by Sarah Graves
A disparaging snort escaped her. “Funny, last time I looked a set of works wouldn’t roll. Spoon, lighter…”
In the street, the last few diehards who’d been sticking it out had begun getting out of Dodge, cars and trucks packed with people, belongings, and pets. One guy had four snowmobiles piled like cordwood in his pickup bed, a child’s tricycle tied to the top.
Dylan shrugged. “Hey, maybe he cooked the heroin back at the place he got it from.”
More likely the uniforms had missed the needle the first time around; nobody liked crawling through rotting garbage in the dark.
They piled into Chevrier’s vehicle; he knew the way better, and anyway, he insisted on driving. On the dark country highway he sped toward the fire zone, its glow painting clouds that were themselves flickering with lightning.
Lizzie stared out the window. “Where’d they say they’d seen her? The woman with bandaged hands?”
What had smelled like a house fire turned out to be three of them, all burning unattended as stretched-thin crews turned their attention to unlost causes.
“Up the Ridge Road.” Chevrier snapped on the lights and siren and hit the gas harder. “Where we found Gemerle.”
“You’ve relayed all the info? About Gemerle’s body, the hole in the ground and all, to the team looking for Tara?”
The state and federal people, she meant. “I told them,” he confirmed. “They already got Gemerle’s body down.”
He swerved around a cardboard box stuffed full of clothes that had probably fallen from someone’s trailer. “But before they could go back and do a thorough search or even process the scene properly, that whole area was in flames again,” he added.
“No one’s been there since? Not even looking for Tara?” She fell back against the passenger seat. “Jesus. So all along, you mean we’ve been the only ones who’ve—”
“Lizzie, it’s an active fire zone,” said Dylan. “What’re they supposed to do, pull on their asbestos suits?”
“Can it, you two.” The Blazer sped up the paved part of the Ridge Road, then hit the dirt section, bouncing over rocks and through deep ruts. Drizzle turned the windshield’s thin coating of ash to muddy smears, while thunder boomed overhead.
“Big rain headed this way on radar,” Chevrier said, flipping on the windshield washer. “Whether we get it in time to help us, though, or whether it misses us entirely is still anyone’s guess.”
The gear heaped in Chevrier’s rear passenger area left barely enough room for Dylan to hunker back there: a fire extinguisher, some respirator masks and goggles, heavy gloves, and a rugged pair of high leather boots, their laces flopping.
“Hudson, hand up one of those fire blankets,” Chevrier said. “Silvery packages, they’ve got black nylon straps on ’em. Deputy Snow, you put one on, and you too, Hudson. And grab that go-bag that’s back there.”
Dylan rummaged in the gear heap. “What about you?”
“Each fire blanket’s big enough for a couple of people,” the sheriff replied. “Probably we won’t need ’em at all.”
He steered abruptly around an especially murderous-looking rut. “But if we do, remember this was all your idea. We run into trouble looking for this girl, one of you two heroes is gonna save the boss, okay?”
He braked the Blazer to a halt amid the skeletal remains of trees, low ash heaps that had been brush thickets, and a line of black charcoal sticks that were all that remained of fence posts.
As they got out, Dylan’s cell phone thweeped. “Yeah. Yeah, I understand,” he said, then noticed her watching and looked away.
Avoiding eye contact. Which was weird. Dylan could look you in the eye and make you believe night was day. “But listen, we’ve got kind of a situation here,” he said, then listened some more.
“Okay. Yeah, do that, will you? Not until we get there. Okay, man. Hey, thanks a lot.” He thumbed the phone off.
“What?” she demanded. He still wouldn’t look at her.
“Bangor PD’s got an unidentified body. One of those found-in-a-wooded-area deals.”
“And?” Her heart thumped. “Dylan, what kind of a—”
Chevrier led them toward a cleared patch where a burn barrel brimming with fast-food wrappers and drink cups stood surrounded by tire tracks in the dust, a staging area for the fire crews.
Dylan met her gaze finally. “Lizzie, it’s a little girl. Blond hair, blue eyes…and there are no current missing persons reports for a child like that. Not anywhere in New England.”
