by D. J. Butler
“Wait here!” she called over her shoulder. She left the door open, and the kitchen door within, and moved quickly back into the house. So quickly she was almost running, and the kimono bounced and flapped around enough for me to realize she wasn’t wearing anything else underneath it. “Nick!”
Done, I texted.
Who did you talk to?
Mrs. Wilding. She went back in the house. I poked my head in through the door and looked, but didn’t see any sign of her coming back.
There was a brief pause. Start walking back, my unknown enemy finally messaged me. Not too fast, and I recommend you keep an eye over your shoulder.
I did as he suggested. I walked at a calm pace, and I looked back constantly, and that was why, when I was about thirty yards from the house I saw the Greek-looking guy come hopping out. He wore jeans and a blue Jack White t-shirt but had bare feet, and he held a long shotgun.
I ran.
“Hey!” he shouted.
I ducked my head and sprinted for the trees.
I left the path. It wasn’t what I’d been told to do by Evil’s captor, but I wanted to get something between the shotgun and my shoulder blades sooner rather than later. Also, I figured his bare feet might be an advantage over my hiking boots on a smooth dirt path; if I could get into the pine trees, with little sticks and pebbles and needles all over, I might be able to flip that calculus around the other way.
Boom!
The shot missed, probably on purpose, but it bit a chunk out of a bluish spruce tree just ahead of me.
“Stop!” the Greek guy yelled again, but I was in no mood. It was one thing to cooperate when a bad guy had Evil hostage, but something else entirely to chicken out just because some loser had a gun.
I burst into the trees kicking up needles like water from a puddle.
Zigging and zagging, I tried to put more trees between me and the man chasing me. As I ran, I reviewed the trail ahead in my mind. On the other side of the fence I’d be a sitting duck on an open hillside for a good long while. To heck with that.
I turned left in the band of trees, totally off the track. I felt my phone buzz in my hand. I hoped it was someone else besides Evil’s captor, anybody else, but even if it was him, I had no choice. I ignored the phone and ran.
My breath and my heart pounded inside my chest like two fists. I couldn’t stop to wonder why the Greek guy was chasing me, or what it was that my faceless enemy had and had offered to Mrs. Wilding for fifty thousand dollars, or who that enemy was. Dimly the uncertainties spun around my mind like the rocking landscape of yellow mountain grass, green and blue evergreens, and faded sky. I couldn’t focus on any of it.
Instead I focused on my feet, and on putting things behind my shoulder blades, as fast as I possibly could.
I hit a patch of the grove in which the trees crept up the side of the bowl. I had no idea what was on the other side; it could have been a bare coverless field, or a thicket of barbed wire, or a sheer drop. But I didn’t have the luxury of picking the terrain. If I stopped, I was sure I’d be shot, so I had to stay undercover as long as I could. I bolted up the slope and over the lip of earth at the top.
The other side was a steep slope of dirt and pebbles. At the top I snagged a toe on the root of the grove’s last tree and tumbled forward, bouncing down the slope like so much denim in the spin cycle, over and over, and then I was up on toes and knuckles and hurling myself into scrubby little trees at the bottom of a narrow defile and—
Boom!
I heard the shotgun slug pop through the air over my head. It might have hit me in the back except that I was tripping again, and when I hit the ground it was in cold, shallow water. I rolled and splashed back onto my feet, crouching, shaking water off my phone.
The trees momentarily hid me, but I could hear grunting and cursing as my attacker chugged after me down into the defile. I rose to run again and my eye caught on the thing that had tripped me and saved my life.
It was a deer. A dead deer. It lay on the edge of the stream, face in the water and hindquarters ramped up awkwardly on the bank, as if it had dropped dead in mid-drink, with not a mark on its body.
I ran.
The trees around me grew closer together and thicker, and for a moment I imagined that I was about to disappear into a dense jungle (as if any such thing existed in the Ups, or could exist there) and get away. The Greek guy had to be someone associated with the Wildings. Family of one of them. He was too old to be Mrs. Wilding’s son—might he be a son of Aaron Wilding, by an earlier marriage? Would that make him the son Dad had been talking about the night before, the one who went off to military school?
