Echoes of the Fall

by Hank Early

“I know, but we’re close, right? We have to be if these guys got here on foot so fast. Just let me handle it.”

  One of them—the one without the cigarette—was heading this way.

  With my window still down, I could hear his boots crunching on the gravel. He was moving slow, cautious. I could hardly see him at all, just a shape—a shadow—floating this way. The only corporeality that emanated from the shadow was the sound of the boots on the gravel.

  Ronnie gasped.

  “What?” I said, but I’d barely felt the word slide past my lips when I saw it too. Another shadow in his hands. A rifle, or shotgun, it hardly mattered except it was aimed right at me.

  I slid down in the seat as the first shot hit the windshield, splintering it into bladed pebbles. The night came alive with sound and light.

  More shots hit the vehicle. I was down low, my body twisted under the steering wheel, but I managed to reach up and put the truck in drive.

  “Hold on,” I said, and put both hands on the gas pedal. I slammed it to the floor and felt the truck lurch ahead, spinning gravel out behind us like machine gun fire. I felt the truck lift, rising with another hill, and I pulled myself out of the floorboard, cutting my hands and wrists on the broken glass. I ignored the pain, grabbed the wheel with one hand, and flipped on the headlights with the other. The road ahead was suddenly awash in my headlights. Another bend lurked, this one as tight or tighter than the last. I slammed my foot on the brakes, but there was no stopping. I’d have to take the turn. Ronnie, still in the floorboard on the passenger’s side, screamed out, as surely as if he’d seen the same thing I had. He must have intuited it somehow. I cut the wheel, and the back end of the truck began to slip out to the side, toward the long fall into the dark nothingness.

  I let off the brake, tried to center the truck, but now my front end was threatened by the yawning pit. The front right tire slipped off the ledge and Ronnie screamed again. I felt my body tense as I ripped the wheel left again, flooring the vehicle.

  Somehow the other three tires found their purchase, and with a great bump and hop, we were back on the gravel road—the now straight gravel road.

  “You okay?” I asked, bringing the truck to a stop.

  “Yeah. Cut up a little, but I ain’t shot. That was some hellacious driving back there, Earl. Never knew you had it in you.”

  “Me neither,” I said. I looked around. The road continued up a long winding rise, at the top of which was a lone cabin with a single light burning inside. The Cadillac was parked in front. “Get out,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Trust me. I’ve got an idea.”

  “I thought you said we were going to come back after we had the lay of the land.”

  “I got the lay of the land, and there ain’t no point in putting off the inevitable. Besides, this might be the only time those brothers are behind us. Hurry, before they catch back up. Oh, and look in the dash. There’s a gun for you.”

  Ronnie opened the dashboard and pulled out my spare gun, a 9mm.

  Then we were both jogging up the rise, toward the cabin and whatever waited inside.

  60

  I felt the light on my back as I ran. I managed to get down before the first rifle shot rang out. A bullet nearly grazed my ear and pinged into the door of the Cadillac.

  I rolled away from the light, toward some trees. Two more shots and the door to the cabin swung open. I looked for Ronnie. He was coming my way, crouched over, the 9mm in one hand. He hit the ground next to me and lay on his belly. I swung around and aimed at the flashlight one of the brothers was holding. I fired. Ronnie fired twice. The light went out.

  The night was silent except for the long echoes of the gunfire, gradually diminishing in waves of eerie dissonance.

  “You think we hit him?” Ronnie said.

  “I doubt it. Otherwise he would have dropped the light instead of turning it off.”

  “Good point.”

  I turned my head to get a look at the house, but it was gone now, as dark as the rest of the night. Someone had come out of it moments before. We had attackers on both sides of us we couldn’t see.

  Footsteps on gravel. Coming from two, no, three directions. One up the hill, in the direction of the cabin. A second from downhill, to my right. That was the brother with the light. The third was the closest of all, just off to our left.

