by Peter Heller
“What the fuck?” she said. “You’re crazy!”
He shook his head, put a finger to his lips, she blinked. Good enough. He saw the stairs. Floating fir treads ascending along one paneled wall. He bounded, two steps at a time. Yes, a gallery. It went around three sides of the great room; the fourth was the huge window facing meadow, the river, the canyon wall. Around the gallery he saw the expected doors to expected bedrooms. These were the super VIP suites, the super VIPs that had to remain super anonymous. What bullshit. All the doors had key card scanners except one. That would be it. Yes, bronze plaque, discreet, said, private.
His thoughts were running fast, but skidded to a stop when he heard a booming voice yell, “You see the fucker? The new guide?” Jesus, he must have been in the basement, too. Or in the other wing. Where were the others. “Shay!” the man yelled. “Did you see him?”
Her voice cracked. “Yes!”
Jack froze. All he had to do was take three steps forward and look down over the gallery rail. He might get a good shot before the man returned fire, doubted it, the dude was a pro.
“Went out the front door!” she called.
Oh, damn, bless you, Shay. Wow. At some point you make a choice that defines the rest of your life. He tried the knob on the private door but of course it was locked. Nothing for it, the merc had run out the front. Jack kicked it in.
* * *
•
One steep flight. He knew that would be there, too. Up to the crow’s nest. At the top no camera, good, but another cherry door and another thumb scanner. He didn’t hesitate. He bounded down the way he had come. Got to the main room. Shay was standing over a table in a daze. He shook her. “Shay! Shay! Do you ever go up to Den’s room? Above? Do you?”
She blinked as if waking. She nodded. “I bring him his meals sometimes. Or leave a shaker of martinis. God, you’re a dead man.”
“Can you get in? The scanner?”
Half nod. What he was asking now dawned, her nod turned into a shake of the head.
“Okay, come with me. Now!”
She stood, frozen.
“Now!” Jack said.
“I can’t. He’ll make sure my mother…He’ll kill me.”
Jack tugged the clip knife from his pocket, flicked it open. “Give me your hand!”
“What? What are you doing?”
“I’m cutting off your thumb.”
She started to cry. Such a hard-boiled drifter, he never thought he’d see that. She nodded and led him back up the two flights of stairs. She put her thumb on the pad and Jack heard a cheep and he whispered, “Now get the hell out of here.”
He raised the rifle to sight it and shouldered through the door.
* * *
•
And came face-to-face with a lion.
A huge male, roaring. Head raised, mouth open, all teeth bared. Mane as red as a strawberry roan’s. What the h—? Simba! The full animal, stuffed and standing.
He saw no man. What he saw was a bank of tall windows circling the room and beneath them a band of video feeds. The screens were large and clear. Jack took in the monitors and recognized in succession: a dark mesh of what must be twigs at Ellery’s fence; a steel gate he didn’t recognize, must be Ellery’s main; the riffle and long pool beneath the bridge, the rapid upstream; the riverbank above the keep out sign; the main lodge gate, both sides; Kreutzer’s gate, both sides; Kreutzer’s turnaround and parking area; aisle of dark trees and a flagstone path—must be from outside the kids’ sleeping bunker; dimly lit room with twenty bunk beds: the inside; another doorway with stone path he didn’t recognize; interior of a cabin—his cabin, POV he could tell was from the thermostat; main lodge bar; main lodge swimming pool.
He heard the scuff and then he saw it: behind the right ear of the lion the lifting stacked barrels of the over-under shotgun, big bore. It was just swinging up, behind the lion’s head. Den had been crouching there. The shotgun swung up and Jack saw above it the tanned handsome face of the man, looking over wire-rim reading glasses, as if just caught working at a computer. Jack didn’t think past that. The shotgun was swinging and Jack fired straight into the lion’s mouth. Into the maw between Simba’s open jaws.
