by Bobby Adair
Tommy raced up the sloping dirt road, taking them across the mountain's forested face. He looked down to his right. They hadn't been driving long, maybe ten minutes. They'd cut across the flat pastureland on the valley floor by bouncing at breakneck speed along a rutted road that was slowly being engulfed by the summer grasses.
In the distance, the three smoking cars were visible on the road where they’d left them. Two more cars were stopped on the lanes, passengers out, offering futile aid or belated prayers for the dead. Up the valley road, coming from Spring Creek, several police cars were racing, lights flashing, sirens wailing.
Pointing ahead, Tommy said, “Around this curve coming up, they won’t be able to spot us from down there. We’ll stop.”
***
With tall pines blocking the view of the road in the valley below, opening up for Tommy and Summer to see the lake and Spring Creek way down between the mountains, Tommy pulled the SUV into a wide spot at the side of the dirt road.
He climbed out of the driver’s seat, opened the back door, unlocked Crosby’s cuffs, and dragged him out. Crosby was weak, and barely able to resist what Tommy was doing, except that his dead weight made him a chore to move. Once Tommy had Crosby on his knees at the edge of the road, he stood back, panting from the effort.
“What if somebody drives by?” Summer asked in a low voice.
In truth, Tommy hadn’t thought that part of his rushed plan through. Leaving Crosby in the back seat and interrogating him there made the most sense, but once he saw the drop-off at the edge of the road, the urge to put Crosby there and earn some revenge overrode Tommy’s rational thought processes.
So he stood there, waiting for his breathing to return to normal, telling himself to keep his emotions in check, reminding himself that irrational choices were the things that got people killed. It was the cool-headed bastards who tended to stay alive once the bullets started flying. That’s what had worked for him all those years ago. He hadn’t been born with a talent for handling a rifle and pistol. Urban gang-war tactics weren’t something that came naturally. He’d learned them by witnessing the mistakes of the fallen. Tommy needed to keep all those lessons in mind or he was going to get himself and Summer killed.
He drew his pistol, stepped up to Crosby, and grabbed a handful of his dyed hair. He turned Crosby’s head to see down the valley, and pointed with the barrel of his pistol. “You see that pale building down there? That one standing above the trees out there all by itself?”
Crosby blinked and breathed without answering.
Tommy bonked him in the head with the butt of the gun.
He cried out.
Summer gasped and stepped back.
Tommy looked at her with a silent explanation, ‘This is vicious.’
He turned back toward his captive. Crosby wasn't blubbering, yet he was on the edge. He was dying, and he knew it. However, he wasn't so far gone that he didn't understand pain.
Tommy told him, “You answer me when I ask you a question. You understand?”
Crosby tried to nod.
Tommy bonked him again.
And the blubbering started. “You’re going to kill me. Just do it.”
Tommy yanked on Crosby’s hair again to urge him to look at the pale building. “That’s the hospital, Malcolm. You tell me what I want to know, and I’ll drop you in the parking lot and give you a chance to—”
He started wailing. "No, you won't."
“Sure, I will,” Tommy lied.
Through snot bubbles and bloody spit, Crosby asked, “What do you want to know?”
Summer stepped up and grabbed Crosby’s jaw to make him look at her. “How many militants do you have?”
“We’re nationwide.” Crosby tried to laugh, but managed to slobber down his chin and fall into a coughing fit.
“How many?” Summer demanded after Crosby stabilized.
“Millions,” he whispered. “Millions.”
“And the police, they’re all in on it?” Tommy asked.
Crosby shook his head.
“Where are the ones who didn’t turn traitor?”
“You’re the traitor,” Crosby snarled through blood-coated teeth. “You don’t love your country. You’re a pig.”
Tommy bonked him on the head. "Did you murder them?" Tommy put the barrel of his pistol against Crosby's temple and ground it into the skin, like he was trying to force it through his skull.
Crosby wailed again. “No, no, no.” He slumped. “They’re alive.”
“Where?” Summer demanded.
“The jail,” Crosby whispered. “With the other criminals.”
“He’s lying,” said Tommy. “They killed them, like they did to everyone in that barn.”
“No!” Crosby wailed again. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.” He was crying, tears rolling down his cheeks. “Nobody was supposed to die. It was supposed to be a bloodless revolution.”
Tommy looked at Summer, shaking his head, to let her know he didn't believe.
“Then why burn the people in the barn?”
“No control,” said Crosby. “Hotheads.”
“You’re saying they did it on their own?” Tommy prodded. “That’s what you want us to believe?”
“Bad elements. It’s not what we planned for.”
“Where’s Frank’s son?” asked Summer.
“How would I know that?” responded Crosby in weak words. He wasn’t going to last much longer.
“Where’s my daughter?” Tommy demanded.
“What would I know about your daughter?”
Tommy bonked him on the head again.
Crosby was barely able to hold himself up. He coughed a wet hack and blew a spray of blood into the dirt in front of him.
“Emma Joss,” Tommy told him. “She was on your list.”
“Emma Joss,” Crosby coughed again and fell over on his side. He struggled to take breaths that came in short, painful gasps. He whispered, “Cancerous cunt.”
