“Well crap! She’s not here! Are both of those guys dead?”
Nantan nodded.
“Then we’ve got to get to the place where they turned around. Maybe they were unable to stop the Mexicans!” Eric said, as he waved frantically for Red to come forward with the other pickup. When he did, Eric took the wheel and they all piled into the truck. He drove as fast as the road would permit, his mind racing even faster as he thought of all the reasons why Shauna wasn’t in that truck. The most likely one of all was the one he feared most—that the contractors escorting the Mexicans had been unable to stop them and even now they were driving away with her to no telling where. Eric knew there were originally three men in the truck, and he wondered if the other one had been killed when they tried to follow the chief’s orders. He was so convinced that he was right about this that it came as quite a shock to find the two black SUVs stopped in the middle of the road, bodies sprawled all around them. Eric skidded to a stop from a safe distance and he and the Apaches got out, their rifles at ready. Nothing was moving in the vicinity, however, so they cautiously closed in on the bullet-riddled vehicles and checked the bodies, finding five Hispanic-looking men in total, all of them dead from bullet wounds. Some of their weapons were still laying there on the ground where they dropped them, and the men began picking them up while Eric examined the interiors of the SUVs, dreading what he might find there. There were no more bodies inside though, and the only evidence he found that Shauna had been there was a cut zip tie on one of the rear floorboards. Eric took it to Luke and asked him what he made of it.
“Well, she wasn’t in the pickup with the two contractors, and she’s not here, but one of those guys is missing too, so they must be nearby.”
“I wonder why the other two would have headed back, when they’d already taken these cartel guys out and they thought the chief was coming here to meet them?”
“Your wife may have escaped. Maybe the other guy even helped her? Who knows? If they went on foot though, I’ll find them. I’ll start looking for their trail right now!”
Eric had full faith in Luke’s tracking abilities after seeing them in action, and he wasn’t let down now. Luke found the place where Shauna left the road, almost directly adjacent to the SUV in which Eric found the cut restraint. There was nothing else at the scene of the shootout to investigate, so Nantan asked Tommy and Red to stay behind and guard the truck while he and Eric followed Luke into the bush.
“She went through here. Three men went this way too,” Luke pointed out the footprints where they crossed a sandy area among the rocks. “Two of them turned around and came back. The other one must be the third man who is missing.”
Eric looked at the confusing jumble of tracks in the sand, many of them obscured by the newer ones on top of them. “So, they all went after her at first. Can you tell how far ahead she was?”
“Not exactly, but she was running faster than them, making longer strides. They were in a hurry too, but they stopped several times, probably trying to figure out where she was. But then, when the two of them came back this way, they were only walking. See their boot prints over the top of the others? Those two had to be the two in the truck we met on the road. But the other one may be still following her. We need to move quickly, but with caution too, because he is out there somewhere.”
Eric was impressed that Luke could tell all that, but not really surprised. He knew the basics of how to read sign, but what separated his elemental knowledge from a master like Luke was that Luke could follow a trail through places where most people couldn’t tell it even existed. That was a skill that took years of study and Eric hadn’t had the patience or the time, but he was glad that Luke did. Without him, Eric would be mostly guessing, perhaps finding a foot print here and there, but stumbling around blind trying to figure out where Shauna went until it was possibly too late to help her.
It seemed strange to Eric that the other two would turn back and leave just the one guy in pursuit, but he thought that maybe it was because they realized by the way she was running that catching her wasn’t going to be quick and easy. Perhaps they left their most skilled tracker to it while the others went back to get help. But that theory proved wrong when Luke had followed the trail but another quarter mile. The third man was face down and unmoving on the blood-stained rocks beneath him, and a closer look revealed two bullet exit wounds in the middle of his back.
“That is why only two of them went back,” Luke smiled.
“Your wife must have grabbed a weapon before she ran,” Nantan said. “The other two must have decided she wasn’t worth the bother.”
Eric agreed that might be right. They’d just survived a major firefight with the men who they were supposed to be working for, killing them all, and this woman the chief had already traded off or given to those men as a gift had then killed one of their own while escaping into the wilderness. Eric could see why they’d have little motivation to continue pursuit. They were hired killers when killing was the job, but no one was paying them any extra to risk their lives going after some crazy bitch they had no use for anyway, so they’d collected their dead buddy’s weapon and headed back to their truck.
Luke pointed out where Shauna’s trail was headed, and Eric scanned the slopes in that direction and easily picked out the logical spot from which she would have set up her ambush. When the three of them reached the jumble of boulders, Luke found several 7.62 x 39mm shell casings on the ground there. “Looks like she’s got an AK,” he grinned. “That’s good shooting, considering the weapon and the distance.”
