Blood Lure (38 page)

She opened her mouth to call out, thought better of it and closed it again. No time to go off half-cocked. A few minutes limping and fumbling located her day pack. She took inventory. A little food. Plenty of water. Pliers, hammer, staples, small hard-sided case with the last skunk love-scent canister inside and a well-used topographical map. Since she’d fully intended to be back in camp before sundown, she’d not brought a flashlight. Joan had the radio and, search as she might, the can of bear spray she’d dropped was not to be found.

Feeling unarmed and fragile, she sat again on her rock. The cold was deepening. She didn’t have a jacket with her for the same reason she was without a flashlight. The Boy Scout motto came to mind. A lesson to be learned. Again. The hard way.

Without light she couldn’t search for Joan. Without a radio, she couldn’t call for help. The one thing she could do was move from this exposed place. Pushing to her feet, she limped slowly toward the thickening screen of alder that heralded the pine forest proper. Chances of encountering a bear or
the
bear were greater in the coverts, but like any hurt and frightened animal, Anna felt the need to hide.

Moving slowly, favoring her bad knee, she picked her way over the rock-embedded land past the miniature lake. Till the moon rose, her eyes were of questionable use and she stopped every few steps to listen. Partly she listened for Joan and Rory; mostly she listened for any sign that the bear was still in the neighborhood. The only sounds she heard were those of her own making.

Beneath the alders darkness was absolute. Anna lost all sense of direction and, knowing what she did was illogical and dangerous, she pushed on. Nowhere seemed safe. Nowhere seemed a good place to stop. The small clearing was too exposed, too near the water source where bears would come to drink. The thicket was too closed in, too dark. Her knee was swelling, her head had left its dull ache to throb, but still she could not bring herself to stop.

Because the patron saint of lost souls—or fools—guided her footsteps she came not to the edge of a cliff or ravine but out of the thicket and into the more open land beneath the pines.

The moon had yet to rise, but there was a hint of ambient light from the sky. After feeling her way blindly through the brush, Anna felt relief as her eyes came alive once more. The need to keep moving abated somewhat. That and the pain in her knee finally convinced her it was wiser to stop.

Back against a pine, she straightened her leg, drank water and listened. From a ways away—a mile, a yard, she couldn’t tell—came the shush of a body passing through brush. The water froze in Anna’s throat. Forcing herself to swallow it, she flinched at the audible gulping sound she made.

More listening. Faint, very faint, a hissing roar like that of distant water rushing down a narrow gorge. No rivers this high, no streams of that magnitude; Anna wondered if she was suffering an auditory hallucination brought on by a bang on the head. Far away, disturbingly hard to get a sense of, the hissing continued. Then, just as faint, just as clear in the still, crystal air, a clink. Metal, the key to the aural conundrum.

The hiss was the familiar obnoxious noise of a Coleman stove, the clink a pan or lid. Someone was making dinner. Anna pushed herself up, started toward the sound in too much of a hurry. The knee gave out and she fell. When the pain ebbed, she sent a tiny prayer of gratitude into a heaven she believed to be deaf and dumb.

Joan would not leave her knocked out in a rocky field while she calmly prepared dinner less than a mile away. Joan didn’t have a stove or camp gear. Anna, in her rush to be right, had dragged her and Rory into this mess as unprepared as she herself was.

For a time she remained sprawled on the soft carpet of needles, unsure whether it was better to go see who was camping in her woods or to run away.

The rumble from the Coleman stopped. An angry voice, just one, the words unclear but the savage tone unmistakable, made the decision for her. Setting her mind beyond the pain in her leg, Anna moved toward the source of the noise with infinite care, one step, one tree at a time. Twice she was stopped. Twice she thought she heard the stealthy padding of oversized paws on the pine needles in the darkness behind her.

The steps stopped when she stopped. Maybe it was only the crush of her own booted feet placed with such care. Maybe she imagined it. Whatever the source, Anna no longer wanted to run away. The terror behind her was as insistent as that which lay ahead.

The ranting voice, though more unsettling, was easier to track through the dark than the amorphous hiss of the stove had been. A person venting with such energy also made enough of a racket to cover the unavoidable sounds of her progress; she covered ground quickly.

