Blood on the Tracks (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 1)

by Barbara Nickless

  Not the Sir. Whip.

  He bared his teeth and snarled at me through the blood that ran down his face. “Not that it’s any of your fucking business. But I didn’t kill Elise. I loved her. Don’t you fucking hang her death on me.”

  He reached for my throat.

  I yanked the Glock free, shoved it into Whip’s stomach, and shot him.

  He went down, hands tight to his belly, blinking up at me as if he couldn’t figure out how a woman had gotten the upper hand.

  “You cunt,” he said.

  Something inside me snapped, like an elastic band under too much strain.

  I shoved Alfred Merkel down with my bad leg, bent painfully to pick up a rock, and slammed the rock into his face.

  Once. “That’s for Liz.”

  He shrieked.

  Twice. Blood flew. “That’s for Thomas Brown.”

  A third time. Bones broke. “That’s for Jazmine.”

  By the time I hit him again, his face was no longer human.

  “And that’s for Clyde, you fucking piece of filth.”

  I heaved the rock away.

  I guess I believed him about Elise.

  Focus, I told myself. That train’s still coming. Gentry.

  Then Clyde.

  I limped to the trestle, hoisted myself onto the base of the bridge, and ignored whatever I’d done to my knee as I hobbled to the nearest sway brace. I grabbed hold of the brace and crawled up the eighteen-inch-wide span of wood.

  At the top of the first sway brace, I pulled myself onto the sill and grabbed hold of the next brace.

  Old timber trestles like this one had been built in the 1800s. Many of them had been replaced with steel or concrete or buried in enough fill to support the tracks. But a few of these old bridges remained, a series of vertical posts braced on horizontal sills and supported by angled sway braces. As a kid I’d climbed one, when I was too stupid to know better.

  The trestle creaked around me in the wind. I clung to the brace and hauled myself up its length. My knee shrieked with every movement. My hands turned numb as I struggled to grip the weathered wood. The wind tore my hat free and tossed it into the darkness, sending my hair whipping about my face.

  But I’d found my rhythm. Reach, pull, drag. Reach, pull, drag.

  Then my bad knee gave. My foot slipped off the brace, swung in the emptiness. Before I could bring it back up, I began sliding back down the timber I’d just climbed, gravity tipping my body toward Devil’s Gulch.

  Markusson’s ghost nodded at me from one of the sills, his Wiggins police jacket flapping.

  Panic later, he told me. Panic kills.

  I grabbed for one of the posts as I went past. Dug in my fingers and jerked to a stop.

  “Is that what happened to you?” I snarled at him.

  But he was right.

  I pulled my foot back onto the brace and kept working my way up as the moon slipped in and out of the clouds like a ship in stormy waves. I didn’t look down. When my feet slid, I brought them back. When my hands slipped, I pressed my body against the brace. I didn’t think about falling. I thought of Clyde, maybe still alive and waiting for me to fetch him home. Of Gentry, hurt, about to die.

  And of Nik.

  Liz’s voice whispered in my ear. He said he couldn’t breathe.

  Nik. Who would do anything for his son.

  The wind told me when I was near the top, its fury unabated as I cleared the sides of the gorge. Now I could see the actual railway, a latticed span of wooden ties set against an insubstantial sky. A few more feet, then I grabbed one of the ties, hooked a leg up, and peered over the edge of the rails just as the moon went dark.

  I strained to hear over the roar of the wind and was rewarded with the low rumble of men’s voices not too far off. A chain clinked.

  “Hurry up,” said one of the men.

  “I’m trying, goddammit,” came the answer.

  I hauled myself onto the bridge. I drew my pistol and inched forward on my elbows and knees.

  A little farther on, the forms of men became visible—shadows hunkered on knees or flat on bellies. Someone coughed, closer than the men I’d spotted, and I froze. Only ten feet away, two men lay propped on their elbows, guns snugged close. The wind had kept them from hearing my approach. I pressed against the ties and listened to the roar of blood in my ears. I could shoot them both where they lay. But I wouldn’t get off another shot before one of the other men found me.

