by M. K. Coker
CHAPTER 41
As she squatted there in the mud, her muscles screaming, her mind racing, she could hear Marek crashing down the trail behind her. Slipping and sliding, a gentle bear of a man on the warpath.
“Call for backup!” she yelled, knowing her death was inevitable. “He’s got a—”
Before she could finish, Biester pulled the trigger. The flash of fire. The hurt, oh God, the hurt. Her heart burst.
Because it wasn’t her he’d aimed at. After a hoarse cry, a thud... and silence.
And she was next. She saw the feral smile, the calculating gleam, as death awaited. He’d talked about that awareness, the edge that the prospect of death gave to life, knowing you were prey, and she felt every beat of her heart. Last beats. He would have to look in her eyes. If he had even a shred of conscience, she hoped that would haunt him for the rest of his sorry life.
She saw the flash. She heard the cry.
But the flash had been from moonlight on gleaming metal, not from a gun. A knife? Relief flooded her. She whirled. “Marek?”
But as a cloud shifted to unveil the full light of the moon, she saw a tall, almost ethereal bearded figure. For a long, incredulous moment, she thought, So I’m dead. And this was what Saint Peter looked like. Like Gandalf. Or Treebeard, more fittingly, in the forest. Except... he wore camos.
Chee Connor. She had no words. They’d gone with her heart.
And in the silence, a man groaned. The wrong man. “Biester’s not dead?”
“I was trained to kill,” Chee told her. “But I got tired of it. I hit what I meant. Disabling strike to the shoulder.”
Ignoring all her training, Karen tossed her cuffs at Connor and raced up the trail, grabbing tree branches to keep from falling. Marek lay a third of the way up. Unmoving. His gun was still in his hand.
Oh, God. He’d been shot in the head. She couldn’t find where to staunch the flow. Lots of blood. Her hand was black with it.
“Take... Becca.”
She stared at the slits of pale moonlight that were his eyes—until they closed with finality. “No! No, by God, no! I won’t take her.” She shook him. “Do you hear me, Marek? Talk to me!”
But all she heard were sirens approaching, then the screech of tires. Two Fingers had been stationed at the entrance to keep campers out. Marek must’ve called for backup before rushing to her aid. Something she should have done. Choices. Hers. Very, very bad.
They needed an ambulance ASAP. Where was her damned phone? Dead. She’d left it plugged in at the office, not wanting it to go off while they were setting the trap.
When the flashlight caught her full in the face, she yelled, “Call for an ambulance! Now!”
Behind her, Connor shouted up, “Too late!”
Karen cried out her denial. “No. It’s bad. I know it’s bad, but... he talked.”
“Too late because I called for one already,” Connor replied as he walked up to her. And to her shock, he held up a flip phone. “For emergencies. I have a solar charger to keep it charged. Dialing 9-1-1 always works.”
Closing her eyes, Karen ran her fingers, slick with blood, over Marek’s throat. And there, yes, there it was. A beat. Her fingers kept track as she willed the beats to continue.
As Two Fingers arrived, with more nimbleness than her as she heard no slip or slide, she didn’t look up. But she told him, in a reed-thin voice that she didn’t recognize as her own, to watch their prisoner until the second ambulance arrived. And to find Biester’s phone and its IR attachment—and her gun. In that order.
Not until the EMTs lifted Marek, with the help of Connor, onto the backboard, did she move her hand. She felt, somehow, that by releasing him, she’d doomed him. That only her will had kept him alive.
“Give me your keys,” Connor said as the ambulance sped off.
“What?”
He held out a hand. “You’re parked in the campground. I saw it earlier.”
Of course he had. She fished out the keys then stared down at her fingers, at the blood. “I can drive.” But she couldn’t get her legs to move.
He just swiped the keys from her hand. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.” He loped up a trail and disappeared. A moment later, he reappeared in the Sub. “Trash ride,” he commented as she finally got her legs to work and got in.
“It started. Often doesn’t.” Leaning over, Karen punched the sirens. “Just go.”
He did. And within a span of minutes that seemed like years, she was standing beside Marek’s gurney at the clinic. Doc Hudson had left him there, in the hallway, to attend Biester.
