Mark’s uncles had spent some time on the rodeo circuit, though neither was much of a rider. Larry was a trick-rope artist, as good as any Mark ever saw, and he could shoot like he’d been born with a gun in his hand. All of the stunts in Westerns that people said couldn’t be done in real life, Larry did in real life. He’d toss a quarter in the air and draw a revolver and put a hole through the center, shooting accurately by fanning the hammer, and even though he wasn’t a lefty, he was better with his left hand than most marksmen were with their right. For a couple years he’d done sporadic stunt work for film and TV gigs. Then, as the popularity of the Western died and computer effects removed the need for any real human achievement, he was just an unemployed trick-shooter with a few stories about Hollywood starlets.
He drank on those stories for years, though. His brother began to call one of Larry’s actress conquests the Annuity because of how consistently the tale paid out for him. Chivalrous.
By now enough years had passed that Larry would have had to wait for people to Google the names of the starlets he’d bedded before he began the stories, and even then, nobody would have bought him a drink just to listen, but he was still shooting. Matter of fact, he was giving lessons, and that was how he’d met Eli Pate. It wasn’t trick stuff, and it wasn’t pistols.
“Your mother told me she knew a guy who wanted to learn how to shoot a sniper rifle,” he said as he and Mark sat in the small cabin and the early-morning light began to creep down from the peaks and fill the pines. Larry had started a fire in the ancient cast-iron woodstove and the small space quickly filled with heat.
“Now, usually when your mother says I met this guy, it’s trouble from the get-go,” he said, and then he caught himself and awkwardly added, “Sorry, Markus.”
“Come on, Uncle. It’s not like I don’t have a sense of the woman.”
Larry nodded ruefully and ran a hand over his unruly white hair as if to flatten it against his skull. He was sitting close to the stove, the fire poker still in one hand.
“So I never look forward to meeting the fellas, but, you know, I needed the money at that particular juncture. I’d hit a hard spell.”
Larry had spent his life hitting hard spells like a bug hits a windshield.
“At the time I was working for an outfitter in Wyoming named Scott Shields. He’d bought a ranch just outside of the Bighorns, had plans to put in a bunkhouse, get a good cook, set it up right, you know? He’d made his money up in Alaska, guiding for bear and moose out on the peninsula, but he was a Wyoming kid and wanted to come back. I met him through your mother. They had a good situation all the way around.”
“But it didn’t last,” Mark said.
Larry shook his head. “She was living with him down in Cody and I was working on this property, fixing up the cabins, and she brought Pate up, said he wanted shooting lessons. He had top-of-the-line equipment for a man who didn’t know how to use it. At least five thousand in the rifle and scope. He wasn’t much of a shot, but he asked all kinds of questions about range and impact. What he wanted to shoot at was metal.”
“What do you mean?”
“The questions he had were about different rounds and their damage at point of impact. He had these things he wanted to use as targets, like big ceramic canisters. Looked like electrical equipment, insulators maybe. He didn’t even want me to tell him how to shoot, he wanted me to do the shooting so he could see how these things blew up with different rounds at different distances. I said, ‘Okay, let’s set the bullshit aside, chief, and you tell me what you’re really after.’ And the weird bastard looks at me with this smile like a pedophile in an amusement park and says, ‘I intend to remind people about the true nature of power.’ That’s exactly what he said, word for word. I remember it because it was strange and the look on his face when he said it chilled me to the bone.”
Mark said, “He wants to shut the electrical grid down. I have no idea why.”
“Here’s the bullshit he’s slinging, and it’s bullshit your mother has bought: Spirits talk to him. Spirits of the mountains and of the old Indian chiefs. You know how much that pisses me off, listening to a white man claim that?”
“It’s smart,” Mark said. “It’s exactly what Mom would want to hear.”
“You got that right,” Larry admitted. “The last time I saw your mother, she told me about how he’d go up into these caves in the Pryor Mountains and wait for the spirit voices to tell him…Markus? What’s the matter?”
Mark hadn’t moved, but his face must have changed plenty. “Nothing’s the matter. I just had a bad experience with caves.”
An understatement. He could see Ridley Barnes standing in water a few hundred feet underground. Ridley, whose corpse had never been found, saying, She doesn’t want you yet. Saying, When things go dark, you’re the one who will have to bring the light back.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Mark said.
“What doesn’t?”
“You say it like Mom’s buying the con. She’s usually selling it.”
“Give her points for both this time. She’s still peddling the stories, but they’re chapters in a bigger one now, and Pate writes that. She can draw in a different type for him. People who wouldn’t trust him, or at least not trust him easily…they believe in Violet. Always have. You know how she does that.”
“What’s she getting out of it?”
Larry looked away and made a drinking motion with his hand and then a plunging motion with his thumb, and Mark felt a sick, impotent rage as he remembered the syringes he’d taken from his mother and the bottle she’d had in her hand on one of the last days he’d ever seen her, the day he’d gone out into a howling snowstorm and found her passed out in a drift, near death, her flesh tinted the blue of a pale winter sky.
