“Do his hands, please,” he said to Bleak.
Bleak tied Andy’s hands to the yoke. Bleak’s knots did not require any further cinching.
“Okay,” Dax said. “Leah with me, Bleak ten paces in front. There shouldn’t be any shooting. Lowery gets what he wants, I get what I want.”
He glanced at Leah, curious if she’d reveal fear or desperation. She just popped open the door and climbed out on the float, then waited for him.
She was ready to see it through, he realized.
Bleak led them to shore. He pivoted right to left, searching for sentries, but he didn’t seem to find any. Dax hadn’t either. It was a private party.
Once he and Leah reached the shore, Dax switched the AR-15 to his right hand and put the Glock in his left, then pressed the Glock to her spine. She seemed indifferent. Her attention was only forward.
She wanted to see Lowery. He could feel it coming off her like heat.
There was a narrow footpath from the shore to the clearing. A tenth of a mile, maybe. Bleak kept pace, staying ten strides ahead. Leah made no move to break away from Dax. Everything as it should be.
They came out of the trees and into the clearing and there stood J. Corson Lowery.
He was taller than Dax had expected, well over six feet, with hair the color of fresh snow and skin like a cowboy’s saddle. He wore a black jacket over a white shirt with jeans and black cowboy boots, looking every bit the part of the wealthy rancher. He had made hundreds of millions of dollars in his life, maybe more than that, and he’d ordered the killings of dozens of men, maybe more than that. Yet there he stood, rich and unrumpled.
Just a job. It is just a job.
They walked across the clearing toward Lowery. Lowery made no move to close the distance himself. He was used to people coming to him. Dax felt Leah’s body tensing. Ten years since she’d seen the man. Ten years on the run, a new identity, a family left behind, and still he’d found her. Still he stood here in front of his helicopter, waiting.
You had to respect that reach. That power.
That relentlessness.
All for one bullet that she had not even fired.
Dax saw Lowery’s pilot inside the helicopter, and although the tinted windshield limited visibility, he didn’t need visibility to know the man was armed.
“Slow up,” Dax said when they were thirty paces from Lowery. Bleak slowed, then stopped altogether. Dax followed suit. They were close enough to hear one another now.
Lowery was wearing a gun in a holster on his hip. He didn’t reach for it, but when he looked at Bleak, he seemed confused.
“Where’s your gun?” he asked. The first words he’d spoken, and in them Dax could hear both the practiced polish and the faint wisp of Florida cracker that all the money in the world hadn’t been able to wash out of J. Corson Lowery’s mouth.
“It’s right here,” Dax said, and he lifted the AR above Leah’s shoulder and leveled it at Lowery.
Lowery’s hand drifted for the holster. Dax said, “No.”
The hand stopped moving. Drifted back.
“The fuck do you think you’re doing?” Lowery said. Low voice. Not scared.
“Finding the highest price for my services,” Dax said. “You wanted her. I brought her to you. Bleak might’ve helped, but I did the heavy lifting. I think even he would agree with that.”
Bleak didn’t speak.
Lowery said, “Who are you, really?”
“Dax Blackwell.” The full name left his lips with pride and an aftertaste of something darker.
“You killed one of my men,” Lowery said. “Why in the hell did you do that?”
“Everyone criticizes the debt collector for his methods,” Dax said. “I’ve never understood that.”
“Killed him,” Lowery said again, and his anger seemed impersonal, as if Dax were a mere frustration to be swatted away. “You stupid little bastard.”
“He just wants his money,” Bleak said, and Dax was astounded that he’d spoken, let alone said that. Immediately, he was distrustful and moved the muzzle of the AR to bear on Bleak instead of Lowery. As he shifted, he saw the pilot move inside the helicopter.
That was where the first trouble would come from. He was almost sure of it.
“Just wants his money,” Lowery echoed.
“We can even forgo the old bill,” Dax said. “Let’s not get bogged down in the past. You want her, and I brought her. Pay me.”
