Fortunes of the Dead (36 page)

“Which way did you come in?” Wilson asked.

“Down forty-five. Past that church and the weird man who stands in the road and sings.”

“I came from the other end. Did you see any pickup trucks parked along the road, anything parked pretty close by?”

Lena frowned. “There's a tan pickup, I think it's a Ford, but it has Tennessee tags and a flat tire. There's also a green Chevy, extended cab, but it had Louisiana plates.”

“That's her,” Wilson said, thinking that sometime in the near future he was going to have to call the Louisiana state cop who'd spotted Rodeo's pickup on his way to the ER.

Wilson took Lena by the shoulders. “Look, Miranda's body is still warm. The blood hasn't even dried. Rodeo can't be more than fifteen minutes ahead of us, if that much. We need to get her now, or she'll slip away. I'm going up in the woods, after her. I want you to go to the Dodge and wait there. Hide, so she won't see you if she comes walking out of the woods.
Don't do anything
if you see her. She's killed seven federal agents we know of, and she killed Miranda Brady. Likely she's the one who killed Cory Edgers. Take my cell—call if you get service. That number there, the first one on the phone list.

“You got all that?” Wilson asked.

“Yeah. I got it.”

“Lena, hear me on this. On no account are you to—”

“I said I got it.” Lena turned away, then stopped. “Cory Edgers is dead?” She looked back over her shoulder to see Wilson disappearing through the trees.

It was full dark by the time she made it down the driveway.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
NINE

The last of the daylight disappeared less than fifteen minutes after Janis killed Miranda. The dark hit suddenly, as if someone had thrown a blanket over a dim and flickering light. Janis does not stumble; she has eyes like a cat. She moves with care and caution, walking alone in the woods, circling behind the big ugly house and following the ridge down to the road where she left the truck. Janis is cold, but she does not regret tucking her coat around the woman and the little boy and his dog.

She is not afraid, but she is tired. Weary to the bone. Tired in her soul. She thinks of long summer nights, playing kick the can with her brothers. Where are they? Why doesn't she see them anymore? Something has happened, she can't remember what. Just that it is bad.

She is worried about something. What is it?

She cannot find him, her Dandy, that's what it is. How could she have forgotten that? She'd Walked into his stall, holding the apple cut into sixths just as he likes, and he was not there. Someone had put another horse in Dandy's stall. Did they think she wouldn't notice? Did they think she was stupid? The other horse, the imposter horse, had butted his head against her arm, and she stopped herself just before she smacked him. He was a horse; he didn't know he was in the wrong stall. She gave him half the apple.

Why can't she remember? Why can't she remember where Emma is and what happened to her? She has the disoriented and disconnected sensation of one who has been plucked from one life and set down in another. There is no continuity. She knows she has lost things, people, places, Dandy, but she does not know when and how. She knows that she can't go home, even though it is what she's been imagining since she left the rodeo. And already that life has receded and she feels like a stranger to the person she was as the rodeo clown.

Janis does not know how to get away from these feelings, and she does not know how to resolve them. She can't quite work things out, and she is beginning to question what is and isn't real. The people she loves have been replaced with imposters. Have they done that with Dandy, too?

Preoccupied as she is, she notices the small red eyes ahead of her on the ridge. The possum scuttles off into the brush. Janis needed just that glimpse to focus. The only reason a shy possum might make the choice to come toward her up the ridge would be if there was something worse waiting at the bottom.

Hidden in the darkness, shielded by the trees, Janis pauses no more that forty feet from the road. She sees the dark shape of her truck. She watches and waits, and sometimes she thinks there is movement or the murmur of a voice, but she cannot be sure. But she knows—somehow, she knows—that someone is down there waiting for her to go for the truck.

Janis points her gun in the air, fires, then emits a wailing, drawn out scream. And then she runs, uphill, drawing whoever it is who waits for her, away from the truck. With any luck she can circle back and drive off while the follower is still bumping into saplings. She will need to be fast. There may be others coming.

