Strange Country by Deborah Coates Page A

horses down, and you know what happened to the other one. I needed something to haul feed. It was cheap.”
    The “little pickup” was a three-quarter-ton Dodge with a special power train package and towing hardware. The other pickup, four doors with a dual-rear axle, had been totaled back in November when Brett had plowed it into a Humvee sitting in the middle of a road that had been completely empty a second earlier. It wasn’t as if Brett couldn’t afford something better than the rusty pickup sitting in Hallie’s yard; it was that, for the most part, she didn’t care.
    “Are you busy?” Brett asked, nodding toward Beth’s car. “I can go. I thought I’d stop to see how Boyd was doing. And your dad.”
    Hallie snugged the collar of her jacket up around her ears. “Come on inside,” she said. She couldn’t remember if Brett had ever met Beth or not. She was pretty sure Brett knew Lily had a sister and that neither Hallie nor Boyd had seen her since November.
    “So how is Boyd doing?” Brett asked again as they headed toward the house.
    “Fine, I guess,” Hallie said. “He wouldn’t tell me.”
    Brett looked at her sideways. “Yeah, I think he would,” she said.
    “Well, then I guess he doesn’t know.” Which was probably true. “I didn’t see him for more than a couple of minutes. Some state investigators came to talk to him.”
    “That’s good, right?” Brett said. “That the state’s called in?” She turned and walked backwards a couple of steps, turned back, scanning all the open land as she did it. “It’s a weird feeling. A bad feeling. That someone shot her, that they could be anywhere. Could be out there right now. It’s got to be settled. Quick.”
    Hallie didn’t know if there was something wrong with her—though there probably was: dying and coming back, for one thing—that she hadn’t considered the issue, how it would make other people in the county feel, that someone had been shot right on their own front doorstep. Taylor County was the kind of place people considered safe. Not that nothing happened. Martin Weber had happened, for one thing. People had mysteriously disappeared and reappeared just a few months ago. But those things felt different, felt like things that happened outside the regular rules of society. Shooting someone with a high-powered rifle felt like a broad strike at everyone and everything, because it could have been any of them, just going about their everyday business. It still could be.
    She stamped her feet as she entered the kitchen, and behind her Brett did the same. There wasn’t any mud or snow or anything to stamp onto the kitchen mat, but it was almost automatic, something you did when you came in from the cold. Beth wasn’t there, but her bag was slumped against the chair she’d been sitting in. Hallie gestured toward the coffeepot and shrugged off her jacket on her way out of the kitchen.
    She found Beth in the office with half a dozen maps pulled up on her computer and the stone clutched in her hand. She looked up when Hallie came in.
    “Yeah, I’m not exactly sure, okay?” she said defiantly.
    “You’re not exactly sure?” Hallie repeated the words because she figured she hadn’t heard right or Beth hadn’t said them right. “I thought you said you knew where all the entrances were.”
    “I know generally where they are.” She stressed the word “generally” like Hallie should have understood that from the beginning. “But the world’s a big place. Knowing where a door is in relation to the whole world still leaves a big area. There’s one somewhere in Custer National Park?” She said it like it was a question, like Hallie could say whether she was right or not. “Or the Badlands?” She turned back to the maps. “The Badlands is kind of big, isn’t it?”
    “Will you know it when you see it?” Hallie didn’t bother to hide her sarcasm.
    “Yes,” Beth said. “Yes. I mean, I see them all. And some of the