Critical Judgment (1996) (47 page)

Abby hurried across six feet of wild grass to a series of smaller rocks. She had a sense of where Quinn was. And if she was right, there was absolutely no way he could see her. Advantage Dolan. She was no more than thirty or forty feet from the end of the fence now. It was possible she’d get there and find the rock wall on this side too steep to climb. But since that horrible moment in the scanner room, each time she needed a break or a miracle, she had gotten one.

“Hey, Doc, last chance,” Quinn called out coyly. “I’ve got the whistle in my hand. One blast and the guards are loose in the meadow. The good news is that
two toots and they’ll stop whatever it is they’re doing to you. At least I think they will.…”

Abby moved around another rock. The meadow was narrowing as the fence drew nearer to the cliff.

“Okay, Abby. Have it your way. Go ahead, guys. Soup’s on!”

There was no whistle blast, but in an instant Abby understood why. The long fenced-in field was patrolled not by guards, but by guard
dogs
. She looked up the meadow to the north and saw them—two ebony torpedoes, streaking across the undulating terrain, closing on her with terrifying speed. Instinctively, she took several steps backward into the open meadow. Then, suddenly, just as she was about to turn and run, Quinn appeared on the top of a large boulder. He was still twenty-five yards from her—far enough away so that she might actually have made it to the corner of the fence, but close enough now to have a decent shot at her whenever he wanted to. Instead, he stood atop the rock, hands at his sides, legs spread. The vision of haughtiness.

“Heeeere’s Johnny,” he shouted.

Trying to outrun the dogs, Abby knew, was futile. But there were really no other options. She whirled but almost immediately slipped on the muddy ground, stumbled, and fell. She could see the dogs flashing past the boulder where Quinn was standing. They were huge Dobermans—black-and-gold phantoms, streaking through the bright wash from the spotlights, one slightly ahead of the other. She could hear their snarling now.

Oh, my God …

The first dog hit the top of the small rise in front of her at full stride and leaped, its body stretched outward like a sprint swimmer leaving the mark. Abby screamed and instinctively lifted her forearm up to shield her face. Suddenly the hurtling shadow changed direction in midair and landed heavily on the ground beside her face. The second Doberman had come over the rise and begun its charge. This time, just as it left the ground, moving
upward toward her face, there was a whiplike snapping sound from off to her left. The animal pitched toward the cliff and fell to the ground with a heavy thud, a long hunting arrow through its neck. Only then did Abby notice the arrow shaft protruding from the thorax of the first Doberman.

“Ives!”

As she shouted the word, a gunshot rang out from where Quinn was perched. She felt a sharp bite through the skin at her right hip and knew that again she had been hit. The shot was still echoing across the meadow, and the pain in her hip was still burning when she heard the snapping bowstring from her left once more. Quinn cried out, fired wildly, and then toppled off the rock.

“Quick, Abby! Over here!”

Ives was on his knees by the fence, rapidly snapping through the links with enormous wire shears. As Abby hurried to him, she could see Quinn writhing on the sodden ground, Ives’s long arrow through his knee. Only then did she appreciate that the hermit had made his three incredible shots through a small opening he had cut in the chain-link fence. Ives pulled a corner of the fence up enough for Abby to scramble through on her belly. Then, albeit briefly, he allowed her to throw her arms around his neck.

“You look like you met up with an angry mob,” he said.

“I’m okay, thanks to you.” She glanced back at the meadow. “Ives, I’m sorry about the dogs,” she said. “I know how hard that must have been for you.”

The hermit squeezed her hand.

“We’d better get going. Two police cruisers just headed up the Colstar drive.” He gestured to the field and added, “I don’t think they’re going to have much trouble figuring out who did this.”

“Damn you, Ives!” Quinn was bellowing now. “I’m going to get you for this, you son of a bitch … !”

“Do you think the arrow broke his leg?” Abby asked as they scrambled along the fence toward Ives’s mountain.

“I don’t know. If it did, it means I’m in need of much practice. I wasn’t aiming for bone.”

