Flight of the Scarlet Tanager

by Bevill, C. L.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked feebly. “Didn’t you see what I just did?” Her face drooped as she stared at the darkened patch of rug. With the door shut, there was only a line of yellow light trickling under the bottom of the passageway, but in the trail of lemon-colored illumination the blood was still visible.

  “Yeah, I did,” answered Fitch. He took a step toward her and firmly grasped her upper arm, giving her a little shake. “That guy was going to shoot me in the head. He wasn’t aiming at you, he was going to kill me, he smiled just before he started to pull the trigger. He saw me and saw that I wasn’t armed. But you protected me. And we don’t have frigging time for this conversation now. Someone else is in the house. Come on!”

  Letting him guide her for a moment, he led her through the bathroom where she’d previously spent a minute mopping up blood from her face before she changed into fresh clothing, and stopped on the other side of the room. There was a smaller door that was covered with mirrors, a compliment to the mirrored walls of the entire bathroom suite. She hadn’t paid it any attention, assuming it was simply a closet for towels and toiletries. The young man yanked it open and tugged her inside, directing her into a space with shelves on four sides, a closet bigger than some rooms she’d stayed in. Cream-colored towels were neatly folded, along with a rack of scented soaps, and the room smelt of jasmine and cinnamon.

  Teddy realized that control of circumstances had shifted violently and that the young man with the sun-lightened hair had the upper hand now. He could have reached back and taken the Glock out of her hand at any moment, so abject was her mood. He saw that she had saved his life, but he didn’t see that she had put him in jeopardy to begin with. This was all her fault. The body count was mounting, and the guy in front of her was potentially body number four. It was only a technicality that his heart was still pumping.

  When he closed the door behind her, they were enveloped in darkness. Teddy almost gasped. She hated the dark. She hated being in the dark. And she was pretty sure that the dark hated her. She said, “The police should be here, pretty quick, with your alarm system going off. They should listen to you. I made you pick me up. Right? You don’t have to worry about them thinking that you’re involved.”

  There was silence from the young man and then a click. He had a little flashlight and a bag in his hands. “Why should I worry about the police thinking I was involved?” he asked as he rooted through the bag for a moment.

  There wasn’t a good answer, and Teddy could have kicked herself. It was possible the young man could get himself out of the situation by telling the truth. She hadn’t shared anything with him, except wanting to find a boat. True, he knew who she was, but he didn’t really know who she was. But her heart sank. He had driven by the hospital at just the right time. Too opportune. They were going to think he was involved, and that he knew more than anyone should. She wouldn’t have bet on him living to see his next birthday with a plugged nickel. “When you get out of here, you need to leave the state,” she said. “You need to disappear for a while. That might be enough. You have some connected family members in Washington, right? You need to call them, pronto and tell them what’s happened to you. That might protect you.”

  Fitch hung the bag over his arm and swung the flashlight around. “Come on,” he said as he pushed against the wall opposite the door, placing his hands in between stacks of towels. It swung inward, on a pivot point that made it seem like just another wall, and Teddy saw that it opened up to the interior of another closet in the house. “My grandfather liked having a little secret passage,” he explained, pushing aside clothing on satin-covered hangers. “I think he used to run Coors up here, when it was illegal in Oregon, back in the seventies. His idea of being a bootlegger in his day. Or maybe he thought he had enemies. He thought it was nifty.”

  He pulled the pivoting wall shut behind them and led them out of the closet, turning the flashlight off. The door of the bedroom was half-closed, allowing dim light to filter inside, and they could hear someone talking into a radio in the hallway. Something about getting more officers out to the Lee place and quickly. Fitch looked at Teddy with a half-smile. “It’s a cop,” he said softly. “We can...”

  Teddy grabbed his arm. She murmured, “Don’t. That was a cop pointing a laser sight at the middle of your forehead. The one who smiled at you, just as he was about to fire his gun. He would have killed you. Just to get to me.”

