More Bitter Than Death

by Dana Cameron

  I ducked behind a tree, my heart racing from more than the exercise. It started to make sense to me: Here was someone that no one had ever seen before, who seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with the field, by his own admission, and who was asking for names of everyone around me. He’d been at the periphery of nearly every event the police were present for, and they’d spent some time talking to him. What was he really up to at the conference, and what was he doing now?

  I could find that out, if I kept myself quiet and kept following. I was sweating in spite of the cold.

  So far, he seemed to be on exactly the same mission that I was, following the access road down to the shore of the lake. Was it possible that he was going down to make sure he hadn’t lost anything at the crime scene? Maybe he was going to recover something that he’d taken from the body?

  He began to slow down, and as I did, I realized why I found his motions familiar, the way I did at the Thursday-night opening reception: He moved like my martial arts instructor, Nolan. Quickly, with a graceful economy of movement, on the balls of his feet. This did not fit with the image I’d come to associate with him—middle-aged, overeager, underfed. Bad breath. I moved off the road now and then, when the secondary growth was thin enough to move through easily but still capable of providing some cover for me. Widmark stopped; I stopped.

  He pulled out a gun.

  I had nothing.

  It took me a moment longer than I wanted to force myself to look out from behind the tree that hid me. If he’d seen me, I reasoned, he surely wouldn’t be continuing on as he had. He wouldn’t have shown the weapon to me, giving me the warning that he was aware of me. There was something else going on here.

  My heart was now beating so fast that I could barely draw breath. I watched, counting out a full fifteen seconds before I followed him again. I only moved when I could find the next glacial erratic to dodge behind, or the next tree to shield me, should Widmark suddenly turn around and start emptying out the pistol at me. He got only a little farther ahead of me, mostly because he was being as careful as I was, and there was a clearing to the side of the road that left a virtually open path between us. Well, open save for the trees—the pricker bushes were farther off the road to the left than they had been before.

  His caution didn’t really fit with my present hypothesis. Something much bigger was going on, and perhaps I needed to get the hell out of here.

  It was already too late. Something ahead of us both drew Widmark’s attention. He extended a pistol, flashed a badge, and shouted, “FBI. Throw down your weapon!”

  An odd muffled bang, followed by a noise like a baseball bat hitting a bag of laundry: whump. The next noise was a scream. It was Widmark. I watched as he looked about and pointed his pistol roughly in the direction of the lake, away from me and to the right. Before he could fire, the dull bang and the whumping noise came again, and he did a clumsy pirouette, slammed himself against the tree and fell down.

  Widmark pulled himself over onto his side, and I saw him painstakingly raise his hand again. He was still alive.

  I had to help. I began to run, hunched down and stooping toward him, always careful to keep something between me and whoever was out there willing to shoot at an FBI agent. I still didn’t know what was going on, so I hid out behind a boulder and pulled out my cell phone.

  The battery was charged and the signal was at maximum. I found myself fumbling for the buttons and tried to focus on the numbers: My vision was playing tricks on me, closing in on the screen. I blinked, just once and quickly, afraid almost that I would fall asleep in a state of denial, to clear my head. I dialed nine-one-one and got the operator almost immediately.

  “Emergency response.”

  “I’m by the General Bartlett Hotel, in Green Bank, New Hampshire,” I said, the words stumbling over each other because I was so desperate to get all the information out in a hurry. “There’s an access road behind the place, there’s been shots fired, someone is hurt, I think he’s probably bleeding—I can’t see who is out—”

  “Okay, ma’am? You stay down, is there somewhere you can be safe?”

  “Uh, I’m in the woods,” I said, trying to figure out what constituted safe at the moment. “I’m behind a big boulder. It’s pretty big.” Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.

  “Okay, you stay there, try and keep hidden, okay? If you think it’s safe, get out of there. We’re sending someone right away, hang in there.”

  “An ambulance too,” I said.

  “How many people are with you?”

