“Fred.”
It wasn’t his name. “What are you looking for up here, Fred?”
The fugitive didn’t answer. His shivering had lessened, but it wasn’t necessarily a good sign. He motioned with his gun, still clenched in his half-frozen hand, and Gus started back along the trail.
The fog wasn’t going to lift. The wind wasn’t going to let up.
The rain wasn’t going to stop.
“Let’s get to where you want to go,” he said wearily.
They came to the spot where his brother and sister-in-law had died. He’d been a firefighter. She’d been a biology teacher. These days, weather reports were more accurate, but even so, people died on Cold Ridge.
“There’s a rock formation just past where your folks died. It looks like a toaster.”
The fugitive’s words were slightly slurred, but he continued. “Do you know it?”
“I do.”
Gus stared into the shifting fog and clouds. He could walk right past the toaster-shaped rock formation, and the fugitive would probably never know it. Then what? Shoot Gus in the back? Drop dead from the cold? But as he continued along the trail, his legs heavier now, the pack grinding into the small of his back, Gus knew he wouldn’t mislead his captor. He’d just take him where he wanted to go.
The wind was steady, at least fifty miles per hour with higher gusts. He had hiked up all forty-eight peaks in the White Mountains over four thousand feet, and he’d experienced hurricane-force winds. But nothing had prepared him for the jumble of emotions he felt at being here-on the ground where his brother and the woman he’d loved had died.
His brother had taken him up this same trail before Gus had left for basic training.
“Be safe, Gus. I’ll be here when you come home.”
He pushed back the memory and nodded to a rock outcropping just ahead, barely visible through the shifting gray. “There. That’s it. It looks just like a toaster.”
The fugitive stepped up next to Gus and pulled the coat’s hood over his head. It would help break the wind but otherwise wouldn’t do much good. His hair was wet.
He wasn’t shivering at all anymore.
“Pal,” Gus said, “listen to me. You need to get warm. Let me help you. You don’t want to die up here, do you?”
He waved the gun, still clenched tight in his right hand. “Behind the rocks. Go.”
Gus sighed and made his way off the trail, the wind going through his layers, the rain soaking his layers. He pushed through scrubby balsams clinging to the thin soil and climbed over a tumble of boulders to the granite formation. It jutted ten feet out of the ground below a rounded knoll.
The fugitive panted, stumbling on the boulders as he followed Gus behind the outcropping. They were out of the wind now, at least.
“I knew I’d make it back here,” the fugitive said.
Gus could hear the wind whipping through the valley, up onto the open ridge. He shivered. He preferred to keep moving.
But he followed the fugitive’s gaze to a mound of dirt and rock between the base of the rock formation and the knoll.
A shallow grave.
“Who’s buried there?” Gus asked.
“Smuggler. He tried to cheat the wrong man.”
“Meaning you.”
The fugitive didn’t answer, his eyes gleaming with excitement as, with a burst of fresh energy, he got onto his knees. The rain let up now, too, and he set the Smith & Wesson next to his right knee and started moving baseball-size rocks with his red, frozen hands.
“You’ve stopped shivering, but it’s not because you’re warm,” Gus said. “Your core temperature has dropped to the point that your body is focused just on keeping your vital organs working.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“Do you? You’re slurring your words. As hypothermia worsens, you get more and more confused. Your mental state-”
“Shut up.” The fugitive glared up at Gus. “I’m digging for gold.”
Was he digging for gold, or was he hallucinating? Despite his slurred speech, he sounded perfectly lucid. He continued to grab rocks and toss them aside, keeping his gun close by as he worked.
Gus stood back. He became aware of another presence up on the knoll in the wind and gray. His teeth were chattering now. His hands were shaking. He wasn’t sure if he could trust his senses. Was he so far gone with hypothermia himself that he was imagining things?
“My coat’s not enough. You’re wet,” he said. “I’ve rescued a lot of people off the ridge who were in better shape than you are now.”
The fugitive looked up at him. His eyes were still, focused, even as he struggled to speak. “You’re not the marshal.”
Gus shrugged. “Never said I was.”
He kicked the fugitive’s pile of wet rocks, creating a distraction, and a man swooped down from the knoll.
Nate.
He leveled a gun at the fugitive.
“Hands in the air. Now.”
“Do it,” Gus told the fugitive. “Don’t make him use deadly force.”
The fugitive raised his hands, and Gus grabbed the Smith & Wesson.
He thought he saw a flicker of fear in the fugitive’s eyes and shook his head. “I’m not going to shoot you,” he said, handing the gun to his nephew. “The situation doesn’t call for deadly force. Not anymore.”
Two more men appeared behind the rock outcropping. Antonia’s husband, a U.S. senator and former rescue helicopter pilot, and Carine’s husband, an airforce para-rescueman. They, too, were armed.
Then came Antonia, a physician, and Carine, a nature photographer who knew the White Mountains at least as well as Gus did. Maybe better.
He hadn’t imagined them.
“We weren’t going back down the mountain without you,” Nate said, his voice catching. “I wasn’t losing you before my baby boy gets to know you.”
Gus sank against the wet rock wall. “I’m worn-out,” he said, “and I’m cold.”
Nate nodded to the fugitive. “What did he want?”
“Gold.”
“And a dead marshal. You didn’t tell him he had the wrong guy?”
“You weren’t the right guy, either.”
A search-and-rescue team arrived with stretchers and made Gus get on one, but he climbed off after a hundred yards and walked the rest of the way down off the ridge.
It was dark and cold, the sky clear, when Gus and his nephew and nieces and their spouses and little ones gathered at the Cold Ridge lakeside home of a federal judge. Her name was Bernadette Peacham, and Gus had known her since kindergarten. She hardly spoke as he helped her get a pile of blankets from the shed and spread them out on a tarp laid on the wet ground in front of her big outdoor stone fireplace. A fire was roaring. There were marshmallows and hot cocoa.
Beanie, as Gus had called Bernadette for decades, dried off an old Adirondack chair. “You could have died up there,” she said as she plopped down. “If Nate hadn’t spotted your trail…I don’t want to think about it.”
“All’s well that ends well.”
The fugitive’s name was Frank Leonard. Two years ago, Nate had recognized him at a hardware store in the village of Cold Ridge. His mug shot was on the USMS Web site, and Nate had a good memory for faces. Leonard was wanted for failing to appear in court on a federal drug charge, and running in to Nate was especially bad timing for him-he’d just killed a fellow smuggler up on the ridge. They’d met there to divide the gold bars they’d received as payment for smuggling drugs and arms over the Canadian border.
Picking the toaster-looking rock formation near the spot where Nate’s parents had died had been Leonard’s idea. On the way down the ridge, restrained in his stretcher, he’d told Gus that even then he didn’t like marshals. “They’d been after me for weeks. They never let up. I thought it was funny, picking that spot.”
Funny.
He and his partner in smuggling argued, and Leonard killed him and buried him as best he could, then hiked back down the ridge to clean up loose ends. The gold bars were heavy and awkward, and he wanted to get his ducks in a row before he went back on the ridge, fetched the gold and disappeared, a rich man.