Summer's hands were on Tommy's shoulders in an instant, attempting to stop him from doing any one of a dozen cruel things that came to Tommy's mind. Yet Tommy didn't do any of them. He clenched his fist and controlled his breathing. He knelt to make sure Crosby could hear. "You know who I'm talking about, Malcolm. Where is she?"
Crosby didn’t answer, he just lay there, gasping, until his eyes closed.
Tommy jumped up and kicked him, not hard enough to damage, just hard enough to get his attention.
Crosby didn’t react.
“Oh, Christ.” Summer fell to her knees beside Crosby, trying to revive him, or help him, or whatever. None of it mattered.
Tommy stepped away.
“Help me!” Summer ordered.
Tommy shook his head. Help for Crosby was the last thing on his mind.
She cursed and ran over to the SUV to retrieve the dead deputy’s first aid kit.
Chapter 20
As it turned out, Summer hadn’t been trying to help Crosby, she’d just wanted the smelling salts to try and revive him. It didn’t work. Crosby’s breaths turned into spasms, and then he stopped breathing.
At first, Summer did nothing, she just knelt there beside him, out of options.
Tommy stared at the body. Crosby knew Emma. He had to have known where she was being held. And the information had died with him.
Standing up and stepping away from the corpse, Summer delicately asked, “What next?”
Tommy stepped over and pushed Crosby off the embankment.
The big man’s body rolled, and then tumbled down the slope, arms and legs flailing grotesquely with his momentum, until he bounced into a boulder with a wet crunch and bent around a sapling growing behind.
Summer stepped away from the edge, far enough she couldn’t see Crosby stuck on that tree.
Tommy stared at it for a long time, the plan’s failure landing hard on him.
The sirens from the racing police cars down on the valley highway fell silent, and Tommy noticed the shush of the bre
eze in the trees again. Somewhere close by, he heard the song of a magpie, sounding like a crow trying to play a bent harmonica.
“They say it’s good luck to hear one,” mumbled Summer.
Faintly, gunshots echoed up the valley from Spring Creek or beyond. Tommy couldn’t tell. A fire was burning in town again, another house turning to smoke over the rooftops, another family’s life ended because of politics’ repressive addiction to conformity.
Agree with me or die.
America had been founded on an ideal of equality and tolerance by flawed men who owned slaves, who believed a woman’s place was to keep her mouth shut while birthing babies and baking biscuits. Yet tolerance and equality grew anyway, through two hundred years of turbulence and triumph. Now Tommy had a front row seat to a new holocaust of ideals as he wondered how long the coming dark age of man would last.
Or was the dream in its death throes, never to be resurrected?
Would humans the world over give up on the idea that freedom and equality could work?
Still careful with her tone, easy with her words, Summer asked, “What are you thinking?”
“He knew Emma.”
“I know.”
“He knew where she was.”
Summer shrugged. She knew Tommy was only making a guess. It was a good guess, though. “We need to decide what to do.”
Tommy searched his pocket for the sat-phone and realized he didn’t have it. “I don’t know what time it is.”
“Is that important?”
Tommy shook his head. “Habit, you know. Checking the time before I make a plan.” He laughed at the irony of it as he wondered where he’d picked up that habit.
Summer checked her pockets. “Shit.”
“Yeah?”
“The phone was in the car, on the console.”
Tommy laughed at that, too. It was twisted in its own way. “We’ve lost the phones. We can’t communicate with your people, and—”
“To be fair,” countered Summer. “I couldn’t get Barry on the line, anyway.”
Tommy nodded down the slope where dead Malcolm waited for the scavengers to come. “And we’ve mishandled our informant. It’s like we’re a couple of amateurs.”
“We are, Tommy.”
“You are.”
“You are, too. You’re not the person you used to be. That was a long time ago.”
Tommy’s black laugh came back harsh and false. “I’ve always been that person. I just stopped being good at it.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t play the self-pity thing. You’re not good at it.”
Tommy sighed, because he didn't have a word to say, an argument with enough conviction to stand behind, or even an idea what to do next.
“You know you’re still good at this—killing people, or enforcing, or whatever you call it.” Summer pointed to the spot where Crosby’s body had rolled over the edge. “We snatched him in broad daylight just like we planned.”
Things did not go as planned. Tommy didn’t point it out.
“What happened wasn’t our fault,” continued Summer. "Sometimes things just don't turn out.” She caught Tommy's eye and wouldn't let it go. "No self-pity."
Tommy said nothing.
“None,” she persisted. “Unless you’re giving up. Is that what you’re doing here? Quitting?”
Tommy shook his head. There was no way he'd give up on finding his daughter, and he wasn't going to leave his wife to be murdered by political halfwits. "Buck up," he told himself.
“What?” asked Summer.
“Just something one of those 704 dumbasses said to me.”
Summer didn’t understand.
“Before they took us up on the mountain to kill us.”
“He gave you a pep talk?” she asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m not giving up.” He walked over to the SUV and leaned in through the open passenger door, examining the electronics built into the console. He peeked under the dashboard, then peered in the back seat before popping open the rear tailgate to search back there.
