Blood on the Tracks (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 1)

by Barbara Nickless

  Petes. The escapee from the shootout at Melody’s house.

  “A woman?” Petes lowered the rifle barrel. “What the hell you doing out here?”

  “Them dogs must’ve broke their ropes,” said the man on the stairs. “That’s pretty good shooting, lady. Hell, I’ve been wanting to shoot those fuckers myself. They don’t never shut up.”

  I tried to see into Petes’s eyes, looking for evil. Looking for anything that said it was okay to put him down in cold blood.

  But he was a cutout against the trailer lights, his eyes a riddle.

  Nik’s voice. You have to kill them.

  I raised my gun and shouted.

  “Special Agent Parnell with Denver Pacific! We’ve got your camp surrounded. Drop your weapons.”

  Petes’s barrel came swinging back up.

  “Fuck that,” he said.

  We fired at the same time. My shot punched a hole through his forehead. Petes folded at the waist and dropped hard, like a man trying to sit without a chair. The second skinhead had his gun partway up when Clyde flew out of the dark and knocked him back. Their combined weight carried them into the trailer’s side. A vicious crack sounded as the man’s skull hit metal. One glance at his face told me he wouldn’t be getting up again.

  I dashed to the trailer wall and flattened myself against it as a third man appeared in the doorway. He fired wildly into the dark. The Colt blew the side of his head off. His body hit the door frame and tumbled down the stairs.

  I whistled to Clyde, shoved past the third man’s body, and barged hard into the trailer, gun extended, shouting, “Hands up!”

  Melody Weber stood near a curtained bunk bed at the far end of the single-room trailer, her hands raised high. When she realized I was the one who’d just shot her pals, her expression changed to relief. She started to lower her hands.

  “Keep them up,” I said, angling myself so I could see both her and the front door.

  Her hands rose. “They’ve got Gentry,” she said. “Up on the bridge. They’re gonna kill him.”

  “Like you killed Elise?”

  Hurt rose in her eyes like floodwater. She shook her head wildly. “I didn’t. It wasn’t me.”

  “Whoever is behind that curtain,” I said, “I’ve got a .45 aimed right at you. Open the curtain and show me your hands.”

  “It’s Liz,” Melody said.

  Hating it, I kept my voice hard. “Open the curtain. Now.”

  “I’ll do it,” Melody said.

  “Don’t move a fucking inch,” I told her.

  “Go ahead, Lizzie,” Melody said. “Open the curtain. It’s the nice Agent Parnell.”

  I’m sure we both enjoyed the irony of that.

  A small hand grabbed the end of the curtain and dragged it open. Liz Weber looked out at me with terrified eyes. Her gaze took in first the gun and then the rest of me, no doubt seeing the blood on my face and coat from the men I’d just killed.

  “I’m sorry, Liz,” I whispered. I swung the gun back to Melody. “They took Gentry?”

  She nodded. “To the bridge.”

  Liz’s eyes locked on Clyde. She rolled out of the bunk bed and skirted past me to throw her arms around him.

  “Agent Parnell—” Melody started.

  “Keep your hands up.” I became aware of a deep burn in my left arm. I glanced down and saw a hole in the sleeve.

  “Mommy didn’t do it,” Liz said to Clyde.

  I squatted next to her. “What, sweetie?”

  “It wasn’t Mommy who hurt Elise. It was the bad man.”

  The world went a little sideways. “Whip?”

  The little girl shook her head. She was crying now, her face buried deep in Clyde’s fur, her arms in a stranglehold around his neck. I touched her shoulder, felt her bones like those of a bird’s beneath her pale skin. Her hair was a rat’s nest. The faint scent of urine rose from her cheap nightgown.

  I wanted to cry, too.

  Outside, from far away, a shot rang out. Liz and I both flinched. Nik, I hoped, catching up to the skinheads.

  “Who told you that, Liz? About the bad man?”

  “We saw him.”

  I lifted my eyes to Melody, wondering if it could be true.

  “Who, then?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” Melody said. “We’d just gotten there, was standing on the porch. It was dark with only the light from the house. All I could see was his outline when he come outside. He was big.”

