by Jon Land
Farlowe was pointing toward the airfield that occupied the area beyond the last row of buildings. He led Kristen toward it and inspected the runways when they got there, apparently with little satisfaction.
“Concrete this firm doesn’t leave signs like that good ol’ roadbed that got us here,” he said, ruffling his foot through the layer of dirt that had accumulated. “Could be some planes been landing. Could be they haven’t.” The sheriff turned suddenly toward Kristen. “You say that phone call came at night?”
“Morning, actually. Around three A.M. your time.”
“Now that’s interesting.” He moved to the edge of the main runway and followed the line of lights, stooping to check each one. “Bulbs are still present. Seems strange folks would abandon a base and leave the bulbs behind … .”
“They could have forgot.”
“Didn’t let me finish, little lady. See, the thing is these bulbs don’t show much dirt and their filaments are barely worn. I’d say they been inserted sometime in the past month.”
“Trucks and planes,” Kristen muttered. “Then something could have been flown out of here!”
“Or flown in. To be loaded onto those trucks, or unloaded from them. Either way, as I figure it, could be your brother got close enough to get a real good look at the proceedings.”
Farlowe swung and fixed his gaze on the hillsides almost hidden from view by the tight clutter of buildings enclosing the airfield.
“Except he couldn’t have seen anything from up there in those hills. The trucks, yeah, but not the planes. Means he musta come down and entered the base. Maybe got to use his brand-new camera to record what they was holding.”
“But we don’t know he was here at all,” Kristen reminded, afraid of what it meant if David had been inside. “Without the tape, we can’t prove anything.”
“Might not need the tape to prove it, little lady.”
“Your brother was ‘bout the age I was when I started out with the Rangers,” Farlowe picked up, as they walked across Old Canyon Road toward the nearby foothills that had once been rich in silver. “Back then, if it was me, I’d want to park my jeep out of sight, but within fast reach. Like to know I could get out in a hurry if I had to. ’Cept now I don’t do nothin’ in a hurry, save for drawing Uncle Earp’s Peacemaker. That’s something that don’t leave you so fast.”
They trudged along the hillsides, covering paths wide enough to handle the Jeep Wrangler. Every time Farlowe found a spot to his liking, he stopped and kicked the dirt about. A few times he leaned over and ran his hand through it. Mostly he just walked with thumbs cocked in his pockets.
“Here,” he said all of a sudden, thrusting a finger downward even before making a careful check of the spot. “Your brother’s jeep, or another damn like it, was parked right here.” He eased himself into a crouch to point out what he had picked up to Kristen. “Sunken tire marks. And here, in these ruts, this is where your brother hauled ass out.” His finger came up and pointed down Old Canyon Road. “That way.”
“Toward Grand Mesa.”
Farlowe nodded and held up a handful of dirt. “See this? Matches the dirt I found stuck in the treads of his jeep’s tires.”
“He got as far as the motel in town and called me.”
“Seems to be the case,” Farlowe affirmed somberly.
“He was trying to tell me what he saw happening on the base.”
“Yup,” Farlowe said, already in motion up a swirling path that cut between adjacent hillsides.
At the top the gap widened to create a gully that provided a clear view into the front of Miravo Air Force Base. As Farlowe had suggested, though, the row of buildings kept the outlying runways hidden from sight. Kristen watched the old sheriff check the dirt with his eyes and then his hands.
“Nothing up here to suggest this is where your brother perched himself,” he said, “but it’s the perfect hiding place. I’m betting he was here. Only thing we don’t know now is—”
Kristen saw the expression on Farlowe’s crusty face change, as if a shadow was suddenly cast over it. In a blur of motion difficult for even a young man, he had torn the Peacemaker from its holster and fired two shots that whizzed by Kristen’s side toward the hillside behind her. There was a gasp and she turned to see a man holding a rifle crumpling, his hands reaching for his midsection. In the next instant Farlowe threw himself toward her. The impact took both of them to the ground.
