Dane wanted to remember this moment forever. He never wanted to forget. How perfect it all could’ve been, but somewhere in the thick of this moment Dane knew what was coming next. He could never just remember the good parts. He had to remember everything that came after. Just like he’d never been able to forget Gwen’s voice, he also couldn’t forget the sound of that shot. It sounded like a .30-30. He didn’t want to, but like always, his mind drifted to the accident, to the blood. So much of it. Blood, cold and congealed, sticking to his clothes and his face. Blood mixing in with his tears, causing a slick, watery film to smear over his face. This is the part where he wants to scream.
So he did. Dane opened his eyes and screamed out over the water as the bright sun violently attacked his vision. For a moment Dane couldn’t see, and he was grateful for the temporary blindness. The bursts of white replacing the pools of red. Dane looked down at the rock he was sitting on. Not just to avoid the sunlight, but because he no longer possessed the ability to look at the sky. He just couldn’t do it. There wasn’t anything up there for him to see anyway. Not anymore. Just cold fire and a host of raging stars camouflaged by the brightest blue. The sun shining down through the trees cast a spider web of shadows across Dane’s cargo pants, boots, and skin. He focused on the patterns as his vision returned. He didn’t look at the treetops anymore, either. They only held thoughts of carrion birds, more blood, and the broken bones of children. Dane could feel a chill rush through him although he’d been sitting in the warm morning sun for hours. The lab report papers from Dr. McKenzie’s office, which Dane had spread out on the flat rock beside him before he dozed off, caught the breeze and started to lift into the air. Dane scrambled before he lost them to the wind and refolded them all, stuffed them back into the tattered envelope, and then pushed the whole mess deep into the utility pocket of his pants. He looked down at his leg and laughed a humorless laugh. It didn’t matter where he looked—up, down—it just didn’t matter. His future wasn’t written in the stars the way Gwen had always said. It was written in faded printer ink on those goddamn papers—right there in black and white. He decided to stare straight ahead instead, out at the roaring water of Bear Creek. The creek itself reminded him of nothing. Nothing was something he could handle. Nothing was good. After a while, he closed his eyes again and filled his lungs the best he could with the fishy smell of dirt and wild water. It helped. He didn’t want to come out here just to get lost in the black parts of his memory, or the big neon parts that refused to go away. He just wanted to catch a damn fish. Or maybe, for once, remember something good, something pure, something that pushed the stars and treetops and paperwork out of his brain, if only for a while. He leaned farther back and rested his head on the massive rock just in time to feel a buzzing on his leg. He reached into his pocket and yanked out the phone only to drop it. It slid down the smooth rock into the dirt. Unbalanced, Dane tried to grab for it and slid right down after it. He landed hard on his shoulder and left hip. He lay there in the grass and mossy earth until the pain subsided and he sat up slowly and looked for his phone. One missed call from a number he didn’t recognize. The phone chirped in his hand—voicemail. He held the phone to his ear and listened to a message from the new sheriff of McFalls County. There’d been a killing up the mountain. The sheriff was asking for his assistance. “Thank God,” Dane said. “Something to do.”
CHAPTER THREE
It took Dane twenty minutes to get his old Ford close enough to the winding dirt path that led to the cabin the new sheriff of McFalls County had called him out to. He passed the young sheriff’s county vehicle back by the main road, where he must have had to leave it and walk the rest of the way in. Dane figured the newly minted sheriff, Darby Ellis, didn’t yet know the steep terrain well enough to know how to get his two-wheel-drive county-issued Crown Victoria this deep into the woods without getting stuck. The new sheriff was trying to play by the rule book, but Dane knew he’d be rolling over this mountain in a four-wheel drive as soon as he got sick of having to hike to every call.
For Dane, on the other hand, there wasn’t a trail or pig path in North Georgia that he couldn’t navigate with his eyes closed, no matter the vehicle. He’d learned every nook and cranny of every county from Fannin to McFalls to Rabun as a kid pitching dirt clods with his friends, from kindergarten through high school. He’d driven every road and trail out there in his Deddy’s old Ford. The same old Ford he’d just climbed out of. What he hadn’t found out about the area out here as a young man looking for the best place to take girls or sip whiskey his father kept in the truck’s old rusted tool box, he had gone on to discover over an eight-year tenure as the fire chief and arson investigator of McFalls and a brief stint as sheriff for Fannin County—the next county over—a job he’d only recently vacated after two years. The former sheriff of McFalls, Clayton Burroughs, had taken his leave as well, and his abrupt retirement left this new guy, Ellis, ready and willing to take up the mantle. The locals around here half expected Dane to take Burroughs’s job himself, but Dane had walked away for a reason. He enjoyed his retirement.
He decided to vouch for Ellis instead. He liked him, and Dane felt like the county needed younger blood behind the badge after almost two decades of Clayton Burroughs calling the shots. He liked Burroughs, although he’d been born to one of the biggest and meanest families of outlaws in the state. He’d done his part to keep them in check but some people thought he was planted in the office to turn a blind eye to his family’s operations. Dane wasn’t one of those people. He believed Burroughs to be a good man, but he believed Ellis to be an even better one.
Besides, Dane had been offered a much better gig to leave his post in Fannin. He now worked part-time for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He was in his first year with the Bureau now and it still felt a little strange to think about. Dane had never been all that fond of the police when he was coming up in the fire service, even during his short stint as sheriff, but now he was Agent Kirby. He laughed to himself every time he had to say that out loud. He was more of a consultant than anything else, and his new job kept him busy mostly deciding which side of the desk to stack the endless piles of useless paperwork on. He’d traded the wide-open spaces of his country home for a small box of an office. He did get to shoot a lot of darts, though, and midday naps had taken on an important role in Dane’s life, so life was good. Fighting fire and running into burning buildings was a young man’s game. The fire service was work, plain and simple, and Dane was enjoying the lack thereof that his new job afforded him. It paid a lot better, too. The state benefits were something he couldn’t go without, even with his county pension, and a nice comfortable leather chair was much more appealing these days than constantly being on his feet in ravines like the one he was hiking into now.
He stopped and looked around the forest. He did have to admit, as easy as he had it now, he sometimes missed his old life. The pine-rich northern air and the feeling of authority that came with wearing a badge and a uniform were things he’d grown accustomed to, and it felt good to be back out on his old stomping ground, even if it was at the behest of the new sheriff. It made Dane feel relevant again and less like the paper pusher he’d become. The move to the Bureau was a good fit for him physically—Dane had just turned thirty-seven—but it wasn’t much of a challenge for the investigator side of him. He’d never say it out loud to anyone, but he was excited to get Sheriff Ellis’s call.