  “Me, and this other guy, Widmark, I think he’s with the FBI, he said so, and who…whoever is shooting.”

  “Do you have any idea of who it is?”

  “No, I don’t know, I can’t see from where I am…”

  The voice on the other end of the line continued calmly. “Don’t move, okay? You just stay put.”

  At this point Widmark looked back and saw me. His eyes widened and he gestured vehemently for me to move away.

  I shook my head. “He’s going to get killed if I don’t pull him away from there,” I said to myself.

  “Ma’am, don’t—”

  I put the phone, still connected, down on the rock.

  By this time, Widmark was hissing at me like all the steam was escaping from him. “Get the hell out of here!”

  “I called for help,” I said from behind a rock. “I’m going to,” I continued as I hurried along, low to the ground. “…to get you out of here,” I said from behind a stand of trees five feet behind him.

  “I don’t need help, I’m not badly hurt—sssh!” He fired twice—the noise almost deafening, so close—then there was silence.

  I waited for a handful of heartbeats. “I saw you got hit, maybe three times.”

  “I’m wearing a vest, I—what are you doing!”

  I grabbed him by the collar of his jacket, which threatened to rip off, and under one armpit—the one without the gun—and pulled him back a few inches. “I’m getting you to cover,” I said, through gritted teeth. My nails ached as I readjusted my grip and pulled again, this time bunching up the fabric in my hand. He weighed a ton, and whatever it was he was wearing under his coat was probably adding some more weight to him. The next try got us another eighteen inches, but he made a noise that people shouldn’t make, and my heart almost left me. Two more tries, with Widmark pushing back with his good leg, and I had him behind the comparative cover of the trees. I sat down heavily, sweating as the snow melted under my butt and into my jeans.

  “Okay, now get the hell out of here,” he gasped. He slapped a fresh clip into his pistol.

  “No, I’m going to take you with me. I’ll get you out of here, you said you’re not hurt badly—”

  “I’ll be okay if you’ve called for help. My leg isn’t going to get me anywhere, and you can’t stay here.”

  I shook my head. “I can, I’ll help keep—”

  “I’ll shoot you and say you were resisting arrest,” he said. “Get the hell out of here.”

  I didn’t think he was really going to shoot me, but in this case, I guess he outranked me, and since he seemed pretty adamant about it, I nodded. There was nothing I could do, really, that wouldn’t get in the way, or cause more of a distraction for him. Or maybe get myself hurt or killed as well.

  He saw me waver. “Get back up to the hotel. Let them know what’s going on—”

  “Don’t you have a phone?” I said.

  “It’s what stopped the first bullet,” he said calmly, “and you said you called already anyway. Don’t go by the road, you’re too obvious a target. If you cut diagonally up here,” he gestured with a hand to our left, “you should hit the street leading to the hotel pretty quick. If nothing else, there’s cover. Now get the hell out, while our friends over there are still trying to figure out what’s going on.”

  I nodded, thought about protesting, thought about asking what was going on, then nodded again. He was right, and as much as I didn’t li
ke leaving, the idea of staying scared me even more.

  I paused, picking out the route before I started. There was a kind of pathway that led the way he indicated. I must have hesitated too long, because he slapped at my shoulder. “Get going!”

  I looked at him a last time, realized there wasn’t really anything else I could do, and began to take a deep breath. Another bang was followed by the sound of a bullet splitting wood, and I shot up like a startled animal, running as hard as I could. It was more difficult than I imagined; there were trees, snow-concealed roots, dips in the ground, and flattened bushes. I stumbled a few steps, moved forward until I got my balance back, then kept going on as fast as I could. As much noise as I knew I was making, I couldn’t hear anything but my own breath.