  Fitch stood still, trying to assimilate the knowledge she had just handed to him. She just killed a cop? Killed a cop? She slaughtered a cop, not just one shot, but more than I could count in a split second. Rat-a-tat-tat. Finally, he gripped her arm again and put his finger up to his lips, indicating that she should be very quiet. They silently went across the room and he opened up the door to the balcony. Peering out the darkened windows he saw nothing but the night sky and a set of bronze chimes tinkling as the wind blew them. Carefully opening the door, he pulled Teddy after him, and then shut it. The closed French doors blocked out the noises of someone prowling the house for the intruders, waiting on other armed individuals to back him up.

  She could see that the balcony overlooked the side of the house opposite from the driveway and where the intruders had entered. It also overlooked sandy scrub and a cliff that descended violently into a void of blackness. From this angle she realized that the house sat on an outcropping of rock that pointed seaward, two sides of the house looked out to the ocean, the most optimal use of the spit of granite.

  The young man secured the bag across his back and started to climb over the wrought iron railing. His eyes were almost black in the night as he regarded her solemnly. “If what you’ve said is true, then we can get away, call my Dad, call his lawyer-bud, and then get this taken care of. They’ll make sure that you’re not harmed. So far, it doesn’t seem to me that you’ve done anything wrong, except maybe kidnap me, and well, hey, I think you were frightened out of your wits.”

  Teddy peered over the railing into an inky pool of nothing at all. She said, “You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.” She could see the dim shape of jagged rocks, knife-like shapes that exuded from the very earth into dim, menacing shapes. Climbing down there would be like descending into the abyss of hell itself. “Where are you going?”

  “Down the cliff face,” he answered calmly. “I’ve done it hundreds of times. It’s easy, and I know you can do it, too. They’re out front. Expecting us to be in or around the house. Not down the cliff face to the beach, up about a mile to the Halford place, and up their stairs. We can use their phone and get out of this.”

  “You want me to climb down a cliff face?” Teddy asked incredulously.

  “Sure,” said Fitch. “You’re already on the run from the cops, shot a man in the chest, and kidnapped me. What’s a little cliff climbing in addition to all of that?”

  He hung from the bottom of the wrought iron balcony by his hands, the muscles in his shoulders bunching with effort, and let himself drop. A scarce moment after that Teddy heard him grunt. “Come on,” his voice urged. “Those guys aren’t waiting for an engraved invitation.”

  “Ya’ll are crazy round here,” said Teddy, slipping back into a southern accent.

  “Look who’s talking, sweet cakes,” came his amused voice. “What are you waiting for? Chicken?”

  Teddy moved a leg across the railing and took a breath. She tucked the Glock into the waistband of the borrowed jeans. How did the sitch get so convoluted? Just because I saved a little boy from swimming with the fishes. What’s his name? Oh, yes, Danby Shelton. “That little creep owes me bigtime,” she muttered. “And I’m not chicken, dammit.”

  The other leg joined the first and she suddenly had the idea that this was going to be the easy part. Dropping some ten feet down to hard rock face would be the simple part. In some parts of the Oregon coast the cliff plummeted a hundred feet or more to the golden beaches below. She had climbed one path down to the beach every day last month. Sometimes t
wice. Sometimes to sleep in the dunes at the base of the cliffs. She began to let herself go down the side, and almost gasped as she looked back into the room and saw the door open. A dark shape insinuated itself in the rectangular passageway, and Teddy froze. She was directly in front of the French doors but she wasn’t sure if the man could see her outside. It was a dark night, with only a silvery sliver of a waning moon to illuminate much of anything.

  Something touched her foot. She repressed a startled exhalation, and shook her foot warningly at the young man below her. Her arms began to tremble with the weight and she could feel every bruise leveled on her in the past two days, her ribs roared with the pressure she was inflicting on them.

  “Just drop,” whispered Fitch. “I’ll cushion your fall. You don’t look that heavy.”

