“Something interest you about that, Willow?”
Dani looked out of her thoughts, found Spook watching her, his gaze still trying to penetrate her outer hull. Dani held his gaze with steady desperation. If he suspected the transmission was a fake, he might abandon their Rocky Mountain high.
“That girl’s parents are sick with worry over their little girl and they’re making jokes. It’s tacky.”
His gaze didn’t change. He suspects I got a message, Dani felt, panic tightening its grip on her throat. The effort of holding herself still was almost more than she could do.
Maybe he could feel hope beating in her heart. The only emotion that could mask hope from him was the one she feared the most: defeat. To show it was to let it in. Not to show it was to lie down with the enemy.
She could see it in his eyes, could see the barely contained lust, the violence threatening to break free of restraint. Only her spiral into defeat would hold him off.
Like Alice’s leap off the cliff, Dani let go of her dark thoughts, let them wash over her in a dark wave. Her ghosts, past and present rode the wave. They were glad to get out. Glad to dance on her hope.
“At least they have a chance.”
“A chance?” Hayes stepped closer, a frown putting lines in the bland surface of his face.
“Of getting their daughter back.”
Some of the tenseness went out of his body. “You won’t have to grieve forever, Willow. Up there, you’ll be free.”
“Sure.” Dani leaned against rock and closed her eyes against his high beam eyes.
“You don’t believe me.”
What had Matt been trying to tell her? “Why should I believe you?”
“Because it worked for me.”
Now there was a yardstick to measure the world against. How could he take himself seriously, let alone expect her to?
“Why did you need all this high altitude healing? Where does your pain come from?” It had better be good. Catastrophic class crap. His whole family wiped out by cholera or a tornado. And that was just for starters.
He remained silent for so long, Dani almost forgot what she had asked. When he did speak, he sounded far away. “From nowhere, from everywhere. I was born empty and never filled with anything except pain.”
I was born empty? What a whiner. He was more interesting when she thought he was a woman.
“I killed someone who wanted to kill me and I was afraid. I came up here to escape, to end it. And I came down renewed. I had purpose and peace.”
Dani yawned. “Killing people isn’t exactly a peaceful purpose, Spook.”
“Life is ‘a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.’ If it eases my pain, why shouldn’t I be the one to make lives vanish?”
“Whatever happened to…” she yawned again, quit trying to fight her heavy lids open, “…no man is an island?”
“Don’t you see, peace has always come at price. I bought it, I bought you, with death.”
Bought from whom? A mountain? Mountains don’t buy people. Her thoughts were spinning now, like the merry-go-round the last time she had gone to the county fair with her mom and dad. She had been eleven…
“The mountain is hard for a reason. We shape ourselves against it and are renewed…”
The lights were spinning faster now. The music, loud and wild, drowned out his voice. The horse was hard between her thighs, but her dad was holding her so she wouldn’t fall. She looked at him with a wide smile. No, it wasn’t her dad. It was Matt. He was smiling, too. She tried to reach for him…
“Wake up, Willow.”
“Mmmmm. In a minute.” She had to find them…
“You can’t sleep now. We have to keep going.”
“Yeah, sure,” she murmured, “keep going in a minute.”
The slap knocked her head back against rock, shattering the merry-go-round and everyone on it. The side of her face stung. She tasted blood again, didn’t like it any better than the last time. She touched the spot, looked at the red on her fingers, then looked at him.
“You hit me?” Steven had hit her once, but he had been drunk. He had only done it once. She moved out the next day. Richard, she recalled with a stab of pain, had helped her.
“Yes. I’ll kiss it better.”
“I’d rather breathe, thank you.”
“Willow…” He reached for her, but she flinched back.
“Don’t touch me. Just…” She stood up. “Just leave me alone.”
She turned and started up the trail.
“You shouldn’t go so fast…”
“Shut up. You wanted me to move. I’m moving.”
“Damn it, Willow, you’ll burn yourself out. You can’t.”
