Abandon (26 page)

“What if he didn’t find it? He’d be distressed if I wasn’t here. Jack’s very protective. No, I think I’ll wait in our suite. But thank you for the invitation. We’ll come along when he arrives. Where is this ball being held?”

Lana shook her head, eyes welling up with tears.

“You know, I have the perfect dress for it. A rose-colored evening gown. Jack first saw me in it in San Francisco, knew instantly he had to have me. Would you care to see an albumen print of my husband? You’ve never seen a more handsome man, I assure—”

Lana tried to grab her arm to pull her out into the hall, but Molly withdrew into her suite and slammed the door.

Sounds of men shouting resounded through Abandon.

She waded out into the middle of the street, where a path had been beaten down in the snow, fell in behind a young family of four, followed them down Main, listening to the children complain of the cold, begging to go home so they could finish supper and play with their Christmas toys.

Glancing up a side street, Lana saw more people streaming out of the cabins, and someone yelled, “
Hostiles?
”

They passed the burned-out buildings on the north end of town, torched over a year ago in an autumn fire. The family ahead of her stopped. The father knelt down, drew his children into his arms.

“Why you cryin, Pa?”

“Ain’t.” But he wiped his eyes. “Gotta leave y’all for a spell.”

“Where you goin?”

“Me and some a the other pas are gonna ride up toward the pass and stop what’s comin, make sure don’t nothin happen to this town and all the mas and children in it. But I’ll be back ’fore you know it. Need you to listen to your ma for me.”

“Yes, Pa.”

“Yes, Pa.”

He stood and embraced his wife, and as Lana bypassed them in the deeper snow, she heard the woman say, “I’m scared, John.”

“Don’t be, love. Just pray.”

The web tracks branched off from Main and went up the hillside. Lana passed smoking cabins on the spruce-dotted slope, saw two Italians on
horseback rousing families from their Christmas suppers, hollering for them to get dressed quick and head up to the chapel.

The church stood in the distance, one of the first buildings erected in Abandon, though after a decade of scant upkeep, it needed whitewashing, and the windows on the north side had been boarded up since a blizzard had blown them out in the winter of 1890.

A crowd was gathering on the steps, and as Lana looked up at the wood cross, black against the copper sky, it began to teeter and she startled, thought for half a second the world was ending.

Then the iron bell began to clang, faster and faster, and she saw the preacher, Stephen Cole, pulling the tolling rope, not with the leisurely announcement of a wedding or a Sunday service, but with all the ominous urgency of a warning, so hard that it shook the belfry and made the cross stand crooked.

“That that menthol shit?”

“Of course.”

“What the hell.”

Isaiah slipped two cigarettes between his lips, lit them both, handed one to Jerrod.

“Ain’t this some shit.”

They sat perched on a four-foot ledge, midway down the icy head wall.

“You got the first-aid kit in your pack?” Jerrod asked, his voice straining with pain.

“Nah, it’s in one of the duffel bags back at the mansion.”

“Fuck.”

“Hurts bad, huh?”

“Holy shit, man. A little morphine would really hit the spot.”

“It looks bad.”

“I haven’t looked.”

“No? You can see the bone—”

“Shut the fuck up. I don’t wanna hear that.”

It was snowing so hard, Isaiah had to cup the end of his cigarette to keep the ember dry. Jerrod took an aggressive drag, leaned back against the rock he’d slammed into feetfirst on his fall down the mountain. Both legs were stretched out, but the right one had rotated almost ninety degrees, so at a passing glance he appeared to own a pair of left legs.

“You think Lawrence is lying?” Jerrod asked.

“Did at first. Now I’m not so sure. I think he may be just as pissed as we are.”

“So no gold.”

“Nada.”

“Fuck, this hurts, man. Talk to me. I gotta keep my mind off it. What were you gonna do, say we actually found it, managed to get the gold out of these mountains?”

“So, say it turned out to be twenty-four mil, right? That’s eight apiece. Well, first off, I’m in debt over two hundred thousand. I was gonna pay that shit off, put enough aside to send the kids through school, set me and Shari up so we didn’t have to work. Then after that, say I got four mil left to play around with. We were gonna build this tight palace, man. In one of those upper-class all-black suburbs of Atlanta. We’d already sketched a design. Shit. Home theater. Exercise room. Huge master bedroom. Twelve-foot ceilings. Big pool. Jacuzzi. Basketball court. Giant grill out back. Kind of place my kids would wanna come back to after they were grown and gone. Christmas or Thanksgiving, it’d be me and Shari, our three kids, about a hundred grandbabies running around. I’d have liked that.”

“Shari knows what you’re doing out here?”

“Me and Shari, we synced, man. No secrets. That’s the only way. She’s my partner in all things. So how ’bout you? Any big plans for your share?”

Jerrod tossed his cigarette over the ledge and groaned.

“Come on, baby, you gotta keep talking. Chase that pain away. You seen worse.”

“No, actually, we have a winner.” Jerrod closed his eyes, tucked his gloved hands into his armpits, shivering violently. “I didn’t even need eight million,” he said.

“You’d have stayed in Colorado?”

“No, I was gonna head up to Alaska. Last frontier, right? Find some land out in the middle of bumfuck. Where there wasn’t even a road in.”

“You Daniel Boone motherfucker, you.”

“Maybe in the Chigmits, the Aleutians. Put a cabin on a big lake. Always wanted to get my pilot’s license. I’d buy a little floatplane, and the only time I’d ever leave would be to go for supplies. Just live out there and fish and hunt. Forget about all the shit I’ve seen.”

