“If who’s up there?” Joanna demanded.
Behind them, a door to the house slammed open, then closed. “Hey!” Amy Baxter shouted. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Come back.”
The sound of that distinctive voice seemed to galvanize Holly Patterson. Her eyes widened. She leaped forward like a startled hare. Joanna was momentarily left behind by Holly’s first sudden burst of speed.
Part of Joanna’s difficulty lay in her bare feet.
Holly Patterson’s house slippers, poor as they were, gave her somewhat better mobility and traction.
Joanna’s feet were cold and bleeding. The rough surface of every bit of gravel cut painfully into her soles. She whimpered with every step.
She considered stopping and giving up, but Holly Patterson was still hurrying forward, and Amy Baxter was coming across the backyard toward them at a dead run.
Joanna turned and limped after Holly. She caught her when they reached the tightly strung fence at the bottom of the dump. Holly stood there, tugging desperately on what seemed to be a bathrobe that had somehow become entangled in the tightly strung wire.
“Go on through,” Joanna urged. “Hurry. If you want the robe, I’ll bring it.”
With the familiarity of a country-raised child, Holly wiggled through the fence. Naturally, one barb caught on Joanna’s blazer and left a jagged rip down the center of the back, but that barely slowed Holly’s forward motion. And as Joanna wormed her way through the fence, she tore her own blouse in the process. As promised, she wrenched the robe loose from the fence and pulled it on over her shoulders, grateful for some covering to ward off the bone-chilling cold.
By the time Joanna reached the bottom of the dump, Holly was already scrambling up the steep incline. Conscious once more of her painful, bleeding feet, Joanna paused, but only for a moment before she, too, began the difficult ascent.
“Holly!” Amy Baxter’s voice commanded from behind them, from the other side of the fence.
“Come back!”
Joanna saw it happen. It was as though an invisible choke chain were being pulled taut around Holly’s neck. She slowed her desperate flight.
Slowed first, and then stopped.
“Come back down!”
Joanna had been scrabbling along behind Holly, picking her way as best she could over and around the huge boulders, trying not to dislodge anything, and trying not to think about what would happen if one of those huge stones came loose and rolled back down the steeply angled incline.
They were only a third of the way up the slope now. Joanna had seen no sign of a weapon on Amy Baxter’s person, but Holly’s fear was palpable absolutely real and overwhelmingly contagious. Joanna didn’t have to see a gun to understand they were both in terrible danger, that they had to get away.
“Come on, Holly,” Joanna urged, overtaking the no-longer-moving woman. “Don’t stop now.” But Holly was already making the first hesitant motions toward retracing her steps.
“Don’t you want to see what’s up here?” Joanna taunted, trying her best to counter the almost magnetic effect Amy Baxter’s voice seemed to have on Holly Patterson.
“She already kept you from doing this once,” Joanna continued. “You’re not going to let her take it away from you again, are you? Not when you’re this close.”
Holly looked at Joanna, as though trying to make sense of what she was saying, but now she stopped and didn’t move in either direction. Joanna dared to look back down, wondering why Amy’s shouting had suddenly stopped. On the far side of the fence, Amy Baxter and Rex Rogers seemed to be standing and arguing.
“Come on, Holly,” Joanna urged again, knowing the respite wouldn’t last long. “Why won’t she let you climb up here? What’s Amy Baxter afraid of?”
And then, miraculously, Holly was moving in the right direction again, climbing slowly uphill with Joanna scrambling along at her side. Off in the distance, she could hear the sound of a wailing siren, of some siren, but Joanna didn’t know the sounds well enough to differentiate between one emergency vehicle and another. She couldn’t tell whether what was coming was a police car of some kind or one of Bisbee’s fire trucks.
And even if it was a police vehicle, Joanna thought despairingly, it wouldn’t be coming for her. How could it? She had told Kristin where she was going, but she hadn’t expected this kind of difficulty.
“Holly!” Amy was shouting again. “Are you listening to me?”
Joanna looked down. Rex Rogers was no longer visible, but Amy was. She had crawled through the fence and even now was at the base of the dump and starting to climb.
“Holly,” she ordered. “I told you to stop! Come back! I want to talk to you.”
Holly slowed once more. “Don’t listen to her,” Joanna urged. “Shut her out! Sing something.”
Already, Holly’s eyes were starting to glaze over. The pull of Amy Baxter’s voice was so strong as to be almost irresistible. In desperation, Joanna Brady began to sing the only song she could remember at a moment’s notice. A hiking song, from her days in the Girl Scouts. She sang it at the top of her panting, air-starved lungs.
“Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, Ninety-nine bottles of beer. You take one down and pass it around, Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall.”
And to her amazement, Holly Patterson miraculously began to climb once more.
By then Joanna was slightly in the lead, and by then the top of the dump was only a few feet away. Joanna was first over the top, pulling herself up over a steep lip and then falling down the far side into what was evidently a rough roadway.
On the other side of the road was a raised ridge, a bern, that formed an inner boundary along the entire length of road as far as the eye could see.
Staying low and slipping her automatic out of the shoulder holster, Joanna belly-crawled back to the edge and looked down. Holly had stopped again, cowering in an eroded dip behind a precariously perched boulder only inches from the top.
Below them Amy Baxter was climbing steadily.
“Come on down, Holly,” Amy was grunting between breaths. “I won’t hurt you.”
“She’s lying,” Joanna yelled. “Don’t listen to her. Come on! Up here!”
But once more Holly seemed frozen, unable to move.
“Give me your hand!” Joanna ordered. “Now!”
When Holly failed to budge, Joanna reached down and grasped Holly’s wrist. With a surge of strength Joanna had no idea she possessed, she hauled Holly up and over the edge. She tumbled down the lip and landed with a breathless thump.
Joanna tumbled after her and lifted the fallen woman to her feet.
“Go,” Joanna urged, pointing toward the ridge and drawing the Colt. She wasn’t sure whether or not Amy was armed but if there was a possibility weapons would be involved, Joanna wanted Holly behind her, out of the line of fire. The ridge on the other side of the road seemed to offer the only possible cover. But Holly seemed incapable of in dependent action. She stared at Joanna uncomprehendingly and didn’t move.
“Come on, then,” Joanna said, grabbing Holly’s hand again and dragging her forward. As they started up and over the side of the bern, there was a clatter of dislodged rock from the side of the dump. At that critical instant, Joanna glanced back over her shoulder.
Rather than being just a bern, the ridge was actually the outside of a retaining wall for one of the series of rectangular copper leaching ponds that covered most of the surface of the dump. On the outside, the retaining wall was simply a rocky ridge, but the inside was covered with a slick layer of slimy, greaselike silt.
In desperation to reach safety and to protect the seemingly helpless woman who was now in her charge, Joanna had been moving as fast as possible. Now, as they topped the bern, there was nothing at all to break their forward momentum.
Staggering like a pair of inept skiers, they skidded down the slippery bank and into the water, where they landed, floundering and sputtering, in the chemically saturated water of a Phelps Dodge leaching pond.