  I nudged Ronnie and whispered to him. “Watch your left. I’ve got the right side.”

  “What about behind us?”

  I didn’t answer. What could I say? There were only two of us, after all.

  My feeling was that the brother with the light would turn it on again at some point. Otherwise, they were as blind as we were. As long as that was the case, we were all handicapped.

  Something moved to my right. I pivoted slowly, irritating the wounds on my stomach as I slid it over the dirt. I held my .45 in both hands. I’d never been what you’d call a crack shot, but I’d also never thought that part mattered much. Most people could hit a target within thirty feet. The problem was most people had a hard time doing it when the target was more than just a target. When it was an actual person. For better or worse, I’d always been able to shut that part of my brain down. Hell, I’d say it was for the better, because if I hadn’t been able to do that, I’d probably have been dead by now.

  The thing I couldn’t do, the thing I’d never been able to do, anyway, was shoot an unarmed man. I remembered the opportunity I’d had to do just that last fall when Jeb Walsh had stood in front of me at gunpoint. God, if I’d just pulled the trigger, would we even be here right now? I had to think we wouldn’t be.

  The life you save may be your own.

  Except when the life you save is some asshole who can’t help getting his dirty fingerprints all over the damned county.

  I felt the light before I saw it. Right on top of me. I rolled over, aiming the gun up, firing wildly. I rolled into Ronnie, who cursed and squeezed off a shot too.

  The ground exploded beside my shoulder, and we were both showered in dirt. The light went crooked and aimed toward the sky, making a full moon in the branches of the trees.

  Someone groaned. I got to my feet.

  Ronnie clutched at my ankles, trying to pull me down. “What are you doing?” he hissed.

  “Going to get that light. Cover me.”

  I was almost there when I realized it might be a trick. The light still lay aimed at the tree branches, and I could see the dark casing of the flashlight, still in the man’s hand. I raised my gun for what I hoped would be kill shot when the light shifted, flashing in my eyes, causing me to lose the target.

  Someone fired. In my blinded state, I couldn’t tell where the shot had come from. But I didn’t feel hit. And the light fell away. The groan was different this time. The groan was misery, the kind from the depths of hell that pricks you inside and makes you regret everything all at once.

  Except being alive to feel regret. Not that.

  I blinked several times, trying to get the spots out of my vision, but they lingered. A hand fell on my back. I jumped, screaming out, and Ronnie hushed me.

  “We got to get down on the—”

  Shots came from two different directions. We fell, rolled onto one of the brothers. I heaved his body over top of us to use as a shield.

  “You hit?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I think maybe I am,” Ronnie said.

  “Shit. Where?” I’d no more gotten the question out than the headlights came on. A car was coming toward us, its high beams freezing us where we lay.

  “What now?” Ronnie said.

  “Where are you shot?”

  “Leg. No, hip. Maybe thigh. Everything hurts.”

  “Can you stand?”

  “Nah. That ain’t happening.”

  “Okay.” I swallowed hard. The car was still coming toward us. If I timed it just right …

  I stayed still, waiting, hoping the driver—Blevins or one of the brothers or even Savanna—woul
d assume us all dead and stop the vehicle.

  The headlights stayed on us as the car crept steadily forward. I’d have to act soon.

  My fingers tightened on my .45 caliber, and I thought again about last fall, the chance I’d had to take Walsh out. Would it really have kept me from this moment? Maybe. Or maybe I would be in prison right now. Still, when it came down to death and prison, there was no real decision to be made …

  I waited until I heard the engine rev before shrugging the dead Hill brother off me and standing up. I couldn’t see because of the high beams, but I held the gun steady and squeezed the trigger until it was empty. The car swerved just before hitting me, hitting us. I watched as it slid down the hill and into a bank of trees before coming to a stop.

  Before I could head down to check it out, I heard another vehicle start up. I spun toward the cabin in time to see a small car darting away. Its headlights illuminated a man—the other brother. He stood there, passive, unafraid, just standing there, as the car slowed and the driver said something to him.

