Those Who Wish Me Dead (19 page)

T
he fire came into view
for the first time at the plateau that ran below Republic Peak, which Hannah and Connor reached gasping and sweating. It had not been an easy climb. They could see Amphitheater, the next peak, in the distance, and below them, a long way down, were glimmers of orange and crimson. It looked like the dying embers of the world’s largest campfire, but Hannah knew it was hardly ready to die. What looked like small flares from up here were probably flames climbing forty- or fifty-foot pines. The crews down there had lost the blaze to the wind and had likely retreated for the night. She’d heard no helicopters, which was unsurprising considering that it was dark and storms were on the way. There’d been no choppers during the day either, so she surmised that they’d thought they could contain it without the helitack units. Now they were backing off, giving themselves some rest and counting on rain, waiting to see what the storm front would do to the fire.

“That’s it?” Connor said, staring down at the colored glows. There was awe in his voice.

“That’s it.”

“I didn’t know we’d be able to see the actual flames. I thought it would just be smoke. I know it’s not right to say, but from way up here, it looks kind of pretty.”

“Yes,” she said, and she was agreeing with both sentiments—it wasn’t right to say, and it was pretty. It was absolutely gorgeous, in fact. “You should see it from the ground,” she said. “When the flames turn to clouds. When the fire runs up on you like something prehistoric, and you can see it and feel it and hear it. The sounds it can make…it’s a hungry sound. That’s the best word I can give you. Hungry.”

“How do you know so much about fires?”

“Spent some time with them, Connor. Fighting them.”

“Really?” He turned to her. “They let girls do that?”

“They do.”

“And you were down there?” He pointed. “I mean, you would have been
right down there?
”

“Yes. Usually, we would have trenched and watched the wind and pulled back by now. Waited for sunrise. Not always, though. It depends on the weather, depends on the circumstances, what your time window looks like. Sometimes we worked all day and all night. With this weather blowing in, though, we’d be waiting. We’d keep a safe distance and wait to see what it would do to the fire.”

“Was it fun?”

She loved him for the genuine quality of the question. It was something adults would never ask; they’d search for a different word, wonder if it had been
rewarding
or
a rush
or something of that nature, but they’d want to know the same thing this kid did: Was it fun? She was silent for a long time, looking down into the shifting lights in the blackness, shapes that moved like scarlet shadows, a role reversal of light and dark.

“I worked with some wonderful people,” she said. “And I got to see some things that were…special. Majestic. There were days when, yes, it was fun. There were days when it was inspiring. Made you think of who you were in the world.”

“Why did you quit?”

“Because,” she said, “I got a taste of the other kinds of days.”

“What does that mean?”

“Sometimes you lose to it.”

“To the fire?”

“Yeah.”

“Did somebody get hurt?”

“A lot of people got hurt.”

Lightning flashed regularly and closer now than before. The warm wind wavered between calm and howling. Stars disappeared in the west as the clouds thickened and crept along. Moisture was heavy in the air. Every warning was being offered, the mountains whispering one imperative instruction:
Get low, get low, get low.
She glanced back at the fire. Miles away still. Not a chance in this world that it would climb toward them fast enough. Not a chance. And if these lightning storms blew in, and they were exposed on top…

“We’re going to go another quarter of a mile,” she said. “Maybe half, no more. And then we’re going to shut it down for the night. It’ll be windy, and it might be rainy. But we’re going to stay up top, where we can see what’s happening. In the morning, we’ll figure out how to call for help.”

“Ethan said people should always be off the peaks when it storms. He said at this altitude, you’re already sitting on an aluminum roof, and the last thing you should do is start climbing an aluminum ladder.”

“Ethan sounds like a very smart guy,” she said, reaching for her pack. “But I don’t know if Ethan’s been burned yet, Connor. I have. We’re going to stay on top.”

He didn’t argue, just walked on with her, but she knew he wasn’t altogether wrong. Storms were coming, there was no question of that. The wind was gusting just as hard as it had been but now it was sticky-hot; it had swung around to the southwest, and when the gusts came, they howled. Looking back toward the tower, you could see a sky littered with stars, the Milky Way never more stunning than it was in Montana at night, but to the west, the stars vanished, and that was trouble. The front that had pushed all this warm air ahead of it and caused havoc with the fires was about to reveal itself for the monster it was, and Hannah expected it to be a hell of a storm. It had been building too long to go any other way.

The question was, How long before it arrived? She didn’t want to be on the peaks when it came, but hiking down the steep, rock-scree slopes at night was begging to break an ankle. If one of them got hurt, both of them were likely to die come morning.