“She knows how to handle a rifle,” Eric agreed. He felt much better now, knowing Shauna was armed, but when Luke picked up her trail where she’d continued on after firing her weapon, her footprints indicated she left at a fast run. There was no telling how many miles that woman would cover before dark if she thought for a minute she was still being pursued. Eric was no slouch at distance running himself, but even if he knew her exact route, Shauna had a good head start. Since he didn’t know though, there was no way he’d ever catch up without Luke’s help. “You may as well go back and tell Tommy and Red we’re going to be awhile,” Eric told Nantan. “My ex-wife is a freakin’ triathlete and may run all night. If Luke is willing, the two of us will go after her until we catch up.”
Sixteen
WHEN SHE REACHED THE top of the ridge above the place where she’d stopped to fire at her pursuers, Shauna saw that the only way ahead was across a wide plain that stretched to another range of hazy blue peaks in the far distance. Bisecting the flatlands ahead of her though was what appeared to be a deep canyon. She couldn’t tell from where she stood if there was a way across it or not, but she picked a spot where it looked like a shallow arroyo on her side intersected it. If she could make it down there, she knew she might find a way into the canyon, which she hoped would offer better places to shelter and hide and maybe even a source of water.
Aside from getting shot or captured by her pursuers, finding water was right up there in importance with finding shelter from the cold. Shauna was confident in her endurance and ability to run for miles and miles without stopping, but without water the dry climate here would do her in after all that exertion. She was putting all her faith in being able to find some in the deep rift ahead of her, because to remain where she was would surely result in her capture. Dodging rocks and picking her way through the brush, Shauna made her way down to the plain at a fast lope. The land there wasn’t as open as it appeared from a distance, and she felt better as she ran among the stunted cedars and other semi-desert vegetation that hid her from view of the ridge behind. She only stopped to look back once, and that was when she’d finally reached the edge of the arroyo. What she saw back there kept her from pausing more than a few seconds though. Silhouetted in the late afternoon sun at the crest of the distant ridge, were the tiny figures of two men! They weren’t giving up! The remaining two contractors were apparently tracking her even though she’d left them that
far behind!
Shauna still had no idea why those men had stopped the convoy out there in the middle of nowhere. Was it some kind of trick the chief’s men had pulled on the Mexicans, handing her over to them and then having his men turn on them and kill them once they were out on the road? It didn’t make a lot of sense, because she figured they could have done the same in the compound, had they wanted, but whatever the reason, it had happened, and now those men apparently wanted her back. She’d thought that taking out one of them with the AK had changed their minds, but now she knew she was wrong. The other two were still in pursuit, even though they were traveling far slower. She figured she must have wounded, rather than killed the one she shot, and that maybe getting him back to the road and tending his wounds had cost them sufficient time for her to gain such a good lead on them. Whatever the reason, she intended to keep her distance, and that meant she couldn’t slack up now. Shauna climbed down into the shallow arroyo and followed its winding course that she hoped would take her to the big canyon she’d seen from the ridge. The men behind her would have seen it too, but Shauna was counting on the vastness of the landscape to enable her to disappear. It was only a short time until dark, and if she could just stay ahead until then, she was confident she could elude them.
As she worked her way down the dry stream bed, Shauna was conscientious about where she placed her steps. If they were tracking her, they would look for the obvious, so she avoided the sand whenever possible and walked on the smooth surfaces of the rocks, taking care not to overturn them or leave other obvious signs of her passage. She’d hoped to find standing water somewhere in the bottom of the arroyo, but there was none so far. This area was far drier than any she’d seen in Colorado since she and Jason had reached the Front Range, and Shauna figured the weather systems that had already brought snow to the high mountains didn’t affect this particular region. If there was water in the vicinity, it would be farther down, probably in the bottom of the main canyon. Shauna’s hopes of getting some soon faded though when she came to the end of the arroyo and found herself on a precipice that dropped more than a hundred feet to the canyon floor below. She crept as close to the edge of the cliff as she dared and looked over. There was water there all right, big pools of it in the bends of the canyon in the shadows of its near-vertical walls. But there was no way down there from where she stood without a climbing rope with which to rappel, so Shauna turned back to find a way out of the arroyo and then make her way along the rim of the canyon to search for another route.
Doing this required her to backtrack nearly a quarter of a mile just to get out of the arroyo. Then she had to follow it back down from the top to return to the canyon. All this time, she had to assume her pursuers were gaining on her, but though she stopped to look back when possible, she saw no sign of them. The next place she saw that could be a potential way down was a narrow slot canyon she came to another mile farther along the rim. It was easy enough to enter from the top, but from up there she couldn’t tell whether it was climbable all the way down or not. Shauna had seen the water in the main canyon floor though, so she was determined to try and reach it, and pressed ahead. In places, the slot was so narrow she had to turn her body sideways to get through. The winding passageway between the vertical walls of smooth sandstone was taking her lower down with every step, but she still wasn’t sure if she could reach the bottom until it finally ended at a drop off that she estimated was fifteen feet above the still water below. Shauna got down on her belly and crawled to the edge to look over, hoping to spot some hand or foot holds by which she could climb the rest of the way down, but the rock beneath her was smooth and featureless.
