Deadfall Page 33

  Cort’s body was shaking wildly, responding to the Jeep’s dance over the terrain. Her head smacked the window frame hard enough for Declan to hear it. She might not be able to hit a hill under these conditions, but . . . who knew? That would be something they’d talk about for years, her blasting someone off a motorcycle. Forget Bonnie and Clyde and True Grit. They were in Easy Rider territory.Very cool.

  When no shots rang out, Declan’s smile faltered. “Shoot ’em, baby. Shoot ’em!”

  Cort returned her upper half to the cab. She was holding the top of her head with both hands. A pained grimace contorted her features.

  “Where’s the gun?” Declan asked.

  “I banged my head, hard. I think I’m bleeding.” But when she looked at her hands, no blood.

  “What are you saying? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I hit my head, Dec! I mean really hard.”

  “You lost another gun? Another gun?”

  They were right on top of the motorcycle. Declan cranked the wheel to collide with it.

  Laura leaned around Terry to watch the Jeep as the dirt bike tore for the smoking hills. She strained to see Dillon in the vehicle. If she did not see him, their best hope was to get to the location of Declan’s last attack. As they drew closer she recognized Declan. He was driving. How badly she wanted to rip those tight, smug lips off his face. She considered drawing one of the two pistols they had put in Terry’s pack to keep them safe from all the rattling and shaking on the bike. She calculated that the two vehicles would pass before she could retrieve a gun, and she knew without question that the effort would result in wasted ammo.

  Apparently someone thought differently. The girl, Cortland, rose up from the passenger window. Something was in her hand, and you didn’t have to be Einstein to know what it was. Her head bounced up and down, seeming to make several jarring points of contact with the doorframe. Then the something in her hand flew away. Holding her head, the girl slid back into the vehicle.

  They were almost on top of it, ready to pass it. She heard Terry let up on the accelerator a second before he swerved sharply left. As he did, the Jeep’s right front corner lunged at them like an attacking dog. It missed Laura’s leg and the rear wheel by inches. Had Terry not anticipated Declan’s move, they would be performing bone-shattering cartwheels through the field right now.

  Terry corrected their direction and continued heading toward the hills marked by columns of fading smoke. Laura craned her head around to see the Jeep making a tight circle, turning around.

  “They’re coming back,” she informed Terry.

  “We can outpace them . . . on the bike,”Terry called back to her between jostles up and down. “But we’re still not gonna have . . . much time . . . to find out what . . . he was shooting at!”

  “I have to know,” she said. The shoulder of a hill encroached onto the valley floor. It created a steep slope that Laura assumed was matched on the other side.

  Instead of going around it,Terry hit it head-on. They rose up and up, both Terry and Laura leaning forward to prevent the bike from tumbling backward. It was the sort of hill off-roaders loved to tackle, though they were not always victorious.

  Declan might attempt to follow them; he had the personality required to attempt it, but considering his desire to get them, he might not risk it. At the top, the shoulder crested in a jumplike ridge; the bike sailed over it.Terry and Laura stood on the pegs to better position the bike when it came down and to use their legs as shock absorbers. When they landed, their rear wheel wanted to slide out from under them. Terry expertly steered into the slide and kept the bike up. The long wide valley continued for another half mile before becoming the hills of their destination.

  Laura looked back. The Jeep had not yet appeared at the crest of the shoulder, and she believed now that Declan would go around.The maneuver bought them probably an extra three or four minutes. At the pace they were going, there was a good chance they’d have seven or eight minutes on Declan by the time they reached the source of the smoke. The valley slowly arced up toward the hills. She could now see an old road cutting across the hill at a shallow incline and then turning to the opposite direction to complete its climb to the top.The right half of the hill appeared to have been shaved off to form a plateau lower than the left half.The road came from around a bend, but Terry had the bike pointed directly at the hill.They would meet the road halfway up.

  She turned in the seat to see the Jeep coming around the shoulder, bouncing and leaping over the rough terrain.

