Hellbender (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 2) (26 page)

“Let’s go, boy. Stop jawing.” My dad hung at the edge of the thicket.

“That’s the first sensible thing you done in a week.” Charlie pulled out a pouch of chewing tobacco. “When you mess with my business you take food from their kids.” He shot a thumb over his shoulder at the wood hicks behind him.

“You think I’m a monster,” he went on. “But unlike some dirt farmers I know from up Davis way, I’m a valuable member of this community. I was county commissioner. I’m a lay pastor, you son of a bitch. You die out here and nobody even notices.”

He spit out a brown stream of tobacco. “This ain’t a game. I make sure my men have a turkey at Thanksgiving and a ham at Easter. I got to make sure they have a safe place to work in. I make sure they’re taken care of.”

“So cutting a few tires is justification for burning my house down?”

“I don’t know nothing about that.”

“Really?” My volume came more from anger than from a need to be heard. “Because the timing sure seemed odd.”

“Yeah, well I heard it was wired wrong. That’s what the fire marshal says anyway.”

My temper wouldn’t let me keep my mouth shut. “How close do you think you can get before we take you all out. We have the advantage.”

“Boy, you got kin back home, don’t you? A couple of aunts, some cousins. We already conversed with one of them.”

Not sure what to say, I froze.

“C’mon, boy. Ask me about that cousin of yours.” His brow was bent with pride. “Come on down here and ask me about her, boy.”

The thought made me dizzy. My knees trembled, my breathing got shallow. A swarm of hornets raged in my head.

“Fuck you, Charlie.” I only knew one way to end this. “You come up here.” I fired a shot in their general direction and they broke for cover.

I followed my dad into the laurel hell. With the stream to my right and a rising wall of rock to my left I found myself in a natural funnel with only one way to go. I held my hand up to my face to protect my eyes against the branches. The path got narrow and sloped dangerously toward the water. The stream made a sharp inside bend, and I found myself looking back downstream toward the area where we’d camped the night before. The vegetation thinned and I sped up my pace.

I scrambled for another twenty yards, picking my way over fallen slabs of sandstone. The stream and the rapids fell further away from our path. I had to be at least thirty-five feet above the water by now. I leaned toward the vertical wall at my left. Thin slivers of shale, broken by my weight, dropped out of the stratigraphy as I passed. At the end of the shallow walkway, my dad and Greg set themselves up behind a waist-high boulder. They each had a pair of rifles and a pistol on the rock before them, just laid out like a surgeon’s tools. They had rounds on the rock too, sorted by caliber. I carefully climbed over and joined them.

Looking back upstream, I couldn’t see the falls where we crossed for the bend. Another set of falls was nearly below us. Behind me, the cliffs retreated into the mountain, and forest was accessible by a short drop off from the ledge. Alex sat a few yards ahead behind my old man, waiting for me.

“Shooting fish in a barrel,” I said. “Good spot.”

“Head on up to the truck now, Henry. You’ve been brave, now I just want you to be safe.” My dad watched for somebody to stick their head around the bend while he talked. “I’m proud of you for being so strong. You did real good taking care of affairs all this time. Now you can let me have a shot to do right by you and Janie.”

“Dad…”

“Go on, now. Leave me Pap’s rifle.” He spoke to me like I was in eighth grade and he caught me in his Copenhagen.

“I’m staying. I’ll ride out with you guys.” I grabbed a few cartridges from the rock and put them into my pocket.

“No.” He turned around. “I told Jamie to take both trucks as soon as you get there. I told him that he was not to wait for us.”

Greg nodded. “We’re spending the night.”

“Bullshit. The plan was for us all to get out of here. Why the hell would you stay? So I can bury another body? So I can be totally on my own?”

“We are not having this discussion now.” “The hell we aren’t.”