  My pace was excruciatingly slow, and I had the nightmare sensation of struggling as hard as I could with little return for my effort. The overgrowth caught at me, tearing my clothes as I staggered past, and suddenly I felt the raw cold as my cheek was slashed by a trailing thorny branch. I kept on, stumbling over a rock, and I rolled my weight over my right ankle the wrong way. Thank God for my boots: If I’d been wearing shoes, I might have broken my ankle. Hell, if I’d been wearing shoes, they have been left behind as I struggled through the snow and roots. A few steps more and I measured my length in the snow. Frigid air rushed over broken skin—I realized I’d scratched my chin raw on the icy crust that had formed over the snow. I hopped up, stumbling as I put too much weight on my ankle, and pelted on as fast as I could, my lungs burning even as I felt my face and fingers going numb with the cold. The pain receded, but I knew I’d pay for it later. My breath left my face damp as I struggled to breathe and run. My only goal was to keep on in the direction that I thought would take me to the main road to the hotel, knowing that if I faltered, it was more than a long trudge back through the woods that I would have waiting for me.

  The grade rose gradually more steeply, and I realized that I was coming to the road. My foot slipped on the sodden leaves under the snow and I came down hard on my hands, jarring my whole skeleton nearly out of my skin. My teeth clacked together, and a sharp pain and the taste of warm copper followed; my tongue began to throb, and a small sob escaped me as I struggled up the bank. I grabbed at a branch and it snapped under my weight; I slid and made another grab, successful this time, and hauled myself up another few feet. I dug in again, and this time had enough momentum to see the asphalt beyond the snow as I staggered out of the woods.

  The snowbank was compacted by the plows and had the same icy glaze as farther back in the woods, but there were coarse handholds that held my weight as I dragged myself up. I could not hear a pursuer, but I didn’t care: I would keep moving until I was either completely safe or I gave out entirely. I rolled down the other side of the snowbank and felt the grit of ice and sand as I slid onto the verge.

  I stood up and looked around wildly, trying to orient myself, and staggered into the middle of the street. A blare of a horn made me jump, and as I turned, a big red pickup truck swerved around me, the horn still sounding and the driver an angry blur of reflexive driving and vehement gestures all at once.

  I spun around again, not sure which way I should go to avoid the danger that was now already past, when I saw that the truck had stopped a few meters ahead of me. Bracing myself against the driver’s anger, I realized that not only was he not extracting himself from the cab, but also that I recognized the hat that was visible through the rear windshield. A colorful Andean knitted hat with a jaunty peak and earflaps with strings dangling was just about visible past the driver’s headrest, and I realized that it was Meg Garrity who was driving. She was shouting at me, though I couldn’t make out what she was saying for the blood pounding in my ears. All I know was that the familiar TRK GRRL license plate meant my salvation was at hand, and I ran for it.

  Meg opened her door and almost got out, but I screamed, “No, don’t! Just get us out of here!” I flung myself at the back of the truck, my feet now feeling leaden and my muscles resisting every demand that I made on them.

  Sliding on the ice where there was no salt, and rolling forward on the coarse grains where they were, I threw myself up and over the drop door of the truck, getting a facefull of plastic woven sacks full of sand. My feet still dangling outside the bed, I slapped at the rear panel, and the truck lurched away.

  “Go! Go!” My grip was less sure than I imagined, and I slid back, almost falling off the truck altogether, my elbows slamming into the drop door and saving me, even as one foot dropped off the bumper and bounced the toe of my boot along the pavement as Meg sped away. The cold metallic tang of the truck bed, the industrial feel of the sand bags, and the exhaust of the truck were the most reassuring smells I could have imagined at this point.

  Meg swerved to miss potholes, but then hit a couple of doozies that knocked the wind from me. Praying that my upper body strength was not as depleted as I feared, I hauled myself up and finally over the back of the truck, coming to rest on the lumpy sacks. I rolled over, watched the gloomy sky fly past overhead, and tried to catch my breath, my chest heaving and my body soaked in sweat that I now could feel running in rivulets down every part of me. The cold seemed to catch up with me, now, and I was shaking.

