Part 6
Three days later I buried Scout on the hill behind my house, where the trees opened toward Blackwater. The press called him a hero. I wrote only SCOUT, ALSO CALLED MAX, SEARCH DOG on the cedar marker, because I thought a working dog might prefer the truth to a grand sentence.
The house was quieter than it had been before I bought him. His bowl remained by the porch wall. Mud from his paws had dried in the grooves of the floor, and I could not bring myself to scrub it out.
At sunset the gate creaked. Frank Dobbs came up the path leaning on a branch cut for a cane. One arm was strapped against his chest; a dirty bandage circled his head. He looked like a man assembled from what the woods had declined to keep.
“You got coffee,” he asked, “or did the reporters drink it all?”
I reached him before his knees gave way. He had been grazed by a bullet and knocked unconscious. Scout drew the gunmen away long enough for Frank to crawl into the side tunnel. He had hidden in river reeds until the raid ended, afraid Cole still had people inside the county response.
I cleaned the wound as well as I could and made him drink broth. He submitted to both with the bad grace of a man who had spent his life giving orders at emergencies. When I said I was calling an ambulance, he caught my wrist with his good hand.
“After Cole,” he said. “If Shaw arrives first, fine. If Cole reaches the river road first, he’s in Idaho by daylight.”
“Why didn’t you go to a hospital?”
“Had one thing left to learn.” Frank sat on the porch step, breathing through pain. “Cole didn’t run far. He came back to his lodge last night. There’s a floor safe the state team missed. Cash, passports, whatever a man like that saves for the day money quits protecting him.”
Frank took a pistol from inside his coat and set it between us.
“I’m going,” he said. “For Scout. For Eli. For seven years I poured into a bottle because I was afraid to admit I let Price turn me around.”
I looked at the marker under the pine. Anger offered a clean road: walk into that lodge, kill Travis Cole, call it justice. The dog in the ground had done something harder. He had protected life.
“We bring him out breathing,” I said. “Or I don’t go.”
Frank’s jaw tightened. After a moment, he nodded.
Before we left, I used the landline to call Daniel Shaw. His voicemail answered. I told him Cole was at the Blackwater lodge and that Frank and I were going because a river access road could put Cole across the state line before officers reached the mountain. I left the porch light on as a marker.
I also called June next door and asked her to try Shaw every ten minutes until she reached a person. She demanded to know whether I had finally lost my mind. I told her probably, then gave her the lodge coordinates from Frank’s map. It was not the behavior of two heroes setting out for vengeance. It was the best poor substitute we had for a plan.
We approached the damaged lodge on foot after midnight. Police tape snapped from the gate. One downstairs window showed the weak orange tremble of a lantern.
The yard still bore the raid: splintered doors, tire ruts, evidence flags left where shell casings had been collected. Cole had returned to a place stripped of its protection because he trusted hidden money more than any person still loyal to him. Through a gap in the curtain I saw him kneeling over lifted floorboards with a duffel open beside him.
Frank circled toward the rear while I stayed near the front steps with my hunting rifle lowered. Ten minutes passed. Glass broke inside, then a man shouted.
“You’re dead. They said you were dead.”
A gunshot cracked through the house.
I entered to find Travis Cole on the floor of a wrecked living room, one hand gripping a duffel bag stuffed with cash, the other holding a pistol toward Frank. The polished candidate from the billboards was gone. His shirt was filthy, his beard patchy, his eyes loose with exhaustion.
Frank stood in the kitchen doorway, bleeding through his bandage but upright.
“How did you sleep, Travis?” he asked. “Did Roy Talbot ever let you get through a whole night? Did Eli?”
“I saved that boy,” Cole said. “He would have died the first winter without me.”
“You put him there.”
Cole shoved the duffel toward us. Bundled bills spilled over the floor. “Take it. Both of you. There’s enough to disappear.”
“Can it give his mother back the seven birthdays you stole?” I asked. “Can it make him sleep without a cave around him?”
Cole swung the pistol toward Frank. The shot tore wood from the doorframe beside his head.
I fired once. Cole dropped with a wound through his gun arm, the pistol skidding beneath an overturned chair. I stepped toward him, every image of the cave tightening my finger against the trigger.
Cole looked up from the floor. Fear had reduced him to pleading, but even then he spoke as though his survival were the practical center of every life in the room.
“Call an ambulance,” he gasped. “You can’t let me bleed.”
The request struck me because Eli, half-starved in a hole, had asked first whether we meant to kill him. Cole assumed rescue was his due.
Frank caught the barrel and pushed it down.
“No, Graham.” His voice was rough, but the rage had gone out of it. “Death lets him leave early. He sits in court. He hears what he did. He lives with a number on his door and every night he remembers why.”
I lowered the rifle.
We bound Cole’s wrists with a torn curtain and waited on the porch. First light thinned the trees. Frank sat with his injured arm against his ribs, looking toward the ridge where Scout was buried.
“He knew he wasn’t coming out of that cave,” Frank said. “When we left your house, he held my hand in his mouth. Never did that before.”
Sirens climbed the access road. Frank listened until they were close, then set the pistol on the step and moved both hands into view.
For the first time in seven years, he did not ask for a drink.
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