"We're going to watch the gate," Cole said, without preamble, the way he always did when he had already made a decision and was now telling Ethan the shape of it. "Mara's idea, and it's a good one. If they try the old code, the system logs it. If they try anything else, she'll be in position to see it. You stay in the cabin. You keep the cameras running. You do not go down there."
"I wasn't planning to," Ethan said.
"I know," Cole said. "That's why I'm telling you instead of asking. You've done the hard part already, Ethan. You kept your head the first night. Keep it now."
Ethan thought about the shotgun in the cabinet, checked once, set aside once, unloaded and returned that first night, and never taken out since. He had not needed it then, and he did not need it now. What he needed was a record that would hold up when Linda Mercer said, as she surely would, that this was all a misunderstanding about drainage.
"We'll watch," Cole said. "And we'll wait."
Chapter 24
Deputy Mara Ellison had learned stakeouts the way most young deputies learn them: by being told they were boring, and then by discovering that boring was the point. Boring meant you were early. Boring meant you were ready. Boring meant that when something finally happened, you were not scrambling to catch up with it.
She parked where Cole had told her to park, off the county road, behind a stand of lodgepole pine thick enough to break up the shape of the patrol vehicle and far enough from Ethan Walker's gate that her headlights would not sweep it. She had a thermos, a radio turned low, a camera with a long lens mounted where she could reach it without fumbling, and a second camera already fixed to a tree near the gate, recording on its own loop. Ethan's own cameras were live too, and Mara had made a point of checking them before dark, not because she doubted them but because she liked to know exactly what each lens could see.
The first night of the watch was quiet. A deer crossed the county road at dusk. An elk called somewhere far off. At 2:13 a.m. Mara glanced at her watch out of habit โ she had read Ethan's timeline, and the number had stayed with her โ and then she shook her head at herself for the superstition of it. Nothing happened. At dawn she packed up, drove to Hamilton, filed a short report that said, in effect, nothing to report, and went home to sleep.
The second night was quiet until it wasn't.
Mara had been watching the gate through the long lens for most of the evening, checking the keypad light, the lock, the gravel where Ethan's road met the county road. At 1:47 a.m. a vehicle came up the county road without headlights, slow, and stopped just short of where the headlights would have caught the gate camera. Mara sat up straighter. She did not reach for the radio yet. She reached for the camera.
Two men got out. Even in the dark, even at that distance, she could see the shape of what they were wearing โ dark jackets, reflective vests, the same kind of vests she had seen in Ethan's first-night video. One of them walked to the keypad with the easy confidence of a man who expected it to work. The other stayed by the gate, holding something long and thin against his leg.
Mara watched through the lens as the first man punched in a code. She could not see the numbers from where she sat, but she did not need to. She knew what the gate would do. The new code was different. The old code โ the one the propane driver had used six days before the first intrusion, the one someone in a Pine Ridge patrol vehicle had filmed him entering โ was dead.
The keypad light blinked red. The gate did not move.
The man tried again, slower this time, as if the first failure had been his own mistake. Red again. He stepped back and said something to the second man, too low for Mara to hear, and the second man lifted the thing he had been holding. In the lens it resolved into bolt cutters.
Mara's hand was steady on the camera. She had been trained not to narrate to herself in moments like this, but she noted everything anyway, the way she had been trained to note it: time, 1:52 a.m.; two males; dark jackets, reflective vests; attempt to enter code twice, failed; second male now at the lock with cutting tool; first male looking up and down the road.
She keyed the radio, quiet and clear. "Sheriff, this is Ellison. We have activity at the Walker gate. Two subjects. Old code failed twice. They are attempting to cut the lock now."
Cole's voice came back at once. "Hold position. Do not approach alone. I'm rolling units."
Mara did not need to be told. She kept filming as the bolt cutters closed on the lock hasp and the man leaned his weight into them. The metal groaned but did not give โ the new lock was heavier than the old one, and Delgado had insisted on that when the cameras were upgraded โ and the man repositioned the cutters and tried again. Sparks were not visible, but the effort was. His shoulders shook with it. The other man kept watch, turning his head toward the county road, then back toward the gate, then toward the trees where Mara sat unseen.