As hideaways went, it was, in Nolan’s greenhorn opinion, a stellar example, blending into its surroundings as if it had been built for stealth. Maybe it had.
Nolan’s next problem was figuring out how to keep himself unseen.
Tommy, ex-Navy, had given him camo face paint and a couple of his old uniforms; since he’d set out on this mission, Nolan had felt like he was playing war games, or channeling one of the survivalist kooks who lived out in places like this. He didn’t know if Canada had survivalist kooks, though. Canadians seemed pretty sane, overall. In comparison.
But being clad in camouflage and actually being camouflaged were, as Tommy had repeated over and over, not the same thing. Nolan had to find a place where he could be still and quiet and see what he needed to see.
Someplace close. He only had his handguns: his Sig and a Glock Len had given him, with a suppressor. The consensus had been that a sniper rifle, or even a hunting rifle, would have been preferable, but Nolan had never fired a sniper before, and he’d had no good, inconspicuous way of carrying a rifle until he’d made it to the end of the road.
So he was going to have to get pretty close to get the job done.
He was okay with that. He wanted to be facing the man who’d killed his father when he shot him repeatedly in the gut.
Ideally, he wanted to be close enough to open him up with his blade.
For now, though, he simply needed to find a place to watch—and soon. It was getting dark, and he had only natural light to work with. Once he found a good location, he could use the night vision binoculars he’d picked up in Springfield.
A thin curl of aromatic smoke wafted up through the little aluminum chimney that poked up in the middle of the roof, and he detected the faint scent, under the wood, of blended spices and meat. Vega was in there. Nolan backed up, trying to keep his attention on all three-hundred-sixty degrees around him, and set his task to finding a blind.
~oOo~
For most of the night, Nolan sat in his little nest and watched the amber glow that lit one window in the cabin, the endless itching of his bug bites keeping him awake and alert. Once in a while, he’d see a shimmer of shadow break up the glow. With clouds heavy overhead, the night became pitch black, and only that single, yellow rectangle assured Nolan he hadn’t gone blind.
Vega never came out of the house, not even before the dark had fallen. Already, Nolan was restless. His quarry was only fifty feet away, and here he sat, alone in the cold dark. There was no one around—why not just go to the house? Face him and kill him. Just like that.
It had been his first plan. But his brothers had told him he was an idiot. He couldn’t know what was inside that cabin, what protections Vega might have. Vega knew he was a marked man, and he knew the people after him were the baddest of the bad. The whole place could have been booby-trapped.
The plan was to catch Vega outside, unawares.
So Nolan burrowed into his military jacket and waited. When the glowing window finally went dark, he let his eyes close and sought sleep.
~oOo~
The sun came up from the horizon into a clear, bluing sky, and birdsong filled the woods before the dawn was warm. Nolan woke, oriented himself, stretched, scratched, and rolled to his knees, easing deeper into the woods before he stood to find a place to take a piss. He had to take the risk that Vega wouldn’t pick those few minutes to finally creep out into the world, because he was going to wet himself otherwise.
Once back in his blind, he pulled a protein bar from his pack, and one of the collapsible water bottles as well.
Nolan wasn’t, as a rule, an outdoorsman. He spent a lot of time outdoors, and he’d walked through his fair share of woods and fields. He’d gone hunting a few times with Show and Len, and fishing a couple of times with Len. But hunting and fishing, though they sounded active, were really about being still, and Nolan hated that. He was too restless in his spirit and his body for sitting and waiting.
Waiting for Vega to show himself, Nolan struggled hard against his nature. He wanted to make something happen, but he was trying to do this right. He wanted to go home, and he didn’t want to bring trouble with him. This thing he was doing—it was about putting trouble to rest. Finishing his unfinished business.
He heard a strange sound, like a grunt, behind him and went still. There were apparently bears and moose in these woods, among other things. Nolan hadn’t yet seen anything more threatening than a deer, but what he’d heard behind him, he thought, sounded bear-like. He heard a rustle of movement and was glad he’d just pissed, because otherwise, he’d have just pissed.
Turning his head in tiny fractions of an arc, he finally saw a brown bear and a cub, at about eight o’clock. Brown, not black. And big. Holy fuck. A grizzly?
The mama bear—he supposed it would have to be a mama bear; his memory of National Geographic Channel programming said that papa bears didn’t really hang around to be good role models—sniffed deeply at the tree where Nolan had pissed. She took in big, deep whiffs of the bark and then made that grunting growl.
Fuck. Even after Nacto’s explanation of what the woods up here held, Nolan had not factored into his calculations the idea that he might die by bear attack. He sat tight and breathed as steadily and slowly as he could, defying the alarm bell that his heart had become.
