by Nina Revoyr
“Where are we now?”
“Near Eitan Pass,” the boy said.
Suddenly Gwen started to shiver. Her pants and feet were still wet from the snow, and the sun had gone down over the ridge.
“Let’s get you warmed up,” the girl said. She took a down jacket out of her pack and wrapped it around Gwen’s shoulders. Then she pulled off Gwen’s shoes and socks and gave her a pair of dry socks. The dog lay down beside her.
The boy took a canister stove out of his pack and handed it to the girl, who set it up to make some hot water. And then he got out his safety beacon—an oval black plastic device the size of a wallet—found a clearing in the trees, and pressed the button to call for help.
Chapter Twenty
Oscar
A sound, a rumbling, like a huge truck coming, or an earthquake rattling a house. He felt it before he heard it, the ground suddenly unstable, but he was too weak to move or to cover himself. It grew closer, bigger, seemed to settle overhead. Tracy must have felt it too—where was she? The vibrations in the ground were strangely comforting, interesting, except that they jostled his shoulder. Would he bleed more? He didn’t know. He didn’t think that there was any blood left.
After some time—he didn’t know how much—there were voices. Someone making their way across the rocks.
“Over here!”
Was that Tracy? He couldn’t tell. No one had talked in hours.
Then the sounds were closer. “Here,” the same voice said again. “He hasn’t spoken for a while.”
“Any movement?” This was a new voice, female, not Gwen’s. Where was Gwen?
“No. But I’ve checked his pulse a few times. Just to make sure.”
A hand on his forehead, fingertips on his neck, direct and strong and intimate. He tried to pull away; they were disturbing his quiet.
“There’s a pulse. Faint, but there,” the new voice said. “We need to get him out of here.”
Someone handled him firmly by the shoulders, the legs. Leave me alone, he thought. Don’t bother me. A yank on his shoulder sent a jolt of pain through him and he screamed.
“Sorry, sorry,” the new voice said.
“At least we know he’s alive.”
They picked him up and moved him, set him down on something else. It was cold, hard, just bigger than his body. Had they put him in a coffin? He felt himself being lifted. It was warm, uncomfortably warm, and he knew they were back in the sun. The whooshing sound was even louder now, something huge and heavy cutting the sky. They set him down and he heard yelling. “Over here! Easy!” Some other things he couldn’t make out. Maybe they were trying to make him more comfortable. Then hands moving over him and sounds of things being tightened, cinched; something was holding him down.
“Pull ’er up!” someone yelled, and he felt himself leave the ground, swing in the open air. He felt but didn’t see the earth give way beneath him, he was moving up into the sky. Was he dying? Was he already dead? And going up to heaven? He didn’t know, but as he swayed in the wind, he cried out. He didn’t want to fall back to earth. He opened his eyes and saw a huge white underbelly, an umbilical cord leading up to a massive body. Nothing but sky around it. Around him. If he turned over, he would roll into the air. He did not want to be taken in, he did not want to die. But try as he might, he couldn’t move. The air, the ground, the underbelly—what did it matter anyway? He was dying or dead. Maybe the rope would snap and it would really be over. But it didn’t, and then there was no more sky, and firm hands pulled him over, and in.
“Let’s get him fluids!” a male voice shouted over the sound of the machine.
“Is he alive?” came another voice, familiar.
“Barely. He’s lost a lot of blood. And he’s fried to a crisp.”
“Rope going back down!” someone yelled.
Hands were all over him, cutting his clothes, poking him. In a few minutes the sense that whatever they were in had taken on more weight.
“There’s one more down there,” someone said. It was the same voice he’d heard on the ground.
“There’s two,” said the familiar voice. “Our other friend was behind us.”
“We’ll have to come back for them—we don’t have room. And we need to get this guy to the hospital.”
And then more words and more prodding that Oscar didn’t hear or feel. A swooping turn of the helicopter, then speed. He tried to tell himself he was headed out and home. He could let go now. And even with the noise, the movement, the voices and hands, he reached a place of quiet and still.
