Black Hills

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Copyright © 2009 by Nora Roberts
    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed
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Published simultaneously in Canada
     
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roberts, Nora.
Black Hills / Nora Roberts.
p. cm.
    eISBN : 978-1-101-08220-1

     
     
     
     
    This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
     
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To those who protect and defend the wild

PART ONE
    HEART
    Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
    —MATTHEW 6:21

1
    SOUTH DAKOTA
June 1989
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Cooper Sullivan’s life, as he’d known it, was over. Judge and jury—in the form of his parents—had not been swayed by pleas, reason, temper, threats, but instead had sentenced him and shipped him off, away from everything he knew and cared about to a world without video parlors or Big Macs.
    The only thing that kept him from completely dying of boredom, or just going wacko, was his prized Game Boy.
    As far as he could see, it would be him and Tetris for the duration of his prison term—two horrible, stupid months—in the Wild freaking West. He knew damn well the game, which his father had gotten pretty much right off the assembly line in Tokyo, was a kind of bribe.
    Coop was eleven, and nobody’s fool.
    Practically nobody in the whole U.S. of A. had the game, and that was definitely cool. But what was the point in having something everybody else wanted if you couldn’t show it off to your friends?
    This way, you were just Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne, the lame alter egos of the cool guys.
    All of his friends were back, a zillion miles back, in New York. They’d be hanging out for the summer, taking trips to the beaches of Long Island or down to the Jersey Shore. He’d been promised two weeks at baseball camp in July.
    But that was before.
    Now his parents were off to Italy and France and other stupid places on a second honeymoon. Which was code for last-ditch effort to save the marriage.
    No, Coop was nobody’s fool.
    Having their eleven-year-old son around wasn’t romantic or whatever, so they’d shipped him off to his grandparents and the boondockies of South holy crap Dakota.
    Godforsaken South Dakota. He’d heard his mother call it that plenty of times—except when she’d smiled and smiled telling him he was going to have an adventure, get to know his roots. Godforsaken turned into pristine and pure and exciting. Like he didn’t know she’d run off from her parents and their crappy little farm the minute she’d turned eighteen?
    So he was stuck back where she’d run from, and he hadn’t done anything to deserve it. It wasn’t his fault his father couldn’t keep his