High Country- Pigeon 12 (25 page)

"Don't bore me." It was a warning. Her life span might not be as long as his smoke.

Strong and cold, a pillar of ice formed in the place womb, stomach, lungs and heart had once been. Her eyes narrowed. She leaned in toward him. In a voice Colleen Dewhurst would have found grating she said:

"You stupid fuck, you know who I am."

His face went blank. Quick as a snake Anna struck. One hand swatted the gun from her chest; the other snapped to his face. Two fingers like fangs bit into his eyes. Anna felt the jelly wetting her finger as one burst. A gunshot deafened her. Cordite stung her nostrils. Muzzle-fire seared her retinas. The shot was wild. Mark was screaming, clawing at his face.

Anna snatched his flashlight from the rock and staggered into the trees leaving him shrieking obscenities and flailing in the place that was to have been her grave.

CHAPTER 14

The chilling core of hate stayed with Anna, supporting her as she gouged through the miserable black gut of the woods beside the Illilouette Trail. Tree cover was sparse and undergrowth virtually nonexistent. Stone shouldered through the earth's skin, rotting trunks fell like matchsticks. A metallic taste in her mouth, biting fear at the edges of her mind, she drove on, stepping over, limping, scooting. Where she could, she confused her trail: circled, doubled back, crossed then recrossed granite slopes. Distance wasn't as important as disappearance. Soon the ice pillar holding her up must melt and she would collapse. When this happened she must be well hidden. In an hour it would be light. If Mark were not dead or blind, he would try to find her.

She moved and she hurt and she kept on moving and she did not think. She never wanted to think again.

After forty minutes or more of tangling and obscuring her trail as best she could, she took shelter. The stolen pack with its stove and matches she eased under the low boughs of a lodgepole pine, careful to leave no drag marks and disturb none of the snow on the evergreen's skirts. A hundred yards away she entombed herself in a log rotted out by cuboidal fungus. The tree's flesh, red and shattered into thousands of cubes slightly bigger than sugar cubes, she used to bury the bits of sleeping bag that could not be fitted beneath the shell of wood that still existed. From the waist up she was sheltered, snuggled in the dead tree's dark embrace like an outsized grub. Here she would sleep and hide through the daylight hours or here she would die. Her body would not allow her to run, and Mark wouldn't hesitate a second time.

Moving, she'd believed if she could stop she could sleep, would sleep; it would force itself on her the way it had when she sat down to rest on the trail. At last supine and, if not warm, at least not freezing, sleep did not come. Her insides were sick and creepy and scared. She wasn't afraid Mark would find her hiding place and put a bullet in her brain. That fear would come later when daylight showed him her trail. The close, dark confines of her woodland sarcophagus didn't bring forth the familiar terrors of claustrophobia. The thin shell of tree trunk above her was sufficiently weakened by weather and fungus she could break her way free should she need to.

What sickened her was the encounter with Mark. She'd gouged out his eye. In the great scheme of things, that was no worse than clobbering him with the ax or shooting him-she would have welcomed either course of action-and given her size, age and weakened physical condition, it was one of the few ways left to her to disable an attacker.

Had she chosen to blind him she would have done so without regrets. But it had not been her choice. The voice she'd cursed him with had not been her voice. She'd said, "You know who I am." But somehow it was not she who spoke, and the "I" was a black shadow within her. His evil had called forth an answering evil, a darkness she'd not known was there, a thing without any light in it, any goodness or compassion or hope.

You're overtired, she told herself. Shock. Your head didn't spin. Green bile didn't fly out of your mouth. Leave it alone. Still, she didn't sleep. This was something she needed to lay at Paul's feet. A woman in Mississippi once said that being engaged to a sheriff/priest must be glorious. She could sin, get caught, repent, atone and be forgiven all in the arms of one man.

Thinking of Paul Davidson's kind eyes and slow smile, Anna drifted off.

Consciousness came in a welter of confusion. Unfocused dream images crawled through her sleeping brain leaving snail-trails of dread. A serial killer stalked her. Or she was a serial killer and, like Pilate, like Lady MacBeth, she couldn't cleanse the blood from her hands. The serpents of the id called to her in high pitched sing-song voices:

"Come out, come out wherever you are."

"You can run but you can't hide."

It took longer than she would have liked-longer than it ever had before-to metaphorically find her feet. A crescent moon of light arced over her hips. Day had come. She was in a log, partially covered by its hollow trunk, partially by rotted wood cubed by an architecturally minded fungus. Wrists crossed on her chest in the time-honored tradition of earthly remains put out for viewing, she was able to see her watch. The darkness in her end of the log was such that she had to put on its tiny nightlight. Careful to shield the blue lest this electronic glowworm get her killed, she read the hands: ten-seventeen. She had had four or more hours of sleep and was better for it. The monsters were no longer within but without.

"I got all day."

Then: "Goddamnit where the fuck . . . Show yourself and I'll kill you quick," and the heavy thump of wood struck with tremendous force.

Anna was fully awake now. The thud was the ax blade buried in a tree. She had had to leave it behind. Mark hadn't given up. He'd not been blinded. He was here. A shock of adrenaline would have made her twitch, give herself away, but numbness saved her.

A grunt sounded. Probably Mark pulling the ax out of whatever tree he'd hacked into. Bundled feet whuffed and crunched over the crusty snow. A dragging shush. Hawking, spitting. More footsteps. Nearer. Then seemingly to the left of her hiding place. The right. Down by her feet. Snuffling. Anna listened till her ears ached with the strain. There was nothing she could do but wait and hope. Prayer had been burned away when The Presence entered her on a column of ice and saved her. Saved me for what, she wondered. For himself? "No time to get the vapors," she heard Edith, the mother-in-law she had dearly loved, say. "There's work to be done."

