idea. Maybe meeting some friends. And I heard there’s a retreat near Snoqualmie Gap. Maybe they were headed there.”
Welles considered this. “Yeah, there is that place. I don’t know much about it. Different county, not our watch. Anybody?”
None of his officers was familiar.
Welles said, “If it’s a church thing, they might be planning to shoot it up too.”
A deputy said, “Or Thompsonville. A couple of churches there. Long walk, but they could hitch.”
Welles looked pensive. “Thompsonville. Yeah. That’d be a target for sure.” He clicked his tongue. “Men who disrespect Christ? That’s baked into the bone. They have mischief in mind, I guarantee it. All right, we’ll take over from here, Mr. Shaw. You said they’re armed.”
“Have to assume so. It’s a .38 Police Special.”
“Mule kicker,” somebody said.
“Where can we find them?” Welles asked.
“Last I saw they were taking a break. They were headed down into a valley about two klicks from here.”
“A valley?”
Shaw noted that the sheriff’s eyes met Dodd’s, whose head dipped a fraction of an inch.
Shaw said, “You have a map, I can point it out.”
Welles muttered to a deputy nearby, the youngest, “Glove compartment, kid.”
With a brisk nod the officer scurried to the sheriff’s squad car and disappeared inside. He returned with a map, handing it to Welles, who unfurled the sheet on the nearest car hood, underneath which the engine ticked as it cooled.
A lover and collector of maps, Shaw studied this one carefully. The crisp, unstained paper explained that the sheriff and probably the rest of the deputies didn’t get out here much. This rugged terrain was within the county they oversaw but much of the land was state park. Shaw supposed that the rangers were the main law enforcers. There was also a national forest around here, with boundaries that ran in and out of the county’s turf.
Looking down at the map, he tapped a site. “They were there, having some water and food. I don’t know how long they were going to rest, though even if they started hiking again right away after I left, they couldn’t be more than a half mile north.” Another tap. “That’d put them about here, at the farthest.”
Welles turned toward his men. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. They’re moving north. I want somebody to circle around to Abbott Ford, fast, get ahead of them and come back south. TJ and B., you do that.”
“Sure, Sheriff.”
“Me and Jimmy’ll go north.”
One deputy said enthusiastically, “So we catch ’em in a pincer movement.”
Which wasn’t exactly what the sheriff was describing.
“Exactly.”
The sheriff turned to gaunt, unexpressive Dodd. “And you get yourself up Scatterback. On the ridge. Get a good position. To cover us.”
“K.” The lean, laconic Dodd asked Shaw, “They have long guns?”
“No.”
Dodd gave a nod.
Welles folded the map. “’Preciate your help, Mr. Shaw. You’ve earned every penny of that reward.” A faint laugh. “Though easy for me to say; I’m not the one writing the check.” The smile faded. He looked over the deputies. “Gentlemen, I am serious now. We’ve gotta stop ’em. The chief in Tacoma told me victims at the church there were black, true, but they were still children of God. Now, let’s get to it.”
Shaw returned to the Kia. He heard a whisper of “Reward.” And some chuckles. As he sat in the driver’s seat he watched the sheriff and the uniformed deputies walk to their cars, which soon sped off, leaving a haze of mustard-colored dust behind them.
Dodd remained. The man loped to his personal SUV, lifted the tailgate and uncased a big-bore Winchester rifle, fitted with a Maven telescopic sight—an expensive one, probably equal to one of the deputy’s paychecks. He opened a metal ammunition box and lifted out a package of bullets. Big ones, .308. Sniper rounds.
The wiry, unsmiling man began loading the magazine. His eyes, which had been dead until now, brightened considerably as he clicked each lengthy, lethal slug home.
As Shaw sped back down Old Mill Road to the place he’d left Erick and Adam he thought:
Never underestimate the power, for good and bad, of religion.
This was not one of his father’s rules; Shaw had come up with it himself over a decade of reward-seeking. (He had significantly supplemented the Never rulebook since Ashton Shaw’s death, some years ago.)
He understood what God’s protector, Sheriff J. Welles, had in mind. The sheriff’s and one other car would block the road south, while the third would do the same from the north, boxing Adam and Erick in. Dodd, on high ground, would understand that his instruction to “cover us” really meant “shoot to kill.”
Maybe Adam would lift his hand in surprise at the officers’ presence.
And Dodd would drop him with one of the big rounds.
“I observed a threat to the officers on the ground and I acted accordingly.”
And Erick?
He’d instinctively turn to the wounded Adam.
Another shot.
“I observed the second suspect reaching for the weapon of the deceased individual and I was concerned that he would use lethal force against the officers who were present.”
And there would be no body cams or witnesses to give a different story.
Having seen the look that passed between Dodd and Welles and guessing what they had in mind, Shaw had tapped a spot on the map miles from the shoulder on Old Mill Road where the two young men actually were.
What exactly he would do when he found Erick and Adam, he couldn’t yet say. But he knew he had to keep them out of the reach of Welles and his Christian soldiers.
He now piloted the Kia back to the hill where he’d parked when he spotted the two for the first time. Shaw backed off the road into thick, stalky growths of pine and sedge and tangled brush. The vehicle was hardly an SUV but it did have four-wheel drive and if he kept it on packed earth he was confident it wouldn’t get stuck.
Leaving his jacket in the car, he climbed out and rearranged brush to obscure the vehicle yet more, then he walked to the road’s edge, looking down the steep, grassy slope to the shoulder where the boys sat, about
