by Jenna Kernan
“Come on Meadow,” called Lupe. “Right now. He won’t shoot you.”
Theron kept the gun aimed at his wife.
Meadow inched closer to Dylan, the only one she seemed to trust at the moment.
“Mama, did you drug me?” she asked.
“Don’t call me that. Not ever again.”
Meadow recoiled as if shot. Dylan wrapped an arm about her as she leaned heavily against him.
“Your father brought you home after his little chippie died. Said he’d be a good boy and help the cause if I just took you in as my own. Ha. Easier said than done.”
“You’re not my mother.”
“Ding-ding.” Lupe’s voice chimed like the bells on a carnival midway.
Why hadn’t Katrina ever told her? She must have known. They all must have known.
“You hate me,” said Meadow.
Lupe rolled her eyes in disgust. “Drama. Always drama.” Lupe said something into the vehicle’s open door. Theron headed for cover, making it behind the stucco wall inside the garage as two men holding pistols left the sedan in unison. They stood flanking the sedan, using the doors for cover. Dylan dragged Meadow behind the golf cart.
Lupe’s orders were clear. “Kill her and the Indian. Get my husband. Don’t kill him.”
Meadow gasped. “It’s her. She did all this.”
From his position, Dylan could see Theron waiting beside the open bay door.
“She’s the head of BEAR,” said Dylan.
Wrangler cast him a glance, his jaw set tight as he nodded. He was caught between his daughter and his wife.
“She took the explosives?”
Theron kept his focus on the approaching gunmen but answered. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“She wants to restore the river.”
“Which river?”
“Shut up, Theron,” said Lupe.
“Your river,” said Theron.
“Ruined with their hydroelectric plants and man-made reservoirs,” said Lupe. “Dammed and filled with speedboats on lakes that never should have existed in the first place. It’s a crime against the earth. Man doesn’t own that river.”
Lupe stepped into the garage and faced her husband.
“Give me the gun, Theron.”
He didn’t. Instead, he moved to open ground, standing between his daughter and his wife.
“You can’t shoot them,” said Theron. “The coroner will see the bullet hole.”
“Not if you’re burned badly enough.”
“They’ll see it, Lupe. Even your connections won’t stop them from an autopsy.”
She gave a half shrug. “They’ve served me well thus far.”
Lupe was used to playing God, thought Dylan.
“If you don’t put down that gun, I’ll leave you here with them,” she said.
Theron now faced the two armed men both with weapons aimed at him.
Without warning, he shot one of the two men in the chest. The wounded man fell as the second man fired. Theron spun.
“Don’t shoot him,” yelled Lupe.
Theron fell to one knee, the gun now trapped between his open hand and the garage floor.
“Get his gun, Joe,” ordered Lupe.
Dylan waited until the remaining gunman stooped in front of Theron to retrieve the pistol. Then Dylan stood and threw his club. It flew end over end and hit the second gunman. Joe managed to get an arm up to shield himself from the worst of it. Dylan rushed him, lifting a putter from the bag as he charged forward. He’d practiced with a war club for many years, and he’d learned hand-to-hand combat in the US Marines. And he knew that he had a chance to break the shooter’s arm before he redirected his aim from the floor. It all depended on how fast his opponent could move and how well he could aim.
Dylan swung the club with all his might.
Chapter Twenty
The blow connected with the raised arm at the same instant Dylan saw the flash from the barrel. There was a burning pain at his neck. The shooter’s arm went slack as both bones in his forearm bent as if on an invisible hinge. The gun clattered to the floor and Lupe scrambled to retrieve it as Dylan’s forward momentum took him into his opponent. Dylan straddled his attacker and Joe screamed in agony as he attempted to splint the broken bones by cradling his injured arm.
Dylan spun in an effort to recover the pistol, but Meadow already held the weapon.
“Theron!” shouted Lupe.
Lupe fell to her knees beside her husband as Meadow’s father sprawled to the cement floor clutching his side.
“You idiot!” Lupe wailed. “Stay with me.”
Lupe fell across her husband’s chest as blood welled bright red from a wound on the left side of Theron’s abdomen.
She lifted her bloodshot eyes to Meadow. “You killed him. With worry and now with this. I should have drowned you in the bathtub when you were a baby.” She looked back to her husband whose breathing was coming in short pants. Clearly he was not dead. “But I didn’t want to hurt him. He’s my only weakness. My compass.” She glared back at the child of her husband’s infidelity. “And you stole him. Part of him was always yours. I hate you for that.”
The hot wind now howled past the building. Dylan knew the sound, like a locomotive. The fire had reached them.
“Meadow, we have to go,” he called.
Meadow dropped to her knees opposite her mother. Dylan could see her father’s chest heaving in a labored, an unnatural rise and fall as his color went from pink to a ghostly gray. Dylan had seen that before, after an IED had taken out the Humvee in front of his, killing all the passengers. Her father was dying.
Dylan left his combatant writhing on the floor and went to Meadow, who had forgotten the gun in her hand, which now rested on her father’s still chest.