  They passed another vehicle she had not noticed before. It was a different model Jeep. It sat unmoving in the meadow. She looked back. The windshield was spiderwebbed from a hole in front of the steering wheel. She did not see anyone inside.

  Something popped! In a split second, a catalog of possibilities unfolded in her mind: The bike had backfired from low gas or no gas. A piston or lifter had snapped—but they were not decelerating, as they would in that case. A tire had blown—but wouldn’t they be eating dirt about now? They had been shot at—but the Jeep seemed too far away.

  More pops, louder—

  Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.

  Terry swerved away from the hill, angling right this time. She saw that two men . . . now three . . . stood at the top of the hill on the plateau. From one of them came flashing starbursts of light.

  Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.

  “No go on your plan!”Terry yelled.

  “We’ll figure something else out! Just go!” She slapped him on the shoulder blade.

  She saw now this was a place of carnage: A body lay sprawled on the hill.The second column of smoke rose from a downed helicopter.

  Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.

  Puffs of dust kicked up in a line twenty feet to their left. At the two o’clock position, the Jeep grew as it closed the distance. Evidently Declan realized that Terry and Laura were trying to slip out between the two factions of his gang like a fly avoiding the clap of two hands. He angled right so he was heading not directly at them, but at a point ahead of them where he believed they would intersect. Now that they were moving with the valley’s length instead of against it, the jostling mellowed and Terry was able to give the bike more gas.

  The Jeep picked up speed as well, but Laura thought the bike could escape its intended collision.

  It was more than a thought. It was a prayer.

  61

  Dillon was not in the mine tunnels.

  Couldn’t be.

  While Hutch knew he had not covered every tunnel, every room, where he had not been physically his voice had certainly reached.The possibility of the boy having been seriously injured in Declan’s strike on the secondary exit had not escaped him. In fact it haunted him. As he pushed the burning branches ahead of him, squinting to see farther than the light would allow, he studied the floor closely. He told himself that he was watching for Dillon’s tracks in the dust, but he equally expected a trail of blood.

  How could it be that Dillon was alive and well and not calling out to him? Did Dillon believe that their pursuers would hear him? Wouldn’t he follow Hutch’s lead and return his yells? Since he and Dillon had been locked in the rec center with Declan’s gang, Hutch was convinced that only the six people he knew about were participating in Declan’s weapon-testing/video-producing scheme. Hutch had seen all six of them on the plateau, so he did not believe Dillon had run into any others; no one was holding the boy captive, in the tunnels or elsewhere.

  When Hutch reached the place where he and Dillon had taken a short nap, everything seemed the way they had left it. Hutch tore the blankets into strips. He tied the first strip to the branches while the bunches of needles still burned. The additional strips would allow him to look for Dillon longer than he otherwise could. He went into the room where they had found the blankets to collect a few more supplies, including a half-used book of matches. He had missed them before, in the excitement of finding the lantern.

  He went as close to the front ent
rance as the collapsed mine allowed. Where the tunnel ceiling had collapsed, the sky showed through. Deep ravines had been blasted into the hill above this section. Hutch found other tunnels that had become impassible as a result of what seemed like random strikes from Declan’s laser weapon. Had Hutch not paid such careful attention to the strikes Declan had meted out during the satellite’s last window of functionality—when Declan had killed his uncle and when Hutch and Phil had escaped—he would be frantically searching for Dillon under the rubble. There had been, however, only one strike on the mine during that last volley.

  Hutch now returned to that damaged part of the tunnel. Realizing he had ignored the section of tunnel that led in the other direction from the ladder, Hutch’s stomach clutched as tightly as a fist. It was the only area he had not searched where Dillon might have fled if he had been injured.

  Hutch did not think he would find Dillon here. He knew he would.

  He stepped around the blocks of broken concrete, past the damaged ladder. And stopped.

