HOWLERS by Kent Harrington Read Free Book Online Page A

friends.
    I’m sure now, sure that it’s coming. I know it, you feel things like that. Feel them in your heart, not your head. We’re there.
    He came back up the stairs with two boxes of .30-30 ammunition and closed the trap door. He went to the cabin’s kitchen table and picked up his rifle. Of all the rifles he owned—and he had scores just in the cabin’s top-floor gun lockers—this was his favorite. He’d gotten it as a gift from his father when he turned thirteen. Still the best kind of brush gun there was, and perfect for deer hunting in the Sierras.
    He slung it over his shoulder and looked at the Christmas tree. He’d kept the lights on, but now it was time to turn them off. He hated that. It would be the last time he would turn off this year’s Christmas tree. It was beautiful. He’d taken a picture with his new iPhone and put it in his computer scrapbook. He had twenty trees in his scrapbook, with comments, things he wanted to add, new lighting schemes.
    He stood for a moment and took it in, found his favorite ornaments. A Santa Claus his mother had made, a gold ball with glitter he’d made in the fourth grade that said 57 on it. There was a crystal reindeer he’d ordered from Germany. Ornaments his sister—who’d married well— had sent him from a fancy store in San Francisco. The glass reindeer caught the electric light and projected a beautiful rainbow.
    Christmas this year had been good. He’d spent hours and hours reloading, adding to his ammo stash sitting across from the tree. He had more than ten thousand rounds of ammo for the FAL NATO-issue machine gun alone.
    He crossed the room and remembered Thanksgiving morning, going out to the field with the snowmobile and racing along. He’d spotted the tree he’d cut months before. He went that morning before going to the Colliers’ for dinner and chopped it down and brought it back to the cabin. He’d even worn the Santa cap he’d bought at the CVS pharmacy in Nevada City.
    Phelps reached down and pulled the plug. The Christmas tree’s lights went dark. It was always painful, he thought, but he reminded himself that it was February. Time to move on.

    Outside, riding his snowmobile, rushing into the wilderness, his .30-30 strapped to his back, Chuck thought how sad it was that people didn’t love winter. He thought they should. We should love all the seasons because the seasons are God. Not their god, the bible thumper’s God. But the God I know is out here. Maybe God would forgive me for what I did over there. I was good at killing people. Maybe too good. Some things you get real good at, he thought. Things you shouldn’t get good at .
    It started to snow hard as he entered the Emigrant Gap wilderness area.

CHAPTER 4

    Quentin realized that it had stopped snowing. He reached for the switch and turned off his windshield wipers. The white snow-covered world outside his patrol car seemed distant. He’d ridden back from breakfast in a kind of daydream, and it was Patty Tyson’s fault. Seeing her had set something loose in him. Their breakfast date had upset his emotional gyroscope; he’d left the Denny’s excited, but wobbly. It had upset his routine, his balance. Stopped snowing and he hadn’t even noticed … Would they have an affair? He wondered how he’d be at affairs now.
    Not a kid anymore. Still, I’m not dead. She is attractive.
    He felt the smooth-warm steering wheel, and without meaning to, felt the warm plastic bumps. He let his fingertips travel over several of them and wondered what it would be like to make love to Patty Tyson. Pretty damn good, probably. 
    The dirty snow-splattered green and white patrol car pulled off the two-lane county road, rocking a little as it left the asphalt and pulled onto the rough gravel road that led, a half-mile down, to his family’s ranch.
    The patrol car passed along the pine trees his great-great-grandfather had planted at the turn of the century. They were massive now, sixty feet,