Her throat was parched, and the deep water directly below looked cool and inviting, a pale turquoise green pool that was clear enough that she could see several feet into it. She thought it was deep enough to jump into from that height without risk of injury, but even at this hour, the floor of the canyon was completely in the shadows, the sun well behind the tall cliffs of the rim. Shauna was cold despite her exertion, and she knew if she plunged into that water, she’d have no way to get warm again before the coming night. She had nothing with which to make a fire and her clothes would be soaked. There was a sandbar on the opposite side of the deep pool, but it was too far away to reliably throw her clothes, boots and rifle to it, even if she decided to take the plunge naked and try to warm up afterwards. She knew that getting her clothing wet with no way to dry it could prove fatal, guaranteeing hypothermia when the temperatures dropped later that night, and she decided it wasn’t worth the risk. It was a huge disappointment, but Shauna took one last look at that beautiful water and turned to retrace her route back up the slot canyon to the rim.
It was going to take everything she had, but Shauna was determined to find another way down to the bottom that wouldn’t involve getting wet. She had just emerged from the slot canyon though when she spotted someone standing frozen behind a small bush. The man must have been following her and had stopped short when he saw her suddenly reappear. Shauna knew immediately that he wasn’t one of the two contractors, but he was carrying an AR or M4-style rifle like them and wearing a Desert Tan boonie hat. Beneath the hat, his hair was long, framing a dark face she knew was Indian or Mexican. Shauna had no idea where he’d come from, and since she’d been climbing, the AK was slung behind her back and not at hand, so she spun around and darted back down into the slot canyon just as the man shouted out a greeting to her: “HEY! WAIT, DON’T RUN!”
She knew she had just two choices now. She could hide and ambush the stranger if he continued to follow her, or she could jump into that cold water that waited below and try to escape into the canyon. She decided on the latter, as she had no idea whether or not the man was alone. With no further hesitation, she entered the narrow section of the slot and had just disappeared when another voice stopped her short: “SHAUNA! HEY SHAUNA… IT’S ME! ERIC...!”
The voice was distorted as it echoed off the wall of the canyon. Shauna had given the chief Eric’s name when she was trying to convince him who she was and why she was there at Bob Barham’s cabin. It was possible the men pursuing her were trying to trick her, but how did that explain the strange man she’d just seen? The one that looked Native American? She wanted to believe that it really was Eric up there calling to her by some miracle, but how in the hell would he have known to look for her here?”
“SHAUNA! You can stop now! You’re safe and Megan is too! I found her!”
Shauna felt her knees go weak as she leaned against the wall of the canyon and listened to the echo of those words. Could this be real? She heard Eric call out again, telling her that the men chasing her were dead, and then Shauna turned and climbed up through the bend she’d just rounded. When she came into view of the ledge above, two men were standing there: the stranger she’d just seen and Eric Branson! Shauna climbed the rest of the way out without another word. She was too exhausted to shout back and forth. When she reached the top, Eric was waiting and took her hands in his.
“You really found Megan? Where is she? Is she really okay? Is she here with you?”
“Yes, I found her, Shauna! She’s safe and well! She’s at the Jicarilla reservation, right where Vicky said she was going. She’s there with her friend Aaron and his aunt and uncle.”
“Are you sure she’s okay there? Why did you leave her?”
“Yes, I’m sure, or I wouldn’t have left her! And why do you think? To come back for you, of course! Just like I said I would in my letter.”
Shauna had momentarily forgotten all about the letter. Now she remembered it and remembered how she’d cursed Eric when she’d read it, and how she’d sworn that she was going to slap the hell out of him the next time she saw him. But she just looked at him through the tears of happiness welling up in her eyes and threw herself into his arms. Megan was alive, and Eric Branson had found her, just like he said he would do! She had so many questions, but for this moment, she just wanted to feel safe in his arms
and grateful for all he’d done. When he finally pulled away, he introduced her to Luke, the tracker who’d made it possible to follow her here.
“We should get going,” Luke said. “It will be dark now before we get back to the road. Nantan and the others are waiting, and we don’t know that there aren’t more of those guys patrolling these roads.”
“Yeah, we’ve got a lot of miles to cover. I knew we were in for a workout when Luke said your tracks indicated you were running, Shauna. I guess if it hadn’t been for this canyon, we’d be chasing you all night!”
Shauna told her story as the three of them set out for the hike back to the road. The first thing she told Eric, of course, was that she had no idea what had become of Jonathan and Vicky when the contractors raided the cabin. Then, Eric told her about Vicky’s note, and how Wolf, the other experienced Jicarilla tracker they had with them, had gone after them.
“He will have no trouble catching up to them,” Luke said. “They are traveling slow, because the girl is walking, while the injured guy rides on the only horse they have.”
Shauna was relieved to know for sure that the two of them had indeed escaped discovery by the raiding party, and that Tucker was with them, the only horse on the place that escaped the senseless slaughter those horrible men had perpetrated. She was also happy to hear that most of the bastards were dead, including the other two that had been with the one she’d shot herself. But out of all of them, she thought it was the chief that deserved it the most.
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