  “I know you were in Elise’s apartment, Melody. Your coat was there.”

  Her chin came up. “It’s true I went in, but I didn’t kill her! After the man left, Liz and me went up to her place. I took off my coat before we knew Elise was dead in her bedroom. After I found her, I was scared. I sure wasn’t thinking about my coat.”

  I stood and tightened my grip on the gun. “Don’t you lie to protect Whip.”

  “I won’t never protect Whip again. Not after all the hurting he did to Gentry.” Fire entered her pale eyes. “Tonight he hit Liz. You was right about him. But he didn’t kill Elise.”

  The clock was ticking. I would process Gentry’s and Liz’s pain later.

  “Tell me about the man,” I said. “Quickly.”

  “We saw a light moving in Elise’s room as we come up to the house, so we hid on the porch. After the man left, we let ourselves in. Elise’s bedroom door was closed, so I poured us some milk. The wind was rattling her door like her window was open, which was weird, it being so cold that night. We waited maybe fifteen minutes, then I knocked on her door. Elise was all—you know. I didn’t know what to do. I worried the police might think it was me. So I called Whip and he come over. He thought I’d done it. On account of how he felt about her. He was really mad. But he went into her room and put some hobo beads there, said it would protect me. Said it would make the police think someone else had been there. Then we left.”

  Which didn’t exactly exonerate Whip. And Melody could be lying about all of it. But I would leave that for later, too. For the moment, she had nowhere to go. Not in a blizzard with the road blocked by Markusson’s cruiser.

  I holstered the gun. “I’m going after Gentry. You and Liz stay inside the trailer. Lock the door and don’t let anyone in until the sheriff gets here.”

  She looked like she’d throw up. “Whip’ll kill you. Then what’s gonna happen to me and Liz?”

  “Maybe you should spend the time praying it goes the other way.”

  I took a rifle from the rack over the sink, checked that it was loaded, and slung it over my shoulder. Then I tried again to raise the train crew on my portable. Still out of range. Or maybe it was the weather and the hills and the gorge. Maybe I’d never get through. Not until it was too late to matter.

  I stopped with my eyes on Clyde. Liz clung to him as if she’d just fallen off the Titanic, and he was her lifeboat. Which wasn’t far off the mark, I figured.

  For just a moment, I considered leaving him with her. I’d made a promise to Dougie to protect him, not walk him into a possible ambush. But I couldn’t honor a promise if it meant treating Clyde like a lapdog. Clyde’s work was his life.

  Dougie would understand.

  “I have to take Clyde,” I told Liz gently. “He’s my partner.”

  She dropped her arms and backed away without any argument. If there was one thing Liz had learned in her young life, it was that fighting back bought you nothing but a split lip or a black eye.

  “I’ll bring him to see you again,” I said. “I promise.”

  She gave me a small smile. “’kay.”

  As Clyde and I headed toward the door, her voice made me turn.

  “The bad man said something. On the porch. Like he was talking to himself.”

  “What, Liz? What did he say?”

  “I think he was sick. Like I get sometimes.”

  “Was he coughing?”

  She shook her head. “He said he couldn’t breathe.”

  Outside, the snow had be
gun to tire. Slow, fat flakes swirled on the wind. A full moon glowed behind a thin haze of clouds. I could just make out the shape of the Boedeker home in the distance, leaning like a drunk in the silver light.

  Clyde and I stepped around the men and dogs I’d shot. I didn’t look at the dead. I don’t think Clyde did, either.

  The lights were gone from the hillside leading up along the gorge to the trestle. With Nik’s first shot, I’m sure the skinheads had switched off their headlamps. No way to know what they’d done after that. If they’d kept going or hidden themselves or turned around. Together Clyde and I hurried past the southernmost trailers and made our way toward the incline. The wind turned and blew hard at our backs, carrying our scent forward and bringing nothing back. Bad news. If someone lay in wait, Clyde wouldn’t pick up their scent until we’d gone past them.

  As we cleared the last of the encampment, the abyss curved in from the west. Dank, cold air rose from its depths. As if Devil’s Gulch really was a passage to the underworld.

