by D. F. Bailey
He examined the blade on the box cutter again. Fully extended it looked about two inches long. He depressed the brass tab that drew in the blade, retracted it into the casing and slipped the tool into a front pocket of his jeans. Then he stepped out of the basement door and ran onto the trail. After clambering uphill for ten minutes—at the transition where the path crossed from the forest and led into a meadow—he could see Kali, Eve, Deacon and a second man struggling to walk in a single file along a switchback above him. They looked to be about five hundred yards ahead. Eve appeared to be fettered in some manner. The halting way she moved her shoulders from side to side as she stumbled forward along the broken track suggested something was wrong. Was she injured? From this distance, he couldn’t tell. A moment later, they disappeared as the trail left the meadow and turned away from the cliff into the forest.
With Eve not far ahead, Finch doubled his pace and continued to thread his way along the switchback in a steady jog. The trail was littered with deadfall that had broken off from the surrounding trees in a windstorm. He could jump over some of the heavier limbs, others simply snapped under the weight of his feet as he pressed on.
For the first time since Eve had encouraged him to join her street jogging routine back in San Francisco, Finch felt thankful for her persistent coaching. His lungs burned and his legs ached but he swallowed the pain, dug the balls of his feet into the rocky soil and doubled his pace. As he gained ground he recognized the blue shoes on the fourth person hiking ahead of him. Nike. The big man also brandished a pool cue which he prodded into Eve’s buttocks whenever she hesitated.
Finch glanced around for a weapon. Behind him lay a tree limb about two inches thick and four feet in length. He tested the heft in his hands. It was maple, still young and green. He took a moment to strip the spurs from the bough and trimmed the narrow end to a sharpened point with the box cutter. He retracted the blade and pushed the tool back into his pocket. Then he took a long drink from the water bottle, put aside the thought of what he knew was coming—and drove himself onward. Ten minutes later he’d almost closed the gap.
No one noticed his approach until Kali turned and saw him one loop below them on the winding switchback. She let out a gasp. Everyone stopped and turned. Finch saw the duct tape strapped around Eve’s wrists and across her mouth. A rush of anger flooded through him.
“Let her loose,” he barked. He grasped his spear in both hands, the tip pointed forward and to his left as he continued to step ahead.
“It doesn’t end this way, Finch.” Kali struggled for breath as she spoke but maintained a look of certainty.
“You’re deluded,” Finch scoffed. “This isn’t some fucking script written in the stars. This is only about letting Eve go. Right now. Then Eve and I walk down the hill alone. The three of you can go on to wherever you want. I won’t stop you. It’s that simple. But first you let her go.”
As Will took another step, Nike turned to block him. With his uphill position he held a positional advantage and he dipped the sharp end of the pool cue toward Finch’s face. From where he stood, Finch could lunge at him with the maple bough and possibly tip Nike off balance. But then what? He drew a gulp of air and decided his best course would be to negotiate.
“Look. The lodge is crawling with FBI agents. By now there has to be twenty cops down there. I escaped custody but they know I came this way. Parker is alive and they have him in cuffs. He told us Eve was in the solarium. In ten minutes they’re going to be swarming all over here. There’ll be choppers, SWAT teams, dogs, snipers.” He swung his arms wide to suggest escape was impossible. “Just let Eve go and I’ll do what I can for you. I know the agents who are running the bust. Believe me, they don’t want any more deaths up here.”
He studied Kali’s face a moment. The dawn light had faded, the sun completely obscured by a combination of clouds and mist crawling above the valley walls. A distant look came through her eyes as she gazed at Finch.
“Kali? All right?” he asked.
She nodded as if she’d woken from a trance. “All right. Maybe it does end this way.” She held out a hand, a sign of loss, or reaching for something intangible. Finch couldn’t decipher the gesture. Finally she said, “Robert, remember who we are.”
