Fatal Descent (17 page)

“Hands behind your back,” Les said.

“He’s tying up Gonzo,” Mandy whispered to Paul. “We’ve got to
move now.”

She said it as much to galvanize herself as Paul. Her breath came in short gasps, and her palms were slick with nervous sweat. While Paul slid quietly out of his tent, she wiped her hands on her pants. “You go for the gun in her left hand, and I’ll grab the one in her right.”

“Let me see where everyone is.” Paul crouched next to her behind the tent and peeked around the edge. He gave a nod, then glanced back at Mandy, his eyes black in the moonlight. “Ready?”

He held up a fist, and Mandy bumped it with her own. “Ready.”

To die?

Paul leapt up and Mandy followed. They charged straight for Alice. To Mandy, their footsteps sounded like elephant stomps.

This isn’t going to work
, she thought, as Alice jerked and turned toward them.

Paul sprang toward Alice, reaching for her left arm.

A surprise burst of speed in Mandy’s legs powered her forward. She flew at Alice just as the woman’s face appeared, grim and twisted with raw anger. Mandy zeroed in on the gun in Alice’s right hand.

Get that!

Paul hit Alice first. They both grunted and Alice stumbled back.

Mandy slammed into Alice’s right arm. While the three of them fell, she groped for the gun and yanked it out of Alice’s hand. She rolled away and came up on her knees, gun in her grasp.

Bang!

Shrieks came from the tents.

At first, Mandy thought the gun in her hand had fired, but no, it hadn’t. She hadn’t felt anything.

Then Kendra leapt on Alice’s chest, pinning her right arm under a knee. She started fighting with the maddened and kicking woman along with Paul.

Had Paul been shot?

“Paul! Are you okay?” Mandy looked for Alice’s left arm. It was under Paul. Both of his hands were under him, too. He seemed to be struggling with Alice for the gun.

“I’m fine,” he said between clenched teeth.

Mandy crawled over to Alice’s head and shoved the gun in her face. “Stop! Now!”

Alice’s eyes were unfocused, hazed with anger. She continued to fight and roll against Kendra and Paul.

Mandy didn’t want to risk shooting Kendra or Paul, so she turned
the gun in her hand and whacked Alice in the head with it. Finally Alice stilled.

Diana screamed again, and Mandy realized she must have come out of her tent and seen her whack Alice. She prayed that Alice’s
parents would stay out of this fight.

Grunts and yells told Mandy that Gonzo and Rob were fighting with Les behind her. She turned to see if she needed to help them, thinking both of them had their hands tied. Gonzo’s hadn’t been yet, however, so he was beating on Les’s prone body with his fists, while Rob stood beside Les and rammed kicks into his side.

“Stop,” Les said, his voice muffled by the sand. “I give.”

Mandy turned back to Alice.

“Got it!” Paul rolled off Alice’s arm and held up the other handgun triumphantly.

Then Mandy saw the bloom of dark blood on his shirt.

seventeen

The highest good is like water. Water gives life to ten thousand
things and does not strive. It flows in places that men reject.

—
the tao te ching

Mandy leaned back on
her haunches and surveyed her bandaging handiwork on Paul Norton’s side by the light of her headlamp. He had only been grazed when the gun in Alice’s hand went off while they were struggling. That didn’t stop Tina from crying hysterically, though, when she emerged from her tent and her flashlight illuminated the blood on her father’s torso.

Elsa had comforted both her daughter and ex-husband while
Mandy ran for the first-aid kit and patched up Paul’s wound. When
the frightened women friends piled out of their tent, full of curious questions, Mandy directed them to Rob so she could focus on taking care of Paul. Diana and Hal were with Rob, too. Diana sobbed while Hal held her and demanded answers from Rob, who tried to answer them while tying up the captives.

While Mandy worked, she explained to the Nortons what had happened. With horrified expressions on their faces, they listened to her story of how Les had tried to kill both Amy and her in Big Drop Two and her harrowing journey in the dark to camp.

“The outer layer of gauze is still white, so I think the bleeding has
stopped,” Mandy said to Paul after she finished her story. “You should
lie still for a while longer, though.”

He lifted his head to peer at the bandage. “Thanks. But I’m cold.
I need to get out of this wind.” A shiver coursed through him.

“Of course,” Mandy said. The night breeze lifted her hair, and she tucked it behind her ears. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, she, too, was feeling chilled. She chafed her arms to warm them inside her fleece jacket.

“Tina, go get his sleeping bag,” Elsa directed. After Tina took off running, she removed her fleece jacket and draped it over Paul. “Can’t have our hero catching cold.”

Paul smiled up at her. “Thanks.”

With a smile of her own, Mandy turned away to pack up the first-aid kit.

“Don’t be getting any romantic ideas, now,” Elsa said. “The divorce
is still final.”

“I’m not,” he replied. “It’s just that I’ve never heard you call me a hero before.”

“You took a huge risk to save all of our lives. I didn’t know you had it in you.” Mandy glanced back at them in time to see Elsa grin and give his shoulder a pat. “I’ll be looking at you with different eyes now.”

“So maybe we can be friends instead of enemies?” Paul’s voice held a hopeful note.

