Date: 2018-12-18 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction
Description: A boy comes of age among a family of grifters in this powerful story from a New York Times-bestselling "master" (Stephen King). Never knowing a real home, Markus Novak's only constant in life is his passion for paperback westerns. The child of a family of outlaws, he moves through the West town by town with his mother and two uncles, staying in a place just long enough to run a short con and move along. After one job goes south and his mom gets locked up, Markus finds himself in the foster care of a rancher and his wife--with whom he's strangely comfortable, yet torn by loyalty to the family h
Publisher: Mysteriouspress.Com/Open Road

The Last Honest Horse Thief

Michael Koryta

By the time Markus was ten he understood the con well enough to participate in it. By the time he was thirteen, he understood it well enough to want nothing to do with it.

That was the year they visited Medicine Wheel, and the pilfering of a few bills from tourists who were happy to offer them suddenly felt evil. That had nothing to do with the con itself, and everything to do with the place.

Markus had seen his mother’s routine practiced all over the west—the Black Hills, Yellowstone, Glacier National Park, Flathead Lake, Sunlight Basin—by the time they drove for Medicine Wheel, a new stop.

“Special kinds of fools,” Uncle Ronny said of the tourists. He drove with one arm resting out the open window the Ford Sport Custom pickup. “The folks who think it’s insane that the Sioux won’t accept 600 million dollars for the Black Hills, even though they don’t have it now and never will again, still believe that any Indian might be in touch with the spirit world.”

Markus didn’t object, didn’t say much of anything, just watched the long empty highway snaking toward the Big Horn Mountains, the highest peaks obscured by low-lying clouds. The four of them were jammed in the cab: Markus and his mother in the middle, Ronny at the wheel, Larry at the opposite window. In the bed of the truck, curled up on blankets, was a dog of unknown origins named Amigo. It had been a good week—Markus’s mother had made nearly two hundred in palm readings, Ronny had made fifty in a trick-shooting demonstration, and Larry had lost only forty at poker. They were coming out ahead, which was probably what convinced them to take the shot at Medicine Wheel.

Markus’s mother was a slim, petite woman with light brown hair and blue eyes. During the summer tourist season, though, you wouldn’t see the blue eyes or the light hair. Between tanning beds and tinted lotion her face became the color of the inside of a walnut. Her hair was dyed raven-black and lay straight down her back in a perfect, tight braid, with a few feathers interwoven. Her blue eyes were hidden by dark contacts. She looked to have exactly the heritage she claimed, and that was critical, because Snow Creek Maiden, princess of the Nez Perce, got a lot more palm-reading dollars than did Violet Novak, single white female, of Billings.

All she got were collection notices.

Because it had been a good week, both in revenue and in weather, with summer at its beautiful peak, the sky huge and blue and cloudless except near the peaks, the country fanned by gentle winds, they were feeling bullish about the ruse, and Markus found Medicine Wheel intriguing for reasons he wouldn’t mention to his family. Truth be told, he was fascinated with the Native American rituals, particularly the drum circles and chants, a sound that carried you right out of the present and into an unknown past. He was the only one who cared to see what the ancient, sacred site at nearly two miles in the air actually looked like; the others cared only that it sounded ripe for the taking.

His uncles often rode his mother’s con based on their sense of energy, like a poker game, and so Markus wasn’t surprised that they endorsed the plan. Also, it had nothing to do with them. They only drove the truck. His mother didn’t have such clear motivation. She was known to give up on a good location to pursue a bad one without explanation, and Markus never voiced his guess—that, on some secret level, she had begun to believe her own act. He suspected there was at least a part of her, hidden beneath the laughter and behind the dark contacts, that thought she truly heard spirit voices better in some places than others.

None of this weighed much on Markus as they drove into Wyoming. The biggest concern on his mind was a girl from his seventh grade class in Cody named Ruby, a rancher’s daughter with endless blue eyes and an unabashed yelp of a laugh. He couldn’t imagine any reason for her to be in the Big Horns in summer, but there was a chance, and if she saw him…God, he couldn’t deal with that.

It was a silly concern for two reasons, really. One, Ruby wasn’t likely to be in the Big Horns, true, but the second reason was sadder than the first and so he didn’t like to consider it: Markus hadn’t spent more than a semester in the same school in five years. He was unlikely to see Ruby again under any circumstances.

They spent the first morning getting acquainted with the location. The wheel was nearly ten thousand feet in elevation, with 28 stone cairns laid out in a circle by unknown hands hundreds and possibly thousands of years before. For as long as understood in recorded history, it had been a sacred spot of the Crow and Arapaho tribes in particular, and its 28 cairns mirrored the 28 sacred lodge poles of the Lakota sun dance. Now in the possession of the United States government, it was also a seasonal tourist attraction, accessible when the snow on the high mountain pass melted enough to allow access. During the season, it was staffed by rangers at top and bottom. The parking lot was a mile below the Medicine Wheel, and it was a steep walk up over the windswept mountainside. Markus’s mother determined that the best location would be somewhere in that mile, forcing one ranger to come up or the other to go down if they wanted to harass her. By the time that happened, she would be done, and have both the tourists’ money and their support. Depending how often they changed rangers, she thought could do well here. Very well.

“It’s perfect,” she said after returning from her first walk to the top. “So much spiritual energy! Even the people who don’t think they believe might want to believe up there. And the rangers are good, actually. They reinforce the chain of thought. One of their jobs to is protect the chance for people to worship. You’re asked to be silent to respect the Indians, and you’re asked to walk in the right direction around the wheel. From up there, you feel as if you’re on top of the world. Absolutely perfect.”

She was almost breathless.

Markus thought that the idea of police stationed to protect the chance for people to worship was a strange one, but maybe not. Everybody seemed to want a piece of the Indians as they passed through, some little token of the authentic western experience. Instead, they got his mother.

They still drove home satisfied.

While she talked about strategy, Markus focused on his fly box. He was fishing a stream to the southeast of Medicine Wheel and had caught three small brook trout on a hand-tied Caddis imitation. He was proud of that, because the flies, tied in the long nights of a long winter, were the first he’d ever made on his own.

They walked along behind him, talking, making plans.

“Rangers will run you off, Violet,” his uncle Larry warned. Larry was the closest to reluctant in the group, which wasn’t saying much. Most people would regard him as a hell-raiser, but in Markus’s family, he was the voice of reason.

“No, they won’t. I’ll make a show of ceremony up on top, and then start back down. Stop halfway. It’s perfect. It will help that there are other native people here, too.”

“Other native people?” Larry said, and then he rolled his eyes and spat. “You do remember our ancestors are German, don’t you?”

She waved him off with a cursory hand and then went back to the truck to dress. Markus wandered farther from the truck, crossing the stream on flat stones, wishing she’d take a day off at least, just one. He actually didn’t mind their summer ramblings. They saw beautiful country and he had regular opportunities to fish. He liked traveling with his uncles, too. In the times when the four of them were separated and it was just Markus and his mother, the loneliness could overwhelm him. He’d find himself thinking about kids at school then, kids with real families, and he’d go quiet and sullen and begin to hate her.

His uncles kept that at bay. They were always either in the middle of doing something interesting or telling a story of a time something interesting had happened. They’d worked nearly every job in the west at some time or another, fished every stream that was worth fishing, drank at every bar that was worth a stop. Strong men, lively men, loud men. Once Markus had asked if his father had been that kind of man, but nobody said much about him. Not even his name.

After a while, you learned not to ask.

While his mother prepped back at the truck and Ronny smoked a cigarette and lay in the sun with his hat shading his eyes, Larry came down to fish. He asked Markus to read the water and point out the casting zones, pleasing himself by catching the occasional trout out of a hole Markus had dismissed. There were less of them these days, though. He was beginning to read the water very well.

“Hell of a spot, isn’t it?” Larry said. He’d stopped casting and was idly scratching Amigo’s ears and looking at the forested slopes and the high rock peaks. The breeze smelled of the fir trees and their limbs dulled the sun to a slanted light that cast sparkles over the rippled water.

Markus said, “Yes, it is. Think we’ll be staying long?”

Larry’s peaceful smile slid away. He took his hand from the dog’s ears, brought out a cigarette, and lit it.

“Long enough for your mom to make some coin, anyhow. Right now, your uncle and I can’t stay in one spot for too long, though. You know how that is, son.”

“Right.”

In late spring, just before the last snow, Larry and Ronny had been arrested for stealing a car in Cody. Their justification made enough sense—the man they’d stolen it from owed them more than five hundred in poker debt, and the car wasn’t worth half that—but it hadn’t mattered much to the police. Markus’s mother had scraped enough money together for bond, but since then they’d been on the move, and they were always a traffic stop away from jail.

Watching his uncle’s face and mood darken, Markus wished he hadn’t brought it up. He said, “Hell, they’ll never catch you. Anyhow, we’ll find ourselves a stronghold if we need to hole up.”

That raised a ghost of a smile on his uncle’s face, and Larry picked up his rod again. “You got it,” he said. “Just like we learned from George Ranger Johnson.”

George Ranger Johnson wrote books about men in all sorts of trouble in the west. Larry couldn’t put them down, and he’d just lately started letting Markus read them. The characters almost always had a stronghold.

“Always have a backup plan,” Larry said as he cast below a riffle that Markus had already tried without success. This time, a trout struck on the fly almost immediately, and Larry soon beached the best fish of the day, its speckled belly gleaming in the sunlit rocks. He slid the hook out of its jaw and released it, but the fish didn’t dart away. For a few seconds it held place, moving its tail just enough to hold in the current. Then, in a blink and a flash, it was gone.

