Flight of the Scarlet Tanager

by Bevill, C. L.

  The motorcycle ripped around the corner of the house, the rear wheel peeling out in dirt and pine needles, spraying everything behind them with a cloud of debris. Teddy grasped Fitch around his middle so hard he almost gasped. She looked up and right and saw Gower peering out the front window as they passed, but it was only a fleeting second and they were around the front of the house. Fitch didn’t even hesitate as they howled across the little parking area by the house and the sheriff’s deputy standing there, breezing so close to him that Teddy could have reached out to touch him. He didn’t even have time to pull the gun fully out of his holster. She looked back as they rounded the side of the restaurant and the deputy had dropped his pistol on the ground and was fumbling to regain control of the weapon. The blonde-haired man was exploding out the front door of Bob’s house and she heard Fitch make another incoherent noise.

  Her gaze returned to the front, craning her neck to see over the section of his shoulder between his neck and the top of his arm, and she saw another man in a suit standing in front of them. There was an impression of dark brown hair and light eyes that glared at them, as if a simple look could cause them to stop and surrender. Fitch downshifted and made a split second decision.

  She ducked her head into the flat spot between his shoulder blades and concentrated on a native-American prayer she’d been learning from the Indian woman at the fish plant.

  The Fed expected them to stop or go through him, which might have been a problem considering that he was holding another Glock in his hands, pointing somewhere between the ground and them. But Fitch deftly turned the motorcycle toward the woods, already in third gear again, and yelled, “Geronimo!”

  Teddy looked over his shoulder again to the front and immediately wished she’d kept her eyes shut instead. They headed directly into the thick band of woods that circled the restaurant, and he was aiming it diagonally toward the highway, but first they were going through a stand of vegetation that was so thick and stuffed with trees that she wondered why he wasn’t slowing down. “Oh, my goodness,” she muttered. “We’re going to die.”

  They headed down the embankment and Teddy adjusted herself on the back of the bike, centering her behind on the narrow seat. She dared to look back and saw several men in suits watching them, their guns drawn, their faces full of astonishment and anger. Just before they disappeared into the darkness of the trees, the one who most frightened her, came into her view, his pale hair visible in the deepening shadows. He stared after them and then started to move toward the front of the restaurant, a loping gait that suited his tall length. Back to their cars, she thought. To chase us. To call for assistance in tracking us.

  Then they were enveloped in a sea of blackness and Teddy didn’t like that much better either.

  •

  Jiminez watched a group of FBI special agents scramble for their cars. He put his pistol back into its holster and looked around him, suddenly alone. He didn’t feel like having a footrace to his squad car. Nor did he care to chase a dirt bike down the side of the mountain, racing around hairpin curves. He looked toward the house and decided to have a quick look-see, maybe there was something that the law enforcement officials should know about. He heard the windup motor of the dirt bike as it careened through the brush and trees and then he heard the other vehicles starting up, their tires spraying dirt as they turned around to pursue the pair on the bike.

  When he went into Bob’s little house behind the restaurant the very first thing he happened to see was the handle of a Glock sticking out of the trash can and when he put it into a paper bag he found in Bob’s kitchen he was whistling. He was going to take it personally to the substation and check it into evidence. Maybe it wouldn’t stand up in court, but it wasn’t going to be accessible to anyone else. And it wouldn’t disappear into the hands of the fibbies so they could take all the credit.

  A few minutes after he had entered the house he heard another vehicle pull into the parking lot, and looked outside to see Robert Wren climbing out of Joe Peter’s Suburban. Jiminez frowned. Not only did he get to the murder weapon before the Feds, but he got to arrest Bob and Joe. So much for those great Swiss-bacon burgers, he thought glumly.