She also didn’t want to go down into the tree-lined drainages. The fire was still far away, but not far enough for her comfort. And with a wind like that behind the blaze? No. She wouldn’t chance it. They’d stay high as long as they could, and they’d camp if they had to, and if the rain came, maybe it would slow the spread of the flames.

Or maybe you’ll get killed by lightning.

It was a greater risk than the fire, she knew. But still…

Deploy or die, Hannah! Deploy or die!

She wouldn’t take them down into those gulches yet. Not until she knew what the wind was going to do. Up here on the high rocks there was nothing for the fire to eat. Below them lay the land of the burnout, where scorched trees glittered like a field of candles, tributes to the dead, and that led all the way to where the main blaze raged, several thousand feet down. The wind and the terrain would hold the fire there.

“How long are your legs?”

Hannah stopped walking and looked at Connor. He’d been in front since they left—after informing her of the importance of rotating pace setters so that they didn’t wear each other out—and he hadn’t talked much as the first mile fell behind them and darkness came on.

“Pardon?”

“Are they the same length?”

“I don’t follow, Connor.”

“Some people have one leg that’s a little longer than the other. I don’t know about mine. They look the same, but it’s probably not an obvious difference. Do you know about yours?”

“I’m pretty sure they’re the same.”

“Well, if they’re not, we should know.”

“Yeah?”

“We’ll be veering in that direction. If your legs aren’t even. You veer without even thinking about it. That’s one way you get lost.”

“Connor, we can still see what we’re walking toward. We aren’t going to get lost.”

“It’s just something to keep in mind,” he said. There was a touch of defensiveness in his voice. He was full of these random facts, and while many of them—like the length of people’s legs—were useless, she had to concede that the boots had been a decent idea, and leaving the light on a very good one, and bringing the map so obvious as to embarrass her. She also realized that he took comfort in the odd collection of wilderness trivia. It was where he’d gone to convince himself that it was worth getting up off the floor and trying to run. Where he went to keep the fear away.

“What else?” she said.

“Nothing.” He was disgruntled now, and she couldn’t have that.

“No,” she said, “I’m serious. What else should we be thinking about?”

He was silent for a moment and then said, “We’re going uphill.”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s a good thing, I think, except for the storm.”

“Why is that?”

“Most people go downhill when they’re lost. I forget exactly what the percentage is, but it’s high. We’re not lost, but we’re trying to get out, so it’s about the same thing, and most of the time, people who want out of the woods head downhill.”

“Makes sense.”

“Not necessarily. If people are looking for you, it’s a lot easier for them to see you if you’re up high than if you’re down in a valley. You can signal better from up high. And you can always see a lot better. Like in your tower, right? It was easier to figure out the route from your tower than it would have been on the ground, just looking at the map.”

“Good point.” She liked this, wanted to keep him talking. The closer they got to that fire, the sharper the teeth of her memories became. Distraction was valuable.

“Lost skiers always want to go downhill,” he said. “Percentage-wise, that is. And lost mountain climbers want to go up. That’s pretty obvious when you think about it. It’s, like, their habit, you know? So even though things have gotten bad for them, their habits aren’t gone. Those stay.”

“Right.”

“It’s a profile. Like the way they try to figure out who a serial killer is. If someone is lost, they’ll make a profile of that person. So that’s what they’ll be doing to find us. They’ll be trying to think like us. I wonder what they’ll come up with. I mean, who are we, right? We don’t have a profile. Maybe I do, and maybe you do, but when they put us together? I think we’d be pretty confusing.”

“I certainly hope so.” Their pace was unbearably slow, but it had to be. It was hard walking, and unlike Connor, Hannah didn’t have a headlamp, so she was using a flashlight. The footwork was treacherous and if you dared to look more than a few steps ahead, the sudden shift in light was disorienting. So they marched on slowly, heads down, twin lights in a dark, windy world. She hadn’t hiked the mountains at night—without a fire crew, at least—in exactly thirteen months. At the start of the last season, she and Nick had taken an overnight trip to a lake fed by glacier melt and had camped alone there beside its frigid waters.

That night was the only time she’d ever heard a cougar scream. They’d been setting up the tent, and the lake had a sunset glow that seemed to come from within the water and everything had been still and beautiful and silent until that ungodly shriek.

Nick found the cat—it was sitting on a ledge across the lake from them, up on the rimrock, a shadow against the stone. It looked like it was black in the fading sunlight, but black mountain lions didn’t exist. A trick of the light. When Nick spotted the cougar, Hannah wondered if they should leave. Nick said no but that they shouldn’t go any closer either. If it was a female and she had cubs, she’d protect them.

