Nolan: Return to Signal Bend (24 page)

Ten years ago—probably closer to eleven now—was when his father was killed. “This is about Havoc?”

Her father’s eyes showed the surprise he wouldn’t let his face show.

Which answered her question—and made a slew more, none of them with answers she had any way of getting. So she turned her attention back to what she did know. “Daddy, he’s hurting. He’s kept all these broken parts of his heart together with nothing but willpower for a long time. I think me—us—him loving me, me loving him, I think he doesn’t know how to deal with feeling so much. He’s afraid of losing it. He just needs not to feel alone.”

“I know. But this is bigger than him.” Her father pulled her snugly into his arms. “I love you, baby flower. You have a huge, good heart. But Nolan chose this path. All we can do is wait and see how it plays out.”

“Daddy, I love him.”

He squeezed her even more tightly, tucking her head under his chin. “I know. He should have known it, too.”

She didn’t like the tense he’d used in that sentence. “You don’t think he’ll come home?”

“I don’t know, flower. I don’t know. But, Iris, he left. I understand he’s going through some changes, but he knew what he was leaving, and he knew what he was facing. He knew the risks, he knew he put other people at risk, and he made the choice. What happens next falls on his shoulders.”

She thought it was far too soon to write Nolan off so completely, but she didn’t say it. Her father was angry; calm as he was, she could tell that he was furious, but she wasn’t sure if it was
at
Nolan or
for
him—or maybe both. There was danger, for Nolan and for the club. But whatever Nolan had done, if he’d turned away from the Horde, then he’d believed he had no other choice.

And he would come home. He had to come home. He would come home, and then everything would be okay.

So she would wait.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Fuck, he was homesick.

The burner sat heavily in his pocket. Its call history remained empty; every time Nolan had gotten or made a call, he’d cleared it out, in case it fell into the wrong hands. But all he wanted to do now was dial Iris.

He wouldn’t, though, even if he’d been in any kind of range for service. Not until he could tell her he was coming home. Not until this was done. If he was still alive then, if he was free, then he’d call and see if she still wanted him.

He figured they’d told her something to keep her from worrying, but he doubted they’d told her enough to make her understand. He didn’t think anybody but he could understand, and sometimes even he was a little muddy on why this was so necessary.

Nacto had not been kidding when he’d described the off-road terrain as ‘rough.’ Traveling the way he was, keeping his lowest possible profile, Nolan had hiked the last ten miles of road, leaving in a gravel lot the loaner bike Nacto had given him. His Ironhead was still in Bismarck. He hoped.

He followed the rest of the road on foot and turned into the wilds when that road degenerated from paved to graded gravel to dirt, to ruts, to weeds. Now he was far beyond the reach of human sight, unless there was a satellite in the sky tracking him.

Not an impossible notion, that. Often he looked up and wondered.

But Nolan kept to the cover of trees has much as he could, struggling through the deep undergrowth of forest that might well have never seen human feet before. It was slow going—but not so slow as traversing a wide plain of huge rounded boulders had been.

It was going to take him two full days, maybe more, to clear the twenty-five miles to Vega’s cabin.

But if he could get there, it was a good bet that there would be no other human besides him and Vega for dozens of miles, and Vega wouldn’t be due to check in again in Winnipeg for another two weeks and change.

Nolan had a good chance to get this done clean. Because the Horde
did
have his back.

Here on the first night, Nolan hunkered into his sleeping bag and stared through the canopy of trees to a sky teeming with sparkling stars. He slapped at his neck—the mosquitoes were ferocious out here. He rubbed his hand over his pocket, where his useless burner rested alone. He missed Iris. And he missed his little star on its cord.

Fuck, he was homesick.

~oOo~

Vega’s cabin was tucked into a little glade, almost a narrow alley between two dense sections of forest. Nolan had had to come up much closer than comfort allowed in order to be sure of what he was seeing; the forest was too thick with old growth, and the light on this overcast day too diffuse, for him to be sure the greying logs that made up the walls of the cabin weren’t simply more trees.

As hideaways went, it was, in Nolan’s greenhorn opinion, a stellar example, blending into its surroundings as if it had been built for stealth. Maybe it had.

Nolan’s next problem was figuring out how to keep himself unseen.

Tommy, ex-Navy, had given him camo face paint and a couple of his old uniforms; since he’d set out on this mission, Nolan had felt like he was playing war games, or channeling one of the survivalist kooks who lived out in places like this. He didn’t know if Canada had survivalist kooks, though. Canadians seemed pretty sane, overall. In comparison.

But being clad in camouflage and actually
being camouflaged
were, as Tommy had repeated over and over, not the same thing. Nolan had to find a place where he could be still and quiet and see what he needed to see.

Someplace close. He only had his handguns: his Sig and a Glock Len had given him, with a suppressor. The consensus had been that a sniper rifle, or even a hunting rifle, would have been preferable, but Nolan had never fired a sniper before, and he’d had no good, inconspicuous way of carrying a rifle until he’d made it to the end of the road.

So he was going to have to get pretty close to get the job done.

He was okay with that. He wanted to be facing the man who’d killed his father when he shot him repeatedly in the gut.

Ideally, he wanted to be close enough to open him up with his blade.

For now, though, he simply needed to find a place to watch—and soon. It was getting dark, and he had only natural light to work with. Once he found a good location, he could use the night vision binoculars he’d picked up in Springfield.