Or, given her state of undress when she’d answered the door, might he be Mrs. Wilding’s…boyfriend? I tripped over a second deer.
It lay dead, right across the middle of the stream.
I couldn’t even look at it. I picked myself up out of the water and staggered on. I could hear Greek Guy behind me, huffing and puffing. He was thin enough, but the running was giving him trouble, so maybe he wasn’t all that fit. Or maybe the altitude was getting to him. For that matter, the altitude was starting to get to me. I felt light-headed and my legs and feet ached.
The trees ended. Ahead of me the defile stretched downward in a straight shot, the stream rushing merrily at the bottom of it, and not a scrap of a tree to hide behind. Out of sheer disappointment, I suppose, I tripped and fell a third time.
Before I could stand, something hard and heavy smacked me across the back of the skull. I fell gasping into the cold water of the stream and stars raced across my vision.
“Talk, bitch!”
I hurt too much to be angry. My vision spun and I wanted to throw up. I realized I still had my phone in my hand, but I couldn’t think how that was any advantage to me. “I don’t know anything!” I yelled, holding my hands over my head.
“You’re the lawyer’s kid!” the Greek guy snapped. “What’s your angle? You trying to blackmail Marilyn, you made a dumb mistake!”
He had followed Marilyn into McCrae’s the day before. Why? Had he just hung back to give her room to talk to her lawyer, or had he been along for something else? Had he come to case the joint? Could he have been one of the two men in Dad’s office?
I saw bright flashes of light and couldn’t really focus on Greek Guy. Nick, that was what Marilyn had called him.
Nick was going to kill me.
Then I realized what I ought to be doing with my phone. “Look,” I said, and I pointed at the phone. I climbed slowly to my feet and turned, careful not to show any sign of making a break for it. Nick pointed the shotgun right at the center of my chest—it was a Remington 870, a go-to gun for police forces everywhere, and poncho or no poncho, at this range it would punch a hole right through me. I would have tried to fake fear, except that I was so afraid and tired from running that I was shaking like a Quaking Aspen in a thunderstorm anyway. “It isn’t me. I don’t know anything, this guy is sending me texts!”
It had the virtue of being true. Also, since I was pointing at and fumbling with my phone, it had the virtue of letting me click on the video camera. I didn’t dare point the camera directly at Nick, but I tried to aim it in his general direction. At least it would capture sound, and if I was lucky it might even get his face.
That way, I thought as I took a deep breath to steady myself, they’d have a video to play at Nick’s trial for my murder.
Nick looked suspicious. “What is it you have?” he asked, sniffing the air. “What are you offering? You making some kind of threat?”
“I told you,” I repeated, “I don’t know anything.”
Nick snorted, pumped the shotgun to chamber a shell, and pointed it at me.
Bang!
With a look of surprise on his face and a chunk of his skull missing, Nick fell forward into the stream.
I jumped back, shaking. I’d been prepared for a bang from Nick’s gun, but not a blast out of nowhere. Also, I’d never seen anyone
shot in the head before. Howard County had the occasional gun accident, because it had more than its share of hunters, but it had never happened in front of me. One moment, Nick was scowling at me, his face flushed and angry and disbelieving.
The next, he collapsed to the ground like so much meat.
There was a lot of blood. I don’t know what I’d imagined, but those veins in the head carry a lot of fluid, and it flooded out in a wash that darkened the grass and the water of the stream.
I stumbled but managed not to fall. As I turned to look for the source of the shot I heard the snicker-snack of a bolt-action rifle ejecting a spent cartridge and snapping a fresh round into the chamber.
A tall, thin man stood at the top of the defile. He wore a tight, high-end black fleece jacket and slim gloves, and he had a black ski mask pulled down over his face. The drop beneath him was steep enough that there was no way I was going to charge up to the top and get the gun out of his hands. Not before he’d shot me half a dozen times.