She wondered if not being surprised by that meant she was getting too calloused, even for a cop. But she knew what he meant; that the dead girl might be Nicki, her murdered sister’s lost child. The one she’d been searching for.
The one she’d given up her whole life for. Dylan took a deep breath, let it out. “Lizzie, when we get done with this here, they want you to come and look. Because…”
“Yeah,” she heard herself say dully. “Yeah, I understand.”
“Okay, both of you, listen.” Chevrier stood backlit by the Blazer’s headlights. “We walk from here.”
The rough, unpaved road had deteriorated with the passage of volunteers and fire vehicles; there was no point trying to drive on. Besides, this kind of search needed boots on the ground.
“We’ll start by the hole where we think the girl was buried,” he said. “From there, it’s half a mile to the top of the hill.”
Lightning flashed so close by that they could hear its deadly crackle. The glare turned the burnt, ruined landscape to a black-and-white disaster scene, as barren looking as the moon.
Then came the thunderclap, so huge it seemed to suck all the air out of the Lizzie’s lungs. Chevrier’s face set itself into a bleak expression as they started off.
But after a few minutes: “I’ve shot deer back here,” he said.
Lizzie stepped into another rut, her ankle turning painfully. She bit back a yelp and trudged on, strafing the burnt grass and low bushes with her flashlight but seeing nothing.
“Yeah?” Dylan asked interestedly. “What, with a rifle?”
“Nope. Bow hunting.” Chevrier held a flashlight, too, and she noticed that the safety strap on his duty weapon was unfastened.
“Birds, I’ll use a shotgun.” They reached the place where the road ran out. Ahead, charred trees steamed in the mist.
Chevrier had called in their location before leaving the Blazer, a precaution she’d thought was overkill at the time, but now she was glad for it.
“But for the big game I figure I should give the animal a sporting chance,” Chevrier said.
Then he stopped. “Okay, here’s the hole.” The coffinlike box they’d seen earlier had been reduced to blackened bits; as Dylan had said, sometime on Thursday the fire had been through here.
“ ’Course,” Chevrier said, moving on, “with bow hunting, you might have to track the animal a way after you hit it, if you miss your kill shot.”
It was why he was so familiar with this land, she realized: He’d walked it. The hunting chatter was his attempt to put her and Dylan at ease in what he knew was a foreign environment to them.
I just hope we’re not the ones being hunted now, she thought suddenly, and where had that idea come from? The prickling on the back of her neck was her imagination, surely.
“Rifle shot’ll bring ’em down by the shock of its impact,” Chevrier mused aloud, “but your arrow might not. Animal’s got to bleed out before it falls and while it does, it’s running.”
He stopped again, aiming the flashlight around. Behind them and downhill, the long, pale cones of the Blazer’s headlights stabbed the night. The smoke-billows drifting on the uneven ground were like ghosts, creeping furtively along.
Dylan stopped suddenly. “You hear that?”
They stood silent. Below in the distance a huge fire still burned, flames licking toward the sky.
“I didn’t hear anything,” said Lizzie finally.
But Chevrier ha
d already turned away to follow his flashlight toward something she couldn’t see.
“I did,” Dylan insisted stubbornly. “It sounded like…”
A stick snapped, and then another. She turned toward where Chevrier had been heading just as he vanished among some charred birch saplings, their trunks falling to ash as he passed.
She hurried to follow. The crackling from somewhere out ahead was probably just him stepping on burnt stuff, she told herself.
Probably. Dylan’s voice made her jump. “Somebody’s out here.”
“Uh-huh.” There were other explanations, though: burnt-crisp branches whickering, or animals disturbed by the fire, trying to find some safe place to rest.
An explosion of sparks lit the night, then a flash. Finally came the dull boom that meant a propane tank had gone off like a bomb somewhere.
“Pretty close to town,” Dylan observed. In the darkness they could just make out the lights of Bearkill, gauzy in the smoke. No fire showed there yet.
“Dylan…” The mental picture of a small body in the Bangor morgue kept assailing her.
He understood. “I don’t know, Lizzie. It might be Nicki. But then again it might not.”
“Hey!” Chevrier called out of the darkness, and when they found him again they fell into line behind him; he at least seemed to have some idea of where they were going.