“Daddy!” she shrieked.
Lupe reached for the gun that lay in her husband’s cupped hand. Dylan kicked it clear. The weapon skittered across the floor and under the cart beside them.
Dylan took the pistol from Meadow’s hand and lifted her to her feet. He kept the weapon raised and on Lupe as he checked for a pulse at Theron’s throat and found none.
“He’s gone, Meadow.” He shouted to be heard above the shrieking wind.
She screamed and tried to drop back to her knees beside her father, but he pulled her away. Lupe’s black eyes remained fixed on his.
“Come with us if you want to live,” he said.
Lupe shook her head and draped herself over her husband.
“Mama. Come,” cried Meadow.
Lupe closed her eyes against the sight of the child she had tolerated and raised on a diet of bile and neglect. Dylan pulled her to the Mercedes. The flames now rose up behind the house, taking the trees below the roofline and sending black smoke swirling into the sky.
Dylan pushed Meadow into the passenger seat. As he reached the driver’s side, he saw the one Lupe had called Joe carrying the struggling Lupe over his shoulder. His other arm hung limp at his side.
He jumped over his fallen comrade as he ran toward Theron’s white SUV.
Dylan reached the road as Joe got Lupe into her husband’s abandoned Range Rover. He did not know if they had a weapon but preferred not having them behind him, so he reversed the sedan far back on the road as the Range Rover roared backward out of the drive.
“They left him,” she cried, looking back at the open garage and the black smoke that made it impossible to see the two fallen men within.
Dylan jerked the shift into gear and hit the gas.
“He’s gone, Meadow. I’m sorry.”
She covered her hands and wept while Dylan faced the problem before him. The inferno was racing up the hillside and the only escape through the fire.
The houses on the winding road below their original position were already engulfed in flames, the telephone poles burning as flames spiraled upward to the sky. The trunks of the trees burned orange, sending plumes of fire into a scarlet sky.
“Put on your belt, Meadow,” he said.
Ash and burning embers now rained down upon the hood of the sedan, reflecting orange and red as they skittered from the metallic surface to fall to the road.
“I can’t see through the smoke,” she said, clicking her belt across her middle.
Dylan knew the roads to this development because he had driven through them on the way to his appointment with Cheney. That clear day, under bright blue skies, he had seen the houses tucked into the rolling pine-covered hillside. All roads led down to the main highway. And that was why, at every intersection, he headed down. He didn’t know how far up they had been transported or where the fire had jumped the road. But he did know that the highway was below them and that it was the only way out.
Meadow coughed and pointed away from the thick smoke blocking his view.
“That way,” she said, choosing the clear road that led away from the fire.
“I spoke to Ray last night before the party. He said they were letting Pine View Springs go.”
“But all these homes.”
Built in a tinderbox of dry forest that had not had a fire in decades. The ground cover alone had enough fuel to take the development. Add the piñon pines and it was impossible. The very thing that drew them to this place, the green trees and mountain views, was what made the landscape so deadly. And her mother had tossed the match that started it all.
“Have to get to the highway,” he said.
He wondered if her mother’s driver had headed into the fire or away?
The visibility dropped to zero as he steered to where the road should be. The smoke lifted in time for him to see the fire at the shoulder sending yellow flames slithering across the asphalt like some living creature. He accelerated across the stream of fire, praying it did not ignite their gas tank and that the thick black smoke beyond came from a fire beside and not on the highway.
The smoke was so thick it no longer looked like day but some eerie combination of twilight and hell. He flicked off the lights because the beams were reflecting back against the gray smoke. They shot through the fire wall and into a blazing inferno to their right. A car sat before them fully engulfed in flames. Dylan veered around.
The blaze beside them was not orange. This was white with pink flames bursting skyward. He had seen this and it was very bad.
“My God,” said Meadow.
This was the burn-over. The fire sweeping from one side of the road to the other, flying on the winds of its own making. Fire and burning debris whisked from one side to the other. Dylan wondered if his decision to make for the highway had been a mistake. It seemed already too late.
He glanced to Meadow and felt a strangled hope mixed with bitter regret. He could see a life with her if they could escape the flames but he could also see their chances of escape burning to ash.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She lowered her chin as the significance of his words reached her. She did not look frightened or torn with sorrow. She looked pissed.
“Don’t you give up on us. We are getting out of this.”
Dylan nodded and pushed the sedan to greater speeds. He couldn’t see the road at times, but he could see the blackened earth on either side of them.
“It’s been past here,” she called, her voice elated. “The fire.”
Meadow was a fast learner. She understood what that meant.
Nothing left to burn. Not the shells of two-by-fours that had once been luxury housing or the smoldering trunks of denuded trees that had once been green with pine needles or the blackened smoldering frames of automobiles stripped of rubber and glass by the raging wildfire.
They had reached a burn-over.
“Keep going. The highway can’t be far.”
She was right. The smoke now hung above them like the anvil head of a huge electrical storm. But the road before them was clear. Dylan allowed himself to exhale.
