Willing Hostage

by Marlys Millhiser

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Glade raised his revolver and sighted along a tree limb. They had pulled over to shore and hidden the boat behind trees to watch for the goons.

  “They couldn’t have made it out of that suck hole.” Leah licked the chalk of Maalox from her lips.

  “Some types can get out of anything. What I saw of those two makes me scared as hell. When we’re on the river they’ve got the advantage and the range. We’ll wait.”

  They waited. No boat. No goons. Leah relaxed.

  “I don’t like it,” he said. “I don’t see any debris from their boat coming down river.”

  When they entered the river again, Glade was quiet. He kept glancing over his shoulder. It made her uncomfortable.

  Surely the only danger lay ahead at Split Mountain Ramp now and on the river itself. Those men could not have survived that suck hole.

  She’d forgotten their faces already. She could visualize their boat and life jackets, their arms swinging paddles.…

  “Glade, I feel a little sick.”

  “We forgot lunch. Have some granola. We’ll stop at Jones Hole for tonight.”

  At dusk a sign announced Jones Hole. Leah had the odd thought that in no matter what outlandish place she found herself, there were always signs.

  The Mormons’ giant pontoons were pulled up on the beach and in the process of being unloaded. There was soon a crowd to welcome them in.

  Dave helped Leah from the boat. “We didn’t figure you’d make it out of Warm Springs in that little boat. We kept pulling over and waiting for you. Haven’t been here long ourselves.”

  “We got a late start. Is the ranger here?” Glade pulled the boat out of the water and Goodyear took off through the trees.

  “No. River’s closed and he left. I just broke into his cabin and used his radio. The patrol’s going to sweep the river for you two. Guess I panicked.”

  “Did all of your party get through?” Leah asked.

  “Yes, but we’ve got several hysterical women. They’re lined up at the outhouse.”

  Leah stumbled past the ranger’s cabin and picnic tables to a clearing on the other side of a grove of trees. The women greeted her with relieved exclamations and she took her place at the end of the line.

  Leah learned that she was now in Utah but that these Mormons came from Denver.

  “You know,” Rayleen said, “we were just taking a tally and realized that if we don’t make it off this river, we will orphan a total of twenty-seven children.”

  They bowed their heads beside the foul-smelling building and Cindy, of the bedraggled pixy haircut, led a prayer of thanks that they had all survived their day on the river.

  Leah prayed with them.

  “You look positively green, Leah.” Rayleen sat next to her at the picnic table. “You’ve sure got your work cut out for you. Any man who would bring a bride with an ulcer on a river-trip honeymoon … and then have nothing along to eat but granola.…”

  Once again the Mormons shared their food with them. They’d boiled eggs for Leah. Everyone else had steak.

  “How long have you had your ulcer?” someone asked from across the table.

  “Since about fifth grade.”

  “How could you mistreat your body that much that early?” The entire table hushed to hear her answer.

  “The doctor said it was because I was jealous of my younger sisters.” Leah had the feeling no one believed her.

  Dave changed the subject. “I called the patrol back to tell them you’d made it. But they’d sent a boat out already.”

  Leah wondered what the river patrol would think of the bodies scattered along the way. She took a tranquilizer, then found her sleeping bag and crawled off away from the Mormon tents while Glade helped them clean up.

  The morning song of hundreds of robins awakened her, a warbling cacophony of bird song that filled the tall cottonwoods of Jones Hole. The natural symphony was ruined only by the itching of her sunburn and the giant Siamese sitting in the grass next to her head.

  He was washing fresh blood and downy gray feathers from his face.

  “How could you, cat? You bad, nasty.…”

  Goodyear looked at her coldly. Not for the first time, he reminded her of Glade Wyndham. He crept forward to sniff her face.

  Leah gathered him to her. “I know nature tells you to eat birds even if your stomach is full of Kal Kan, but I can’t accept it somehow.”

  Glade walked toward her between two tents. He handed her a cup of milk and an egg. “I hard-boiled it for you last night.”

