Doesn’t matter. You’re alive. Sabrina may not be for long. Get the hell up.
Baldwin, they’d said. She is secured.
Secured by this man Garland. Jay’s instinct said it was terrible, but the other woman, the unknown woman, was on the run between groups of armed men, and Pate had instructed his men to take out the others, the armed intruders. That meant that the woman who was not secured was in a lot more danger than the one who was.
Didn’t it?
He inched out on along the crossbar until he reached the upright. Then he got both hands around it and pulled cautiously to his feet. The tower didn’t shift, which shouldn’t have been a surprise. Jay’s weight was insignificant when dispersed amid all that steel. The loose brace had hopefully shifted as much as it could, or would, unless it had some powerful help.
As if in answer, a new sound joined the mix, far off but audible.
A train whistle.
There was the help. Hustling westward, unaware of the trap, and guaranteed to pull down the towers. Jay began to climb again, into the darkening sky. He was vaguely aware that on his next trip he would need a light. He was vaguely aware of the pain in his chest and arm. He was only vaguely aware of anything.
He’d just gotten high enough to swing the hot stick free, ready to crimp the second cable into place, when the radio came to life again, the same voice as before but sounding anything but composed now.
“We are taking heavy fire!”
Pate said, “Then return it,” cool and indifferent. Jay wondered if the men on the other end were Pate’s followers or if they were more like Jay, pulled in against their will.
“Garland, report, please,” Pate said.
The radio was silent. A few seconds passed. Pate said, “Garland?”
Again there was only silence from the radio, and, all around Jay, the humming chorus of five hundred thousand volts.
“Get to work, Jay!” Pate shouted, and for the first time his voice had lost its detached cool.
Jay looped the cable. He had the hot stick in hand, ready to crimp the cable, when his radio chirped.
“We have a runner. The second woman is out. Both women are out!”
A hundred feet in the air, Jay froze and stared down at Eli Pate, who held the radio to his lips but didn’t key the mike.
For once, something had silenced him.
66
Mark and Lynn were still in the gulch when Larry ran to join them. Mark’s tracks had disappeared as the sun descended, a fringe line of blackness that kept working higher up the mountain.
Larry gave no warning he was coming. Mark and Lynn heard the sound when he was almost on them. He made it across the steep pitch without a fall, better than Mark, and used a tree to aid his drop into the gulch, landing on his feet, rifle at waist-level, pointed at Lynn.
“That didn’t look like a real warm reunion you all had. How’s your throat?”
Mark said, “Mom’s up there. With Garland Webb.”
“Violet is up there?”
“Yes.”
Larry looked up the slope. He was quiet for a moment, then said, “We wait long, and we’ll be pinned down here.”
“How many left for the Winchester?” Mark said.
“Four.”
“Shit.”
“Yup.”
“Any more rounds in the truck?”
“No.”
“How many for the handgun?”
“Two handguns, two clips each.”
“Give one to her.”
Larry looked at Lynn and hesitated, but she extended her hand and made a gimme gesture, curling her fingers in toward her palm. He drew a Ruger semiautomatic from his pocket and gave it to her.
When she closed her hand around the gun, she looked at Mark. He turned his palms up. “Got enough trust yet? I’m the only one without a weapon. You want to kill me and figure out you were wrong later, there’s nothing stopping you.”
She knelt, picked up the.38, and passed it to him.
“Thank you,” he said. “Now tell me what I’m running into up there.”
“A high fence that may or may not be electrified at the moment. A cabin. I don’t know if they took her back there. I don’t even know if…if she’s alive. They got her as she was going over the fence. She shut it down long enough for me to get over, but they got her.”
“How many are there?”
“Four. Three men and your mother.”
Larry swore under his breath and spit into the snow, then scrambled to the high side of the gulch and peered up at the shrinking pool of sunlight where the telephone poles stood.
“You take her down to the truck. I’ll go see about your mother.”
I’ll go see about your mother. How many times had Mark heard that? In the past, it had meant that they were going to pull her out of some bar or flophouse or con’s bedroom. Now it meant that Larry intended to head up the gulch alone toward three armed men.
“Not happening, Uncle,” Mark said. He gestured to Lynn. “We’ve got to take her down.”
“You’re not taking her anywhere,” Lynn snapped. “Until I know what happened to Sabrina, I am not leaving.”
“That’s a stupid choice,” Mark said. “We need to leave and call for help.”
He was watching the ground shadows seep down the mountainside, deepening the darkness. Any chance of reaching the truck depended on moving now, while enough visibility remained to get down the gulch in relative quiet. They were outgunned above, and if their trek was pinpointed by clattering stumbles over rocks and snapped branches underfoot, they’d be shredded.
“She’ll die in that time,” Lynn said. “Once they know we’re gone, they’ll kill her.”
“I’ve got no interest in leaving my sister up there either,” Larry said. He turned back to them when he said it, so he was facing away from the woods when the shadowed slope gave birth to something bright and white. A man dressed in white camouflage like a 10th Mountain Division soldier spun around a tree not twenty feet from them and lifted his rifle.
Mark saw it all with strange clarity, a neat, clean line: Larry, the lip of the gulch, a downed tree, a shooter. The tableau was stamped into his memory instantly and forever.
The shot he fired, though, he would never remember.
He wasn’t aware of it until the man dropped, shooting as he fell, peppering a line of bullets into the sky, ripping apart pine boughs that fell with a peaceful whisper. Larry and Lynn both hit the ground, but Mark just stood there, the.38 still extended.
“Son of a bitch!” Larry scrambled up and stared at Mark. “You put him down?”
“Yes.”
“Lord, son, you must’ve fired faster than you saw him. Who taught you that?”
Mark looked at the gun as it if were unfamiliar. He had never been the best shot. Not the worst, but certainly not the best. Both of his uncles had been better. So had his wife.
“I guess it was Ronny,” he said.
Before his uncle could answer, they were interrupted by the crackle of a radio and a voice. It was coming from the dead man’s belt, but his body muffled the words.
Mark said, “Cover me, will you? I want to get a look at him.”
Larry snapped at him to stay down, but Mark climbed over the lip of the gulch. He glanced back once and saw Larry standing waist-deep in the gulch, braced against the earth, panning the gloaming forest with the scope.
“You see the other one?” Mark asked.
“No, but hurry up.”
Mark crawled to the dead man and saw a face he didn’t know. Not Garland Webb. That was a shame. Lord, was that a shame. If it had been Garland Webb, he could have gone on back down the gulch and out to the truck and driven out of here.
No, you couldn’t.