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say—”
    â€œShe didn’t have to.” She gave me a long look, as if she might be about to tell me something, but sighed and turned away.
    I understood then. Ruby’s gift had given her a glimpse of something she didn’t want to see, something that she was afraid might happen over the coming weekend.
    But I wasn’t going to ask her what it was. To tell the truth, I’d rather notknow.

Chapter Two
    Rifle in hand, Mackenzie Chambers opened the passenger door of her state-issued Ford F-150 and whistled for Molly. Pink tongue lolling, the blue heeler loped from the bushes where she’d been taking care of her early-morning business and jumped eagerly into the truck. An Australian cattle dog bred to keep the herd moving in the right direction, Molly had a heavy-duty sense of responsibility. She knew when it was time to go to work and had to be reminded when it was time to quit—a little bit like herself, Mack reflected ruefully, as she shut the truck door. A personality characteristic that her former husband, Lanny, hadn’t liked and one of the reasons they were now divorced.
    Mack walked slowly around the dark green Ford pickup truck, noticing that there was mud on the grill and a big splash on the Texas Parks and Wildlife logo on the driver’s door. There’d been rain the previous weekend, and her night patrols had taken her down some sloppy roads. She probably ought to run
the truck through the car wash—Utopia’s only car wash, at the Pico convenience store, Utopia’s only gas station. After a couple of weeks of unseasonably warm temperatures, the November air had a frosty bite, and the clipped grass of her small front yard was glazed with silver in the last light of the full moon that was setting over thewooded hills west of town. The thermometer had dropped to just below freezing during the night.
    But the weather guy on KSAT-TV in San Antonio, some seventy crow miles away, was forecasting a high in the upper 50s and partly cloudy skies with scattered showers through the rest of the week—good hunting weather. Deer season was three weeks old, and with the Thanksgiving weekend coming up, she would be patrolling the hills and canyons of northern Uvalde County—her third of the county’s nearly 1,600 square miles. The other 1,000 square miles were split between wardens Bert Jenkins and Dusty Ross, her comrades-in-arms. Their District Two boss, headquartered in San Antonio, always talked about them as if they were a team, but their patrol areas were so large that there wasn’t much chance for teamwork. Most of the time they were on their own. If one of them radioed for backup, they were likely to get the nearest deputy sheriff.
    And vice versa. Just after midnight a couple of weeks ago, a Uvalde County deputy had been alerted to a copper theft in progress at a construction site on the Old Leakey Road, east of Garner State Park. He apprehended two of the thieves, but the third fled in an old black pickup. Happening to be on patrol in the area, Mack had picked up the dispatch on her radio, spotted the suspect with a roll of copper wire in the back of his vehicle, and stopped him. He gave her a little trouble, but her martial arts training came in handy, along with the fact that she was trim and fit from jogging and weight training and he was your basic six-pack-a-day couch potato, two-twenty-plus and slow on his feet. She had him on the ground with her knee in his back and was cuffing him as another deputy arrived on the scene. Last she’d heard, two of the thieves had bonded out, but her guy was still in the county jail charged with copper theft, criminal trespass, and resisting arrest.
    Mack didn’t much like that part of the job, but it came with the territory. In Texas, wardens and sheriffs’ deputies alike were peace officers, with similar duties, similar armament and vehicles, and similar training—except that the deputies