Anna would have welcomed physical or mental work, business for hands or mind. The work before her was of the kind she found the most trying: she must do absolutely nothing in complete silence for as long as she could.

Her clattering thoughts moved from the realm of Catholic horror stories of demon possession and soul snatching to the world of make-believe-a short trip at best. She saw herself from above, lying still and cold in the hollowed log, a near-perfect arc of wood covering her from hip to head, cubed pine like chunks of red gold heaped over her from hip to toes. It put her in mind of the glass-topped bier in which Prince Charming laid Snow White. At least he did in the Disney version.

Snow White waited to be awakened with a kiss, Anna with an ax.

Her mother had warned her that comparing herself to the other girls would make her miserable in the end.

Noise from without began to lose meaning and direction. Thinking clearly on one's back in a hollow log was harder than Anna would have guessed. Disorienting. Mark was out there but the snuffs and shuffles and grunts seemed to come not from a man but from bears, out of their dens and around her log for a late-autumn snack before the long winter's repose.

"Damn. About fucking time." This was said so close by, Anna opened her eyes wide in order to be paying attention when she died and not miss anything. Despite the earlier threat, she believed it would be quick; not out of mercy-the devil prided himself on mercilessness-but because he, too, was cold and hungry and tired and hurt. Pure hatefulness was probably all that kept him around. That and the fear she'd report back and federal claim jumpers would take his find.

Four gunshots cracked, the sound exploding so loud Anna knew she'd been hit. Numbed from so long without moving and the shock of bullets ripping her flesh, she couldn't tell where. Stilling her breath, she waited for the agony then the peace of life pulsing out.

Mark's footsteps stamped purposefully away. "God," he muttered. Anna found it preferable to his usual expletive. "If I ever leave San Francisco again, they can fucking shoot me." Anna was disappointed. The last thing a person heard should be Shakespeare, music or the purring of a cat.

"God damn it," exploded almost as loud as the gunfire, but farther away. Crashing and more cursing followed.

Anna was not shot. Anna was not found. The pack she'd stolen had probably been fatally wounded, but she was okay. A fervent prayer of thanks began to form. She quashed it, not knowing to whom or to what she owed this extra time.

Silence returned and stayed. Evil had moved on or waited motionless nearby. Anna dozed and dreamed. Listened and waited. Pins and needles tortured her. Pain throbbed from her ankle. Her bladder filled. A true mountaineer would have watered the tree rather than suffer. Childhood taboos and a vestigial training in how to be a lady would not allow her this crude comfort. The worst was thirst. Because the body could go only a short time without water even in the earliest stages of deprivation, the cravings were intense. Customarily she would have cursed herself for a fool, holing up without water. Since, at the time, she'd had a lot on her mind, she gave herself a pass.

Sleep helped. It made the time pass, and with no food and an injury, being warm and still were next best to getting out or being rescued.

Two o'clock came. Two-thirty. Three. Mark didn't return. If he ever left. He left, Anna told herself. If he knew I was here, he'd have killed me. If he didn't know I was here he'd have left. Ergo . . . Regardless, she didn't dare move till full dark. If he had waited, if he saw her, she had no defenses: not speed, not strength, not weaponry.

The afternoon passed in a misery of dreams and physical demands unmet, but it did pass. When the crescent of light that was her entire view of the world had completely vanished, she began to stir. Emerging from her cocoon, she struggled as mightily as any newborn butterfly. Nerves buzzed and snapped, firing off mixed messages of cold, burning and electrical shock. Finally upright, she turned on Mark's flashlight, the only thing she'd taken to bed with her, and scanned the area. He'd gone. His pack-her pack-had been dragged from its hiding place beneath the pine tree. Bullet holes pierced the nylon, and the aluminum frame was bent where he'd vented his frustration with the ax. The camping stove had been hurled against the tree. Matches lay scattered on the ground. The water bottle, half-full and undamaged, was beneath the pack. Anna drank it all.

Feeling stronger, genuinely hopeful, she repacked sleeping bag, stove, matches and empty bottle. The smashed frame rested uneasily on her back but it weighed little and she didn't know how much longer she'd be in the backcountry. Already the sleeping bag had saved her life. If she were forced to go to ground it might do so again.

Lame, without compass, stars or landmarks, Anna had to find her way back to the trail. If he'd hiked out, Mark would have used the trail as well. Without a flashlight he'd have had to do it during daylight hours. The ruined eye would be hurting him, and Anna had heard, though she couldn't remember where, that after the loss of sight in one eye a person could suffer visual disturbances in the remaining eye. She hoped it was true, but not so true as to keep him from leaving. She wanted him to escape, to run as far away from her as he could. There'd be plenty of time to track him down later.

Picking her way slowly down the Illilouette, a sturdy branch for a staff and the flashlight for a guide, Anna played these rationales over and over in her mind. The logic calmed her somewhat but didn't lessen her wariness. Her ears strained against the near perfect silence of the night. Her eyes strained against the darkness. Her soul waited for a return of the stench of evil Mark had called forth from the depths of her being; practical evil that had saved her life.

Necessary evil?

She wasn't sure there was such a thing. At least not that the average pagan could afford to invest in.

Steps and minutes, steps and hours ticked past with the slowness of seconds on a wall clock. Pain and fatigue returned in force, jarred through her for timeless time, then seemed to recede. They were still there, she could still feel them. It was just she didn't mind so much. She stopped focusing on hiking out. She focused only on hiking, making that one small step into the white circle of light that was always one step ahead of her on the trail.