Karen had almost called Nikki, to let her know...but it was too late to make that call.
Hands in her back pockets, Karen knew the moment that awareness hit those pale-blue eyes. His face tightened, and he turned his head, even though it must’ve hurt.
She rounded the gurney. “Oh, no, you don’t. Look at me, Marek.” She trapped his head between her hands. “I’ll take Becca if that’s what you want. Though after tonight, you might want to rethink that. Nikki, even Dad and Clara, not to mention your New Mexico friends and family, might be better. Whatever you want, though. We’ll do it up right and tight.”
“Why...?” he croaked.
“Because I wanted you to fight!” Karen leaned down and hugged what she could, letting the relief, the tears, flow out onto his chest, where his heart beat steadily. “My God, Marek. I thought you were slipping away from me.”
“Slipped...” He put a hand to his head. “Ouch.”
“Concussion and laceration.” She dashed her knuckles under her eyes. “Lots of blood.”
“Can see that.” He was looking at her hands. “Yours?”
“No, yours. You scared me to death.”
Marek moved his head again, as if testing to make sure it was still attached. “Biester?”
“Chee Connor to the rescue. I lost my gun when I slipped. Connor nailed him with a knife. A little kiddie knife, if you can believe it. But he knew where to hit. Entire arm went numb. Doc Hudson is patching Biester up, Walrus is sitting on him, and I’m heading over to the office to talk to Connor. And I need to check with Two Fingers to see if he found Biester’s phone. That’s going to be key. Without you there, I want all the ammunition I can get against Biester, assuming he doesn’t cry lawyer.”
Marek gripped the sides of the gurney and pulled himself up.
“Hey, don’t you dare—” she started, but he’d already swung his legs over. “No. Just, no. You nearly...”
“Didn’t die,” he finished.
Doc Hudson came in, stripped off bloodied gloves, and took a penlight to Marek’s eyes. “Hard head. No obvious signs of subdural hematoma. I’d like to keep you over for observation...” As Marek slid his feet to the floor, he sighed. “But I’ll have to settle for second best. Sheriff, be sure to keep him awake.”
“Not a problem,” she returned. “I’ll slap him silly.”
But Marek didn’t sway, didn’t even stumble, as he shook himself out like a dog.
With a sigh, Karen asked, “How’s your patient?”
“My cooperative patient? He’ll live. You can have him in an hour or so. Enough time for the two of you to get cleaned up. Thought I’d been invaded by a pack of zombies.”
Karen looked down at her sodden, muddied, and bloodied self. Then at Marek. And she laughed. A real, unbridled laugh, like she hadn’t done in... days? “That’s a prescription that I promise we’ll be filling.”
CHAPTER 42
By the time Karen arrived back at the courthouse with Marek, they weren’t the only ones who’d cleaned up. A strangely familiar stranger awaited them, sitting in Walrus’s chair, Laura’s hand on his shoulder as she sat on Walrus’s desk.
They turned together, rose together. Talk about the Twin Towers. Like his cousin, Connor had once had flaming-red hair. Unlike her darker titian, his had become more pepper, with plenty of salt. A hard life had left its marks. But in his steady eyes, the color of fall a
corns, she saw something that she hadn’t in most of the homeless: a deep well of acceptance—of himself, mostly, that led to acceptance of others. She saw no desperation, no bitterness, nothing but the moment. Good or bad, he’d take it.
Connor smiled at Marek. “Now that’s a treat. Guess you’re not at death’s door.”
Karen had texted Laura that an early Christmas present was arriving at the courthouse in her Sub. And that Marek was going to live. But nothing more. She’d had too much else to do.
So, too, had Laura, apparently. “You took Connor home?”
“He looked about a hundred years old and was twice as ripe.” Laura bumped his arm. “Greybeard.”
“Always was bossy,” he said, fingering his beardless chin.
His filthy camos were gone, probably burned. Where Laura had gotten him the jeans and sweatshirt, though, Karen had no clue. Neither Walrus nor any of their boys were of that build—though the younger boys might eventually get there. In another decade or so. Karen assumed that the boys were with their grandfather.... ah. That might well be the source of the clothes, though she had never seen the local jeweler slumming in jeans before.