Mama bear took another whiff, made another protest of the information she’d taken in, and then lifted off her front paws—‘paws’ was a much too innocuous word for those supper plates rimmed with scimitars—and snarled, her muzzle twisting with menace. She roared fully, and her cub made a sound like a practice roar.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. If she was scenting him, fifteen feet away, he was dead.
Mama swung her massive brown head to and fro, her nose in the air. Then she dropped to all four paws and looked right at him. She yelled again, stretching her neck out as she did. A long rope of saliva dripped from her teeth.
A lone thought skated through the terrified wasteland of his mind: she sounded like Chewbacca.
He was going to die. There would be no vengeance for Havoc. Karma or fate or whatever was intervening here. Nolan wondered if he’d been wrong after all about the righteousness of this hunt.
But then she turned and shoved her cub toward the opposite direction, and they simply ambled off, Mama’s huge brown butt rocking back and forth.
Nolan stayed frozen in place until she was well away, and he could no longer see her for the trees between them. Then he sagged forward, dropping his head almost to his crossed legs. There he remained until his heart found its regular beat and his head no longer seemed at risk of exploding.
“Jesus fuck,” he muttered aloud and then chuckled to himself.
He didn’t know why she hadn’t attacked. She’d seen him; she must have. Maybe being so still had made it clear that he was no threat to her or her baby. Whatever it was, Nolan was glad.
Aware that his attention had been turned too long from the cabin, still fighting his body’s adrenaline-fueled demand that he just get up and run, he swiveled back to face his target.
Standing about twenty feet away, staring right at him, was David Vega. Nolan had never met the man, but he’d seen photographs. This Vega was older and rougher, with long, tangled hair and a bushy beard, but Nolan still knew him.
He bore a big compound bow. It was nocked, drawn, and aimed. Right at Nolan.
Nolan had that much time—enough to know what would happen—and then it happened.
Strangely, he thought he heard the whistle of the arrow through air at the same time that it punched into his chest.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Iris missed Nolan. Every day, she missed him a little more, and her worry for his safety dug a little deeper into her heart.
Often, she called his number, knowing that his personal phone was turned off and stowed in a drawer in Cory’s kitchen, just so that she could hear the brief outgoing message: It’s Nolan. Leave a message. If you want to hear back, make it short
and sweet.
Each day, she left a message, short and sweet, the same one each time: “I love you. Come home.”
She wondered if his voice mail would be full before he made it home.
It was strange to simply be going on about her life, when she had no idea where he was, or if he was okay. But her only alternative was…there was no other alternative. She had no way to look for him, or to contact him. The club did; her father at least knew more than she did, but he wasn’t saying, other than to say that ‘as far as he knew,’ Nolan was okay.
All Iris could do was wait, and if she simply leaned on the windowsill and waited, she’d be mental in a matter of hours. So she went on about her life. She went to work. She hung out with her family. She snuggled Austin, her new nephew. She lived.
And it was a good life, even with the big, Nolan-shaped hole in its middle. Signal Bend was her home. Now more than ever, she felt that. Everywhere she went in town, she was at home. Even people who’d officially lived in Signal Bend longer, recently, than she had were coming to see her as an ‘Original.’
That was how families like the Lundens and the Ryans, the Bakkes and the Olsens, the Nesses and the Wahlbergs, the Mortensens and the Freys, to name some of the most prominent, were known now: the ‘Original Families.’ Iris thought it made them all sound like vampires or something.
Historically speaking, most of the Original Families did, in fact, predate the town charter. But the term was used in reference to any family that had been established before Signal Bend’s big resurgence. Iris found the dynamic fascinating, a sort of ‘big brother/little brother’ feel, where newcomers—some of whom had lived in Signal Bend for a decade—went to the Originals to get support for their ideas before they brought them up at town meetings.
It was more than asking for help—the people of this town had always gone to the Horde for that, and most of the Horde were Originals, too—it was asking for validation. Iris had attended several town meetings since she’d come to stay, and the families that had been there for generations were the ones who, ultimately, made the decisions. The role of the Mayor had always, as far as Iris knew, been mainly decorative; the town council made most of the policy, and the Horde made the law. The townspeople made their opinions known, but the Originals had the real say.
Town meetings were often loud and even exciting, where everybody talked, sometimes all at once, and the council heard it all and explained their votes. Ever since she was a girl, she’d liked sitting in the middle of that mess. But now, with the lens of her studies sharpening her vision, she also saw how much power the Originals wielded.
For all Signal Bend’s changes, it was, at its heart, the same small town it had always been. And it was her home. Living here again, Iris realized that she hadn’t ever really had a home since she’d been taken from this one as a little girl.
When Nolan came home, they would make a home together here, where they both belonged.
~oOo~
Iris hadn’t spoken to Nolan in more than a week. According to the little any of the Horde would tell her, he’d left the same day that they’d last spoken—and with that, she knew, beyond all doubt, that their last call had been the thing which had pushed him off his increasingly unstable base.
