by Blake Pierce
“You think he’s having a visitor?” Timbrook asked.
At that moment, Mackenzie felt her phone vibrate in her pocket. She withdrew it and saw she had a text message. When she read it, she could not decide if she wanted to chuckle or to scream in frustration.
The text read: Don’t shoot. It’s just your husband.
“What is it?” Timbrook asked.
“Let this be Exhibit A for you. Reasons to maybe not get married.”
They stood where they were until about twenty seconds later, they could see Ellington coming through the trees. He looked cautious as he approached, like he knew he had probably pissed Mackenzie off.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him, her tone one of annoyance.
“I know your gut well enough. If you left that early in the morning, I figured you could only be walking into trouble.”
“What did you do? Follow us?”
“No. I just tracked you on my phone.”
She rubbed her head in the frustration. She wanted to lash out at him; it was a bit embarrassing, especially to appear as if she needed her husband by her side while in front of a woman as capable as Timbrook. On the other hand, maybe his sudden appearance was for the best. If Timbrook had indeed suffered some sort of minor concussion from the blow from Lutz last night, she really had no business being out here. Even if it all turned out to be nothing, there was no sense in her stressing herself out.
“I hate to pull rank here,” Mackenzie said, looking at Timbrook. “But I want you to go back to the car. I don’t want you risking any further injury. Ellington and I are good from here.”
Timbrook looked disappointed and even a bit hurt. But in the end, she nodded her understanding. “Call if anything goes wrong,” she said.
Mackenzie nodded, but Timbrook had already turned back toward the woods and the car beyond—perhaps to hide an expression that showed how she truly felt about the situation.
When she was far enough away to be separated from the tension, Mackenzie stepped closer to Ellington. “I’m a little pissed you’re here.”
“Then why do you look so relieved?”
“Maybe because I regret leaving without waking you up this morning. I was pissed at you then, too.”
“I see a pattern here…”
“Yeah, there’s a pattern. And we can discuss it later. For now…”
“I know. Waverly filled me in over the phone. He said Timbrook called in to update him. The guy that lives here is a loner, right? Froze up on a few lessons, started sort of obsessing over climbers.”
“Something like that. You good to go?”
He only gave a nod and they started walking closer to the little shed-like building. As they got closer, she saw that the door was basically held on with old rusted hinges that had been nailed into an old cracked frame. The place was so run down that she wondered if they were at the right place. Certainly no one could live in such a state—off the grid or not.
As they drew closer to the building, Mackenzie stopped walking. Off to the left and further back, she thought she heard something. Maybe a deer crossing through the forest, maybe just the wind passing through the branches.
But then she heard it again and knew what it was at once. It was hard to tell because of the muted sounds of the forest and the trees to all sides, but it was there. A slight creaking, followed by footfalls.
And it was all coming from behind the little shed-like structure.
“He’s on the move,” Mackenzie said.
She took off at a run to the right side of the building. Ellington did the same, angling in front of her. There was a moment where her heart thrummed, once again back in action with Ellington at her side. But the potential danger in the situation made that warm feeling fade very quickly.
Whether he realized it or not, Ellington took the lead as he cut in front of her. He was drawing his gun and ran close along the outer wall for cover. Mackenzie barely had time to be irritated by this, though. As they neared the back corner of the dwelling, she heard a thump and then a muffed grunt from Ellington.
As Mackenzie came around the side of the building, she saw a man standing at the corner. He was holding a wooden baseball bat and leering down at Ellington, who was on his hands and knees trying to scramble back to his feet, gasping for air on the ground. The man was raising the bat over his head, preparing to strike Ellington while he was down.
“Drop it!” Mackenzie yelled as she drew the Glock from her holster. The man redirected his gaze toward her and instead of bringing the bat down in a lethal blow to Ellington’s head, he threw it forward instead. It came, wobbling end over end, directly at Mackenzie’s face. She had a spit second to decide: shoot at the man or stop the bat from crushing her face in.
She held her hands up, the bat striking the underside of her right arm. A flaring pins and needles sensation went spiraling up her arm as the bat rebound and struck the ground.
She uttered a curse and tried to shake the feeling back into her arm as the man took off at a mad dash toward the woods behind the cabin.
Mackenzie stepped forward and knelt down to Ellington.. Thankfully, the blow had not struck his head or face. He was doubled over in pain, holding his stomach and gasping.
“What did he hit?” she asked.
“Stomach. Rib…maybe. Damn…”
Mackenzie looked to the tree line behind the shed. The attacker—presumably Aaron Pinkett—had already made it into the trees. She looked back to Ellington and frowned. “I’m going after him.”
“Mac…”
She kissed him on the cheek and got to her feet. She took another five seconds to pull out her phone. She pulled up Timbrook’s number and the moment she answered the phone, Mackenzie cut her off before she could even say hello.
“Ellington is down, Pinkett is on the run. Call in assistance and then come help Ellington, please.”
She hung up before Timbrook could utter so much as a word. She looked back to Ellington one last time before heading toward the tree line.
