Breaking Point

times.
    Underwood extended his hand for the phone back.
    “Good work,” Joe said.
    “Stay safe.”
    —
    L ATER, AS J OE closed his eyes, he heard the faraway sound of two unmanned drones whining through the sky.

26
    JIMMY SOLLIS WEPT IN THE MOONLIGHT.
    With the daypack strapped on his back and his wrists bound in front of him, Sollis stumbled on a tree root, lost his footing, and did a face-plant into the dank-smelling musky ground. He hit his head hard enough to produce spangles of orange on the inside of his eyelids, and his face was covered with dirt and pine needles.
    He clumsily got to his feet again. That damned pack threw his balance off and he nearly sidestepped and stumbled to the ground again, but he got his tired legs beneath him.
    And stood there and cursed and cried. He hadn’t cried for years, not for anything.
    It was all so damned
unfair
. . .
    —
    S INCE THAT SON OF A BITCH Butch Roberson had shot a crease in his cheek and sent him away, Sollis had blindly worked his way down the mountain. Without a map, a GPS, or a good sense of direction, he simply went
down
. Whenever he was given a choice to continue on a line or veer to the right or left, he chose whichever side descended. Several times, this had led him into tangled ravines he had to tear himself out of—his clothes were rags now—but sometimes it was the right choice. His goal was to get out of the black timber onto the valley floor, where at least he could see and be seen if someone was looking for him.
    He’d long ago given up trying to retrace their route up the mountain, as directed by the son of a bitch Butch Roberson. Sollis hadn’t paid much attention to the trail they’d taken on the way up because he’d been concentrating on his footing, and it had been in daylight. Now, everything was jumbled and confusing. He told himself that if he kept walking down he’d eventually hit the bottom. It only made sense.
    The trek had been pure torture. He was without any food—although there might be some in the backpack he couldn’t unshoulder or open—and his thirst was quenched only when he bumbled upon a small trickle of stream or creek.
    Two hours before, he’d found a tiny ribbon of running creek and had dropped to his knees and plunged his face into it, only to find out in the dark there was less than an inch of water. He’d inhaled sand, twigs, and a floating beetle with the first gulp, and spit it out down his shirtfront. Aching of thirst, he’d pushed his way upstream through thorny brush until he located what looked like a wide and deep natural cistern bordered by rocks. Again, he dropped to his knees in the brush and lowered his head halfway between two white and spindly tree roots and drank deeply. The water was cold and cut its way down his throat and chilled him to the bone. But he kept drinking, ignoring the metallic taste.
    When he was sated, he sat back and wiped his mouth dry. He could feel the hydration seep through his guts, and spread out to his extremities. Sollis couldn’t remember how long a human could survive without food and water, but he knew it wasn’t long without water. So he knew he’d staved off an ugly death.
    Then he realized he was sitting back on something large and spongy, something that had some give to it. Something that smelled putrid. He turned and looked into the naked eyehole of a dead mule deer. He was sitting on its body, and the two long white roots he’d drunk between were its decomposing legs.
    That was the first time he cried.
    —
    H E’D BEEN TWENTY YEARS OLD when he first heard about the sport of long-distance shooting. Until that time, it seemed he’d spent his life under the shadow of his muscle-bound older brother Trent, who had landed a job as a deputy under Sheriff McLanahan in the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department. Oh, how their parents loved
Trent
, who played high school football and basketball and lifted weights (and shot human growth hormone into himself) all through college until he emerged double the size he went in. Sollis, meanwhile, ran with a pack of losers and was frequently in trouble. The joke in the Sollis house—which Sollis never found funny—was that someday Trent would arrest Sollis.
    Ha-ha
, Sollis thought bitterly, although he admitted to himself it might have happened if Trent hadn’t been killed in the line of duty the year before. He didn’t miss his brother at all.
    Jimmy Sollis had been on a crew of roofers who followed