Lance was surprised. He felt like she could see right through him.

“You want to be able to sleep at night,” she said, “so you come interfering in my life, where you have no business.”

“Those guys you were with,” he said, “they were bad news.”

“Oh, thanks for the tip, Sherlock. You got a team of army detectives working round the clock on that? What gave it away?”

“I want to help you.”

“And what a fine job you’ve done. How am I supposed to go back now? You know what they’ll do to me when they find me?”

“I’ll take care of that.”

“Well everything’s fine then, isn’t it? I’ll quit worrying because you’ll take care of everything.”

Lance didn’t know what to say.

“Those guys will kill you,” she said. “And they’ll mess me up real good too.”

He took a sip of his coffee.

“Yeah,” she said when she saw he had no answer. “Thought so.”

The waitress returned with their food but Sam had lost her appetite.

Instead, she sat and watched Lance eat. He’d lost his appetite too but didn’t know what else to do.

“I thought I could help,” he said.

“You kidnapped me, you psycho.”

“I didn’t kidnap you.”

“You want to help? You know what? Go back to Iraq. Go back to Syria. Do what we spent all that tax money training you to do. Serve your country, asshole.”

He looked down at his plate, shoveling chili methodically, not tasting it.

“Go back,” she said again, louder. “Go back and fight, coward.”

He put his fork down.

“Go back and die there. Like my dad did. Like a real soldier.”

Then she did it. He’d known it was coming. She picked up her mug and threw the coffee in his face. He could have stopped her but didn’t. He owed her that much.

4

Deweyville, Montana was a town of about a thousand people. It hadn’t changed much since its founding by miners and frontiersmen in the eighteen hundreds. Visitors could be forgiven for thinking it was a resort, custom-built to look like an old mining town. It still had a hunting and trapping store, a tobacco store, and a massive wooden statue of a lumberjack in front of the courthouse. The town’s largest building was the old headquarters of the Farmers and Merchants Bank, and was such a fine example of the western commercial architecture style that it was on the national register of historic places.

It was all pretty as a postcard, the kind of place people liked to think small towns were still like, nestled in a mountain valley nine miles south of the Canadian border.

Lance pulled his truck up outside a bar called The Eureka and got out. He was followed by Sam. She hadn’t made a run for it yet, which he took as a positive sign.