Never Far Away

by Michael Koryta

  And now each kick was achieving less, and each ounce of water that saturated the pack dragged her shoulders lower. She was doing exactly what you should never do in a river: aiming with her head. She should be floating with her feet out and her head back so any collision with rock wasn’t led by the skull. She couldn’t afford to do that, though; on her back, she thought the current would sweep her past the rock before she could get a hand on it, and then she’d be shot through the churning stretch of white water and right out into the open above the pond, visible to anyone who waited.

  A limb scraped her boot, and above her, keeping pace, Tessa barked and barked. If Leah could have drawn a deep enough breath to shout, she’d have told the dog to shut up, please, please, just shut up, but there wasn’t enough air for shouting and there wasn’t enough time to allow distraction. The water raced and the rock rose and she rode the current and saved her final kicks for the place where she would need them the most.

  Just ahead of the rock, the water below her seemed to strengthen, as if outstretched hands had reached up to snag her, a hard pull down and to the right. She kicked then, kicked furiously, defying gravity, fighting up and left, up and left, up and—

  Bam.

  The impact was worse than she’d anticipated. She’d managed to get the pack up just high enough to cushion the blow, but still her face snapped forward and ripped across the wet nylon, shredding her cheek as she released the pack with her left hand and scrabbled for purchase on the rock, feeling her body turn and the current catch her again, the bloodied face and the screaming shoulder pain not enough, she was going to miss it anyhow, be swept right by.

  A handhold, thick as a tennis ball, brushed hard and sharp against her palm.

  She held tight. Pulled. Felt the current release her grudgingly, with a final, ferocious swirl around her aching ankles as she pulled free, as if reminding her that she’d won the battle but not the war.

  She lay facedown on the stone with the sun on her back. Gasped in, rasped out. Felt the head-to-toe throb of that collision with the rock, her muscles and nerves all yelling out to one another that, yes, they’d gotten it over here too, like neighbors after a lightning strike.

  She dumped the pack in a crevice high enough to keep it from being swept away, then pushed her hair back from her face. Her palm swirled with diluted blood. Her cheek had been torn open, and that was with the backpack absorbing most of the impact. If she’d hit it head-on…

  But she hadn’t.

  She was right where she wanted to be.

  Leah Trenton climbed up the rock and started to free the rifle strap so she could swing the gun around and use the scope. Then her head cleared the rock and she saw that she wouldn’t need the scope. She was close enough that they were all in view.

  Her children, on a sandbar in the middle of the river, standing with their backs to her and gazing downstream, where a red plane taxied toward them out of Lower Martin Pond. To the right of the kids, a campfire burned on a gravel bank. A gray Zodiac inflatable boat was pulled up on the bank. Who in the hell had been in the Zodiac? And where were they now?

  She panned right. High, slanted rocks, much like the one she was on. Then trees. She panned farther, scanning the trees, looking for motion. Who’d been on the boat, and who had started the fire? She couldn’t imagine campers out here, or at least any who would have walked far from the river. The terrain was too rugged and held no clear allure. Anyone who camped in this part of the Allagash would know better than to leave a fire burning untended.

  And yet there was the boat, and there was the fire, and there were her kids—unharmed, standing on the sandbar, soaked but safe, waving at the plane.

  She lifted the scope, focused on the plane, then adjusted the zoom with her left hand, bringing the cockpit into focus. The sun glare fell on the right side and the shadows claimed the left, but even so, she could see Ed behind the stick. He was alone. Or seemed to be. No one was sitting beside him. In the back, she couldn’t tell. Was that a human crouched behind the seat or just a shadow? She inched higher, the rock like steel wool against her forearms, her cheek stinging and her back throbbing. The gun held level. She felt steady, her breathing controlled, her hands still. Ready to shoot.

  She’d never taken a shot at an animal, let alone a man. She’d fired who knew how many thousands of rounds into targets in her early years in Maine, fired rifles and shotguns and handguns of every make and caliber. Convinced herself that she was a killing machine, cool under fire. She would be ready to shoot.

