PRECIPICE

by Leland Davis

  About two miles below Pinball Rapid, the pace picked up again. Chip carefully launched himself seven feet over the dangerous recirculation at Roadblock Rapid, then steeled himself for the final major paddling challenge of his trip. This one was called Humpty Dumpty—a long, dangerous rapid that demanded a lot of respect. He dropped into the swift flow and over the first ledge, careful to avoid a dangerous slot on the right. It was soon over, and he once again relaxed into a rhythm on the easier rapids that followed. He was now traversing one of the deepest and most scenic portions of the gorge. It was still barely 9 in the morning, and he had traveled about four miles down the canyon. He was making incredible time.

  It was about a half-hour later when he saw the mouth of Bear Creek where it entered the Little River from the right side. This was his destination. He pulled over on the opposite bank and carried his kayak up into the woods where he could remain concealed behind a giant boulder. A major trail dropped into the canyon near Bear Creek on the other side, and he didn’t want to be seen by any passing hikers. It was unlikely that anyone would be hiking here on a Wednesday in late November, but it wasn’t impossible. He removed his paddling gear and drysuit and hung them over some small boulders to dry. He took a few minutes to drink some water and eat a few energy bars, stocking up on fuel for the next phase of his mission. He would need all of the calories that he could get. As he ate, the sun finally peeked over the towering sandstone wall to his east, and he basked in the meager warmth that filtered down through the ghostly bare branches of the oak trees overhead.

  Finished with his lunch, he opened a drybag and extracted a set of RealTree AP camouflage shirt and pants that he’d picked up at the Bass Pro outlet the day before. The pattern seemed like the best match for the Alabama forest. He left his thermal long johns on and pulled the camouflage clothes on over them. Next, he pulled his Sig from the bag. The options for holsters had been limited at the store, so he’d settled on a universal nylon model that clipped to the inside of the waistband of his pants. Unfortunately, the holster wouldn’t accommodate the pistol with the suppressor attached, so he dropped the fat metal tube into a thigh pocket of his pants and buttoned it closed. He put a compact pair of binoculars into another pocket and filled yet more pockets with energy bars, his new phone, and a headlamp with a red lens. Finally, he tucked a camouflage fleece hat into the waistband of his pants near the holster.

  Satisfied that he was ready, he started walking through the woods toward a small side canyon that cut a cleft into the canyon wall above him. The going was tough. There was no trail, and he was often forced to detour around thickets of brush, giant boulders, and downed trees. A huge promontory of sandstone cliffs rose on his left, and he hugged the base of it looking for a break in the rocky wall. He stayed under the trees. There was a house perched on the jagged jut of land above him, and although he doubted that its occupants would be sitting on the edge looking down into the woods, he didn’t want to take any chance of being seen.

  It took him thirty minutes to cover six hundred steep yards up the gully to the canyon’s rim. He sat for a minute tucked into the woods near a driveway that led to the house on the point of rocks. He looked and listened for a few minutes to make sure nobody was around, then he slipped quickly out of the woods and crossed the gravel drive. He knew the house at the end of the drive was Senator Moore’s next-door neighbor—or as close as it came to being ‘next door’ way out here in the woods.

  Another ten minutes of careful creeping brought him to a place where he could see the senator’s house about a hundred yards away through the leafless forest. He found a spot where he was well concealed and settled in to observe. He pulled his new smartphone from a pocket to check the time—10:30—and got a shot of nervous adrenaline when he realized that he’d accidentally left the ringer on. It wouldn’t be good if the phone’s speaker began blaring while he was hiding in the woods. He chided himself for the amateur mistake as he switched the phone over to mute. He still had a lot to learn about this business. He told himself that he needed to slow down and make his actions more thoughtful and deliberate until these little things became second nature to him. Just like he had done with whitewater safety skills many years before, he would need to practice until the proper actions became habits. That was how you became good at something; and just like with whitewater, being good at this was the only way to ensure that you stayed alive. Luck and instinctive reaction would only get you so far, and finding that limit would come at a terrible price.