Speed acted against her in a peculiar way. The faster she moved, the more she believed she was being pursued, the better she could imagine the glowing eyes and bared teeth inches from the nape of her neck. It took effort and a damaged knee to keep her from giving in to childlike panic and running toward the sound of a human voice.

A misstep. The knee twisted and Anna was forced to a halt. Her breathing was ragged. She’d broken a sweat that would soon turn to chill.
Out of control,
she warned herself, and
Breathe.

Not making noise in body by movement or in mind by fear of the dark and the monsters that dwelt therein, Anna began to hear distinct words: “Out. Not a fucking game. By Christ I will.”

Sobered, she moved again. Closing out the vision of the bear, she returned to the calming slowness that had marked her progress in the beginning, careful to make no sound, barge into no solid objects in the dark.

Another minute and she stopped abruptly. Perhaps fifteen feet in front of her was a dark form. A man, she guessed. He held a flashlight that he was pointing into the woods in the opposite direction from where she stood. By its backwash she could see he was tall and under his right arm he held a long-barreled rifle. In the pale spill of the flash she saw Joan and Rory.

Joan’s face was colorless but for black around one corner of her mouth that could be blood or dirt. Her wrists and ankles were tied together so she had to sit hunched over, elbows around her knees. Rory was beside her. His ankles had been lashed together but his hands were free. He held them palm up in front of his face as if he felt for raindrops. At his feet the Coleman stove lay on its side, a pan tipped over nearby.

Rory’d been put to cooking, Anna guessed. In a rage the man with the flashlight had kicked over the stove, burning Rory’s hands in the process.

“Goddamn it,” the man bellowed. The light swung like a sword, piercing the darkness several feet to Anna’s left. Staring right at her, Bill McCaskil screamed, “Come out now or I’ll blow their fucking heads off!”

23

The McCaskil who
held the rifle and the flashlight was a different man than the shifty Lothario Anna remembered. Days alone in the wilderness had had an adverse effect on the city boy. His beard was rough, his hair matted and spiky by turns, his clothes dirty. The biggest change was the eyes. McCaskil was scared, scared to the point of unreason. Even in the dim backwash of the flashlight Anna could see his irises were entirely ringed in white as his facial muscles pulled the lids away. Whatever edge he’d been running toward when he came to Glacier, McCaskil had been pushed over it.

A crazy man, a scared crazy man, with a rifle and hostages. In law enforcement this was what was referred to as a worst-case scenario.

“Out,” McCaskil cried in a voice ugly with fear. He swung the rifle toward Rory and Joan, and Anna raised her hands, stepped forward. She never made it into the light. McCaskil was wheeling, screaming, the flashlight raking the trees. He’d not seen her.

“I’m not going to hurt him.” His voice became wheedling as he turned. Silence followed, deepened by the darkness and the trees. “Balthazar’s mine!” he shrieked and Anna flinched. Whomever he shouted for, it wasn’t her. Joan and Rory must have told him they were alone. Anna blessed them for their courage and began creeping around the circle. McCaskil was beyond negotiation even if she’d had anything to negotiate with. Running away was the best option. With the cover of night she could do it easily if she left Joan and Rory.

A gut-numbing roar froze the cowardly thoughts; bear—
the
bear—close by. McCaskil screamed high and shrill, and the rifle at his side fired, the glare of the muzzle harsh and bright and then gone, leaving a red wound seared across Anna’s night vision.

“I’ll kill them. You’ll have killed them,” he screamed into the night. “Like you killed that Van Slyke woman. Butcher. I’ll do it.”

A great gush of terror brought the contents of Anna’s stomach into her throat and she had to fight to keep from retching. The slicer of faces was somewhere in the darkness with her. He, and a great bear that seemed to have an agenda of its own.

Run away, run away,
she thought and moved to the next tree, closer to Joan and Rory.

The two of them sat shoulder to shoulder about fifteen feet from the mad McCaskil. Ranting, a second round fired, the thrashing of his booted feet as he made short, aborted dashes at sounds only he could hear, covered the noise Anna made as she moved.

The west-facing slope was dryer than the valleys, and there was little undergrowth, not much in the way of cover but shadow and luck. Behind Rory and Joan, several yards in the woods, Anna parked herself in the shelter of a tree that she hoped was wide enough to hide her should McCaskil’s light come back around. Her shirt was gray, her shorts green—all to the good—but in the near-perfect darkness under the pines, should light touch on her bare arms, her legs or her face, they would shine like beacons.

