Borderline

by Nevada Barr

  The shooter was waiting. Quiet as they had tried to be, climbing in the dark is a noisy business. Paul closed the phone before the operator answered, and he and Anna stared up at the bulge of shale above. Scraping followed the first skitter of gravel as boots walked across stone. Either he knew where they were or knew approximately where they were.

  There were three ways out from the shallow niche in which they sheltered: right, left and down. If the shooter remained directly over them, all three directions would end with a bullet in the back. For what seemed hours, no one made another sound, not Paul, not Anna, not the owner of the boots. Not Helena. Not a gurgle or a sigh, nothing. Fear that the child had died took hold of Anna. Fumbling as silently as she could she found a tiny arm and followed it up to where the brachial artery was closest to the surface. Maybe she felt a pulse. Maybe she didn’t.

  Curling down, she managed to put her ear on the baby’s chest. Her own heart was pounding so loudly she couldn’t tell if she heard a faint thumping in Helena’s breast or not. A feeling akin to panic gripped her and she lifted the newborn from its T-shirt hammock and held the baby’s mouth next to her ear to see if she could hear her breathing. She heard nothing but the rustle of her own hair against the baby’s skull and the soft susurration of fabrics as she dragged cotton knit over linen. In desperation she pinched Helena’s bare toes, toes no bigger than baby peas.

  Helena protested the mistreatment and Anna felt the weight of all the rock in Texas lift from her shoulders. Scraping from above, purposeful now, let her and Paul know the shooter had heard the mewling as well. In her concern for the baby, Anna had forgotten a man with a gun was listening for breathing as intently as she’d been but with altogether different reasons.

  Paul put his lips so close to Anna’s ear that his breath thrilled her despite the unthrilling nature of their situation. “You look after the baby; I’ll look after you. Do not argue.” As his whisper penetrated one ear, the other could hear the scratch of hard soles on loose gravel; the man was making his way down the rock.

  Anna had no intention of arguing. She needed time to put the baby in as safe a place as she could find on short notice, then help Paul to save them both. Probably this was not what her husband had in mind, but Anna said nothing. Even if she stashed Helena where snakes and scorpions and coyotes and mountain lions and javelina congregated for meals, she would probably be safer than anywhere mankind was.

  The thud of a man landing from a short leap sounded to the right of their alcove. Anna pressed her lips to Paul’s ear and breathed: “He’s coming. Give me the phone.” While stashing, she might as well be dialing 911. If the shooter didn’t kill them, the natural vicissitudes of being born an orphan in the desert with no proper care available was going to take Helena anyway. They were in dire need of rescue and park rangers were particularly good at that kind of thing.

  Paul helped Anna find her feet, then pulled himself up using the rock overhang. Sitting after the ardors of the day had left their muscles so stiff that Anna was staggering after the first few steps and would have fallen had there been any room to do it. They had some time—even if the shooter was well versed in the ins and outs of the rocks this near the rim, it would take a few minutes to check under each one.

  Moving as quickly as she could she clambered for the lip of Santa Elena Canyon. Paul was close behind, between her and their pursuer, hoping to find higher ground to make a stand. Confrontation was the last of a lawman’s choices, or should be. If they could have left the man in place while they called for backup or hidden until he grew bored and left the scene, that was what they would have done. The danger to Helena—not to mention their own mortal coils—was too great to risk by fighting with an armed assailant who, it was safe to assume, was better hydrated and rested than they were.

  The ifs, unfortunately, came with a caveat: if it could be done without endangering the lives of others. Whoever the man behind them was, he’d proven he could not be trusted to babysit the three other children while Anna and Paul went for help.

  Light crashed into the rock ahead of Anna. After hours of darkness the glare splintered and cut into her eyes with the force of a bullet hurling shards of stone. Momentarily blinded, she stopped. The shooter had a flashlight.

  “Go, go, go,” Paul whispered urgently, and strong hands shoved her up the next slurry of rock and sand. The flashlight changed the time factor. With a light the shooter could move much more quickly than could they, find them more quickly. Kill them more quickly. Wrapping a protective arm around Helena the way a quarterback might around a football, Anna speeded up, ignoring the battering of rock outcrop-pings against elbow, knees and ankles.