  I had no idea where Nik was. If he was still in the picture. If he was still alive.

  One of the men near me shifted. “Asshole’ll start firing again.”

  “He can’t see us, you dumb fuck. Anyway, I think Ty got ’im.”

  From the east, a mournful whistle floated through the night. The 1740 freight to Denver approaching a crossroads near Wiggins. Which meant it wasn’t far off.

  The sound created a flurry of panic and swearing among the men on the bridge.

  I inched backwards, swung my legs out over the edge until I felt the end cap beneath my feet. I climbed back down the brace, went twenty feet to my right, and climbed back up.

  When I peered over again, I was looking right at the other three men.

  “Leave him!” one of them was saying. “He’s not gonna wake up. Just put him on the rail.”

  “Whip wants him to hang. After. Like a message.”

  “Oh, Jesus, fuck that. C’mon!”

  Chains rattled. “Got it. Let’s go.”

  A pair of feet came in my direction. I grabbed an ankle and yanked.

  The man screamed as he catapulted over the edge.

  Four to go.

  “What the hell?” someone said.

  I shot another man then dropped below the level of the ties. Up above, the three remaining men unleashed a panicked volley of shots. Rifle fire broke and echoed, but none of it came my way. They must have figured my shots had come from Nik. Now they were aiming for wherever they thought he’d holed up.

  The moon hit a stretch of clear sky, bouncing off the snow and turning night into day. A rifle opened up from the east. A man screamed and a body tipped over the edge.

  Nik stopped firing. The echoes died away.

  I peered over the edge. Nothing moved. I pulled myself onto the bridge, hoping Nik could see it was me. Three dead men lay on their backs nearby. I limped over to Gentry. He lay unmoving, pale as death. Both eyes were blackened, his nose broken, the left cheek crushed. Lips like pulpy melons. Beneath a light jacket, his dress shirt and slacks were black with blood.

  I knelt and placed my ear near his mouth, heard his faint breath.

  I touched his hair, the only part of him that wasn’t hurt. “We’ll get you out of here, Gentry. Nik and I.”

  He made no response.

  They had trussed him like a pig. Ankles shackled with cuffs. His wrists likewise manacled. A chain ran from his ankles to his wrists then up past his head, yanking his hands to his face.

  The end of the chain had been looped around the rail tie and padlocked closed. I cursed myself for not searching Whip’s pockets before I left him. I knelt on the tie and tried to get my fingers under the chain. But the metal had bitten into the wood, and Gentry’s own weight held it taut.

  Markusson’s ghost appeared, sitting on the end of one of the ties, feet swinging over the abyss. Like he didn’t have anything better to do.

  I scrabbled back to Gentry and shoved him toward the edge, trying to ease the tension on the chain. Then back to the tie, tearing against the wood with my fingers. The panic now a full-blown monster.

  The minutes raced past.

  Panic kills, Markusson offered.

  I pulled out the Glock and fired at the padlock. The slug smacked into the housing, but the latch stayed firm. I fired two more times. Nothing. Fired at the chain with the same result.

  Nik’s voice came from behind me. “Stand back.”

  I stepped away. Nik raised the AR-15 and fired. The housing shattered.

 
; “We’d better hurry,” he said. Deceptively calm.

  With no time to do anything different, I gathered the chain and laid it on Gentry’s chest. Gentry’s body bounced over the rail as Nik pulled him away from the edge. I lifted Gentry under his arms while Nik grabbed his feet. We stepped over the bodies of the dead men and headed west, walking between the rails. As I stumbled backwards in the dark, stepping from one snow-covered tie to the next above the gorge, I willed myself to look only at my feet. The standard span from rail to rail, an exact four feet, eight and a half inches, felt no wider than my shoulders.

  “Whip shot Clyde,” I said.

  “Move faster,” was Nik’s reply. He was breathing hard, a strange, high whistle running through each inhalation.

  Man’s gotta breathe.

  I focused on my feet again. Images flipped through my mind like a series of photographs.

  Elise’s open window, her hair fluttering in the breeze.

  Nik rolling down the kitchen window after I’d brought the news of Elise.

