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clouds that undulated across the sky. Difference was, he hadn’t been alone then. Johnny Moon was there, chatting away, eager as always for any kind of excitement, reminding Bill in some ways of Bill’s dead sister, Leanne.
    “You got to let go sometimes, Sarge,” Johnny would say. “Live a little. Ask that fine reporter out. You know she’s got it bad for you.”
    He smiled at the memory. He’d decided to follow his partner’s advice and ask Heather to dinner that same night. Yes, Johnny had been full to the brim with life, even though Bill sensed worry in his young partner in the months before his death. Something was distracting him, but it never for a moment took away his ebullience.
    The trip wire did that.
    A thin filament of death, set carefully in place by a man as lethal as a rattlesnake with a bite every bit as vicious.
    Bill would go to his grave believing Oscar had known they were coming, planned the execution down to the last detail. Only, Oscar hadn’t known Johnny would cross it first.
    And neither had Bill.
    He sighed, watching a raccoon waddle down the thick bark of a pine tree on his way to forage. Tank jerked alert at thesound and took off running for the critter, which about-faced and climbed back up, hissing and snapping his displeasure at the dog.
    Bill’s mind wandered back to Heather and her geriatric pet. The presence of a dog in her life amused him. She acted tough, but he’d seen glimmers of that soft spot in her before. He couldn’t reconcile the two opposites in his mind, so he stopped trying. It was one of the many things he’d probably never understand about her.
    A dull ache was settling into his upper arm and he flexed his injured shoulder. Fixing the Jeep, after spending most of the morning cleaning up the broken glass, hadn’t helped the wound. Mopping up the paint had proved mostly futile, but he’d done what he could. The house was still smeared in ugly streaks of red.
    He lingered there on the porch a long time, until the sun was high. He allowed himself to remember, for the briefest of moments, how much his sister, Leanne, had loved the sunshine. Years before, he might have summoned up a prayer for those he had lost, Leanne and Johnny. Instead he turned back inside the paint-spattered house to find his gun.
    When the Glock was cleaned and oiled, he holstered it to his side, and after he fed Tank, they headed out onto the property. It was a sprawling ten acres of parched flatland, rolling hills and a spring, hidden by a thick cluster of pines. The smell of it soothed him—rusty earth, dry grass and heat. He’d been gone for so long, the ground had lost some of its familiarity. He needed to reacquaint himself, to relearn every dip, every hollow, every possible shaded nook that had grown over in the time he’d been away. His survival might depend on it.
    Bill started hiking to the farthest edge of the property where it sloped downward into a dry wash. The boulders piled in crazy formations along the edge formed a labyrinth of rockand hence a myriad of hiding places. As far as he could tell by a careful examination, no one had been prowling there anytime recently. The dry soil was marked only by the curving slices of rattlesnake tracks and the scattered dry bones of a hare that had probably fallen victim to a coyote.
    He continued upslope to the pine grove, a welcome cool against the sun that was hammering down mercilessly. Tank took advantage of the shade to stretch out and put his bony head on his paws. Here again, there was no sign that any trespassers had been present. Bill removed a pair of binoculars from his backpack and scanned the area below, his defaced cabin, tucked up against the side of a granite cliff, the flat area surrounding it and the distant cliffs standing like broad-chested sentries against the sky. Nothing out of the ordinary until Tank sat up abruptly, ears swiveling, body rigid.
    “What do you hear, Tank?” Bill whispered.
    Tank listened for another