Making herself small in mind if not in body, she wriggled out of her day pack and set it squarely in front of her where probing light would not fire its burgundy hue in a dun and green landscape. Working by feel, Anna groped through it. Her breath was coming in short shallow gasps, audible, panicked. Her scalp was tingling and she was losing sensation in her hands and feet.
Hyperventilating,
she warned herself.
Too scared.
Lifting the pack to her face in lieu of the traditional paper sack, she breathed into it, then out. The smells of her short history in Glacier were all there: peanut butter, skunk, sweat, fish guts, grease, dust. The skin on her head loosened, her heart ceased to pound in her ears, her fingers began to feel like fingers. Ten breaths more, counted out over a brief eternity, and she put the pack down again. In her hand were the wire cutters, quicker and more sure than a Swiss army knife dulled from years of promiscuous use.

The light flew erratically past. She waited a moment for the sound of a rifle shot and the sudden blasting away of an exposed elbow or knee, but she’d not been spotted. Further out into the trees, drowned in the impossible ink of a woodland night, she heard the stealthy sound of padded feet moving over duff.

Nothing she could do about that. She pushed it from her mind.

A quick peek let her know McCaskil had turned again and faced away from her. He stopped shouting. In a voice dead calm and more frightening because of it, he spoke to the darkness, “In one minute I will kill the boy. You can save him. Balthazar’s life for the boy’s. One minute.” He began counting down in a loud voice.

Out of the frying pan,
Anna said to herself and rolled from the cover of her tree. Ignoring the burst of pain in her injured knee, she moved as rapidly as possible toward the others. In seconds she knelt behind Rory. “Not a sound,” she hissed in his ear. She showed him the wire cutters and he understood. Quickly and quietly, he swung his feet around.

Joan’s head turned. Without light Anna could not read her expression. She trusted in Joan’s good sense. What she could not know was how much of it fear had eaten away. As there was nothing to be done to reassure either the researcher or herself, Anna ignored her.

Closing her mind to the possibilities, Anna felt at Rory’s ankles. Thin, hard plastic; McCaskil had bound his prisoners with the disposable cuffs policemen carry as spares. Clearly he’d come prepared. Though virtually impossible to break, he couldn’t have picked anything more vulnerable to fence pliers, and Anna was grateful.

“Twenty-nine,” McCaskil called. “Twenty-eight.”

Snip, snip.

Anna clipped a bit of Rory’s flesh along with the plastic and he hollered, “Ouch!” The wretched rotten boy actually said ouch. “Sorry,” he whispered too late.

“He’s turning,” Joan hissed.

“Run,” Anna said and pushed Rory to his feet, “run!” She shoved at unidentified bits of boy anatomy as she scrambled to her feet to follow.

A hailstorm of words, shrieked and screamed from what sounded like the throats of a multitude of demons, rained down. McCaskil’s threats, Rory’s squeaks, Joan’s exhortations and Anna’s own sailorlike vocabulary of meaningless obscenities. McCaskil’s flashlight shivered and snapped. In her mind Anna heard Teddy Pinson, an old college friend, intone, “‘
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
’”

Rory disappeared in darkness followed by a gunshot close and loud, a blow on Anna’s eardrums. Cutting through trauma-induced deafness came a scream. Anna’s mind folded down in confusion. The metallic swallowing sound of a bolt-action rifle and another round was chambered. Anna’d fallen. Had she been shot and screamed? Had the bullet found Rory in the dark? Before enough time had elapsed to draw a full breath, Anna knew she’d not been hit. Her knee had given out as she’d lunged for the cover of the woods.

“No!”

That was Joan. Anna rolled and the butt of McCaskil’s rifle pounded down, not the killing blow to the back of the head he’d intended, but a glancing strike to the shoulder that made Anna cry out.

McCaskil had thrown aside the flashlight. The beam ran along the ground catching up the rust of the needles, illuminating the man’s booted feet. Anna bunched up her weight on her left hip and kicked out. The sole of her boot connected with McCaskil’s ankle. Fierce pain shot up from her bad knee but she scarcely felt it. McCaskil went down on one knee.