No Immunity

feel it battering the truck as she hit a curve.
    The edge of the canyon was longer than it had appeared in the dark. The road slashed back and forth, turning suddenly, sharply.
    Abruptly a driveway cut right, into a pocket invisible from the road. Now, close, she could make out a high wooden skeleton of a mining building. It and two other crumbling buildings stood around an open area. Even in the dark she could see between the burned-out roof beams of the nearest one.
    She looked around for a pit, but there was none. The whole place looked as if it had been deserted for decades.
    She cut the engine, got out, and made her way into the compound. Here the wind was not so sharp, but the cold more chilling. The dry, sharp scrabble crackled under her feet. No car was visible, and looking down, she could make out no tire tracks. She rarely carried a gun; she’d seen the devastation bullets caused in too many postmortems. But here, in this deserted spot, a piece in hand would have comforted her.
    She moved off the loose scrabble. Sky showed through the burned-out beams of the nearest house.
    The second place, probably once a miners’ bunkhouse, was burned as badly. A rusted metal bed frame hung off the porch on three legs.
    When she approached the last house, she sighed-Burned to a shell. Could she have been wrong about this mine? Maybe it was not a marvelous semblance of a deserted mine but was in fact a deserted mine.
    Something gave under her foot. She looked down, saw nothing, bent down, and fingered a fuzzy, faded green tennis ball. A shot of longing went through her as she imagined Ezra bounding down the beach corralling his ball with his feet in the wet sand.
    Leaving the ball on the ground, she stood, turned around very slowly till she made out a dark spot on the far side of the compound. No light shone, but unlike the other burned-out buildings this one was solid. No sky was visible between its beams.
    She knocked. “Open up. You know I’m here.”
    Connie opened the door. The spiky gray hair that had looked so adventurous in the Gattozzi saloon, was matted back as if from sweaty hands drawn through it again and again. In the flickering light her chiseled features looked sepulchral and her caramel-colored eyes shone. She was holding a pistol.
    Kiernan smacked it out of her hand. The gun sailed across the porch. Connie dove toward her, but Kiernan was already halfway to the wall scooping up the gun. It was an old, long-barreled revolver and it felt heavy in her hand. She stood and glared down at Connie^ “Stay right there on the ground. I could have died out there in that mine pit!”
    “You should have thought about that before you screwed Jeff.” Connie had landed on an elbow, and it was already swelling visibly, but she made no move to coddle it.
    “You think I —”
    “Now I don’t care who Jeff sleeps with. But when he went off to Africa, I wasn’t thirty years old, and it mattered.”
    Kiernan took a breath, acutely aware of the cold wind blowing across her back. She stared down at the tough, wiry woman now sitting up, back to the wall. “You’re Jeff’s wife? I don’t remember—”
    “Don’t remember me from his med-school years? There’s a surprise. Those were the four most isolated years of my life.” It had been over a decade since then, but her anger sounded fresh and triumphant, as if she had always known this moment of vindication would come. Her face was flushed and her eyes moist, and in that moment she bore no resemblance to the no-nonsense woman in the saloon.
    Kiernan waited till she caught her eye. “For that you were willing to kill me?”
    “Kill you?”
    “You led me into a mine hole.”
    “I didn’t lead you anywhere.”
    “You didn’t come back when my headlights disappeared. No one does that on an isolated mountain road.”
    “You’ve been here less than a day and you’re giving forth the commandments for mountain driving?” The vulnerability was gone from her face now.
    Kiernan shook her head. She couldn’t tell what was behind Connie’s sarcasm—guilt or just anger. There would never be any proof of her intentions. She would never know whether Connie Tremaine would have let her die. Motioning the woman up, she said, “Jeff may have had affairs, but they weren’t with me.”
    “Please. You go to med school together, you go to Africa together. It doesn’t take scientific deduction to come to a conclusion.”
    “The wrong conclusion.” It would have