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road, into the almost-full Denny’s parking lot. “You hungry?”
    Willis looked at him.
    “I guarantee this will be your last good meal for a while. I’d come in if I were you. I promised your mom I would make sure you had a square meal. If you try to escape, I’ll shoot you. I swear to God, Willis. Do you understand that? I’m not supposed to let you out of the goddamn car, much less take you into Denny’s for a meal.”
    Willis nodded. He felt himself being picked up out of the back in the wind and cold. He felt the handcuffs come off his wrists.
    “Thank you, T.C.,” Willis said.
    “You’re welcome, Willis.” The deputy, much bigger than him, turned him around and they walked toward the restaurant together.
    “Would you really shoot me?” Willis asked. He looked over his shoulder at T.C.. Willis was wearing the clothes his mother had brought him: a clean t-shirt, blue jeans and a heavy Sheriff’s Dept. green nylon coat that Quentin had lent him so he wouldn’t catch cold on the ride.
    “Why, you feeling lucky?” T.C. asked.

CHAPTER 3

    Quentin knew when he opened the car door that his life was going to change. He grabbed the door’s handle, but couldn’t make himself open it.  His eyes fixed on the red Denny’s sign showing through the falling snow. He’d been listening to the chatter on his police radio: Caltrans crews were about to blow a massive snowdrift on Emigrant Gap ridge. He knew that if the drift wasn’t blown, they were risking an avalanche that would close the road connecting Timberline to HHhighway 50, the town’s gateway to the outside world. Caltrans was broadcasting alerts to all police, sheriff departments, and Highway Patrol in the area. Quentin listened to an excited voice on the radio counting down. “Ten, nine, eight.” He switched the radio off.
    You have to go on with your life. You’re only forty. Do you really want to be sitting by the fire alone the rest of your life? Okay, like the commercial says: Just do it.
    He felt the door handle depress, the car door cracked open, a two-year spell broken. The life he’d lived before now—the years with his wife, who had been everything to him—were sucked out into the lightly falling snow. It wasn’t a betrayal; his wife, Marie, was dead after all. He felt the pain of that cold separation one more time nonetheless.
    Time changes everything , he thought.
    Quentin stepped out of his patrol car, slamming the door behind him. He looked up at the face of the Sierra, the sun nowhere to be seen.
    You aren’t dead, you’re alive. So act like it, for Christ’s sake.

       Inside the packed restaurant he nodded to a table of Rotary Club members; the town’s prominent business people and ranchers ate at this Denny’s every Friday morning. The Rotary Club had contributed to all his campaigns over the years. He stopped and shook hands and made the necessary small talk about Founder’s Day, Timberline’s mid-winter holiday celebration that was right around the corner. They asked him about the possible highway closure and Quentin assured them the road would be back open in an hour, in plenty of time for the weekend’s festivities.
    While he shook hands, Quentin searched the big dining room for Patty Tyson, the girl he’d come to meet. He saw her head bent over a newspaper in a booth in the back, along a row of windows with a view of the Emigrant Gap Ranger Station. Quentin lifted his cowboy hat, nervously slipped it off, and shook the last hand at the Rotary’s table. He made a passing joke to the business people, all old-time Timberline residents, about his not having had an opponent in the last election—an embarrassment, he told them with a smile, he was willing to undergo again.
       He left the Rotarians, most of whom he’d grown up with, and walked across the busy dining room. He tried to relax but couldn’t. The butterflies in his stomach rioted as he crossed the restaurant.
    You’re an idiot for doing this. She