house and the barn, said, “Good a place as any. You clean up inside, and I’ll get the horses unloaded. We’ll put the truck and trailer back where we found them, and we’re out of here. No one the wiser.”
His wife nodded absently and put on latex gloves. The windows were already caked in rime, and Mary was spraying and wiping down the interior of the pickup when Potter climbed out.
The wind howled through the ranch yard. With the wind chill, it had to be fifty below.
Potter ducked his face away from the wind, went around the back of the horse trailer, and opened it. He got the horses out one by one and tied them to a tree on the leeward side of the ranch house.
The wind gusted. As he came around the porch to shut the trailer, he put up his arm to shield his eyes and face from snow.
At first Potter didn’t see the old woman in the wheelchair on the porch, buried under wool clothes and quilts, wearing ski goggles, and aiming a lever-action hunting rifle at him.
When he finally spotted her, he threw up his hands and said, “Don’t shoot!”
She wiggled her lower face out from beneath a scarf, revealing sagging gray skin and an oxygen line running to her nostrils. She glared at him venomously.
“That’s my damn truck!” she shouted in a thin, bitter voice. “That’s my damn trailer too!”