The second book in the Sun Valley series, 2008

Copyright © 2008 by Ridley Pearson

For Marcelle, Paige, and Storey

Thanks to Gordon Russell for his founding of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, his continuing support, and, most of all, his friendship and his love of the written word.

Special thanks to Blaine County Sheriff Walt Femling, Hope Stevens, R.N., Dr. Phil Tarr, Dr. Paul Hruz, Brad Pearson, and Roger McGuinn for their expertise on subjects ranging from nursing care to Gamma-Scout radiation detectors. Any mistakes are all mine. Thanks, too, to Nancy Litzinger for office management, Robbie Freund at Creative Edge for all the IT solutions, Christine Pepe at Putnam for her diligent and patient editing, as well as Amy Berkower at Writers House and Matthew Snyder at Creative Artists for their representation. Killer View was written using StoryMill word processing software.

HE SAW HIMSELF AS A CAMERA WOULD, AND OFTEN THOUGHT of himself in the third person, as if an omniscient eye were looking down on him and his activities. It was no different that Halloween night, as he prepared the syringes. He talked to himself-out loud- narrating every carefully conceived action, as if reading from a script. He could picture himself as one of those guys on the Discovery Channel or A & E.

“He moves with the utmost care as he makes his preparations, as skilled a technician as he is a hunter…”

The snow was falling to beat hell, which brought a twisted grin to his scrappy face. Virgin snow-the irony not lost on him, although his education had stopped in the ninth grade and irony, per se, was unknown to him. Fresh-fallen snow erased tracks. No one knew this better than a tracker, and, according to the voice-over, he was among the most accomplished trackers in all of Idaho, all of the West, if you excluded Montana, because there were guys up there who could follow wolves for three hundred miles on foot without a dog. Not him. He used his dogs and their radio collars whenever called for.

“The final preparations almost complete, he anticipates the events in the hours to come with near-military precision…”

On that night, he was scheduled for a twofer, a tricky bit of timing and complicated logistics, especially given the storm. He intended to get an early start for just this reason, the narrator in his head reminding him of the importance of meticulous preparation and execution.

He arranged the five darts and two syringes, methodically checking dosages, storing them in two metal lunch boxes, the kind he’d once carried to school, the kind his daddy before him had carried into the mine. This one was lined with a gray foam rubber, not a white napkin or sheet of paper towel. He double-checked the charge on the Taser, was half tempted to test the thing on one of the dogs, as he sometimes did. But with Pepper’s staying behind, plump with a litter, he couldn’t afford to have another one out of commission for the night.

Next came the firearms: the 22-gauge dart rifle; the MAC-10, with its three-speed taped magazines; the double-barreled sawed-off, for under the seat of the pickup. He was careful to separate the Bore Thunder/Flash Bang cartridges from the 12-gauge shot. The flash bangs performed like stun grenades but could be fired from the sawed-off. He kept the right barrel loaded with one of these in case of a run-in with law enforcement; he’d stun the bastard and then shoot him up with some ketamine and leave him by the side of the road, knowing he wouldn’t remember what day it was, much less the make or registration of the truck he’d pulled over.

He attached the magnetic license plates over the pickup truck’s existing ones-a move as routine to him as brushing his teeth-a necessary precaution when working with his private clients. The plates were registered to a similar truck in Bannock County.

He stuffed some fresh chew behind his molars, hawking a gob of spit onto the garage’s dirt floor. Even after being off of crystal meth for six months, at moments like this he found the allure of it tough to resist.

He checked the straps on the wire cages for the dogs. The snow wouldn’t hurt them any, and he was in too big a hurry to trade them out for the vinyl carriers that were better in bad weather. He put only one of the weatherproof carriers in the back, the biggest he had. He double- and triple-checked its electric mat, a black sheet of heavy rubber, a wire from which ran to a 12-volt outlet installed in the side paneling of the truck bed; it was warm to the touch-a good sign.

The specially outfitted carrier was large enough to hold a mastiff or Bernese mountain dog, or a mature sheep.

Beneath his stubble, he carried a hard scar on his chin, looking like a strip of stretched pink leather, the result of a meat hook slipping when transferring a she-cat from the pickup to the dressing shed. He scratched at it, a nervous habit, the result of too many hours with nothing to do. He spent far too much of his life waiting for others, a disappointing aspect of being a work-for-hire.

But now he had purpose, a higher calling.

It was time to put things straight. There were enough assholes in Washington to fill a latrine. It was about time they remembered him and others who believed in their country.

THE MALE CAUCASIAN, TWENTY-FOUR, A SKIER, WAS SAID TO have been missing for over three hours. A man’s panicked voice had made the call to 911: “A friend of mine… He never showed up… We thought we’d accounted for everyone. I have no fricking idea how we missed him but… I think he’s still up there.”

“Calm down, sir.” The county’s ERC operator.

“Calm down? WE LEFT HIM UP THERE. We were skiing the Drop on Galena Pass. He never came off that mountain. He’s out there somewhere. You got to do something.”

Click.

“Sir?”

Blaine County sheriff Walt Fleming had listened to the Emergency Response Center tape several times, trying to judge if it was a prank or not. It wouldn’t be the first time some yahoo had called in a false alarm to Search and Rescue. This one sounded authentic. And hanging up on such calls was, sadly, not that unusual. Guilt could be a powerful motivator. Didn’t need to tell a sheriff that.

A life in the balance.

A snowstorm. A miserable night.

Walt had set Search and Rescue’s phone tree into operation.

Now, standing in blowing snow, in the freezing cold, with only his pale face protruding from the parka, Walt caught his reflection in the glass of a nearby pickup. Where others saw a capable outdoorsman, Walt saw a softness settling in, his desk job taking over. Where others saw a face that could be elected, Walt saw fatigue. No one had ever called him handsome; the closest he’d gotten was “good-looking,” and that from a woman who no longer shared his bed. He blamed his sleepless nights on her: the mental images of her riding his own deputy, Tommy Brandon, flickering through his mind. The two of them laughing. At him. After twelve years of marriage, she’d left him alone with their young twins. And as much as he wouldn’t have it any other way, it wasn’t working. He was failing as a single dad. Barely keeping his head above water as the county sheriff. With the help of only eight full-time deputies, he oversaw law enforcement in a piece of Idaho roughly the size of Rhode Island. Now he faced Galena Summit in a snowstorm when all he wanted was a night playing Uno with his kids, and a decent night’s sleep.