A thin curl of aromatic smoke wafted up through the little aluminum chimney that poked up in the middle of the roof, and he detected the faint scent, under the wood, of blended spices and meat. Vega was in there. Nolan backed up, trying to keep his attention on all three-hundred-sixty degrees around him, and set his task to finding a blind.

~oOo~

For most of the night, Nolan sat in his little nest and watched the amber glow that lit one window in the cabin, the endless itching of his bug bites keeping him awake and alert. Once in a while, he’d see a shimmer of shadow break up the glow. With clouds heavy overhead, the night became pitch black, and only that single, yellow rectangle assured Nolan he hadn’t gone blind.

Vega never came out of the house, not even before the dark had fallen. Already, Nolan was restless. His quarry was only fifty feet away, and here he sat, alone in the cold dark. There was no one around—why not just go to the house? Face him and kill him. Just like that.

It had been his first plan. But his brothers had told him he was an idiot. He couldn’t know what was inside that cabin, what protections Vega might have. Vega knew he was a marked man, and he knew the people after him were the baddest of the bad. The whole place could have been booby-trapped.

The plan was to catch Vega outside, unawares.

So Nolan burrowed into his military jacket and waited. When the glowing window finally went dark, he let his eyes close and sought sleep.

~oOo~

The sun came up from the horizon into a clear, bluing sky, and birdsong filled the woods before the dawn was warm. Nolan woke, oriented himself, stretched, scratched, and rolled to his knees, easing deeper into the woods before he stood to find a place to take a piss. He had to take the risk that Vega wouldn’t pick those few minutes to finally creep out into the world, because he was going to wet himself otherwise.

Once back in his blind, he pulled a protein bar from his pack, and one of the collapsible water bottles as well.

Nolan wasn’t, as a rule, an outdoorsman. He spent a lot of time outdoors, and he’d walked through his fair share of woods and fields. He’d gone hunting a few times with Show and Len, and fishing a couple of times with Len. But hunting and fishing, though they sounded active, were really about being still, and Nolan hated that. He was too restless in his spirit and his body for sitting and waiting.

Waiting for Vega to show himself, Nolan struggled hard against his nature. He wanted to make something happen, but he was trying to do this right. He wanted to go home, and he didn’t want to bring trouble with him. This thing he was doing—it was about putting trouble to rest. Finishing his unfinished business.

He heard a strange sound, like a grunt, behind him and went still. There were apparently bears and moose in these woods, among other things. Nolan hadn’t yet seen anything more threatening than a deer, but what he’d heard behind him, he thought, sounded bear-like. He heard a rustle of movement and was glad he’d just pissed, because otherwise, he’d have just pissed.

Turning his head in tiny fractions of an arc, he finally saw a brown bear and a cub, at about eight o’clock. Brown, not black. And big. Holy fuck. A grizzly?

The mama bear—he supposed it would have to be a mama bear; his memory of National Geographic Channel programming said that papa bears didn’t really hang around to be good role models—sniffed deeply at the tree where Nolan had pissed. She took in big, deep whiffs of the bark and then made that grunting growl.

Fuck. Even after Nacto’s explanation of what the woods up here held, Nolan had not factored into his calculations the idea that he might die by bear attack. He sat tight and breathed as steadily and slowly as he could, defying the alarm bell that his heart had become.

Mama bear took another whiff, made another protest of the information she’d taken in, and then lifted off her front paws—‘paws’ was a much too innocuous word for those supper plates rimmed with scimitars—and snarled, her muzzle twisting with menace. She roared fully, and her cub made a sound like a practice roar.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. If she was scenting him, fifteen feet away, he was dead.

Mama swung her massive brown head to and fro, her nose in the air. Then she dropped to all four paws and looked right at him. She yelled again, stretching her neck out as she did. A long rope of saliva dripped from her teeth.

A lone thought skated through the terrified wasteland of his mind: she sounded like Chewbacca.

He was going to die. There would be no vengeance for Havoc. Karma or fate or whatever was intervening here. Nolan wondered if he’d been wrong after all about the righteousness of this hunt.

But then she turned and shoved her cub toward the opposite direction, and they simply ambled off, Mama’s huge brown butt rocking back and forth.

Nolan stayed frozen in place until she was well away, and he could no longer see her for the trees between them. Then he sagged forward, dropping his head almost to his crossed legs. There he remained until his heart found its regular beat and his head no longer seemed at risk of exploding.

“Jesus fuck,” he muttered aloud and then chuckled to himself.

He didn’t know why she hadn’t attacked. She’d seen him; she must have. Maybe being so still had made it clear that he was no threat to her or her baby. Whatever it was, Nolan was glad.

Aware that his attention had been turned too long from the cabin, still fighting his body’s adrenaline-fueled demand that he just get up and run, he swiveled back to face his target.

Standing about twenty feet away, staring right at him, was David Vega. Nolan had never met the man, but he’d seen photographs. This Vega was older and rougher, with long, tangled hair and a bushy beard, but Nolan still knew him.

He bore a big compound bow. It was nocked, drawn, and aimed. Right at Nolan.

Nolan had that much time—enough to know what would happen—and then it happened.

Strangely, he thought he heard the whistle of the arrow through air at the same time that it punched into his chest.