She rounded on him. “Can’t. Got to. Do this. Don’t do that. You’ve been calling the shots all the way up this stupid pile of rock. You want me to get to the top. So I’m going to the top.”
“You’ll make yourself sick!”
“News flash, mountain boy. I’m already sick. Now shut up and let me climb or kill me right now.” She glared at him, her heaving chest wrenching the oxygen it needed from the paper thin air.
“All right. Climb.” His lips twitched as he gestured toward the trail.
She wanted to wipe the grin off his face. She wanted to wipe his face off his face. She threw herself at the incline. Almost immediately it blunted her drive. Spook’s mountain wasn’t generous. It would probably kill her if Spook didn’t, but at least it wouldn’t screw her first.
* * * *
The weather started to turn on them just as the choppers dropped Matt and his team on the far side of Long’s Peak. It felt good to be on the move. As soon as the chopper pulled away, he heard Luke, who was taking a team up another side, say in his radio, “Great. Looks like the afternoon storm is moving in early today. Gonna make the search for the kid real fun.”
The pretext they had crafted to disguise their movements was also going to make it hard to coordinate the various teams’ movements toward the Summit.
One of the climbers on his team, a cop in his work time, said, “If he’s a climber, he’ll turn aside. He could take the old cable route, then head down into Wild Basin.”
Matt slung his pack over his shoulder. “Maybe. Maybe not. Depends how bad he wants up there. Doesn’t matter. We got it covered. I’ve even got people at the foot of the Diamond.”
“No way he could take a romance writer down that, even by rappelling,” the cop scoffed.
“I’ve learned not to take chances with this bastard. He’s got more lives than a cat and more twists than a phone cord. And the romance writer? Well, let’s just say she’d surprise you, too. Do not, I repeat, do not under estimate this guy. He’s better than you’ll see in your lifetime. You got any question about him or the safety of the hostage, shoot first, ask questions later. I’ll cover your asses if there’s heat later. That’s a promise.”
“Uh, I see something moving along the south side of Lake Solitude. Could be the kid,” the voice of Matt’s helicopter pilot came over the radio.
Matt lifted the radio. “Thanks, bubba. We’ll try to work our way toward her from the South.” A confirmed sighting. Now they were getting somewhere. He took his finger off talk and said to his team, “Okay, they’re in the Trough. Let’s gear up and try to beat them to the Summit. Last one there buys the first round of beer tonight.”
* * * *
It was like drowning. If there was oxygen in the atmosphere, she couldn’t find it. Dani wanted to quit but she didn’t know how. Didn’t know why she kept reaching for the next rock ledge. It was what she did. One hand, then the other. Feet to follow. Higher and higher, she inched her way up against the rising howl of the wind. She had to get to the top of Spook’s world. Fourteen thousand feet below was her world. She didn’t look up or down. She didn’t dare. Like the opening salvo in her personal war with Spook, she heard the first clap of thunder over head.
As exhaustion began to edge pa
st her will, her mind spun slowly off into disjointed fragments, pictures from the past mingling with those from the present.
The look on Matt’s face the last time she saw him in his mountain cabin.
Kelly dancing with that stripper to Abba music.
New Orleans. Damp and warm. Beignets. The hum of cicadas and the scent of flowers drifting up from the courtyard of her French Quarter apartment.
Matt in his hallway asking her to come in.
Sunday dinner with Elizabeth and Richard, their babies and hers in high chairs throwing food.
The cold sun shining down on a tiny coffin.
Steven staring into a bottle instead of looking at her.
His fist heading for her face.
Richard’s face disappearing in a ball of flame.
Matt holding her as she cried.
Where did the will come from to keep struggling up the side of the mountain, against the wind, against her own fears?
In some deeply buried place, Dani marveled at what she was doing, even as she put one hand, one foot up on the next ridge of rock.
After a time she climbed into the swirl of dark clouds crowning the peak of the mountain. The pictures in her head swirled, too, with Matt’s face at the center. Each time she reached up to him, he dissolved and reformed higher.
