PROLOGUE
Dusk settled over Harlan County with a copper light that made every field look scorched at the edges.To most, it would have been picturesque.But to Warren Holt, a lifelong resident of Elmsview, it had lost some of its beauty.
Warren drove with one hand tight around the wheel and the other resting near the gearshift, his pickup rattling along a dirt road that hadn’t seen a county grader in weeks.Loose stones and sun-dried clumps of dirt pinged against the undercarriage.The tires threw up a long brown tail behind him, and every few seconds the truck lurched hard enough to make the dead deer in the bed shift against the ropes.
"Stay put," Warren muttered, glancing in the rear-view mirror.
The deer didn’t move again.He had managed to get in a few hours of hunting before the meeting was due to take place.It may have seemed mad.But hunting always helped when he was stressed.Helped him put things into perspective.Doing it had taken the edge off, if only temporarily.
That was one good thing, at least.
There weren’t many tonight.
Had his life continued as he'd hoped, he would have been home by now.He should have been pulling into his driveway, skinning knife laid out, tarp spread, freezer bags ready.A man who knew what he was doing didn't leave a kill lying in the back of a truck while the June evening cooled around it, not in Kentucky.His father would have had something to say about leaving it too long.
His father had always had something to say.
Warren checked the clock on the dash, then cursed under his breath.
I’m late, he thought.Not late enough that a reasonable person would make trouble over it.But then reason would be in short supply at the meeting.He had received the note earlier in the day, destroying it as soon as he had read it.But that would not end the dirty business there.Blackmail was the subject matter.Blackmail that would shatter his family apart.It gave him a time and a place to be.And here he was.
A wash of low sun cut through the woodland to his left, flashing between trunks in hard little glints.Warren turned his head just enough to catch them.Pine and oak crowded the slope, the undergrowth darkening already beneath them.Beyond those trees, the land rolled down toward creeks and old logging tracks and the kind of places a man could vanish for hours without seeing another soul.
As a boy, he had loved that about it.
Back then, those woods had felt like a private kingdom.He and his father moving before dawn, boots wet from grass, rifles carried carefully, both of them speaking only when they needed to.Warren could still picture his old man ahead of him in a brown coat, broad shoulders blocking half the trail, one hand raised whenever he wanted silence.
The memory came so clean it made the present feel dirtier somehow.Hell, just looking in the mirror was enough to tell him that time had done a number on him.
A younger Warren had stood under those same trees with cold fingers wrapped around a rifle stock, trying not to breathe too loudly.Keen to prove to his old man that he had what it took.He’d take aim and get advice even if he didn’t want it.
“Don’t fight the shot,” his father had told him.“Let your body settle.Keep your aim steady.That’s the secret, Son.You keep everything in life simple, it’ll all come easy.”
A laugh left Warren now, short and dry.
It almost caught in his throat.
“Yeah,” he said to the empty cab.“Easy.”
Nothing had come easy in a long time.Not business.Not his marriage.Nothing.Hell, even the card games he’d once loved had turned against him.A win seemed far off on all horizons.
If things were easy, he would have been headed home.If things were easy, he wouldn’t have been driving to that lodge at this hour with dust in his teeth, a deer in the truck bed, and his stomach twisted up so tight he could feel it under his ribs.
Who the hell is trying to blackmail me in this town?
The road dipped, then climbed.Branches brushed the passenger side with a dry scrape.Warren eased off the gas at a bend where the ruts deepened, but the truck still jolted as it crossed them.From the back came another dull thump.
“Damn it.”
At the next flat stretch, he looked again in the mirror.The deer's antlers were visible, pointing up jaggedly to the darkening sky.Rope crossed the body twice, tight enough.Still, Warren didn't trust anything tonight.Not the knots.Not the road.Not himself.At least after his meeting at the lodge, he'd know what sort of future he had.
His fingers tightened until the leather wheel cover creaked.
It’s just a meeting.
That was what he had told himself when he’d turned off the main road.
Just a meeting.Don’t build it up, ya fool.There’s a way to get out of this.There always is.