Laura fisted her hands on her hips with mock outrage. “I was right. He wasn’t your killer.”
Echoing her friend’s stance and tone, Karen bit out, “You are so right.” She dropped her fists. “He was the hero of the piece.”
For the first time, that self-acceptance slipped, to show scars that Karen thought would never truly heal. “I’m no hero.”
“I beg to differ.” Karen went tippy-toed to kiss him lightly on his newly bared cheek. “For my life, I thank you.”
“And mine,” Marek said, holding out his hand.
“Never thought to see you again in Reunion.” Connor held his former classmate’s hand for a long moment. “I missed you, you know, on the Island of Misfit Toys.”
Karen lifted an eyebrow at Laura, who shrugged. That must be a reference to the broken toys looking for a home in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Both boys, broken, in different ways. A broken brain. A broken home.
Marek dropped his hand. “Misfits united. We’ll need your testimony against Biester.”
“I didn’t see him kill Bunting. I’d have told you.”
“But you saw him try to kill me, to kill Marek,” Karen followed up. Enough sentiment. They would all be blubbering soon, and Biester would mud-board right over them.
Laura slapped her hands over her ears. “Lalalala. I didn’t hear that. Go do your stuff. I’ll wait for Walrus. Oh, and, Chee... I mean, Connor? Taylor Peterson’s got the granny flat for now, but we’ve got a spare room for you.”
“I don’t need—”
“You are not going back to Grove Park. Not tonight. Not any night, if I have anything to do with it.” She squeezed him until he cried uncle. “You are so... loved. Now go give the law what they need. Then I can put all my boys to bed.” She pushed him toward the interview room, and Marek followed. After a second’s hesitation, Karen sent a quick text then pocketed her phone.
When she closed the interview door behind her, Karen asked the first thing that popped into her head. “Why didn’t you return Laura’s calls, her letters, when you were in Nevada?”
The curse of his fair coloring was, of course, the dreaded flush that turned redder than the pepper in his hair. “I’d think that was pretty obvious. I was ashamed. Of what I’d done. What I’d become. That she bothered to keep track of me at all, though, was an eye-opener. That someone out there in the world was for me, not against me. I didn’t think I had any family left, not the Army, not the Connors. I wanted to be worthy of that, if I ever returned.”
“So where were you, after Nevada?” Marek asked.
“Here and there. Still homeless. But I no longer feared it. I did a lot of reading, of soul-searching, of talking to other veterans. I chucked all the meds, all the shrinks, and hooked up with a veterans group that did the Pacific Coast Trail. A sort of Mother-Nature-heals kind of thing. I was skeptical, given my track record, that I could be helped, that anything was worth saving. But I’d been happy, truly happy, when I was free to roam the woods as a kid, in the woods I always believed had been stolen from us Connors. So I figured that was going to be my last shot. If it didn’t work... well, there was always the last shot.”
Marek ran a fingernail down a joint in the table. “It worked.”
“Somehow, someway, by the time my buddies and I made it to the end, I felt... like I’d come home. I don’t know how else to describe it. I wasn’t the only one. We bonded, but not really with each other, but with our true selves. Who we had been, who we could be again. Afterward, we all went our separate ways.”
“Was Mountain Man your trail name?” Marek asked.
“No wonder you ended up a detective.” Amusement crinkled Connor’s eyes. “You ever read The Seven Storey Mountain?”
“Monks?” Karen hazarded, snagging a stray memory. Connor certainly had the life of poverty down pat.
“A monk. Thomas Merton. His autobiography. A battered hardback no one else wanted from the prison library in Nevada. Big, thick book. I figured I could use it to beat off any attackers. I put my nose in it, and by the time I stuck it out, I’d done my time. The mountain referred to purgatory. Seemed appropriate. Not that I was really a mountain man. I preferred the small woods, the long view, of our lands.”
“So you came back home,” Karen said. “But you met with Ted, not Laura, when you came back. Why?”