“Mac!” Ellington’s voice was strained and urgent.
“What?” she hissed at him, sensing precious seconds slipping away while Pinkett was escaping into the woods.
“Sorry,” he grunted. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she said, not realizing just how much she meant it until the words were out of her mouth.
She then turned back toward the trees and took off after Pinkett, her borrowed sidearm drawn and her feet anxious for the chase.
CHAPTER THIRTY
If Aaron Pinkett was indeed responsible for the three climber deaths, he was not doing much in the way of remaining inconspicuous. He made absolutely no attempt to quietly escape. He was barreling through the forest, making it quite easy for Mackenzie to follow after him. The only obstacle was that he was far enough ahead of her to be out of sight; she was having to rely on sound alone to track him. She had to stop after every few strides to make sure she was headed in the right direction.
She had been running no more than thirty seconds when she realized that it might have been foolish to go running after him. Pinkett knew these woods much better than she did. This became eerily evident when she started to see small footpaths breaking away to either side of the route she was currently on.
This told her several things, none of which made her feel especially confident. First, it was evidence that he did indeed know these forests well—so well that he had a tiny network of footpaths behind his ramshackle home. It also made her wonder just where these trails went. She recalled the trail where they had discovered Tim Wyatt’s little love shack.
If a killer had access to this secret network of trails, they could have easy access to any climbing spots in the area. More than that, they would also have convenient escape routes to get away from the scene as quickly as possible.
Mackenzie came to another stop, cocking her head to listen for the sound of Pinkett’s progress through the forest. Again, she located him
easily, down one of the trails that forked off in front of her, hard to the left.
As she followed him, she noticed that the ground was starting to rise up slightly. This close to the mountains and cliffs out at Grand Teton, she supposed it made sense. But once again, it made her feel as if she were walking directly into some sort of planned-out trap. And with every panicked stride he took away from her, the more confident she became that he was guilty of something—even if it was only hammering a federal agent with a baseball bat.
The path she was on forked off again after another thirty seconds or so, but she could easily hear Pinkett clambering through the trees ahead. The incline to the ground grew a bit more severe, but he seemed to be having no trouble keeping pace and outrunning her. It probably also helped that he knew the terrain much better than she did.
The trail bore to the right, the incline getting a bit harsher. Mackenzie was having to hunch over, using her hands to grab outcropped roots to help her along. She stopped for a moment to make sure she could still hear Pinkett’s progress through the forest.
There was nothing…just a bird trilling somewhere nearby. But in terms of footfalls or snapping twigs and low-hanging branches, there was nothing.
Mackenzie gripped the handle of the Glock, assuming he was hiding somewhere. Waiting to strike, waiting to take her out. God only knew what he had hiding out here.
But then she craned her neck up to see what was waiting further ahead. The footpath meandered further up a bit and then leveled off as it cut to the left. There, the trail came to a stop. So did the forest, though it was hard to tell why from where she stood. But as she glanced up, it made sense—and it also made her feel small.
The trail stopped in front of a tall granite wall. It was gray and black, mostly shadowed by the trees along its side from where she stood. She couldn’t tell how far up it went—her angle from the inclined ground made it impossible to tell—but there was one thing she knew for certain.
Pinkett was scaling the wall. She could see a slight blur through the trees, going up the wall. He was moving at a surprising speed, making Mackenzie assume he knew the holds and crevices along that wall just as well as he knew the trails he had just led her down.
For only a single moment, she thought about rushing back to the little building Pinkett called a home. She could give coordinates to the police and someone could probably figure out where this wall led to—probably to level ground that led to a more towering wall or mountain face if she had to guess. Again, from her vantage point, it was impossible to tell.
But Mackenzie had never been a fan of probably.
She continued up the trail, her calves burning again. But it was starting to feel familiar—it was starting to feel good. By the time she neared the top of the hill, she felt almost back to normal, back to the Mackenzie White shape before she’d gotten pregnant.
She glanced up to the rock wall and saw that Pinkett was much further up than she had expected. Twenty-five, maybe thirty feet already.
She aimed her gun up and took aim. She had a clean shot. She could take him anywhere she wanted. But she also knew that if he fell from that height, there was a chance he could break his neck or back and die. And if he was the killer they had been looking for, it was always better to have them alive and able to share their insights and, God forbid, other victims no one knew about.
“Pinkett, stop where you are,” she yelled. “I’ve got a clean shot. You keep climbing, I’ll take it.”
He did not stop. He did not even look down. He was calling her bluff. Apparently, he was thinking the same thing she was: he was better to her alive rather than smeared on the ground.
“Shit,” Mackenzie said.
She approached the wall and looked up. It was quite rough and rugged—the sort that provided plenty of handholds and footrests. But as she reached up for the first grip, she saw the real reason why. There were climber bolts embedded into the wall, easy handholds located at strategic locations in the wall to make the climb easier. Apparently, Pinkett had been practicing on this wall—and had gotten quite good. He was climbing in a way that indicated he basically had the holds and bolts down to a science.
