Night of Thunder

So far, so good-Miko had a rhythm and a patience that even a generally stoic animal like a horse could feel and love. She had magical ways, or so Bob believed, and he would have gladly given up the other hip-or anything-for Miko.

Gracefully, she took a jump, without a twitch to her posture, a tightness to her spine, a twist to her landing.

“That was a good one, sweetie,” he called.

“I know, Daddy,” she responded, and he smiled a bit, wiped his brow, then looked up at a flash of movement too fast for good news and saw Julie coming from the house. He knew immediately something was wrong. Julie never got upset; she’d stitched up enough cut-open Indian boys on the reservation where she’d run a clinic for ten years, and kept her head around blood and pain and emotional upheaval and the occasional death. So if she was upset, Bob knew immediately it could be only one thing: his other daughter, Nikki.

“Sweetie,” he called before Julie reached him, wanting to bring Miko in before the bad news arrived and he lost contact with reality, “you come on down now, just for a second.”

“Oh, Daddy, I-”

He turned to Julie.

“I just got a call from Jim Gustofson, the managing editor of Nikki’s paper-”

Bob felt constriction through his heart and lungs, as if his respiratory system had just blown a valve and was leaking fluid. His knees went weak; he’d seen violent death, particularly as inflicted upon the young and innocent, in both hemispheres, and he had a bleak and terrifying image of disaster, of his daughter gone, of his endless, terrible grief and rage.

“What is it?”

“She was in some kind of accident. She went off the road out in the mountains, ended up in some trees.”

“Oh, Christ, how is she?”

“She’s alive.”

“Thank God.”

“She was conscious long enough to call 911 and give her location. They got to her soon enough, and her vital signs were good.”

“Is she going to be all right?”

“Mommy, what’s wrong?”

“Nikki’s been in an accident, honey.”

It killed Bob to see the pain on his younger daughter’s face; the child reacted as if she’d been hit in the chest by a boxer. She almost crumpled.

“She’s in a coma,” Julie said. “She’s unconscious. They found her that way, with minor abrasions and contusions. No paralysis, no indications of serious trauma, but the whiplash must have put her out, and then she hit her head hard, and her eyes are blackened, and she’s still out.”

“Oh, God,” said Bob.

“We have to get out there right away.”

Yet even as Julie said that, Bob knew it was wrong. His oldest and darkest fear came out of its cave and began to nuzzle him with a cold nose, looking him over with yellow eyes, blood on its breath and teeth.

“I’ll go. I’ll leave soon as I can get a flight. You book me on the Internet, then call me as I head to Boise for the flight out.”

“No. No, I will see my daughter. I will not stay here. We’ll all go. Miko has to see her too.”

“Come over here,” he said, and when he drew her away from the child, he explained.

“I’m worried this could be linked to something I’ve done to someone. It’s a way to get me out-”

“Bob, not everything-”

“Not everything’s about me, but you have no idea of some of the fixes and the places I’ve been. You have no idea who might be hunting me. You have a scar on your chest, and memories of months in the hospital when that fellow put a bullet into you.”

“He put it into me because of me, not you.”

It was all so long ago, but he remembered hearing the shots and finding her, almost bled out, along the trail, Nikki screaming, another man dead close by.

“I don’t say it’s my business,” he said. “But I can’t say it ain’t. And I can’t operate if I’m thinking all the while about your safety and Miko’s. I have to recon this alone. If it’s safe, I’ll let you know.”

It was gunman’s paranoia, he knew it. All the boys felt it, all the mankillers, good, bad, or indifferent. At a certain age, faces come to you unbidden, and you can’t place them quite, but it’s your subconscious reminding you of this or that man you took down and you think: Did he have brothers, parents, cousins, friends, peers, colleagues? Maybe they were as savaged by that unknown man’s death as he had been by the deaths of those he’d known himself, like Julie’s first husband, Donnie Fenn, such a good young man, the best, his chest torn open by the same sniper who put the bullet into Julie. Bob remembered, I killed the sniper.

But maybe the sniper’s brother was here and couldn’t get at Bob in Idaho where Bob had friends and family and knew the land and where all the creeks were, so he figured out how to draw him onto unfamiliar land, and maybe it was his pleasure to see the pain on Bob’s face by taking his family first, one by one, first Nikki, then Julie, then Mi-