  He chewed Granola while she ate the egg. “We’ve got to get out of here and to the Ramp before the Mormons do. It’s only about four hours away. If there’s any trouble we don’t want to involve them.” Tired worry lines creased the corners of his eyes and pulled down the edges of his lips. “But first there’s one last thing I want to show you. It’s early and I think we have time. How do you feel?”

  “Pretty good, considering.” She didn’t like the sound of the one last thing.

  He looked as if he’d slept little. This was the dawn of his big day. Today would prove if his “hapless little crusade” would bear fruit or end in disaster.

  Because she had grown to care, Leah choked on the last of her egg. She didn’t trust the people waiting at Split Mountain Ramp. She tied on river-stiffened tennis shoes and took his hand to follow him into the sweet, fresh morning. Goodyear stayed behind, curled up on the warm spot she’d left in the sleeping bag.

  The smell of summer green, of cottonwood leaves, tall dewy grass, and earth came alive as sunlight lowered to the canyon floor. He led her across the clearing, away from the camp.

  The richness of bird song followed them as they climbed a gentle trail to a rock-strewn canyon.

  “If I don’t die today, I must remember this,” she thought and breathed in unsullied morning, felt through her jeans the cool wet of waist-high grass that overhung the path, saw the textured depth of sky, and tried to ignore the clouds gathering at its edges.

  She tugged at Glade’s hand to stop him, turned him around, and kissed him. “For this I could almost forgive you the Yampa River.”

  “But we’re not there yet.”

  “What more could there be?”

  “Indian pictographs.”

  Leah laughed. “We’re not four hours from Split Mountain Ramp and you want to show me pictographs.”

  The sun warmed her shoulders, gentle sweetness enveloped them. The canyon walls took on a redder hue, adding to the rich colors of land and sky. Leah wished that they would never have to return to the river. She felt at peace with surrounding nature … a part of it rather than an alien.

  “There.” He stopped in the middle of the path and pointed.

  She had to search the canyon wall opposite to find the dark scrawl on its face. Primitive figures of animals and people, one-dimensional and in fading black, defaced rocky grandeur. Undecipherable geometric patterns in peeling yellow orange … the mere scratchings of puny man.

  “Probably four to six hundred years old,” he said in wonder.

  “Early American graffiti,” Leah answered, unimpressed, and looked down the canyon that had outlived the Indians and would outlive her. Her own insignificance in the pattern of things was important only to her. For a moment Split Mountain Ramp seemed to matter less.

  He turned to start back but she stopped him, wrapped her arms around him, and buried her face in his jacket. “Glade, I’m beginning to see why you’re doing this thing … this mission you’ve chosen. But I still wish you didn’t have to. I wish we could go off somewhere together, get to know each other without all the fear and danger.”

  “Hey, we will.” He tipped her chin back so that she had to look up at his darkness against the blue brilliance of the sky. “As soon as this is over. Someplace nice and quiet. Who knows, I might even convince you to stop running away from things.”

  When “this” was over, Leah thought, they’d proba
bly be under arrest at best and at worst.… But what if they did make it? What if the impossible happened?

  “I came to Colorado to prove I could stand alone … and now.…”

  “But you have proved it. Look at all you’ve survived. And you alone saved my life at Warm Springs. You’ve proved you’re not helpless, Leah. I doubt you ever were.” He pushed her away to look at her and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “You know, you’re beautiful when you’re a mess.” And his voice was almost soft, almost dreamy as it had been once when they climbed toward the rim of the Flat Tops.

  They dawdled on their way back, saying nothing, knowing that minutes counted yet unable to hurry.

  The smell of burning bacon mingled with the first odors of the river and the outhouses as they approached. The Mormons were up.

  They walked faster.

  A woman screamed and a shot exploded ahead; the sky above the cottonwoods of Jones Hole filled with frantic robins.

  Glade pushed Leah behind a thick tree trunk but not before she’d glimpsed the incredible scene near the picnic tables.