Crack!
A bullet sliced a chasm cut out of the hillside directly where Kristen’s chest had been. A series of muted echoes followed, and more dirt and shale showered over them.
“Yup,” muttered Farlowe, Peacemaker still in hand, “this is the place, all right.”
More gunshots rang out from both south and west, then east again as another man replaced the one the sheriff had shot.
“I’d say they got us surrounded, little lady,” Farlowe said after Kristen assumed a sitting position next to him in the cover of the small gully.
He held the Peacemaker near his chest.
“And I only got three bullets left. Rest are in the truck, ’long with the radio.”
Kristen found herself not only terrified but also deeply saddened. The fact that they had been ambushed by men with the obvious intention of killing them did not bode well for the fate of her brother. Up till now she had been clinging to the hope he had simply stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and was being held prisoner or might still be on the run. Now she realized whoever was behind what David had uncovered, what he had witnessed inside the base, would stop at nothing to prevent their secret from being revealed. If they were trying to kill her and Farlowe, then …
The sheriff saved her the trouble of completing the thought. “They’ll be closing in on us now,” he said as soon as the gunshots had abated. “Know they got us boxed in. No reason for them to rush.”
“What can we do?”
“I could make a run for the truck, or …”
Farlowe, seemed to change his mind in midsentence. He sniffed at the air, a narrow smile stretching across his lips.
“ … we wait.”
“Wait? Wait for wh—”
And that’s when she felt it, just as a slight wisp of wind at first, but then a gush against her face a few breaths later.
Another brown-out! Duncan Farlowe had sniffed the air and known it was coming!
“Cover your eyes and mouth as best you can,” he instructed as swirls of dust began to whip about in dozens of mini-tornadoes. The air darkened with them. The sun was already gone. “Take my hand and follow me when I pull you.”
Kristen had her sleeve over her eyes. “Follow you?”
“Yup. I know these hills as well as I know my own face. I’m figuring our gunslingin’ friends don’t have quite that advantage.”
The blowing dirt filled his mouth and turned his last few words to little more than garble. He spat it out and then tied the red bandanna that had circled his neck over the lower part of his face.
“Come on!” Farlowe rasped from behind his bandanna, tilting his wide-brimmed hat low to better shield his eyes.
He took the steps of the hillside blindly but surely. Kristen thought she had lost her bearings when they started off, then realized they weren’t retracing their route down the path toward the truck; they were heading south further out into the hills toward the abandoned silver mines.
Kristen heard gunshots crackling in the brown air, fired wildly. There were distant sounds of men shouting. Then came a yell from what seemed not more than fifteen feet away. She felt Farlowe tense and stopped a step behind him. She managed to open her eyes enough to make out a shape feeling its way sightlessly almost right before them. Farlowe’s Peacemaker roared once. The shape was gone, its wail lost to the howling wind that swept the dirt into a heavy brown blanket tossed over the day.
The sheriff had only two bullets left now. He pulled Kristen on again a bit faster, aware that the distinctive roar of the Peacemaker wou
ld draw the remainder of the enemy force to the area. She could tell from his pace that this didn’t seem to bother him. In fact, she could almost sense it was exactly what he wanted. The brown-out was theirs to use for as long as it lasted. The one they had encountered on the drive here had lingered five, maybe six minutes, Kristen recalled. That meant there were six or so left.
Farlowe steered Kristen around a narrow hole in the ground leading into one of the hundreds of abandoned silver mines that were like pockmarks on the land. He angled to the right and brought her to a halt directly over the rim of a larger entryway.
“We’re going down!” he tried to scream over the wind.
“What?”
“Follow me!”
He pulled her down with him and eased her to the rear of the shaft’s head just before it sloped forward into the vein. At first she thought they were going to hide in here or perhaps even use the vein as an escape route. But Farlowe moved away from her and perched himself right beneath the shaft’s rim at ground level, listening for whatever sounds of approach the brown-out would let through.