Finch shook his head as if he’d just heard a coin click into a metal slot. Nike—Row-bare—stood before him with a broad smirk on his lips. “It was you,” he whispered. “You killed Edmund Austen.”
“Why does this matter? What matters is only which comes next.”
Along with the awkward phrasing, Finch detected the French accent, the same slight inflection he’d heard in the Hotel Penn elevator car on the ride up to the sixth floor. It convinced him that Robert had stabbed Austen on his home turf and then disappeared into the warren of alleys that branched off the streets of Paris.
“What comes next is letting this go,” Finch said. He could see the pool cue was broken at one end. The tip had a short, sharp point. “Drop the pool cue and we’re done.”
Robert shook his head with a look of contempt. He slipped the grip of the pool cue into both fists and held it over his right shoulder like a baseball bat. He committed himself to strike from right to left, from up to down, and took a step forward.
If he connected, he could take Finch down in a single blow. At the very least, the jagged tip of the pool cue would open a serious laceration on his arms or chest. But in bootcamp Finch had earned a reputation as a counter-puncher. Let the other guy commit, duck the first blow, then attack the exposed vulnerabilities. Two or three always opened up—and he’d learned not to wait for second chances.
Finch felt a renewed confidence and spaced his hands about a foot apart at the thick end of the maple branch. He turned to face Robert with the limb horizontal to his chest and ready to parry the first strike.
“Robert, drop the cue,” Finch said in an even voice. “We don’t have to do this.”
Robert smiled as if he refused to be taunted by any sort of child play. He shifted the stick from his right shoulder to his left. Then to the right shoulder, and back again. Between each move, Finch speared the maple limb forward, each thrust coming closer to striking Robert’s chest. Four inches, two inches, one.
Then Finch pulled both arms back to prepare a serious forward thrust—and balked. The dodge worked. With all his strength Robert swung his cue past Finch’s head. As Will ducked he felt the cue slash across his forearm. He looked up and saw Robert’s head, neck and torso completely exposed. He drove the tip of his spear into the big man’s throat and heard him gasp as he dropped to his knees and fall backwards across the path.
As Finch stepped forward he shifted the gaff end-to-end and swinging his weapon like a club he smashed the heavy end against Robert’s collar bone. One blow. The bone snapped and Robert cried out in pain.
Finch’s blood was at a boil. He stood above Robert and glared down at him. He could barely contain his rage.
“Had enough?”
Robert gasped, unable to speak. A thin track of blood seeped from his throat where Finch’s first strike had broken the skin.
“I said, have you had enough?”
Robert sucked in a lungful of air and pulled himself up to his knees.
“Look, stay down or I’ll really fucking hurt you!”
Then Will noticed the gash in his arm where the pool cue had cut a shallow laceration. Blood oozed over his wrist and into his hand. He felt a renewed fury. He did not want to do this. He hated it. Hated himself.
Robert drew the pool cue into his fist and pressed the butt cap into the ground. He began to hoist himself up with one hand. As he stood, Finch tried to kick the stick away but as he swung his leg forward, Robert grabbed his ankle and twisted it to the left. Finch fell to the ground and watched his spear fly downhill and rattle over the cliff.
“Fuck!”
He scrambled away before Robert could slash him again with the cue. Will pulled himself up and began to circle him. The big man still held
the stick in his left hand and grasped at his throat with his right. He whimpered with pain and turned to face his opponent. His breathing was uneven. Finch shuffled his feet, went left, then right and scuttled behind him. When he had a clear opening he planted a round-house kick in Robert’s back that struck just below the broken collar bone. Robert toppled face-down on the ground with an exhausted grunt. His fist released the pool cue and Finch kicked it away.
Then Finch sat heavily on the back of Robert’s thighs, pinning him down so that he couldn’t move. He grasped the right ankle, tugged his calf straight up in a ninety-degree angle to the ground and locked it in place with his left forearm. He yanked off the shoe. The blue Nike. He then pulled the box cutter from his pocket, extended the steel blade, and arched the ball of Robert’s foot forward until the flesh on his heel was taut.