  My gun was empty, so I went to Ronnie and asked for his. He handed it to me, grunting from the pain, but by the time I got the gun up, the brother was gone and the car was moving again. I squeezed off two shots, but I didn’t think either one of them hit anything. The taillights vanished around the bend.

  As far as I could tell, we were alone. I looked up at the cabin. The single light burned inside again. Somehow I doubted we’d find Rufus there.

  61

  Two days later, Ronnie and I checked into the Wildflower Motel on the west side of the county. We took possession of a spartan room with two double beds, an old box television with a button on the remote that said press for adult only content, a framed watercolor painting of the ocean at sunset, and a bathtub with a broken drain. The best part of the place—other than it being far enough off the beaten path to let us avoid being found—was the back window that looked out onto a meadow dappled with wildflowers and rolling hills, hence the name of the place. Ronnie and I both commented that the view alone was worth $18.99 a night.

  Mindy and Chip were in the room right next door. It had been Chip I’d called first when Ronnie and I finally made it to my place and I’d had a chance to charge my phone.

  “Where are you?” I’d asked him.

  “I’m safe,” he said. “And I’ve talked to Mindy. In fact, she’s here with me.”

  “You’re still interviewing her?”

  “Not so much. She’s worried, though, because her mother overheard her talking to me and called her uncle.”

  “Okay, that’s good. I’m glad you’re both all right.”

  “What about you?”

  I looked at Ronnie. I’d helped him out of the truck and onto the couch at my place. He was still in a lot of pain, but the bleeding was under control. He’d live as long as the wound didn’t get infected. Despite my best efforts, he would not hear of me taking him to the hospital. “Bad news,” he’d said. “That’s how Argent finds out where we are.”

  I would have made him if I’d thought he was in real danger. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to get some antibiotics in him just in case.

  “We’ve been better,” I said.

  “Did you find what I needed?”

  “Not yet. I’m still working on it.”

  “Are you safe?”

  “Far from it.”

  “Come stay with us.”

  Once he explained where they were and how he’d only seen a few people since being there, I agreed that Ronnie and I would stay there for a few days until I figured out what my next move was. Except I thought I might already know.

  We’d been at the Wildflower less than two days when Chip asked me to come over to his room for a talk.

  Mindy was around back with Ronnie, the two of them sitting in the grass, watching the sunset. We could see them through the back window of Chip’s room from where we sat across from each other at the small round table, the same round table that was in Ronnie’s and my room. He had his laptop out and told me he’d gotten in touch with Harriet that morning.

  “Her story is quite compelling. I think I’ve got something here. The one thing I don’t have is something that connects Jeb Walsh to it all in a concrete way. Do you really think he was behind the death of that boy?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “But that happened a while back. There’s no way to know for sure.”

  “I’d like to interview his son.”

  “That’s going to be tough.”

  He shrugged. “You found Harriet. After talking to her, I understand that was no easy task. This whole story is coming together, but there are still some missing pieces I need you to fill in.”

  I knew he was right, but I didn’t have many options available to me to fix the problem. Well, maybe one, but the truth was, I’d been putting it off. Ronnie needed me, I told myself. But that wasn’t it. Mindy or Chip could have taken care of him fine. The real truth was I was still pretty depressed over Mary, and now Rufus.

  When we’d gone inside the house at the top of the hill, after all the shooting, we’d found no sign of Rufus whatsoever. I searched the place for as long as I dared, looking for anything that might prove to me he’d been there. I didn’t find it.

  But I did find something. Well, a couple of somethings. One was a mini recorder with a missing battery door. I rewound the tape and pressed play. I heard my voice and Claire’s as we talked that day in the bookstore. But how and why had the brothers known to follow me there?

  I could think of only one reason. They’d been the ones who’d killed Joe.