Something made Farlowe tense. He cocked the Peacemaker’s hammer and waited, propped up on his toes. A few seconds later, he bounced upward.
The cracking in his knees was audible above even the swirling sounds of the brown-out. So again was the Peacemaker as it barked twice.
Farlowe turned back Kristen’s way and pulled the bandanna down from his mouth.
“That’s another down. Let’s go.”
Kristen could see how hard he was breathing, the strain draining the color from his eyes. She approached Farlowe, and once again he grasped her jacket. The Peacemaker was holstered, empty.
“This is where it gets tough, little lady. Just watch my feet and follow them. Keep your eyes down!”
And then the bandanna was back over his mouth and they climbed out from the mine’s entrance.
Farlowe headed off toward the southwest this time, the world a brown curtain before them. Kristen could taste the dirt in her mouth. She felt as though the insides of her throat had been coated with ground-up chalk. She couldn’t swallow. It was as if she had taken a bite out of a desert.
Farlowe’s tightening grasp alerted her to employ extra caution just before she made out a rolling collection of foothills that were dotted with mine entrances. Only narrow slopes of turf separated one shaft from another. This area had been bled dry of life and silver. The land had died. The holes, deep and ominous, were lesions on its corpse.
Farlowe led Kristen behind a slight rise. He pressed down on her shoulders as a signal to crouch behind the cover it provided.
“Stay here,” he ordered, holding his bandanna away from his mouth to make sure she heard him.
She tried to ask him what he was going to do, but the caked-up air stole her words. Farlowe disappeared into the brown cloud, and Kristen peered around the rise to follow him with her eyes as best as she could.
She locked her gaze onto the sheriff’s shape and refused to blink. He was retracing their steps, heading straight back toward the enemy. The brown-out had begun to abate slightly, enough for slivers of clear air to appear. Kristen noticed the approaching shapes when they crossed these slivers: three, she thought, though it could have been four. She looked back toward Farlowe. He was gone.
Then his shape reappeared in her line of vision fifty feet away. He was running, a dark blur amidst the storm. Kristen heard shouts, then gunfire crackled. The approaching shapes that had been coming her way turned round and charged toward Farlowe.
A scream sounded as one of them seemed to drop off the world, simply disappearing.
Into one of the mine shafts.
Farlowe darted through the brown-out again and a second rapid burst of gunfire sounded. Another enemy gave chase, and he too fell with a scream as a different shaft welcomed him. It was like being caught in a treacherous mine field, Kristen realized, and Farlowe was using himself as bait to lure the enemy into its reach. Kristen pulled back behind the rise to wipe her eyes and then slid round it again to find out what was happening.
One of the enemy was coming straight for her. As she watched, though, the man suddenly turned away and steadied his rifle into the storm.
For Farlowe, no doubt!
Kristen lunged to her feet and charged into the dirt-clogged air. She struck the man as he pulled the trigger, and an errant barrage stitched across the sky. He wobbled on his feet but didn’t go down. Kristen clung tight and he turned the butt of his rifle on her and smashed her in the shoulder.
Stars exploded before Kristen’s eyes. She knew the pain was there, but refused to feel it. She wrapped herself tighter around the gunman and tried to find his rifle’s trigger to keep him from pulling it. He hammered her under the chin with another blow and then rammed her in the sternum. Kristen lost her grasp. She sank to her knees and fell over on her side gasping for air, which allowed the storm to flood into her lungs and choke her on dirt.
The man struggled to tilt his gun down to take aim at her. He had managed to angle the barrel Kristen’s way when the shape of Duncan Farlowe lunged at him through the swirl of the storm. Kristen saw that Farlowe was holding the Peacemaker by the barrel. The handle swooped sideways and down, smacking into the back of the gunman’s skull. His head snapped forward. He staggered and tried to turn Farlowe’s way.