Lowery laughed. It was an oddly high, delighted sound. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course I will. Why would I not?” He laughed again, shook his head in disbelief, and then ran a hand back and forth over that coiffed white hair.
Dax was ready when the pilot moved. He swept Leah’s legs out from under her so that she fell beneath the line of fire and dropped the Glock from his left hand so he could shoot the AR with a two-handed grip as the pilot swung out of the helicopter door and pointed a scoped rifle at him using the helicopter as protection, nothing visible above the chopper but the rifle and his face.
Dax stitched a line of bullets through his face.
The scoped rifle, unfired, fell a half a second before the pilot did. Dax sidestepped and aimed at Lowery as the old man’s hand went for the gun once more. Dax shook his head and Lowery straightened, moving his hand away from the gun.
“That was a bad signal for your shooter,” Dax said. “I mean, come on. It’s pretty clear that a man with your head of hair doesn’t spend much time mussing it up.”
He stepped back, clearing room. They were three points of a triangle to him now, Bleak and Lowery on their feet, Leah on the ground. Dax swept the AR back and forth, hoping there was no one behind him. If he’d been wrong—and if Bleak had been wrong or if Bleak had lied—and there were more guards waiting, Dax would die soon.
No shots came. The wind blew soft and gentle in the pines, and no one moved. There was a trace of blood on the wind again. Second time today, or was it the third? So hard to remember.
“Pay me,” Dax told J. Corson Lowery.
Lowery turned from Dax to Bleak. His voice was full of disdain when he said, “How did you let this happen?”
Bleak did not respond.
“Sure,” Lowery said after a pause. “I’ll fucking pay you. Just bring her to me.” He looked at Leah Trenton as if no one else in the world mattered. If he’d given a thought to his dead helicopter pilot, it wasn’t evident. Leah was crouched in the grass where Dax had dropped her, on her hands and knees, looking up at Lowery. Dax watched her glance to her right, where the Glock now lay in the grass. He understood her idea, and he heard that internal voice whispering the family mantra, It’s just a job, it’s just a job, so he kept silent.
The mantra was right. Dax would have died hours ago if he’d admitted that there were no bullets in Andy West’s Glock and never had been. It was hard to hold people hostage with an unloaded gun, though, so you had to convince them to believe the lie.
Clearly, Leah had believed.
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Leah’s only question was whether Dax Blackwell would shoot her. If he fired at her as fast as he had the pilot, then Leah would die.
If he let her go, though…
She looked at the Glock in the grass. Looked at Lowery. He was fifteen feet away. She just needed to make the first shot count. If Dax killed her after the first shot, so be it. As long as she made that one count, she would die knowing her children were safe and the bad man was dead. That was enough.
“How much?” Lowery asked Dax.
“What were you going to give Pollard?”
“Freedom. He got it.”
“He squandered it,” Dax said.
Lowery shook his head as if he couldn’t understand why this intolerable interruption had come along. “Just bring her to me.”
“Leah’s worth a lot to you, I think. Maybe I’ll protect her, and we negotiate a higher price.”
“Her name is Nina.” Lowery took a few steps closer, and his eyes moved from Dax
to Leah. “I’ll kill your children now. You realize that, don’t you? Before, they didn’t matter to me. You’ve made them matter. So I’ll kill them too.”
She flexed on her toes, felt the ache of her exhausted legs. She’d already run through the woods today, ridden a river, shot a man. She should be done. Damn it, she should be done.
But she wouldn’t be as long as he still breathed.
Lowery spoke to Dax without looking away from Leah. “May I finish this? You’ll find that I’m in a more generous mood when the job is complete. Your father and uncle should have told you that. They’d have been rich men if they’d just honored their word.”
Leah started to glance at the Glock again but stopped herself. She knew where it was. She knew what needed to be done. Wait for the right moment. It would come when his attention was fully on Dax. She sensed, somehow, that Dax would command Lowery’s attention at least once more. She would have to move fast then.