“Henry, now you listen to me.” The way he said it told me he wasn’t going to move. “I may be a good-for-nothing and I can live with that. But I can’t live with you getting hurt. Understand, the only way for you to go on is by me clearing a path for you. I tried to do it for you when you was little, and things didn’t turn out at all like I wanted them to. But now I got a gun in my hand and a chance to do right by you and Janie. Hear me? This ain’t for you, it’s for me. So get. I’ll see you all back home.”

Greg said, “I hear them.”

“Go,” my dad said. “We’ll be fine. Take care of your girl. You two better get around the mountain before the beans burn. Hear me?”

Greg fired a shot. The sound echoed off the cliff. My ears rang, and I tried to shake it out. I walked over to Alex. “Hey,” I said.

From the other side of the rock Lewis’s men cursed and yelled. It sounded like Greg had winged one.

“I can’t let this happen.” I pointed at my dad and Greg. “I can’t. I ain’t fixing to bury another family member.”

Alex nodded. She looked scared.

“You head on up to the truck, okay? I’m going to get them to chase me.” I checked the chamber to make sure there was a round in there. “I’m going with you.” She stood up and grabbed my hand. “Alex. No—”

“I’m not doing anything different than you’re doing to your dad. I’m the one they followed into Pennsylvania and back down here. I can protect you.” She held up the envelope.

“No, please.” I let go of her hand.

“When somebody reaches a hand out to you, you take it.” She was mad.

“This is dangerous. They’re not playing.”

“I’m dangerous.” She started to walk. “And I’m going to have a little fun with it.”

We edged toward the trees that sat adjacent to the cliff. It was a short drop, only about six feet or so. I handed Alex my rifle and climbed down. Once I had my feet beneath me, I let her pass me the rifle and her envelope. Then I directed her to use my shoulder like a step.

“You sure about this?” I said.

“Don’t ask me again, okay?”

I took her hand and led her down toward the stream. The laurel was thinner here, replaced by ferns and a thick layer of old leaves. The trees were too big and too high to let enough light to the forest floor for much else to grow. We moved faster and easier than we had all day. Our feet made no sound at all as we pounded over the soft ground. At the bottom we picked our way through rocks to get right up to the edge of the water. My dad’s roost on the cliff was hidden from me by trees, but I could see Charlie’s guys waiting on the other side of the bend. I wasn’t certain, but it looked like they were going to keep my dad and Greg pinned down.

I watched, trying to figure out what they were doing.

“C’mon,” Alex said, pulling me downstream.

“Wait.” I listened. I put my finger up to my lips. “Where are the rest?”

Alex pointed. “They’re starting to cross.”

At the crest of the lower waterfall I could see Darren and a bunch of guys working back up the slope to the trail we hiked in on, like they were going to flank my dad and Greg. Charlie sat on the beach, yelling in short coughs.

“They’re going to fire on dad and Greg from the other side,” I said, trying to see how close they were. “Once they’re out of the way Ben and my pap won’t stand a chance.”

From where my old man sat, he could have no idea they were setting up to pick them off. “I got to warn them.”

“Just shoot them.” Alex pointed to the guys on the cliff. She shuffled through the papers in her envelope. “They’d kill you without a second thought.”

I raised the scope to my eye, but couldn’t aim for my breathing. I found a tree to lean against and dropped to one knee. “Don’t hesitate. Don’t even think. They won’t hit you.” She started to mumble words with no melody. Just monotone, unrelated syllables.

I put my eye to the scope, found a man in the reticle, closed my eyes and squeezed the trigger.

He fell backwards in a splatter of blood. One of the other men caught him and dragged him into the laurel. The first two men to retreat to the laurel fired on me from cover, but their shots never came close.

“Holy shit, I got him,” I said. Remorse filled my nose like smoke, entered my head and crept into my gut. I held the gun out. “I killed him, Alex. I can’t believe it, he’s dead—”

I reloaded and aimed again. Finding a target was much easier this time. I squeezed the trigger and wounded a second man.
You fucking animal. Way to rise above
.