Chapter Twenty-One
Todd
Todd watched the helicopter disappear over the ridge. At first, it had hovered on the other side of the pass, so he hadn’t seen what happened. Then, on this side, well north of his location, he’d watched a rescue litter with a person attached let down on a rope; he’d seen the litter pulled back up with someone in it. Oscar, he guessed, since his injury was worst. He was sure it had picked up Gwen before. So now it was just Tracy and him, and then they’d be out, and this ordeal would finally be over.
He did not know what had happened, but he was fairly sure that A.J. was dead. Several hours before, after he’d crested what he’d thought was the final pass and discovered a new canyon below him, he’d heard a faint, male, unmistakable scream, someone crying out in mortal anguish. It hadn’t sounded like Oscar, and anyway, Oscar was too far gone to muster such energy. There had been no gunshot, though—had A.J. fallen? Been attacked by a mountain lion? Run into someone else from the cartel? And did that mean there was still somebody dangerous on the loose? He didn’t know, but he thought A.J. was dead. He felt it, the removal of something malevolent from the world. And with him gone, the others would have a better chance to make it. Led by Gwen, the last one he would have expected. Gwen, who had toughed it out, and who was now someplace hopefully down in the valley, safe, waiting for the rest of them.
When the copter was out of sight, he rested for a moment. The land was barren here, treeless. The lake where he’d stopped was a kind of blue he’d never seen before—teal, dramatic and beautiful. To the left he heard a disturbance of rock and saw a lone startled deer; he raised his rifle reflexively but did not shoot. He was hungry, and he’d thought of eating bugs or silver-blue mountain butterflies. But the helicopter would be back for him soon; there were still a few hours of daylight. He’d make his way to a place where he’d be easy to spot, and then he’d be flown to town, where he could eat at a table and sleep in a proper bed.
He closed his eyes for a moment. A meal, a shower, a bed—how wonderful. He would call Kelly to let her know that he was all right; he would talk to both his kids.
And yet there was something bittersweet about the thought of all that. He had been somewhere else, and it had changed him. Or maybe it had stripped away some unessential layer and he was left with who he truly was. With a twinge he imagined the moment when he could hug Joey and Brooke; they were the only things in his daily world that really mattered. He realized with a surprising clarity that right now, at this moment, he felt satisfied. Even happy. Yet on top of his relief that the end of their ordeal was near, he felt hollowed by loss. He thought of the life he was about to return to, and knew he didn’t want to go back.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Gwen
Gwen struggled to wake up. Everything was heavy; it felt like there were sandbags on her body. When the room finally came into focus, a young woman she’d never seen before was sitting in the corner. She was wearing a ranger uniform, olive pants and khaki shirt. A wide-brimmed hat sat on a table behind her; a walkie-talkie and gun were attached to her belt. She had long dark hair that was pulled back into a ponytail, and smooth olive skin, and she looked too young to be a ranger—especially when she saw that Gwen was awake and her face broke into a smile, which carved two perfect dimples into her cheeks.
“Well, hello,” she said, sitting up straight. She sounded young too, collegiate even.
“Whe
re am I?” Gwen’s own voice sounded strange to her, like she was talking through cotton. Had she seen this woman before?
“You’re in Mercy Hospital, Inyo County,” the ranger answered, pulling her chair up to the side of the bed. “You’ve been asleep for about three days.”
“Three days!” Gwen looked past the woman at the beige walls, the heavy institutional door. “What day is it?”
“July 5. A Thursday.”
Gwen took this in. Thursday. They’d been gone for a week. Somehow it felt more like a year.
“You were pretty out of it in the helicopter,” the ranger said. “Unconscious by the time we got here. It was mostly heat exhaustion, dehydration, so they’ve been pumping you with fluids. And now here you are, back with us again.”
“You were in the helicopter with me?” Gwen vaguely remembered swinging through space and being pulled into the copter. She remembered this same voice, urgent and full of authority. The same too-young-looking face.