  On the strip of concrete remaining in the shaft just below the bottom of the ladder were two capital letters: CA. If there were ever more letters—and Hutch knew there had been—the laser cannon had obliterated them with the rest of the shaft. He hadn’t seen the letters earlier because he had descended the ladder in darkness. Had he possessed a flashlight or lighted the torch topside, he would have immediately seen Dillon’s message. It had been scrawled using the pasty chocolate energy bar he had left with the boy. He imagined Dillon making the substance gooier with his mouth, wanting to be sure it left a discernable image. Dillon would not have been certain it did. The light from above penetrated only partially down the shaft.

  Writing blind, he had done well. The C was big and bold. The A too close to it, the first slanting arm running into the bottom arc of the C. A hint of the next letter was visible, too high on the wall.

  Had Dillon’s smiling face appeared at the top of the shaft and given him a perky Hiya, Hutch! he would not have felt more relief than he did at that moment.Well . . . that wasn’t true. He would rather have the boy in his sights than merely know where to find him.

  Not willing to wait to reach the surface, Hutch wedged his torch into the metal workings of the ladder. By its flickering light, Hutch removed the vinyl topo map from the inside pocket of his jacket. He unfolded it and found the location of the abandoned mine, though the map omitted it. He ran his finger southeast to a small square he had placed there with his black grease pencil: the cabin.

  He and Dillon had talked about it at length. They had invested a solid ten or fifteen minutes transferring its location from Dillon’s memory to the map. It was where his mother had told him to meet her, and where he and Hutch had been heading when the storm had driven them into the mine. He had told Dillon to wait for him in the mine in case something happened and they became separated. He understood, however, the anxiety and impatience that would have impelled Dillon up the ladder and to the cabin.

  His great relief would not let him ponder the what-if scenarios of Dillon being at the bottom of the shaft or climbing the ladder or exiting the door above at the time of Declan’s strike. He believed, with all his heart, that Dillon had already been making his way to the cabin. Never mind that two minutes earlier Hutch had been equally certain that he would find Dillon’s body in the tunnel on the other side of the shaft.

  He assessed the map one last time and judged the cabin to be roughly two hours away by foot. Even as an adult and with his experience in the outdoors, Hutch had no real advantage over Dillon in reaching the cabin faster. Dillon was an outdoorsy kid, and the shortfall of his weaker muscles and smaller lungs was still better than Hutch’s bruised and battered body.

  He replaced the map, removed the torch from the ladder, and dropped it to the floor.

  He hoisted himself up and climbed. The ladder was shakier than before, but relief for Dillon made it easier to climb up than it had been to climb down. He thought he would be able to climb the buckled areas hand over hand without the use of his legs, but he found that his bruised arms and shoulders did not support his weight as they would have uninjured. Several bolts popped out of the concrete, making the ladder shake and cant over the shaft, but he did not stop to consider more careful movements.Twenty feet from the surface he heard Phil’s hushed voice.

  “Hutch? That you, Hutch?”

  “Almost there.”

  “Did you hear the gunfire?”

  That made Hutch stop. “What do you mean?”

  “Gunfire. Machine-gun fire. Lots of it.”

  “When? Where?” He prayed it had not emanated from the hills or valleys to the southeast, but there was no guarantee that the shots had not been directed at Dillon, regardless of the direction from which they came.

  “Fifteen, twenty minutes ago. I can’t believe you didn’t hear it. Up on the plateau. I thought they were shooting at me. I almost had a coronary.Then I thought they were shooting at you, but I couldn’t figure out how you would’ve got up there. Or why you would want to.”

  Hutch continued to climb.

  “I think they were shooting at a motorcycle,” Phil said.

  “Motorcycle?”

  “Yeah, I heard a motorcycle engine. High-pitched, unmuffled, like those dirt bikes we tried a couple years ago.”

  Hutch reached the top and swung himself out. Phil was crouched between a boulder and a man-sized chunk of concrete. Patches of red had surfaced on his cheeks and forehead, accompanied by beads of perspiration.

  “Still cuffed?” Hutch asked.