They walked through the remains of scrub trees, now puddles of dust. Burnt thickets spread out flat, whitish gray. Then:
“Here.” Chevrier’s voice came from beyond a miraculously untorched stand of undergrowth. In the distance, explosions went off like firecrackers popping, but bigger, as they pushed through the brambles to where he stood.
“This way,” said Chevrier. “There’s a shed up ahead, as long as we’re here we’d better look. But then it’s time to leave.”
The rank air thickened, each breath full of a gritty stench. Either the wind had turned or the fire was getting too close for comfort again.
The latter, it turned out; Chevrier cursed as yellow flames jumped up in front of him, snap-crackling suddenly.
“Damn,” said Dylan, “let’s just cut this short, okay? This is getting way too—”
A sound sent her hand to her duty weapon—damn, I should’ve brought both guns—before she knew what she’d heard. But in the same instant something slammed into her head; her vision blurred, her knees weakened, and she went down.
Then came the hard, concussive crack of a gunshot. When her sight cleared, a figure loomed over her. She struggled to get up but before she could, the figure aimed a gun at her.
Her own gun. She grabbed at her duty holster, its safety strap unsnapped in imitation of Chevrier, and found it empty.
“Lie down.” The butt of another weapon stuck out from their attacker’s waistband. The figure’s sooty clothes and ash-smeared face nearly obscured her identity. “Do it now.”
Nearly but not quite. Jane Crimmins’s hands were bandaged, only her fingers poking through the white gauze wrappings. But the injury didn’t seem to be slowing her down much.
“Lie down,” she repeated, waving the gun briefly at Dylan and Chevrier, on his knees in the ash-strewn dust, before targeting Lizzie again.
“That’s right,” Jane said. The rock she’d hit Lizzie with lay by her feet, blood-smeared.
“Now, don’t any of you move a goddamn inch.”
—
“Tell us where she is, Jane. Just tell us, and we can sort everything else out later.”
But the woman who’d ambushed them had no intention of telling anyone anything. Lizzie caught Dylan’s eye.
His answering glance confirmed her own assessment. They’d seen that same expression on other people: desperate, deranged. This woman was ready to fire the weapon she held.
Ready and able. They knelt, then lay facedown. “Now put your hands up behind you where I can get at them,” Jane said.
She looped some kind of plastic material around Lizzie’s wrists and slip-knotted it; a plastic bag, maybe, Lizzie thought.
Whatever. It was an effective restraint. Then Jane seized the rest of the guns and phones. “All right, on your feet again.”
Jane waved her weapon, lit by the glow of Chevrier’s fallen flashlight. She’d tossed the rest of the guns out into the night along with the comm gear; at her urging, Dylan and Lizzie sat up, then made it to their knees and onto their feet.
Only Chevrier stayed prone, and after a moment Lizzie saw the dark stain spreading on his jacket. “He’s hit.”
She moved toward him but stopped short when Jane jerked the gun at her. “Get him up,” Jane said.
She angled her head at Chevrier. “And turn off that damn flashlight of his.”
Dylan half turned with a cooperative smile. “You bet, just get these ties off my wrists, and…”
“Yeah, right, because I’m so stupid. Stomp on it if you have to, but get over there and put that light out or I’ll blow this bitch’s head right off her…”
“What’s this all about, Jane?” Lizzie crouched and clumsily kneed Chevrier’s flashlight switch to the off position, hoping he would have sense enough to go on playing dead.
The trouble was, she wasn’t sure he was playing. “Don’t ask questions,” Jane snarled as the wind shifted, the ash drifting out of the sky changing from feathery fragments to—
Hot. Those ashes are…
They were embers blowing from the wildfire now burning very nearby. Pinpricks of heat peppered Lizzie’s neck; bright flames munched the underbrush only a few yards away.
She glanced at Dylan again as fire’s hot breath gusted in her face. “Is Tara still alive?”
A kick to the thigh rewarded her question; she stumbled and nearly fell. But it was worth it; while Jane focused on Lizzie, Dylan crouched swiftly, managing to snatch something up in his fingers even with his hands still tied behind him.