  But she did not need to shoot Ed. Had he really come alone?

  Too early. You asked him for time. He would have given you time.

  Unless the plane’s arrival wasn’t a threat but an emergency. Maybe he had learned something alarming. Maybe he’d been afraid that the dock was compromised, that his identity had been determined, something. He would’ve come back fast then.

  Flashing the navigation lights. A distress signal. A warning. She couldn’t believe it was anything else. She’d flown with him countless times, and he’d never taken that approach. It was a simple but clear visual cue to anyone on the ground.

  That didn’t mean the plane was compromised, though. She might have seen the signal but misinterpreted it. Maybe, upon returning to the cabin at the pond, he’d seen that the canoe was missing and had done the smart thing and gone searching for it from the air without pause. He’d been in pursuit of the canoe—in pursuit of them all—when he spotted the kids. He’d put the plane down and come to help.

  It all made sense now, it was all vintage Ed Levenseller, observant and proactive, and she felt ridiculous for not realizing it sooner, for risking her foolish float down to the rocks to lie here, rifle in hand. She should stand up and shout to them. Let everyone know that she was here, that she’d come to help, she’d come to help them and tell them the truth.

  She didn’t, though. She held still and stayed low and kept her eye to the scope and her finger floating near the trigger.

  He brought the plane up almost to the sandbar against a crosswind that turned it slightly, presenting her with a better view of the passenger seat. Empty. Ed’s hands were free on the stick, and she could see him adjusting the rudder controls, moving unencumbered, showing no trace of tension. The plane floated about twenty-five feet from the sandbar when he killed the engine.

  She frowned. Why hadn’t he banked it on the gravel bar?

  The kids are alone, the boat is not mine, and the campfire is not mine. He doesn’t know what he’s getting into.

  He opened the door and climbed out. She tracked him, focused but still aware of a distant sickness at having him in the rifle’s crosshairs. He stepped down onto the float as the plane drifted, a short but deep stretch of water between him and the kids. She heard him shout, and though his voice was probably full-throated, up here by the rushing water it was almost unintelligible. Had he said I come in peace? He was making jokes? Nervous, probably. As unsure of what that Zodiac and that campfire meant as she was.

  “I come in peace,” he repeated, and this time she heard it clearer, and she saw him raising his hand and making a peace sign. Trying to relax the kids and knowing something was wrong, but not understanding it yet.

  The kids stayed on the sandbar.

  “Where is your aunt?” Ed shouted. The question was returned to him by the rocks.

  If either child responded, Leah couldn’t hear it. Their backs were to her and their voices softer than his loud, awkward attempt at humor. One of them must have said something, though, because Ed nodded and stepped farther out onto the float.

  “Let’s get you home, guys. Get you safe.” This was shouted too. Why was he screaming at them from such a short distance? And he still had his hand raised in the peace sign. He kept it up while he turned to look at the gravel bank where the campfire burned.

  Scared. Yes, he is scared that something has already happened.

  Then he said, “She let you take that boat? Alone?”

&
nbsp; Let them take that boat? What was he talking about? He knew it wasn’t her boat. He knew that they’d been in the canoe. So what was he—

  Signaling. Not a peace sign or a dumb joke. He’s holding up two fingers to tell me how many are in the plane. She swung the scope away from Ed, up and over, and refocused on the interior of the plane.

  Empty. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe the kids were talking to him in voices she couldn’t hear and were lying to him about the boat. It was possible, because they had run away and wouldn’t want to admit it, so maybe—

  Something moved inside the plane. A quick glimmer, there and gone, but motion. She was sure of it, and sure of more than that.

  They’d come with him. Bleak and Pollard. They’d forced him to fly to her. She was absolutely certain, felt it in her blood, felt it in the pulse of the finger she curled around the trigger.

  Ed was still talking loudly, still asking about the boat, and now it was even more clear that he was lying with intent, because he was asking if the motor had worked all right, if it had been shaken up on the plane. He was trying to buy time and shout some truth into the woods, hopeful that Leah might be there, listening. Ready to shoot.

