Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money (30 page)

I pulled Tycho deeper into the trees,
feeling my panic rise when he tried to resist me. Putting a hand on
his chest and one on his back thinking to quiet him, I was almost
surprised when he responded as I wished. Though I’d never be sure
if it was that physical restraint or the bushel of quieting energy
I sent his way. Whatever the case, on some canine level, he seemed
to understand the urgency of the situation, perhaps not so
surprising when you think about how dogs in the wild spend their
time.

By now the men were closer than they had
been and I could hear their words.

“Jesus, asshole. Stop. You don’t really
think I’d kill you?”

“Why wouldn’t you?” This was the running
man. The one in the suit. His voice was ragged from his exertions
but I recognized it instantly. “Why would I think you
wouldn’t?”

“Come on, we’re way past games. If I’d
wanted to kill you, I would have done it back there.”

And now I realized I recognized the second
voice, as well. Incredulity forced my head up, carefully, to see if
I could get a glimpse of him. And I could, but barely and with the
sun against me I couldn’t quite be sure. It could be him. But then
again, it had been a long time since I’d seen Paul Westbrook and,
at this distance, it might just be someone who looked and sounded
like him.

And who also has a connection to Ernie?

That little voice again, but I didn’t stop
to think about it. Ernie — if it
was
Ernie, and I was pretty
sure it was — was moving directly towards me. And he hadn’t seen
me... yet. But I was also fairly sure that if I moved very far in
either direction, one of the two would spot me. And then I caught a
break.

“OK, man. Look, you win,” it was the chasing
guy — Paul? “You’re right, OK? Let’s talk about it. Maybe things
have
gotten a little out of hand.”

The first man hesitated, then stopped and
turned towards his pursuer. “You mean it?”

“Sure. I’d been thinking that myself. C’mon,
let’s go back inside and talk this through.” As if to illustrate
his sincerity, he turned around and headed towards the camp without
a backwards glance. Ernie hesitated. For a second he seemed to look
directly at me. Though I knew he couldn’t possibly see me, I pulled
myself still further back behind the tree. Finally he sighed as
though resigning himself to something, turned around and followed
the first man.

I held my position, flattened against the
back of a tree and, cursing the whim that had made me don a white
shirt this morning, I watched their progress while I waited for
both men to get themselves out of sight, which would — of course —
mean I was out of
their
sight, which would leave the coast
clear for me and Tycho to scurry back to the road.

It didn’t happen. I watched while Ernie
trotted across the camp towards the man I was pretty sure was Paul.
They were out of earshot again, but I could see them clearly: they
were less than a hundred feet from where I crouched. I couldn’t see
their expressions or make out their words, but I could see the
shapes that made them. So I saw when Paul turned and held something
in front of him and though I was too far away to make out the
details, his stance and the way he held the object instructed me. I
flashed quickly on Jack —
What can I do you for?
— the gun
in the shooter’s hand, Jack on the floor.

Now, in the San Bernardino forest, I could
see Ernie take a few steps back, as though he’d run again if he had
the chance. He didn’t get it. The distance between us warped the
sound, so I heard the shot at the same time Ernie’s legs just
seemed to give out beneath him and he fell. The undergrowth between
us prevented me from seeing the spot where he’d gone down, but he
did
go down: I saw it as clearly as I could see the tips of
Tycho’s ears.

Time is a funny thing. When you’re a kid, a
month can seem like a year: especially if the month is September
and it means you have to go back to school after a summer that has
been endless. When you’re an adult with a regular job, that same
month can whizz by in a moment, regardless of season.
Intellectually I know I only hesitated behind my tree for a minute
— maybe two — my hand resting on the reassuring dome of Tycho’s
head. But in that relatively small speck of time I tried hard to
process what I had just seen and, more importantly, just what I
should do about it.