  The moon was high enough now and the going was easier. In minutes she’d moved ahead of Paul.

  Sudden silence made her scrabbling ring loud. Paul had stopped. Above her she could see a wide opening between two boulders, then, straight as a ruler, the false horizon drawn by the floor of the Chihuahuan desert. Moonlight loved the desert, and beyond the rock fall that shattered the cliff from desert to river, the land glowed pale silver and shadows were sharply drawn.

  Making as much noise with her feet and hands as she could, Anna pushed on, heading for that gap and the light. Over her own racket she could hear nothing of the men below her and hoped the shooter would mistake her for two and not realize Paul had stopped to lie in wait.

  She hoped Paul had armed himself with one damn big rock.

  The cut from the fall sliced down from the desert cleanly and Anna heaved herself up a waist-high step to the flat world she’d nearly forgotten existed. Clutching Helena to her chest, she crawled on hand and knees till she could no longer be seen by anyone below the edge of the canyon. But for the ragged stones tumbling into the chasm, there was no cover for miles, nothing but cacti, horse-crippler, round and low to the earth, creosote bushes and ocotillo with arms so thin and long only a Kessler could hide behind one.

  A horse was tied to the branch of a creosote bush. For a moment it stared at her with scared and rolling eyes. Its nostrils flared, then, maybe smelling that she was not in the market for horsemeat, it went back to cropping the meager grasses. A fire smoldered nearby in a battered iron pan. Beside it, right off the set of a hundred westerns Anna had seen as a kid, was a saddle turned top down to provide a headrest. The only modern note was a sleeping bag instead of a bedroll.

  Had Lori and Carmen been killed by an outlaw, a psycho living out dreams of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Jesse James, Billy the Kid and various other serial killers that myth had transformed into heroes?

  “Sorry, buddy,” Anna whispered as she dragged the blanket off the horse. Out of the ring of firelight, in a swale no more than eight inches deep and protected by cholla cacti with stunningly yellow blossoms, she spread the blanket and laid Helena in the middle of it so crawling things would have to make an effort to get to her and to protect her from accidentally throwing a tender little hand into a spiny plant. That done, she moved far enough away so she would not draw anything near the baby should she become a target and dialed 911.

  She didn’t know if she reached an operator or a dispatcher and didn’t take the time to find out. As briefly and quietly as she could, she told the responder where they were and what they were up against and requested police and medical assistance and a meat wagon for the bodies. Then she pushed the off button and closed the phone. Leaving Helena to be watched over by the creatures of the night, Anna quickly searched the cowboy’s camp: no guns, no alcohol, no knives but for one so beat up she doubted it would cut the three apples he’d brought for snacks, and a half-smoked pack of Marlboro Lights. Taking the pathetic knife, she slipped quietly back into the black crevasse leading into the rock fall and the place she had last seen Paul.

  Stopping often to listen, Anna crept to the back of the boulder they had sheltered beneath, the one the shooter had paced atop as they cowered below, too afraid to breathe. Without the baby to keep alive from one instant to the next Anna found she was
breathing just fine and the fear, though still with her, had lost its panicked edge. Without Helena in her arms, Anna liked the dark. With the pit black beneath her esophagus, she liked the danger. The danger to Paul was something else, a fear as sharp as that she’d carried for Helena but not as bone deep. Paul Davidson was not a helpless dependent. Paul was her partner. To worry too much about him felt disrespectful, as if he was not a good enough sheriff to stay alive or, should the worst occur, not a good enough priest to get into heaven.

  Going to the right of the rock so that with luck she would be behind the killer, Anna slipped back into the black shadows.

  SIXTEEN

  The hard edge of night was broken by the moon and, this close to the iridescence of the desert floor, a faint glow from above. Anna’s eyes had recovered from the blast of light from the shooter’s flashlight and she could see well enough to move quietly. Slipping down from rock to rock, placing each foot carefully, she crept to where she and Paul had sheltered with Helena. Still there was no sound from either her husband or the hunter.