Larry watched the trout vanish and said, “It’s important that you understand that your mother and Ronny and I, we’re sticking together, Markus. Never forget that.”

“I won’t.”

“I’ll forgive you for most mistakes, you know that. But you got to have some rules to live by. That’s just a matter of honor, like those cowboy stories you like so much.”

“I like so much! They’re your books!”

Larry laughed. “Fine. That we like so much. Gotta remember your sense of honor, just like the men in those books. You gotta have a plan, and you gotta take care of the people you ride with. And your family. In your case, for now, family is both.”

Markus had heard a version of this speech dozens of times, usually offered to explain why they were leaving one town or another after one uncle or another—or, plenty of times, his mother—had gotten into some type of trouble.

“I know it, Uncle.”

“And you also know we’ve got a bit of risk out here.”

The bit of risk involved the active arrest warrants for car theft. Markus didn’t like considering that on any level—what it meant that his uncles had stolen a car, or what might happen if they were caught for it, but Larry was looking at him with a hard stare that said they were talking man-to-man, not man-to-boy, and Markus forced himself to meet his uncle’s eyes.

“Yes, sir.”

“All right. Your mom’s going to do her thing here, and I’m not saying it’ll go bad, but if it does, Ronny and I…well, we can’t exactly linger to see how it sorts out. You follow?”

Markus nodded again. There was a thick ledge forming in the back of his throat, but if he kept his eyes on his uncle’s, the tears stayed away.

“Now, I’m not expecting trouble,” Larry said, “but if there is any, I got a way of contacting you all worked out. You remember that bookstore in Powell?”

“Sure.”

The bookstore was little more than a couple of bookcases at the back of a pawn shop where the owner paid less attention to the sources of items than their immediate value, but Larry always called it the bookstore when they took Markus along, and Ronny dealt with selling the guns, car parts, stereo equipment, or whatever else might be in play that day while Larry and Markus browsed the old books.

“If we get separated for any reason, you get down there, and look for my George Ranger Johnson books. You’ll know ’em. I’ll leave a note in there for you, okay?”

Markus felt an overwhelming sense of alarm. There was a difference between this plan and the ones he’d discussed with his uncle before—it felt more real, and less like a game.

“We’re not going to get separated, are we? I don’t understand—”

“Just listen to me, Markus. I’m telling you, if it were to happen, you need to find a way to get down there. The way I see it is, nobody’s going to keep a kid from getting a book, right? Everybody thinks reading is good for a kid.” Larry seemed to be talking to himself as much as to Markus now. “So you tell them you want a book, and you get over to that store, and you’ll find the right books, and I’ll leave word for you in them. Okay?”

“Who are you talking about? Who would I be with? I don’t want to—”

“Markus.” Larry’s voice softened and he knelt before Markus and gripped his upper arm gently. “We’re gonna be fine, hoss. I’m just doing what I always do, and thinkin’ ahead. You need to learn how to do the same. It’s a mean world for a man who can’t see the horizon. You understand that?”

Markus blinked back the rising tears and nodded.

“Of course you do,” Larry said, and clapped him on the back. “Do you know how to catch a damned trout, though?”

“Yes.”

“Best prove it. You’ve been showing off with that cast, trying to look pretty. You catch a fish in the air, you’ll be the first man to do it.”

Markus laughed and coughed to clear away the tears. He turned back to the water, trying to breathe and relax. They were fishing, that was all he needed to worry about. The horizon, whatever it held, didn’t matter right now.

“Tighten it up now,” Larry said. “Read the water, and tighten your motion up.”

Markus made a short cast just below the base of a fallen tree. No strike, but it was a fine cast, and Larry nodded in approval. Four casts later, a riffle caught his fly and sucked it down toward the bone-white limb of the downed tree and then there was a flash of color and splash as a cutthroat hit it. Markus jerked the line, setting the hook in the trout’s lower jaw, and then kept his rod tip up and fought the fish to the bank. It wasn’t big, but it was beautiful, and it was earned by careful casting. They didn’t need to be big to be wonderful.

“That’s my nephew at work right there,” Larry said with enough pride to make Markus flush as he removed the hook and put the trout into his creel.

They went on down the bank, and Markus would have been happy to spend the rest of the day fishing and talking with his uncle, Amigo trailing behind, hunting patches of sunlight to sleep in, but it wasn’t to be. A busload of tourists from Ohio pulled in, and Markus’s mother saw potential.

“I’m going to need you, Markus.”

He wanted to argue, but he knew better. “Right.”

His role in the con was both integral and shameful. He’d dress to look as much like a rich tourist’s kid as possible. Then he’d come by his mother once she was in a session, her fingertips tracing someone’s palm, her voice issuing a low hum or chant, and he’d say something racist and cruel. She would look at him gently then, playing the part of the implacable Indian, used to this treatment. The white man or woman paying for the reading usually threw in a couple extra bills on account of guilt-by-proxy, as Larry termed it.

Neither Larry nor Ronny could play the role, because there was always the chance that someone would want to fight them, which wouldn’t end well, or call the police, which would end even worse. But when it was just a child, a spoiled brat on his summer vacation, people tended to let him go on by. Oh, they’d yell at him a bit, and once a guy had grabbed him by the arm, but mostly they just ran him off with a few sharp words. Then they’d pay their Indian spirit guide a few extra dollars for the suffering she’d had to endure. Money like that allowed the Indian spirit guide to buy more contacts to shield her blue eyes. Then, if there was enough cash, she’d take the contacts out so that the blue eyes could sparkle while she spent the rest of the dollars at one of the cowboy bars down in Sheridan.

Today, Markus was wearing jeans and an old canvas shirt button down shirt with the sleeves rolled, but his mother wanted him to put on cargo shorts and a T-shirt that said Tommy Hilfiger. There was a Nike Jordan Air baseball cap and sunglasses to complete it.

Larry said, “Violet, just do your bit. The kid don’t need to be part of it.”

“He’s the most important part of it.”

Larry shook his head. “You don’t get to choose your family, Markus. You just got to deal with them.”

“Stop talking like that,” she said.

Larry lit a cigarette and blew smoke in silence, staring at the mountains.

Markus went behind a thick stand of firs to change, and when he returned, Amigo wandered over and sniffed him curiously. Markus wondered what the dog understood about these clothes and their former owner. Wondered if Amigo wouldn’t prefer to be at whatever suburban home the clothes came from.

“Perfect, kiddo,” his mom said. “You’re an old pro.”

She touched his cheek with the side of her hand and smiled. Already she was unrecognizable to him; blue eyes turned brown, dark braid laced with feathers, a fringed doeskin smock hanging just below her slim, tanned thighs. She wore ankle-high boots, decorated with bright beads and leather thongs.

“A damn shame to take the boy away when the fish are biting,” Ronny said.

“The tourists will be, too. Or maybe you’ve got enough money in your pocket that we don’t need to worry about it today?”

Ronny’s chest filled with a sigh and he turned away. “Just get done without having any trouble with the rangers. I’d like to be at the Mint Bar by sunset, having a steak.”

As much as Mark didn’t like the idea of going up toward Medicine Wheel, he liked the idea of the Mint Bar. It was a place down in Sheridan that looked more like a taxidermy museum than a bar, filled with trophy animals and pictures of the Old West.

“Let’s go on, then,” he told his mother, and she smiled and squeezed his arm.

He wasn’t sure exactly when the strange feeling overtook him. Not in the parking lot, where they passed the first ranger without incident. It was sometime on the walk to the top. From the parking lot the path became a steep ramp of packed earth, and the wind rose the higher you went. More of the world became visible with each step, the mountains falling away in every direction. It wasn’t all that different from many places in the mountains, and yet there was something that felt different. Markus had no idea just why that was. He wished he’d brought Amigo along, but the dog had stayed back at the truck with his uncles. He wouldn’t have even minded walking with his mother, but of course he had to keep distance between them so that when she found her marks, the boy in the Jordan hat and sunglasses would seem unconnected to her, the rude product of some other, terrible family.

He was fifty strides ahead of her, walking the way the worst of the tourist kids did, looking tired and bored and indifferent, when he heard the chanting.

He came to a full stop and looked up at the summit, where the Medicine Wheel was, and felt a strange swirl of vertigo that he never had experienced even on the steepest slopes of the Beartooth or Absarokee ranges. There was nowhere to fall here, and yet he had the sense of being somewhere very high, the sense that the earth was sliding out from under his feet. He hunched over like someone caught with a stomach cramp, stared at the ground, and breathed deeply, listening to the chanting. It was beautiful, the rising and falling voices joined perfectly. Pow wow music. He’d heard it before. He always liked it, but for some reason today…

“Markus? You okay?”

His mother’s whisper stirred him into action. He looked back and saw her trudging solemnly up the path with a dreamcatcher held in her hands. From the distance, she looked authentic. He said, “I’m fine,” and walked away quickly, before she could catch up. She didn’t pursue—they were strangers here, after all.

That was another reason he didn’t mind this con. In this routine, there was no way anyone associated him with her. In fact, he was her polar opposite, from another world entirely. That was why he didn’t mind playing the role.

He hurried on up the path and followed a switchback to the top and for the first time he saw the Medicine Wheel. It was on a flat summit buffeted by the high-elevation winds, a simple arrangement of ancient stone cairns laid in a careful circle, with a small, fragile perimeter fence strung around them, lined with twisted bits of twine and feathers and even hair and bone. You could see endlessly in every direction, but Markus couldn’t bring himself to look at the view. He was, like the Ohio tourists, staring at the chanting group.