  And she was.

  She reached up with her left hand and twisted the focus knob, bringing the cockpit into the crosshairs, Ed and the floats entirely hidden from view, nothing left but that empty pilot seat and copilot seat and—

  A face. A flash of white flesh as the man hidden in the back seat lifted his head.

  As Leah pulled the trigger, she saw it wasn’t a man.

  It was a child.

  44

  The first round came from an unanticipated source, somewhere upriver, and if Dax were the type of man to jump at an explosive sound, he’d have cleared the eight-foot boulder that hid him in the shadows. He was not the jumping type, though, and so he simply leaned back and put his eye to the V-shaped crack in the rock that afforded him a view upriver.

  It wasn’t a wide angle, and he couldn’t see much beyond the white water and the rocks. He leaned forward again, looked at the plane.

  The bullet had punched through the fuselage on its left side, ripping a nasty furrow through it, bits of fiberglass and metal scattered to the river like a handful of gold dust.

  A warning shot or a terrible shot. One or the other. Nobody with a gun that big—the sound still seemed to echo in the stillness of the woods—was incapable of hitting Ed or the cockpit unless the shooter was beyond incompetent.

  Not an ineffective shot, though. It had put things in motion. The kids were screaming and crouching on the sandbar, holding on to each other, and Ed Levenseller had been so scared by the sound that he’d jumped—or fallen?—right off the pontoon and into the river. He sank out of sight, then surfaced, and when he surfaced, he was screaming.

  “Run!” he shouted at the kids. “Hailey, Nick, run!”

  He was swimming toward them while he shouted, and he never so much as looked back at the plane.

  That was a mistake. His back was turned when a man leaned out of the plane with a semiautomatic pistol in hand and fired three shots.

  Ed screamed again, but this time it was out of pain and not fear, and then he disappeared below the surface. Still swimming, though. Still fighting against the current toward the kids. There was a slick of blood in the water, so he was wounded, but not yet dead.

  Wrong gun, Dax thought, and he felt mild disappointment, because he’d been promised these two were very good. If the shooter had used an AR-15 he’d have been able to make quick work of Ed. Plugging away with a handgun was less efficient.

  Dax looked from the water to the plane and saw that the shooter was leaning back into the plane and someone inside was handing him something. A smooth exchange, fluid, and then the shooter was back outside of the plane with an AR-15 and an extended clip.

  Excellent. They’d come to party after all.

  The shooter—he was white, so that meant he wasn’t Marvin “Bleak” Sanders, but the other one, Randall Pollard—swung nimbly down from the cockpit to the float, keeping low and close to the side of the plane. He understood where the gunfire had originated, and he knew that the gunfire was a bigger problem than Ed Levenseller swimming wounded or the two kids screaming on the sandbar. He did not glance at the C-shaped curl of rocks where Dax was positioned, completely sheltered from any threat that didn’t come from behind him. Dax didn’t anticipate any threats arriving from those deep woods.

  Then again, Dax hadn’t anticipated the first shot.

  He checked his back, watched the pines wave in the breeze, studied the dark wood. There was no sound that did not belong, no motion save the weaving trees.

  He turned back to the cut in the rock that afforded his upriver view. He still couldn’t see anything. He squinted, waited…yes, there was a glimmer of metal at the top of one of the huge, slanted boulders where the rapids frothed. An excellent shooting location. Too good of a vantage point for an amateur, which meant that the shot must have been a warning, not a miss. What was the point of the warning shot? Leah, he assumed, would have known better than to open the gunplay with a shot that didn’t count.

  Randall Pollard crouched on the float, the AR at his shoulder, and scanned the river, searching. He would find her in time, but he wasn’t going to hurt her, not with that much rock between her and the bullets. He might fire just to fluster her. Dax would.

  Ed Levenseller had surfaced again and was gasping out his cries of Run, and Dax watched Randall Pollard note him and ignore him.