  Phil lifted his arms. His wrists were raw, bleeding, and bruised. “I tried to squeeze out.” He made an exasperated sound. “Then I tried to pry them apart. I heard it was possible.”

  “If you’re Arnold Schwarzenegger. People have pulled out their biceps doing that.”

  “I didn’t go that far.”

  “Give me a chance to catch my breath. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Hutch pushed away from the edge and fell back into the dirt. His heart was pounding, pounding. The breaths he pulled in felt like cold water on a parched tongue. He suspected his discomfort wasn’t entirely from the climb or even from the beating he’d taken; anxiety had amplified the effects of his physical exertion the way sea salt brings out the flavor of meat.

  He said, “Tell me again what you heard.”

  Phil considered for a moment. “First, there was this buzzing. Coulda been an engine, but it was like an echo in the hills, you know? Then it got louder, and I thought maybe a dirt bike. A few seconds later, ten or fifteen, the shooting started. Seemed to go on for about a minute.”

  “You said up on the plateau?”

  “The shooting. Not the motorcycle. I couldn’t tell where the motorcycle was.”

  “Are our friends still up there, or did they chase after whatever they were shooting at?”

  “I don’t know.” Something dawned on Phil. He rose and leaned toward the hole. “Where’s the kid?”

  Hutch took in the sky. You’d never know that just a few hours before, a swirling cauldron of iron clouds had filled it from horizon to horizon. The air was chilly on his skin, but nothing like the openfreezer draft that had accompanied the downpour. He closed his eyes and felt his pulse and respiration slow. He said, “He went on ahead of me. He’ll meet us at the cabin.”

  “What cabin?”

  “It’s where we were heading before we stopped here.”

  “Why were you going there?”

  Hutch thought about it. “Good question. It seems so long ago. I guess it was only this morning, before dawn.We wouldn’t have made it to the next town, and Dillon thought the cabin would be a safe place to wait all this out. It’s where his mother said she’d meet him.”

  “Dillon’s the kid?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re going there because the kid wanted to go there?”

  Hutch sat up. He looked over the concrete block at Phil. “You did better? Where were you?
”

  “I told you. Halfway to the next town, I think, when Uncle Creepo showed up in that helicopter.”

  Hutch moved around the block and knelt in front of Phil. He pulled the jaw harp from his breast pocket. “Well, Creepo’s dead, and you’re not,” he said. “Now let me see those cuffs.”

  “Must be doing something right, huh?” He held his hands in front of Hutch, as though in prayer.

  Hutch examined the keyhole and said, “To jimmy or jar your way out of handcuffs means releasing yourself without fiddling with the keyhole. Sometimes you can slip a piece of hard wire in and disengage the pawl from the ratchet, but that’s actually more difficult than going into the keyhole, which is called picking.”

  “Let me guess.You interviewed a magician.”

  “Better than that,” Hutch said, working the metal tongue of the harp into the keyhole. “I profiled a shoplifter who kept escaping from the security offices and twice from the cops after they picked him up.”

  “How did he represent the ‘spirit of Colorado’?”

  “He had a great story. Teacher. Lost his job. Down on his luck. Family to feed. Don’t you read my columns?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well, having all this time on his hands, and being sort of a research nerd, he planned exactly what he was going to steal.You know, what things would be easy to pocket and pawn and yield the highest riskto-reward ratio.”

  “Man.”

  “He also researched how not to get caught—what kind of stores had the best security, stuff like that. As part of all that—”

  The steel cuff on Phil’s right wrist opened and fell off.

  “Hey!” Phil said.

  Hutch smiled coyly. “As part of that, he learned how to pick handcuffs.” He set to work on the left cuff.

  “And he showed you?”

  “I always try to learn at least one thing from my subjects, and I didn’t have any interest in shoplifting.”

  “But getting out of handcuffs . . .”

  “I figured it’d be a cool thing to dazzle the kids. I never got around to buying a set of cuffs, though.”