  The, Mormons stood in a long line facing two men who still wore their orange life jackets and had their backs to Leah.

  Sunburned faces were shocked to ashen. Pairs of tennis shoes, streaked with dried river tan and their toes curling upward, still sat around a low concrete grill.

  Breeze jerked at tent flaps, played with the paper wrappers of food on the tables, and hummed in whispers through cottonwood leaves.

  “The next time will be for real,” a rather undistinguished voice said clearly, “if you don’t tell us where they are … and now.”

  “Stay here,” Glade whispered against Leah’s ear and moved with catlike stealth to the next tree and then to the next.

  A coherent thought finally disengaged itself from the whirl in her head … had he remembered to oil the revolver in his hand since Warm Springs?

  “They were here but they left before we got up,” a sickened voice said.

  “Their boat and their cat are still here. You’re lying.” His gun went off and again birds screamed overhead.

  Leah peered around her tree in time to see Rayleen slump to the earth.

  Leah tasted blood but she was past knowing if it was from her stomach or if she’d bitten her tongue. She stooped to dislodge the heavy rock at her feet from its dirty bed.

  Partly in a dream stupor and partly in a rage, she stepped out of the shelter of the tree. Her feet seemed to float. Her skin tingled with the onset of shock. Her senses were stimulated beyond reason … sight, sound, color … even the feel of the cold rock in her hands seemed unbearably exaggerated.

  Dave Randolf fell to his knees beside his wife, oblivious to the armed men.

  Goodyear sat beneath a picnic table eating stolen bacon, unmoved by the horror around him.

  Leah heard the faint click of Glade’s revolver some distance to her left, saw one of the goons turn as if in slow motion … and fire.

  Glade’s gun went off at the same time and both men crumpled.

  Glade Wyndham lay stretched out and still … with his face in the dirt of Jones Hole.

  Leah registered loss and regret even as she raised the rock above her head. The man in front of her had turned slightly when Glade and the other goon fired, then snapped his head back to cover the Mormons, and as Leah jumped into the air, he began to turn again to check behind him.

  Her full weight brought the weight of the rock down with a sickening crunch. The shock of rock hitting skull reverberated up her arms to her neck and shoulders. His gun fired as he fell and the sound jerked every muscle in her body.

  The rock lifted of its own volition and came down again … up and then down yet again … and Leah’s scream lifted to mingle with those of frightened birds.

  She stepped back and watched the Mormons’ eyes rise from the grisly mess at her feet to her face. Disgust and incredulity hardened to blankness as fourteen faces closed against her.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  For a moment, Leah Harper had stood alone. And there was blood on her hands.

  She could smell it … it had spattered across her clothes. The man was truly faceless now.

  “I wish … I wish we’d never met you,” Dave choked. He stared at Leah and turned back to help Cindy tear away Rayleen’s pants leg. “Her knee is shattered. She’ll never walk on this leg again.”

  Rayleen lay unconscious as her friends stirred from their shock to help her.

  Another man checked for a pulse on the man that Glade had shot. “Dead. I’ll go use the ranger’s radio.”

  Leah clasped bloody hands around the pain in her stomach and staggered to where Glade lay face down in the dirt. More blood, and she almost slipped in the dark pool by his shoulder as she turned him over.

  There was a pulse in his neck.

  She grabbed a dishtowel left to dry on a tree branch and stuck it under the hand pump on the concrete platform.

  “Here, I’ll pump. You hold it,” Cindy said without expression.

  They tore away Glade’s shirt and washed the wound on his arm. Someone else wiped the dirt from his face.

  Glade opened his eyes but he didn’t seem able to focus.

  “The bullet’s gone through, I think,” said a man she had met but didn’t know. He made a tourniquet and twisted the knot with a kitchen knife, as he had done for Rayleen’s leg.

  People were cold but helpful. Glade was lifted from his blood pool and transferred to his sleeping bag.