If he was hurt or killed, it would be her fault. At least in part. In the moments that she let herself be quiet and still—at night, lying in bed, in the tiny bedroom that used to be her sister Daisy’s, while she hugged her ratty teddy bear—her mind and heart beat each other up over that fact. She’d gotten wrapped up in her own problems and forgotten that Nolan needed saving, and now he was gone.
She’d been home for five days and back at work for two. Nothing had changed at home, or at work, or in town, except that Nolan wasn’t there.
Late in the morning on her second day back at work, she was alone in the shop while Geoff met with a collector in Rolla. Usually, she liked these days best: a weekday, so not too much traffic through the store. A night rain had brought in cooler weather, a break in an otherwise hot, muggy summer. Iris had the front door open and some funky new finds displayed on the boardwalk. Those shoppers who had the middle of the week at their leisure strolled contently along the walks and ate their lunch at tables the cafés had set outside.
Alone for most of the day, she meant to play around, maybe move some things about and make up some new displays or something. Now that she knew their full inventory and understood the aesthetic of the shop, Geoff gave her a lot of latitude to change things up. After returning from her personal hell in Little Rock, a little changing up seemed like a good idea, something to focus her mind away from Nolan.
She had taken all the knickknacks off a country kitchen hutch that Geoff had stained a unique shade, something like teal, almost iridescent. Iris knew it was literally unique, because Geoff mixed his own stains. He’d done this one with a light finish, so that the wear of the century-old piece showed through. The color had inspired her, and she thought she’d pull curiosities from the side rooms and do something color-themed with the display.
The gargoyle bell tinkled while she was shoving her back against the piece, which was hard to move even on the little coaster things they put under the feet of especially heavy pieces to move them. She stopped, ready with her shopkeeper smile, and saw Gia Lunden standing in the doorway with her hands in her jeans pockets.
“Hi, Gia! You shopping?”
The girl shrugged her shoulders. “My mom’s talking to the mayor about something, and it’s taking forever. We’re supposed to go to Jack’s Tack after and get my saddle fixed. I’m just killing time until she’s done. I saw you in the window. You need help?”
“Sure, that’d be great.” Gia came over, and Iris moved to make room. “I’m trying to move it to the wall by the sales desk. Don’t push too hard, or it’ll come off the little slide pad thingies.”
Working together, they got the hutch in place. Gia stood back. “We have something like this in the kitchen. It’s just white, though.”
“I think lots of people around here have these things, and they’ve probably been used like they were meant to be used forever. This one would be more of a…I don’t know…collector piece, I guess.”
“The color’s weird.”
“Yeah, but I like it. I’m going to dig around the shop and find stuff that’s the same color, or close to it, or maybe contrasty. You want to help?”
Gia turned and looked out the front window. Then she dug into her pocket for her phone. After she tapped out a text, she turned back to Iris with a small smile. “Yeah, that’d be cool.
“Did you tell your mom where you were?”
“Yeah.” She waved her phone at Iris and then slid it back into her pocket.
“Okay, well, we’re on the hunt for anything kinda weird that is a similar color to the hutch.”
“Everything in here’s kinda weird.”
“I know, right? Isn’t it great? Why don’t you take the curiosities room, and I’ll go to the back. The deal is, we want it to look good on the hutch.”
They worked for about half an hour, until they had a good assortment of options scattered on and around the hutch, ranging from a few frames of pinned butterflies to a 1920s-era masquerade mask with peacock feathers, from glass paperweights to an abalone cigar box.
Iris set down the last piece she’d found, and Gia picked it up immediately. “Oof. It’s heavy. What is it?”
“It’s a doorknocker. See?” She took the cast-iron piece, thick with patina, from Gia’s hands and held it up straight. Lifting the knocker an inch or so from its base, she released it, and it made a dull thunk. “It would sound a lot better on a door, of course.”
Gia took it back and studied it closely. “That’s the world,” she said, tracing a finger over the ball striker. “It’s a globe.”
“You’re right.” The knocker looked, at first glance, to be an arm and hand holding simply a ball. But Gia was right—the ball was actually carved with the features of
a globe. The hand was God’s hand—or a god’s hand, anyway.
“That’s so rad. My dad totally needs it for his shop door.” Gia grinned. “Is it expensive?”
“Two hundred and thirty dollars.”
“Oh.” The grin ebbed away. “Yeah, then. It is.”
“I tell you what. This was in the back room. I’ll tuck it in a corner somewhere so maybe it doesn’t get bought, and then you can save up for it. Plus, we can cut you a deal, too. When’s your dad’s birthday?” She supposed she should know it, since Gia’s dad was Iris’s family, too, her Uncle Isaac, but details like that were things she’d missed, being mostly away for so many years.
Nolan: Return to Signal Bend Page 24