Elsa nodded.

Tina returned at a trot with her father’s sleeping bag. Elsa and Mandy helped her unzip it and lay it next to Paul, so he could roll into it. Then Elsa zipped it closed and bent down to kiss Paul on the cheek. “Thank you, friend.”

Tina clapped her hands with glee. “So you two have finally made up?”

Paul gave her a chiding stare. “We’ve agreed to be friends, Tina, nothing more.”

Tina looked from her father to her mother, then heaved a sigh. “That’s a lot better than the sniping I’ve had to put up with until now. I guess I’ll take what I can get.”

Paul lifted a hand out of his sleeping bag to take her hand, and Elsa put an arm around Tina’s shoulders. “You’re still our daughter, honey,” Paul said. “We both love you.”

“And that will never change,” Elsa added.

Mandy picked up the first-aid kit and stood, stifling a groan
as various aching body parts made themselves known. “Well, since
Paul’s in such good hands, I’ll check on the others. Take a look at
his bandage in about ten or fifteen minutes. If he hasn’t bled through, you can help him move—slowly—into a tent.” She glanced at her watch, pressing the button to make its face glow. “It’s one thirty in the morning. You may want to try to get some sleep.”

Viv, Betsy, and Mo approached and each gave Mandy a hug and
words of thanks and praise. Though they had obviously heard the story from Rob, they still buzzed with questions for Mandy. She answered a couple, then said she needed to check everyone who had been in the fight for injuries. With a promise to answer any more questions they had in the morning, Mandy suggested the three girlfriends return to their tent.

“If you think we’re going to go back to sleep, you’re sadly mistaken,” Viv said, “but we’ll get out of your way.” She pulled Betsy and Mo with her toward their tent.

Mandy walked over to where Rob and Gonzo were standing guard.
They aimed their headlamps and the two handguns at Les and
Alice, who sat on the sand with arms bound behind their backs and duct tape wrapped around their ankles. Cool lay on his back beside them, being similarly trussed up by Kendra, but with his hands tied in front.

Kendra cut the duct tape wrapped around his ankles from the roll and stood. She flipped the roll into the air and caught it. “We ran out of rope, so I used this,” she said. “As they say, ‘One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop.’ I’d say these three are well-stopped.”

“Ha ha,” Alice said with a sneer. “Gloat all you want, but don’t expect anyone to laugh at your lame jokes.”

Mandy knelt beside Cool and shone her headlamp on his face. His gaze tracked her movements, which was a good sign. He probably had a concussion from being knocked out, but it seemed to be a minor one—both eyes were dilated the same amount. “How’s your head?”

“Got a mother of a headache,” he answered.

“Dizzy?”

“Only when I sit up.”

Mandy nodded and stood. “We’ll keep checking on you through
the night, and I’ll let the cops know you’ve got a head wound.”

“Fuck,” Cool whispered and closed his eyes. Mandy could imagine that he was picturing his dream of spending his days free climbing and living off his cool million flushing down the drain.

“Anyone bleeding?” Mandy asked the others.

Rob and Gonzo shook their heads, and Gonzo said, “Battered, bruised, and scratched, but not bloodied.”

“I checked Les and Alice when I tied them up,” Kendra said. “No blood on them.”

“What’s that, then?” Mandy pointed at a maroon stain on Kendra’s hand.

Kendra gazed at her hand in surprise and turned it over, then looked at her other hand. “Well, I’ll be damned, there’s a cut here. Never felt it.”

Mandy cleaned the cut with an alcohol wipe, making Kendra wince, then bandaged it.

“How about you,
mi querida
?” Rob looked her over, concern wrinkling his brow.

“Gonzo summed it up about right. I’m okay.”
Not really.
She was dog-tired, almost dizzy on her feet with fatigue, and she didn’t think there was a single place on her that wasn’t bruised or scratched. But she wasn’t going to reveal any of that to their prisoners.

She felt a hand on her arm and turned. Bundled up in a fleece jacket and sweatpants, Diana Anderson looked at her with sorrowful, pleading eyes, dried tears staining her cheeks. “Where’s Amy?” she asked tentatively, as if afraid to hear the answer.

Mandy put a comforting hand on top of Diana’s. “She’s on a beach upriver and has a space blanket and a fire to keep her warm.”

Diana’s shoulders drooped with relief. She leaned back against Hal, who was standing behind her. “Thank God.”

“Amy’s injured, though,” Mandy added. “She’s got a broken leg, which I put in a splint. She’s in pain, but otherwise she’s okay.”

Hal embraced his wife from behind with shaking hands. He nodded at Mandy. “Thanks for taking such good care of her. Can someone go back up the canyon to rescue her now?”

“It’s too dangerous in the dark,” Mandy said. “I barely made it here alive. And we’ve got our hands full guarding these three. As soon as the launch comes to collect us, and I can get my hands on a working radio, I’ll make sure a powerboat gets sent to pick her up.”

“Damn it!” Alice kicked Les with her bound feet. “You can’t do anything right, can you?”

“Hell,” he grumbled. “You screwed it up the first time.”

That caught Mandy’s attention. “First time?”