“I was there. I’m Jessica Montez, by the way. I’m a National Park Service ranger—Law Enforcement and Search and Rescue.” She held her hand out and Gwen lifted her own to shake it. Her arm felt weak, and for the first time she noticed the tube that fed into it, attached to bag of fluids at the side of the bed.
“Were we still in the park? I thought we had left it.”
“You did, but we were the closest rescue unit. Inyo County Search and Rescue was farther north, and the CHP helicopter out of Fresno was looking over on the western side. We were just to the south of you when the call came in, and so we flew right up. Plus, there were some other elements that made this case relevant to us.”
Gwen took this all in. If she hadn’t been so out of sorts, she would have been impressed.
Ranger Montez got up and went to the door, where she gestured to someone out in the hallway. A middle-aged male ranger came in, thick through the middle, with slightly burned cheeks and deep wrinkles. His face was kind, though, and the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth looked like they’d been caused by laughter.
“I’m Ranger Perry,” he said, holding out a beefy hand. “Glad to see you’re awake. You’re in good hands here with Ranger Montez.”
“Nice to meet you,” Gwen said, shaking his hand. She didn’t know what else to say. “I can’t believe I’ve been asleep for three days.”
“You’ve been in and out,” said Ranger Montez, returning to her seat. “And you were tossing around quite a bit, especially the first day. Talking about A.J. and needing food. And someone named Robert. You kept saying that you had to get moving.”
Gwen closed her eyes for a moment; she wasn’t ready to think about where she’d been. But the image of A.J.’s face appeared unbidden—his smirk, his touch, the confusion and horror on his face as he went sideways over the cliff.
“We were able to reach your mother,” Ranger Montez said. “She was very relieved to hear you’re okay.”
So relieved that she rushed right up here to see me, Gwen thought. “Are my friends here too?” she asked, and Ranger Montez nodded. She exchanged a glance with her colleague.
“Todd Harris is in good shape,” Ranger Perry said, pulling up a chair. “He was checked over and given fluids and then discharged. Oscar Barajas is critical but stable. He lost quite a bit of blood and he’s been fighting an infection. But he’s over the worst of it. Tomorrow they’re taking him by ambulance back to LA.”
Gwen closed her eyes again. “Thank God. And Tracy?”
Ranger Montez tilted her chin a bit. “We’re not sure where she is. She was there when we took Oscar up in the rescue litter—we gave her something for her pain and wrapped her up. But when we went back to get her, she was gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
“I mean, she wasn’t there. We did pick up Todd, of course, a couple of miles to the south. But he hadn’t seen her, either. Inyo SAR’s still searching the area.”
Gwen tried to digest this. Tracy was gone. She still had the gun when Gwen left her—had she tried to go after the men tied to A.J. or José? Had someone connected to one of them found her and killed her? Had she wandered off in pain and confusion? Or had she simply disappeared?
“We did find three bodies, though,” Ranger Perry said, leaning forward, and Gwen was alert again. “Two men associated with the Mexican drug trade. And a known domestic criminal, Arthur James Miles.”
Gwen glanced around the room, avoiding his eyes. There was a TV on the wall, muted, playing an afternoon talk show. Her heart was beating out of her chest. She felt the eyes of both rangers watching her steadily.
“Do you want to tell us about them?” the ranger asked softly. His voice was deep and soothing.
She did not know where to start. She did not know how all their actions looked now, in the light of day, when they were out of the mountains.
“A.J. shot a young Mexican kid. We accidentally stumbled onto a marijuana garden the kid was protecting.”
Ranger Montez nodded as if Gwen had answered a test question correctly. “This is part of why we’re involved, because of the grows in the national parks and national forests. We found it and finished eradicating it the day after we rescued you.”
“The second guy, I don’t know,” Gwen said. They’d never seen a second guy—had A.J. killed him too? Or—and now she felt a chill of realization—had that been who Todd shot?
“Someone was shooting at us,” she continued. “I thought it was A.J.”
