Free The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky by Patrick Lee

serving counter. It was eight o’clock at night, the sunlight slanting long and red from the northwest.
    He stopped at the road, a hundred feet from the restaurant. Paige was stirring in his arms, jostled by the run but unable to regain consciousness. Her breathing had developed a rattle in the past two hours. Sometimes she took a deep breath and sounded like she was choking for a second before getting past it.
    Travis studied the patrons as well as he could at this distance. They looked harmless enough—to the extent he could judge it.
    There was every reason to expect trouble from Paige’s enemies here, the one place where their arrival could have been predicted—and predicted well in advance. The only advantage the town offered was its limited size: there was simply no place where the enemy could have set up a stakeout without attracting attention. No sprawling parking lots to conceal a van. No residential side streets, either. The one place in town where a person might sit for a few hours without drawing looks was the restaurant in the lodge, but if the hostiles’ reinforcements were anything like the ones Travis had seen at the camp—foreign nationals armed with halting English—then blending in that way would be off the table as well.
    Granted, they probably had the connections to send someone who didn’t stick out so much, and they’d had a day and a half now to do it, but even at that, Coldfoot was just not a place where outsiders lingered. Truckers heading north to Prudhoe Bay might stop for a meal, and the occasional van full of tourists might spend the night, but nobody hung around. Coldfoot was a stop on a long road that went to exactly one place. It was nobody’s endpoint.
    No, if there were watchers here, they were in concealment high above town. Travis swept his eyes over the encircling ridges; there were so many pine and alder groves it wasn’t worth scrutinizing any one in particular. Either they were there, or they weren’t. If they were, then trouble would arrive long before help, and it would simply have to be dealt with. The 9mm pistol from the hostiles’ camp, the only weapon he’d brought along, felt reassuring in his back waistband, his shirt draped loosely over it.
    He crossed the highway and jogged the last distance over the gravel lot, past his own Explorer, two Jeeps, and a yellow Land Rover. When he was thirty feet from the building, a big guy in a John Deere hat inside saw him coming, looked confused for a second, and then ran to shove the door open and meet him.
    “What happened?” the man shouted.
    Behind him, the others had forgotten the ball game and were on their feet, staring through the windows as Travis ran up.
    He had the abridged version of the story well rehearsed, and the stress in his delivery would simply be genuine.
    “I found her in a valley west of here,” he said, hearing his own voice for the first time in twenty hours and finding it convincingly ragged. No doubt his appearance matched it.
    The big guy held the door aside as Travis stepped through, and the gathered patrons reacted as one to the sight of Paige’s arm; it couldn’t have been much worse if he’d brought a corpse into their midst. A blonde woman who’d come from behind the counter—Molly, according to her shirt—choked down most of a scream, stepping back and knocking over a wire newspaper stand.
    Then everyone was talking, a short woman with her hand on her mouth, her eyes going from Paige to Travis and narrowing, maybe judging, the big guy in the hat coming around from the door now, reacting hard at the sight of the clamps, asking what in the holy fuck they were—
    “This is how I found her,” Travis said over them all. “She hasn’t spoken, I don’t know who the hell did this. I don’t know anything, just call it in, okay? How fast can the cops and paramedics get up here?”
    That last bit was for the locals’ benefit only—he had no intention of waiting around for police or