Nick’s body lay crumpled on top of the shotgun, and he was several steps away, too. I’d never make it.
Ski Mask raised the rifle to his shoulder, pointing the gun straight at me—a body slammed into Ski Mask from behind.
Bang! The rifle went off and the shot missed me, thumping into the dirt at my feet.
Ski Mask and his attacker went down in a tumbling whirl of long limbs, fleece, rifle, and—I now saw—Evil Patten. They spun over and over each other, yowling like cats, and crashed into a pile on top of Nick.
“Evil!” I yelled.
He was on top of the heap of elbows, but there was something awkward about his stance. It wasn’t until he reared back onto his knees that I realized that both his hands were behind his back. Also, he had a cloth gag wrapped through his mouth.
I rushed to him.
Ski Mask tried to roll away sideways, clutching at the rifle under his body. Evil fell on him like a Legion Hall semi-pro wrestler, face first, and he smashed Ski Mask in the temple with a head butt that was as loud as the crack of the rifle. Ski Mask collapsed.
I grabbed Evil by the elbow and dragged him to his feet. His hands were tied together at the wrists. That fixed his arms in a single position, and helped me lever him up.
He made choking noises around his gag, and we ran.
Maybe I should have grabbed the rifle first, or the shotgun, but Ski Mask was on top of both of them, and since he still had the guns, more or less, I couldn’t really take him prisoner. Even with Evil, I felt very alone; what allies might Ski Mask have hiding in the trees? Also, cut me some slack—I was sixteen years old, exhausted, and scared.
We followed the stream down. The arroyo walls got steeper; they felt like a blanket being pulled over my head, which is fine when it’s because you want to snuggle with someone special, but terrifying when the blanket is in the hand of someone who hates you, and in the other hand he holds a hammer.
I felt a little better when the canyon took a sharp right turn, toward the Flats. Good enough that I stopped Evil. With the tiny pocket knife on my car keys I gouged through the plastic that wrapped his wrists together—they were really thick zip ties, but they gave way after a little bit of persuasion and fell off. He tore off his own gag, then grabbed my hand and we ran again. I didn’t dare peek around the corner to see how far behind us Ski Mask was.
“Who is he?” I puffed.
“He didn’t exactly show me ID,” Evil snapped. As snapping went, though, it was pretty good-natured, just a joke with a slight edge to it. For a guy who had just pounded his own forehead into his captor’s skull, Evil was impressively gentle.
The stream passed under the barbed wire again, which I guessed meant we were at the edge of the Wilding property. There was no gate, but the stream created enough of a depression that we could both lie on our bellies and slip under the wire. The stream dropped down a steep bank of stone and we rattled along its edge. I really needed to stop running; my feet felt as if someone had held me upside down in vise grips and pounded on my soles with a mallet for two hours. I was also weak from lack of sleep and food and shaking from effort. My poncho was beginning to feel really heavy. On top of everything else, I looked like I’d been rolling around in the mud.
“There’s no cover,” I said. The stream splashed down into another canyon, bare of trees or decent-sized rocks. We ran on stony ground, and my ankles felt as if they might give way. “He’ll catch us.”
“Maybe he won’t follow us.” Evil shot a look over his shoulder as he ran.
“We’re witnesses,” I pointed out. “We saw him kill that man.”
“And kidnap me,” Evil pointed out. “I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that’s also a no-no.”
“Did he…hurt you?” I asked, breathing hard. I risked a look back—I could see the water of the stream splashing down over rock from the defile, but no sign of Ski Mask. I felt a little bud of something in my heart that might have been hope.
Evil shook his head. He had more control over his breath than I did over mine. “Scared the pants off me. Shook me up.”
“How did you escape?” My steps were beginning to falter. I wasn’t running anymore so much as speed-plodding.
Evil laughed. “When he took the rifle and left, I figured it was my best chance. He’d tied my ankles, but it was just with zip ties, you know, those big ones they sell in truck stops. The faucet of the tub I was in was old and a little jagged. I used it like a saw, rubbed the ties against the faucet until they broke. My ankles are cut up some, and I’ve totally shot a good pair of socks. I would have freed my hands too, except I was afraid he’d come back.”