  “There’s a man in the bedroom,” she whispered back, out of the side of her mouth, not daring to move. She let herself slip down the filigree ironwork an inch, and kept her eyes on the figure. It moved toward the closet and threw open the doors. She flinched as the sound reached her and when the unknown man’s back was turned she let go.

  Fitch took the young woman’s weight with another concealed grunt. He grabbed her under her arms and pulled her to her feet. She struggled to regain her breath, having lost it from renewed fear and the throbbing pain of cracked ribs. “What did he do?” he asked faintly. “Did he see you?” He gazed upward toward the balcony, hoping not to hear the door open, a flashlight shown down on them, a voice commanding them to halt, or worse, gunshots without preamble. There was nothing. And the rapid beating of his heart began to slow.

  Teddy found some strength. “I don’t think he...” she paused for air, “...saw me.”

  The young man threw one of her arms over his shoulders and supported her as they carefully negotiated the rocks. It wasn’t level; wind, sea, and ancient movements of the earth’s plates had shaped the granite boulders. As they made their way to the edge of the cliff, where the wind howled as it crashed against the sloping rock face, they could hear sirens. It was an intermittent sound, coming between brief, hesitant breaks in the undulating wind. He said, “I was going to put a climbing rig on you. There’s pitons set into the face here. I’ve practiced before, but...”

  Swallowing hard, Teddy closed her eyes for a moment. She had been correct. The descent off the cliff face into absolute blackness would be worse. It was like the real-life representation of a nightmare. Her dreams come true, in the very worst possible manner. Then the young man finished, “But we really are whack now. Those guys are out front, and in a few they’re going to figure out we’re not in the house. De facto, we ain’t in the house. We outside the house. They outside the house. Maybe we’re on the beach surfing. Then the police go on a little search and shoot mission. They really don’t like it when one of their own gets killed.” He shook his head. “Really. They don’t. And worse, they don’t want to stop and ask, ‘Well, are you sure he deserved it?’ because that doesn’t go over with them.”

  Teddy opened her eyes and saw him staring at her. “Listen, take the Glock,” she suggested. “Make sure to leave my prints on it. Then you can go give it to them, but make sure you give yourself up to one of the local cops and not a Fed, because they’ll shoot you. Maybe not at first, but after you tell them which way I went, they’ll find a way to ensure that you have an accident, because they think you know too much.”

  Fitch hooted with laughter. “Is this a movie, or what? I know too much. I know you ran in front of my Jeep. I know you’ve got a cute butt. I know you saved a kid yesterday. I know you just shot a guy a half dozen times in the chest because he was about to shoot me in the middle of my forehead.” He tapped the position in between his eyes for emphasis. “And I don’t think he had a lot of cause to do it. Hell, he didn’t have any. But what he did have, was you right there, with a gun in your hand, and he chose me to shoot instead.” He stared over her shoulder at the house. The lights were starting to come on all over the structure. He could see brighter lights reflecting from the front of the home, lights from vehicles arriving at the Lee’s beach house, lights from law enforcement. It wouldn’t be long before it was a carnival there. His voice lowered, “He didn’t think you would shoot him. He didn’t think you would go that route.” He paused again. “We gotta go. Put your hands where I put my hands. The rock is slicker at night so be careful. It’s a long way down. And even though the police will have to go through a locked gate to go down the beach path a half mile down, they’ll make it there eventually.”

  The young man positioned himself at a large crack and started to shimmy into it. Teddy swallowed hard again and waited for him to move downward. He shifted his weight from side to side as he wriggled into the fractured rock and gazed intently at her. “Why are they so serious about you? You look like you’re barely out of school? Why you? What could you have possibly done to get this kind of attention?”

  “It isn’t exactly what I’ve done,” she said quietly. “Hurry up. I’m going to lose any kind of courage that I have and you’ll be shagging down the cliff by yourself.”

  “Follow me closely, Teddy,” he said. “We’ll be done in fifteen minutes.”

  “Promise,” she kidded.

