by Blake Banner
Primrose was watching me with narrowed eyes. “You’ve done this kind of thing before, haven’t you?”
“In Afghanistan, in the mountains. It was worse than this.” I turned back to Abi. “I’ll try and arrange a chopper to come in and collect her. I’ll notify the sheriff, and so will the doctors. There will be an investigation.”
She closed her eyes. “I suppose it will be for the best. But if the investigation fails…”
“If there is no investigation, it will be worse, believe me.”
We gazed at each other for a moment. She caught my meaning and looked away. “I suppose I always knew this day would come, sooner or later. I think, unconsciously, I prayed for it.”
I stared at her for a moment. “There are over fifteen thousand rape-murders in the States every year. And almost twenty thousand rapes without murder. I promise, the national TV and press are not going to swarm over Independence because a kid got raped by a redneck. And even if they do, that is not such a high price to pay to have this son of a bitch brought to justice.”
She didn’t look at me. “That was never my personal concern. But please, Lacklan, we don’t cuss in this house.”
“Then what is your concern?”
Primrose and Sean had gone quiet. Abi raised her eyes from the tabletop to look at me. “Isaac and Elsa Ibanez, Sally’s parents. They also disappeared about three weeks after Sally was found. Word was they had moved away, like the Gordons. But, like the Gordons, nobody has ever heard from them since.”
I leaned back in my chair. “You fear they were silenced as possible witnesses.”
She nodded.
I added, “That’s why Peggy’s parents are so terrified.”
“I imagine so. They are a very simple couple. The Lord knows how they are coping with this.”
I grunted. “Not admirably.”
“Don’t judge them.”
“Why not? Wake up, Abi. I never yet saw an angel arrest a killer, a rapist, or a drug dealer. And I never saw your Good Lord pass judgment on one. But I’ve seen plenty of cops and judges do it. I don’t know anything about gods, heaven or hell. But I know a lot about this world. And in this world, we have to take responsibility for what happens to us, and the people around us. And while the Martins sat at home reading the Bible, their daughter was getting raped and strangled. I judge them to be poor, negligent parents, and so should you. Every judgment we fail to pass is an evil act that prospers.”
A tense silence fell over the table. Outside, the wind rattled the glass in the windows. The gingham drapes moved in the frozen fingers of a hidden draft. After a moment, Abi said, “Are you quite finished lecturing me?”
“Yeah.”
“Please have some lunch. Let’s talk to the doctor and some of the other townsfolk, perhaps somebody can help you, drive you part of the way, give you some equipment…” She shrugged. “Make this something less of a suicide mission.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
Sean was staring at his mother. “Mom, I should go, too. I know the way. I’ve done it plenty of times. Alone he might get lost, but together we can make it.”
She was shaking her head long before he had finished. “Absolutely not, Sean! No! Out of the question.”
He appealed to me with his eyes. I smiled and shook my head. “Thanks, pal. I think I have to do this one alone.”
He sighed. “OK, I’ll draw you a map.”
“That would be helpful.”
Primrose got up from the table and went and opened the oven. The smell of baking bread and hot steak pie invaded the kitchen. Outside, the wind howled and groaned, and for a moment it sounded like all the demons of Hell were baying for my life.
Maybe they were.
Seven
The doc, the reverend, and the few neighbors Abi went to see could offer little in the way of help or advice—other than the eternal ‘don’t do it, stay out of it’ refrain. The doc provided me with elasticized thermal long johns and socks, and the reverend gave me two extra thermos flasks, bringing my total to four. The doc told me not to drink alcohol, as it was a depressant and would make me more vulnerable to the cold. He then supplied me with a pint of whiskey and told me to drink it when I got there.
Nobody was willing to drive me up to the end of the woodlands. Nobody wanted to be seen helping me. I was going to have to make the whole journey on foot. I thought about using the Zombie, but I knew it would never make it. It would just get stuck in the snow.
