"Can I get anything else for you?" Stanton asked when she'd finished.
"A large pepperoni, extra cheese, extra onions."
Behind her, hidden from view by the truck, Anna heard the same sound that had alarmed her earlier. It was closer.
Quietly she pushed herself to her knees and looked over the hood. Black-and-white landscape camouflaged hummocks, piled snags, hollows. Hiding would be easy. A rustling so tiny it seemed only a tickle in her inner ear held her attention.
"John?" she tried her radio. No answer. LeFleur had his radio off, conserving the battery. Base was helpless to interfere, still she needed to let someone know what was going on. "Frederick?"
"I'm here."
"I've got company, please monitor."
"Anna?" Stanton sounded worried and it pleased her.
"Stand by," she said, and switched the Motorola off.
Chapter Twenty-One
SENSES HONED TO an uncomfortable edge by the furtive sounds, Anna listened. From her stomach she heard the badger growl for company; breath rasped in her ears—the body clamoring for the necessities of life. Consciously she slowed her breathing, forced air deep into her lungs.
With oxygen came a semblance of calm. The ridge was bathed in a silence so deep as to be unnatural. From her years in the backcountry, Anna knew she could settle into that silence, wait it out. Few people could, and it put time on her side. Leaning against the remaining fender, she made herself comfortable and focused on seeing, hearing, breathing, staying alert and in the moment.
The wait wasn't prolonged. Humanity hates a silence the way nature abhors a vacuum. To her left she heard movement. Ice had made the snow as brittle as ground glass. Every footstep reverberated.
On impulse, Anna shouted: "Hugh!"
The only response was a crunching rearrangement of body parts on snow. Noise pinpointed location: a pile of downed snags twenty feet from where she stood. Since it had neither color nor shadow, she'd not realized it was big enough to hide anyone. "Come out from behind that deadfall," she called. "You've got to be getting cold hunkered down like that. Don't be such an ass."
The insult gouged Pepperdine out of hiding. A yellow hunchback materialized above the snags—Hugh's back with its yellow pack strapped firmly in place—then his face as he pushed himself up.
They stared at each other across a field of white. Anna was at a loss for words. Those that came to mind were of the four-letter variety and inherently unproductive. What was passing through Pepperdine's mind, she could only guess at. Embarrassment had flitted across his face, anger chasing it quickly away. His brain was in overdrive, she suspected, spinning desperately in an attempt to turn the situation around to where he wasn't the idiot.
"I need your radio," Hugh said, as if that was what he'd come for.
"Why? You seem fairly adept at sneaking and eavesdropping. No sense in carrying the extra weight."
"I suppose you were planning on keeping the fact that Sir Lawrencelot is an arsonist under wraps." Hugh changed tactics.
"Did it ever cross your so-called mind that he killed Len to keep him from telling? Or is the mama lion protecting her mate?"
Words were to Pepperdine what whiskey was to some men. Anna could see him getting drunk on his own verbiage. With it, he found the courage to step out from behind the screen of burned logs. His eyes locked on hers in an unwinking stare and she recalled one of her instructors saying when you saw that look, get ready to fight or make love.
Casually, she rebalanced herself, got her fanny off the fender, moved her weight to the balls of her feet. "We only protect our young," she said. "I don't know where you're getting all this stuff from but it's growing a bit thin."
Hugh snorted. "You've been sniffing around Lawrence since day one. If you'd seen him facedown in the dirt whimpering like a girl, maybe you'd lose your taste for Mexican."
More words, more courage. Anna didn't like it. Pepperdine had a screw loose somewhere and she felt inadequate to handle him. "What put a burr under your saddle about me and Lawrence? I hardly know the guy. I'm old enough to be his mother," she threw in for good measure.
"I saw you and sonny boy at that hot springs lake... Mom." The coupe de grace delivered, Hugh took several steps toward her. "I'll be taking that radio from now on."
"I'll tell you what," Anna said. "Howard's feeling so bad I doubt he'd miss his. When we get back down the hill, let's ask him."
"The battery's dead in Howard's."
Anna had switched hers out with Howard. He needed the comfort; she needed the communication. Evidently Pepperdine had already taken the liberty of "confiscating" Black Elk's radio a second time.
Hugh advanced a couple more steps. "I'll be taking that radio."
"You and whose army?" Anna meant it as a joke, a way of lightening the mood and underlining the absurdity of the situation. Pepperdine took it as a challenge. He pushed his brush jacket back like a TV gunslinger and began fingering the hilt of Black Elk's Buck knife.
"Stop playing with that damn knife," Anna snapped. "You're making me crazy."
"This knife?" Hugh said innocently, and pulled the thing from its sheath. He turned the blade this way and that as if catching the light. "This knife scares you, doesn't it?"
Anna said nothing. She was racking her brain for any kernels of information her sister might have let fall when discussing her psychiatric practice on the handling of dangerous lunatics.
Pepperdine made a feint toward her and when she flinched, he laughed.
"Give me the knife," she said evenly.
"Give me the radio."
Anna could see no harm in that. Back in camp, when she had help, she could always get it back. Hugh could do less damage with a Motorola than with a weapon. "Sure." She pulled it from its leather holster.
Hugh's face took on a crafty look, taking her easy capitulation as a sign of his power. "No deal," he said.
Anna raised the radio to her lips and thumbed down the mike button. "Frederick, are you still standing by?"
Hugh rushed her.
Instinct told her to run. Her legs quivered with the need to comply. But something warned her flight would further excite Pepperdine. She'd seen small dogs in hot pursuit; the moment the cat stopped the little beasts invariably backed off.