  “I promise,” he stated quietly. His eyes, darkened by the night, caught hers, and she couldn’t help a little shiver. A shiver of fear for what she didn’t understand.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and she could help that, either.

  “For what?” he asked almost vaguely as his head dipped under where the rocks lay. “There’s a crevice here, I’ll guide your foot to it. Step down here, Teddy.”

  Teddy repeated his movements, stretching her legs to fit where his legs had been. She tried not to look down, hearing the rumble of waves as they encroached upon the sandy line of beach below them. The tennis shoes, large on her feet, slid on her limbs as she elongated herself to make the same footholds as he had. His large hands guided her feet to the right spots as they went down the cliff face. She trembled as she went, feeling that at any moment the Cimmerian blackness would come alive and swallow her whole, an inky animal with an unlimited appetite. It rolled out behind her, boundless and immeasurable, a great sea of night, a great sleeping monster.

  Her hand slipped from a moss-covered rock and she was frantic to replace it for a moment. As it curled around the rough surface she sighed unevenly and said, “If I had known that they would think that you were involved with me, that they would try to kill you, I wouldn’t have forced you to drive the Jeep away with me. Now you’re in more trouble than ever. The only thing that might help you is that no one has seen you help me, except me.”

  Fitch didn’t answer for a minute. He was putting his feet into places he remembered using as a youth, clambering up and down the cliff to spite his father, causing the older Lee to have conniption fits while he watched to see if his son would maintain his grasp or fall away to his death. Later, Fitch climbed for his own pleasure. Certain rock climbs were like solving intricate puzzles. One had to attain the climb in a premeditated fashion. If he’d explained this to his father, the general, the older man would have understood immediately. It was not dissimilar to a game of chess. One planned, one strategized, and one moved. Sometimes the wind or rain or even rock took the game to another level, but it was always a careful tactical maneuver. Man against rock.

  Then he thought about what Teddy said. This was another type of game. More deadly to be sure, and certainly breaking the agreement with his father, in fact, ripping it to little, itty-bitty pieces and torching the remains. But he thought his father would understand that sometimes there are things more important in life than what they’d agreed. The man in the Lee home, the one who’d entered without permission, without setting off the alarm system, who had a laser-sighted weapon that looked extremely deadly, had been pointing it at Fitch’s head. Without doubt, Fitch knew that he had intended to kill him. Despite the fact that he didn’t have a weapon himself. If Fitch had thought that
the black-haired man had been some kind of thug, it would have been more understandable. But Teddy said the man was a cop, worse, she’d implied he was a Fed, part of the same intelligence community to which his father belonged. What he did wasn’t just wrong, it was inexcusable, and Fitch needed to understand why this was happening. Why would anyone want to shoot the cute babe with the scarlet hair and a nose stud? Why would anyone want to shoot the studly hunkmuffin who got carjacked by the hottie?

  Teddy slipped again and Fitch caught her foot with his right hand. With a groan he hoisted her back up to where she belonged. “Keep frosty there, sweet cheeks. We’ve got about twenty feet to go.”

  Gasping raggedly, Teddy held herself to the rock face and garnered her strength once more. Only a few hours before she’d been lying in a hospital bed. Now she was running for her life, and what was really bad, was that she was running for someone else’s life. Someone whose name she didn’t even know. “So what’s your name?” she asked and could have winced because it sounded so lame.

  “Kidnap me, almost get me killed, fall on me from the side of the house and now she asks my name,” complained Fitch, good heartedly. “It’s Fitch. Fitch Lee.”

  “That’s your name? What kind of name is that?”

  “Hey, it’s a good English name, straight form merry England stock, what kind of name is Teddy?”

  Teddy shrugged on the rock face and immediately wished she hadn’t. “It’s just a name. I wish it was something else. Anything else.” She paused, wishing tremendously that she could change the subject without sounding patently obvious. “But Fitch. It sounds like the name of a fish.”

  “Some women appreciate it,” his response floated up to her.