He squeezed the trigger of the AR and fired off three fast rounds and saw a spray of sawdust out the back of the big head and flinched away hard at the concussive blast of the twelve-gauge, the one trigger pulled, and then Jack heard the window behind him to his left explode outward, and heard the screech of the man as he spun back and knocked over a monitor.
Jack flinched but sprang forward and saw the man flung facedown over a keyboard beneath the screens. An insulated cup leaking tea rolled off the edge of the desk and crashed to the floor. Smelled like Constant Comment. Next to the keyboard a phone. What he needed. The man leaked blood. One shot had hit apparently—not slowed too much by the back of a ten-year-old taxidermied skull—hit the man in the right chest. He screeched like some startled owl and sucked air which wheezed and chortled. Jack stepped in and with a hand and knee flipped the man onto his back. One lens of his glasses had cracked, the titanium frames bent.
“Den,” Jack said.
The man gaped, both blue eyes open and blazing with scorn. “You’re just…just a cowpoke.” English accent.
“Yep, that’s what I am. Don’t fuck with a cowboy.” Jack pulled out Alison’s phone, swiped five times until he got to the naked girl being dragged across the barnyard. He shoved it in Den’s face. “This is you,” he said. “What are you doing to these kids?”
Den reached up with his left arm as if trying to grab the phone—to touch or claw, Jack couldn’t tell. “She’s just…no life,” Den said. “Home…no life.” He choked, coughed, licked dry lips, swallowed. “My clients run the world.” Shot in the chest and still haughty. God.
“You shouldn’t have said that. You’re telling me that if you ever went to trial, you’d get off somehow—”
Den gaped to speak and Jack shot him twice in the chest.
He picked up the phone and then he cursed himself for killing Den too fast. Because the courteous operator said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Den. For security purposes, what is your PIN, please?”
* * *
•
He shook himself, rushed for the door. As he passed the lion he put one hand on the animal’s rump in a kind of thanks.
Then the whole building shook and exploded.
It didn’t explode but felt like it. At first he thought it was the propane tank. No ball of fire. Then he heard the stutter of an automatic weapon. Alison. The merc was shooting at her. She had waited, waited, heard the shots in the tower, seen the window blow out, and known: Jack was in the shit, way up in the attic, and needed a little help. And she’d lit a stick of the TNT and tossed it against the front of the lodge, probably the door. Now she was out in the grass somewhere in a firefight with a special operator.
Jack sprinted down the stairs, just let his feet windmill over the treads. He hit the great room, bottom of the stairs—caustic stench of scorched nitric acid, the smoke hanging in the room like a morning blasting fence post holes, but this wasn’t fencing, it was killing. The bursts of fire were louder, just outside, and he edged to the corner and peered down the foyer. The front door was blasted off one hinge and leaned, and beyond it was a drift of lingering smoke. He ran to the maw and he could see Kurt’s black pickup angled in the turnaround against the fountain statue as if it had skidded to a stop, and behind the engine block, shooting over the hood, was Blond Beard. He was shooting down the long drive, she was out in the meadow toward the front gate. No cover out there but grass stems. Where were the others? He heard another automatic rifle firing and the deeper boom of a larger caliber, probably Jensen with a handgun, probably a .45. Blond Beard was in profile and Jack could take him out. Don’t rush it. Just like hunting. He raised the rifle
and the man must have caught the movement. He wheeled and fired and Jack pulled the trigger and the man dove behind the truck where he was probably in view of Alison and Jack unzipped the waist pack and fingered out a stick of TNT and found the lighter beneath it and lit the fuse. He tossed it under the truck and ran out the front door, firing as he went.
The wheels of the truck lifted six inches off the ground in the blast and the gas tank blew in a second explosion and the whole vehicle burned.
He had remembered the red Tesla and prayed. It was parked to his left beside the front door. Beyond it was the black Jeep. Jack peered in the window and saw the key fob lying in the console. The new ones used voice commands; thank you, God, for old cars. He yanked open the door, threw the rifle in the passenger well, and jumped in; and, yes, the start button was big enough, obvious enough, and he thumbed it and the dash lit up like a pinball, and he pulled the automatic shifter to R and peeled a tight arc backward. He was aware that he was drawing more fire from the upstream corner of the building but everything had gone somehow silent, or muffled, as if the chaos and exploding shots were behind an unbreakable glass. The burning truck gave him some cover as he screeched down the driveway and made himself slow.