They were Crow. Markus knew this without remembering or even understanding why. He’d been through the Crow Reservation countless times, but if there was a visual cue to their traditional dress, he didn’t recognize it. The chant, maybe. He wasn’t sure; he knew only that he was right.

He felt the dizziness again, stronger than ever, and he sat down on the ground. That still didn’t feel steady enough, so he lay flat on his back and closed his eyes and the swirling sensation steadied just a touch, but he felt like he could hear echoes from deep within the earth. The chanting, yes, but something else. Footsteps.

From long ago. They are the footsteps of someone who walked this way long ago.

“Son? Are you all right?”

It was one of the Ohio tourists, a man with bifocals and a sunburn, learning down to Markus with a concerned face.

“I’m fine. Sorry. Just resting.”

“The way you went down, we thought you’d fainted or something.”

“No, just tired. It’s steep coming up here.”

The man’s face was impossibly kind. “It sure is! I know we were winded.”

Markus nodded but didn’t say anything else. He was watching the chanting group of Crow. There were ten of them. They sang with their eyes closed and their faces turned to the sky.

“It’s a sacred place to them,” the sunburned man whispered.

Yes, Markus thought, it really is. They are real, and to them, this place is, too.

That was when he understood how badly he wanted to go back down, and take his mother with him. There were places where it was a game, and the people whose palms she read understood it as a game, even if they hoped some bit of it was real.

That was nothing like this place.

He’d just gotten back to his feet when the sunburned man said, “We lost our little girl this spring. And it might seem silly to folks, but we’ve tried to make stops at places like this, for her. We were going to make this trip together, you know, as a family. We’d had that all arranged and she was so excited about all of it, especially Yellowstone, and then summer came and she was gone but…but we decided we should make the trip anyhow.”

Markus could see the man’s wife now. Same age as him but weathered in a worse way, someplace that seemed to come from not her face but her eyes. She was watching with concern.

“Sorry,” the sunburned man said. “I didn’t meant to unload all that on you, son. I talk too damn much.”

“It’s okay,” Markus said, and he got up and shook the man’s hand and said, “I’m sorry about your daughter,” and just as he was saying it he saw his mother approaching, and she gave a little nod, as if she thought Markus was singling the man out to her.

He had a few times before.

“Go on and find your family,” the man said, and his voice was rough. “Be careful walking up here. It’s thin air. Don’t push yourself. That thin air, it can be tough on both the head and the heart.”

Markus nodded and slipped away. He left the Medicine Wheel without walking around it. He’d wanted to do that, but now he just wanted to get back to the truck and his uncles and his dog.

He stumbled back down the steep path and then a cloud passed over the sun and the path fell into shadow and he had the strange vertigo again. He wondered numbly if he was getting sick. What was the last thing he’d eaten? He sat down on a boulder that lined the path, put his head between his knees, and sucked in air. His chest felt like there was a small bird trapped in it, beating against his ribs. A sickly bird, though, something wrong with it, like a bird with only one wing. He kept his eyes closed and he breathed and at length the strange feeling subsided and the shadow fell away from the sun and he was left with only a thin, cool sweat on his forehead.

He opened his eyes then and got shakily to his feet and started back down. Before he did, he cast one glance back up at the Medicine Wheel, and that was when he saw his mother.

She was sitting on the ground a hundred yards up the slope, and she was with the man and woman from Ohio. The man’s head was bowed, listening, and the woman with the hurt-filled eyes had her hands extended. Markus’s mother was tracing the lines on her palms.

He ran toward them.

The dizziness didn’t follow him; he ran fast and fluid, even on the steep slope, and he didn’t break stride until he reached them, lungs burning, and said in a gasp, “Don’t give her any money.”

They all looked up. Two of them in surprise; his mother with calm acknowledgement. She clearly expected this was just a variation on the routine. Instead of his standard racist taunt, he was opening with some description of her as a beggar. She looked almost proud to see him improvising.

He said, “She’s not real. She’s not like them.” He pointed at the group of Crow who were descending from the wheel.

His mother said, “Child, these people are grieving. Please find your family and leave us in peace. Do not bother the spirits that—”

“You are my family,” Markus said. He turned to the sunburned man. “That’s my mother. She’s not an Indian. She’s a white woman from Billings, and she dresses up like that to take money from people like you. Don’t give her any.”

Neither the husband nor wife had spoken. They were both staring at him, stunned. Markus said, “Ask her to say a single Nez Perce name. One that’s not Chief Joseph, at least. Go on, ask her. She doesn’t know any of them. I know more about them than she does.”

The woman withdrew her hands stiffly. She looked from Markus to his mother and said, “I was telling you about my child. About my baby.”

His mother turned to him, and he was expecting anger, or perhaps even a denial as she tried to stick with her lie, but all she said was, “Markus, I can help them, you know. It’s not all a lie.”

“Trust me,” Markus told the sunburned man, “it is all a lie.”

The Crow contingent was close enough to hear now, and they were speaking among themselves in soft voices. Markus couldn’t look in their direction.

“She shouldn’t be here,” he said. His voice broke and he was close to tears. “This place is real, and she isn’t. She shouldn’t dress up like that in a place like this.”

Someone broke free from the group of Crow onlookers and walked toward them with a brisk stride. When Markus looked up he realized it wasn’t one of their group, at all. It was the ranger, and he had a radio at his lips.

Markus’s mother’s voice was gentle when she said, “This is going to be a problem, son. We’ve all got active warrants. You know that.”

The first adult to call Markus “Mark” was his foster father, a rancher with faraway eyes who opened his home after the trouble at Medicine Wheel. In exchange, he was paid a stipend by the state to host his troubled ward.

“Sixty days ain’t so long,” he told Markus during his first dinner at the house. “We’ll figure each other out. It’s a nice place here and we’ll take good care of you so long as you respect us, and respect the property. You think you can do that, Mark?”

Markus looked at the rancher’s wife, Beth, an overweight woman with gray hair and a wide face, and said, “Isn’t there any way I can get my dog back, at least?”

The rancher answered for her. “That’s none of our business, Mark. That’s all for the state to figure out. But we got plenty of animals around here for you.”

That was the truth. Markus spent most of his day with animals. There were eggs to be collected in the morning, a solitary milk cow to be milked, and countless head of beef cattle. The rancher worked him hard, but not in a cruel way, or even an unkind way. They were both kind to him, in fact, but he could feel them circling like wolves when they asked questions about his family that were disguised as casual, and so he let a full week pass before he asked if they could take him to the bookstore in Powell.

“We can take you to the library,” the rancher said after a measured pause. “Books are free there.”

“I know it. But the one in Powell…they’ve got the books by my favorite writers. A big old stack of paperbacks. They aren’t expensive. I’ll earn it back. Whatever it costs, I’ll earn it.”

“What kind of books are these?”

“Westerns, mostly.”

Beth frowned. “Shooting and sex is what he means.”

“They aren’t like that. They’re real good stories. There’s good stuff in there, good lessons, like remembering honor and being true to your word and your…”

He stopped before he said family.

The last time he’d seen his uncles they were in the blue Ford, headed west, after he’d waved them away. The rangers had his mother’s identity by then, and there was no way she was going anywhere but jail. Markus didn’t think his uncles needed to end the night in the same place. Truthfully, he also hadn’t wanted to face them. At that point they’d been clueless, unaware of what had happened at the summit of Medicine Wheel, when Markus had committed the only sin his family considered unpardonable and turned on one of his own.

Gotta remember your sense of honor, just like the men in those books. You gotta have a plan, and you gotta take care of the people you ride with. And your family.

When he thought about his betrayal, he wondered if it had been bad enough that his Uncle Larry wouldn’t even have followed through on the plan. Maybe they wouldn’t want to see him again, after what he’d done.

He wished his mother had been angry. It would have been easier then. He’d expected outrage but he’d received none, and now he found himself wishing that there had been some, just to relieve his guilt.

“It won’t hurt the boy to read a western,” the rancher said, and Markus thought of his uncle’s prediction that everyone thought a kid should read. A smart choice. Larry saw the horizon awfully well, it seemed.

The next day they took him into Powell, and when they saw that the bookstore was part of a pawnshop they nearly refused, but he assured them he never looked at anything in there except the books in the back.

That wasn’t true, as he usually enjoyed browsing the entirety of the odd collection, particularly the knives, but he didn’t think it was wise to mention that.

Instead, he went straight back to the old bookcases, and though it was cool in the old brick building that had once been a company store for miners, he was sweating and his heart was thumping as he scanned the yellowed, dusty paperbacks—Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, Terry C. Johnston, Loren D. Estleman, Elmore Leonard….

He felt his breath catch when he ran out of titles and hadn’t come across George Ranger Johnson. This was the price of his choice, he thought. You betrayed your family, and your family moved on without you. He’d known this and still—

“Isn’t this the one you was talkin’ about?” the rancher said, and pointed to a stack on the floor, waiting to be shelved.

George Ranger Johnson.

“That’s him,” Markus said, and it came out nearly a whisper. He knelt and thumbed through the stack and recognized each one. He didn’t dare look for a note in front of the rancher and his wife, so he just gathered the whole stack and said, “I promise I’ll earn the money.”

The rancher’s wife looked at the cover with her lips set in a thin line and said, “Looks like sex and shooting to me.”

“Then let’s be glad he’s only reading about it and not doing it,” the rancher said, and he took the stack of paperbacks to the counter and paid for them.