* * * *
Matt pushed the climbing cam in the crevasse and released the spring load, then tested it to make sure it was secure before looping his rope through it.
“Taking in,” he called to his climbing partner, a guy named Malloy. He heard a faint, “Climbing,” from below that the wind tried to blow away. Hayes and Dani would be close to the Summit, too. Their last sighting before they disappeared in cloud cover, had them still climbing toward the Home Stretch despite the storm moving in. The wind was already making their climb more dangerous and difficult. When the rain came it would be harder still. He blessed his training in search and rescue. Was glad the men joining him in this race against Hayes and the storm knew the mountain and were used to pitting their lives against it.
The wild passion in the building storm beat against detachment and cool thought, but Matt fought it back. Pushed out thoughts of Dani up there with Hayes and a storm moving in. Instead he put Hayes in his mental cross-hairs and started the next pitch.
* * * *
The ground leveled out so abruptly, Dani wasn’t ready and sprawled onto the rocky surface, gasping for air that still wasn’t there. Never would be there.
“You did it.” Spook had to yell to be heard above the building wind. His eyes were wild, his face lit from within. The storm had cut off the sun and sky above, cut off the ground below, leaving only the mountain top.
Leaving her there alone with a wild man.
The wind beat against her as if it longed to throw her back down for daring to come. Hair whipped her face in tiny, stinging lashes. Terror whipped her insides, but distantly, as if Spook had drugged her again.
“Can we go now?”
He shrugged off his pack, then helped her off with hers.
“The storm is almost on us.”
Almost? The guy had a serious problem with reality.
“We’ll have to hurry.”
Hurry? Incredibly, she felt the urge to giggle. Luckily, when she opened her mouth to do it, the wind rushed down her throat and made her choke instead.
The air around them crackled and snapped like hyperactive Rice Crispies, making the hair on her arms stand up—in between the brief moments of calm between fierce gusts of wind. Above her the clouds crashed together, sending the first drops of moisture smashing into her face like pellets from a gun.
Spook grabbed her arm and dragged her against wind and will to the center, the place where all the forces of the storm seemed poised to strike.
The rain picked up its tempo. The lightning flashes came with the thunder on its heels. Spook grabbed her shoulders, his face lit from within by fanaticism and without by lightning.
“It’s time!” He had to shout to be heard above the wind.
“You’re kidding, right?” He wouldn’t, would he? No one could be that nuts.
Her hair soaked up as much water as it could, then sent the over flow cascading down her face. Her clothes were soaked, her teeth chattered with cold and fright. The ground she stood was soaked, too.
If he really was looking for a good lay, he’d chosen the wrong place for it.
He grabbed handfuls of her hair and yanked her against him. If she had any lingering doubts he was seriously mental, he was putting them all to rest.
Behind him she saw a jagged flash of lightning sizzle through the rain and strike the peak just over from them.
“We’re gonna get toasted. Spook!” She tried to twist free of his iron grip. “This isn’t a good time! I have a headache!”
For an answer he crushed his mouth on hers, his hands moving roughly over her body. He tried to push tongue and teeth into her mouth, but she fought him. His passion for her beat against her passion to resist. His was fueled by madness and the charged storm. Hers got a boost from adrenaline.
She twisted her mouth free. In a burst of lightning she saw his eyes. It was going to take more than elbows and knees to stop him this time.
* * * *
Matt tried to call to Malloy, but the wind took his words as soon as they left his mouth, then brought them back with a roar as it tried to tear him from the rock face. He rode out the gust with his toes and fingernails, then reached up, feeling for the next crack. In a flash of lightning, he saw the rim. He was there. He eased up and peered over the edge, but it was too dark to see anything. He topped the rise and crouched behind a boulder, anchoring himself to belay for Malloy.
He had to lean over nothing to give him the signal to start. A grim-faced Malloy gave him a thumbs up sign, then started his turn at the difficult pitch. Malloy was only halfway up it when Matt heard Dani cry out.