  The other something I found was sitting on the kitchen counter among a veritable mound of other dirty dishes.

  It was a red cooler just like the one Daphne had filled up at my house.

  * * *

  Was it possible it was just the same kind of red cooler but not Daphne’s red cooler? Sure, anything was possible. In fact, it might even have been likely. But it got me to thinking about Daphne and Savanna and how the clues had been there all along.

  First and foremost was timing. A few short days after Claire and I had been recorded in the bookstore, Daphne had shown up. Second was my own arrogance. It was actually quite astonishing. I’d been willing to accept that this woman had just come out of nowhere to fuck me. That I was just so damned attractive—at fifty-three, for God’s sake—that she literally couldn’t keep her hands off me.

  And then there was the car. She drove a little Toyota Corolla. When Savanna had made her escape—with or without Rufus—she’d been driving a small car, roughly the size and shape of a Corolla.

  The red cooler just snapped all of this into focus. The one thing I couldn’t get my head around was why. If I’d been a threat—and obviously I had been, since she’d felt the need to put her feral sons on me early—why not just have those same sons eliminate me? The only answer I could come up with was that sex was a luxury she believed she had, like a cat toying with a mouse before killing it. This seemed to fit with Harriet’s narrative of her sister.

  So, that left me with one more thing to do, and that was wait. But I had to make sure I was waiting in the right place. I had to go home and hope she showed up, hope she was willing to play cat-and-mouse one more time. And this time, I had to make sure I was the cat instead of the mouse.

  I walked to the back window and raised it. “Come on in,” I said. “I need to talk to both of you.”

  Ronnie and Mindy turned as if embarrassed, as if I’d caught them in the middle of something they didn’t want me to see. I felt a flood of emotions as I realized they were falling for each other. On the one hand, I couldn’t help but think of Mary and how much I missed her, and that made me hate both Mindy and Ronnie just a little bit. On the other hand, I’d come to love Ronnie like a brother—imagine that—and my heart felt full seeing him so happy.

  The world was made of mysteries, I decided, and sat down at the table to think about how I was going to solve one of them and come out on
the other side unscathed.

  Except I’d faced enough of the world’s mysteries in the past to know that wasn’t going to happen. This wasn’t a gentle world. It always left a mark.

  62

  I decided to head home and wait her out. My logic was that, sooner or later, Daphne would come looking for me. She had to know I was the one who’d killed one of her boys, not to mention whoever had been driving the Cadillac.

  I spent most of the day sitting outside, pretending to read, waiting for the sound of her car coming up the road. I kept my phone beside me in case someone called. But the car didn’t come and the phone didn’t ring.

  Two days passed this way, with me checking in with Chip and Ronnie on a daily basis. They both begged me to come back to the Wildflower where it was safe, but I told them I knew what I was doing. I sounded confident when I said it, but in reality I was growing less and less sure of myself with each passing day.

  Eventually I decided I might need to be a little more proactive. An idea began to take root, and the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I was in the midst of contemplating the best way to initiate it when the phone rang.

  I didn’t recognize the number and wondered if it might be Savanna. I picked it up, ready for anything.

  It was Claire. She wanted to meet me somewhere to talk about “the case.” I almost told her no, but I decided it might not be wise to exclude anything at this point, so I agreed to meet her.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  “Okay, but don’t wait too long. I want to know what’s going on!”

  “Sure,” I told her. “I’ll call you back.”

  The reason I wanted to wait on where to meet was because of the idea I’d had. I needed to check on a couple of things first.

  I found Eleanor Walsh’s number and dialed it. She picked up on the third ring.

  “Mr. Marcus, I thought you’d fallen off the face of the earth. I’ve tried to call you several times. I even left a voice mail. Did you know Dr. Blevins was missing?”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve had a hard couple of days. Haven’t even checked my voice mail yet. And no, I hadn’t heard about Blevins. What happened?” I decided playing dumb was the way to go here.