The gratitude Markus showered on him was sincere, but something about that felt wrong. It wasn’t so different from what his mother did, was it? He was running a con, even if it didn’t hurt anyone.

He checked the books on the ride home, when he was confident that nobody was watching him. There was a note in each book, and each bore the same message, written in Larry’s block printing.

IF YOU’RE DRIVING A HOT EIGHT, THEN YOU’VE GOT A DATE IN SILVER GATE.

That was the stronghold! That was where they’d gone to hide, and they’d picked the perfect town for it, Silver Gate, Montana, was high up in the Beartooth Mountains with only one road in and out. The town was built up beside Amphitheater Mountain, a great towering bowl of rock that seemed designed to guard your back. And once you left the road and got up into the Beartooths, why, you were as good as gone.

Now he knew where they were. It was just a matter of figuring out how to join them. Silver Gate was not walking distance, not by a long shot.

That night, after dinner, when Markus joined the rancher and his wife out on the porch, as was their custom at sunset, he looked to the northwest where the peaks were just barely visible.

“Silver Gate’s up that way, isn’t it?” he said.

“Silver Gate, Montana? Why, that’s right outside of Yellowstone.”

The rancher said this as if it altered Markus’s statement.

“Right.” He pointed northwest. “Up there.”

Beth smiled. “It’s an awful long way off, Mark.”

He realized then that they didn’t think he could find his way to Silver Gate if given the chance. He supposed that made some sense. Most 13-year-old kids didn’t have much understanding of a map. Most of them hadn’t spent endless hours in a truck with road atlas at hand, calling out directions, either. He didn’t push the subject, though, just watched the sun settle, picturing the way the top of Mount Republic would glow at this time of day, and how the bowl of Amphitheater would hold the slanted light.

It would take some planning to get all the way up there. A hot eight, as Larry had termed it, was a stolen car. Markus knew how to drive, but he couldn’t bring himself to consider stealing the rancher’s truck.

“Say,” he ventured cautiously, “what’s that old car under the tarp in the pole barn?”

The rancher laughed softly, and Beth closed her eyes and shook her head as if Markus had mentioned a nest of rattlesnakes out in the barn instead of a car.

“It’s nothing but rusting metal,” the rancher said.

“Doesn’t run?”

“Not even a little bit.”

Markus nodded and stared out at the vanishing mountains as the shadows overtook them. He’d find a way. It would take some time, but he would find a way.

Three weeks passed with surprising speed. In the days he worked, and in the evenings they all sat together and talked in soft voices and then they went to bed early. The routine varied only on Sundays, when they went to church an hour east and would eat lunch at a restaurant in town, the only meal of the week that wasn’t taken in the kitchen. They had a dining room with seating for ten, but they never used it.

It wasn’t a bad life. They were not bad people. The home was the nicest he’d ever known, the bed the softest, the food the best, and most consistently delivered. He’d also never hated anyplace more. Not even the winter he was ten, when they’d lived out of the truck for five weeks.

He understood what the warrants meant, and he understood what the world thought of his family, a point made even more clear by sending him here to live with these kind, quiet people, but…

They weren’t his family. And he didn’t belong.

He was on the porch with the rancher one night, staring at distant peaks as the sun sank behind them, when the rancher said, “Could be more than sixty days.”

Mark turned and stared at him. “What? Why?”

“I don’t make the decision. You know that. It’s people with the state, people whose job it is to see that you’re in…the best situation possible. They make that choice.”

“Does that mean my mother is in jail longer?” He hadn’t written or asked to visit. The way he looked at it, they’d both been sentenced to sixty days. His location nicer than hers, that was all.

“I’m really not sure. They’ll send someone out here and we’ll all talk things over. That nice woman who was here the day you came. But you don’t have to worry about relocating or anything. It’ll be stable. Consistent.”

“If she has to stay in longer, I should go to my uncles.”

The rancher worked that one over in his mind for a long time before he spoke. When he did, his voice was soft, almost sad.

“That’s not a legal option. At least not right now.”

“Are they in jail, too?”

“Not yet.”

Not yet. That meant they hadn’t been caught. The news made him strangely proud, and he felt his chest swell.

“We’ll make sure things go well for you, Mark.”

Markus, he thought, but he’d never corrected him before and he didn’t now. The old man slipped some chewing tobacco between his jaw and lip. This meant that his wife was already in for the night; he never used tobacco in front of her.

“I ’spect you’re used to more kids around. Beth and me aren’t exactly playmates, I know.”

Markus, always an outsider in every new school—or, far worse, the returnee a year or later, when everyone else had already forgotten his existence—didn’t bother to dispute this notion.

“I like the quiet fine,” he said.

The rancher nodded, his lip bulging at he worked at the tobacco. “Might be you need a project?”

“I think there’s plenty of work,” Markus said cautiously, and the old man laughed. He didn’t laugh much, but that one got him going for some reason.

“There always is,” he said. “That’s just the problem, Mark. Come on with me, now.” He got to his feet. During the days of hard work he didn’t betray any pain, but Markus had noticed that by evening even simple acts seemed laborious to him, and once he closed his bedroom door the smell of muscle liniment hung in the air every night.

He walked slowly to the pole barn and Markus followed. They went inside and the rancher tugged the tarp off the old car.

“Hard to believe,” he said, “but that was a beautiful car once.”

“I can tell,” Markus said, and he meant it. The body was rusted and dented but the lines were still clear, and it was a fine-looking car. “It’s just awfully old, that’s all. Was it always yours?”

“Yes and no. It was my first car, first that I bought with my own money, leastwise. My father told me it was foolish, and the first winter proved him right. This is truck country.” He worked at the tobacco, spat into a cup, and nodded. “Truck country,” he repeated. “But back in those days, I wanted something a little different. So I bought that ’55 Chevy. A Chevy, that turned my father’s stomach even worse, what with him having been a Ford man all his life. But that honey had a small-block V8 under the hood, and the body, when you waxed it right, put this deep shine in all that blue…I’ll tell you, Mark, it turned heads back then. It turned some heads.” He smiled wistfully.

“So you just let it rust?” Markus asked.

“No, no. I sold it and bought a Ford truck.” He laughed again. “Then I got married. We had kids. And the oldest was five and the youngest not even a year when I got word that the ’55 was for sale at a used-car lot up in Sheridan. I went to have a look, that was all. Just a look. Because it reminded me of…well, a different time, a different kind of living.” His eyes narrowed and his voice sharpened. “Not that those were better days or living. Different, sure. Better, no. You clear on that?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, and the barest hint of a smile creased his stern face. “The day I drove that car up here was the maddest I’ve ever seen Beth. She’s all soft edges with you, boy, but…” He smiled a little wider and shook his head. “You’d be well-advised to tread lightly.”

“She thought it was a bad winter car, too, like your dad did?”

“Something like that.”

“You never drove it?”

“Not much. Head gasket went not six months after I bought it. Had that fixed, but then the transmission went, and…well, eventually it got so there was more to be done on it than there was time to do it. Not without making a trade, at least. You understand me, Mark? So many hours in the day, days in the week, weeks in the year, years in the life. You gotta make trades. That’s all there is to it. Your life, son, is going to be all about making trades. You’ll learn that soon enough. Choices and trades.”

“But you kept the car.”

“I did do that.”

“Why?”

The rancher spat tobacco juice and shook his head. “There was a time it meant something to me just having it in the corner of my eye. Like a reminder of what I’d been once. Not that I wanted to be that again. I just liked to see it there in the corner of my eye, and know that it had been real once.”

Markus didn’t follow that, but he didn’t say anything.

“What I’ve considered, time to time, is getting her back in action. One last ride. I’ve watched you work, know you’re mechanically inclined. You know a bit about your tools.”

“A bit.” Markus didn’t mention that some of the lessons he’d learned had come while helping his uncles repair a stolen car in a blizzard outside of Cheyenne. There were some things best left unsaid.

“Follow me,” the rancher said, and then they went into the workshop at the back of the barn, which was Markus’s favorite place on the entire property. The tools were ancient but each one was clean and worked, and it was the best-organized workshop Markus had ever seen. There were pencil-traced outlines on the pegboard walls so that even a stranger wouldn’t have trouble remembering where to hang the tools.

The rancher reached up on one of the high shelves and retrieved a thick paperback volume with yellowed pages, which he handed to Markus.

1955 Chevrolet passenger car shop manual.

It was the only book Markus had seen in the house that wasn’t a Bible. At least until he’d brought in the westerns, with their sex and shooting.

“You seemed curious about the car, Mark. Consider it yours. If that car can be fixed, that book’ll say how. Engines back then were nothing like they are now. Everything’s in plain sight. Those engines, they’re more honest than the new ones.”

Consider it yours.

It wouldn’t be stealing, then. It wouldn’t be anything like taking the rancher’s truck. This was more like catching a fish—it needed to earned.

Markus thumbed the book open. It was more than five hundred pages, and the one he landed on was for brake repair.

#39: Insert six screws. Tighten screws sufficiently to prevent vacuum leakage.

“It does seem straight-forward,” he acknowledged.

“Oh, it absolutely does. Right until you’ve got a wrench in hand. Then it’ll shift on you.” The rancher chuckled a little. “You got any interest in seeing what you can do, I’ll give you the starting point. I know what the problem is, generally.”

“What’s that?”

“Electrical.”

“The electrical in what part?”

The rancher smiled. “That’s why I gave the book to you, Mark.”