Sean gave me a rucksack and Abi filled two of the flasks with hot chicken soup and the other two with hot, sweet coffee. That, a bar of chocolate, and a large slice of meat pie was my rations. Sean begged again to be allowed to come with me, but was promptly slapped down by both his mother and his sister. So he handed me a detailed, carefully drawn map which he had sealed in a plastic envelope, to keep it dry. He stood behind my shoulder as I sat at the kitchen table and explained it to me in the failing light of the afternoon.
“You just follow the road all the way to the end of the woods,” he said. “As long as you’re in the woods, the road is going to be easy to follow, and there won’t be much snow. But once you get out of the trees and it levels off, it’s going to be more difficult. It’ll be dark for one thing, there won’t be any stars or moon to guide you, and the road will by buried in snow.” He reached in his pocket, pulled out a compass, and handed it to me. “Keep going west. But when you get to the top, you’re going to see a big moth…” He glanced at his mother. “A big peak in front of you, so then you are going to go north, for about a thousand yards. See? That’s here…”
He pointed at the map. I nodded. It was clear and well drawn. “Thanks, Sean, that’s great.”
“Wait! This is the next difficult bit where you could get lost. The canyon then follows a kind of inverted ‘S’ shape and comes out at a fork. You’re going to want to take the left fork, because it goes down hill, but it comes out at a bad place. Don’t go that way. Turn right and go up hill. It’s gonna be hard in the snow, but that’s the path. You’re going to go northwest for maybe a mile, then you’re going to come to the highest point, out in the open. You got a tough climb, maybe half a mile, and the snow will be deep. You got to keep a little south of west. I put it on the map, see, here. Three degrees south of west. Then, when you get to the top, you’ll see the canyon below you.” He squeezed in beside me, grinned and gave a small laugh. “You can go down on your ass…”
His mother scowled at him and he grimaced. “I mean, on, like… as though you had a sledge.”
“I get the idea.”
“Once you’re in the canyon, you just follow it all the way down.”
I slapped him on the shoulder. “Good man, Sean. That is going to be very helpful.”
His face flushed with pleasure. “Jeez! I wish I could come with you. Mom, please?”
“No!
I patted his shoulder again. “You stay safe, Sean, and most important, keep your mom and your sister safe.” To his mother, I said, “Walk me to my car.”
We stepped out and she closed the door behind her. It was no later than four, but it was almost as dark as night. The clouds overhead were practically black and even in the relative protection of her small orchard, with her fruit trees and the rose bower providing some shelter, the wind seemed to drive needles of ice right through your skin.
I stopped her on the step, pulled my collar up, and asked her, “Have you got a weapon?”
Her face hardened.
“I’m not asking for it, Abi. You have two children to protect.”
She shook her head. “He has never gone for a boy, and Primrose is older than…”
I interrupted her. “Abi, you need to start facing this thing. It must be clear to you that we are dealing with two killers here.”
Her eyes went wide. “What are you talking about?”
I stressed it. “At least two. You said yourself that the disappearance of the Ibanez family and the Gordons was suspect.” I shrug
ged. “Who is it that the Martins are scared of? There is some kind of clean-up crew going around, and they are not fussy about age or gender.”
She stared at me for a moment. She seemed astonished. “But why me? The Martins, perhaps, but why us…?”
“Maybe no reason at all, but maybe because I’ve been staying here, you have helped me, and they see me as a threat. Now please, answer the question, Abi. Have you got a weapon?”
She shook head. “No.”
“Go inside out of the cold.”
I went down the path to my car. I heard the door close behind me. I popped the trunk and pulled over the canvas kit bag I always keep there. It was sadly depleted. I had intended to drive to San Francisco, see Marni off, and drive home. I had not intended to cross a small mountain range on foot in the snow, or to make war on a gang of rapists and murderers. So it contained only the basics: there were my two Sig Sauer 9mm Tacops with their extended magazines, my take down, seventy pound orange osage bow with twelve aluminum arrows that formed a removable, rigid frame for the bag, and a Fairbairn & Sykes fighting knife with a brass, knurled grip. There was also some spare ammunition.
