by Urban Waite
He followed, rounding a corner of the hillside, only to see Ray crouched on the slope between two pines with his gun drawn. Diving headfirst down the slope, Tom heard the bullet hit the earth where he’d been standing only a moment before.
He lay there listening. The heels of his hands scraped and bloodied from where he’d broken his fall. The feel of dirt all over him, and the painful sting from a cut on his head. No sound. Looking back up the slope, he kept his eyes on the forest above. When he thought himself safe, he looked down at his hands, each scraped pink with blood where the skin had come away. The blood beginning to collect and run down along the insides of his wrists, he pressed them to his pants, feeling the shriek of fresh nerves on his jeans.
No idea now where Ray was.
There was little to be seen out the cockpit of the helicopter. The spotlight moving below as they went, skipping past rocks and trees, until they came up on the snow-topped ridge and ran along it for a time before dipping back down toward the valley below. For twenty minutes they cut back and forth, with only a small hope they would find something.
The first five minutes of the flight, Kelly had leaned out looking down at the flatness of the desert below them, then, as they’d come to the hills and mountains farther on, she’d drawn herself up in the seat, picking what she could from the night. The sky to the east of them taking on the dull gray that came just before the dawn and the muted washed-out light that fell now along the slope over which they flew.
“Continue?” the pilot asked, turning to look back at Tollville.
Moving away from the rear window, Tollville told him to keep going, motioning with his hand for the pilot to make another pass. His voice, heard through the helmets they all wore, vibrating with the wash of the rotors. Like Kelly, he still wore the brown sheriff’s department vest, his loose at the shoulders to allow for movement as he scanned the earth below. In his hand he carried his service weapon. His legs stretched wide for balance as the helicopter turned and moved back into a search pattern.
They were running a short grid of the area, and they hadn’t seen anything yet but trees and rock. The sound of the blades fighting with the altitude as they climbed again, heading for the ridgeline.
Below him, Ray heard the helicopter rotor working up through the elevation. The sound of the blades still several miles off to the west.
Leaning into the hillside, he let his weight down and turned over on his back. With one hand on the .45 still, he unbuttoned his shirt to look at the wound. His stomach stained red with iodine where he’d cleaned the skin.
Minutes before he’d coughed up blood. None of it was a good sign. The bullet hole seemed too low on his body to have hit a lung, but his breath was definitely tougher to come by, and he tasted the alkaline flavor of his own blood now on his tongue.
Around him the pines were all but gone, and a mix of low grass and high desert rock was covered in places by a dusting of snow. Nothing ahead of him but the razed curve of the pass for a quarter mile or more, until at the end, the slope began its gradual decline toward the other side. In the distance to the north the thin ethereal light of the highway where it came through the mountains, and down below the larger swath of city light from Deming, another ten miles or so beyond.
Tom moved up out of the ravine just as the DEA helicopter went past. The white underbelly of the machine moving by along the ridge and the light splashing down everywhere.
Perhaps it had been a trick of the landscape, the sound waves bouncing from one ridge to the next, or maybe just the pulse of his own breathing and the scrape of his efforts up the loose rock, but he hadn’t heard the helicopter till then, thinking it was a mile or so more to the west.
He stood, watching it move away down the line of the pass, suddenly there, then gone again, following the open track of rock and grassland that separated the south slope of the mountain from the north. No sign of Ray.
Ray heard the helicopter break free over the top of the pass. Not there, then there in a sudden shimmer of light, just a quarter mile to the west of him. The shadow of his movements now falling before him on the rock as he went. His gait crooked as he ran over the open, wind-scraped ground toward the far protection at the other side of the pass.
He went on, holding his stomach with one hand, the .45 in the other. The rifle still strapped to his back and the blood from his wound dried coarse and brittle into the fabric of his shirt.
The helicopter moving toward him, with the spotlight beam now just a few hundred feet away. “Come on,” he said, urging himself forward. His teeth clenched and the air pushed up out of his mouth tasting metallic and sour.
He ran, scrambling over rocks and into hummocks of dirt and sedge. His face contorted with pain, the top of his stomach tight beneath his hand. The strain evident in the rigid gait of his movements and the warmth of the wound felt on his bare palm.
He ran with difficulty, the climb behind him and the strength gone from his legs. Snow everywhere now on the rocks and in the shallow indentations between. He slipped, one leg going out from under him while he reached a hand out to catch himself. He gasped with pain as he came down, the shock of his movements cutting through
him.
The light moved across him for a moment and then came back, wavering above him like a celestial body, floating there a hundred feet above. The sound of the machinery and the rush of wind suddenly all around him.
Looking ahead, there was still a chance of making the tree line a hundred yards away. He brought the rifle off his back, desperate with the idea of escape. The beat of the helicopter’s rotor splashing down everywhere along the bare rock. Pain echoing up out of his stomach, and the ever-present thirst in the back of his throat.