  Chapter Nineteen

  August 16th

  Excerpt from Boudraux’s Big Book of Birding for Beginners, written by Boudraux Gille, Smith and Sons Publishing, 1987, pg. 211: The Lava Lark has some unusual characteristics, developed in its adjustment to subsisting in the lava fields of the Pacific Northwest. Its biggest predator is the larger avian community, the owls and hawks that frequent the region, along with eagles. The next threat to its continued existence is, of course, man. As bird of prey and man encroaches even in the inhospitable waves of once molten rock that was issued forth from the nearby volcanoes, the Lark takes advantage of air pockets that created tiny caves within the fields. They compete for these useful, compact areas of protection with field mice and other small mammals that have learned that although food might be scarce, the curious and bleak locale can be sustaining...

  Lieutenant General Bishop Lee had landed in Salem, Oregon at two-thirty PM. He had called the FBI’s director, Stephen Urban, not five minutes after he landed. He counted on arriving in the general vicinity of Robert Wren’s residence at or about the same time as the local authorities. His adjutant had rustled up an official vehicle and they set off for the area of the Cascades where Bob had moved after retiring. For some reason Bishop wasn’t feeling very happy with himself. A gaggle of reporters were just now cottoning to the kidnapping of his son. His adjutant evaded them and as the sun was dropping down in the west they were close to their goal.

  Bishop sat in the back of the Army sedan and silently contemplated the dark, silent woods they passed.

  •

  “Uh, Fitch,” said Teddy. She gazed around her, seeing alternating flashes of darkness and trees, zipping by them at a rate faster than she would have liked, at a rate faster than a skydiver would have liked. He expertly threaded the Honda motorcycle through shrubbery and went over ground that was far from flat, gunning the motor when he was able, and downshifting when he could not. The bike mowed over brush and branches, loudly crunching pinecones, causing smaller rocks to ricochet away from them. She had looked back once and the restaurant and the agents had vanished almost immediately behind a seemingly solid line of pine and fir and ever growing shadows. “You mind telling me what IN THE NAME OF GOD ARE YOU DOING?”

  Fitch kept his eyes forward and downshifted again as they locomotived past trees at a break-neck speed. And it was her neck that was going to be broken, along with Fitch’s. They bounced off a tree and the bark scraped along her leg, leaving a burning feeling through the material of her jeans. Teddy winced, knowing that another bruise was sure to appear the next day, a small price to pay for her uninterrupted existence for another twenty-four hours. “Hang on!” he yelled, and they started to tip to one side. He leaned to the right and she leaned with him.

  For a long moment Teddy thought the whole kit and caboodle was going down. Although she was leaning with Fitch she had only to turn her head slightly and see that the ground was only a foot away, and it didn’t seem quite right that a motorcycle, no matter what kind, could do that and stay on its two wheels. There was the heavy smell of gasoline and pine sap mixing together and the tires seemed to be slipping farther than they could ever come back. Then they righted themselves and the bike boomed through a tiny space between two trees, either of which that Teddy couldn’t have put her arms around. Bark scraped one of her knees, the other side this time, and a pinecone managed to interject itself between the two of them. She wiggled and the pinecone flew out again.

  Fitch managed to say in a voice that was louder than the sound of the revving engine and lascivious at the same time, “Oh, baby.”

  Teddy didn’t deign to reply. The biggest reason was that he was driving. The second reason was that they weren’t even on a road, and it was getting dark, and there were a bunch of men who had access
to weapons and resources not five hundred yards behind them, and she really didn’t want to die. Nor did she want to know that she was responsible for another person’s death. Not even the murdering bastard who would have gunned Fitch down without as much as a by-your-leave. And most certainly, not Fitch’s.

  The dirt bike roared again as Fitch downshifted and the wheels bounced as they came up a sudden incline. Teddy bit the inside of her cheek with the abrupt bump, and she cringed with the fresh surge of pain. Abruptly, they topped a ridge with a roar of engine without wheels on anything at all for a long moment. Then, they were on hard asphalt and the world seemed a little more coherent. “Thank you, Jesus!” bellowed Fitch fervently, finally upright, and shifting all the way up, while gunning the engine to its full capacity.