“But then?”
“But then I saw A.J. the last day we were up there. I was totally surprised. I thought—” She was about to say she thought he was dead, she thought that Todd had shot him. But it occurred to her that she didn’t know what Todd had told them.
Ranger Montez waited to see if Gwen would finish the sentence. When she didn’t, the ranger asked, “And what happened to A.J.?”
Gwen’s heart felt like it was coming up in her throat. In a moment she’d change from someone who’d been fleeing a pursuer to someone who’d caused a person to die. She looked at Ranger Montez, then Ranger Perry, straight in their eyes.
“He attacked me. He’d captured us back at the pot garden but we fought him and tied him up. But he got loose and followed us, and then he caught up with me and began to assault me. Then the dog—it had been his dog, but she’d come along with us—she bit him, and I grabbed my bear spray and sprayed him in the face.”
Ranger Montez nodded. “That would explain the residual bear spray on your hands and clothes. And then he fell over the edge?”
Gwen kept her voice steady. “I pushed him.”
The rangers exchanged a look again, and now Ranger Perry pulled his chair up closer. His face was grim. “We appreciate your honesty, Miss Foster. But we’re going to pretend we never heard that.”
“What?”
“Arthur Miles fell over the cliff on his own. I told your friend Todd to forget what he told me too—that he shot the other individual, a Mexican national. The gun that killed the second man was the same one that killed the first. It was Arthur Miles’s gun, and as far as we’re concerned, Arthur Miles was responsible for both deaths.”
Gwen stared at him, confused. Todd had shot the second guy? And that was who had shot Oscar? And this ranger was making up a different story? And this other baby-faced ranger, this girl who’d saved their asses, was going along with it?
“I’m perfectly happy to take responsibility for what I did. And it sounds like Todd is too.”
“That’s honorable of you,” Ranger Perry said. “It is. But you take the blame for this publicly, and you’ll put your lives at risk. Your lives, and the lives of your loved ones.”
Ranger Montez pushed her chair closer to the bed, the legs squeaking on the linoleum. “You stumbled into a drug war, Miss Foster,” she said. Her eyes were bright and intense, and for the first time, she seemed older. “A drug war, and a race war. Those people aren’t messing around. They’re fighting over where to grow their crops and how to di
stribute them, and they each cut into what the other one thinks is their territory. There are millions of dollars at stake here. Tens of millions of dollars. And it’s all intensified by the racial angle, since Miles was part of an antigovernment white supremacist group.”
“I got that.”
“Part of why they got into the drug trade in the first place was to fund their other activities—conferences, concerts, printed materials, websites that preach hate. They want to do battle with the cartels for economic and racial reasons. And then all of you show up, and it’s like fuel on the fire.”
“He was terrifying,” Gwen said, her voice shaking. She remembered the look on his face when he pressed up against her, the rough hands on her breasts and stomach. Thank God for Timber, she thought. Thank God for that damned crazy dog.
“Yes,” Ranger Perry said. “He is. Or he was. He’s one of the most notorious leaders in the California white supremacy movement. And he’s under suspicion for two other murders, which is probably just the tip of the iceberg. There’s no question that you did the right thing, Miss Foster. He would have killed you without a second thought.”
Gwen’s skin prickled with revulsion and fear. He was gone, she told herself. He was gone, and yet she could still see him clearly.
Ranger Montez reached out and covered her hand. The warmth of her touch brought tears to Gwen’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” the ranger said. She took her hand away, and after a moment she spoke again. “The Mexican growers are just as bad. They kill anyone who gets in their way. Three innocent people who wandered into grow areas, like you did, have been murdered just this year—all on national forest and National Park Service lands. Not to mention what they do to their own. The young guys who guard the fields—some of them are captured in Mexico and forced to do this work, or the cartels threaten to murder their families.”
Gwen thought about José, his youth and his fear. She thought about Oscar, falling forward, the torn and bloody flesh. “That second guy was trying to kill us too.”