He cast a guilty look through the closed door. “It wasn’t intentional. I ran into Ted in the woods. He recognized me, gave me a big hug, asked me how I was doing. We had a long talk. Several of them, actually. I didn’t want to come back to Reunion, to family, until I could trust myself to stay clean.”
Karen leaned forward. “Do you know what’s in Ted’s will? It involves Bobby and you, I know that much, but Ted had atrocious handwriting.”
He looked startled. “I thought he didn’t write the will, though we talked about it.”
“He wrote it. Digges found it. He took it to Bunting to ask if it was valid. No witnesses, so he said no, but Judge Rudibaugh says it’s legal.”
“Ah... I see now why you might have questions for me.” A rueful look crossed Connor’s face. “Yes, I know what Ted intended, at least generally. He was very fond of Bobby—and it’s not hard to figure out why. He’s got an innocence to him, a purity, that so many of us lack. Ted was adamant that Alan Digges not get his hands on the trailer park. ‘Bad seed,’ was all he said when I asked why. Obviously, he didn’t trust his nephew. At all. He thought about giving the park to Bobby’s mother, Lori. Seemed no matter how hard she tried, she just kept going backward. But she didn’t have a head for business.” He pulled at his ear. “Before I went off the wagon, I got a solid base in business on the Army’s dime. That’s what I was going to do—start my own business. Something like whitewater rafting or working as a trail guide. Anything outdoors. I wanted to work for myself, since I didn’t think anyone would hire me, with the black marks on my record.”
The dishonorable discharge was the blackest. Karen wondered if, once his heroism hit the airwaves, whether she could get the Army to take another look. If she ever had the time. “So... Ted made you the trustee? What did you get out of the deal?”
“I believe I talked him down to ten percent of profit. I don’t need much. And if I’ve gauged Lori Jansen right, she wants to work. Needs to work. It’s her makeup. So while I might do the books, deal with the administration, profits and losses, she’d likely be out there doing what she did with her own trailer. Planting stuff, making a home. Fixing whatever she can and bartering for what she can’t. And you’re making a face at me, Karen. It’s not sexist. It’s what she does. It’s why Bobby, for all that’s happened, is what he is. Secure. Loved.”
Marek said, “You seem to have made your own home at Grove Park.”
“Yeah, I got a thrill out of making my own way on the old Connor
lands.”
“With the help of Biester’s blind eye toward your poaching,” Karen pointed out.
“Ah. Yes. He caught me at it. We got talking. Whatever he’s done, whatever he tried to do, he knew how to live off these lands, appreciated them, wanted to preserve them.” A deep sadness touched Connor’s acorn eyes. Memories squirreled away. “We also had some good talks.”
“Until Biester tried to frame you?” Karen prompted when he fell silent.
“Yeah. Until. Which I found out, apparently, just after you did. I thought he was in Sioux Falls that night. He let it be known far and wide so no one would be alarmed.”
Alarmed. That was the word. Karen shook her head. “Biester was in Sioux Falls. Until he returned after midnight with a new trail monitor at the park entrance and his new IR attachment for his phone, so he could prove the identities of those in the encampment and get me to do something about it.” And the thought that if she had, none of this would have happened, twisted her stomach. “He was afraid the state park board wouldn’t get on board until that was done.”
Connor still looked puzzled. “But why kill Bunting?”
“We hope to find out from the horse’s mouth. All we know for sure is, one of the homeless saw the IR light. Evil eye, she called it. That’s what finally clicked for us. When we were setting a trap for you, Biester was setting one for us. We’re just hoping that his phone can be found.” When she saw a blank look on Mountain Man’s face, she clarified. “Biester had a wireless video feed set up. We’ve got good towers now. But he may well have deleted the good stuff, though maybe DCI can recover it. But... I heard a plop. Water. Not good.”
Connor scratched at his shorn head. “You guys make me feel old. All this technology.” He’d been living without it. Like Walden. Well, other than the emergency phone.
“And you make us feel frivolous.”
“Why didn’t you just come out from the get-go?” Marek asked.
“I’ve tried to stay away from your kind. Better for all of us.”
“But you were in the woods that night?”
