High Country- Pigeon 12 (24 page)

Her fingers poked and plucked through soft places, the inside of a tent even on short trips usually resembling nothing so much as a dirty laundry hamper.

Her fingers closed on a hard round object and a needy mind told her it was the barrel of a pistol, but it proved to be a water bottle. Anna slid it through the cut. Either she'd take it with her or destroy it. Oddly it took more courage to put her hand in the second time. Rather than being emboldened by her success, she had a bad feeling that life held only so many chances for any given individual and she'd spent hers with the abandon of a drunken sailor; one day, maybe this day, she'd use up her last.

A whimper.

She jerked her fist from the hole as if she'd been scalded. Her heart swelled till it blocked her breath. She fought the sudden panic and won. The whimper had come from Phil. Now that she was between the two men she could tell from where sounds emanated. He might be close to waking. Anna hoped not. She'd have to hit him again, and if the first blow did enough damage, a second would kill him. Why killing him now repulsed her when half an hour before she'd been ready to hack his head from his shoulders with his own ax, she wasn't sure. Maybe because now she didn't have to.

A deep breath and she plunged her hand back through the nylon and reached. They were there, on the opposite side of the tent flap from the cut. One by one she eased Mark's boots out and put them on the fire. Phil was next. His boots followed Mark's. Flames licked and curled in pretty blues as the fire found new and wondrous components to consume.

Methodically, she ferreted out everything she could that might be of use and fed it to the blaze. Inside the tent there would probably be a flashlight, certainly a sleeping bag and possibly a second water bottle. These things being beyond her reach, she didn't waste time thinking about them.

For herself, she took one of the backpacks, two pairs of socks, a gas camp stove and matches and Phil's sleeping bag. If any food was left it wasn't in either pack. In cold weather, fuel for the body to burn to warm itself was important. Lamed as she was, Anna wasn't sure she could hike out in less than two days. Maybe three. And that was if the weather held. Without food to cook, she considered jettisoning the stove but, should the expedition drag on, hot water would do her body more good than cold.

Throughout the rummaging, packing, pillaging and burning the big man remained comatose. Anna rolled him onto his side. A bottle of Jack Daniel's with a concussion chaser were going to make him vomit at some point and she didn't want him to choke to death on his own bile. For like reasons, she left him in his down coat. At what point he'd changed from prey to patient, she couldn't have said.

The tenor of the snores from inside the tent changed. Maybe the fierce and fitful alteration in the fire's light had penetrated to Mark's subconscious. Time had come for Anna to vanish like the thief in the night she was.

The pack wasn't heavy and she welcomed the warmth it lent her back. The ax was heavy but it served as crutch, cane and companion. It never crossed her mind to leave it behind.

"Phil?"

She'd stayed too long. One last look around the camp let her know her welcome was long worn out. Leaning heavily on the ax, she limped away, keeping to the more treacherous but less trackable granite humps where shoulders of stone broke through the thin mantle of earth.

"Phil? What the fuck?"

The words followed her into the trees. A part of her that was still young, strong and unhurt, the Huckleberry Finn soul of every woman who has dreamed of hiding in the choir loft and watching her own funeral, wanted to stay and watch the fun as Mark explored the carnage she'd left. The old cynical part of her that just wanted to stay alive kept her walking, each step slow, short and painful.

"God damn son-of-a-bitch motherfucker," shot over her head, an expletive missile.

Anna smiled. It was good to have one's work appreciated.

Away from the lake, again in the trees, she was forced to use the stolen flashlight. With her injured ankle, no stars or moon, her compass gone, she didn't dare try a cross-country adventure. The trail was a trough of India ink running along the floor of a lightless tunnel. Until nearer dawn it would be impossible to follow without a light If the gods were good, there wasn't a second flashlight tucked away in the tent. Anna doubted they were that good. She'd already strained their generosity with her raid. With gods it was a bad juju to push one's luck.

Two good legs had led Anna to remember the trail as far less rugged than it was. Patches of comparatively easy walking on dirt trails were broken by long passages over rock, sometimes smooth as ice, other times shattered into erstwhile steps of varying heights, widths and sharpness. Her geriatric shuffles through the woods seemed a breakneck pace compared with the creeping and scooting, much of it on her rear end, required to cross the granite expanses.

Traverses that had been so easy as to be forgotten in health and sunlight became treacherous and exhausting. Every misstep was punished by nauseating pain. By five A.M. her flashlight was browning out and she was so tired just breathing was a chore. Her legs shook and her knees gave way every three or four yards, forcing her to stop or fall. Without rest she wouldn't make it, not another mile, not another fifty yards. It was an hour or more till dawn.

Sitting on a fallen log at the edge of the trail, she began to cry. The only ray of sunshine in the whole miserable, cold, pain-filled universe was that there was no one to see her doing it. Tears sapped the last of her energy. She could feel herself falling asleep where she sat, but she was unable to do anything about it. On some level she knew to sleep was to die, knew in the pack she had never abandoned though its little weight had taken on the weight of the world, was a sleeping bag that would keep her alive. She simply couldn't find the wherewithal to stand and pull it out, crawl into it.

Soon, she thought. Just let me sit here another minute, then I'll do it.

And she slept.

