“Eric!” the other kid cried.

Trevalian hurried over to the fallen boy. The kid was in shock, but still tried to move away from Trevalian. He smeared his own blood on the floor with his movement.

Trevalian took the boy’s right hand, uncurled his unwilling fingers, and pressed the fingers against the gash on his neck. “Push here as hard as you can.”

The alarm sounded. A robotic voice announced, “INTRUDER! INTRUDER! GET OUT OF THE HOUSE NOW!” at a numbing volume.

The second kid screamed, “ERIC!” and took off out the back door. Trevalian went after him. His buddy needed to keep that pressure up. If the boy should pass out…But the kid panicked and ran hard toward the street. His attention remained on Trevalian a beat too long. He ran headlong into an eight-foot-tall wooden grizzly bear. He might as well have been hit by a truck. He went down hard and lay still on the sidewalk.

The boy was out cold, bleeding from his ear and nose. It looked as if he’d shattered the bone around his right eye socket. He was breathing.

A siren grew louder.

Trevalian blended into shadow and disappeared. He was well on his way back to the rental before the first cruiser arrived.

M ost people, when under the harsh tube lighting of the Sheriff’s Office, looked somewhat green and sickly. But not Fiona. She had an intriguing look about her, fan lines at the edges of her eyes, giving her wisdom and her small but pouty mouth something of a distraction.

Walt studied her as she arranged the contents of the lost-and-found carry-on discovered at the airport. She spread them out and began photographing them while maintaining a conversation with him.

“It must strike you as odd,” she said, “some guy carrying around all this stuff.”

“Atypical is how I’d classify it,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s exactly how I’d put it as well.”

He’d shut the door to the room and locked it because he didn’t want anyone from his office seeing the bag or its contents. For now, the bag was all his.

“Tell me about your father. He’s here for the conference, right?” She ran off a series of shots.

“The usual sordid history,” he said.

“Sordid’s a strong word.”

“And accurate in this case.”

“Fathers and sons. Mothers and daughters. As old as the Bible,” she said.

“There was…an event,” he said. “A long time ago.” He felt on the verge of sharing something he had shared with no one.

She remained focused on the photography. “An event. That does sound ominous.” She took a few more shots. “Are you going to tell me about it?”

“No.”

“That hardly seems fair.”

“He put me through something. He went from god to demon in an afternoon.”

“That doesn’t sound pretty.”

“It wasn’t pretty.” He added, “And the funny thing is: I’ll bet he doesn’t even remember it. Strange how that happens-a kid’s world crumbles and the adult doesn’t even take notice.”

“Change is good. Look at what a strong leader you’ve become as an adult.”

“Me?” Walt didn’t think of himself as a strong leader. He felt like a failed husband and father. “If it had been adolescence, it might have made more sense. I was nine at the time. I still worshipped at his feet at that point.”

“And you’re not going to tell me?”

“It’s not you…I’ve never told anyone,” he said. “I don’t know if-”

His cell phone rang, and he answered it. He caught himself holding his breath as a nurse explained the situation to him. He hung up.

“It’s my nephew,” he muttered. “He’s in the emergency room. I gotta go.”

“Is he all right?”

Walt couldn’t get a word out. He’d lost his brother, his marriage. He couldn’t lose Kevin, too.

He climbed into the Cherokee and sped off, his light rack flashing. She’d started him thinking about the past, and he found himself stuck there.

His father had been drinking; Walt had no trouble remembering that day. The furtive promise had been father to son, filling Walt with great expectancy. He’d labeled it “a secret mission,” which further played to Walt’s imagination, causing his pulse to race. He would not, for any reason, allow his mother to find out.

He was given the task of retrieving the neighbor’s cat, a noisy vandal whose crimes included digging up his mother’s rosebushes and crying loudly at all hours of the night. Chippers, as the cat was known, had become the stuff of legend in their house, the subject of many dinner conversations.

“Chippers?” Walt had said-an attempt to clarify his mission.

“He’s critical to the assignment,” his father said. “Get Chippers into the cage in the back of the car and wait for me.”

The lure of the adventure had been intensified for Walt by his father’s brandishing a handgun: a six-shot revolver, with a barrel as long as a ruler. They’d been down in the basement together at the time. It was a gray gun wrapped in a damp cloth with the sweet smell of gun oil. His father had loaded and unloaded it, inspecting it with a careful eye.

“What’s that for?” Walt asked excitedly.

“Target practice.”

“Do I get to shoot?”

“If you’re a good boy. If you get Chippers into that car like I said.”

“But why Chippers?” Walt asked.

“He’s a hunter, isn’t he?”

It was true. Chippers delivered a dead mouse or mole to their back door every so often.

With a beer pinched between his father’s legs, they were off. The Ford Pinto rattled a lot and smelled of exhaust. They drove with the windows down. Chippers moaned in the back.

“What’s the mission?” Walt asked, now that they were alone and driving into the mountains.

“A good soldier learns to never question his senior officer. And he learns to keep his mouth shut even after the mission is over. Are we clear, soldier?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s good, because this mission is top secret, and I’d hate to see you lose rank and be prevented from taking future missions.”

“No, sir. Won’t happen.”

“What’s a soldier’s first duty?”

“To God and Country,” the boy answered.

“Damn straight. You’re a good kid, you know that?”

“To follow orders and never question authority.” Walt repeated anything he could remember his father saying about army service.

“Now you’re talking!”

“To boldly go where no man has gone before,” Walt said.

His father laughed, sipped the beer, and returned the can to his crotch. “I borrowed that one, son, but that’s the spirit. You bet it is.” He looked at Walt with a smile: His father never smiled. He put his eyes back on the road. “You remember a lot of the shi-things…I tell you.”

“I try to remember them all,” Walt said proudly.

“You’re a good kid. Have I told you that?”

“Yes, sir, you have. About one minute ago, actually.”

His father chuckled some more. “Just so long as we got it straight between us that this mission is top secret. Even your brother’s not to hear of it. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir!” The idea of Walt knowing something Bobby did not was nearly too much for him to contain. He jittered and jumped around in the front seat-having graduated backseat to front on his ninth birthday. Asked to fetch a second beer from the cooler, he did so, a task that required unfastening his seat belt while the car was moving. He’d never done that before either. This was a day of firsts. It was only while fetching the beer that he noticed an oil-stained towel lying along the backseat. He thought about asking but decided not to.

They drove up the narrow, curving, dangerously steep and precipitous one-lane track to the top of Trail Creek summit. The road was a composition of packed dirt and scree, with no guardrails and drops of a thousand feet or more. Rock walls on the hillside leached water that streamed across the track, cutting muddy ruts into the road bed. His father handled the car poorly. It jumped and skidded as the tires caught in the ruts. More than once, Walt felt they were going over the edge. He rode white-knuckled, his eyes straight ahead, never questioning his superior officer, not even when his father lost control of the car while juggling the beer.