My feet moved me forward before I’d even
fully considered my actions. Someone was hurt, needed my help: I
didn’t think much beyond that. I wasn’t aware of doing anything
either noisy or visibly louder than I’d been doing previously and
had only moved a few feet away from my cover — though maybe it was
just the funny sixth sense people get when they’re being watched —
but I saw Paul’s head jerk up, scan the area, light on me — or the
speck of something that, from the distance and with the partial
cover the trees must have afforded me — light on the partial
non-treelike thing that was, in fact, me.

I saw him hesitate — perhaps processing what
might be represented by this visual aberration — then raise his
weapon in my direction. I heard a shot, and then another, but I had
no way of gauging if they were landing close to me or not because,
by that time, I was in full flight, not worrying too much about
direction, only that I put distance between myself and the man
pointing a firearm at me.

Tycho and I stopped in the protection of a
little copse of trees and strewn boulders so I could catch my
breath. I crouched behind a rock, my hand on the smooth surface
grounding me, and listened as well as I could over my ragged
breathing and Tycho’s panting. Had we lost him? And then the crunch
of feet on dry wood forced us into motion again. It might have been
a deer, I knew, but it might just as easily have been a man and
taking chances at this point didn’t seem like a good idea.

It took me a while to understand how
completely in the wilderness we were. It’s not like you could loop
around and run into a goat farm or, as Ned/Ted/Fred had
anticipated, a Seven-Eleven: though I would have loved
that
right now. The camp was situated in the San Bernardino National
Forest. Sure there were bound to be roads and highways and probably
even farms or ranches out there someplace, but in the deep silence
of the forest, with the mountains all around me and what was very
probably a crazy man somewhere behind me, it was easy to believe in
the total wilderness I saw in every direction. Getting back to my
car was the only type of safety I dared think about.

And so I ran. I ran as though my life
depended on it, for by this point and after what I’d just seen, it
seemed very likely that it did.

I was on unfamiliar terrain. Without the
guide of the old camp road to follow there were no markers. I just
hoped I was running in the right direction and that, before very
long, I’d come across the road and could, from there, find the way
back to my car.

Every now and then, when I’d encounter a
particularly large boulder or well-positioned stand of trees to
hide behind, I’d scrunch down to catch my breath and listen
carefully again. Was that the crunch of a branch? A shout? A shot?
No? Maybe? Then off we’d go again.

I wasn’t sure how long or how far we ran,
but after a while with our shadows lengthening, the trees thinning
and the road still not in sight, I realized that I had fled in the
wrong direction. This realization didn’t concern me as much as I
would have thought. I was
alive
. Alive and running towards
all of the possibilities represented by that fact. What was behind
me was a less attractive option. Lost and moving was preferable to
the fate to which I’d seen Ernie fall.

Hoping we were no longer being pursued, but
knowing I had to figure out where we were, I stood on a boulder and
tried to get my bearings. Once I was perched up there it made me
regret again that I’d passed on the whole Girl Guide thing: none of
what I saw made any sense to me. All the more because this wasn’t
wilderness as I’d come to know it in the Pacific Northwest where
trees are trees and mountains are formidable.

Where we were now was arid in a mountainous
sort of way. The thick trees that had hugged the camp had given way
to scraggly, low lying scrub, tree-sized rocks and — to make
matters worse — we’d been running hard for most of the last hour
and hadn’t passed anything that resembled potable water. Harder on
the canine than me, sure: but I was starting to think about it,
too. Poor Tycho’s tongue was practically dragging on the ground and
I hated to see bits of dirt and plant material clinging to it. We
were OK for the moment, but we wouldn’t be able to go on like this
indefinitely. I had no feeling for where we were and though I had a
hunch that we’d come across a town before we hit Las Vegas, the
very thought of the possibility of running until we hit the desert
filled me with dread.

There was no choice. I just kept leading us
on and hoping like hell that we weren’t going around in circles
like the poor saps in movies always tend to do. As we moved, I kept
peeking over my shoulder, partly to see that the scenery behind us
was staying the same but growing more distant and partly to check
if anyone was following.