Markus look at him and smiled a little, and thought that the old man had no idea what he’d just offered up. This wasn’t a distraction; it was escape.

He took to working on the car in the evenings. Working was a generous term at first. In the beginning, it was simply a matter of getting familiar with it. He cleaned the exterior of the car first, and checked the tires. All of them were flat and only two held air. A can of fix-a-flat corrected one, but not the other. He found the spare, wrestled the bad tire off and put the old spare on, and sure enough, it filled and held. The car now sat on four solid, if old, tires. All it needed was a working engine. He’d spent long enough with the book to feel confident by the time he put the hood up. Once the hood was up, though…

He left the barn and returned to get the book.

The first night, he just located parts, calling them out aloud even though he was alone with the car, and then going back to the book to double check. Sometimes it was more than double-checking. When he got to the point that he thought he understood where all of the major components were located, and only then, did he allow himself to turn to Section 6, which was labeled Engine Electrical.

There were 53 portions to Section 6.

He removed the battery, which weighed so much he wasn’t sure he’d be able to wrestle it free himself, and attached it to a voltage meter. Dead as a doornail. There was a battery charger near the tractors, and he was surprised to find the old Delco would still hold a charge.

Can’t be that easy, he thought, but the only way to know was to test it. The next night, he reinstalled the fully charged battery. He turned on the headlights, and they tossed a clean white glow on the far wall, drawing current from the battery with no difficulty.

Turned the key.

Click.

No, it wasn’t going to be that easy.

But he knew he had voltage now, and you had to start with a power source. He went back to the book. The first suggested problem was the regulator.

Measure the voltage of the regulator at idle speed and medium engine speed. The voltage should be higher at medium engine speed than it is at idle speed.

Mark sat in the driver’s seat with the shop lamp illuminating him and said, “Now how in the hell do you compare two engine speeds if there is no engine?”

He sat and brooded on that for a while, turning the key and listening to the dead click, knowing that the big old Delco had voltage and was ready to distribute it, but the engine wouldn’t crank yet. Why not?

“Ignition,” he muttered, and read further. He didn’t want to wait another day to get started, but he’d gone late already, and was afraid of missing the sunset. He wanted to watch it fade behind the mountains where, somewhere northwest, Silver Gate and his uncles and his dog waited. By the time he got out of the barn, though, it was already full dark.

That was the first time he’d missed a sunset.

He had trouble sleeping that night, and at breakfast, when the rancher asked him how things were coming with the car, he was noncommittal. He saw the trap now. The project in the barn wasn’t designed to keep him interested or occupied. It was designed to make him forget. This was how sixty days turned into seventy, eighty, a hundred.

A year.

They were running a con on him, plain and simple. Redirecting his attention from where it belonged—getting back to his family—and putting it someplace on the ranch. Keep him focused on the ranch long enough and the old would be forgotten, and the new would become old. He saw it clear now and, while it angered him, he didn’t feel defeated by it. Just because you realized someone was dealing you bad cards didn’t mean you couldn’t still win with them. His Uncle Ronny had taught him that. It was riskier to bluff with a bad hand, maybe, but it wasn’t impossible. Markus already understood how to beat this sleight of hand move. He’d stay just as distracted by the old car as they wanted him to be. Only he’d be better with it than they expected he could be. He would fix it. And then, once it was running, he’d drive it right off the ranch and point it northwest, toward Silver Gate, where his family waited.

Consider it yours, the rancher had said, and that was good enough. They’d used the car to redirect his attention, just like the way his mother handled change, talking all the while, dropping the bills, picking them up in a clutter. You distracted people until they forgot what they wanted. Then you could take almost anything from them.

He wasn’t going to forget, though.

If you can start it, he promised himself, then you’re taking it.

The electrical problem was not the ignition. He’d disassembled it, tested, reassembled, and turned the key.

There was the faintest of hums, and the headlights dimmed. The change excited him—anything beyond that dead click was progress. He turned the key again, and again, and again. Hum, dim. Hum, dim. Hum, dim. The engine never tried to turn over.

That was the first time his anger had risen because of the car, as he sat there in the driver’s seat smelling the musty interior and turning the useless key. He swore and punched the steering wheel and there was a dull cracking noise from somewhere in the dashboard and immediately he felt bad, like he’d kicked a dog for no reason but his own frustration. He took a shop rag and wiped the dash clean, spending extra time on the steering wheel, as if tending to a wound. Then he returned to the book. The humming and the dimming lights were a change, and that meant he’d made progress with the ignition. He’d fixed something; he just hadn’t fixed enough. The rest was clear enough: keep trying, or quit.

He picked up the wrench and fixed the shop lamp to the bottom of the hood once more.

Two nights later, he was ready to run the book’s prescribed series of generator tests. He’d read enough at night—after watching the sunset; he hadn’t missed a second one—to determine that if there was current draw (check) that didn’t attain cranking speed (check) then he was most likely facing a problem with the starter or the armature. Possible issues included worn bearings, dirty bushings, or an electrical short. Other possibilities were grimmer. If one of the components needed to be replaced, Mark wasn’t sure how to proceed. He had no spending money, no way to get to town, and even if he did, he doubted that you’d just walk into the nearest NAPA and find the armature for a 1955 Chevy small-block V8. It would have to be a special-ordered, custom item, and how much that would cost and how long it might take…

He wasn’t ready to consider those options. Not before running the tests. He didn’t think he’d even have that chance because the book instructed the use of something called a growler, and that stumped him. For the first time, he turned to the rancher for help.

“Is it an old term for something else, or is it something I don’t have? Only growler I’ve ever heard of was for beer.”

The rancher’s face soured at that admission but he said, “Yes, it’s an old term, but you do have one. Probably aren’t many people left who do, but I’ve never been one to throw out a tool if it still worked.”

He came out to the workshop and found it within five minutes. It was small but heavy, like a metal brick, with a coil of wire wrapped around an iron core, outfitted with a standard electrical plug.

“You’ve dug deeper on this old girl than I’d have figured,” the rancher said, looking at the book, seeing Markus’s notations in pencil, check marks for the tests he’d already done. “You have a special mechanical inclination, Mark. You won’t be hurting for steady work in your life, not if you keep that up.”

No one in Markus’s family had ever held a job longer than six months. The very prospect of desiring such a thing seemed strange, although he knew that it shouldn’t. He didn’t want to talk about work with the rancher, or his mechanical skills, or for him to study the amount of work Markus had already done. If the car actually started, Markus would need to be alone when it happened.

“Let’s watch the sun go down before we test anything,” Markus said, and they left the barn just as Beth returned.

“Look who’s back. Go give her a hand, Mark. She’s got some things for you.”

“What do you mean, some things?”

“Could be you should go see them with your own eyes, maybe. And say thank you.”

The last words contained a warning. Markus nodded and left the barn and went back to the house. Beth had been gone all day, and he and the rancher had eaten fried egg sandwiches alone. Now she was back, loaded with shopping bags. Markus helped carry them inside. Some groceries, but also bags from a department store.

“For school,” she told him, and she had a smile that was both genuine and uncertain, as if she was afraid that he’d break it.

There was a new backpack with three clean notebooks, pens, and a pack of mechanical pencils. A calculator. And clothes. Lots of clothes. All of them new. Jeans and shirts, boots and tennis shoes.

“I made some guesses,” she said, and there was the uncertainty again. She was afraid of displeasing him, Markus realized, and the thought was so jarring he didn’t know what to say for a moment. Then he saw her face begin to change, taking his silence as confirmation that he didn’t like the clothes.

“They’re great,” he said, putting as much enthusiasm into his voice as possible. It wasn’t hard, because they were great. Nicer clothes than he’d ever had before to start school, and more of them.

“I think the sizes are all right, but try them on to make sure,” she said.

He tried them on. They all fit. They were clean and comfortable and modern looking, the clothes of a kid from a good house, or at least one with a washing machine and an ironing board. He’d blend in better, certainly. Truthfully, he wanted to pause longer in front of the mirror when he was wearing one of the new shirts, a blue button down that Beth said matched his eyes, and he thought of Ruby, getting ready for school in Cody. She wouldn’t be in Powell, but there might be a girl like her.

He thanked Beth repeatedly, saw the quiet happiness in her face, and then he put the clothes away neatly and carefully in the bureau in his bedroom, taking more care folding them than he usually did. On his way downstairs, she called him into the kitchen. She’d picked up a quart of ice cream in town, and had a bowl waiting on him. He joined them at the little table and ate the ice cream and laughed at her story of driving behind a truck that had an old sofa in the bed, and a dog stretched out on the sofa.

“Only in Wyoming,” she said, and shook her head and sighed. Markus finished his ice cream and washed the bowl and headed for the garage again, not realizing until he’d stepped outside and saw the rising moon that he’d missed another sunset. The western horizon line held only a sliver of gray light, and the mountains were already hidden by darkness.

In the barn, beneath the warm glow of the shop light, he ran the generator tests with his heart tight as a fist in his chest. All along he’d told himself that it was fixable, because he’d believed the rancher’s promise that the problem was electrical. But if a part in such an old engine had failed then there would be no fixing it. Not easily, anyhow. Not before school.

But how bad would that be? It’s a nice school, they say, and what if there’s a girl like Ruby, or at least like Sarah? Maybe a friend like Matt, back in Kalispell. Or Nate in Bozeman. So you wait a few weeks, that’s all.

The first recommended test was to inspect the armature parts for shorts. The instructions: “Check armature for shorts by placing on growler and with hack saw blade over armature core, rotate armature. If saw blade vibrates, armature or commutator is shorted. Recheck after cleaning between the commutator bars and if saw blade still vibrates, armature is shorted and must be replaced.