W
ith Sam Ives leading the way, they hurried north along a corridor of shadow just outside the fence. Although Abby was battered and exhausted, she had little trouble keeping up. Ives’s leg was healing well, but the muscles that had been destroyed by chronic infection were gone for good. As a result he ran with a stiff, syncopated gait that Abby sensed was causing him some pain.

She glanced over at the hospital as they passed and realized that somewhere just a few feet below them was the tunnel from the MRI unit to the Colstar lab. She wondered about Kelly Franklin—whether Barbara Torres was still standing guard, whether Lew planned to take over when his relief showed up at the ER. Abby had said she’d be back in ten or fifteen minutes, and that had been a lifetime ago. He must be frantic, wondering what had happened to her.

She peered up into the rain. The ceiling was still too low for a MedFlight landing and transfer. If Kelly hadn’t regained consciousness, morning was going to be too late for her. Hell, the truth was, it was probably too late for her already.

To her right she could see the two open emergency exits gaping like wounds on the rock face of the Colstar
cliff. In a few minutes or a few hours the holes would be sealed and the Colstar spin doctors would be meeting. The story they would concoct was sure to do nothing to slow her plummeting reputation. She glanced back just as one of the police cruisers, blue strobe flashing, siren wailing, sped down the Colstar drive. It was disgusting, but totally typical of the man, that before Quinn climbed into the tunnel to pursue her, he would have issued orders to Gould to get a warrant for her arrest. Human experimentation, falsified autopsy report, murder, attempted murder, fabricated arrest warrant. The Colstar Golden Rule: we have the gold, so we make the rules.

Well, you haven’t got me yet
, she thought angrily. And later on, when she connected with Lew, one would be two. Then there would be more—Torres and Gil Brant, and surely others when the word got out. The dike was leaking—one hole after another. And soon Colstar was going to run out of fingers.

By the time they passed the north corner of the fence, Abby was gasping for breath again. She stumbled crossing the narrow footbridge over the Oxbow River and tripped on the gentle slope leading up to the foothills,

“Ives, I’ve got to stop,” she begged.

Ives glanced nervously back at the valley.

“Do whatever you have to do,” he replied. “You’ve been through a lot. Are the police after you, too?”

“I think so.”

“Do you have anyplace to go?”

“No place that’s safe. My best bet is Dr. Alvarez’s farm. I could hide out there until he gets home.”

“I call him Dr. Lew. I did some work for him.”

“I know.”

“Good man. Where’s your car?”

“At the hospital. But I could never go there. Ives, I’m in real trouble.”

“I guess you could say we both are. Are you ready to move?”

“I can handle a fast walk,” she said.

“Fine.”

“Where are we going?”

“My place, for starters. The back way—the way I got down. There’s some climbing involved. Think you can make it?”

Abby looked back at the Colstar cliff.

“I can make it.”

Ives slipped his longbow onto his back, and they headed upward at a brisk pace, Ives in front, Abby a few steps behind.

“Ives,” she said as they neared some very steep terrain, “the police know where you live, don’t they?”

“I imagine they do. We won’t be able to stay for very long. But there’s some clean, dry clothes for you—your clothes, as a matter of fact, at least the clothes you brought me. Then I’ll head up to where some friends of mine have a place. None of them is too fond of the police. Besides, I doubt anyone could follow me up where I’ll be going. You can head over to Dr. Lew’s.”

“His place is a few miles from here. How’ll I get there?”

“Unless you suddenly sprout wings, you’ll walk. Come on, let’s go. You can explain how you ended up popping out of the Colstar cliff when we get to my place.”

“And you can explain how you managed to show up like you did.”

“Deal.”

The back way to Ives’s camp was an ingenious series of heavy ropes strung from tree limbs and roots at strategic intervals. The ropes, along with some carefully carved toeholds in the rock, enabled him to make a near-vertical ascent without too much difficulty, although Abby needed some help. The hike up to the camp by the usual way took thirty to forty-five minutes.
By this route they made it up in not much more than ten. Having seen the hermit drop down the rope from his hammock, Abby bet that the descent to the meadow took him five minutes, if that.

Once they’d reached Ives’s compound, he hurried into his hut and came out with a small knapsack, a dozen more perfectly hewn arrows, an old sweat suit and black rain slicker of Josh’s. It was strange to see Ives anxious or rushed.

