Chapter 9: The Ridge

I watched my own funeral through hunting binoculars.

I sat in the cab of a delivery truck parked on a gravel service road.

The ridge was three hundred yards above me, a bare spur of rock in the Rockies.

Fir trees covered one side of it and a drop fell away on the other.

Sleet blew across it in gray sheets.

Marla had gone up an hour earlier in a black coat.

She was my executor, and she was carrying out my last wishes.

I wanted to see them done.

The herbalist's cousin sat behind the wheel with the heater running and did not say a word.

Only one black SUV had come up the mountain.

Eamon had not brought the honor guard or the line of luxury cars.

The whole coast had expected them for a Luna.

I had asked for none of it in my will, and for once he had listened.

The grave was cut into the gray rock at the cliff edge.

A black marble headstone stood beside it with no crest and no seal.

Only one word was carved into it, deep and plain.

Hazel.

Four of his men lowered the alloy pod on pulleys.

The ropes groaned in the sleet.

I thought of the sandbags inside it, and my lab coat, and a black sweater I had always hated.

I had thought watching would be satisfying.

I had thought I would feel the click of something finishing.

I felt tired, and the cold came up through the floor of the truck into my feet.

"Wait!"

The shout came across the ridge, thin and ragged.

I turned the dial on the binoculars.

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