“Now,” Lowery said, “may I draw the gun, and you can keep your rifle on me, and we can both trust that when this is done, money will change hands?”
Silence. Bleak stood, motionless, between Leah and Lowery. She couldn’t tell what he was looking at. Someplace beyond all of them.
“You may draw the gun,” Dax said, and Leah’s execution order was signed. “But whose is it?”
Lowery’s hand stopped an inch above the butt of his pistol. “What?”
“Is it Brad’s suicide gun?”
Leah almost took her eyes off Lowery and looked at Dax Blackwell herself. The question was that shocking.
“What did you say?” Lowery asked slowly. Still facing Leah.
“I thought it would be poetic,” Dax Blackwell said. “After all these years, if you finally put the bullet in her head with that gun…well, pardon me for the question. I was just curious.”
Lowery swallowed. “It is not his gun.” There was a tremor just beneath his right eye. His skin was very tight, as if over the years he’d simply contracted in on himself, hardening.
“Wise choice,” Dax said. “Sentiment is always a risk. Romantics are reckless by nature. A pragmatic man comes in with clear eyes and an empty heart. Brad was probably a pragmatic man. His solution to his own problems, while extreme, was efficient.”
Lowery’s face whitened with rage, as if Dax’s words had drained him of blood. “How dare—” he began, and then he turned to Dax, and Leah grabbed the Glock from the grass.
She grasped it cleanly on the first try, just as she needed to, and she spun back with the gun tracking right to left as her left hand came up to cup the right in a shooter’s grip. Lowery turned back to her and his shocked face fell into the center of her aim and she squeezed the trigger before he had so much as reached for the weapon on his own hip.
The flat, impotent click of a dry fire.
Lowery’s face, a mask of horror, warmed to a smile.
Leah fired again, and again.
Click, click.
He laughed then. Threw his head back and laughed as he reached for the gun on his hip and said, “Nina, Nina, Nina,” and she threw the Glock at him and charged as he cleared his own gun and leveled it at her face and fired. She heard the shot and felt a terrible agony at being so close and yet never even drawing blood. She’d wanted to draw blood.
She was still moving, though, the shot hadn’t dropped her, and she could see the shock on his face, could see the fear on his face, and then he was down and she was on top of him, her left hand on his throat as her right fist hammered his lips into his teeth.
There was the blood.
There it was.
She struck him again and again, and then suddenly she was lifted and hauled back, and she still felt no pain. It wasn’t until Bleak pulled her away that she realized the gunshot she’d heard hadn’t been Lowery’s.
Dax Blackwell had shot him in the thigh.
Lowery fumbled for his own gun but his fingers were wet with his own blood and he couldn’t draw it from the grass. Bleak held on to Leah, but she didn’t fight him, just watched, gasping, as Dax Blackwell approached Lowery with the AR-15 in hand. He looked older, somehow, the boyish face weathered with sorrow.
“I know I shouldn’t have done it,” he said, and she had no idea who he was speaking to.
He dropped into an exhausted squat beside Lowery, bracing himself on the rifle. He looked up at Leah and Bleak. Studied them as if hoping for an answer to an unasked question.
“He shouldn’t have criticized them,” he said. “That was the problem, I think. Up until then…I was steady up until then.”
Bleak released Leah and stepped back. Leah looked at him and then at Dax and tried to decide what to do.
Then Lowery lunged up and grabbed Dax’s rifle.
Dax Blackwell shook him off with ease, sighed, stood up, and stepped back. He was the only one holding a gun now. The empty Glock lay in the grass and Lowery’s sidearm lay in the grass, and Bleak and Leah stood and watched as Lowery bled and hissed in pain. He was trying to speak. Leah could barely make out the words.
“Paid you,” he was saying. “Would’ve paid you.”
“I know you would have,” Dax Blackwell said. “I made a poor choice.” He looked up at the trees and smiled. Then looked out to the lake. “There’s a river on the other side of that lake,” he said. “The river flows out to the sea. All the water on earth is finite, remember. One drop joins another. They evaporate and fall and join again. Enough time, and rain in Montana will find its way to the sea.”
