Max was about to start down the hill when the crack of a distant gunshot froze him in his tracks.

CHAPTER 61

By Reed’s best guess, he should have been able to see the blue of a lake in the distance, yet he saw only trees. Loon Lake, a twenty-five-hundred-acre body of water, fed the river that they would cross to get into Canada. He took off his backpack and tried to get his bearings as he waited for Spud and Pip. Reed pulled the gun and binoculars from his pack and walked to a stone slab at the top of the ridge to get a better view, looking first to the northern horizon. It took a moment, but he spied a touch of blue peeking through the trees in a valley ahead of them. Loon Lake. The tightness in his chest lifted.

Spud carried Pip to the top of the ridge and set the boy down, taking off his pack and using it as a seat for them both. Two peas in a fucking pod.

Reed hadn’t woken up when Pip left the tent the night before to sneak off to Spud’s side. That Pip would choose Spud over him made Reed want to crush Spud’s skull. He would do it with a stone, right in front of the boy. That would teach his son to be hard, prepare him for the tough world that awaited them. He had put up with the boy’s softness to the point that Reed felt he might break.

Reed looked to the sky, the sun farther to the west than he would have liked. There were no search planes—a good sign. No planes meant that no one was looking for them yet. But how could that be? Something about that didn’t add up.

He lifted the binoculars again and looked to the hills behind him.

Someone had put a phone in the box with Pip’s toy car. Who? A cop? No. A cop would have gotten a warrant for a real tracker, and they would have wired it to the battery of Spud’s car. So it wasn’t a cop, which meant that someone else had broken into Spud’s house to pull off that stunt.

Lyle? It had to be.

But Lyle knew about Reed’s escape up the Sioux Hustler Trail the last time Reed had been a fugitive. If Lyle was behind the phone in the car trick… why hadn’t he sent out a search plane?

As he scanned the southern horizon, a flicker of light on the ridge caught his eye.

Reed stepped behind a tree to hide as he tried to find it again. He waited… and there it was, a glint of light, brief but unmistakable, sunlight ricocheting off glass. He held the binoculars against the tree trunk to steady them. With his middle finger he rolled the focus wheel to get a fix on the hill. At first he saw nothing, but then it moved—a man, standing on the ridge. Reed got down on his belly, elbows on the ground. Not just one man, but two.