Except for the gun. By the time Jay came down, that gun would matter. And if he didn’t come down to face the gun, he’d be perched up here when the train roared through. One way or another, he was coming down soon, and he’d rather take his chances with the pistol than the five hundred thousand volts. One was likely to kill him; the other was certain to.
It was then, watching Pate stand with the gun in his left hand and the radio in his right, demanding a response from Novak that did not come, that Jay allowed himself, for the first time, to look up at those killing lines overhead.
He was fifteen feet away from turning his cold steel cable into a live wire.
And Eli Pate, a hundred feet below, was standing on metal train tracks.
68
The GPS said that Janell was seven minutes out.
It seemed impossible that so much could go so wrong in seven minutes, but it was happening.
“This is Markus Novak, reporting in from Wardenclyffe.”
Hate for him rose through her like a fever, and her hands were so tight on the wheel that her wrists ached. She looked at the radio but did not reach for it. Eli was still in command, and she was only seven minutes away.
She’d join him, at least. No matter what else happened today, they would escape together. The way it had always been. Together, they would regroup and adjust. Together, they would set it all right.
69
The hot stick could be telescoped to ten feet. The flash zone, depending on conditions, could reach beyond that in the world of a half a million volts.
But it shouldn’t. Not today. The air was dry and the sun had baked it all afternoon. There was no rain or snow, no high humidity, none of the things that should extend that flash zone beyond ten feet. With the hot stick, Jay should be able to extend that cable high enough to make it live and kill Eli Pate in a literal flash.
What he had to figure out first was how to do it without killing himself too. The Faraday suit was not enough protection, not when he was standing on a steel pole. In an energized bucket or helicopter, he could do it, but not reaching out from the steel tower. Jay would turn into Tim’s corpse in a blink. Worse than Tim’s corpse, actually. With this voltage, he’d vaporize. There’d be nothing left of him but boots and smoke.
Just climb down. Take your chances with the gun.
But the memory of Sabrina in chains was back with him, and the image was wider now. It included the blinking lights Jay had watched from bed with his wife, that first warning that the madness of Eli Pate was coming his way; it included the phone in Pate’s hand as he sat in Jay’s kitchen, sipping his coffee and holding Jay’s world under his thumb.
I’m not a kind man, he had said.
No. He was not. And he’d held too much power over Jay for too long, and held it through the force of fear. What was left to fear now was no longer up to Pate. It was up to Jay.
Jay looked down, confirmed that Pate was still in the same position, on the tracks and between the cables, no more than a foot from the cable Jay currently had wrapped around the head of his hot stick, and then he took a few steps higher, edging toward the flash zone.
All it would take was contact. That was just how damn powerful the current up here was; the briefest touch between the world above and the world below would create an epic collision, sending a blast of current strong enough to power a city down that cable in the blink of an eye. Eli Pate had not been wrong about one thing: all that the electricity on these lines wanted to do was return to the earth.
To make it happen, Jay was going to have to let go of the tower completely. He’d need his left hand to free enough slack in the cable to throw the hot stick, and his right hand to toss it. He’d need to be strong with it too, because if he threw it short and the cable swung back into the tower…
Well, if that happened, at least he wouldn’t know it. Speed was the only blessing in a death on the high lines. You wouldn’t have time to recognize the mistake that killed you.
He held his hot stick in his right hand. Then, six months after he’d frozen seventy feet in the air and known that his climbing days were done, Jay Baldwin removed his left hand from the tower and stood hands-free one hundred and five feet above the ground.
You’re going to have to hurry, because if he sees you, he’ll understand. And you’re going to have to be strong. You’ll have to get the legs into it.
He’d have to, in short, make an upward lunge out and away from a tower that had already tried to buck him off like an angry horse and manage not to fall off it.
Just climb down.
No. No, that was not an option. Sabrina had seen to that. She had gotten away somehow, and that was all that had ever mattered. He thought of Novak’s voice on the radio and remembered the look in his eyes back when he could have removed all hope from Jay and chose not to. He’d given Jay time, and Sabrina had escaped on her own.
Eli Pate was not allowed to do the same.
Jay balanced the hot stick in his right hand like a javelin and pulled up slack cable with his left. He counted its length as he reeled it up-two feet, four, six, eight, ten. Ten would do it.
The train whistle rose loud and shrill from the east, and Jay glanced toward it and then down at Pate. Pate did just the same, looking first east, then up at Jay, as if remembering, finally, that he was still up there, the bird on a wire.
When he saw the way Jay was standing, he seemed to understand immediately. Eli must have realized that he’d committed the cardinal sin of high-voltage work: he’d allowed his mind to go elsewhere.
As Eli Pate tried to run off the tracks, he backed into one of his own cables, stumbled, and fell. Jay looked away and pivoted his body to the right, winding up for the toss. The hot stick’s awkward length nearly kept the momentum going, though, almost spun him right off the tower, but old instincts saved him, and he slid his foot as he turned, muscle memory protecting his balance up on the high steel. He reversed the turn then, whirling back to the left, and released the hot stick and its trailing cable. The cable rustled over his Faraday suit, and he thought, Dead, you are dead now, but then the cable pulled free, away from him and the tower as it followed the hot stick toward the power lines.
It never reached them. The throw was short by two feet.
That was still enough.
The electricity-filled air around the lines, crackling with corona discharge, smelled the first, faint chance to return to the earth, and leaped at it. A brilliant cobalt-blue arc flash ripped through the air, found the stainless-steel cable, and rode it home.
Jay heard the explosion below but never saw it. It was over that fast. The hot stick was falling then, out of the flash zone, already turned back into a dead tool carrying a dead line.
He wrapped both hands around the steel tower and looked down at the place where Eli Pate had last stood.
He couldn’t see anything but smoke.
70
When the last radio exchange was finished, Mark stood in the cold breeze and looked up through the dark trees to the place where the faintest traces of crimson light lingered at the summit. Then he turned back to Lynn.
“You know you’ve got to get her out of here,” he said. “That’s the first thing. Everything else is secondary. She’s innocent. You’ve got to get her to help.”
Lynn nodded but didn’t speak. She was staring at Mark with soft eyes. This was not the feral woman who’d tried to kill him in the gulch but the one whose face had hovered so close to his in the dark motel room in what seemed like another lifetime.
“Don’t go up there,” she said. “We’ll call the police. They’ll handle him.”