  Leah crouched beside him, reeling through waves of nausea, her arms hugging her knees.

  Cindy brought her a cup of milk. “If you hadn’t … done what you did, they’d have killed some or all of us,” she said in a daze. “It’s just that … if we’d never met you we wouldn’t have gotten involved in this … and … Rayleen has five kids and.…” She shrugged helplessly.

  Someone brought a first-aid kit and worked on Glade’s arm. He groaned.

  Leah left to find her Maalox. When she returned, Glade was talking to the Mormons and Goodyear had stretched out beside him.

  “I hear you killed someone,” he said, when they were alone. His skin was deathly pale around the dark beard stubble.

  The man and the cat stared at Leah with the same expression in different-colored eyes.

  She rose to get him water without speaking.

  “Don’t,” she said when he sat up to drink it.

  But he took the cup, drained it, and lay back down. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “How? On angel wings? I’m sick and you’re wounded.”

  “The river’s not that bad from here to the ramp.” Someone had taken the precaution to bandage him from the elbow to the tourniquet.

  “You’re delirious. There aren’t just two dead men over there. There’s a mother with a busted leg. If you think these people are going to let us leave, you’re nuts. You should see how they’ve been looking at me. Besides, neither one of us is in any shape to face Split Mountain Ramp.”

  Glade sat up again and winced. “I told them that there was a possibility that more trouble was coming down the river, that they were better off without us.”

  Leah looked over her shoulder to find all the Mormons on the far side of the campground. “But they’ve radioed for help from the ranger’s cabin.”

  “It’ll be a while in coming and they know it.” A corner of black plastic showed where his shirt had been torn away. “Leah, please?”

  “You don’t know what the river is really like in flood. You’ve admitted that … I just want to live … in peace”—she thought of their brief morning idyl—“with you. And I promised to call my sister.…”

  “Leah?”

  “Oh, what the hell!”

  Leah dunked herself in the dun-colored river to wash away the red of blood.

  A strange boat had been pulled up on the beach. It was longer than the one Glade and Leah used and had two board seats with a large wooden box in between for
supplies. Lettered in black across the top of the box were the words “River Patrol.”

  So the goons had lost their boats in the suck hole. But they’d lived to capture another boat when the patrol came down the river. And Leah was certain there were more bodies upstream where this boat had been taken.

  The Mormons had helped to load the boat and Glade sat now in Leah’s place at the front. He held a struggling Goodyear on his lap. Leah crawled into the back and felt strong arms push them off.

  They left Jones Hole without good-byes.

  The sweat of illness felt clammy on her skin, mixing with river grit and spray.

  They entered a canyon where whirlpools played with the current, but troubled them little if Leah steered down the middle.

  Goodyear sat on the duffels behind Glade, eyes squinted to slits against the glare of sun on water, tawny fur sparkling with mist beads.

  She could see the end of the silly kitchen knife that still held a loosened tourniquet in place. The black head in front of her bobbed with the motion of the boat. “How are you feeling?”

  “A little weak,” he said thickly. “But the pain is strong enough.”

  “Well, don’t climb the rim. I’ll try to get us through.

  You’ve lost a lot of blood and you’d probably get dizzy and fall off.”

  The whirlpool canyon ended and the river widened, sprawled, slowed. They had to pick their way around islands, some with bushes and a few live trees. A prehistoric setting. It seemed so remote from their planned destination that Leah relaxed and trailed her fingers over the side of the boat to wash away the vestiges of red that still clung to her cuticles.

  Sun on pink-red buttes … an eagle floating in lazy circles, his shadow diving off sandstone and crossing the water.

  She noticed the spreading stain on Glade’s bandages and tightened the tourniquet. If only she hadn’t had to kill.…

  At least there shouldn’t be any goons left and she felt more confident with the river.… “Glade, I’ve revived enough to want to start hoping again. Is there really a chance for us at this ramp place?”

  “Well … the agency will be watching the bureau. And the bureau will be watching the agency.…”