“I hear that.”

“Nobody’d ever see my ass again.” Jerrod gritted his teeth. “I never been so cold, man.”

“Think Stu would’ve got his shit together with his share?”

“I think he’d have just drunk himself to death faster, and with better booze. Damn, man, this is getting worse and worse.”

Isaiah flicked his cigarette away. He stood up, peered over the ledge, staring down into roiling snow and bottomless dark.

“How’s it look?” Jerrod asked.

“Steep as shit. Can’t even tell how much farther down it goes.”

“We got a situation here.”

“That we do, brother.”

“You aren’t hurt bad, are you?”

“Just my head and my pride, but they hurt like a motherfucker.”

“You foresee any way of getting me out of here?”

Isaiah sat down, put his hand on Jerrod’s shoulder, shook his head.

Jerrod nodded. “Afraid you might say that.”

“Just don’t know how we’d explain our way out of this one, partner.”

“I’m sorry. I fucked that jump up.” Jerrod wiped his eyes. “You ain’t gotta apologize for shit.” A catch in Isaiah’s voice, too.

Jerrod said, “Look, if it’s gotta be this way, I can’t just sit up here by myself, wait to freeze to death. Not in this kind of pain. You know what I’m saying?”

“I feel you.”

“There’s no other way? You sure?”

“I don’t see it.” Isaiah pursed his lips together and cocked his head, his brow furrowing up as his eyes welled. “Serving with you, man,” he said.

“I know. I know. Same here. Let’s just get this the fuck over with, huh?” Isaiah took up his machine pistol and racked the slide. His eyes burned. He couldn’t see, had to wait a moment, letting them clear, not wanting to fuck any part of this up.

“You wanna pray or something, Jerrod?”

“Wouldn’t know what the fuck to say. Haven’t prayed a day out of my whole life. God ain’t a fool if He’s up there, and I don’t wanna insult the Man, particularly now.”

“Anything you want me to take care of when I get out of here? Anybody you want me to go see, let ’em know, give ’em a message or—”

“Like who?”

“I don’t know. Your parents.” He smiled. “Your harem of bitches.”

“Nah. Nobody’ll notice.”

“You ready, then?”

Jerrod drew in a deep breath, looked all around at the rock, the snow, the darkness, the cliffs, taking heed of this cold ledge where he was going to die. “Yeah.”

“Love you, brother. Never said that to a—”

“You, too, man. You, too. Family, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, the suspense is killing me, so . . .” Jerrod turned away. He stared at the tip of his boot, thought how pretty the snow was falling on it, and what a strange last thought this was.

Isaiah raised the machine pistol, positioned the barrel a few inches from the back of Jerrod’s head. He calmed himself, held the red dot steady.

Jerrod slumped over into the snow.

Isaiah fired another Kool, sat for a while, smoking, listening to the wind, watching snow pile up on the rock, on Jerrod. For the moment, it melted on his friend’s warm face.

At length, Isaiah stood up. But he felt empty, something unfinished. He had a notepad in his backpack, and he pulled it out and found a pencil, sat hunched over the paper, shielding it from the snow. He scribbled down five words, tore out the sheet of paper, and slipped it into the pocket of Jerrod’s parka.

Isaiah gathered up his things, then followed the ledge for thirty feet until it slimmed out into nothing. As he began the slow and treacherous descent into the canyon, he kept thinking of what he’d written for his friend, wished it could have been more, repeating Jerrod’s epitaph in his head like a plain-song.

This man was a soldier.

This man was a soldier.

There was a flash, Abigail thinking he’d pulled the trigger, the walls of the sitting area lighting up, the snow glinting. It went dark again. Muffled thunder rolled through the basin, shook the chandelier, the weakened floor trembling beneath her feet.

Abigail rose up slowly, her arms outstretched in deference to the weapon. When the lightning came again, she noticed the streaks of blood down the man’s face, his eyes rimmed with black bruises.

“Are you with them?”
he whispered again.

“With who?” Abigail asked.

“The men in masks. There were—Get back!” he yelled and Abigail saw the machine pistol shift to her father.

Lawrence said, “You see my hands, right? I promise you we aren’t a threat. In fact, we’re probably in the same—”

“I’ll decide that.” His eyes returned to Abigail. “What are you doing here?”

“We arrived in Abandon this afternoon, a team of six. Downstairs in the foyer is the third remaining member of our party. Tonight, while we were exploring the town, those men in masks took us hostage. They killed our guide and a man named Emmett.”

“Tell me the names of the men who attacked you.”

Abigail had to think for a moment, her mind edging into overdrive. “Isaiah. Stu . . . and Jerrod. Jerrod was also one of our guides on the hike in. But they’re dead now.”

“All?”

“Yes.”

“How’d the other two die?”

“Isaiah and Jerrod fell off a cliff near the pass a couple hours ago.”

“What were you doing up there in this storm?”

Abigail hesitated only a second or two. “Looking for these gold bars. Did you kill Stu?”

The man nodded slowly.

“What happened to you?” Abigail said. “Your face—”

“Is it bad?”

“Yeah.”

“You two look pretty banged up yourselves.”

The man lowered the machine pistol. He stepped out from behind the divan, walked into the beam of her headlamp, tall and very thin, though even through the bruises, he had gentle eyes, which Abigail instinctively trusted. His silver-and-black down coat appeared to have been ripped through the middle by a knife swipe, and his stringy brown hair lay pasted with sweat to the sides of his face.