  It was a boring several hours before he saw any motion at the house. He tried to sit as still as he could, but he was forced to shift a few times to get the blood flowing again when his legs went to sleep. Sitting still had never been one of Chip’s skills. It was another thing that he would have to practice.

  At 2:30 he finally saw the door of the house open. A tall, thickly-built man emerged dressed in camouflage from head to toe with a blaze orange vest draped over him and a scoped rifle slung from his shoulder. Chip raised his binoculars and double-checked that it was the same man he had seen in the photo on the senator’s website. It was him alright. Chip was struck by how much his facial features were similar to Sam’s. He found it a little bit creepy that she could look so much like her burly, bald old dad and yet still have been so beautiful. Thinking about Sam gave him another pang of regret as the image of her lying dead in the barn in Mexico rose unbidden in his mind’s eye. No matter how much the man through the binoculars looked like Sam, he had caused her death. He was also responsible for the deaths of Chip’s teammates. Neither of these transgressions was something that Chip intended to ignore, not to mention that the man had betrayed his country for financial gain.

  Chip stood from his hiding place and tried to get the blood flowing to his cramped legs while Moore walked across the small yard of the house and started down the gravel drive. When the other man was far enough away, Chip began quietly and carefully slinking through the woods, paralleling the senator’s path.

  Sheldon’s mind was numb as he walked across the gravel road and onto the short trail that led through the woods to the field. He’d drunk three bourbons and then taken a short nap after his morning hunt. Part of him wanted to sit in the house and drink all day, but he’d felt like the walls were closing in on him and compulsively needed to leave. He had no real desire to hunt any more, but he took some small solace in the routine. This was what he knew. The activity that had been his escape, his one freedom during his confinement in DC, was now simply all that he had left.

  He’d drunk himself to sleep last night after waiting all day for some word about Sam. He had attempted to contact Juan Ortiz at least a dozen times and received no response, and some time last night he had finally admitted to himself that the chances were minuscule that he would ever see his daughter alive again. After the three excruciating days of awaiting her return after her call last week, he had little capacity for hope left.

  Liza had incessantly called him every hour yesterday to ask where their daughter was, growing progressively more angry at Sheldon in her frustration that he had no good news to share. She had eventually ceased calling after 10 o’clock last night, and Sheldon had thankfully not heard from her today at all. Before he had left DC, they had battled each other in what was most likely an irreconcilable fight over whether she would accompany him to Alabama, but he had insisted in the end that it was simply too dangerous for her to come along. He had stormed out of the house around 9 o’clock that evening and headed to the airport to look for a red-eye flight to Atlanta. In truth, he had been filled with dread by the very thought of being trapped in his remote Alabama home with his furious wife. The emotion left him feeling somewhat ashamed. His embarrassment wasn’t out of love for Liza; he ruefully admitted to himself that he’d stopped loving her years ago. His despondency stemmed rather from the knowledge that he’d failed at his marriage just as he’d failed at parenting, failed at being a senator, and in fact failed at every other major aspect of his life.
What was left of him was little more than a torpid human soul inhabiting the shell of a man, going through the mechanical motions of life that would carry him to his inevitable but welcomed death. If his daughter didn’t somehow magically reappear, he hoped his death would come soon. However, he wasn’t the kind of man who would take action to make it happen. The knowledge that he lacked the will to end things on his own terms only served to make him more morose. He was even a failure at that.

  He trudged along the edge of the field, his boots picking up giant gobs of red mud. It looked like there had been a torrential rainstorm the day before he’d arrived, but the weather now was crisp and cool. Despite the chill his brow was covered in sweat, and he could feel the acrid alcohol seeping out through his pores. The perspiration was streaming from under his cap and down his face into the white stubble of two days worth of beard. But he didn’t wipe it away. He simply didn’t care.