  The fatigue that adrenaline had been keeping at bay struck from nowhere, and Anna was suddenly dizzy with it. Dehydration, hunger, the climb up and down the crack to Carmen’s body, the trudge up the rockslide, coalesced in her muscles and it was all she could do to remain upright. Hunting a hunter when she was as weak as a newborn kitten, as weak as Helena lying all but lifeless on a horse blanket, Anna felt helpless. She felt like crying and falling in a heap and giving up, abdicating. It was a rotten sensation.

  For a moment that rang in her ears like a symphony, she stood still in the shadows and sent her senses out into the maze of dark and light, shadow and stone. Down in the rocks it felt as if hearing, sight, the flight of mind was smashing into shale and the world was no bigger than the crevice she waited in. Then came the faint sound of a footfall. Not the rasp of rubber that Paul’s river shoes would produce, but the hollow knock of a boot heel.

  The shooter was also waiting, listening. Now he’d heard or seen something and was on the move again. Forcing herself forward, hands on the boulders at either side, eyes and ears wide in the night, the effort of lifting her feet and putting them down taxing what was left of her energy, Anna followed the sound. Her sandaled foot struck a rock and she stopped. The boots stopped. Feeling for what had stubbed her toes, she found a rock roughly the size of a baseball and picked it up. The weight felt good in her hand, the smoothness comfortingly deadly against her palms and fingers.

  Where was Paul? A vision of him already dead, his skull smashed in by a six-cell flashlight, burned like a flash fire behind her eyes. The anger that followed it gave her a last gasp of strength and she took it to her like a drowning woman grabbing at the last straw. Rock firm in her grasp, she moved up the narrow incline sandwiched between the boulders quickly, no longer worried about being quiet.

  A banshee’s scream and the sound of bodies colliding thundered down her tiny canyon. The shooter had found Paul. Or vice versa. Exhilaration flooded her. Paul wasn’t dead. Yet. Anna flung herself onto the next rock and, stone in hand, skittered over it like a three-legged lizard. Ahead, where the last lip shadowed the climb to the desert floor, Paul’s silvery hair shone as he grappled with the shooter. The flashlight had fallen to the ground and rolled, creating an eerie kaleidoscope of illuminated feet in a shattered dance. In glimpses she could see the shooter wore a pistol on his hip like a gunslinger.

  The man who had killed Lori and Carmen was tall and broad with ink-black hair and long arms. His face was dark with blood where Paul had struck him with something. He was bigger, stronger, watered and fed. And he was winning. Locked together, the two men slammed into the lip of the canyon and Anna saw Paul’s head snap back, heard it strike stone. He reeled and the tall man drew his arm back to hit him in the face.

  Anna stood. “Hey!” she shouted. In the second the shooter’s fist hesitated, she threw her rock.

  The hurling of spherical objects was not an art girls were trained in. The repetitive task of “playing catch” had never appealed to her any more than had running after shagged balls like a rat terrier after a tennis ball. The rock went wide and cracked into a boulder between her and the fighting men. It served one small purpose. The shooter was distracted long enough Paul got his arm up and deflected the blow from his face. Anna leapt from her boulder and landed on all fours, scrambling to hands and feet, running like a Navaho skinwalker, more wolf than woman, closing the distance between herself and the fight.

  No rocks neatly to hand, she sprang on the shooter’s back. Wrapping one arm around his throat, her other hand grabbing at the six-shooter in the holster, she tucked her head tight against his shoulder where he’d have trouble hitting her and squeezed. Knuckles whipped across the side of her face and she felt the blood start. She squeezed harder.

  With a grunt the man reeled backward, smashing her against the wall of the ever-present, unforgiving prison of shale she’d been sentenced to. Air gusted from her lungs and she couldn’t pull it back in. The panic of suffocation did what metal to her skull had failed to. Losing her grip on the man’s throat, she fell. Silhouetted against the curtain of stars and faint moonlight she watched him stoop quickly, then rise. He’d retrieved the flashlight. Crouching, he cocked his arm back and swung at her head.