  His passenger didn’t know what to say. She tightened her arms around Fitch’s waist and he paused to take his hand off the clutch and pat her clenched hands reassuringly, as if he could read her mind. Then he glanced over his shoulder. “Oh, damn,” he said and she heard it over the wind and clamor of the motorcycle.

  Teddy glanced over her shoulder and saw not one, not two, not three, but four cars racing to catch up to them on Highway 20. Their lights were on, including bright high beams, and flashing blue and red lights contained within the unmarked vehicles. She only had to watch for a moment to tell that they were moving swiftly like the great hulking predators they were.

  “Teddy!” he yelled again.

  She was still staring at the cars behind them. Maybe two hundred feet away. Then one hundred fifty feet. They had to be going ninety mph plus on this twisting road. The Honda was topped out at seventy; its engine was screaming. It was a dirt bike, not a racer, and never meant to do road duty. “Yeah?” she yelled back. One hundred feet and coming. Guess who’s in front?

  “We’re going to go off road again!” he told her warningly.

  “Great,” she muttered. “I really love the idea of hitting some huge tree at night.”

  “Hey, look!” shouted Fitch as they came around a corner. “There’s Bob!”

  The large red Suburban came around the curve at regular speed and the two astonished faces of the middle-aged men followed the buzzing progress of the dirt bike with nonplused amazement. Fitch took his hand off the clutch and waved cheerfully. Then they were past and he shouted nonsensically, “You should have waved! You could have hurt his feelings!”

  “I’ll make it up to him!” she yelled back. “After we make it through the next few days!”

  “It’s really dark around here!” he boomed. He flipped on the single headlight of the bike, and Teddy glanced back again to see that the gap had closed to seventy-five feet, when they weren’t disappearing behind the bends, and their blinking, bright lights could be seen through the stands of trees at the curves. Suddenly there were cars ahead in their lane, and Fitch didn’t hesitate. He whipped the bike around them, riding the center double white lines, the tires of the bike shaking precariously as it hit the reflectors attached in the middle of the road.

  They passed a pick-up truck, a mid-sized sedan, and one SUV hauling a small trailer in front of them all, going slowly on the curving route, hauling a load up the graded road, perhaps waiting for a pull-out in order to let traffic behind him pass. The guy in the SUV blinked his high beams at them angrily as they passed him going uphill on the wrong side of the road. Fitch shrugged and Teddy had to resist gathering her arms closer around him. “When did you learn how to drive a motorcycle?” she screamed at him.

  “When I was about eight years old,” he called back. “My grandfather taught me. The guy thought his grandkids should be well-rounded!”

  “Sounds like a man I should have known!” she said sincerely. She’d never known her grandparents. She’d never had the chance.

  “Fishing, camping, hiking, bomb-making!” yelled Fitch. “He was the best! He taught us how to make a potato launcher out of pipes when I was nine! But we used paint in balloons instead! Boy, was my dad pissed! Speaking of my dad...”

  “Bomb-making?”

  “Sure! Bombs! Booby-traps! All kinds of funky shit! Curve ahead!”

  Teddy looked back. The gap had increased to two hundred feet again. The cars and trailer had slowed the Feds down. With the road suddenly straddling the side of a mountain, a steep hill going up on one side, and an even steeper hill on the other side going down, there wasn’t any place to safely pull over. She looked down again and saw that there was a deep blue lake below them. It was the color of the midnight sky, reflecting the emerging stars in the skies.

  “We’re going to go down to the right, where they can’t take their sedans, just past the curve!” he bellowed. The bike began to slow a little.

  Teddy closed her eyes and hoped that if they had to go down, it would be rapid, and that Fitch was just as good a driver as he seemed to be.

