Free Cold Heart by Chandler McGrew

eave,” she agreed.
    “Too fucking late now.”
    “Never too late,” she laughed, watching him stomp off back up the trail to his cabin. “Thank you!”
    Aaron lifted one gauntleted hand over his shoulder but didn't look back.
    “I'll take it!” she shouted without thinking.
    “Take what?” He kept walking.
    “The cabin.”
    He turned.
    “You never asked my price.”
    “I don't care,” she said, thinking of the money from both her parents’ and Wade's insurance policies, gathering dust in some dark bank vault.
    “Take it,” said Aaron, with a thin-lipped smile. “I give it to you.”
    Micky stood in the snow, shaking her head.
    A month later the deed had arrived in her mail.
    In a slash of blue, one of the jays whipped down through the trees and chattered at her and she thought how like a jay Aaron was. All chatter and no bite.
    Another gunshot rang through the still air.
    Just across the creek. Maybe it wasn't Marty or Stan. Maybe El had spotted a bear. They did come out this time of year and rummage around the cabins sometimes. Clive had told her to bang a spoon on a pot to frighten them away— noise bothered the big animals—but most people trusted gunfire better.
    But the grizzlies weren't usually aggressive. Not unless you got between a sow and her cub.
    Micky wondered idly if she should go back and get the Glock just for its noise value. But she was already halfway to the store. She began to whistle and snap her fingers as she walked, anything to let a wandering bear know that she was coming. Next to running from one of the giant beasts, the worst thing you could do was startle one.
    The trail was narrow and twisting, strewn with boulders and still dotted here and there with tufts of crusty snow. Hares usually shot out of the woods as she traversed the path, but today they were strangely shy. She spotted only one, peeping around a grandfather spruce, off to her left, but he swiftly vanished.
    “Nervous, old bunny?” she said. “You know I wouldn't hurt a fly.”
    Maybe the gunshots had the rabbits on edge. Howard MacArthur and most of the other men in the community hunted the big snowshoes for meat but no one hunted this close to her cabin. Still, the animals were savvy enough to know what the sound of gunfire meant to their species.
    “Sorry,” she whispered, speaking to the empty forest. A sudden burst of anxiety thickened the very air around her. She stared at the spot where the hare was hiding.
    She knew exactly what it felt.
    She could sense it quivering, feel its fear.
    To the rabbit, the gunshot would be echoing like cannon fire, the ground beneath its soft pads vibrating with the terror of the explosion. Its tiny nose would be sniffing the air for the intruder, its ears twitching, eyes shifting desperately left and right, every shadow in the forest a portent of impending pain and death.
    And suddenly she felt an intense hatred for the hunters.
    It was an irrational and emotional response that she should be able to reason away with a good walk on this beautiful day. But the shots touched a bad place in her heart, and just as irrationally she felt the fear not dissipating but growing. She had the crazy thought that it wasn't the hare that was in danger.
    It was her.
    Her heart pounded and her breath quickened. Her palms were damp and her mouth was dry.
    She glanced back down the trail behind her, then hurried on.

12:25
    E L SPUN AND FIRED while he was still in mid-sentence, still coaxing Dawn to come out of hiding and give herself up. Now he had his back to her, searching the brush.
    When he fired, she'd ducked instinctively. His sudden movement had disturbed the snarl of branches and now all he had to do was turn around and they would be face-toface.
    She felt like a rabbit.
    The shot still rumbled in her ears and tears leaked from her cheeks into the rock-hard ground beneath her palms.
    What set him off again?
    A noise in the alders?
    A puff of breeze?
    The North Fork was only a few feet