  Up ahead, another shot rang out. The echoes rattled through the gorge. Far away, a coyote gave a yipping bark and fell silent.

  Jimmy had proven true so far. He’d said there were twelve skinheads in camp. The guard was dead, as were my three. That left the eight we’d seen heading up toward the bridge with Gentry. If the two shots I’d heard had been Nik firing, then six remained. Nik didn’t miss his shots.

  I found Nik’s second killing another hundred yards up the path. The man lay on the trail, eyes open to the sky, his throat blown open.

  Moonlight turned his eyes to silver coins, made him both more and less than human. I’d seen so many like this in Iraq. Held them. Laid them in bags.

  My stomach clenched. Five corpses in, the death fear hit with a sick flutter in my bowels. The heat of Iraq rose around me and I was back in the seven-ton, driving into a bombed-out wasteland. A desert Charon collecting the dead.

  The panic drove me to my knees.

  Clyde nudged me.

  The Sir knelt by my ear.

  Our men are in danger, Marine. Get the fuck up.

  I got the fuck up.

  Night resumed around me with the jitter of the winter wind. Clyde and I kept walking. We were close enough now to the bridge for me to see the rails gleaming in the moonlight. On either side of us rose a jumble of sandstone rocks. Some no higher than my shoulders. Others the size of a house.

  The potential for ambush waited at every bend. But the knowledge of the coming train rode my thoughts like a knife blade. We went fast.

  Another fifty yards, another dead man. This one with his throat smiling. Nik had been close enough to the group with Gentry not to risk a shot. Or maybe it was just that he was good with a knife.

  Man’s gotta breathe.

  Maybe all of us were half crazy. All of us former Marines, soldiers, pilots. Maybe we all came back from our wars infected with something dark and secret. Something that multiplied in the fertile silence of our hushed hearts.

  Clyde stopped so suddenly I almost tripped over him. I crouched and watched as he circled back the way we’d come then trotted forward again, nose to the ground and then up in the air as he worked to pull whatever scent had alerted him. But the wind scattered the scent cone, spread the molecules to nothing.

  He trotted back down the trail, and I followed.

  The trestle bridge grew larger, filling the southern horizon. To our west, the gorge released a thin, chill breath of ice. Unease pricked at my skin. I crouched again and downed Clyde next to me. I looked up and down the hillside. The wind dropped, and for a moment the entire world lay wrapped in silence, the night a velvet glove.

  Beside me, Clyde shivered. I felt it, too. A baleful presence. Someone nearby, their eyes on our skin.

  I groped for Clyde’s lead, intending to back us off the trail.

  A burst of light hit my face. I pushed Clyde hard, trying to knock him back into the darkness.

  His feet scrabbled on the icy ground and then he whirled and leapt into the space in front of me, a furious growl in his throat.

  “Clyde!”

  There came the flat report of a gunshot, and Clyde went down.

  I rose and tried to run to him, but there came another crack, and something slammed into my chest with the heft and speed of a man swinging a baseball bat.

  My rifle skittered away as I fell, the pain in my chest burning through my lungs until no breath remained. I skidded along the snow-packed slope toward the abyss. My right foot caught on something; the sudden braking spun me around and shoved me against a rocky outcropping.

  Clyde, I screamed without a voice. Clyde!

  A figure appeared above me, silhouetted against the moon-hazed sky. A man, tall and lean. He flicked a light on my face then flicked it off again. In the darkness, his breath hit my skin like the scratch of wool.

  He reached out a hand and felt under my coat. Found the vest.

  “Well, well, well,” he said.

  You’re not breathing, Parnell, said the Sir.

  I’m goddamn trying, sir.

  “The lady cop, riding to the rescue,” the man said. “But who’s going to rescue the lady cop?”

  The Sir squatted next to me. Get. Up.

  A trickle of air slid down my windpipe. “Clyde?”

  “What’s that?” asked the man. “You got something to say?”

  The light returned to my face, panned down my inert body. A headlamp. This time I caught a glimpse of the man behind it.

  Narrow face, high cheekbones, a domed forehead. The face that had stared at me from a piece of paper until I’d memorized every feature.

  Alfred Merkel, aka Whip.