Will focussed on the exposed flesh and set his teeth. With one quick incision he sliced the blade through Robert’s achilles tendon. As the tendon severed Robert let out a scream and Finch knew that the fight was done.
He retracted the blade, slipped the knife into his back pocket, then turned to face Eve and the others. They were gone.
※
Finch took a moment to nurse the cut on his forearm. He cut off a sleeve from his shirt with the box cutter and wrapped the cotton strip around the wound and tied it off. Then he tore the second sleeve away and wrapped it around the laceration at Robert’s ankle. Satisfied that Robert would survive on his own until he could return for him, Will drank the last of the water from the plastic bottle and tossed it aside. Then he grabbed the discarded pool cue and followed the switchback up to a narrow ridge where the trail leveled off.
From there the path became a straight line that ran parallel to the cliff edge. About a hundred feet ahead he could see them stumbling forward three abreast—Eve braced by her elbows with Kali and Deacon at her sides. Before they turned a corner and entered another thicket of woods, he noticed that someone had slipped a hood over Eve’s head. She was walking blind, faltering, her wrists still bound together by duct tape. He assumed that her mouth remained sealed shut as well. He tried to imagine how that might feel, then let the thought go. The important thing was to save her before Kali was afflicted by a new stroke of her growing insanity. He pushed himself up the trail and through the next turn into the forest.
When he emerged from the stand of pines he saw them gathered just thirty feet ahead next to a massive tree that had been torn from the soil in a windstorm. It looked like a gale had heaved the upper half of a tree over the cliff leaving a tangle of roots bound in a massive ball between the path and the cliff. The trunk extended about twenty feet over the precipice where it appeared to be suspended in midair. Over the course of the winter storms all the upper branches had been stripped away from the trunk, limb by limb. What remained was a tenuous balancing act. The pine teetered on the cliff edge, drawn downward by the weight of the trunk, but tethered to the ground by the root ball that still held it in place.
Finch approached warily. Why had they covered Eve’s head? With Robert out of the picture he guessed that she must have put up a fight. She stood there immobile, mute and blind. He realized that she could do nothing to help herself.
He tightened his grip on the pool cue. Even acting together, he doubted that Kali and Deacon could overpower him. But they could still harm Eve. The cliff stood just a foot away from where Deacon rested against the tree trunk as he peered over the edge.
He studied Deacon’s neck and torso. A thin man. When he turned toward Finch, Deacon’s face bore a look of complete emptiness. Void of thought or feeling. Since they’d left the lodge, Finch hadn’t heard him utter a word.
“Now what, Finch?” Kali took a step toward Eve and grasped her forearm in her left hand. As she moved, the Ankh medallion shifted on her necklace from left to right.
“First, uncover her head.”
“Not going to happen,” she scoffed.
“Then just let her go and you and Deacon can be on your way.” He nodded toward the next turn in the path ahead. “Look, I’m not going to hurt you.”
He threw the pool cue behind him. It took an odd turn, kicked against the rocks and disappeared over the cliff. The gesture provided a moment of relief. The clouds and patches of mist had dissipated and the morning air was clear and fresh. They could hear the wind channel through the valley below and the tree trunk vibrated slightly as it caught an updraft. The soil around the tree root sighed upward, then settled back into place.
Kali broke the silence. “What happened to Robert?”
“He’ll live. I imagine the FBI picked him up by now. Same as Parker. They’ll have them both talking soon.”
He took a step forward. He could easily reach out and grab a strand from the half-buried root ball. Five more steps and Eve would be in his arms.
“Stop right there,” Kali said.
“Give her to me.”
“Stop or you’ll kill us all.” She maintained the look of certainty that he’d seen on her face three or four times now. “Any more weight this close to the edge could send us all over.”
“You don’t know that, Kali,” he whispered.