  Nik ordering me away from Tucker so he could shoot him.

  Nik sitting on the front porch, claiming he couldn’t breathe in the house.

  Nik, who knew where to find the skinheads. Because he’d known all along who they were, what they were up to.

  Nik, who’d lied to protect his son ten years ago. Who would risk everything to keep him from going down for that crime. Nik, who must have believed what I could not. That Gentry had played a part in Jazmine’s death.

  His voice brought me back to the bridge. “Don’t slow down, Sydney Rose.”

  Beyond him, the train’s headlamp appeared, the locomotive ditch lights joining it to form a brilliant triangle that hung bodiless in the night.

  Far to the north, sirens rose and fell. The cavalry at long last. The sheriff. Maybe Denver PD. Maybe Cohen was riding toward me. Maybe he had forgiven me.

  Nik stumbled. Held on to Gentry’s ankles. Steadied himself. His breathing sounded like he was sucking air through a straw.

  “It was you,” I whispered, even as I was thinking, Deny it, Nik. Tell me I’m crazy. “You killed Elise.”

  Nik gave another wheeze. “Don’t you slow down.”

  I stepped to the next tie, and the next, the ten-and-a-half-inch gaps yawning over something deeper and darker than Devil’s Gulch.

  “You knew Rhodes was coming into town,” I went on. “You knew he’d be the first person the police looked at. Having Whip throw down those beads was just a lucky break.”

  Tell me to go fuck myself, Nik.

  Nik said, “A man—” wheeze “does—” wheeze “what he has to.”

  His confession struck with such force that had the words been physical, they would have ripped skin, smashed bone, crushed organs. They would have killed me.

  “It’s not true,” I said. I’d gone mad, and Nik was humoring me.

  He faltered. Righted himself. “She threw her life away. On those hobos. Would have thrown his away, too.”

  “You loved her,” I cried.

  “Had to choose. Between a lawyer and a waitress. Between a son and a niece.”

  “And she loved you.” Just as I always had. Loved you beyond reason.

  The lights behind Nik swelled like a trio of rising suns. Now I could hear the steady thrum of the train wheels, feel the vibration beneath my feet. The world disappearing in an onrush of steel.

  “Keep moving.” His voice held the first metal-bright thread of panic.

  Nik had never let anything stand in his path. Not the jungles in ’Nam. Not the Viet Cong sniper who had shredded his leg. Not Gentry’s attempt to join the skinheads, nor my sudden orphaning. And I’d loved him for it.

  Ten feet along, Nik went down on one knee. His other foot dropped between the ties. As he fell, Gentry’s ankles slipped from his hands.

  “Keep going,” he told me.

  The light grew brighter. The wheels thundered.

  Gritting my teeth against the pain, against the weight, I walked. Gentry’s feet bounced and dragged along the ties, his heels catching between the spaces so that each time I had to yank him free.

  When I looked up again, Nik had gained his knees.

  “Nik!” I shouted.

  “You and I are just alike, Sydney Rose. Damaged.” He got one foot under him. Then the other. Came to a crouch. “But strong as hell, too. We do what we have to.”

  I reached the end of the bridge, hauled Gentry to the side. When I looked again, Nik was back on his knees. His shadow stretched across the ties.

  I put everything I had in my voice. “Nik! Come on!”

  The lights of the train formed a supernova, filling the horizon.

  I stepped back toward the bridge. “You told me. Never leave a fallen soldier behind.”

  The engineer saw Nik and sounded his horn. The brakes gave a wailing cry, a high drilling sound like a thousand voices calling in pain.

  “Unless they’ve gone bad,” Nik said.

  Or I think that’s what he said. Metal shrieked around the curve of the bridge. Sparks boiled under the wheels as if the train was on fire. I threw myself off the tracks and covered Gentry’s body with my own, wrapping my arms around him and squeezing my eyes shut as the train hurtled past, tugging at us with its slipstream.

  The pain in my chest burst into flame, burning everything.

  The end of the world.

