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Liam got out and quickly unloaded the back of the SUV. He slung his duffel bag over one shoulder and handed Cate’s small suitcase to her, leaving his gun hand free. Then he slowly rotated around the clearing. If he didn’t miss his guess...yes! There it was. It didn’t look like a path, and as he recalled there would be places they’d have to walk single file, but eventually the rough path would widen out and lead to the clearing where Cody’s cabin stood.
“Come on,” he told Cate, leading the way. He wasn’t worried too much about their safety at this point. While he wasn’t familiar with the Big Horn Mountains in general and Granite Peak in particular, his family had a cabin the Rockies, and he’d spent a lot of time in the mountains growing up. Sound carried. Especially man-made sound—such as a car engine. His ears were already attuned, and he knew if anyone followed them he’d hear it.
A little more than fifty yards later a clearing materialized, and there in the center stood Cody’s split-log cabin. Liam started forward, then turned around. “Wait here,” he told Cate. “Let me check it out first.”
“Do you have the key?”
“Don’t need a key,” he told her. “Cody doesn’t keep it locked.”
She looked startled. “He doesn’t?”
He shook his head. “Cody said he doesn’t keep anything valuable here, anything worth stealing. Other than nonperishable food, that is. If someone needed his cabin, he’d rather they just walk in instead of break in. There’s a generator out back—that runs the pump for the well in addition to electric lights, so he’s got running water. It’s a great place to hole up, and I’m not surprised Callahan suggested it. My sister, Keira, told me the Callahans have used this place more than once in an emergency.”
Cate’s eyes asked a question, but all Liam said was, “Long story. I’ll tell you sometime, but right now I want to check the place out and make sure no one’s inside. Once I know you’re safe there will be time for other things. Stay here, okay? If something happens, drop your suitcase and run like hell.”
Liam strode across the clearing, but paused halfway. “Callahan?” he called. He didn’t think Callahan was inside—the fact that no other car had been parked at the dead end in the road was a good indication they’d arrived first. But just in case...
When there was no response after a minute, he mounted the steps, then reached for the door latch, opened the door and walked inside. The cabin had that disused smell. Not rank or moldy, just...uninhabited. A thin layer of dust on the Spartan furniture told him no one had been at the cabin for quite some time, which was just fine with him. He dropped his duffel bag on the kitchen table, then went back to fetch Cate.
“All clear,” he told her. Then, “Here, I’ll take that.” He took the suitcase from her right hand, but let her carry her bag of books.
Once inside, Liam bolted the front door, then went and did the same for the back door. “I’ll go out in a little bit and start the generator,” he told Cate, “but let me show you around first.”
The cabin was one large room. He placed Cate’s suitcase on the double bed that stood in one corner, half-screened from the rest of the room by a large carved wooden folding screen that Liam recognized as having once belonged to his mother. A rocking chair held pride of place in front of the fireplace, and a child’s bed stood against another wall. For Alyssa, no doubt, he acknowledged, thinking of his young niece. The one and only time he’d been here before, he and his brothers had all brought sleeping bags, and they’d bunked down in front of the fireplace.
That had been before Alyssa was born, shortly after Keira had married Cody. Cody had invited the Jones brothers to stag it with him at the cabin, as a way of getting to know each other. Even Shane had made a point to get leave from the Marine Corps, Liam remembered, and he chuckled softly to himself.
“What is it?” Cate asked. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” he told her. “I was just remembering the last time I was here.” When she lifted her eyebrows in a question, he added, “I told you this cabin belongs to my brother-in-law. He married my only sister, and boy! Were we tough on him at first!”
“What did you do?”
“Put him through the wringer, that’s what we did. Cody’s a couple of years older than my oldest brother, Shane, which means he’s quite a bit older than Keira—eight years. We gave him the benefit of the doubt because he was a US Marine at one time, same as us. Same as Keira. But we were all pretty ticked off he’d let her get shot when they were working a case together for the agency—you know the agency I mean. Keira threatened us all with dire consequences if we did anything to her new husband, but...” Liam spread his hands out. “We had to make sure he was right for her. Know what I mean?”