  In person, he was more imposing than I’d imagined from the artist’s sketch. Violence sizzled off him with a chained ferocity. Muscled beneath his camos, his bare head smooth, he sat on his heels and regarded me with the languid confidence of a predator. His gray eyes held glints of amber, like sparks off flint.

  Score one for the Burned Man, giving this guy his licks.

  The light returned to my face. “That your pal up there, picking off my men?”

  “My dog,” I whispered.

  “That your dog I shot?” He hawked up phlegm, turned his head and spit. “Looks like the fucker’s dead.” He swiveled his gaze back to me. “Was supposed to be you.”

  My face and chest grew hot with rage and grief.

  “I will put you down,” I said. “For my dog.”

  “That right?”

  “And for killing Elise.” Testing him. Testing my own theories.

  Whip’s eyes went to slits. His breath hung in a cloud between us. He seemed to be thinking. Probably not something he was used to doing in a hurry. He reached into his boot, came back with a knife.

  I pulled my thigh to my chest then shoved my foot into him with everything I had.

  He flew backwards.

  I scrabbled to get my feet under me, thinking I would kill him. Then I would go to Clyde and fix whatever was wrong. Because Clyde couldn’t be dead.

  I made it to a half crouch before Whip came at me, swinging the knife in an arc. I feinted to the right and, as he followed, made a quick jag to the left. My foot slipped on the snow and went out from under me. Desperately I threw myself forward, grasping for anything to stop my fall.

  My hands found Whip’s coat, yanked him close.

  The abyss opened behind us.

  CHAPTER 27

  Nietzsche said that whoever fights monsters should be careful not to become one.

  I say, sometimes that’s all you’ve got.

  —Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

  We hit, bounced, caught air, hit and bounced again. Even as we went, Whip was trying to get the knife into me. The blade was the only thing that caught the light as we hurtled into the dark.

  I let go of him, tumbling end over end as I descended, careening off snow-covered rock faces and tree trunks in an oddly weightless flight, the heavy snow and gravity carrying
me like a wave past anything that could hit me with enough force to stop my downward descent. I heard Sarge’s gun go flying. A second later the radio broke away and smashed against a rock.

  And then gravity was done with me. It fetched me up against the trestle’s base and left me there, stunned and panting, flung like a doll on my back.

  With a groan, I lifted my head.

  A little way north, where the ravine dropped deeper, a small light shone. Whip’s headlamp. I watched it long enough to see that it was moving, but I couldn’t tell if it was approaching or receding.

  I dropped my head back and closed my eyes.

  I had not known how much of me belonged to Clyde, how much room he had claimed in my heart. He was the one good thing, the one living thing, that had come back with me from Iraq. Clyde had held me together as we shared our grief over Dougie, our relief at leaving the war zone, and eventually our sense of purpose—muted though it was—when we returned to work.

  From somewhere down the canyon an owl hooted, a throaty roll like water spilling.

  I opened my eyes and turned my head, staring into the narrow gash of Devil’s Gorge where the moon managed only a frail light. A little larger now, Whip’s light continued to bob and weave, a ghost light making its way through the underworld.

  My body was so filled with pain that I could not separate the hurt within from that without. And I was tired. Tired in Cohen’s way, tired with the weight that makes your bones two inches shorter. I was tired of killing. Tired of death. Exhausted from scraping up against the kind of hatred that makes a man slap a little girl, slaughter a woman, shoot a dog. All I wanted was to lie in the snow and the dark and think about Clyde and Dougie and Cohen until I ran out of thoughts. Ran out of feelings. Until the wind abraded my skin to nothing and I was only disarticulated bones.

  Cue the Sir. He was supposed to be here, telling me to get on my feet. Telling me that fifty feet above me, important things were happening. Gentry might be dying. Nik might be dying.

  Perhaps the Sir was afraid of heights.

  The thought made me laugh. Deep, aching belly rolls that brought tears to my eyes until the laughter began to hitch and moan and turn to a wild weeping.

  Then the Sir was there. He grabbed my hand, hauled me up. I bit off a scream as my left leg buckled and sent pain rocketing up my thigh. The pain in my wounded arm flared like a beacon. The Sir held me upright.