She jumped out of the grass like a jackrabbit, straight at the car, running low, and maybe three were firing now and she had the passenger door open and was in, didn’t bother to roll down the window, just shattered it with the barrel of her gun so she could keep the rifle and close the door on the tiny cockpit, and before she had it latched Jack was moving.
He adjusted the rearview. Could see the turnaround in the mirror and the others moving. He saw three of them jump in the Jeep, Jensen in the driver’s seat and two others, and the Jeep swerved out of its parking spot and made a half donut and pointed down the drive.
Quarter mile. Long shallow S of a driveway. The torque of the electric car grabbed speed and shoved them back in the seats. The rusty steel wall of the gate loomed fast. Had to open it. He could see the keypad on its post. He jammed the brakes, skidded to a stop, cursed. The truck would be on them in seconds. He felt her hand squeezing his shoulder. Stay calm. “Take my gun!” he said. “Lay down fire right at the windshield. Point and shoot.” She did. Kicked open the door, the truck screamed around the bend and she fired.
He punched in the numbers Kurt had given him. They were firing back, but on the move, bouncing over frost heaves. Nothing was hitting, not yet. And she was crouched behind her door and blasting in bursts of two. Her door wouldn’t stop a bullet. The gate didn’t budge. Of course not. Maybe he’d punched it wrong. He tried again, frantic. Nothing. Fuck fuck. Then their back window shattered and a hole tore into the dashboard. They were cooked.
“Got ’em!” she yelled.
And he remembered. Ana. Ana! She’d said, Recuerde…Dígamelo…Tell me so you remember. Her words on the porch. She’d insisted. Tres, tres, nueve, tres. Not a damn thing to lose.
He punched in the numbers and the big steel plates shuddered. And began to slide. Thank you, thank you. Gracias a Dios y Ana—
He glanced in the rearview, saw the Jeep’s windshield had half shattered and spiderwebbed and the SUV caromed halfway into grass and stopped. Maybe she’d hit the driver. Maybe they were all dead. No such luck. The car backed out of the ditch and up onto the driveway and the front passenger was firing out his own window and the vehicle came on.
Goddamn, the gate was slow. But the Tesla was not that wide. Jack jammed the accelerator and they went through with maybe an inch to spare.
The g-force slammed them back into their seats and he was on the good paved county highway eating up the curves with the river and the tender greens of its cottonwoods flying by. The car hugged the road and the water smells poured in Alison’s shattered window. With every mile he knew they were leaving the bastards in the dust. “Hey, here’s the phone,” he called over the rush of air. “All the photos.” They gunned out into the open ranch country, alfalfa fields ahead and the bridge…“Tell him we’re in deep shit and getting fired on and have the whole thing ready to send—”
“Got it.” She was already typing fast with two thumbs, something Jack could never do. They took the turn at the bridge in a slide and whomped over the heavy planks and spun tires in the gravel on the other side. How many miles to phone reception? Maybe four, four more. All dirt for the next six miles till they intersected the highway along East River that led into Crested Butte. He’d have to slow way down. The roadster was heavy and did not do well on gravel; if they wanted to get there in one piece he’d have to slow. At least it wasn’t raining. The sky was dark, boiling over the ridgetops, but the rain had held off.
They tore up through the groves of aspen, sliding in the switchbacks, slalomed around the scattered spruce, and topped the ridge and began to nose down. No one in his rearview. Good.
“Reception!” she yelled. “Got it! Sent!” Really good. And he let the elation rise in him like helium, and he looked out over the wider valley below and the paved highway and saw the bar lights flashing red and blue, two squad cars screaming down from Crested Butte.