  A black shape crashed into him and the flashlight went flying. The wind that had been knocked out of Anna came back in a rush. Crawling between the kick of boots and the slash of river shoes, she retrieved the flashlight and rolled free of the fracas. Again on her feet she swung the flashlight like a baseball bat at the shooter’s head. The fight turned and her blow glanced off his temple and cracked into Paul’s hand. Paul cried out in pain. The shooter slumped to the ground.

  “Thank you, love,” Paul gasped. Both of them were panting heavily.

  “Gun,” Anna managed.

  Paul knelt on the man’s shoulders and Anna unsnapped the keeper and pulled the gun from the shooter’s holster. Not a six-shooter. A nine-millimeter semiautomatic, the kind she’d carried most of her career. Why hadn’t he drawn it? After Lori and Carmen, she doubted he had any feel for the sanctity of life.

  “We . . . tie . . . him . . .” she gasped.

  “With what?” Paul backed off the shooter’s body and he and Anna slumped together against a rock trying to breathe. Wrists braced on knees so she wouldn’t drop the thing, Anna held the gun on the man who was now their captive—or their corpse, depending on how hard the flashlight had hit him.

  “Good point,” she said. Every scrap of anything that could make rope had been sacrificed already. Anna was barely decent in her ripped shirt, and Paul’s pants were riding at an inner-city half-mast without his belt.

  Anna’s and Paul’s breath began to even out. The gun stopped shaking in her hand and steadied on the downed man. The shooter had fallen forward and lay on his side, half curled around a beach ball-sized rock, his face in the angle between the proverbial rock and the hard place. One leg was bent over the other liked those of the hanged man in the Tarot deck. One arm was cocked behind him, palm toward Anna and Paul. The other was out of sight. All in all it was a good position as far as Anna was concerned. There would be no sudden leapings up from that tangle of bones and flesh.

  “Do you think he’s dead?” Anna asked. The question was one of indifference to her and that indifference sent a jolt of horror through her that started the edges of the pit in her soul bleeding. She felt herself starting to fall and was only stopped by the sharp rap of the pistol barrel against her scraped shin. The external pain snapped her from the internal. Paul was looking at her with concern, his eyes unreadable in the faint light.

  “Hand fell asleep,” Anna said as she retrained the weapon on the body at their feet.

  Paul looked back at their predator-become-prey. “I sure hope we didn’t.”

  Anna envied his hope. His voice was rich with compassion for the guy who’d stalked and murdered two girls and tried to murder them. Paul woul
d have killed him if he’d had to, to protect himself or others, but he was genuinely happy it might not have been necessary. Anna tried to care and failed. She cared that she failed, maybe that counted for something in the final reckoning.

  “Unh,” emanated from beneath the stone beach ball.

  “Not dead,” Anna said.

  “Hallelujah.”

  Anna was heartened at the surge of, if not joy, then relief she felt when life was confirmed.

  Paul had switched the flashlight off when they’d collapsed against the rock. He turned it on now and shined it on the groaning man.

  The crabbed hand behind his back twitched then began to be pulled under him, reminding Anna weirdly of the witch’s feet sliding under the house in Munchkin Land. Keeping the gun trained on the shooter, Anna pushed herself to her feet, grunting as if she, too, were stirring from a death sleep. Paul stood as well. Anna heard the companionable crack of his knees.

  She had intended to grow old with this man. She hadn’t planned on doing it all in one night.

  The hand vanished beneath the torso, seeking the empty holster pinned beneath the hip.

  “We’ve taken your weapon,” Paul said quietly. “Do everything carefully and slowly.”

  Anna relaxed her eyes and flexed her fingers on the butt of the gun. Annie Oakley, she thought absurdly. She shook her head to clear it of witches and sharpshooters.

  “I hear you,” returned a voice muffled by rock and earth. “Easy it is. I’m going to sit up, okay? Real slow.”

  The shooter didn’t sound calm, precisely, but he didn’t sound psycho or hyper the way Anna had thought he would. His voice was as quiet and rational as Paul’s had been. He was trying to calm and reassure them so they wouldn’t shoot him the first time he blinked. This guy wanted to stay alive.

  “Okay,” the man said in the same calming tones. “I’ve got my hands under me now. I’m going to do sort of a push-up then get myself into a sitting position here. Real slow. That okay with you folks?”