Over the sound of her own ragged breathing, Janis can hear she is being followed by one of them, if not two. She veers farther right, then crouches and waits. The noise of the follower draws her, and she gets a first glimpse of her enemy, who is small and lithe, stopping now to listen.

“Wilson?” The enemy is a woman, and she is smart. She is heading back down the hill to the truck. Janis forgets she is tired and goes after the enemy like the predator she is.

A heavy blow knocks Janis to her knees. The enemy must have heard Janis coming up from behind, because she was hiding, waiting, holding the heavy stick. Her shoulder blades will be black and blue, Janis thinks, and she is pissed. Janis pitches forward, face to the dirt, waiting for the enemy to come closer, something an enemy can never resist.

Janis grabs the enemy's ankle, and slams her head into the enemy's knees. The enemy makes a noise as the air goes out of her lungs. She has gone down quickly and hard. It catches her wrist when Janis raises her arm; it is strong, but not strong enough. She pins both of its arms, but the enemy is quick and it bites. The teeth are merciless, and Janis loses her balance, and both of them slide over the edge of the ridge.

Janis is falling, it is steep, and she cannot stop the momentum. The enemy is falling, too, it is getting away. Janis grabs a skinny tree, and hugs it like a lover. Her heart is slamming, and here comes that old headache, her constant companion; she's ripped out a fingernail, and bruised if not broken a rib.

Janis is so tired. That anger that she calls her tantrums is gone, and she doesn't care if the enemy gets away. She tries to look at her forearm where the enemy bit, but it is too dark to see. She touches it carefully; the bite hurts more than the rib. She wants to head for the truck, but there is something she has left behind. She can't remember what it is. She left it at the barn, right, the barn. Is it Dandy? Is that where Dandy is? Janis sobs deep in her chest. What if she never finds him? What if she never sees him again?

Nobody but Mama knows how scared Janis used to get. Sometimes, after a bad fall, her legs used to shake so badly she could hardly get up in the saddle. She used to make over ninety thousand dollars a year barrel racing as a teenage girl, and she was elected Sweetheart of the Rodeo when she was twenty years old. No Sweetheart of the Rodeo was ever afraid of a horse. Dandy would never hurt her, Dandy never did. They were both scared, but when it was the two of them together, they were safe as rocks.

Wilson moved quickly, plotting a trajectory in his mind. He climbed down off the ridge, losing any semblance of a trail, and followed a steep slope back in the direction he'd come. He moved as fast as he could and still stayed on his feet, but it was taking him too long, and he was making too much noise. He stayed with it, grimacing. The presence of pain was already making itself known over the buffer of the Advil. The leg had been getting too much of a workout.

Damn, he was awkward as hell. Before Waco he would have moved down this slope without breaking a sweat. Before Waco he could crouch on a surfboard and run his hand on the wall of water moving his wave, right in the sweet spot of the curl.

The worst thing was facing it, knowing Chesterfield was right, that his leg was a problem in a crunch. He moved as swiftly as he could but even the girl could outdo him. She might be a sociopath, but she was also a girl.

Wilson kept the pain in a separate compartment. He was aware enough to dread the long hours it would take to get it back in control, the spaced-out exhaustion and relief of pain medication. But worse was giving up. Knowing he no longer belonged in the thick of an investigation like this; that ethically, he would have to retire to the sidelines, the minor gun buys, the endless paperwork. He'd be pretty useful doing computer analysis and research for the active agents.

So much of what he loved in life had been taken away when the bullet tore through his thigh, penetrated the bone, and shattered. It always used to amaze him the way doctors could pull someone through when they were horribly, tragically hurt. You saw the documentary on television, found out the patient lived, and never thought about it again. Wilson knows that the story is not over after the first dramatic hours in the ER. Welcome to a lifetime of trouble. Old bullet wounds never die.

A split second's difference in Waco … he could be dead. A lot of them were dead—agents, women and children in the compound, and so many of them innocents, sucked into the cult by their own tragedies, with no way out once inside. Who was really to blame for it? All of them human, stumbling through the drama of their own lives and ripe for mistakes, all of the pathways converging. Somewhere in that night of oily black smoke and no heroes, was the story of Janis Winters.