  Just past the curve, he hit the hand and foot brakes at the same time. The bike started to fishtail to the side, the back coming around to the front, causing Teddy to open her eyes suddenly, looking to her left at the rather large, eighteen wheeler which was just starting into the curve, coming directly at them. What she saw was grills the size of a refrigerator and headlights larger than basketballs far closer than the Department of Public Safety would have really approved. There was a squeal of tires from the trucker as he slammed on his own brakes, the air brakes making a loud whooshing noise as pressure was released. She saw that his trailer was starting to fishtail like the bike, sending tons and tons of screaming metal across the highway, ready to smear them onto the pavement.

  Teddy couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. The dirt bike paused in the middle of the road, as Fitch downshifted and looked over the side of the road toward the lake far below them, gauging the angle of descent, disregarding the truck and its trailer screaming across the road at them. The front end of the semi was headed directly for them as they sat half on one side of the road and half on the other, silently willing Fitch to, Move, move, Move RIGHT NOW! Then the bike suddenly began to peel out, the back tire leaving black rubber on the pavement, and screeching like an animal caught in a trap. Then they moved rapidly, the bike scooted perpendicular to the truck and trailer, and they launched themselves off the side of the mountain.

  For another moment it was worse. How could it be worse? There wasn’t a great, blaring truck coming at them, or cops with flashing lights and earsplitting sirens behind them, or a man with a gun sighted on them, waiting for the right time to shoot, or the same man ready to bump the bike as soon as they caught up and cause them to go into a controlled crash so they could get their hands on Teddy. Instead of all of that, they were airborne, wheels on nothing at all, darkness and black shapes all around them. For a moment, there was no sound, just the feel of emptiness around them, as if they were flying, and everything had stopped just to let them appreciate the quality of flight for just that one little second in time.

  Then the front end came down into dirt and rocks and bit into the earth, and sound and sight and smell resumed with an abruptness that was more than jarring. The back end started to roll upward and Teddy leaned back as far as she could, instinctively using her body weight to shift the momentum of the motorcycle. She heard Fitch gasp as he fought to control the front end of the bike. The wheels sank into the ground and they were speeding down a hill strewn with pine needles, rocks, and rotting branches, avoiding trees, and steadily attempting to stay upright.

  There was a loud claxon of noise as something crashed above them, the truck must have hit trees or careened off the side of the road. Teddy was still leaning backward and all she had to do was tilt her head back to see that part of the tractor-trailer was hanging off the highway above them. It balanced on the edge of the road, five feet of its rear end suspended in space above them, the huge side of a teeter-totter about to come crashing down on top of their heads. “Oh, fiddlysticks,” she said.

  Fitch didn’t dare look away from what he was doing. Going down a slope of dirt o
n a dirt bike, with a passenger, and a lake below them, required all of his concentration. But at the back of his mind he was aware that Teddy’s body movements behind him indicated that something was wrong. Not a little something like racing down the side of a mountain on a dirt bike with a woman who had kidnapped him and also shot a guy to protect him and who also happened to be one of the most infamous underground heroines since Angela Davis. Not that, no, but something was telling him that something else was wrong. Something major. He reached back without looking and hauled her up against him, screaming, “Hang on, dammit!”

  “FITCH!” she yelled, her head still all the way back, watching the yellow and white lights that lit up the tractor trailer, showing that it was still moving, dragging itself over the narrow embankment, moving more slowly now, but still moving, starting to bend the stunted trees that grew on the steep ridges. Five feet of the trailer became ten feet and the lights were still moving.

  “WHAT?” he yelled back.

  She pointed with one hand, too terrified to realize that he couldn’t possibly see what she was pointing at, much less take his eyes away from what he was doing. Teddy kept her head bent backwards watching the progress with horrified fascination. The trailer was tipping over the edge of the ridge and broke apart from the front part of the truck. Its running lights flickered and died as it hit the first set of trees, a huge shadow of black bulk, and even over the sound of the motorcycle she could hear the cracking of wood. Then it began to slide, and worst of all, it was sliding at an angle to them, the maximum amount being spread out in order to knock them down like little bowling pins.

  “WHAT IS IT?” he hollered again.