Salvatore Capone's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

By dawn, Salvatore knew the heads on the posts had drawn more than flies. A rider came in hard from the south ridge and said the dead men had kin, and the kin were walking the trail in twos and threes, checking every print. Salvatore stood over his half-built walls and felt the soft ground shift under his boot. He had hours, not days. He set every man he had to work above the foundation pit. They stacked a squat stone watchtower against the rise, rough courses, slit windows, a single low door. It would not be pretty. It would shoot. Down the only trail wide enough for a horse, Salvatore had them dig. A long jagged cut in the dirt, lined with sharpened stakes, deep enough to swallow a man and his animal both. Past it, where the path bent blind, he planted a lashed wall of bone-tipped posts across the throat of the pass. Anyone walking up would see the white tips first and read the message clean. They came at dusk, the way he guessed they would. The lead pair hit the staked cut before they saw it. A horse screamed and went down. The rest pulled up at the bone wall and stood there, arguing in low voices about whether to climb it or turn. Salvatore's rifles answered from the slit windows of the new tower. Three fell on the stakes. The others ran. He walked the trail himself after, counting bodies, kicking dirt over the blood. The trap had held. The trail was shut. But when he climbed back to the stronghold, a man was waiting at his table who should not have gotten past any of it. A tan coat. A badge on the belt. A folded letter set neatly under one hand. "Agent Peter Burke," the man said, flat. "I walked in from the north. No one saw me. That should worry you more than the bodies." He tapped the letter. "I wrote this before I came. In case I didn't leave. You should read it. Then we should talk about who in my bureau already knows your ground won't hold."