Markus wondered how many modern repair manuals instructed you to test an engine component with a hacksaw blade. Plenty of people wouldn’t even have one. The rancher did, though. Three hacksaws, with replacement blades for each. Markus took one of the blades down, slipped off the cover so the metal was bare, and carried it back to the armature, which was already resting on the growler, which was plugged in. He held the blade close, and felt the vibration in his fingertips before he saw the motion.

A short.

Two options left. Either the short was caused by dirt, and could be fixed with a careful cleaning, or the armature was toast and had to be replaced. However long that took.

You’ll be in school for a while, that’s for sure. And maybe those parts from a car like this are real hard to find, or real expensive. Then you’ll be stuck.

The voice in his head struggled to put the right amount of negativity into that idea. Instead, it was almost hopeful, and he felt ashamed, and tried to refocus on words Larry had once said, at that creek below Medicine Wheel, right before it had all gone bad.

You gotta have a plan, and you gotta take care of the people you ride with. And your family.

He used an old toothbrush and some fine-grain sandpaper to clean the corrosion. He was sure it wouldn’t work. There was some build-up there, yes, but not enough to bring the whole ancient engine to a stop. He was wasting time and effort cleaning the old thing, only to put the hacksaw blade back to it and feel the same vibration, the shivering metal in his fingertips a physical promise that he’d still be on this ranch when the school bus arrived.

When he had the corrosion cleaned away, he retrieved the hacksaw blade and lowered it to the metal core, waiting for the faint tremble.

If saw blade still vibrates, armature is shorted and must be replaced.

There was nothing. He pulled the blade back, studied it as if there was something wrong with it, and then lowered it again.

Nothing.

He set the blade down, stunned. That was all? Just dirt? The car wouldn’t even attempt to start just because a little bit of grit built up on a small piece of a large engine? It seemed impossible.

Might still be impossible. He wouldn’t know until he had the armature installed again.

It took him two hours to get the generator put back together, following the detailed illustration in the manual, making sure he had every bearing and gasket set right. When it was fixed back in place, the thru bolts anchoring the frame, he saw no mistake to his work. It looked just as it had before he took it apart, only cleaner. And it had passed the test with the growler and the hacksaw blade. First there’d been a vibration, then there’d been none. That was one of his mother’s favorite words, vibration. She used that one a lot when she was pretending to be Snow Creek Maiden. She talked about the vibration of the earth, of the body, of everything. Her imagined messages from the dead always came from the vibrations.

The memory unsettled him, and he wished the book had used another word for the hacksaw blade test. It had been the right word, though. The only word. The engine had told him what plagued it through a vibration, and he couldn’t argue that. As he slid behind the steering wheel, he almost believed he was about to test more than the armature. Because of the message in the vibration, it now seemed like a test of his mother’s promises, and those were always lies.

He held the key in his hand and looked at the 500-page shop manual and thought about all that it contained and he knew that he couldn’t have fixed anything. Not simply by scraping a little corrosion off one component of that massive engine.

He turned the key.

The motor cranked, growled, coughed…and caught.

It was running.

For a few minutes he just sat there, stunned, listening to it, waiting for it to fail. It ran on, smooth, and he was so transfixed by the sound that he jumped and shouted when the rancher rapped his knuckles off the glass of the driver’s window. Markus hadn’t even seen him enter. He cut the engine, reached for the window crank, turned it…and the crank fell off in his hand.

He lifted the crank and looked back at the rancher, helpless, still trapped behind the glass, and at the sight the old man doubled over with laughter and pulled the door open. By then, Markus was laughing, too. It was the first time they’d shared a laugh, and he felt a sudden warmth toward the man.

“I got it all fixed,” he said, “but then this broke?”

“Oh, my goodness.” The rancher wiped his eyes. “That was some perfect timing, I’ve got to say. The look on your face…” He laughed again, cleared his throat, and shook his head. “The window crank ain’t much of a problem in the grand scheme, Mark. You got the engine running. Damn all, that is impressive!”

Markus climbed out of the car and followed him around to stare down under the hood. Suddenly, he felt as surprised by it as the older man sounded. The engine looked imposing, infinitely complex. And he’d fixed it.

“You were right,” he said. “It was an electrical problem.”

“I’d have never gotten it fixed. Never.” He clapped a hand on Markus’s shoulder, the first time he’d touched him since an awkward handshake on the first day, and it reminded Markus of being with his uncles, that warm pride he’d feel when they were impressed by a trout he caught or a cast he’d made.

“It’s late now,” the rancher said. “Later than either of us should be up. I was in bed when I heard the noise and I didn’t trust my ears, didn’t think it was possible. So let’s get some sleep, and in the morning, first thing, we’ll take her out for a ride.”

“All right,” Markus said. He was thinking of the promise he’d made with himself.

“You did a great job, Mark. A great job. When I tell folks about this…you’ll have as much good, honest work waiting for you next summer as you want, I can guarantee you. Next summer and beyond.”

Next summer and beyond.

The words chased him into the house and floated around him in the dark bedroom. He’d never considered he could be here so long. Part of him felt sick with the idea—a year on the ranch, a year of school in Powell, a year without seeing Larry or Ronny. Or his mother.

But another part…

He lay in the dark on that soft mattress, smelling the clean house around him, always tinged with lemon oil that Beth used on the furniture and at night mingled with the rancher’s muscle liniment, and he thought of the way the days here had gone, the rock-steady consistency of them. Meals at the same table and same times, sleep in the same bed. He’d been proud of himself for how well he’d tolerated the place, but the truth was, it hadn’t been hard to tolerate.

The truth was, it was a nice way to live.

They’d be my family now.

He sat up in the bed, pushed the covers off, and went to the window. The moon was high in a clear sky, and he knew the way it would look in the peaks, putting an electric blue tint up where the snowmelt remained year-round.

Gotta remember your sense of honor, just like the men in those books. You gotta have a plan, and you gotta take care of the people you ride with. And your family.

He opened the bedroom door soundlessly and stepped into the hall and listened. The rancher was snoring, sleeping hard. Markus returned to the bedroom, closed the door, and went to the bureau to dress. He selected the new blue shirt but didn’t have it even half buttoned before he took it back off, folded it carefully, and replaced it. He dressed in the clothes he’d worn on the day he’d arrived, and then he made the bed, smoothing down the corners just the way Beth had shown him, and he carried his shoes so that his footsteps made no sound as he walked downstairs and slipped out into the night.

The rancher had heard the engine the first time, but he’d also said he wasn’t asleep yet, just in bed. The barn was far enough from the house that the noise shouldn’t be overloud, and it was a cool enough night that the windows were closed. If Markus moved fast, he’d have a good head start. Not that the rancher wouldn’t be able to close the gap in his truck, a nice Ford F-350.

It occurred to Markus then, for the first time, that if he’d wanted to take this route, he always could have. The keys to the F-350 were in a drawer in the kitchen, along with the keys to Beth’s SUV. It would have been easy to steal a reliable vehicle and head for the hills, but instead he’d made his bargain with the ancient car in the barn. Maybe that felt more honest, somehow, because he’d earned it.

Or maybe you don’t really want to leave, and that was your excuse.

He took the license plate off the truck and put it on the old car. There were three five-gallon gas cans in the barn, and he emptied all of them into the tank. He didn’t know what mileage the old Chevy would get, but it couldn’t be good. All he had to do was make it to Powell, and fill her up there. He had enough money for a full tank, maybe two.

He backed the ’55 slowly out of the barn, braked, and looked up at the house.

Every window was dark.

Could park it and go back up and get some sleep in that warm, soft bed. Wait for the woman from the state to visit, see how much longer it’ll be. Doing this, maybe it’ll just make things worse.

But he could hear his Uncle Larry again, down below the Medicine Wheel on the day it had all gone bad, telling Markus that you didn’t get to choose your family, you just dealt with them.

He knew that was true.

All the same, his throat was tight while he drove through the ranch gates. It had not been a bad home. It had been, in fact, the best one he’d ever known.

But you didn’t choose your family.

He waited for lights to appear behind him. Either the high-set headlights of the F-350, or the colored flashers of a police car.

Neither did.

The night road was empty and black as a skillet top, and he was alone on it. He thought the fastest way to travel might be to head east and pick up the interstate in Sheridan, take I-90 into Montana and then west to pick up 212, the highway that wound through steep switchbacks over the Beartooth Pass and led all the way to Silver Gate. He knew from past experience that interstate travel chanced more police encounters, though, and while he felt confident enough as a driver—he’d been behind the wheel several times before, Larry coaching him, at least until Larry fell asleep—he didn’t like the idea of the higher speeds. As it was, the ’55 seemed appropriately named: any faster than that and the car’s subtle tremors would become violent shaking. At fifty or below, though, it cruised well enough, and the engine hadn’t so much as skipped or misfired. Even the growl of its exhaust sounded good, almost cheerful, as if the car was pleased to be back on the road. For so long, it had just sat, forgotten. Well, maybe not forgotten. What had the rancher said?

There was a time it meant something to me just having it in the corner of my eye. Like a reminder of what I’d been once. Not that I wanted to be that again. I just liked to see it there in the corner of my eye, and know that it had been real once.