“Go ahead in there and change,” he said. “I’ll be sitting right here, so you can tell me what’s going on.”

Abby did as he asked. The inside of his hut was always surprisingly neat. Tonight it was lit warmly with a Coleman lantern. She glanced over at the cinder-block-and-boards bookcase, filled to overflowing with well-worn paperbacks. It made her deeply sad to think about Ives having to leave his place on her account. But at the moment there was nothing she could do about it. She stripped her sodden clothes off with some difficulty. The gash over her shin, and the many other abrasions, welts, and cuts, were ugly but tolerable. The bullets that had torn through the skin of her calf and hip had done no serious damage.

She took some of the dressings she had brought for Ives and bandaged the most troublesome wounds on her leg, hip, and shoulder.

“Ives, there’s a laboratory inside the base of the cliff,” she said as she worked. “Colstar’s getting hefty government contracts for their batteries. In exchange they’re testing chemical weapons and the antidotes for them on patients in the hospital. I found their lab, but then Quinn found me.”

“Well, you set off the alarms inside the plant, and all the spotlights went on across the fence line,” Ives replied. “I had never seen that before, so I got out my field glasses. Then, while I was watching the cliff, out you popped. Right out of one of those openings you once
called to my attention. I had a sense you might need some help, so I took the back way down.”

“I’m very grateful you did,” Abby said.

“You’re a good person. You do good things for folks like me. From time to time we get the chance to do something back.”

“Ives, absolutely everyone with any power in this town is involved in this thing, and they’re all after me. Quinn, the chief of police, the president of the hospital, the chief of medicine, even that boor who sewed up your face—they made a pact with the devil in the form of Senator Corman. In exchange for turning the town over as a lab, and running the experiments, they get full employment for the region, beautiful parks, great schools.”

“Faustville.”

“Exactly.”

Abby emerged from the hut wearing Josh’s frayed sweat suit, rubber rain jacket, and even an old green-and-gold Oakland A’s baseball cap that he had given up on for one reason or another. Wearing his clothes was something she had always enjoyed. And although she had stopped the day he left, it felt strange, but not uncomfortable, to be doing it again.

“We ought to get cracking,” Ives said. “You can come with me if you want.”

“I can’t put you in even more jeopardy. My only real hope is to connect with Lew.”

“The trail I’ll show you runs along the hillside through the woods. Use the flashlight I’ll give you sparingly, and I doubt you’ll be seen from down below.”

He took a powerful four-battery flashlight from his knapsack and handed it to her.

“Ives, I can’t take this. You’re going to need it as much as I will.”

Sam Ives looked at her. From above his thick beard, his eyes sparkled.

“As I recall, you and I have already had a conversation
about the circumstances in which I can and cannot see. Don’t make me show
off.”

Abby tested the flashlight and nodded her acceptance of it. Then, after Ives shut off the lantern in his hut, he allowed his gaze to make one final sweep of the camp before they set off toward the west.

The forest was fully saturated, the branches dripping so steadily, Abby could not tell how much rain was still falling. They hiked downward for a time until she could easily make out the town, perhaps two hundred feet below them and to their left. Some distance from Ives’s camp they connected with a partially overgrown trail.

“Get used to the way this path looks,” he said. “It’s like this all the way along the rim of the valley. Keep your eyes sharp and you should be able to stay on it all the way. If you get lost, just keep Patience on your left, don’t go up and don’t go down, and you should make it okay.”

Suddenly he raised his hand and put one finger over his lips. Then he pointed down the hill. Through the dense woods Abby could see a car approaching down a straight road that appeared to end right below where they were standing. Then she recognized the street as the one she took to visit Ives’s camp.

“Police,” he whispered, well before she could make out the unlit lights on the roof.

“That didn’t take long.”

“They’ll be going the other direction up to my place, but we’d better keep moving.”

For the next fifteen minutes they hiked in silence with Abby leading the way. Only once, for just a minute or so, did she stray from the trail. She recovered smoothly, backtracked, and found the trail once more. Apparently, Ives decided he had seen enough.