“Oh, but we do know, Mr. Finch.” Deacon took a sideways step and grasped a long tentacle from the rootball. He lifted his free hand to the side, palm up. “We know everything.”
“Show him,” Kali said. Her voice was even, serene. She turned toward Deacon and nodded.
Deacon blinked as if he’d stepped into a self-induced trance. He released the tendril from the rootball, leaned backward then plunged head first over the cliff. The air was still, completely silent until the blunt thud of his body striking the rocks below rolled up to them.
“My God,” Finch murmured. His heart stumbled and then he felt a burst of adrenaline course through his body.
A faint smile settled on Kali’s lips. “I am alive for evermore and have the keys of Hades and of death.” She recited the scripture in a calm, almost hypnotic voice.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Finch said. “Listen to yourself. You’re talking in riddles and rhymes.”
“Not if your ears are open to hearing the truth.”
“Kali, please.” His voice carried a tone of empathy, an understanding of how wrong we can all be. All she needed was the humility to back away from this madness.
“All right,” Kali said as if she were responding to an earlier question. In one motion she tugged the hood from Eve’s head and tossed it over the cliff. The cloth caught an eddy of wind and for a moment all three of them saw it rise in the breeze and then sail out of sight.
“Remember our bargain.” Kali said and wrapped her left hand around Eve’s waist.
“What?”
Kali fixed her eyes on his with another look that that he couldn’t decipher.
“What?” he asked again.
“One month, Barabbas.”
Finch could feel the seconds ticking past him. Now … now … now. As he lunged for Eve, Kali took a step backward. She balanced on one of the rootball tubers and pushed Eve toward him. In that instant Will grabbed Eve by her right wrist and pulled her into his arms. He drew her away from the cliff edge and settled her on the ground.
When he knew Eve was safe, he turned back to Kali thinking he could pull her away, too. He took a step forward. Kali brushed the hair from her face and their eyes locked again. For a moment Finch felt as if he was looking into himself, into the deepest part of his unseen self. He could barely believe it, but she radiated an expression of complete serenity as though she had one last decision to take, a choice that had been made long ago. She nodded, then without uttering another word she stepped into the air and plummeted to the rocks below.
In a moment of psychosis—a complete break from reality—Finch felt as if she’d attached an invisible steel line to his neck and he stumbled after her toward the cliff edge. Impossible! He fell on his belly to break his forward momentum and managed to wedge one thigh between tw
o fat stalks of the rootball. No sooner had he broken his fall, than he felt himself slipping forward again.
“Eve. Look at me!” He turned his head to where she sat and tried to get her to concentrate, but an opaque sheen had glazed over her face. “Do you hear me? Eve, grab my ankle!”
She notched her head to one side and looked into Will’s eyes. Her mouth, still sealed under the gray band of duct tape, seemed to be working at something. He tried to ignore it and kept his focus on her eyes. Then he felt the root ball slip under his legs.
“Eve, I need you to grab my foot.” He felt his sanity returning. Just by speaking these few words he recovered a measure of control. “Just so I can pull myself clear, okay. Can you do that, Eve? I know your hands are taped together, but just hold my foot with your fingers, okay?”
She blinked. Then nodded. She crawled toward him on her belly and wrapped a hand around his left ankle. He felt her fingers tighten and lock in place. He shook his thigh free from the root tuber and pushed himself away from the edge. He drew a breath and knew he would make it now. He pulled himself onto his knees and dragged Eve back toward the path. One foot, another. Another. He rolled her onto her back. Her eyes blinked away the dirt clotted against her lashes. She held her hands out, a plea to cut her loose. He drew the box cutter from his pocket and slid the blade through the bands of duct tape. Her hands flew to her mouth in near hysteria.
“Let me do it!” he pleaded. “You don’t want to tear your skin.” He clasped her in his arms as he struggled to calm her. A drizzle of blood dripped from her nose across the snot and mud smudged over the duct tape.
