Last Lie by Stephen White Read Free Book Online

took off down the hill. Because she hadn't yet proven herself qualified to act as Emily's deputy, Fiji was haltered and leashed. Truth be told, Fiji wasn't even yet Girl Scout material. The Havanese was still a puppy, if not in size--the vet assured us that she was approaching her full weight of a dozen pounds--certainly in temperament.
    She was a bit of a nut. Intellectually, we hoped she still had some maturing to do. Though we were no longer holding out hope for a canine Einstein, we were praying for something more cognitively complex than what we'd seen so far. Jonas kept telling us that the dog had hidden smarts. I kept hoping he was right.
    For almost a month, Fiji had spent every determined moment of our daily late evening walks sniffing for prairie dogs. After a solitary surprise encounter in the open with one of the critters--the two mammals, Cuban puppy and Great Plains prairie dog, had a precious moment nose-to-nose before the prairie dog went all subterranean on her--Fiji reached a couple of impetuous conclusions about life in the Boulder Valley. She decided that prairie dogs were as ubiquitous as dirt and that they were as dangerous as the devil.
    The first conclusion had some truth to it. There were plenty of prairie dog colonies in our neck of the nonwoods of Boulder County. But dangerous? Not so much, at least not to humans. Well over a century of Western history had proven that livestock legs and prairie dog tunnels were most definitely not a match made in heaven. Occasional plague was another small risk from the colonies, sure. But from my perspective of many years in the valley, prairie dogs were more of a nuisance than they were a danger.
    Our little Havanese, bred to protect Cuban chickens from Cuban foxes, begged to differ. That evening's search-and-destroy mission had Fiji checking at the roots of some dry grasses at the base of the accumulated loose dirt that multiple passes by graders and snowplows had left piled on each side of the lane. Since I was significantly more copacetic about burrowing rodents than was the dog--but please don't get me started on wasps and yellow jackets--I was content to meander along the edge of the eastern rim of the dirt and gravel path while catching up on my e-mails.
    Fiji's retractable leash dangled from one of my hands. The dog's lead was at maximum extension, stretching across the lane between the amusingly paranoid Havanese and me. My other hand held my cell phone.
    I was walking north. An hour or so before, a solid wind had begun blowing out of Wyoming. One of the perks of living in the vicinity of Colorado's Front Range is that compass directions are easy to discern. If the Rocky Mountains are on your left--as a landmark, they are nigh on impossible to miss from a distance of seventy blocks--north is the direction you're walking. Since north is also where Wyoming is, the insistent gusts from the Wind River Range were blowing into my face. I was forcing my chin down near my chest in a futile effort to keep dust from my eyes.
    I was already thinking that night's walk with the dogs would be abbreviated. Although the sky was clear above the Rockies, the harsh chill in the wind and the unpleasant tang in my nose--northern gusts carried the unmistakable scent of the big stockyards near Greeley--suggested we might have a dusting of snow by morning.
    Because the northern wind was so boisterous, my ears didn't even register the advent of the siren crackle of tires rolling on gravel behind me, from the south. The first thing I heard that announced any impending danger was the scream of a woman's voice: "Eric! Oh my God, there's--Your lights! Lights! Lights!" Then, as the van passed, "Oh my--Did you--"
    The driver of the van--Eric, I presumed--didn't flick on the lights until his vehicle was almost fifty yards farther down the road, a fraction of a second after he was into the kind of not-so-subtle bend that drivers typically don't like to be surprised by in the dark on