  Again, excellent. The pilot had more value alive than dead. It had been wise to prevent him from reaching the children, but there was no need to kill him. Also, Pollard would need to expose himself for a clean shot at the pilot, and maybe Leah Trenton wouldn’t miss twice.

  There was no sign of the much-ballyhooed Bleak, which was disappointing. Had he sent Pollard on a solo mission? Or was he simply biding his time, like Dax?

  On the sandbar, Hailey Chatfield rose, shielding her brother with her own body, and turned to face the rocks that hid Dax.

  “Shoot them!” she screamed. “Help us! Help us!”

  Dax sighed. He hadn’t expected the children to obey their instructions in a moment of chaos, but nevertheless, he’d enjoyed his invisibility.

  Randall Pollard turned in the direction of Hailey’s shouts, and Dax could see that he was pondering the development. And, no doubt, thinking that he was in a hell of a lot of trouble now, because he was exposed to Dax’s position but moving away from it would put him in Leah’s line. Oops!

  “Open fire,” Dax muttered, resigned, as he ducked deeper into the protective granite and Randall Pollard opened up on him with the AR-15.

  The sound was nowhere near as impressive as the single, massive blast of Leah’s shot into the plane, but the result was annoying—rock chips sprayed into the air and fragments blew into treacherous needles, and Dax closed his eyes and pressed tight to the rock, held it like a lover until the shooting stopped.

  Out of ammunition? Probably not. If he’s any good, he’d have saved a round or two. He wants to see who’s going to poke their heads out.

  It would be a dumb way to die, leaning out from behind a rock to take a .227-caliber bullet to the forehead.

  It wasn’t even a paying job.

  Fun, though. Isn’t it just a little bit of fun?

  It was. It was more than fun, it was living, real living in a way so few humans would ever know.

  Dax dropped to his knees and grabbed Andy West’s twelve-gauge. Lying on his side, he wriggled forward, inch by inch. The silence was broken by a hoarse shout, probably from Levenseller. A cry that was nearly feral, a shout of…no, no. Wait. It wasn’t a shout at all.

  It was a bark.

  Hmm.

  Dax stood up behind the rocks and put his eye to the crack that let him look upriver. Leah Trenton’s dog was running down the bank, barking and baying.

  “A circus,” Dax whispered. “That’s what this
is turning into, my friends. An absolute circus.”

  He ducked again and slid along the rock, the granite rough on his shoulder, then let the barrel of the shotgun slide out, testing to see if he’d draw any fire. He thought his angle would make him invisible to anyone on the plane, but it was better to be sure of that than to be dead.

  No shots came. The baying turned to furious barking, and Nick shouted: “Tessa!”

  Dax slid out from behind the rock just far enough so that he could see the plane again. Pollard had turned his attention upriver, leaving his back to Dax. Dax could kill him if he wanted to, but what was the point of that? Everything was fine here for now, and it was interesting to watch them all sort it out. You never knew who had a trick you hadn’t seen before.

  He squirmed out farther, and now the sandbar was in view. The kids were sticking to it, neither of them seeking refuge in the water. Levenseller was between the sandbar and the far shore. He was probably trying to get on the other side of the plane, which would both protect him from Pollard’s current angle of fire and maybe draw that fire away from the children.

  Positively heroic.

  Randall Pollard was down on one knee now, inching up the float and sighting from beneath the plane. A terrific, protected position. From there he could kill Ed if needed and probably get some decent cover fire down on Leah’s position, maybe flush her out.

  There was a splash, and Dax looked upriver to see that Tessa had leaped from the bank into the water and was now swimming to Ed Levenseller. The dog was not a good swimmer—every awkward, lunging stroke of the paws announced that she was built for land, not water—but her powerful hind legs were enough to keep her snout high, and her fierce determination was enough to drive her toward her friend in need.

  Randall Pollard dipped lower, shifted his angle, and swung the AR-15 toward the dog.

  It was a wise choice. The dog could not fly the plane, but the dog could cause some trouble. The dog was all risk and no reward. Kill the dog, then.

  Absolutely the right choice, and yet…not one that Dax cared for.