If he was indeed the killer and was struggling with some sort of fear of heights or climbing, she figured this would be a good place to try to quash them. The same route, over and over again, would work wonders.
Mackenzie readied herself, grabbed the first natural handhold, and propelled herself up to grip onto the first installed bolt. Her feet scrambled for purchase and when her right one found a thin little ridge, she panted her toes and pushed herself up to allow her left arm to stretch out and up to the next bolt. It was a little out of her reach, but a yoga-like stretch allowed her to grab it.
She pressed her body against the wall and looked up. Pinkett was well ahead of her, but she was ignoring him for the moment. If she was really going to do this, she was going to have to put everything into it. She studied the bolts; they were easy enough to see, little silver glints protruding from the side of the rock face. From her perspective, they looked like nothing more than little nails, but she knew that they were all roughly the size of a closed fist.
She started to reach up for the next one—slightly to her right—when the memory of her long-ago instructor surfaced.
“You’ll have to come down on your own and get help…”
The blood…the certainty that he was going to die and that it was her fault…
She shook her head defiantly. Nope…not today. She discarded the thought and the memory as she reached up for the next bolt. She pulled herself up, placed her foot on the bolt her hand had just been, and continued to climb upward.
Pinkett was taking notice now. He was at least thirty feet above her but had finally stopped to pay her some attention. When she had been on the ground, he seemed not to care much about her once he made it to the wall. But he seemed hesitant now. She watched as he looked from her and then back down to the ground before starting back up the wall.
Mackenzie followed after him, doing her very best not to look down. Instead, she looked up, trying to determine where, exactly, this wall ended. She had seen no immediate mountains directly behind Pinkett’s little campsite and knew that their chase through the woods had been little more than a mile or so. She was quite sure this was not an actual mountain face of any kind, but could easily be the lead-up to a much more severe climb.
But she couldn’t worry about that. Not yet, anyway. For now, she had to make up time—to try to catch up to Pinkett before he reached the top.
She could hear Pinkett from above her. He seemed to be chuckling a bit, laughing nervously and speaking to himself. “You’re doing it,” he told himself. “You’re actually doing it because you have to do it.” More of that strange laughter followed this.
This unsettled Mackenzie a bit but she climbed on, undeterred.
She was fortunate that it had not rained recently. It allowed her a dry grip on each bolt, though she did have to press her hand against the rock every now and then to remove some of the sweat from her palms. She didn’t really have the convenience of climbing gloves or chalk to assist with her climb.
She was also fortunate that Pinkett was apparently not very confident in his climbing abilities. The bolts were placed in a way that might be featured on an indoor climbing wall for beginners. There were a few places where they were spaced apart in such a way that made her think he might have been trying to challenge himself, but it was easy going for the most part.
She focused on climbing, on switching hands and giving attention to the muscles in her fingers. Her toes were getting a bit sore from placing weight on the bolts and pushing upward, but it wasn’t too bad for right now. She climbed, hand over hand, scaling the wall and refusing to look down. She felt that new memory still trying to steal the show, trying to sabotage her, but she pushed it as far back as she could. She did so by hyper-focusing on the climb, on each and every movement of her body—reinforcing it with the r
eminder that she had no ropes or safety of any kind.
If she fell, she was likely dead.
She glanced up again and saw that she was indeed gaining on him. But she could also see the end of the wall. It came to a ragged stop roughly fifteen feet over Pinkett’s head. Realizing this, Mackenzie couldn’t help herself; she looked down.
The world swam for a moment. She knew she had been climbing fast, but had lost track of time. She figured she had been climbing for perhaps five minutes. Maybe a bit more. But she had not been expecting this.
It was hard to properly gauge from being pressed against the wall, but she guessed she was eighty feet in the air. Probably not quite one hundred feet yet, but close.
Her arms started to tremble at the reality of this. She could feel her heart pumping erratically as fear flooded it. She looked back up one more time and saw that Pinkett’s own movements were slow as well. She estimated that the distance from the very bottom to the top that Pinkett was nearing was somewhere around one hundred and twenty feet.
She took a deep breath and pushed on. The fear could have been crippling, but she didn’t give it room to grow. She kept forging on, from one bolt to the next. Her jaw was clenched and her muscles tightened, as if trying to convince her heart that she had this—that there was no way in hell they were not making it to the top.
That’s when she looked up and saw that Pinkett was at the top. He was pulling himself up, the top portion of his body hidden by the summit as his legs kicked at the air.
Anger flared up, momentarily replacing the fear. Mackenzie climbed on with laser focus. She was so intent on getting to the top that she missed one of the bolts as she reached out for it. Her arm fell forward, dangling in the air for a moment. She clutched the bolt she was holding onto it with her left hand, making sure she retained her balance instead of waving uncontrollably and loosening her grip. It was harder that it would have been if she’d had all of her core strength, but her abs had gone to hell ever since the pregnancy.