“Do you think they got through?” Meadow asked.
Her mother. The woman who had drugged her and dropped her in the path of a wildfire—twice.
“Meadow,” he said.
“I know.” She cradled her head in her hands. “She hated me. Now I understand why.”
Dylan exhaled slowly, trying to unravel the tangle of emotions that came with family. Her mother despised her. But Meadow couldn’t do the same. No matter how awful, that was her mother—or the only mother she had ever known. Perhaps with her father’s death, she might never find the name of her real one.
“I’m sorry, Meadow. And, yes, they might have gotten through.” If they had come down the hillside, he thought.
Ahead, Dylan spotted flashing blue lights and slowed as the emergency vehicles came into view. The roadblock was staffed by a female officer, who wore a yellow vest over her uniform and waved a flashlight to help him see her. Dylan slowed and rolled down his window.
“You both all right?” she asked, bending to speak to Dylan. “Mister, you’re bleeding.”
Dylan touched the wound at his neck, feeling the clotting blood in the gash carved through skin and muscle by the bullet.
“I’m all right. Anyone else come this way recently?”
She shook her head, still staring at his neck.
“That looks bad.”
“I’m on my way to medical now. Can you radio the FBI?”
“FBI? Why?”
“There are two people still up there. One is wanted. The other shot me.”
“You two better pull over.”
Dylan did and answered her questions while accepting some gauze from her medical kit. She let him use her mobile and he got through to Forrest, flipping the call to speaker and then explaining their situation.
“She’s up there?” asked Forrest.
“I think so. Only one way out and we’re at it.”
“So she still might get out?”
“Possibly.”
“Tell the officer not to stop them but to notify me if that Range Rover passes her position. I’ve got people en route. You two head for Flagstaff and our offices there.”
Meadow shook her head and spoke up. “Hospital. He’s been shot in the neck and there’s a gash on the back of his head.”
“You better drive, Meadow,” said Forrest. “I’m sending help. They’ll meet you.”
Dylan returned the phone to the officer who did not detain them.
They switched seats. Meadow drove them toward help and they were intercepted twenty miles outside of the city by an ambulance. Dylan’s headache had only gotten worse and the smoke and the blood loss made him woozy and sick to his stomach. He needed help to stand and to get onto the gurney. Meadow abandoned the sedan to ride with him to the hospital. He didn’t remember much of it, just the IV going in.
Meadow sat beside him, her face smudged with ash and soot. But they had made it out. Dylan closed his eyes and let himself drift. But drifting was dangerous. You never knew which way the current would take you.
He heard Meadow calling him back, but he just couldn’t summon the strength.
* * *
AT THE FLAGSTAFF HOSPITAL, they took Dylan through a double door and into Emergency, where she could not follow. She called Jack and told him what had happened. He said they would send his family and tribal leadership.
She was treated and released to the custody of the FBI. Neither Field Agent Forrest nor Field Agent Cassidy Cosen arrived to interview her. Instead she was grilled by Special Agent Virginia Bicher. It became apparent quickly that she did not believe one word Meadow said.
“I want a lawyer,” she said.
“You’re not under arrest, Miss Wrangler. We’re just investigating a crime you allege was committed.”
“Did you find my mother?”
“Let me ask the questions, please.”
After that Meadow closed her mouth. Following another barrage of questions she would not answer, she stood up to leave.
“We’re not finished yet,” said Agent Bicher.
“I’m finished.” Meadow walked out, expecting to be arrested or detained. But they let her go. She still wore her silver satin dress, now torn, soot covered and smelling of smoke. She had no shoes and her stockings had run at both knees. It was this picture that was captured by the news media waiting outside FBI headquarters. Meadow was forced to return to the lobby. Then she faced a dilemma. She had no money. No credit cards. She called her sister Katrina for help.
Katrina came in a limo ninety minutes later, having driven up from Phoenix with a driver and a bodyguard, who plowed a path through the reporters and herded Meadow into the backseat where her sister was waiting.
“What did you do now?” Katrina said by way of a greeting. “Mom is furious. She could barely speak to me.”
“Mom’s alive?”
“What?”
“You talked to Mom?” Meadow felt she had dropped down the rabbit hole again. “When?”
“She said you called Dad out of bed last night and you two took off to film the fire.” Katrina waved a hand before her face. “God, you reek.”
The bodyguard climbed into the passenger seat and glanced back at Katrina. She nodded.
“Go,” she said, and then touched the button to lift the privacy shield between them and the men seated in front of them.
The limo pulled away from the throng of photographers still snapping photos.
“Why did you go back up there?” asked Katrina.
Meadow shook her head in denial. “I didn’t. I was drugged.”
“You mean you drank too much.”
“I had two glasses of wine.”
“More like six. I was there, remember.”
Meadow’s skin began to crawl. “Take me to the hospital.”
“More reporters there. Mom said to bring you home. She actually said to leave you, but I talked her out of that. You can thank me later.”