But his story was in there, too. The story of Wilson—who can no longer dance or surf or do his job. The story of Alex Ruggers, who died with a wire around his neck, struggling so hard his wrists were sliced to the bone as he died slowly, and suffered. And no doubt that somewhere in an inside pocket of the clothes the Medical Examiner cut away from Rugger's body were pictures of his kids, his wife, his dog.

Janis hears someone moving up on the ridge, quieter than the other one. Another enemy, a big one this time. Janis has adrenaline now and it renews her. Where before she could barely hang on to the tree and keep from sliding down that steep mountain slope, now she moves in spurts, strong and ready, making her way back up to the ridge.

Up at last, and back on her feet, Janis stops to listen. There is so much noise, coming from down the slope. Which one is it? It is hard to keep track of two. She needs to be high, she needs to be above them, and she sees what may be a shortcut that will take her past a switchback on the trail. She can wait there for both of them.

In the darkness, Janis can't see that the offshoot of trail only peters out, and she has to backtrack and find her way back to the ridge. The big one has gotten ahead of her, and is blocking her way on the path. Janis is not afraid. She is never afraid anymore.

She can't see the face of this enemy, but she can tell that it is a he, and the enemy comes toward her.
Come and get me
, she thinks.
I'll be waiting
. But she does not take the gun out of her waistband.

The enemy does not see her as she stands behind a tree. It is too dark. She knows who he is by the limp—a Fed, another Waco veteran, another name on her list. His face is shadows, and he seems to bring the darkness with him, and he sees her, finally. They are ten feet apart on the trail.

The enemy has a gun, and he points it at her. Janis knows what to do. It is just like when she played out in the fields with Chris and Dale—once they get the drop on you, partner, you have to play fair, don't you, or the boys won't let you back in the game. Girls on sufferance only.

Janis puts her hands up, and the bullets catch her, one-two-three. She is thrown off her feet with a force that is familiar—because it happens so fast, because she is helpless; and because this is a place she has been before. She has missed her chance to get it under control, it's bad horsemanship and her own damn fault, she should have been ready for it, not smiling at that cowboy who is up-and-coming on the team roping circuit.

Ah, God, it is happening now, the nightmare, her foot caught in the stirrup, she is being dragged. No, no, no she can't make it stop, she is going so fast, her back is hurt, her muscles won't obey. She feels her body flip, and the left foot is still tangled, something has to give, and she hears the bone in her leg snap. She is facedown now, and her forehead seems to explode in showers of fireworks … oh, she remembers this well.

How strange the mind is, how odd the ways it finds to protect. She has been here all along, it isn't over, a memory of the past, it is still happening—the thing she has always dreaded, being dragged. All of those other things, just hallucination, the blood and the wires and the haze of pain before the anger takes her under like a monstrous wave crashing over her head. Thank God it is all just a bad dream, she's hurt her head, and Dandy, her Dandy, is stopping, people are screaming, one of them is her. Mama's voice, talking to Dandy, keeping him still; only Mama could stop this horse, she must have run so fast, she was way back in the stands, Mama is magic, Mama will save the day, Mama is screaming
cut the leather cut the leather
…

“Catch Dandy,” Janis whispers.

And the man who leans over her, who checks the pulse at her neck, does not understand what she means, but he does understand she is dead, and he says a small prayer in the back of his mind, just for her.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY

Wilson was aware that Lena was standing just up the pathway looking down. He felt his muscles jerk, it was uncontrollable. He wondered how long she had been standing and watching.

“You okay?” he said.

“Nothing that can't be cured by a hot bath and a Band-Aid. So that's her? Your killer?”

“That's her.”

“Is she dead, then?”

“She's dead,” Wilson said. He took the cell phone out of his pants pocket, and flipped it open, but there was no service at the top of the mountain. He expected as much. “We'll head for the house, make sure everything is okay there, get a team out to round up the bodies.”