Abandon

She reached into the right side pocket of her parka. No keys. Left pocket. Not there, either. “What the hell did I—” She remembered, unzipped the parka and the breast pocket of her fleece jacket, jammed her hand inside, willing herself not to watch him come.

The third key she tried unlocked the driver’s door. The rusted Suburban had been outfitted with knobby off-road tires, and Abigail had to step two and a half feet up to climb behind the wheel. She shut the door, slid the seat forward, and slipped the same key that had opened the door into the ignition. If this were a movie, the car wouldn’t start, she thought.

The engine roared to life.

Through the front passenger window, she saw Quinn rounding the final switchback.

Abigail released the emergency brake and shifted into drive, her foot burning as she pressed the accelerator. The Suburban lurched forward over the uneven ground, rattling and rocking, the big tires rolling over rocks, through shallow ditches slicked with runoff.

She screamed when the bullet passed through the glass beside her ear, felt the spray of shards as they embedded themselves in the left side of her face, cracks spiderwebbing through the windshield.

She ducked and drove onto the road as another round chinked through her door and punctured the ashtray, the accompanying report drowned out in the noisy growl of the Suburban’s 410 engine.

Where rocks didn’t jut out of the dirt, the narrow road was washboarded. She looked down, found the off-road stick shift. Good, she thought. Scott had left the four-wheel high engaged.

Pain raged through her foot, up into her tailbone, raindrops plopping on the windshield.

Thunder dropped above the engine, clouds darkening, snow mixing in.

Abigail began to cry.

A half hour later, she flipped on the headlights.

Rain fell through the beams.

She kept looking in the rearview mirror, watching for another pair of high beams to punch through all that darkness, the Suburban jittery and bouncing like it might shake itself to pieces. She’d never driven such a rough road, and twice she took a turn too fast, nearly launched off the shoulder into the canyon.

After eight miles, the bumps smoothed out, and she could keep the speed at a steady thirty-five miles per hour.

A mile later, it turned to pavement, and she gunned the Suburban to forty-five.

Her ears popped.

She crested a hill, and below in the rainy gloom, a collection of lights appeared, and a green road sign flashed by:

WELCOME TO SILVERTON

POP. 473

ELEV. 9318

She veered through a hairpin turn, straightened out onto Greene Street, drove over a bridge that spanned all twenty feet of Cement Creek, and eased onto the brake pedal.

To her immediate right stood the San Juan County Courthouse, gold-domed and surmounted by a clock tower.

Ahead, streetlamps lined either side of Silverton’s main thoroughfare, each illuminating spheres of slushy rain. It was a quarter past seven on a raw Thursday night, and with the buildings dark and scarcely a single occupied parking space as far as she could see, it seemed the town had already gone to sleep.

She drove a few blocks past rows of refurbished Victorian-style buildings that would have looked like something out of a Western, if not for their ostentatious paint schemes—Silverton Clinic, Fred Wolfe Memorial Carriage House, a Church of Christ no bigger than a trailer, Silverton City Hall, Wyman Hotel, Pride of the West Restaurant, Rocky Mountain Funnel Cakes and Café, Blue Raven Fine Arts, Outdoor World.

The saloons and brothels had long since been replaced with trendy coffeehouses, galleries, ice-cream, candy, and gift shops. There was even a photography studio where they would doll you up like a cowboy or a whore and take your portrait, so when you went home, you could show your friends you’d been in the real West.

The West for tourists, she thought. You could probably order an appletini from one of the bars and stand a good chance of not being shot between the eyes.

At the corner of Greene and Twelfth, Abigail pulled into a parking space in front of the Grand Imperial, a three-story white-brick hotel with lavender trim, red brick chimneys, and topped by a row of shed-roofed dormers.

She killed the engine, climbed down onto the street, and glass fell out of the window when she slammed shut the Suburban’s heavy door.

Beyond the ticking of the engine and the splatter of icy rain, Silverton stood silent.

Looking through the windows, she could see into the lobby of the hotel, where a clerk read a paperback behind the front desk.

As she started toward the entrance, she heard the groan of a revving engine.

At the north end of town, headlights appeared.

1893

EIGHTY-FIVE

Milton wiped his mouth and shuddered. After a day of deadpan drinking in the Blair Street saloons, he’d just aired the paunches into a snowbank, noting bitterly to himself that he’d never touched liquor prior to coming west.

As he staggered up Twelfth Street toward the boardinghouse, even the glow from all that rotgut wasn’t sufficient to ward off the loneliness or the early-evening chill.

The lights of Silverton had begun to wink on.

He passed a butcher shop, a grub house, a pharmacy, a Chinese laundry, and was thinking of his wife and son back in Missouri and choking on guilt, having had his thorn sucked that morning by a whore named Maribell, when he tripped over something and tumbled into the snow.

He sat up and scratched the ice out of his beard and shook his head in an attempt to right the spinning world. When at last he did, he found himself sprawled near the entrance to the Grand Imperial Hotel.

It took some doing, but he managed to regain his feet.

“Son of a bitch.”

He stared down at what had toppled him—some bindle-stiff whore in a white cape, either drunker than he was or stone-dead, lying facedown in the filthy snow.

Voices washed out, distant.

“You a diploma doc?”

“I’m the best chance she’s got of . . . This a whore?”

“I don’t know. What’s it matter?”

“I don’t treat whores. Find Dr. Stout. He makes the rounds on Blair—”

“I’m not certain she’s a—”

“You know how many dead prostitutes he’s seen since Christmas Eve? Five. Had to pump the stomachs of seven. They all take to suicide this time of year. Morphine. Carbolic acid for the more desperate.”

“She ain’t poisoned. She’s frozed.”

“Or maybe she’s poisoned and froze.”

“She needs your help, whichever the—”

“Should it come to my attention she eats c**k for her bed and supper, you can double the amounts on my fee bill.”