Light rose ahead, sodium vapor lamps marking the tiny town of Powell. He saw a gas station and knew that he should pull over and fill up. He hated the idea of stopping, though, fearing that his first stop would be his last, that someone would prevent him from returning to the car as soon as he left it. The car felt magical now, this old relic that had allowed him to heal it with just some care and cleaning. Now it carried him through the empty roads beneath a three-quarter moon and toward the peaks of the Beartooths.

He looked at his fuel gauge, and to his astonishment saw that the tank was full. These old cars were apparently better on gas than everyone said. That removed any thought of a stop.

He drove on.

The next road between him and the Beartooth Highway was the Chief Joseph Highway, named after the real Nez Perce chief. It was a beautiful road that cut through the mountains where once Joseph and his band had evaded the US military, fleeing—just like Markus—north. They were headed for Canada. They hadn’t made it.

Markus was hoping for better luck.

As the road began to climb and the switchbacks started, he grew nervous about his driving, slowing to twenty, then fifteen. It was sometime around three in the morning, and the ’55 was the only car on the mountain road. He was relieved by that. The idea of someone bearing down behind him and a logging truck headed toward him on these narrow, steep curves was frightening. No lights came, though. It was as if the night had hidden him away. He remembered one of Larry’s stories about the Sioux at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, how some of them had believed their horses were magical, bulletproof. That was how the ’55 felt now. That it was running at all was improbable; that it was running so smoothly, impossible.

At the top of the road, in a place called Dead Indian Pass, he finally took his eyes off the road to look at the gas gauge again.

Full!

Unbelievable. He thought of all the commercials he’d seen and conversations he’d listened to criticizing the fuel mileage of old cars. Newer was always better, they said. Maybe not, though. The ’55, his magic ride, not only galloped through the night, but it nursed each precious gallon of gas.

The Chief Joseph Highway ended in an intersection with 212, high in the Beartooth Mountains and, for the first time on the drive, Markus smiled. He was one left turn away now. A left turn and ten miles. Maybe not even that. The remaining miles were steep and desolate, but there weren’t many of them, and the old Chevy sipped fuel like it was champagne.

He made the left turn and had gone maybe two hundred yards when the car died.

It went without warning. One second cruising smoothly, the next coasting to a silent stop. The headlights gleamed. He shifted into park and turned the key. The engine cranked but didn’t catch. He tried again, mystified, and then finally he realized what should have been obvious from the start—you didn’t drive through mountains like this in any car, let alone one with an old V-8, without watching the needle creep toward empty.

The fuel gauge was broken.

Ahead of him, the road was visible for maybe thirty feet. He flicked on the high beams, got an extra five feet. Blackness ahead and at the edges. Bear country. There’d been a grizzly mauling not far from here last summer. And there were wolves. The packs reintroduced to Yellowstone would range up the Soda Butte sometimes. Larry said they wouldn’t attack a human, but Ronny said it depended on circumstances.

He turned the headlights off to conserve the old Delco and the darkness hit him like a blindside tackle. He put the lights back on right way. Took a few breaths. For the first time, he was scared.

It wasn’t a long walk ahead. Four or five hours. But the things he knew occupied the night up here were frightening things, and the ones he didn’t know, worse still.

He looked around for a weapon, thinking of all the hammers and chisels and long-handled screwdrivers he’d left in the workshop. Even a socket wrench, one with good weight, would feel nice in his hand. The only thing he could find was the window crank handle that had fallen off. He picked it up, knowing it was ridiculous, but, still, better than nothing.

“Can’t just sit here,” he said aloud, and his voice sounded high and tiny in the empty car and he wished he hadn’t said anything. With a final, deep breath, he turned the lights off again.

The blackness closed on him with that same blitzing power, but this time he didn’t succumb to the desire to turn the lights back on. Instead, he opened the door and stepped out onto the highway and into the cold night. This place was at least four thousand feet higher than the ranch, and the temperature reflected it. He wished he’d brought a jacket.

“Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up first,” his mother would say.

He started walking.

The dawn was just beginning to show its first gray light when a rusted pickup appeared behind him. Markus had been walking down the middle of the road because it was farther from the trees and whatever hid behind them. He hurried to the shoulder, but the truck slowed and he felt a cold sinking sensation in his belly.

They were looking for him. And they’d found him.

The face that looked out at him from the driver’s window showed no recognition, though, just concern.

“What in the hell are you doing walking this road in the middle of the night, kid?”

“It’s almost morning.”

“Shit. Where’d you come from? Campground?”

Markus shook his head. “On my way to Silver Gate.”

“Didn’t ask where you’re headed. Asked where you came from.”

Markus didn’t say anything. The man in the truck was maybe thirty, with a shock of unkempt blond hair and several days of beard.

“What’s in your hand?” he said. “That a knife?”

Markus lifted the window crank. “No.”

“The hell are you carrying that for?”

Markus shrugged. The man sighed, rubbed his jaw, and said, “Get in the truck before somebody driving too fast runs you over, or a bear moving too slow does worse.”

Markus went around and climbed in the passenger side. The man looked at the window crank, sighed again, and shook his head.

“I’m not gonna ask about that. Where do I take you in Silver Gate?”

If his uncles were in town, someone at the Range Rider would know. It was a boarding house and saloon. But Markus didn’t want to say that, didn’t really want to say anything. He kept silent, and the man said, “Okay, kid,” and didn’t push.

They were descending toward Cooke City now, the little town just two miles from Silver Gate, the elevation dropping steadily, and Markus wondered what he would do if his uncles weren’t there.

Give himself up, he figured. If they weren’t there, if the stronghold hadn’t meant anything to them, or at least not enough, then he’d just go back to the ranch. When the woman from the state came to talk to him, he’d tell her he wanted to stay. Wanted to go to school for a full year. The same school. Wanted a job in the summer, something mechanical.

He looked for the blue Ford as they cruised slowly through Cooke City. Usually they left it parked outside of Miner’s, or maybe Hoosier’s. Either bar was fine. They’d leave the truck there, but they’d sleep in Silver Gate, keeping enough distance between vehicle and residence to buy a little time in the unlikely event that police managed to come all this way looking for them.

The truck wasn’t anywhere in town.

He felt that clenching sensation again, tightening of throat and chest, and for the second time he wondered if maybe he didn’t want to find them after all. He’d done all that could be asked of him, he’d stuck to the plan and figured out his way back to them, and if they hadn’t done the same, then…well, then he could move on.

They drove out of Cooke City and past a handful of cabins built into the steep slopes above the road and then the cluster of log buildings of Silver Gate appeared, huddled beneath the massive wall of Amphitheater Mountain, the one he’d imagined during all those sunsets.

The blue Ford was nowhere to be seen.

“Well, kid? Where do I drop you?”

The northeast gate to Yellowstone was the next stop, and it was manned by rangers with radios, and it wouldn’t take them long to get him back to the ranch where the state had decided he belonged.

“Are you going through the park?” Markus asked. His mouth was dry and his voice cracked.

“Yup. All the way to Gardiner. But you said Silver Gate.”

“Right. If you could take me just a mile farther and drop me at the ranger…”

His voice trailed off. He was staring out the window.

“What are you looking at, kid?”

“That’s my dog.”

And it was. Amigo was asleep on the porch of the general store, muzzle resting on his paws, dead to the world. There was no mistaking him. Ronny always said the dog looked as if he’d been assembled from spare parts.

Markus opened the door and called for him. Amigo lifted a sleepy head, looked in the wrong direction first, then focused on the truck. He rose stiffly, stretched his hips, and ambled off the porch and loped up. He sniffed Markus’s hand and his tail began to wag immediately.

“In or out, kid,” the truck driver said. “I’ll take you where you need to go, but I’ll be damned if the dog is riding with us. What’s it gonna be?”

Markus looked up the dirt road past the general store, where a cluster of rundown rental cabins were nestled beneath the mountain, and in the dim light he saw the front end of the truck. His uncles were here. As promised.

“What’s it gonna be?” the driver repeated. Markus stared at the cabin beside the truck, thinking that the whole thing would have fit in the living room of the house at the ranch. Amigo whined and nudged his hand, seeking more attention.

“I guess this is it,” Markus said. The words came slowly.

“Okay then. I don’t know what your deal is, and I don’t need to, but…this isn’t really the place for a kid. If you got another option, I’d take it.”

“I’m sure I won’t be here long,” Markus said, and he climbed out of the truck and, with Amigo at his side, walked to the decrepit cabin.

Larry and Ronny were both inside and greeted him with whoops and fierce hugs. The hesitation he’d felt back on the road just minutes earlier seemed like a sin now, another betrayal, like the one at Medicine Wheel. He started apologizing for that straight away and Larry cut him off.

“She never should’ve had you involved. She knows that. She feels worse about it then you do.”

“You’ve seen her?”

“Talked to her. We can’t exactly visit the place. She’s only got nine days left.”

“The family they put me with thought it was going to be longer.”

“Nope. Nine days left, then she’ll be out. Then it’ll be back to the way things always were.”

He said it cheerfully.

“What if the state doesn’t let that happen?”

“Hell, son, she’s your birth mother. State ain’t putting a stop to that unless she’s doing you harm. Which of course has never happened. She ain’t winning mother of the year prizes, but she takes good care of you. Even what she was doing up there at Medicine Wheel, that’s all for you. You know that. Money’s hard to come by sometimes. We’ll get it all set right. You want some coffee?”

He hadn’t had coffee in weeks. Beth always put out milk and juice for him. With scrambled eggs, most days. Sometimes pancakes and sausage. Always the milk and juice.

He took the coffee.

“I can’t believe you made it,” Ronny said, and laughed. “Hot damn, Larry, can you believe this?”