  I heard something that sounded like a human voice, and realized that Meg had slid the rear window back and was shouting at me. I shinnied down the bed as quickly as I could without actually getting up, and caught her last words:

  “—going on? What should I do?”

  “Drive anywhere, fast,” I shouted. “Anywhere there’s people. Fast!”

  I didn’t hear her response, but saw her nod and heard the window slide shut. I let my head sink down onto my uncomfortable nest once again, feeling the cold follow the warmth of the sweat congealing on my body. I was glad to think that the aches I knew were awaiting me were going to come, that I was going to live to clean out the cuts and to ice the strains and curse my bitten tongue. There are some times when pain is as welcome as a hug and a cup of tea.

  Chapter 14

  “WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?” MEG SAID AFTER she pulled over in the parking lot of the hotel. “What are you doing out here, with no jacket! And”—her eyes widened—“you’re bleeding!”

  “It’s not bad,” I said automatically, though I was now trembling violently. She took off her coat immediately and put it around my shoulders. “You got a phone?” I said through chattering teeth. “I left mine down the road.”

  “Yep.” She tossed it to me, and I dialed information for the hotel. I was lucky, and I got the manager right away. I told him to get the cops who were here down the road, there was a shoot-out, there was an FBI officer down.

  Meg kept the rest of her questions to herself until I was done, and then handed me a water bottle from the cab of the truck. Even as I had finished the call, the aches and chills I was feeling were making themselves known. Then I was swarmed by uniformed officers. Okay, there were only two of them, but they were big enough, or seemed so to me, at any rate. I was still seeing with tunnel vision. I heard more sirens in the distance and hoped that Widmark was still alive.

  I was still sweating and shaking more than a half hour later, sitting in the driver’s seat of the truck with the heat on high, as I repeated for what seemed like the millionth time the details of what I saw to Church. Church, with his red cheeks and turned-up nose, looked like he’d just come in from sledding. The smudges under his eyes told another story.

  The racket from the radios eventually confirmed that the massive team that had descended upon the service road had found Widmark alive, and had gotten him into an ambulance and off to a hospital. So far, however, it seemed that they’d found nothing but footprints in the snow down the road, and empty cartridge casings. Whoever had been down there had found a way out and away.

  There was a last batch of indecipherable crackling and jargon, and one of the officers looked at me. “The only look that Widmark got of the shooters—there were two of th
em—was when they rushed across the road, chasing after the crazy broad who dragged him to safety and then took off screaming through the woods.”

  I was not screaming, I thought. I was far too busy breathing. And I guess that was about as much of a thank-you as I would get. A second later, I felt sick. I never dreamed they were behind me. Were coming after me. Had seen me. Who the hell were they? “I was lucky that Meg went by when she did.”

  “Yes, you were. But the team followed their footprints off to the road. They had a car pointing away from the hotel, and they made themselves scarce pretty quick.” Then Church did a double take: Maybe I looked as ill as I felt. “Thing was, they veered off a ways from where you were,” he admitted. “They moved a lot farther south of where you were, so it seems they were more interested in getting to their car than they were in finding you.”

  I nodded; it was about all I was able to do. I wasn’t actually freezing anymore, but every part of me was stiffening up and throbbing. Even places where I wasn’t scratched felt scraped raw from the cold.

  We went over what I’d seen, or rather, what I hadn’t seen, up until the point that I’d taken off, and I realized that I was only paying about half attention to my answers. Maybe it was stress and denial, maybe it was cussed curiosity, but I found myself thinking more about the questions I was being asked as a way of determining what the police knew. There were no cars missing from the lot that had been registered by guests; nearly everyone save Meg and me was at the banquet or accounted for in their rooms or at the bar. It seemed the police believed that whoever shot Widmark was an outsider, not a part of the archaeology conference.

  “But what is he doing here in the first place?” I said. “I mean, what was he looking for? He might not have been shot by an archaeologist, but apparently we’re what brought him here in the first place. And what does this have to do with Garrison?”

  “It looks like Garrison—” one guy said.