Following along behind him and unable to guess what he was up to, Summer asked, “What are you doing?”
“These things probably have transponders built in.”
Summer took a moment to make sense of it. “Like GPS location devices or something?”
“Yeah. I was looking to see if I could find it. Maybe disable it.”
“Oh, my God. They can track us?”
“Yeah,” answered Tommy. “As soon as they do the math down there and figure they have a deputy missing her truck, they’ll look at whatever tracking system they have back at the station and then they’ll come for us. And they’ll find us.”
“If we stay with the truck.”
“Yeah.” Tommy stepped away from the SUV and looked around at the mountains. “That’s where we are right now, about to lose our transportation.”
“And no plan even if we did have something to drive.”
Tommy had no argument for that either.
Summer took a breath of confidence and said, “Just because things didn’t work out with Crosby doesn’t mean we had a bad plan. Besides, killing Crosby isn’t without its benefits. We don’t know where he stands in the 704 command structure after Lugenbuhl, but he had to be one of Frank’s top lieutenants. One down, that’s what I say. What does the meth-war bible say about that?”
“If there actually was a bible,” Tommy admitted, “it would list killing off other bosses as one of the best strategies.”
Summer looked down to Spring Creek in the far distance. “That’s what they’re doing to us, isn’t it? Killing off the leadership.”
"In every way," Tommy agreed. "They don't want any leaders, and they don't want any prominent voices."
“They’re trying to take out every single voice,” clarified Summer. “They don’t want anybody anywhere speaking out against them in any capacity. If it works for them it should work for—” Summer stopped herself from finishing.
“Assassination squads are hard things to contemplate,” Tommy told her. “Now, you’ve seen both sides of it.”
Summer reluctantly nodded.
“Killing Crosby down there, that kind of just happened, but shooting an unarmed enemy in the face while he’s begging you not to, while he’s promising he’ll never do anything ever again to harm anyone if only you let him go home to his pregnant wife and twin toddlers. While he’s crying and groveling at your feet. Can you kill that guy, Summer? Can you shoot her if she’s a woman? Some girl you went to high school with, maybe? Somebody from your volleyball team? Maybe some parent whose kid played soccer with your son? Somebody you sang Christmas Carols with back before all of this political shit got so nasty we stopped socializing in the same circles? Could you kill that woman?”
“I don’t know, Tommy.”
Nodding, while not feeling like he’d won the argument, he said, “Thanks for being honest.”
Summer gulped as she thought about all Tommy had just said. “I don’t know if I can do that, yet I’m afraid I need to figure out how.”
“How to harden your heart enough to pull the trigger, you mean?”
Summer nodded.
"See enough dead friends," Tommy told her, "and the rest comes naturally.” Looking back toward Spring Creek, he said, "For now, let's concentrate on making a plan. I still need to find my family, and you need to gather intel for Barry, or his little attack is going to fail if he ever launches it.”
“I have an idea.”
“Do tell.”
“If we follow this road,” explained Summer, “we can get off onto a four-wheeler path—”
Tommy was already skeptical.
"It's wide enough," she assured him. "It's rough, and the dropoffs are steep, however, once we're on it, they won't be able to catch us. You can only drive so fast up there."
“Where does it lead?”
“O
ver the mountain, to the highway between Leadville and Copper Mountain.”
“What’s to stop them from taking the highway over and meeting us on the other side?” asked Tommy.
“We won’t be coming down over there.”
***
As promised, the dirt road grew rougher and rougher, and here and there was eroded down to boulders and loose rock. If the SUV hadn’t been built with four-wheel drive and outfitted with off-road tires, they’d have become stuck in a dozen different places before they ever made it above the trees.
Once up there, though, it wasn’t the condition of the road that worried Tommy, it was the steep slopes at the edge that put the white-knuckle fear into his grip on the wheel. The drop-offs weren’t sheer, but any bad turn or skid on the loose ground would send the SUV over the edge, and then the truck would tumble over the rocks with nothing to stop it until it smashed into the trees hundreds of feet below. Tommy didn’t need to wonder whether they’d survive it. He knew they wouldn’t.
When the goat path widened, and unexpectedly flattened out, Tommy saw the Copper Mountain ski resort sprawling along the curving gray ribbon of I-70 to the west. They’d reached the high point.
“This would be a good place,” suggested Summer.
Tommy didn’t need any convincing. He brought the truck to a careful stop, set the brake, put the thing in park, and leaving the motor running, all but jumped out through the door.
Every muscle in his body was tense. He was happy to have his feet on solid ground.
Summer came around to Tommy's side of the SUV, the downhill side. "Hair-raising."
“Not my kind of driving,” said Tommy.
Summer pointed southeast. “Look, you can see Breck from here, too.”
Tommy turned to see Breckenridge, another ski town, down the valley. Spring Creek lay to the north. In the distance all around, mountain peaks reached to the sky, some twenty, thirty, or fifty miles away. Maybe even a hundred.
Summer turned and pointed in the direction of their goal. “It should take us a couple of hours to get there.
“Even at this altitude?”
“We’re not hiking to the peaks,” she answered. “Everything else is downhill.”