  Moore reached the base of the oak tree, and out of habit he double-checked that his rifle didn’t have a round in the chamber. Satisfied that the gun was safe, he slung it over his shoulder and began the precarious climb. He almost fell from ten feet up when his foot slipped off one of the spikes, and he cautioned himself before he continued to be more careful in his semi-inebriated state. He finally heaved himself onto the wooden platform high in the tree and collapsed onto the bench. He removed the rifle from his shoulder and laid it across his lap, then leaned back against the knobby trunk of the oak. He pulled a flask from the inside chest pocket of his hunting coat and took a long pull. He scanned the field out of habit, not expecting to see a deer yet after the disturbance of his passing. He hadn’t been there ten minutes before he lost interest and closed his eyes, then drifted into a restless doze.

  Chip hunkered behind a tree trunk about a hundred yards back in the woods behind the deer stand. It had taken him a long time to patiently make his way around the field, moving slowly and quietly and staying far back in the trees where the leafy forest floor would hide his footprints. Stalking a man who had the higher ground and was armed with a scoped, high-powered rifle was tricky business, so Chip concentrated on taking his time and doing it right. He finally settled into his concealed position and raised the binoculars to have a look through the trees. He could see the wooden planks of the deer stand perched high in the tree, but Moore’s body was mostly concealed behind the wide trunk. He could only see a small strip of blaze-orange vest exposed on one side.

  Chip settled in to wait, munching on a couple of energy bars while he sat. In contrast to his earlier period of vigilance, this time he ignored the discomfort in his legs and remained relatively still. An hour dragged by with nothing happening at all. This secret-agent-assassin stuff was dangerous, he thought, but it could be exceedingly boring work. This part reminded him more of the slow, methodical process of rock climbing than the familiar rush of running a whitewater river. It didn’t matter; he was determined to finish this job and do it right.

  Twilight was beginning to fade when Chip saw Moore’s form stir through the trees. The light was too low to see much through the binoculars, but he could see the movement of the man’s orange vest. He watched as the senator climbed slowly to the bottom of the tree and headed back around the field. He looked at the clock on his phone. It was 4:45. Dark came early this time of year in the eastern edge of the central time zone. Chip waited another twenty minutes as the day’s waning light faded to black night. There was no need to follow this time—he knew that Moore was headed back to his house.

  After he was certain that his quarry was long gone, Chip stood and began making his way carefully through the dark forest. He turned on the GPS feature on his phone and called up the Google Maps app. He turned on the satellite layer and watched his position imposed on satellite imagery in real-time in order to navigate through the woods in the pitch dark. Despite the advantages of the GPS, it took him a long time to make his way through the uneven and obstructed terrain on his return trip. It was almost 7 o’clock when he finally arrived back at his kayak. He set up a small campsite with the equipment that was stored in his boat and opened a package of dehydrated food. He needed to get to bed soon. He would need an early start in the morning.

  *

  Chucho raced southward in the silver Audi, feeling the surprisingly strong surge of the two-liter turbocharged engine vibrate through his taught muscles as it propelled him down the darkened interstate. On the other side of the median, the headlights of the oncoming cars blurred to streaks of bright white that seemed to stretch from the horizon directly to the backs of Chucho’s eyeballs. He hadn’t slept since awakening early Monday morning in his DC hotel room, and he was starting to feel the effects of many alert hours distorting and distending his reality. He would have to finish this and rest soon.

  After witnessing the death of Juan Ortiz on the bank of the Potomac River, Chucho had proceeded to search for the home of Senator Moore. He had finally located the old four-thousand-square-foot colonial around 10 that night and settled in to watch, periodically sampling from the baggie in his pocket to keep himself alert. Although the lights were on, nobody had come or gone for the twenty-four hours that he’d sat there. He had eventually grown impatient and slunk around to the back yard where he had broken into the house through a basement window.

  He had found Senator Moore’s wife in an upstairs bedroom and interrogated her to find out where her husband was. He only had to hit her a few times before she had spilled the information about the location of his house in Alabama. It had almost seemed as if she wanted Chucho to find her husband. Chucho had been sidetracked for almost the entire night before finally leaving Eliza Moore’s body and slipping out of the house shortly before dawn.