“You came to rescue me with your hands tied.” I was a little astonished Evil could be so brave.
“Nope.” He laughed raggedly. “I just ran. But then I saw him shooting down into the draw, and I figured I had to stop him.”
“You didn’t know he was shooting at me?”
“Nope. But I knew he wasn’t shooting deer, and…well, I owed him one.”
Deer. “Evil,” I said, “the canyon behind the house up there is full of dead deer.”
“Wasn’t hunters,” Evil said defensively. “We don’t trespass.”
“No, they weren’t marked, just dead.” The stitch in my side cut like a knife, and I shuffled at a speed barely faster than a walk.
“Disease, maybe. It happens.” Evil looked back. “We gotta get out of here. Around the bend is that little picnic area and campground, but there won’t be anybody there to help us on a weekday morning.”
“Any good place to hide?” I stopped running, trying to catch my breath and willing the sharp pain in my side to go away. Evil knew the Ups a lot better than I did, from hunting, fishing, and backpacking.
Evil stopped with me, watching the valley behind us. He shrugged. “Under a picnic table, I guess. You won’t stay hidden long.”
A thought struck me. “So he was with you the whole time?”
Evil nodded. “From when he jumped me in the Fun Lanes until I escaped. He had me tied up in a car, and then a cabin.” He pointed. “Up there on the Wilding place. Old hunting cabin, I guess, or a place for ranch hands to sleep, back when they ran cattle in these valleys.”
“Then how did he see me?”
Evil took my hand and pulled me along. “He didn’t. He took my wallet and made a stop in the Dog Ears, and then he sat on the toilet watching me and playing with my phone.”
With Evil’s phone. “Oh no,” I said. I pushed my wooden legs to swing faster, and focused on my phone, scrolling sideways through pages of apps to find the one I was looking for.
“What is it?”
I looked over my shoulder as I found the app. We were nearing the bend of the canyon, and I could see a smudge of black behind us, where the stream poured into the valley.
And sure enough, when I pulled up FindMe, I tapped on Evil Patten in the Friends menu and saw the pulsing red dot right on the GPS map image of the canyon. “Remember that FindMe
app that seemed so useful when we were lab partners?” I asked. We passed the bend of the canyon, but the Flats were still a long way away, and I felt, if anything, less safe.
“Yeah,” Evil said. “Also, it was a good way for me to be sure you weren’t out at the movies with other guys while I was working.”
Maybe I should have been offended, or maybe I should have laughed. I couldn’t do either. “He used it to follow me all morning. He’s following us with it now.”
Evil cursed.
I had an idea. “Look for a piece of wood.” I scanned the ground as I stumbled along, looking for anything big enough to float and carry a little extra weight with it. All I saw was dried yellow grass, gray rock, and patches of bare earth.
We hit the campground. It was empty, three dry sandy circles of pale earth around three picnic tables. I looked into the fire pit of each. The pits were full of ash and dead coals, but no sizable wood.
“What do people burn in their fires up here?” I snapped, exasperated.
“When you pack in your own firewood, you pack out what’s left.” Evil looked with me, kicking around in the ashes with his Redwings. “What are you thinking, Bucky?”
I waved my phone at him. “I’m thinking we send this phone on down the stream and him after it.”
“Still no place to hide,” Evil pointed out.
“If he’s staring down at your phone, we might not have to hide very well.”
Evil nodded, catching on. “In that case,” he said, pulling something out of his back pocket, “what about this?”
I stared at the thing in his hand. “That’s a condom. And if you think that now is the right time to suggest this to me, your head is flatter than I ever realized.”
“Yeah.” Evil tore off the wrapper with his teeth. I couldn’t imagine what he was doing and I couldn’t bear to look at his hands, so I watched the intent expression on his face. He puffed once into the condom, inflating the tip of it like a balloon. “And if I tie a knot in the end, it should float.”