Hugh wasn't grasping the knife like he knew how to use it. The hilt was in his palm and his index finger extended along the blade, the way children are taught to hold a knife when cutting their food. His arms were in front of him, close together as if he intended to tackle rather than slash her.
These things were noted in the seconds it took him to close the distance between them. The observations were mildly reassuring but the look on Pepperdine's face was not. Committed to an insane act, he was intent on carrying it through.
At Anna's back was the truck. She'd effectively limited her escape routes. Dodging left or right was likely to result in some portion of her person getting pinned between the iron and Hugh's bulk.
Reflexes superseded thought; she threw herself up and back, her butt landing on the hood. Crablike, she scrabbled across the ice-slicked surface.
Hugh dove after. The knife collided with Anna's left ankle, cutting into her boot leather. Black Elk kept his equipment honed and in good condition. Anna didn't thank him for it.
Kicking out, she connected with Hugh's shoulder. Recoil sent her off the far side of the hood. Breath was knocked out on impact but there was no time to give in to the shock. Overcoming the panic of airlessness, she pushed herself to her feet.
Hugh was stretched across the hood like a stag brought home from the hunt. He'd be on top of her in a heartbeat. With the knife clutched now more in the fashion of a weapon than a butter knife, he clawed at the hood, trying for purchase.
The Motorola was still in Anna's grasp. With all the strength she could muster, she brought it down on Pepperdine's wrist. He screamed and his fingers flew open, the knife skittering down the hood and into the snow.
Anna dropped the radio and grabbed Pepperdine by the hair and the back of his collar. Using her weight she pulled. Ice helped and Hugh's two hundred pounds slid across the hood, shot out and fell; a belly flop into the frozen snow.
Before he could recover, Anna jumped on his back, one knee in his sacrum, the other on the small vertebrae of his neck. With both hands, she grabbed one of his and twisted it up behind his back.
Writhing, Hugh tried to buck her off.
Anna cranked down on his arm. "Lay still or I'll bust it. Swear to God, I will."
Pain did what logic could not and Hugh stopped struggling.
Both of them were breathing hard. Seconds ticked by. Anna was trying to figure out what to do next. He was too big to control, too crazy to let go.
"Okay," he panted. "Let me up. Come on, Anna, don't be a bitch."
A laugh barked out of Anna's lungs. Hugh was whining, apparently totally oblivious to what had just transpired. "You've got to be kidding. You just attacked me with an eight-inch Buck knife. I'm never going to let you up. If you move, I'll break your arm." She tweaked it to prove she could. "If you move twice I'll break your neck." She shifted to the knee on his vertebrae to lend weight to her threat. "It might not kill you but as a quadraplegic, maybe you won't be such a pain in the ass."
"The snow is burning me. I'm getting frostbitten. You can't leave me here with my face on the ground."
Face on the ground. The phrase jogged something in Anna's mind and she stared into the nothing that was the sky trying to lure the memory out.
"If you'd seen him facedown in the dirt whimpering like a girl..." Hugh had said that of Gonzales. Anna could only think of one circumstance where Pepperdine might have witnessed a scene like that. After the blowup they'd all been facedown in the sand and, she was willing to bet, even the bravest among them had let a whimper or two escape.
"You saw Lawrence get out of his shelter," she said with certainty. "Admit it or I'll break your arm."
"Duress. Won't hold up in court," Hugh gasped through the pain.
"I don't care. I just want to hurt you." To prove it, she did.
Hugh shrieked.
"It wasn't that bad," she said, annoyed. "I hardly even twisted it. As Mom used to say, 'Quit crying or I'll give you something to cry about.' Lawrence. The shelter," she prompted, putting enough pressure on Pepperdine's arm to make a fracture seem like a distinct possibility.
"Okay! I saw!" he yelped. "You're going to break my frigging arm!"
"Fucking arm, Hugh. I'm going to break your fucking arm. So you helped Lawrence out of his shelter. Good. Now, you knew Nims was dead. None of us did. How come? Did you kill him, Barney?" At the sound of the hated nickname, Anna realized what she was doing was cruel. Later she would probably feel guilty. At the moment she just didn't give a damn.
"No. I just guessed. We'd been through a frigging fire!"
"Fucking fire," Anna corrected, and tweaked his arm. "You knew. You killed him."
"He wanted to get in my shelter," Hugh blurted out.
Meanness went out of Anna, taking her strength with it. The firestorm roaring down the mountain, Nims without a shelter, begging to be let in, begging for his life. Pepperdine, a bigger man, stronger, pushing him away, condemning him to be burned alive. Hugh was guilty, not of sticking a knife in a man's ribs, but of craven cowardice. In many ways it was worse and Anna's contempt was tempered with pity.
She still knelt on Hugh and he lay compliant, afraid she'd carry out her bone-crushing threats, but the time had passed.
"If I let you up, what are you going to do?" she asked wearily.
"Nothing, I promise. Just let me up. My face is frozen."
"Don't get up till I say, okay?"
"Okay. Just get off me."
"Stay," Anna ordered. She backed away from him, retrieved the radio and the knife, then moved around to the far side of the truck. "You can get up now."
Hugh pushed himself to his knees, then struggled to his feet and brushed the snow from his jacket and trousers. "I suppose you're going to rush back and blab everything," he said bitterly.
"Not unless you annoy me in some small way."
He stood, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his eyes not meeting hers, and Anna wondered what he was up to. "Can I have my knife back?" he said finally.
"Nope."
"Anna, do you read? Anna, come in please." It was Frederick on her radio.
Hugh sneered as best he could and walked toward the trail leading back to camp. Ten yards from her he stopped and turned.