But the Heckler and Koch G36 assault rifle, the Smith & Wesson 500, the cakes of C4, the bugs, and all the rest of the kit—that wasn’t even in my place in Wyoming. That was all in my house in Weston, in Boston[2]. I sighed, pulled out the bag, slammed the trunk shut, and made my way back into the house.
I stamped the snow from my boots in the reception and went through to the kitchen. They were all sitting, silently staring at their cold cups of tea. I dumped the almost-empty bag on the table, pulled out the two Sigs and a box of ammunition. Sean’s face lit up. Abi and Primrose looked like they’d just seen Freddy Kreuger peer in at the window.
“I am not going to argue with you guys. I want you and Primrose to have one of these each.” Sean drew breath, but I gave him a look that silenced him. “I don’t want to hear any bullshit.” Abi drew breath. I gave her the same look I’d given Sean. “There are men in this village who are prepared to kill. We don’t know why, we don’t know who they are, and that makes them three times as dangerous.”
Abi was shaking her head. “Lacklan, for God’s sake, Sean is only thirteen...”
“And I would never expose a child to this kind of thing, Abi, unless I believed that the danger was real and present. And we all know that it is. If I could be here to protect you, this would not be necessary. But I am going to be gone for at least a day, and during that time you must be able to protect your family.” I held up the Sig. “This is the only way.”
I showed all three of them how the pistols worked. When I was done, I said, “Sean, I do not want you to touch these guns. You stay away from them, you understand? But, if the time comes and you need to protect your mother or your sister, I want you to know how to do it. You got me? This is not a game. This is real.”
He looked at me with huge, solemn eyes and nodded, while his mother and sister looked sick.
I stressed to all three of them the dangers of the chambered round: if you eject the magazine and forget that you have a round in the chamber, that can cost lives. Too many people who should know better forget that. Then I took them out to the back yard to fire a few shots and get the feel of the weapons.
Back inside, I put the Fairbairn & Sykes in my boot, the rucksack they had given me with the food and flasks inside the kit bag, and slung the bag on my back. Primrose watched me do it and said, “You’re not armed.”
“I’m pretty sure they won’t come after me. If they do, the weather is my first weapon, if that fails, I have a bow and my knife.” I winked at Sean. “Believe me, I am a lot more dangerous than they are.”
Abi stared at me a moment with the kind of strange, complicated expression that only women know how to make. It tells you they love the way you are and cannot wait to change you to the way they want you to be. She said, “I believe you probably are.”
I zipped up my jacket and pulled on some thermal gloves Abi had given me, along with a thick, woolen scarf and a woolen hat, both of which I now used to cover my head and mouth. I made them stay inside, pulled the door closed behind me and set off along the track, past the dark, silent saloon, past the dark, silent houses with only the faintest glow creeping out from behind their drapes to touch with warm amber the deepening drifts on their front lawns.
The town of Independence was soon behind me and the track began to climb toward the pine forest that sprawled up both sides of the canyon and enclosed and protected the path. The sky was low and heavy and the snowfall was dense. A cruel wind gusted across the plain below, dragging huge white billows in its wake, reducing the poor visibility even further. There was no moonlight and no starlight, but even so, the endless blanket of snow seemed to emit a strange, blue luminescence all on its own.
But when I finally entered the long tunnel of trees that enclosed the path up the canyon, the darkness became almost impenetrable. The trade-off was that the snow was shallower, barely ankle deep, and the wind was nothing but a moan and a sigh, and an occasional wild scream in the canopy above.
What didn’t change was the cold. I estimated it at somewhere around zero degrees Fahrenheit, minus fifteen or twenty Celsius. It was a numbing, penetrating cold, and I knew I had to endure it for the next nine or ten hours. And it could only get worse. All you can do in that kind of situation, in that kind of physical environment, is to create a rhythm with your walking and your breathing, and put yourself into a trance. Deep breathing to a rhythm has the double advantage of generating heat and distorting your perception of time.