Another hour and the terrain became even
more rugged and the ground began to slope upwards more sharply. We
were climbing. Gently, but we were definitely heading to higher
altitudes. I didn’t dare stop to wonder if up was a good idea. I
knew what was behind us: a whole lot of nothing with a gun-toting
killer at the end. And going up at least meant that we hadn’t
passed this way before. We were bound to come upon something or
someone sooner or later. I hoped.

Just as I was about to give in to despair,
we came upon something good and hopeful. At first and from the
distance, I thought it was some kind of luxury home perched at the
top of the highest mountain in the vicinity. As unlikely as it
seemed to find a structure like that way out here, I still thought
it would be a Good Thing.

As we got closer, I began to be able to make
out the building’s details and could see it wasn’t a house. It was
some kind of ranger station or forest outlook. A manmade crowsnest
the size of a small house, perched on stilts, commanding a view of
the forest on all sides. I was so relieved I felt like crying.

Once I was reasonably sure that it was, in
fact, some sort of government-built forest lookout — not just a
mirage brought on by hours of wandering and a lack of water — I
took my sweater from around my waist and waved it frantically over
my head. If someone was watching, it seemed like it would be a much
better idea to try and get their attention and maybe grab a lift up
there rather than walking the rest of the way. After a while with
no response, though, I stopped and just kept walking. The waving
sweater had produced no results and I’d started to feel sharply
ridiculous: like I was trying to hail a cab on Fifth Avenue. I
tried not to think about what it meant that no one had responded to
my frantic waving. Where there was a human created structure, there
would be probably be humans, or at least a telephone or other
communication device.

Just trudge.

My step grew lighter as the ranger station
got more near. It was still a long way off, but the closer I got,
the more detail I could see and I thought the various aerials and
satellite dishes I could now make out were a good sign: Not some
derelict abandoned in the 1960s, then — something I hadn’t even
allowed myself to consider until it was no longer a possibility.
But a modern outpost where there would be people and a telephone
and water.

The last few hundred yards were the worst.
Some lookout, I thought, if they couldn’t even see a lone woman and
a dog coming towards them from miles and miles and miles away.
Until I had to scale the rocks that looked distressingly like
cliffs that led to the peak where the station actually sat, I kept
hoping that some ranger — on a white charger or an SUV emblazoned
with a forestry service logo — would come barreling down the hill
and give us a lift back to his remote post. When this didn’t
happen, I plunged ahead, keeping myself going — up, up, up — with
thoughts of the water cooler that likely dominated one corner,
right next to the telephone, across from the bathroom and so
on.

Tycho, for his part, followed valiantly
wherever I led though, just occasionally, I’d swear I caught an
incredulous glance. Like: this is the craziest walk I’ve
ever
been on. And, of course, he was right. Crazy didn’t
even begin to cover it.

Finally, we scaled the cliff-like face —
Tycho hopping and dodging lithely, putting all of his practice from
hunting lizards on the Malibu cliffs to good use — me pulling
myself from boulder to boulder, ever upwards — until we stood at
the foot of the outlook. Attaining our goal made me feel more
ridiculous than I’d ever thought possible and even more out of my
element.

From what I now saw, the cliff was on one
side only: the side we’d come from. Murphy’s Law. On the side
directly opposite was a meadow that sloped gently away from us, cut
through only by a paved road that ended where I stood: at the
outpost’s gangly legs. All we’d had to do to avoid that climb was
skirt the cliff face by a couple of hundred yards, and we would
have hit the road. A Girl Guide would have thought of that in an
instant. But me? I’d just gone ever forward and up.

All of this — road, ranger station, meadow,
relative civilization — was the good news. The bad news I could see
with my own eyes: there was nothing remotely resembling a motor
vehicle in sight. And though I hoped that meant that the rangers
worked in pairs and one had gone for a pizza, I doubted it. I just
wasn’t having that kind of day.