Ironically, her life was saved by the grim reaper in yet another of his many guises. A fury of pain shot up from her ankle and a rough voice growled: "You dead? You're gonna be."

Anna hated irony.

She opened her eyes and was instantly blinded by the light of a flash trained on her face. Instinctively she threw up her arm to shade her face. It was batted away by a fist of ice and bone.

Her wits coalesced quickly, adrenaline winning over cold and fatigue.

"Mark," she said. "What brings you here?"

He laughed then, standing there unshaven, looking immense in a down jacket, his feet wrapped in socks and shirts and God knew what else. "You're a freaky bitch."

He would shoot her now and hike out on his Sasquatch paws, climb in his red SUV and disappear back into whatever urban hole he'd crawled out of. In a day, maybe two, Lorraine's rangers would become suspicious about Anna's rental car parked at the trailhead. Someone would be sent up to find her corpse, frozen and bloody, sprawled in the trail. The account of her demise would be detailed in the Ranger Report and e-mailed to every National Park in the country.

"What a drag," she murmured.

"You got that right."

A second passed. Two. He didn't shoot. There must be a reason for the delay. A tiny spark of hope began to burn away the strange indifference that had clogged her mind at the sight of Mark and the pistol so close to her face.

He was hulking, feet planted wide, a few feet in front of the rock she'd fallen asleep on. He'd let the beam of his flashlight drop to her chest, and she could see his face. The cruelty she'd noted before was honed by fatigue and the shock of finding his camp trashed. She guessed he wanted to torture her before he ended the game, vent the anger he probably always carried with him and, tonight, carried for her.

Torture was good. It gave her time. The cool efficiency of an assassin's bullet to the base of the skull was hard to outsmart.

"Is Phil dead?" she asked because she needed to keep the conversation, and so herself, alive.

"He wasn't when I left," Mark replied. A half smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, and Anna knew he had finished the job she'd started before he came after her. Phil, if he could walk at all after the blow to the head, would have slowed Mark down. Left behind, there was a chance he'd be found by the rangers before the wilderness killed him. He might talk, trade information for leniency. Either way, he had become a liability. Mark had cut his losses.

In a selfish and heartless way, Anna was glad. Phil might have died eventually from brain injury. This way she was absolved to a certain extent. She could pretend he would have awakened, seen stars, staggered a few steps, then, like Wile E. Coyote, been right as rain.

"Ah," she said.

Mark sat opposite her on a matching boulder across the trail. He put the flashlight beside his thigh. Its beam now struck her in the sternum and enough was reflected back that he showed the ghoulish effect children try for when they put flashlights beneath their chins. The muzzle of the pistol remained steady, pointed at her center body mass. Without disturbing his aim, Mark fumbled a cigarette out of his jacket pocket and lit it with the dexterity of a longtime smoker.

Anna tried to see past blood and bone to the tickings of his mind. What would keep him talking? What would put him off guard? As far as she knew he believed her to be a crippled, middle-aged waitress-albeit with a homicidal streak where double-bladed axes were concerned-who had inadvertently stumbled on his salvage operation.

She had that going for her. Might as well play it.

"Why did you guys shoot at me? You scared me half to death. Did the gun go off by accident?" Innocence, stupidity, her husband, Zach, had once told her, were the hardest things for an actor to portray believably. Unlike him, Anna had never been much for being on stage. To her the lines sounded false to the point of absurdity.

Mark twitched his aborted smile once again and blew smoke through his nostrils. In the strange light and frigid air the smoke swirled into the steam of their breath connecting them like ectoplasm. In an uncharacteristic flash of superstition, Anna nearly recoiled lest his evil enter her being. Horror passed but not this sudden sense of palpable evil.

She'd arrested felons of various stripes: rapists, wife beaters, murderers, even a child molester. Several had done their damnedest to kill her. One had died by her hand. She'd sensed anger, greed, indifference, sickness of mind. Never before had she felt surpassing evil.

Mark's wasn't even a sickness of the soul so much as an indefinable soullessness; the pleasure of other people's pain not a lust nor an addiction but merely a passing entertainment. She'd never seen his eyes by the light of day, but she doubted all the sunlight in the world could illuminate the spark of the divine that cats, dogs and real people carried from cradle to grave.

It was as if he were a spider in a man's body.

This staggering gestalt jolted through her in less time than it took for him to suck in another lungful of smoke. She was left with a creepy hollow feeling.

"Yeah. An accident," he said. Her question seemed so long ago it took her an instant to figure out what he was talking about. "I'm not used to these things." He waved the gun with a degree of comfort that suggested he was as accustomed to pistol grips as Tiger Woods was to golf clubs.

"Why did you bring it? It's against park rules," Anna said in the phony bad-actor voice that had settled in her throat. He couldn't be buying her act. Evil wasn't stupid. Evil was cunning.

"Why did you run?" he countered. He tilted his cigarette and studied the growing ash.

When the cigarette was finished, he'd kill her; Anna knew it as surely as if he'd told her. She'd only been left alive to amuse him during his smoke break.

"Why did you chase me?" her own voice was back. It got his attention. His eyes locked on hers and widened slightly.

"Well hello," he said and she felt that the devil had seen her, recognized her. "What have we here?"

"I don't know what you mean . . ." Anna tried to get back into character and failed.