Les sneered at Alice. “It wasn’t Kendra’s fault that her raft tipped.
Alice and I maneuvered that quite well. But then she didn’t finish the job.”

Kendra gasped while Mandy’s mind whirled back to her rescue of Alice and Amy in Rapid Fifteen. Alice hadn’t helped her sister grab onto the raft when Amy seemed to be having extra difficulty grabbing on. Mandy couldn’t see what was going on under the murky water. Maybe Alice had actually been kicking Amy away from the raft.

“I was having enough trouble keeping my own head above
water,” Alice spat back to Les, “to make sure hers was below. I’d like to see you try to do that in the middle of a Class IV rapid.”

Mandy glanced at Rob, who along with her was listening intently to the two bickering murderers. Were Alice and Les really that stupid, or were they just so mad at each other—and the fact that their whole scheme had failed—that they didn’t realize they were digging their own graves? She wasn’t about to say anything that would make them stop and think. She still had questions, though. Which one of them had killed Alex, and why had they gone after Elsa?

“Rob explained some of what happened to us,” Hal said to Mandy,
interrupting her thoughts. “But Diana and I are still trying to understand.” He and Diana turned to look at Alice, disbelief and shock in their gaze.

Alice and Les’s words had degenerated into flinging insults at each other, so Mandy decided it was okay to stop paying attention to them. “I’ll tell you what I know,” she said to Diana and Hal, “but it may take a while, so we’d better sit down.”

She pulled the older Andersons over to some camp chairs a few
feet away and righted two that had been knocked down. After they had all taken seats, she explained what she had managed to put together. Alice and Les were having an affair and wanted the whole inheritance from Hal’s death to themselves. When Alex had suggested the remote trip through Cataract Canyon, Alice and Les saw their chance. They hatched a plan to work together to kill her brother and sister and make their deaths look like accidents.

Diana shook her head. “I can’t believe this. Alice wouldn’t kill her own flesh and blood. What proof do you have?”

Mandy waved Kendra over. “Go get Les’s camera bag and bring it here.”

Kendra trotted over to Les and Cool’s mangled tent and searched through the contents by the light of her headlamp until she found a small dry bag. She brought it back and gave it to Mandy. “This one has his name on it.”

Mandy opened it and inverted it to dump the contents in the sand. She shone her headlamp on the scattered contents.

“Hey,” Les shouted. “Don’t get sand all over my camera gear.”

Alice kicked him again. “You fool. You’ve got a lot more to worry
about than your stupid camera and lenses.”

“Stop kicking me!” Les returned her kick. “That equipment cost
thousands of dollars.”

“And what do you think criminal lawyers cost?”

That was the first indication that either one of them knew how
much trouble they were in. While Diana gasped, Mandy peered at
Alice’s face, which bore an expression of worry now, instead of the
pure bile that had distorted her features earlier. Maybe Alice’s temper had finally cooled enough that her situation had sunk in
. Mandy doubted that they would hear much more from the woman, unfortunately.

Mandy turned back to the small pile of Les’s gear and pushed around the contents with a stick. She pointed the stick to a preserved bear claw. “There’s the bear claw that scratched Alex.”

Diana put a hand to her mouth.

“Good God almighty.” Hal reached out for the claw.

Mandy stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Don’t touch it. The police will need to test it.”

After Hal dropped his arm back into his lap, she poked at a small box labeled “disposable hypodermic needles” and a plastic disposable syringe. “Here’re the needles and syringe that were used to sedate both Alex and Amy. And this must be the sedative he used.”

A small medicine bottle lay in the sand. Mandy rolled it over with the stick to read the label, which contained the words “animal tranquilizer” along with a bunch of words she had never heard of.

“How’d Les get those?” Hal asked woodenly.

Mandy glanced at him, worried that the shock might have been
t
oo much for him and that he might pass out. But when Diana grabbed
his hand
, and a look of horror passed between them, she realized they were both still struggling to absorb the bombshell that their daughter and son-in-law were killers.

She bent down to focus her headlamp on the labels on the box and the bottle so she could read the small print. “Looks like a veterinary supply company. Les probably just ordered them over the Internet.”

“You’re too stupid to live, you know that?” Alice yelled at Les, her face reddening. “Why didn’t you throw that stuff in the river?”

“Because I thought we might need it again,” Les yelled back.

Nope, Mandy was wrong. She suppressed a grin. Alice was at it again.

“Yeah, I need ’em again,” Alice mumbled, “to use on you.” She tugged
against her bonds, as if anxious to free her hands and get them on the animal tranquilizer. After a few tries, she blew out a breath, then glared at Les. “At least I don’t have to pretend to love you anymore, you fucking asshole.”

Les rocked back and gaped at her. “Pretend? You mean—?”

An evil grin split Alice’s face. “You thought I was going to share that money with you? As soon as I inherited, I was going to drop you like a hot potato. Hot? Ha! More like a cold flabby couch potato.”

“Hey, I work out!”

Alice sputtered. “Oh, you’re a piece of work, all right. Your ego is five times the size of your pea brain. A little stroking, and I could get you to do anything.”

Les’s face fell. “You don’t love me?”