Safe And Sound. J.D. Rhoades

his finger resting lightly on the trigger. As the Jeep reached the bend in the road, the man’s finger tensed ever so slightly.

      The Jeep stopped. The headlights flashed once, twice. The rifleman relaxed the pressure. If the Jeep had not stopped and signaled, he would have put a .50-caliber bullet into the driver’s side window, then another into the engine block. Each of the rounds was the length of a man’s hand and traveled at three thousand feet per second. The rifle was originally designed to disable vehicles at extended ranges; against flesh and bone it wreaked terrible damage. The rifleman had seen the weapon cut a man in half at fourteen hundred yards.

      As the Jeep approached the cabin below him, the rifleman saw a flash of movement at the edge of his field of vision. He swung the rifle to bear, his finger taking up the slack on the trigger again. The crosshairs centered on the back of a blond head. He tracked the figure of the small child running across the tiny yard in front of the cabin. She was about five years old, dressed in a light-blue flowered dress. The rifleman held the sight on the girl for a long second. He blew out the breath he had been holding and let off the trigger. He kept his eye to the sight and focused again on the red Jeep. It pulled to a stop in a cloud of dust. A man got out. The rifleman swung the scope to bear on the passenger side. No one got out. The driver was alone. The rifleman took his eye away from the scope. Only then did he wipe the sweat from his brow.

      “Shit,” he said under his breath. A slight breeze blew up and he closed his eyes, savoring the coolness on his flesh. He opened them again and looked out over the vista before him.

      He was standing in a rusting steel hut at the top of an abandoned fire watchtower. The tower itself was situated atop the highest of the local mountains. His vantage commanded a view of hundreds of square miles of forest that covered this part of the Blue Ridge. The ever-present haze that gave the mountains their name was light today. It obscured his view only slightly. The tower and the cabin at its base were far enough from the main road that even the muted whisper of traffic that most people tune out at the edge of hearing was gone. The silence of the ancient hills seemed to be a noise in itself, an emptiness that roared at him from the valleys below. In that enormous sound that was not a sound, the Jeep door’s opening and closing seemed muffled, as did the voices that followed. One was high and childish, the other one deeper.

      It was a voice the rifleman knew as well as his own. But it was only one voice and he had hoped to be hearing two. He sat down on the wooden floor of the tower and leaned against the steel side. The massive rifle lay across his lap.

      The tower vibrated slightly as the man below mounted the steps that spiraled up from the bottom of the tower. The vibration grew stronger as the second man drew nearer, until his head poked up through the hole in the middle of the floor.

      “Anything?” the rifleman said.

      The second man shook his head. He climbed the rest of the way into the observation deck. He walked over to the side and looked out.

      The second man was tall and broad-shouldered, in contrast to the rifleman’s wiry compactness. The second man was light-haired and fair-skinned, where the rifleman was dark-haired and Mediterranean-looking. Yet there was an indefinable similarity between them that occasionally led people to ask if they were related or even if they were brothers. In some senses, they were.

      “We’re going to have to call DeGroot,” the rifleman said.

      “He’s not going to like this,” the second man replied.

      The rifleman lifted up slightly and fumbled in his pocket for a coin. He pulled one out. “Call it,” he said as he flicked the coin into the air with his thumb.

      The second man smiled slightly. “Tails.”

      The rifleman caught the rapidly spinning coin out of the air with one hand and slapped it down on his other wrist. He took his hand away. “Heads.”

      The second man grimaced. “I’ll make the call. You get to feed the kid. I got groceries.”

      The rifleman sighed. “Spaghettios again.”

      “It’s all she eats.” The second man smiled tightly. “And we’ve eaten worse.”

      ***

      The bells hanging on the doorknob jingled. Angela Hager looked up from the counter as Keller and Oscar entered the front door. Keller gave her a thumbs-up as he placed a sheaf of paperwork on the counter. She picked it up. Her hands were covered by soft black leather gloves.

      “Did he give you any trouble?” she asked him.

      “Nah,” Keller said. “But he didn’t do himself any good.”

      “What does that mean?” she asked.

      “He ran off a roof,” Oscar Sanchez said. “Trying to get away.”

      She arched an eyebrow at them. “Why would he do that?”

      “Because he’s a dumb-ass,” Keller said. “If he wasn’t a dumb-ass, he wouldn’t have run in the first place.”

      “If you can spare me,” Oscar said, “I am going upstairs for a bit.”

      Angela looked concerned. “Is the leg acting up?”

      Oscar shrugged. “It hurts a bit, yes. But it is better than it was.”

      “There’s some ibuprofen in the medicine cabinet,” she said. “Take some of that.” Oscar only nodded. He went up the stairs to the small apartment that he shared with Angela. She winced slightly at the sound of his halting tread on the stairs. She turned to Keller. “So how’s he doing?” she asked.

      “Not bad,” Keller said. “He still underestimates how crazy or stupid some of these jumpers can get.” He fished in his shirt pocket and pulled out the five that Oscar had handed him earlier. “By the way,” he said, “slip this back into his wallet sometime.”

      She took the bill, looking at it quizzically. “What’s this for?” she asked.

      “Oscar didn’t think Edward would be stupid enough to try and run off a roof to get away. I bet five bucks that he would. But I was just doing it to make a point.”

      Angela tried to hand the bill back to him. “It won’t work,” she said. “He’ll know. He knows exactly how much money he has. To the penny.”

      Keller shrugged. “He needs it more than I do,” he said. “What with trying to get his immigration problems straightened out. He’s got a good lawyer, and good lawyers cost money.”

      She grimaced. “You got that right,” she said. She sat down in the chair behind the counter and massaged her temples as if her head hurt. “And he’s gotten back to the idea of bringing his sons here from Colombia. And that’s going to cost another fortune.” She shook her head. “But you know how he is. He made a bet. He lost. If you try to give it back, he’ll think you’re patronizing him. And he’ll be impossible to live with for days.”

      Keller came around the counter and sat down. “So how do you feel about having his kids here?” he said.

      She gave a short, sharp laugh. “Boy, there’s a can of worms.”

      “Sorry,” Keller said. “If you don’t want to…”

      “No, no,” she said. “That’s not what I meant.” She looked down at her hands. “You mind if I take these off?” she said. “I’m roasting.”

      “You know you don’t have to ask me,” Keller said softly.

      She looked up and smiled. “Yeah,” she said. “Well, I’m still working out exactly where we stand, now that…”

      “Now that you’re with someone else,” he said. “Well, we’re still friends,” Keller said. “I hope.”

      “Yeah,” she said. “We still are.” She began pulling the gloves off as she spoke, exposing the web of burn scars that covered the backs of her hands. “Anyway. He’s been talking