Jensen had called them. Called in his compadres on a VHF or sat phone. Of course. Squeeze move. Jack could see that the SUV cruisers would get to the end of their road before the Tesla did. They would meet them head-on. The three heavily armed men would climb their tail. How many minutes behind? Two?
The crush in his chest was the knowledge. That he would lose again. What was he thinking? They were outnumbered, outgunned, outplanned. Outmoneyed a million times. The deck was stacked and he would again lose someone he had grown to love. He had pulled her into this, and again, ultimately, he would be the killer.
Up ahead on the right was a gap in the trees and a rough ATV track descending into the ferns beneath the aspen. He smashed the brakes, skidded, and bounced onto the four-wheel-drive track.
* * *
•
They didn’t make it far. Just far enough to drop into the slew of an old stock pond. Just out of sight of the road. Jack tried to stay on the highest edge of the track, but the tires dropped into the ruts and the frame scraped and the Tesla ground to a stop and they stepped out. They could hear sirens louder now, rising out of the valley. Then the gravel blast of a heavy vehicle on the road going too fast.
Without a word they reached in and picked up the rifles and slung them and they loped. Past the muddy pond it was more of a trail, and it contoured along the slope and they were trotting single file through the pale columns of the trees. Paler for the dark of the threatening sky. He thought they were like the columns of a church, or a catacomb. They slowed to a fast walk and kept on. Maybe two miles, three. They could no longer hear sirens, only the surges of the aspen leaves as the gusts swept through. There was nothing else to be done. The two pincers would meet and the Jeep would backtrack and they would find the trace, see the car. Then they would come after them, three trained soldiers at a run. Who even knew where Vincent Serra was. In St. Lucia? San Francisco? Who knew if he even had the vaunted connections she spoke of? A long shot.
Jack smelled water. They emerged into a narrow meadow and a view to mountains, close across a wooded basin. The meadow was flecked with asters and lupine. A tiny creek cut through it. They sat on rounded stones among the horsetail and listened to the burble. Neither had a word to say. They crouched and cupped their hands and rinsed their faces. The water was icy. Somewhere above them the last shaded patches of last winter’s snow was melting.
And they could see them: the rags and tatters of snow on the sharp ridges of the peaks to the north. Not so far off. A half day’s walk maybe. There would be ice blue gems of lakes up there, just above timberline, and just below it.
“Here,” she said finally. “Let’s take this off.” And she reached for his bandanna and loosened it and carefully unstuck it from his hair and pulled it free. “Lemme see. Ouch. Let’s rinse it.�
�
He knew they should take cover, prepare for an assault. But he lowered himself to where his head was nearly in the dark water and she cupped her hands and washed the gash. He inhaled sharply. He was just sitting up when she put a hand on his arm. “Listen,” she said. He froze. Then he felt for his gun in the horsetails.
“No,” she whispered. “Listen.”
He heard a stutter. Not firing this time but something on the edge of hearing, far off. She touched her ear. A roll, heard, then not, then steady, like a beating at the membrane of the afternoon, and then a drumming and he squinted under his palm and saw the two choppers coming over the divide. They came fast from the northeast, just over the sharp ridge of rock and snow and dropped down into the basin and the thwopping now was loud with a rhythmic pressure drop Jack felt in his chest. Two black Jet Ranger helicopters at speed, in formation. Close over the tops of the trees. They came straight across the drainage and as they approached their low ridge they banked south and went over.
A tear ran to the corner of her mouth. She blinked it back, tried, and her hand held to his arm. “Vincent,” she said. “It’s his people.”
Jack could not yield. That this time he might not have to bear the loss. That there might be a reprieve. But. There was nowhere else those birds could be going; they were heading straight for the Taylor Canyon.
* * *
•
They stayed as the darkness thickened and true dusk filled the basin. It never rained and no one came. They lay down in the fescue on the far side of the creek and used the stiff horsetails for cover and watched the path until they could no longer see it. No one. Jensen and the operators must have seen the choppers, too, because they had Jack and Alison pretty much dead to rights, and did not come.