The sheriff cracked him with the handle again, this time right over the bridge of his nose. Kristen heard the bones mash and watched the gunman keel over backwards like a felled tree, his face reduced to pulp. Not taking any chances, Farlowe tore the gun from his grasp and held it before him as he approached Kristen.
“Nice work, little lady,” he said through his bandanna as he lifted her to her feet.
Kristen realized her chin was swollen, the pain rising from a dull ache to a throbbing agony that made her feel faint. She couldn’t move her mouth, even if the brown-out would have let her speak.
They stopped over the body of the man Farlowe had dropped with the butt of his pistol. The man’s eyes had locked sightlessly opened. The sheriff reached down and checked his pockets for identification, but found none. His gaze slid about the pockmarked land through the clearing air. The two men she had seen fall into shafts remained unaccounted for, and he kept the rifle steady in case they reappeared.
“I think we seen enough here,” Farlowe told Kristen and led her away.
Back in town she insisted they stop back at the motel. Only when another search of David’s room failed to turn up the missing camcorder did she accompany Farlowe back to his office so he could tend to her wounds.
“I was a medic in World War II,” he explained. “Then again in Korea. Some things you don’t forget.” He swabbed her gashed cheek with alcohol. “I’ll call you a doctor if you want, but nothing’s broke and I don’t think this gotta be stitched.”
“No,” she managed painfully. “The less people that know I’m here, the better.”
“My thoughts exactly, little lady.”
“I’m more worried about something else, Sheriff: they could have identified you.”
“If any of them survived, that is.”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
Farlowe winked at her. “I can take care of myself just fine. Got just enough Earp blood in my veins. And where the blood leaves off,” he continued, tapping the handle of the Colt Peacemaker he had reloaded as soon as they’d reached his car back outside Miravo, “there’s always this.”
He placed a gauze pad gingerly over the wound and taped it down. Then he adjusted the way Kristen was holding the ice bag atop her head.
She looked at him with grim resolve. “We’ve got to find out what happened to my brother after he called me from the motel. We know now where he was before.” She swallowed hard. “Those men in the hills could have been the same ones who …”
Farlowe leaned over and grasped her shoulders. “Nothin’ you can do on that account. Leave it to me.”
“I’
ve come this far.”
“You want to help.”
“More than that.”
“Then start lookin’ at this thing a different way. Could be the trail your brother’s left has taken us as far as it can. Leaves us only with finding out who’s behind whatever he saw happening at Miravo.” He paused briefly. “Now I got to figure you got friends who can help on that account.”
“How?”
“Way you handle yourself, for one thing. The fact that I saw your plane ticket from Washington stickin’ out your bag for another. Everyone there has friends.”
Kristen shrugged. “Granted,” she said, thinking of Senator Jordan.
“Use your friends, little lady. You got any old favors, call ’em in. Never gonna be a better time to do it.”
The phone rang and Farlowe moved back to his desk to answer it. Kristen didn’t bother listening, too busy rechecking her wounds. It still hurt to talk and her head pounded with each breath. Similarly, every inhale sent a bolt of pain surging through her bruised sternum. In sum, she was a wreck. The last thing she was looking forward to was the long plane ride home, especially since she’d be leaving Grand Mesa with matters even more unsettled than when she had arrived.
She looked up again suddenly to find Duncan Farlowe standing right before her. He had put his wide-brimmed hat back on and a grim expression was stretched over his features.
“We gotta take a ride, little lady.”
Kristen came slowly out of her chair. “What? What is it?”
“Nobody’s sure yet, but it ain’t good.”
“Maybe you oughta let me do this,” Sheriff Farlowe offered when they reached the river. “If it’s David, I’ll know it from that picture you showed me.”
Two kids had spotted the body while walking along the riverbank. The highway patrol had already pulled it from the river by the time Farlowe parked his truck as close to the bank as he could. Kristen was out of the truck before him and on her way down to the bank. Farlowe hustled to get ahead of her and held her back.
