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and didn’t appear to be terribly nervous. He examined the saddles and recognized the initials of some of the vigilantes engraved on them.

    You stupid sons a bitches. What kind of trouble have you gotten yourselves in?

 
     
     
    CHAPTER 7
     
     
    Several yards in front of him Logan was hunched over with the scorching sunlight behind him, staring at something. He slowly raised his head and motioned the sheriff over. Underwood thought he looked like a man who’d just stared death in the face. A swarm of black flies smudged an aura around Logan’s body as he stood waiting, his face cast in blue shadow.
    A stiff breeze kicked past, and Underwood found himself being assaulted by the stench of soured meat spiced with juniper, the perfect buzzard aphrodisiac. The smell of death…
    He covered his nose and forced himself to move forward on resisting legs.
    The body was lying face down. Logan moved aside while Underwood carefully rolled it over and gasped. Grinning up at him was Hemmel’s enormous white skull. All the flesh had been stripped away, leaving behind only the thick black hair on his head and his long peppery beard. Ants dribbled from his empty eye sockets.
    Underwood fell back a few steps. His intestines were roiling like an angry nest of snakes. Before he could think of doing anything else, he had to find a place to relieve himself. He raised his hand silently before turning and heading for a bit of privacy. Logan bit off a plug of tobacco and waited.
    By late afternoon they found the others spread out across the high desert plain. The hardest part for Underwood was seeing Stu hadn’t been spared.
    “Who in God’s name would do this to a boy?” he asked.
    “Horn,” Logan said without hesitation.
    Underwood turned to his partner. Logan’s soldier-worn eyes betrayed no emotion, not even for the faceless boy, a boy who should have never been out tagging along with a group of troublemakers.
    Buzzards screeched above the mutilated bodies still lying where they’d found them. Underwood looked away from the deputy and stared into the distance, wishing at that moment he was with less stoic company. Suddenly he let out a sharp groan, as if he’d been sucker punched in the stomach.
    Glimmering behind the wall of a heat mirage, Jared Horn’s farmhouse loomed before them. It was a trick the desert sometimes played. Waves of heat acted like mirrors, bouncing things around—even sometimes projecting the fading images of the dead or dying. And it always took you by surprise when it happened.
    Underwood rubbed his eyes, looked again and the image was gone. He knew the Horn ranch was still at least an hour’s ride away. If Logan hadn’t been with him, Underwood might have been tempted to turn away, go back to his house and weep in the dark and drink his whiskey. Anything to shed the horrific images that now stuck in his mind and would undoubtedly scar.

 
     
     
    CHAPTER 8
     
     
    Robert had never wanted to take over the family business, but that’s precisely what had happened.
    Once he’d finished high school, he left Portland for a small liberal arts college in upstate New York on a scholarship, to the surprise of everyone. The relatively short period far from home provided some of the most pleasurable moments he’d ever had away on his own. Although his father failed to see any practical use for the pursuit of art and literature, Robert had finally felt free to explore without feeling like someone was constantly looking over his shoulder.
    Not long after he’d started attending classes, he began to imagine himself as a beggar who’d accidentally found an opened door to a gigantic banquet. Dizzy with a real hunger for knowledge, he began filling his pockets and devouring as much as he could. The fear that it wouldn’t last was always lurking in the back of his mind. Instead of spending his evenings handing his father tools in a cold garage after school, he found himself nestled next to a fireplace at the