They were taking shots to the body of the helicopter. Kelly could hear them digging through the metal. Something sparked and the lights on several of the onboard displays blinked red, then faded, a warning signal sounding as the helicopter began to list.
“Move!” Tollville yelled, his voice more frantic now, telling the pilot to drop, to pull the helicopter down to the east and get beneath the ridgeline. Another bullet hit, breaking through the underside and ricocheting off the ceiling of the cabin.
Kelly turned to see if Tollville was hit but they were falling now, faster than Kelly thought possible, the pilot pulling the helicopter hard to the left and the nose dropping toward the protection beyond the ridge.
Tom began to run. Scrambling from one rock to the next over the gradual rise of the pass, then cresting the top, he saw Ray out in front of him running down the slope toward the line of squat trees farther on.
Tom had heard the shots, watching helplessly as the helicopter wavered there in the air for a second, then dipped hard to the left and fell away.
Running, he followed after Ray till his cousin was lost from sight in the low pines and stunted juniper that clung to the wind-worn ridgeline. With fifty yards still to go, he couldn’t hear the helicopter anymore and he went on, knowing that if he was going to catch up to Ray it would have to be now.
Breaking past the first couple trees, Tom slowed, listening to the air around him. Shadows thick within the trees. He stood in a deepening stand of pine. The sedge that had covered the pass appeared in sparse pathways between the trees, poking its grasslike stalks from the snow.
Ahead, on the ground, the heel of a boot print in the snow one place, then the toe of another five feet on. No telling where
Ray had gone and Tom following, trying to make sense of what little trail he could take from the snow before it, too, disappeared.
Tom went on, his gun held out in front of him as he took his steps carefully, pausing to sweep the undergrowth and watch where he put his feet. Ray’s footprints visible ahead of him for maybe thirty feet, disappearing into the gloom. The sun just beginning to rise, and the air filled everywhere with the stark contrasts of light and dark.
“Stop there, Tom.”
Tom stiffened. Ray’s voice close behind.
“Throw the gun out and then step away.”
Tom did as he was told, throwing the gun toward one of the small clumps of grass, where the metal took up the light from the dawning sky above. Tom watched Ray move out from behind him, limping from beneath the shadow of a juniper, his side held tight in one hand. A .45 in his other hand. When he reached Tom’s gun, he knelt and picked it up, examining it for a second in his bloodstained palm before slipping it into his waistband. “Come on,” he said. Waving Tom on with the .45. “I’m not going to be here when that helicopter comes back. And I’m not leaving you here to signal them.”
“How do you know it’ll come back?” Tom said.
“Listen.”
Tom looked back toward the ridge. He could just see to the first part of the pass through the trees, scraped to the soil in places by the winds that rushed across the mountain range. Then, listening, he heard the beat of the helicopter again, down low on the other side of the mountain, working up through the altitude, the sound intensifying even as he stood there. “How long?” Tom asked.
“A couple minutes at most,” Ray said, waving the gun again, gesturing for Tom to keep moving. “I winged them, though not good enough to take them down.”
“You could have killed them,” Tom said.
“I could have, but I didn’t. Now, let’s keep moving.”
“You nearly killed Pierce,” Tom said. “You didn’t need to do that.”
“Who?”
“The young deputy outside the bar.”
“He’ll live,” Ray said. “I did what I had to.” He turned his head over his shoulder as the sound of the rotor intensified behind. The helicopter rising on the other side of the ridge, the first glimmer of light from the spot reaching up into the sky. “I can shoot you in the leg right here or you can come with me,” Ray said. “I don’t have any better options for you at the moment.”
Tom watched Ray where he stood. No idea what to do and any hope he had of bringing Ray in now gone. He didn’t want to go on with Ray, but he didn’t want to get shot either. Tom was sorry about the whole damn business and he stood watching Ray, trying to figure if he would have done anything differently, and knowing without a doubt that he would be right here on this ridge, all the same.
The sound of the helicopter again and Ray motioning for Tom to follow.
The pilot thumbed off the warning lights. There was a smell of burned wires and blown fuses, but they were still in the air. Dropped almost a thousand feet and working their way back up the mountain, with Tollville urging the pilot on. Telling him to climb and get them back up there.
Composing herself, Kelly looked behind her to find Tollville braced in his seat, one hand held out against the wall for support and the other wrapped into the webbing overhead, the gun he’d been holding loose on the floor, jittering back and forth across the metal as the cabin of the helicopter shook.
A slight ticking now heard from the tail rotor, the pilot pulling at the stick, trying for control. Every tick a new adjustment for the pilot to make as Kelly felt the helicopter shift ever so slightly to the left, then back to the right, climbing still but not completely under their control.