Whatever it was, he’d been lying atop it to hide it, Lizzie realized as a nearby cedar tree went up with a dazzling whoosh.
Lizzie hesitated. “What about him?” Chevrier lay motionless.
“Leave him.” Down on the main road, the whirl of a dashboard beacon mingled confusingly with the fire’s glow.
That backup call Chevrier had made, Lizzie realized. She bent to Chevrier. A cold touch of metal on her neck froze her.
“Alive? Or is he…?”
“No. He’s dead,” Lizzie said flatly. A rush of fury fueled her sudden spring upward, her weight automatically shifting onto her left foot and her right kicking back hard.
She spun to deliver a head-butt but Jane danced away. Dylan lunged but she avoided him too, and she had that damn gun.
Soon this whole area would be ablaze, all the remaining unburnt fuel fully primed by heat to go up in another, even more annihilating wave of flames. And the squad’s headlights were still only halfway up the ridge.
Jane’s gun thrust hard into Lizzie’s ribs. Another cedar tree flamed up like a torch and for an instant it seemed that all the oxygen had been sucked out of the world; then came the new rush of heat.
“Walk,” ordered Jane. “Or stay here if you want.” She jammed the gun into Lizzie’s side again. “Is that what you want?”
But Lizzie couldn’t answer. A sharp, unexpected pain knocked the breath out of her suddenly. The squad car topped the hill, the driver raking the area with his vehicle’s spotlight but unable to see the Blazer from his position.
Slowly, the car turned. A trickle of panic went through Lizzie as it moved away. She sucked in a breath. With the air came another thrilling jolt of pain, as if that last hard shove with the gun had cracked a rib.
“Like I said, you can stay,” Jane repeated unpleasantly. “But I’ll have to shoot you first.”
“Come on, Lizzie,” said Dylan resignedly, and if she hadn’t known him so well she’d have thought he’d given up.
But Dylan never gave up, and now she glimpsed what was hidden behind his back. The gun stabbed Lizzie�
�s ribs again, and this time through the agony she could feel the tension in Jane’s hand, the way just one extra twitch would jerk the trigger through its pressure point, discharging the weapon.
“Now walk.” Another shove, bringing with it another crashing thunderbolt of pain, nearly dropped Lizzie to her knees.
“Don’t you get any dumb ideas, either,” Jane added to Dylan. “You rush me, I’ll shoot her. Get it?”
Dylan nodded slowly as the flames cavorted nearer, sucking in oxygen, exhaling fiery death. The cop car that Lizzie had set her hopes on was now stopped entirely, maybe while the driver called in for help on the location.
No point, Lizzie decided, in trying to yell to the cop, even if she could draw enough breath to do it. Just getting any air in at all was a struggle.
Pierced my lung, she realized with dawning horror, a broken rib has a sharp end on it and when she jabbed me—
And when a lung got pierced, it didn’t heal up by itself. It collapsed, and if you didn’t get quick medical help…But with that gun suddenly in her side again, she had no options left.
“Come on, Lizzie,” said Dylan again. “We’d better just do as she says.”
In the glow of the relentlessly approaching flames, his gaze met hers. It was a look she’d seen before, perhaps over a couple of wineglasses late at night.
Or in her bed. And he’d been lying then, too. Only this time it wasn’t Lizzie that he was lying to.
The thought got Lizzie moving, her breath coming in short, agonized gulps. The squad car reversed and slowly turned back toward them.
“Hurry up,” Jane ordered. They reached a narrow trail, well used and seemingly without tripping hazards.
Still, almost at once Dylan stumbled.
Jane spun toward him. “I’ll shoot her, I swear—”
She would, too. It was in Jane’s voice, strained nearly to the breaking point. No matter that a gunshot would alert that cop down there; Jane wasn’t making clear decisions now, only reacting to her own distress.
As Lizzie thought this, the emergency flare that Dylan had been clutching behind his back—from the go-bag that Chevrier had told Dylan to take, Lizzie recalled suddenly—erupted with a yellow-white sizzle of brilliance. At once the distant squad car’s lights glared on, static from its radio crackling through the night. “All units…”