“Of course.”
“She got clean for a bit,” Larry said, somehow always able to rise to his sister’s defense. “She really did. After you left. That knocked her sideways, son. When you left, she got clean and dry and held on for a long time. But then…”
“Right,” Mark said. “But then.” He shook his head. “You mentioned the Pryor Mountains. You think Pate is up there?”
“No idea.”
“Well, I’m going to need some ideas. I’m not the only one looking for him either. The police are too by now. But I need to get there first.”
“Why?”
“Because I think the man who killed my wife is with him. She wrote three words in her notebook on the day she was killed that didn’t make sense to anyone I knew. It makes sense to everyone around Eli Pate, though. Rise the dark. I suppose it’s referring to the moment, this attack they’re planning. The man who told his cell mate he killed Lauren is supposed to be up here with Pate. I just need a shot at him, Uncle.”
Larry said, “You came up here to kill a man?” His voice steady. Unfazed.
“Yes.”
“Then you should know this: After my first go-round with Pate, I went looking for your mother to get her the hell away from him. Scott Shields had left by then, gone back to Alaska, and she and Pate were living in a campground. Couple bikers, guy with an RV, a few tents. You said something about preppers earlier? That’s what this group felt like, sure. And they protect him well.”
He got to his feet and pulled his undershirt off and Mark hissed in a breath and nearly turned away. Larry’s torso was wrapped with ribbons of scars, raised and red. Though the wounds had closed, the flesh would never look right again.
“That’s from a whip,” Larry said quietly. There was anger in his voice, but also shame. “They chained my hands to the tow hitch of an old Jeep and my feet to a cinder block and they whipped me like a dog. Why? Because they’d heard me telling your mother what I thought of Eli Pate. They told me that disrespect—that was the word they used, disrespect—wouldn’t be tolerated.”
Larry regarded his own wounds in silence for a few seconds, then said, “The most important lessons are the ones that leave scars, boy. That’s what your grandfather used to say, whether we’d gotten a lip split in a fight or been thrown by a horse or whatever. The most important lessons leave scars.”
He pulled his shirt back on.
“So that was the last time I saw Pate’s crew. Saw your mother once more. She came up here looking for me, wanted to apologize, she said, but it was more warning than apology. She knew what it would mean if I went back at them, and she knew I had the inclination to try.”
“Why?”
Larry looked at Mark as if he’d asked why he needed oxygen.
“They whipped me, Markus. Tied me down and whipped me. The hell do you mean, why?”
“Tell me where to find him,” Mark said.
“You don’t want to find him. It’s not worth it.”
“They shot my wife twice in the head and left her in a ditch,” Mark said. “Don’t tell me it’s not worth it.”
“You go after Pate, the same thing might happen to you.”
“So be it. I’m not concerned about this being my last ride.”
“And I’m not supposed to be concerned about it being mine either?”
“Just tell me how to find him. I don’t need you to come along.”
“Oh yes, you do. Because he isn’t going to be easy to find, son! This boy is the type you need to flush out of the deep weeds.”
“Tell me where to start, then. Who to ask.”
“You’re not going to find Pate by asking, Markus. And you’re going to need me riding with you, or you’ll be dead before you get started.”
“Then ride with me. Please.”
Larry let out a long breath and opened the stove door and poked at the dying fire. When the flames were licking upward again, he closed the door, set the poker aside, sat down, and said, “I would’ve liked to know you got married. That would have been a nice thing to hear. Anything from you would have been nice to hear.”
“I’ll give you all the apologies you want, but right now isn’t the time.”
“The hell it isn’t! You just showed up at my door and asked for my help killing a man. Don’t tell me what you’ve got time for and what you don’t.”
Mark didn’t speak. Larry turned and looked out the window, up at the crown of Mount Republic, and made a soft sound with his tongue.
“And God made family,” he said. Then he got to his feet.
“Tell you something, Markus—older you get, the more you realize the only things in this world that can really cause you pain are the people you love. I always did love you, son, and it’s damn clear you loved your wife. No doubt about that. It would be easier on us both right now if we weren’t so afflicted, right?”
Mark stayed silent. Larry nodded as if the silence were a good enough answer, then said, “I s’pose it’s time for me to put my pants on, isn’t it? We’re burning daylight, and you’re running a race against the police. Won’t win that one sitting here by the fire, will we?”
“Thank you,” Mark said. His voice was rough. “And I’m sorry.”
His uncle stood looking out the grimy window at the mountain. “You know what I thought, the day those cocksuckers whipped me? I thought, Lord, if only my brother were still alive. Not that it would have put the numbers in my favor, but with Ronny, I didn’t mind being outnumbered. Ronny’s been in the ground a long time, though. I always miss him, but never more than I did that day. I needed a brother, and my brother was gone.” He turned back to Mark and gave a cold, humorless smile. “I got a nephew, though. How ’bout that. Now the question is, how much of Ronny is in you, boy?”