So I breathed, five steps in, five steps out, five steps in, five steps out, and as I breathed and walked, in my mind, I went over, in minute detail, everything that had happened since I turned right at Mill City the day before.
I had been walking for maybe an hour, perhaps a little less, when I became aware that the path was beginning to veer slightly north of west, and as I became aware of that, I noticed also that the forest was beginning to thin slightly. This then was the first marker on Sean’s map. I had covered barely two miles in slightly less than an hour. After this, the going would get tough. I pressed on for another five or ten minutes, until the sky began to show through the silhouettes of the trees above. Then, ahead, I saw the huge black bulk of the hills that Sean had talked about, blocking my path and forcing the canyon road north. The sound of the wind had changed. It was less muffled by the trees, but the howls and groans were deeper among the peaks of the mountains that now surrounded me.
As I turned slightly to follow the path, which bore now more north than west, out into the open among the wind and the snow, something made me look back. Perhaps it was instinct, perhaps habit and training. Whatever it was, it made me glance over my shoulder, and something caught my eye. I was not sure at first if it was the snow playing tricks or my imagination, but I stopped, hunkered down, and remained immobile, watching. Then I saw it again. It was unmistakable. It was the flash of a light. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the sounds I could hear around me. The wind dominated everything, so I focused on it and tried to detect what other sounds there were within it. Groans, whistles, cries, howls… the rustle of the canopy, the creak of branches… and there, just perceptible on the edge of hearing, the growl of diesel.
Eight
I ran. I didn’t sprint because I needed to preserve every bit of energy I could, but I knew I was making two miles an hour, and even up hill in the snow, if they were in trucks, they were making a damn sight more than that. So I set off at a steady jog, keeping close to the tree line where I could duck in if I needed to. I had a fleeting wish for my Heckler and Koch assault rifle, but pushed it from my mind and focused on what I did have; on what was real right there and then. I had a bow, twelve aluminum arrows, and a knife. They would have at the very least pistols and shotguns, and very probably hunting rifles. How many would there be? Impossible to say, but they had some idea of what I could do, so the chances were
there would be at least four of them, maybe eight or more.
I was in trouble. I was in big trouble, and the only advantages I had were my head start and my training. Both were weighing light in the balance right then, and I knew that my best hope was to get ahead of them, and get lost on the slopes beyond the dogleg I was in right then. And that raised one, vital question—how far would they take the trucks?
My bet was that they would leave them at the tree line. They would not want to risk getting them trapped in the deeper snow. They’d take them as far as the end of the woods and leave them there. Try to track me on foot, kill me, and then drive back. That meant I had to put as much distance between me and the tree cover as I could.
Pretty soon I’d left the trees behind and the snow was falling heavily all around me. Visibility was worse than poor. I could barely see fifteen yards ahead of me, and though the wind was not as strong as it was down on the plain, it was bad enough to whip up the flakes and lash them painfully in my face. It was impossible to run for any distance in those conditions, so I did what the Brits call a rifleman’s march: ten paces walking, ten paces running, ten paces walking, ten paces running…
After about ten minutes I stopped, crouched down, and looked back along my tracks. They were being covered fast by the snowfall and the wind. The weather was in my favor in that respect at least. Dimly, through the misty swirl of flakes, I could see lights—headlamps, four of them. They were making no effort to conceal themselves. They were either very confident or very stupid. Maybe they were both. Maybe they expected me to be curled up in a drift dying of hypothermia. I caught the sound of slamming doors on the gale. I thought I heard four, but I couldn’t be sure. They sounded far off, but I knew that in that wind, they would have to be pretty close to be heard at all. I considered my options again and decided, for now, to stick with my plan and try to lose them. If they started gaining on me, which was a distinct possibility, as they were fresh and I was already very tired, then I might rethink my options. But for now I would press on.