“She didn’t have to let us know she was there,” he’d said.

The cat watched them for a long time and never moved and eventually its shadow blurred with the others, and night claimed the ledge and then the mountain. Hannah hadn’t slept well, knowing that it was out there in the dark, but that was all right. They didn’t spend much time sleeping anyhow.

“You need me to slow down?”

Hannah jerked her head up, moving her eyes out of the past and into the glare of Connor’s headlamp. He’d pulled well ahead of her.

“I’m fine.”

“We can rest. You’re breathing pretty hard.”

Actually, she’d been close to crying.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll take a rest.” She unclipped the canteen from her belt and sipped some water and said, “I used to be in a lot better shape.”

“You don’t look too old,” Connor said.

She had to laugh at that. “Thanks.”

“No, I just mean…you said it the way an old person would. How old are you?”

“Twenty-eight, Connor. I am twenty-eight.”

“See, that’s still young.”

It certainly was. She had her whole life ahead of her, she’d been told.

On her twenty-seventh birthday, Nick had given her a watch, along with a card on which he’d written a line from an old John Hiatt song.
Time is our friend, because for us there is no end.

He’d been dead nine days later.

Because for us there is no end.

It had been a beautiful sentiment that day. She’d kissed him and told him that it was true. It had proven to be, in a terrible way. There was no escape from him—time for them did not and would not end.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Connor said.

“You didn’t.”

“Then why are you crying?”

She hadn’t known she was. She wiped her face and said, “Sorry. It’s been a long day.”

“Yeah.”

She remembered then that Connor had come her way in the dark, with that one headlight bobbing through the blackness to her. He had been on the move for many hours to get to her, and he hadn’t slept since he’d arrived. She was standing here crying over the dead, but right in front of her, the living needed help.

“We’re going to go just a bit farther,” she said. “I want to get a little more distance between us and the tower. Then we’ll rest for a while.”

“You think that’s safe?”

She pointed ahead, into the blackness. “We’ve got to do some serious climbing at some point. Up or down, it doesn’t matter, it’s going to be hard. Going down is more dangerous, probably, especially in the dark. So we’ll push on just a little more. Then get some rest.”

“Okay. You sure you’re all right?”

She clipped her canteen back on her belt. “Just fine, Connor. I’m just fine. Let’s keep walking.”

T
hey spoke just as Allison
had promised they would: Ethan was the focus but he was not part of the conversation; it swirled around him. One thing he learned from listening was their names, or at least the names by which they called themselves. The other thing he learned was that they were the most chilling men he’d ever encountered. At first, he believed it was because they were empty of fear. Later, he decided it was because they were just empty, period.

“Ethan tells me the searchers found no sign of the boy. Now, so far Ethan has had a propensity to tell the truth. Would you say I received it this time, Patrick?”

“I would, Jack. I would. I’ve been with them most of the day. There was no sighting. They spent some time at a fire tower, where they spoke with a lookout, and then they moved on with renewed purpose. As if she’d told them something that encouraged them.”

“A perfect match to Ethan’s account. As I said, I believe he’s an honest man.”

“An honorable quality.”

“Isn’t it, though? And noble. He chose to join us simply to protect his wife. The man has had ample opportunities to cause trouble for me, perhaps even to escape, and yet here he is, walking beside us, guiding us even. Why would a man do that for the likes of us?”

“To keep the wife alive, I’d say.”

“Correct again. And Ethan, I tell you, he is one loyal husband. He’s working hard, and working against the clock. All for her.”

“Protecting her.”

“Exactly. The man appears to be nothing short of a local legend, and you know what? I believe he’s earned his reputation. That rarest of breeds.”

“He seems noble, as you say. Loyal, certainly. But here’s my question, Jack, and bear in mind that I hardly wish to impugn a good man’s character.”

“Of course not.”

“We agree that Ethan is a noble, brave man, a smart man, and a loyal one. Do I believe he’d do anything in his power to save his wife? Certainly. But I have to confess, Jack, that I have my doubts that he’s willing to give up the boy so easily.”

“Interesting.”

“He’s earned his reputation for protection, has he not? For salvation. Yet we are to believe that he’s guiding us to a boy, knowing all the while that we intend to kill that boy?”

“You’re dismissing the power of his marriage vows?”