  He scrolled through the Sirius satellite radio on the Audi’s stereo to try to find another station playing something in Spanish before settling back on the ‘Viva’ channel. Then he fished in his pocket for the baggie of crank and helped himself to another sniff. Soon he could retrieve his PT Cruiser, leave this accursed end of the country and head back to L.A. where he belonged. Only one more long night left to go.

  24

  Thursday, December 1st

  THE ALARM ON Chip’s phone startled him awake at 4:30 in the morning. He involuntarily groaned as he struggled to shut off the annoying noise, fumbling around for the correct spot on the touchscreen in the dark. The cold air stung his hands and the exposed skin of his face. It took a lot of willpower to exit his cozy, down-filled sleeping bag in conditions like this, but he resigned himself to the unpleasant task. He struggled into his thermal long johns and a fleece top, then pulled his camouflage clothes on over it. He also crammed the camouflage fleece hat onto his head and pulled on a pair of Thinsulate-lined black leather gloves. He had a quick breakfast of granola bars then washed it down with a 5-hour Energy drink. He winced at the disgusting taste of the thick liquid, but he needed the kick to get him moving. It was the most caffeine he could get in a tiny package that would fit easily in his boat. He rinsed his mouth out with some water to rid himself of the bitter aftertaste from the artificial sweetener.

  Ten minutes after waking up he was walking by the dim red light of his headlamp toward the gully he’d used to reach the rim of the canyon the day before. It was slower going in the dark than it had been the previous day, but it helped that he remembered the circuitous path he’d taken around many of the obstacles on his prior trip. When he reached the top he used the driveway next door to Moore’s house to get quickly to the gravel road, and then he walked along the road toward the trail that led into the field near Moore’s deer stand. The going was much quicker on this route, and he had little worry of being spotted by anyone this long before dawn. If a vehicle came down the road he would hear the motor and see the lights in plenty of time to duck into the woods and hide. Once off the road, he stayed in the woods so as not to leave footprints in the soft earth of the trail or the muddy edge of the field.

  He reached the base of the oak tree and located the de
er stand high above him. As he looked up, he couldn’t believe that the burly old senator regularly made that climb. It was no problem for Chip. A few seconds later, he pulled himself onto the wooden platform. He took the suppressor from his pocket and screwed it onto the threaded end of his Sig’s barrel, then he lay down on his back on the rough-cut wooden planks to wait.

  The low-slung Audi bottomed out as it bounced along a potholed gravel road between rows of southern long-leafed pines, the undercarriage making scraping noises that occasionally made Chucho cringe. It had taken forever to find the turnoff to the obscure country road, and he hoped that he was finally headed in the right direction. He was far more at home in a maze of city streets than he was in the backwoods boonies of Alabama. Ghostly shadows flickered around the edges of the cone of light cast by the small car’s headlights. Chucho drove with his muscles tensed and hands clenched around the steering wheel, half expecting a bear or a sasquatch to charge into his path from the murky forest at any second.

  He found what he hoped was the correct turn onto another dirt backroad and made a right, then wove his way painstakingly along the new route. He eased down the road turning ninety degrees first one way and then the other and then back again, following the vague directions from the Audi’s navigation system as it led him to the address that he’d extracted from Senator Moore’s wife. It was still about twenty minutes before dawn when he saw the proper address displayed in plastic letters nailed to a tree near the end of a gravel drive. He slowly pulled down the driveway and parked in front of the house near a white Ford F250. He twisted around to open the gym bag that was resting on the back seat and fetched his sawed-off pump-action twelve gauge. He racked the slide to put a double-aught buckshot shell in the pipe, then he opened the door and stepped out of the car into the pre-dawn chill. Despite the fact that he was still wearing only the sleeveless t-shirt, the bite of the cold air only energized him more.