Snowmelt

Eleven years ago Tobias Okafor was called Snow, and he did things for the Skeleton Wolves that he still measures his life against. Now he runs a snowmobile-repair shop outside Bozeman, lives alone, and hasn't pulled a trigger in nine years. He answers the phone once, out of politeness. The club needs his memory, not his gun. A rival outfit is using the Bitterroot corridor, and Snow is the only man alive who knows every drainage from Missoula to the pass. One season, the president says. Then he's free. What the president doesn't mention is Jessa Reeve, the club's twenty-seven-year-old bookkeeper, who has been moving money the club doesn't know about and asking the kind of questions that get you buried in the Bitterroot. And what nobody mentions at all is that the president is holding Jessa's brother as leverage and Snow's entire map is a lie. By May the creek is running hard, the legal fund has cleared its first record, and Snow has finally said out loud what he wants.