“Of course I can. Resourceful kid. We taught him, didn’t we?” Larry poured a shot of bourbon into his coffee. “I gotta hear about the car, though. A ’55 Chevy, you say it was?”

So he told them about the car, and soon he was laughing as he explained the way it had run out of gas on the mountain highway.

“I kept checking the gauge, but it always said full! I should’ve known better, but when the needle’s all the way over, you expect it’s right.”

“I don’t blame you a bit,” Ronny said. “And that’s exactly the problem with stealing cars.” He added a split length of soft pine to the fire he’d built in the wood stove, filling the little cabin with warmth and color. “You never know what’s wrong with them! Could be all shined up on the outside, but under the hood, you never know. A hundred years ago, you’d have never had that problem. You’d have looked at a horse and known whether it was worth stealing or not.”

Larry poured another shot of bourbon into his coffee and frowned. “What if the horse was sick?”

“Why, it would show that. Symptoms.”

“Not necessarily. Could be it was just starting to get sick. How would you know then?”

Ronny sighed with exasperation and turned from the stove to face his brother. “Are you honestly telling me you’d trust a car more than a horse?”

“I’m just saying, it ain’t ever a sure thing.”

Markus was sitting on the floor, Amigo at his side, soaking in the warmth from the woodstove, when he said, “Speaking of the car…we’re going to need to get some gas for it.”

Ronny pointed at him with approval. “Damn smart call. Can’t leave it sitting right on the side of the highway like that, pointing right down the road to where you went. We’ll get it off the road.”

“That’s not what I mean. We’ve got to take it back. I can’t just steal it. Not from them. I needed the ride, but I’m not keeping it.”

They both stared at him. Then they exchanged a glance and Ronny said, “You’re smart enough to know that’s a real bad idea, Markus. Real bad.”

“I’m not stealing it. That car means a lot to him. Has for his whole life, practically.”

“Then we’ll make sure he gets word of where to collect it.”

“That’s not enough. I can’t…” He stopped, struggling for the right words.

“What?” Larry said. “You can’t what?”

“I can’t have them thinking I’m that bad. As it is, I’m just something in the middle, maybe.”

“Markus,” Ronny said, “you understand what you’re asking here? We’re both in the wind right now because of a stolen car, and you’re asking us to get behind the wheel of another? A damned relic at that. We would have to be driving a parade float to attract more attention!”

“Then I’ll drive it and you can follow me. We’ll figure something out.”

“Son, you’re lucky you made it here. Hats off to you, and damn glad to see you, but you gotta understand the truth of this situation. You took a risk and made it, but you can’t take this one, and you don’t need to.”

“I didn’t need to take the first one!” Markus shouted. “I could’ve stayed. And not just nine days, either. More than that. Long as I wanted, probably. It was a nice house and there was always good food and she bought me clothes and he made her let me have those westerns because I cared so much about them! It’s the only reason I even made it back, was because of how he saw that I cared about those books, and now…” He sputtered to a stop, gathered himself, and then shouted, “You said you can’t choose your family, but I could! I had a choice, and I came back!”

Hot tears rose and he blinked them back, ashamed. His uncles looked away. Nobody made eye contact for a few seconds. The only sound was the crackling and popping of the pinewood in the stove.

“I’ll drive it,” Larry said. Ronny’s face twisted and he started to object but Larry’s stare cut him down.

“I’ll drive it,” he repeated.

“Be the stupidest bust you ever took, and that’s saying plenty.”

Larry shook his head. He still hadn’t looked at Markus. “Nah,” he said. “Even if it goes that way, it won’t be the stupidest by a long sight.”

They moved the car off the highway as soon as the gas station in Cooke City opened. There they filled two cans and then drove on up to the intersection with the Chief Joseph Highway. Even in daylight, the mountains looked ominous, filled with danger, and Markus couldn’t begin to tell them the way it had felt on the walk.

When they reached the ’55, Ronny pulled in behind it and gaped.

“You drove that car all the way up here from south of Powell?”

Markus had to admit that here under the sun the ’55 did not look anything close to the magical ride it had felt like in the night. The walk didn’t seem as menacing, nor the car as miraculous. Everything was different and couldn’t be explained.

“It ran fine. Just don’t take it up too fast.”

“Hell, boy, I have trouble believing it’ll start, let alone run fast.”

“It’ll start.”

They poured in the gas, and Markus got behind the wheel and turned the key. The engine growled to life, choked in its initial quest for fuel, then smoothed out. Larry let out a rebel yell that echoed off the mountains and even Ronny had to laugh.

“Park it down somewhere out of sight and we’ll wait until dark to return it,” he said.

By then, even Markus was having doubts.

“You don’t need to go all the way to him, maybe,” he said. “Just get it close. They’ll find it easy enough. And be sure to leave the note.”

He’d written the note on the back of a title page torn out of one of Larry’s paperback westerns. It was spelled right and said the right things but not enough of them. He didn’t know how to put it all into words.

“We’ll get it to him, Markus,” Larry said. “You were right. He deserves that much.”

“I’m sorry.”

Larry squeezed his shoulder and forced a grin.

“You’re the last honest horse thief, kid. And maybe the first. It’s clearly not your line of work. Just keep it that way, would you?”

They waited in the cabin until full dark, and then they went back for the car and Larry got behind the wheel. It started on the first try again. They drove out of town and turned right onto the Chief Joseph Highway, headed south. Markus’s worry had progressed to a sickness and he was afraid he was going to throw up. What in the world had he done? All this trouble started because he’d betrayed his mother, now doubled down by setting his uncle up for disaster.

He’d tried to make the right choices in each case but each time they’d been wrong.

When they turned onto the ranch road, he was waiting for police cars but there weren’t any. It was dark and lonesome. Ronny pulled onto the shoulder and let Larry go on alone.

“Stop him,” Markus said. “I was wrong. You gotta stop him.”

“Can’t now,” Ronny said. “Now we just see how it plays out.”

They saw Larry turn off the headlights as he approached the drive, and then they couldn’t see any more. Ronny kept checking his watch. After fifteen minutes passed, he swore.

“Should’ve been back by now.”

Markus tasted bile, swallowed hard, held it down.

Twenty minutes.

“We’re gonna need to roll,” Ronny said.

“No!”

“Trust me, I don’t like it any more than you do, but that’s the score. We wait much longer and all three of us will end up in the same way. We wait any longer and eight days from now your mother will be the only Novak not in jail.”

“Give him five more minutes.”

“Can’t,” Ronny said, and he had just put the key in the ignition when Markus saw Larry walking toward them.

“There he is!”

Larry opened the door and slid in beside Markus as Ronny started the engine.

“You about lost your ride, brother. That was way too slow.”

“I was trying to be quiet.”

“Quiet, my ass. You burned twenty minutes being quiet?”

“Just get the hell going.”

They drove to Powell and headed north again. Nobody spoke until they were outside of town and alone on the highway. Everyone seemed to exhale at once then.

“I’m glad we brought it back,” Larry said, and he bumped his fist off Markus’s knee. “That was the right thing. I’m sorry you needed to take it in the first place. But I’m damn glad we brought it back.”

His voice was rough and Markus suddenly understood why he’d taken so long: He’d read the note.

It was silent for another mile or two, and then it was Ronny who broke it.

“Eight days from now we’ll go to Sheridan and get your mother,” he said. “Be back together, the whole fam-damily. All of this will be forgotten soon and your scorecard is still clean, kid. First man I’ve known to return a stolen car.”

He laughed and lit a cigarette and the cab filled with smoke. Markus put his hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt, felt something hard and cold, and realized what he’d forgotten—the window crank handle.

“I meant to put this back on,” he said, holding it up. “I figured it’s hard to find a part like that for a car like that.”

Larry stared at the crank handle and said, “I was foolish enough to return the car. I’ll be damned if I’m going back with a window crank. Guess your scorecard isn’t clean, after all. You’ll have to live with that much.”

Markus didn’t say anything. He turned the crank handle over, tracing the lines of the old metal, thinking of the way the rancher had laughed when it came off in his hands. He’d laughed until he had tears in his eyes.

There was a time it meant something to me just having it in the corner of my eye. Like a reminder of what I’d been once. Not that I wanted to be that again. I just liked to see it there in the corner of my eye, and know that it had been real once.

Markus sat between his uncles, the night road rolling beneath the tires, eight days out from the Sheridan jail and a reunion with his mother. Then, who knew. Another town, probably another state. They would want to put some distance between them and these towns now. He wondered whether the rancher was awake, and Beth. Whether she’d kept the receipts for the clothes she’d bought. He hoped she’d be able to get her money back. He wondered when they’d find the note, and if it would mean anything to them, or if he’d still just be remembered as the foster kid who stole their car.

If I could choose, I’d stay here, he’d written. But that’s just not the way it’s supposed to work. Not with family.

He’d signed it Mark. It was the first time he’d ever used that name for himself, but it was what the rancher and his wife had called him and so it felt right. The experience of signing it felt different, though, a physical sensation of change, cutting things off before they dragged on needlessly.

Mark. Standing alone, with the us that his family had insisted on adding. A shorter name, cleaner, not dragging extra characters along. He thought he might use it at his next school, wherever that would be. Try it on, at least, see how it sounded.

By the end of his time at the ranch, he’d almost grown to like it.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2018 by Michael Koryta

Cover design by Amanda Shaffer

ISBN: 978-1-5040-5564-2

Published in 2018 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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Table of Contents

- The Last Honest Horse Thief

- Copyright