* * * *
“NO!” What to do came naturally from the self defense class she had taken with Kelly. “NO!”
The storm provided the perfect punctuation.
Spook’s grasp loosened. Dani broke free. Spook’s body was already bunching for round two.
She needed a flash of brilliance or a miracle from God.
The devil looked out from Spook’s eyes. “What’s it going to be Willow? We live together or you die on this rock.”
It was only now, when she knew she was going to die, that Dani realized how very much she wanted to live.
It didn’t matter that life hurt. It didn’t matter that she mourned her baby every day and every night. It didn’t matter that she loved Matt and he didn’t love her. In sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, in sorrow and in joy, in all ways and all things, she wanted to live.
She wanted to see the sun rise and set. She wanted to turn the ideas in her head into books that would make her readers laugh and weep for people that didn’t exist. She wanted to go to Kelly’s hunky dentist and get her teeth cleaned. She wanted to get a cavity filled.
She didn’t have to have a happy ending, as long as she didn’t get an ending.
She wanted to live.
She was going to die.
If she was lucky, she would die before he got what he wanted.
“If thou must love me, let it be for naught, except for love’s sake only,” she shouted above the storm, trying one last time to reach the sane part in him.
For a moment, she thought she had done it.
He smiled, the lust in his eyes replaced by amusement. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning. You’ve learned much since we met, Willow. What about her Sonnets from the Portuguese? ‘Guess now who holds thee? Death’, I said, but there the silver answer rang… ‘Not Death, but Love.’ I love you, Willow. Do you love me?”
He reached for her. She stepped back. The hand reaching for her curled into a fist. His eyes hardened.
“Love chooses its own path. Don’t you see? I can’t. Maybe I can’t love anymore
. Maybe Steven killed the love I had left. I just know, I can’t love you. I can’t.”
“You didn’t try hard enough!”
The sky flashed again. Was that a movement she saw over by the edge? She saw Spook’s eyes narrow and yelled, “No, I didn’t try. I didn’t want to try! I didn’t want to love you!”
That got his attention. “Why? Why didn’t you want to love me?” He grabbed her arm, roughly pulled her against him, his face thrust into hers.
She had his whole attention. Meant to keep it.
“You kill people!” His grip on her arm tightened until she almost cried out. “You don’t love me! You don’t know how to love! You only know how to lust. To want. To take. To hurt! That isn’t love.”
“Shut up!” His rage found expression in the back of his hand against her face. She would have been knocked on her butt if he hadn’t kept his grip on her arm. As it was, she saw stars wheel over his head.
The third time he had hit her. They say it’s the charm. Dani didn’t know about charms. She did know those wheeling stars had turned red.
“No! You can’t make me!” Somehow she jerked her arm free. Maybe he let her go. He looked like he merged with his mountain, his face turning to cold, hard rock. “You didn’t break me, Spook. You or your stupid mountain.”
“Didn’t I?” His eyes narrowed to knife points. “Then I’ll send you to hell, you bitch!”
Lightning lit them up again. Now he held a gun. Behind him, near the edge, Matt was still tethered to his climbing gear, rope trailing from him over the cliff edge, trying to rip his gun clear of the holster.
“Hold it, Hayes!” His gun wasn’t clear.
Hayes whirled, his gun already lining up on Matt.
“No!” Dani threw herself on his gun arm just as he fired. He shook her off with embarrassing ease. She rolled until she hit a boulder. Still dizzy from the blow, she scrambled around it and crouched in its shelter.
Spook had vanished in the raging dark, his silhouette lost against the darker rise of tumbled boulders. Above them, the sky gathered itself for another electric discharge. Dani could feel it in the air, in the rising of the hair on her body. Something brushed past her shoulder. She thought it was Spook and flinched back. The rain sizzled. For an instant she saw Spook crouched a few feet away. Then light exploded between them, throwing her backwards.
The Lonesome Lawmen Trilogy Page 30