Jan parked the county vehicle in his driveway. He leaned against the door and scanned the acreage before him where, some 115 years earlier, his great-grandfather homesteaded this brush patch along the muddy Big Horn River. He came from Maryland via Colorado and the Jim Bridger Cutoff before he crossed the river where Dead Horse Gulch drained its meager oblation into it. Jan’s great-grandfather, George Richardson, with his young wife and their five-year-old daughter, wintered the first year in a dugout near the river. Jan imagined his great-grandfather gathering scrub brush for a fire and pondering why he had left Maryland to come to a place like this—a place where only trappers, Indians, and bushwhackers moved among the cottonwoods.
Richardson opened a store on a bluff six miles north of the ranch near where a ferry carried horses and men across the river and east to the mountains. He built a home near the store, but retained ownership of the ranch. He then opened the first bank in what became Basin City. Shortly thereafter Basin won a political fight with the tiny community of Otto, to become the county seat of the newly-formed Big Horn County. That led the CB&Q railroad to build a line one block east of Richardson’s house. Jan’s great-grandfather was firmly established as a Basin founding father when he died young on his kitchen table, attended by a physician trying desperately to force a breathing tube into his infected throat.
Richardson’s widow retained ownership of the ranch. Jan’s mother eventually inherited the ranch during the Great Depression. She spurned a scholarship to the University of Wyoming, married a bohunk from Nebraska, and birthed four children on the ranch. As newlyweds, Jan’s parents lived in a log cabin with dirt floors. They drew drinking water in a bucket from the Big Horn River. Jan’s father eventually built a basement house, nothing more than a large cement cellar with a flat roof. He dug the cistern, lined it with cement and ran a pipe to the kitchen. Not much of a home, but Jan had been at peace in that basement with his parents, his older brother, and two older sisters. The original dugout had long since eroded away, given up along with fifty feet of riverbank to the incessant flooding of the Big Horn. The river flooded every year, Jan’s father sandbagging the house and wading waist deep into the barnyard to rescue chickens and pigs. After World War II the federal government constructed the Boysen Reservoir, eighty miles upstream, saving the property from further destruction.
Jan’s mother had been forced to sell the ranch after his father left the family for greener pastures. Fifty years later when Jan repurchased the place, he constructed a new log structure over the old cement walls of the original basement. But the peace he had hoped to replicate on the ranch had morphed into a nightmare.
* * *
Stepping out of the county vehicle onto the driveway, Jan smelled the river and the odor of the horses in the corral. The sun was now warming the June morning. Across the river he saw an eagle perched on a dirt pinnacle, twisting its head as it surveyed its Dead Horse domain. A casual observer would never spot him blending into the sandstone, but Jan knew the dark silhouette.
He walked over to the corral and threw some hay to Brutus, the big gelding paint, and Trudy, the small bay mare. The ponies watched him with huge black eyes while they ground pungent stalks of hay with their big molars. Jan stroked their powerful necks and drank in their smell. They stepped gingerly back and forth as they watched him and chewed, hoping, Jan thought, that he would bridle them and ride along the river.
“Not today, kids,” he said. “Your old man is too tired. We had a big night, remember? Hope you weren’t as scared as I was by the fireworks.”
He walked up the wooden steps to the house. The screen was hanging by one hinge. The hardwood door was ruined. Inside, he inspected the bedroom trashed from gunfire. Window glass littered the entire room and the bed looked like someone had run a Rototiller over its surface. Jan decided it was time to order the pillow top king-sized bed he had seen in Billings. He would need a new bureau, and from the looks of the closet doors, a new wardrobe.
The far wall, constructed not out of logs but drywall, was destroyed. Bullets had ripped the plasterboard from the two-by-fours and the entire wall would need to be replaced. Surprisingly, only one computer monitor on the other side of the wall was shattered; at least three slugs had passed through the monitor before lodging in the exterior log wall. The copier was missing a corner, but it made a perfect test copy when he tried it. The Internet connection was operable. All in all, it wasn’t too bad.
Then Jan saw the picture frame on the floor. He froze. Slowly he reached down and picked it up. Turning it over, he saw that the glass was shattered and a bullet had pierced the picture exactly between Emma’s eyes. Jan shook the remaining glass onto the floor and pulled the picture out of the frame. With a pair of scissors he carefully cut a rectangle out of the center. Holding the two-by three-inch segment by one corner, he looked at Emma. Then he pulled out his wallet and placed the picture in the plastic pocket over his driver’s license. From now on, when he opened his wallet for any reason, he would see Emma with the bullet hole in her face.
Back out on the porch, a warm morning breeze blew up. Jan gazed at the concrete pad where the two-car garage had stood until Emma died there two years earlier. A few burned timbers from the building were stacked to one side of the pad, reminders of the explosion that had been intended for him. A wave of fresh grief washed over him, a sensation he experienced with increasing—instead of decreasing—frequency. The shrink in Billings said that was a bad sign. But he could not let go of the memories, as if doing so would somehow take Emma even further from him.
He stood frozen in place as the movie played in his mind—the front door slowly floating toward him into the kitchen, hinges flying in slow motion. A coffee cup lazily floating upward, turning over, pouring its contents out, and drifting slowly down to shatter on the floor. He could hear the explosion coming from the garage and could see, through the front door, timbers from the garage sailing in an arc, as though lofted by an unseen hand. Two vehicles were on fire, his Jeep Cherokee was missing its roof and, of course, Emma was dead. Her Nissan Sentra was blown ten feet outside what had been the wall of the garage.
A crazy cosmic flip-flop killed her instead of Jan. The bomb was meant for him. It was in his Jeep. Their routine never varied: she left for her real estate office in her car while he cleaned up the breakfast dishes and got to his current writing project. His Cherokee on most days sat alone in the garage unless he needed to run to town for office supplies or drive to a spot on the ranch for some chore or other. But that morning Emma was to take his rig to work so he could take her car in for an oil change. When she keyed the ignition to his Cherokee, she died.
He had known the moment he ran through the doorway toward the flaming garage that she was dead.
###
Copyright ©2011 by James R. Spencer
For more titles by StoneHouse Ink go to www.StoneHouseInk.net
Copyright ©2010 by Matthew John Slick
http://www.carm.org
All rights reserved as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the publisher.
StoneHouse Ink 2010
Boise ID 83713
www.StoneHouseInk.net
First Hardcover Edition: 2010
First Paperback Edition: 2010
First eBook Edition: 2010
Second Paperback Edition: 2011
Second eBook Edition: 2012
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to a real person, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.
The influence: a novel/ by Matt Slick. -1 ed. p.cm.
Cover art by StoneHouse Ink
Published in the United States of America
StoneHouse Ink
Table of Contents
Note from the Author
Title Page
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
Last Things
Preview of "Desert Atonement"
Copyright Information
Table of Contents
Note from the Author
Title Page
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
Last Things
Preview of "Desert Atonement"
Copyright Information
The Influence (Supernatural Thriller) Page 40