St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

anyway.
    So why am I here?
    It was a good question. He didn’t have an answer. He wasn’t even sure he wanted one.
    The wind rushing down from the harsh peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains tasted of snow and distance and the kind of time that made most people uncomfortable. Deep time. Unimaginable time. Time so great it reduced humanity to an amusing footnote in Earth’s four-billion-year history.
    Dan liked that kind of time. Humans were amusing. Laughable. It was the only way to stay sane.
    And that was something he’d promised himself he wouldn’t think about for a few months. Staying sane.
    If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, chances are you don’t understand the situation. Why else would ignorance be called bliss?
    With a grim smile he turned so that his injured leg didn’t take the force of the brutal wind.
    “You should have stayed home,” John Duran said.
    Dan gave his father a sidelong look. “The exercise is good for my leg.”
    “That old man never acknowledged you or your mother as kin. Hell, he barely acknowledged his own legitimate daughter.”
    Dan shrugged and let the wind comb dark hair he hadn’t bothered to have cut in months. “I don’t take it personally. He never acknowledged any of his bastards.”
    “So why bother hiking here for the Senator’s funeral? And don’t waste your breath on the exercise excuse. You could do laps around the Taos town square with a lot less trouble.”
    For a time there was only the sound of the ice-tipped wind scouring the ridge. Finally Dan said, “I don’t know.”
    John grunted. He doubted that his fiercely bright son didn’t know why they were freezing their nuts off on Castillo Ridge watching one of New Mexico’s most famous womanizers get buried. Then again, maybe Dan truly didn’t know.
    “You sure?” John asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, that’s the most hopeful thing that’s happened since you turned up three months ago.”
    Once, Dan would have smiled, but that was before pain had etched his face and cynicism had eroded his soul. “How so?”
    “You cared about something enough to walk three miles in the snow.”
    Dan’s dark brown eyebrows lifted. “Have I been that bad?”
    “No,” his father said slowly. “But you’re different. Much less smile. Too much steel. Less laughter. More silence. Too old to be thirty-four.”
    Dan didn’t argue. It was the truth.
    “It’s more than the injury,” John said, waving at his son’s right leg, where metal and pain had exploded through flesh. “Muscle and bone heals. Emotions…” He sighed. “Well, they take longer. And sometimes they just don’t heal at all.”
    “You’re thinking of Mom and whatever happened with her mother.”
    John nodded. “She still doesn’t talk about it.”
    “Good for her.” I hope.
    “You didn’t feel that way a few years ago.”
    “A few years ago I didn’t understand about sleeping dogs and land mines. Now I do.”
    And that’s what was bothering Dan. The Senator’s sister-in-law Winifred was running around kicking sleeping dogs right and left. Sooner or later she would step on a land mine and wake up something so brutal that his own mother had never once spoken of it, even to the man she loved.
    Silently the two men watched the shiny white hearse wait next to the graveyard’s wide gate. The couple in the rear seat, Josh Quintrell and his wife Anne, waited for the driver to open their doors. Their son, A. J. V, called Andy, got out and turned his back to the windblown snow. When his parents stepped into the gray daylight, their clothes were as black as the ravens perched on the graveside tarp.
    A second car pulled up close to the hearse. As soon as it stopped, a tall, lanky woman emerged into the bitter wind with just enough hesitation to show her age. The iron gray of her hair beneath a black lace mantilla marked her as Winifred Simmons y Castillo, sister-in-law to the dead Senator, and a woman who in more than seven decades hadn’t found a man—or anything else—she couldn’t live without.
    “Hell on wheels,” John said almost admiringly.
    “Is that what you call someone who looks for land mines by stomping and kicking everything in sight?”
    John shook his head and shut up. He didn’t know why Dan was upset by Winifred’s quest for her family’s past. When he’d asked what the problem was, Dan had shut down, all hard edges and silence. John hadn’t asked again. When his son had worked for