Gunfire came from both sides of the stream now. Charlie’s men fired on me and Alex and my dad and Greg from the trees to my left. My dad and Greg fired back across the stream from above us to the right. I hoped that meant he was pulling away from the bottleneck.

I reloaded. I took aim. I found the red of a Lewis Lumber hat in the laurel. “Don’t stop,” Alex said. “They shot Katy.”

Bullets zipped through the leaves by my head. I ducked behind a big old hemlock. “Why didn’t you tell me? You had no right to keep that from me.”

“They took her in an ambulance. You would’ve wanted to go back and we need to keep them out here. Rachael said this is the only way we win. Keeping them out here, away from the real world.”

I stepped out from behind the tree. I didn’t know where my faith came from—maybe anger. I shot into the laurel. I knew they’d retreated. I reloaded and shot again.

“I’m out.” I leaned the rifle against the tree. I still had Ben’s pistol, but they were too far away.

Gunshots rang down from the trees above us. There were no more from our side, from my dad and Greg.

Alex said, “They went to the trucks. Don’t worry.”

I nodded. “How pissed is Levon going to be when he realizes I ain’t back there waiting with them?”

“Now what?” she said, ignoring my moment of celebration. “Time to run.”

She grabbed my hand. I pulled her along the stream, over downed trees and through twisted rhododendron. Lewis’s men continued to shoot from the trail on the other side of the stream. Their shots went high. The tall cliff across the stream sheltered us from their vantage. We seemed to be safe as long as we didn’t stray from the stream. I kept looking over my shoulder for a sign of their location.

For another five or ten minutes the moving was easy. A wide flood plain with a lot of open space between the trees. We put a lot of distance between ourselves and the posse. I tried to figure out where they were based on what I could remember from our trip up the trail this morning. All I could say for certain was that they were behind us.

“How you holding up?” I asked. “Fine.”

“Still feel okay to keep moving?”

“I’ll let you know when I can’t go on.”

The boulders grew, and the moving got slower as the cliff on our side of the stream steepened. The walls got closer to the water again, reminding me of High Falls Rapid on the Cheat. The narrow gorge eventually choked after another quarter mile, forcing us to wade. At a few locations the walls of the gorge were so close together that sunlight didn’t even hit the bottom. Waterfalls and springs trickled in from both sides intermittently. Ferns grew all around some of the seeps, like little ecosystems in miniature.

Cold, waist-deep water shook the ache right out of my legs. I helped Alex find footing on the slippery bottom, basically holding her and acting like a second set of legs against the gentle push of the water. The static hiss of falls and rapids made good noise cover.

We moved fast. The current did a nice job of pushing us along, and the little bit of buoyancy helped my aching feet. Because of the way the stream moved, we occasionally had to swim to the other side, or climb over a ledge to avoid the main flow. Whenever we swam, I held Alex’s envelope and Ben’s pistol over my head to keep them dry. Had a lot of practice at that when I videoed rafting trips.

We climbed to shore on the inside of a real tight bend. The trail was directly overhead, so there’d be no way for them to see us. Alex shivered. I held her, to warm her. She said, “If this is safe, why don’t we stay here?”

I thought about it for a long time, but didn’t answer. I wanted to stop, too. “Henry.”

My reply took a long time to fully form. “If we stop they’ll cut us off downstream. If they get their shit together they can surround us. We’d be trapped.”

She buried her head in my chest.

“But we can rest. For a few minutes,” I said. I could’ve slept for a week.

Every time I closed my eyes I nodded off. The cold water had sapped my energy. I fought to keep them open for a long time. I realized I’d failed when Alex woke me.

“Hey.”

“What?” I jerked myself up. Adrenaline made my heart pump, like when you spook a turkey.

Without any other sort of transition, Alex let out a long breath, stood up and asked, “So tell me about the rattlesnakes?”

The tone in her voice changed. It wasn’t tired so much as curious. Like, she remembered the business we still had to get to.

“What snakes?” I asked, kind of surprised by the change in her disposition.