He looked down at Lowery.
“We’re all burned-out stars in the end, nothing but dust,” he said. “I know this is true, and yet…” A cold smile spread across his face. “And yet still I enjoy the idea of your old, burned-out dust meeting theirs. I love the idea that you’ll find them waiting for you somewhere downriver.”
He stepped back, and Leah was sure that he would take the killing shot. Instead, he retrieved Lowery’s gun from the grass. He racked the slide, checked to ensure that there was a chambered round, then ejected the magazine. Looked at Leah. His unlined face was hard and his eyes distant.
“You get one,” he said. “Use it however you’d like. I’m tired.”
He tossed the pistol to her. She caught it, flipped it, lifted it…and watched him take a knee in the grass, leaning on the rifle, the muzzle pointed skyward.
She turned to Bleak. He stood with his arms folded. Waiting.
She took a breath and stepped across the bloody grass to look down at J. Corson Lowery. He parted his lips, and she waited for the offer—how much money did he think she would need? How many promises of protection?
“Let’s negotiate,” she said, and his eyes brightened at that, because on some level he actually could believe his good fortune. There was always one more chance for a man with money and power.
She fired the bullet into the center of his forehead.
Dropped the gun onto his chest.
Silence descended.
After a while, Dax Blackwell looked up at Bleak. “Can you fly a helicopter?”
Bleak shook his head.
“Damn,” Dax said. “Me neither. Looks easy but probably isn’t.” He sighed. “I wouldn’t trust that plane for long either. We’ve burned that one.”
Bleak nodded.
“So we figure it out,” Dax said. “Such is life.” He pushed upright and looked at Leah. “It would be very good,” he said, “if we had some lead time. Just a little. Useful for you, too, because you’re going to have to explain this dead man, and that will be easier if you have the two of us to blame. I don’t think my friend is the confessing type, and I know that I am not.”
“You’re not walking out of here,” she said. “It’s miles upon miles of…” She waved a hand at the densely packed woods, the pines crowding each other for light. “That.”
“We’ll figure it out,” he said. He shifted the rifle to his left hand and reached behind his back with his right. Once, this would have made h
er tense. Now, she simply waited.
His hand came back with a hundred-dollar bill held between two fingers.
“Give this to your daughter,” he said. “She wanted a refund. You might caution her about impulse purchases, though. She’s quite shrewd when she can control her emotions. I sympathize with that particular challenge.”
Leah took the hundred, staring at him, unsure of what to say or even think.
Dax turned to Bleak.
“You’ve worked with a partner before,” he said.
Bleak nodded one time.
“I’m sorry I killed him,” Dax said.
Bleak said nothing.
“If you’re as good as I think,” Dax said, “then you understand that my killing your partner in those circumstances is no reflection of my loyalty in other circumstances.”
Still nothing.
“I could use help,” Dax said. “I’ve wanted a collaborator. Sometimes you’re born to one. Sometimes it’s a longer journey to find one.”
Bleak said, “You’d do the talking, I take it.”
Dax smiled. “Feels that way, doesn’t it?” He pointed at Leah. “I know you came to kill her. I could let you do that, as a gesture of goodwill, but from a marketing perspective, it sends a troubling message if we both kill our bosses, I think.”
Bleak might’ve smiled right then.
“Here’s the bargain we’ll strike,” Dax said, turning to Leah. “We let you walk back to that plane, and you—”
“Give you time. Yes.”
“And you put him in the water,” Dax finished, pointing at Lowery.
Leah frowned and looked at the helicopter. Hiding Lowery’s corpse was a pointless task as long as the helicopter sat there.
“It’s not about that,” Dax Blackwell said, understanding her thinking. “I just want him in the water.”
“All right.”
“You said there’s a river, right? The lake flows into a river and then on out…” He swept his hand through the air.
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