Potter raised his leather mitts higher, thought fast, and said, “Please, Mrs. Linney, I work for the Montana Department of Justice. The truck and trailer were found abandoned down the Bitterroot Valley. Didn’t anybody call to tell you I was coming?”
The old lady’s glare did not diminish, but she lifted her head a few inches off the rifle sights before saying, “Phone’s been out since the storm hit. And the electricity. And the furnace.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. Don’t you have anyone to help you?”
“My son’s coming for me.”
“Could you lower the gun, Mrs. Linney? It’s making me nervous.”
“You got ID? Badge?” she said, keeping the rifle trained on him.
“ID, no badge,” he said, lowering his arms. “The company I work for does contract delivery work for the state. I have papers for you to sign too. Can we go inside? Get out of the wind?”
Mrs. Linney hesitated until a frigid gale hit them. She grimaced and gestured with the rifle toward the closed front door. “You first.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Potter said. He bowed his head into the biting, whistling wind and started toward the door.
She’s an ornery old cuss, he thought, but he made sure he smiled at her over the barrel of her gun, which followed him in a way that let him know she knew how to use it. He twisted the knob, pushed the door open, and stepped into a center hallway with old wide-planked wood floors.
There was a modern kitchen at the far end. He walked past a room with a television to his right and an old-fashioned formal parlor to his left. Both rooms were neat, tidy.
He stopped and pivoted to look back at Mrs. Linney, who was driving her motorized wheelchair with her left hand while her right gripped the rifle, which was now in her lap. That helped.
“Here,” Potter said, starting toward her. “I’ll shut the door for you.”
“No need,” she said, and she threw the chair in reverse and pushed the door shut.
She stared at him a moment, then pulled down her scarf. Her breath came in clouds. Even without the wind, it had to be near zero inside.
“Your pipes freeze?” he asked.
“Drained them, poured antifreeze down the lines,” she said. “I know how to survive up here.”
“I bet you do.”
She drove a few feet toward Potter and then stopped.
“Let’s see that ID and those papers,” she said.
He smiled again, unzipped his parka, and reached inside for his wallet. He dug out his fake Wyoming driver’s license and started toward her.
Mrs. Linney directed the gun toward him. “Just hold it up from there.”
Potter did.
“Wyoming?” she said.
“We deliver to both states and Idaho too. I kept my residence in Cheyenne because there’s no state income tax.”
“Montana takes ten percent of what’s mine,” she said, sounding disgusted. “What about those papers?”
Potter patted his chest, acted confused, said, “Darn, they’re in the truck. Can I get them?”
Mrs. Linney raised the rifle, aimed at his chest, said, “You do that.”
She put up the wool scarf, retreated, and reached around to twist the doorknob. The wind blew the door open. She drove a few feet toward him so the door was pinned against the wall, and then started to back out onto the porch.
Potter was beginning to regret his decision to borrow Mrs. Linney’s truck and trailer to bring his horses to Texas. But she was supposed to be in Tucson all winter.
Before Mrs. Linney’s wheels crossed the doorway, Mary stepped up behind the old bird, reached around, and tore out her oxygen line before clamping a leather mitten across her mouth and nose.
Instead of screaming and struggling, Mrs. Linney aimed wildly at Potter and pulled the trigger. The gun went off. Plaster exploded off the wall next to him.
She tried to run the lever. But he took two big strides and pinned the rifle against her thighs. Mrs. Linney showed no terror at being trapped and smothered. She just glared at him, making sputtering noises of hatred in her throat.
“Poor thing,” Mary said, keeping her grip firm. “Chair battery ran down in the cold. Oxygen tank empty.”
Potter nodded to his wife and to the old woman, who’d begun to struggle now and show fear.
“Poor thing froze to death, right on her front porch,” Potter said, more to Mrs. Linney than to Mary. “Her son found her.”
They left Mrs. Linney like that, sitting there in her wheelchair, dead on her front porch, eyes open, with the gun in her lap and her oxygen line back in place. By the time they’d dropped the trailer, put the truck in the barn, and mounted the horses, the snow was already collecting on the quilts in the old woman’s lap.
They trotted out of the ranch yard, heading true north along the creek. The cold and the wind were beyond bitter. But they forged on. The snow and the gales would soon obliterate their tracks. And they hadn’t far to go.
Seven miles farther on, the Linney ranch road became a cattle trail that snaked another three miles to a gate in a barbed-wire fence cutting across a vast, empty, broken prairie.
Beyond the fence, they’d be in Saskatchewan.
Beyond the fence, the Potters would almost be home.