The ravine led north, closing in around them on both sides. Nowhere to go but down, Tom leading the way with Ray following behind, still holding the .45 on Tom.
“Would you really have shot me?” Tom asked, walking. “Up there on the ridge?” He paused to look at Ray where his cousin had stopped, holding his side as he rested against one of the rock walls.
Ray took his hand back from where he’d kept it against his side, the blood grown in a wet circle against the material. “Who says I’m not still thinking about it?” he said, pushing himself off the wall and motioning Tom on with the muzzle of the gun.
Tom kept walking. Overhead, the sun was up in the sky and the top of the walls showed the orange slant of light. Every echo of their movements caught between those two walls as they moved down toward the plain. “Why keep me alive if you think I betrayed you?” Tom said.
“Let’s just say we’re even now.”
“I didn’t tell them anything about you. I wanted to but I never got to.”
Ray laughed. “I’d have loved to have heard that conversation.”
They walked on for a while. Behind, Tom heard the beat of the helicopter as it ran along the ridge, once even skimming across the narrow opening of the ravine above. There and then gone in less than a second.
“So you’re just going to run now?” Tom asked. “Just like you did before. Leave Billy again?”
“You know that’s not how it is,” Ray said. “I wanted to come back. I’ve always wanted to. But I see it’s just not for me.”
“I don’t know,” Tom said. “I don’t know anything about you anymore.”
“I’ve tried to be the same as I was ten years ago, before Marianne died. But it’s never worked,” Ray said. “Every day I try to hold on to my past it just seems to fall farther away.”
Tom went on, he could see the city before them. A sliver showed through the ravine opening ahead, the blue-yellow lights of a city at dawn.
“I’ve been getting played this whole time,” Ray said. “I’ve been getting played for over ten years and never knew it. After everything I did back there, it turns out it wasn’t the cartel I needed to be worried about at all.”
Here,” Tollville said. “Put it down here.” His voice heard loud through Kelly’s helmet. The helicopter wavering over the open, rock-strewn pass and the pilot fighting to bring the skids even. “You ready?” Tollville asked. His hand held out on Kelly’s shoulder as he leaned forward, checking the pilot’s progress.
Kelly felt the skids hit ground. The pilot cut the engine, going down through the switches, as the blades wound to a stop above. Tollville opened the side door and got out onto the ground, urging Kelly to follow.
“Can you get your deputy on that radio?” Tollville asked once they were away from the rotor wash.
Kelly took the radio from her belt and as soon as Hastings’s voice came through Tollville was telling her what to say. Relaying their location and asking Hastings to talk with the state police. “You ready?” Tollville asked as soon as she’d put the radio back on her hip.
“You making this up as you go along?” she said.
What will it take?” Tom asked. He was watching Ray where they’d stopped to sit for a moment. Ray’s breath ragged in his chest, his back to one side of the wall, while Tom sat opposite. Ray had laid everything out now—getting the job from Memo, Sanchez, Gil Suarez, Burnham—all of it, going all the way back to the death of his wife and leaving Billy with Gus.
“To stop all this?” Ray said. “I don’t know, I thought I’d finished all this years ago, but I can see it was never done.
“You’re going after your boss, then? You think it was him this whole time, setting you up against the cartel?”
“I don’t know,” Ray said. “I don’t know anything anymore. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life. Things that I can’t take back, but at one time thought were for a good reason. I don’t think that anymore. I don’t know if I ever will again.”
“Whatever you do, Ray, none of it will bring back Marianne or the life you had.”
“A lot of people have been hurt by me,” Ray said. “There’s a lot I need to make up for, even if it is in my own way.” Ray coughed and looked down at his hand, where there was a speckling of blood on his palm. He coughed again and spit into the dirt at his feet. “Come on,” he said, looking to Tom and waving him on with the gun. Another thousand feet before they would come out onto the plain below.
Tom just sat there, unsure now where he was in all this. Why he’d come. Had he ever really intended to take Ray back with him, give him over to Kelly like any other criminal on the run?
Deputy Pierce would be okay, Tom had known it all along. Chasing after Ray had never really been about Pierce, never about anyone but himself and the person he’d once been. No idea now where he belonged in all this. He’d wanted back in with the department, meeting Kelly that evening outside the hospital, he’d wanted a small piece of a life he could no longer have. Claire calling him every ten minutes because of a past he no longer wanted any part of. It was his fault and he knew it. There was no avoiding that now, though he’d tried.
Where had it led him? Just hours before he’d felt just as sure about wanting Dario dead as Ray was about going through with it. Now, Tom didn’t know where he stood. Dario lying there on his office floor, white in the face, with blood leaking from the wound in his neck at an alarming pace. Tom hadn’t wanted that. Had he?
Shouldn’t Tom want to see Memo get the same punishment he’d been so certain Dario deserved? Pierce had been shot because of him, because Tom had looked the other way.