Read Online Trapline by Mark Stevens - Free Book Online

ground.
    Three times she circled the site in concentric circles—ten, twenty, and thirty yards out from where the half-corpse had been found. No drag marks.
    She walked back and forth across the slope that rose up from Lumberjack Camp—hundred-yard-long sweeps. She moved quickly, scanning for anything undisturbed, broken brush or wildflowers.
    Near the northern end of her last sweep, she spotted a set of parallel and faint tracks, subtle indents about three feet long in an exposed patch of dirt. Each was slightly wider than her thumb. The two tracks were about 18 inches apart. Straight, parallel lines. The indents were carved in a layer of loose grit on top of the hard-baked dirt. Something had been rolled or dragged. No tread. The tracks followed the line she would have followed if she was walking uphill and headed to the spot where the half-corpse had been found. She followed down the slope and found another set, even more subtle and only inches long but oriented in the same direction as the first.
    Again back at the first location, she snapped a photo with her cell phone from a variety of angles, but the tracks didn’t have enough relief to show up on her crappy device. One good breeze or rain shower would destroy the tracks. Maybe the detail would emerge once uploaded to a computer. She stared at the tracks, felt her anger rise. From the moment she’d found Gail and the boys at Lumberjack Camp, nothing about this scene had seemed right, no matter what the houndsman claimed.
    She retrieved Sunny Boy and walked him to the edge of the ridge.
    â€œHad about enough?” she asked Sunny Boy. “Eager to get?”
    Sunny Boy shook his mane.
    â€œI know—frustrating, isn’t it?” she said. “But I think what you’re thinking—we’ve got something fishy here.”
    Allison realized the earth had, in fact, maintained its rotational speed and not even this once had put her needs for a bit more daylight over its boringly predictable habits.
    She walked around to Sunny Boy’s uphill side—the easier to climb on—and spotted three riders on horseback heading east to west. They were on the trail that formed the spine of the valley floor far below. Sunlight caught them flush, heightened the detail. Allison dug for her binoculars. She and Sunny Boy were in the shade of the mountains and likely hard to spot. But what did it matter?
    They were almost out of view, rounding a bend in the long flank of the ridge where she was perched. All three horses were nose-to-tail.
    The lead rider wasn’t merely tall or wide, he transformed what appeared to be a regular-size blond sorrel into the stubby runt of the litter. The way he sat on the horse—an odd, uncomfortable-to-watch melding, like he was the first man to ever try it—was painful to watch. His horse would remember this day and Allison hoped it was only one. The middle rider was on a dark bay and the third rode a brown-and-white paint. The third rider carried a rifle with the butt down on his thigh. “It’s archery season, boys,” Allison said out loud. Even if the rifle was replaced by a butterfly net, their energy was dark.
    Riding with a rifle out in the open meant they expected to need it in a hurry and that meant, of course, that it was loaded.
    Three horses, three men, three saddles. They had two hours of daylight left. With some groups in the wilderness, you wouldn’t think twice because they looked ready. That’s really what the woods came down to, b e prepared. These three were ready for nothing but the sun to shine.
    Allison went back to the middle rider—something different about him.
    They were almost out of view. Their pace was steady but unhurried. They hadn’t looked up or around. The middle one looked smaller, even slight. His head slumped forward and his hands grabbed the horn on the saddle. He wasn’t actively riding. His posture suggested defeat and Allison had the