“I’d also say that he looks at me with hate in his eyes. Disgust. Loathing. Why? Because I’ve killed. And yet, as I said, he’s guiding us to the boy. He’s playing a role in a child’s death now, and he can rationalize it away, because he believes that he’s protecting his wife. Perhaps I can accept that. Perhaps.”

“What troubles you, then?”

“He knows why we’ve come for the boy. He knows that the boy poses a threat. And, being the very bright man that he is, Ethan should understand something else by now. Can you guess what that is, Jack?”

“It would seem, using fairly basic reasoning, that both Ethan and his wife represent threats to us as well.”

“So you see the flaw here?”

“I do.”

Ethan could hear thunder. A prolonged rumble in the west. Somewhere ahead of them, a limb cracked loose from a tree and fell, thrashing down through the branches. The wind had been blowing steadily since they arrived on the trail but now it was gusting. The smell of the smoke rode along with it, stronger than it had been before. He had one flashlight, taken from the burned man’s truck, and it was not bright. Behind him, the brothers walked in darkness.

His plan was gone, Republic Peak no longer offering him the opportunity he’d envisioned, and he was trying to adapt, but it was hard. With the weapons and the numbers in their favor, it was very hard.

Where is Luke Bowden?
he wondered. Earlier, he’d demanded that Roy bring Luke out of the mountains. He hadn’t wanted any help, because he’d had a plan. Now he had nothing, and he wanted the help.

Maybe Luke didn’t listen,
he told himself.
It’s possible. Probable, even. He doesn’t like to lose a trail any more than you do. He’ll have gone back to find it, and he will hear you coming, and he will know that you should be alone.

Luke would be armed. Luke would be armed and he would move like the night breeze. He might be watching them now. It no longer mattered whether he’d found the boy or not. All that mattered was that he saw the boy’s pursuers in time.

He will have to come this way. Either he’s still trailing, in which case we will catch up to him eventually, or he will pass this way when he heads back out of the mountains. He will see us, and he will know what to do.

Even better, Ethan could
tell
him what to do. Ethan realized he was thinking like a passive man, which was both deadly and unnecessary. He wasn’t helpless. He knew an ally existed out here, and the Blackwell brothers did not. He could signal Luke; he could do things that only someone who knew Ethan and knew the mountains would notice. Noise would be good, for one thing. Light signals, for another. He had only one light, but its beam could tell a story.

When the burned man spoke again, there was a trace of amused pleasure in his voice.

“He must have determined that there is no difference between himself and his wife and the boy from our perspective, so he has surely wondered what the endgame is. I believe he’s been wondering about it for many hours now. Virtually since we met. He’s had, as I mentioned, opportunities to change our path. Instead he chose to carry on, knowing that each hour brings his wife closer to death, and yet each step toward the boy does the same. It’s fascinating to watch. Fascinating to consider. Because he’s seen it all clearly, weighed his options, and made his decision. He will pursue the boy because if he doesn’t, it simply speeds us toward the inevitable. We will kill him for lying and wasting our time, and what good would that do his wife?”

“What do you make of this, then? Knowing these things, what would you say Ethan is thinking right now?”

“Well, he has no intention of finding the boy or allowing his wife to die.”

Ethan ignored them, let them talk while he continued to hike. As he walked, he passed his palm over the beam of the flashlight. Quick, flickering motions, his hand moving like a Las Vegas blackjack dealer’s. He did it in sets of three. Sets of three meant one thing to a trained searcher: distress. Luke Bowden was a trained searcher.

“That’s my conclusion as well,” Patrick Blackwell said. “Which means…”

“He intended to kill me.”

“I believe so. He wasn’t counting on me, then. I’ve hindered him. This is the reason for his apparent antipathy toward me.”

“He doesn’t seem to have taken to you, no.”

“Third wheel. It’s often been my curse.”

“But I don’t sense he’s a beaten man just yet. An unhappy one, yes, quite disgruntled about your joining our quest, but not beaten. And so he may still try, Patrick. I’m telling you, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he tried to kill us both.”

Ethan stopped and looked back at him. The burned man was smiling, and when he saw Ethan’s face, his smile turned into a laugh. Loud and genuine and delighted.

“You’re going to try,” he said. “Good for you, Ethan. You are going to try.”

Ethan shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m going to succeed.” It was important to keep their attention on him. Let them not even consider the idea that there might be a watcher in the woods.

The burned man turned to the other and said, “You hear that? He’s going to succeed.”

“It will be fun to see, won’t it?”

“It certainly will. Let’s walk along and see how his confidence holds up.”

Ethan didn’t understand the full weight of that remark for another quarter mile. That was when they found Luke Bowden’s body in the rocks.