  CHAPTER 28

  Cops and soldiers. We have a moral code that is too limited for what we face in the street or on the battlefield. Serve and protect. Defend with honor, courage, and commitment.

  But the lines aren’t clearly drawn. The bad guys don’t wear signs. And all of us are only human.

  —Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

  I spent three weeks in the hospital. The blows to my chest had caused an arrhythmia in the upper chamber of my heart, which the docs thought would resolve on its own if they could get everything else fixed. I had two broken ribs, numerous lacerations, some serious, and a handful of hairline fractures, including one in my skull. My patellar tendon was shredded, my left bicep torn. So while I healed, the docs kept me afloat on a sea of artificial calm. Probably a good thing, since around me the world had erupted in a flurry of investigations, accusations, turf battles, and finger-pointing.

  Throughout the days and weeks after Cohen pulled Gentry and me off that hill, the sheriff and a team of forensics experts spent long hours sorting through the dead. The last body recovered by the forensics team was the skeleton of Jazmine Brown, her bones sifted so deep into the soil at the bottom of Devil’s Gulch that she would likely never have been found if Elise hadn’t started the investigation. The team found nine other bodies in the gorge, as yet unidentified. All were disarticulated, gnawed and scattered by scavengers. One they thought might belong to a hunter—a man who’d stumbled upon the other bodies and been condemned to join them.

  No one could accuse Whip and his gang of sitting idle.

  The sheriff counted twelve recently deceased in the camp and on and around the bridge. They added that body count to the men Nik and I had killed at The Pint and Pecker and told me we’d done a good job. A bang-up job, I think the sheriff said, his tongue not obviously in his cheek. As if we’d done nothing more than clean up a rattler den. An internal investigation by Denver Pacific Continental cleared both Nik and me of any wrongdoing. Now it was up to the Colorado Bureau of Investigations and the DA’s office to decide my fate. Cohen told me not to worry about it, and I didn’t. Whatever the legal system decided about our actions, Nik would never face any sort of earthly trial. And I had done what I had to do.

  Or at least, that’s what I told myself. Killing is never easy to justify.

  During those drugged-out days, I spent a lot of time staring out my tenth-floor window, working hard to keep my mind empty. Some days I was fairly successful. Other days, Nik and the rest of the dead crowded so close it was all I could do to breathe.

  But the doctors said I was making gr
eat progress. By the fifteenth day, I was off most of the drugs. On the sixteenth day, I took myself to the bathroom. Brushed my own teeth. The morning of the seventeenth day I started physical therapy. And on the evening of the eighteenth day of my stay, I turned on the television and watched for fifteen minutes before turning it off again.

  On the nineteenth morning I woke with a clear head, as if someone had finally switched on the light.

  A nurse was bustling around my bed, poking and prodding.

  “Aren’t you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed today,” she said.

  “You got coffee in this place?”

  “Welcome back, honey. Your detective coming to see you today?” She was cranking up the head of my bed.

  According to the hospital staff, Cohen had visited me every day. Even before I was conscious. Even while I was drugged out of my mind. Probably I was easier to take in that state.

  “Can you fix my braid?”

  She patted my hand and stuck a digital thermometer in my ear. “You look beautiful.”

  “Maybe something to cover the bruises?”

  She read a number off the thermometer, wrote it down. “You’re a lucky woman. Having a handsome detective and his handsome dog looking out for you.”

  Clyde is my dog, I thought but did not say. My partner.

  The nurse finished with me, patted my hand again, and left. A minute later, there was a knock on the half-open door, and Cohen walked in.

  Or tried to. Clyde beat him to it then had to wait for the detective to lift him onto the bed. The nurses had been livid the first few times they’d come in and found a dog lying next to me, tangled among the tubes and wires. But Clyde wouldn’t take no. They’d finally thrown up their hands, moved the tubing, and laid out a blanket for him.

  I rested my hand on Clyde’s head, felt the warmth of him, felt his strength pass through my skin in that wonderful osmosis we shared. Clyde opened his mouth and let his tongue hang down just about to the bed and watched me. He smiled like that every time I saw him. Judging by how much my face hurt, I was probably smiling, too.