Plaster showered on them as the bat thudded to the floor. Fortin’s momentum drove him into Lyle, tackling him through the doorway, into the darkness, off the landing, and onto the ground where he rolled him to his stomach and handcuffed him.

Trudy pulled Daisy to her, both of them sobbing. Starner comforted his wife. Fortin locked the bat in his trunk along with a rifle he’d found in Lyle’s pick-up. Lyle sat statue-still in the back of the patrol car. Fortin was satisfied no one was hurt badly, but called for an ambulance. Then he stared up at the night sky, letting his heart rate return to normal as constellations wheeled by.

That’s how it was out here.

-Chapter 2-

Lone Tree stood at the edge of the immense prairie where the Rocky Mountains rise from the earth, a windswept town in a near empty corner of southern Alberta, across the border from Montana.

You could go a long way before seeing another soul, for this is where the sky met the land on even terms, where the landscape exaggerated, or diminished, your place in the world. If you were lucky, trouble would never find you here. If you weren’t, this was your battleground, Fortin thought, as he guided his patrol car deeper into the rain and the darkness where Trudy Dolan had again called for help.

Hang on, Trudy. I’m getting closer, almost there.

Tonight he was the only cop on duty to cover an area nearly the size of Delaware. The handful of Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers posted to Lone Tree worked rotation shifts. Fortin was three hours into his seventh straight all-nighter and it seemed like he was the only living thing in this part of the world, until red eyes blazed in his rain-streaked headlights. He dropped his speed to let three mule deer prance across the road in front of him. Then a small one, a straggler, appeared in his path and froze. Fortin stopped. His high beams locked onto its eyes. They were wide with fear, as if telegraphing a warning.

A sense of foreboding shivered through him. He tapped his horn. The deer flinched then fled.

Fortin drove on, accelerating.

To the west, his jurisdiction bordered the Big Diamond Creek First Nation. To the south was Montana. In the East, his zone encompassed a sprinkling of villages, settled by American and European immigrants in the early 1900s, a God-fearing region of ranches and farms that produced barley, canola, and wheat. Not much crime. You got traffic deaths, drunken drivers and bar fights, and a few domestics.

He’d requested this posting as a career move but that wasn’t the only reason. There was something unspoken about the beauty of the land that had drawn him here. Maybe it was the majesty of the snowcapped Rockies but something comforting, even something spiritual, made him believe that he was meant to be here.