Those Who Wish Me Dead (20 page)

H
e was on the side
of the trail, stretched out on his back, blood pooled around him, eyes to the stars. Ethan stopped walking when the shape of the body came into view, and though he recognized him immediately, his mind tried to reject it. Not Luke, no, it couldn’t be Luke, because Luke was too good and Luke was also the wild card that was supposed to tilt this back in Ethan’s favor. The last best hope.

His first reaction was a foolish one—try to help. He went to the body and dropped onto his knees beside it and reached for Luke’s hand, thinking he might find a pulse, and if he did, it wasn’t too late. He had Luke’s cold hand in his own when he finally focused on the source of the blood. A diagonal line was laced through Luke’s throat, and in the flashlight glow, Ethan could see the cartilage of the larynx exposed, the blood around it already drying and collecting dust from that endless western wind.

“A bit late for medical attention,” Patrick Blackwell said. “Let’s not linger too long, because I can assure you, it is a pointless exercise. You’ll not breathe any life back into him.”

“Damn you,” Ethan said. The words were soft and choked. “This wasn’t needed. All you came for was—”

“I’m aware of my own goals, thank you. And on the matter of what was needed, I’d differ strongly. He was a curious man, and he had a radio, and I’m afraid that was not a pleasing combination for me.”

Ethan didn’t speak. There was no point to it. Words from him would do nothing but bring more from them, and he believed their words would drive him mad soon. He looked at his old friend’s body. Luke had been done; he could have called it quits along with the rest of them, but he didn’t, because he was a rescuer. The search had not been successful and so he had doubled back after a long, hard day and continued on in the darkness, looking for the lost boy.

Ethan’s lost boy.

“You didn’t need to,” he said again. He couldn’t help himself, looking at that throat wound, thinking of the waste of it all. Thinking of Luke’s wife, who’d danced with her husband at Miner’s Saloon just a few weeks ago, full of laughter. She was always laughing, seemed as if she’d never stop.

This would stop her.

“Did you extract anything of use from him?” Jack Blackwell said. He’d joined Ethan in the dusty rocks and was looking at the body as if it were a discarded cigarette butt. “Or were the circumstances not favorable for talk?”

“He wanted to do most of the talking, I’m afraid. I gathered only that he was looking for the boy. He was, as I said, curious about me. Particularly my rifle. I was hoping to ease his concerns, as you can imagine—”

“Of course.”

“—and so I offered him the rifle so that he might be reassured. At this point it became clear that he desired to speak with some people on his radio, and I thought that was less than ideal.”

“Understandable.”

“From there, we had little chance for conversation. But since he returned this way, I can only imagine he did so because he believed the search party had taken a wrong turn earlier.”

“Ethan’s theory as well.”

“I had some time to think about that. I have to ask: How would a boy fourteen years of age, with limited knowledge of the mountains, manage to elude a quality search party that was familiar with the terrain?”

“Your suggestion seems to be that Ethan knows more than he says?”

“I’ve wondered, at least. It would seem that the boy had a contingency plan, would it not? And if such a plan was in place, well, it would most likely require Ethan’s expertise.”

“Ethan, your thoughts?”

This came from the burned man, the one called Jack, and Ethan was so numb to them now, he almost didn’t respond. It took him a moment to realize the question had been directed at him. He was still holding Luke’s hand.

“You’d like my thoughts?” he said.

“Indeed.”

“I think that you should die slowly. With every hurt in the world.”

The burned man smiled sadly and sighed. “Ethan. There’s no time for this.”

“Agreed,” Patrick said. “I think we should get moving again.”

Jack got to his feet and put one hand on Ethan’s shoulder and used the other one to press the gun to the back of his head. He lifted Ethan by his shirt, and Ethan didn’t fight him, just released Luke Bowden’s hand and stepped away. He wished that Luke’s eyes were closed. The dead always seemed to prefer to watch, though. He’d noticed that with corpses over the years. They were looking for something in the end, almost always.

“I don’t know where the boy is,” he said. “Neither did Luke. He could have found him for you as well as I could have, don’t you see that? You should have just used him, killed me; it would have been the same. Neither of us knows where he is.”

“You’ll forgive me, I’m sure, if I say I have difficulty believing that,” Patrick Blackwell said. “I’ve been all day in these mountains, Ethan. I’ve covered some ground, and I’ve spent plenty of time with my eye to the scope. Either the boy is possessed of remarkable speed and endurance, or he managed to hide without a trace after leaving a clear trail for the first several hours of his journey.”

Eye to the scope. Ethan looked at his rifle then, that bit of machinery that gave the other man dominion. Ethan wasn’t much of a gun guy. He’d used them, of course, had trained with them in the Air Force, and he owned a few now, but he wasn’t even an armchair expert. It was a heavy rifle, that much was clear, bolt-action, maybe a .300 magnum. It would shoot long and it would shoot accurately, and with that scope, even an amateur would stand a killing chance. This man was not an amateur.

They began to move again, and Ethan walked numbly ahead. All his plans were gone; his ability
to
plan seemed gone. They walked away and left Luke in his own drying blood.

They were walking in a well-spaced formation, with Jack directly behind Ethan, and Patrick floating some twenty feet in the rear. The men hadn’t discussed this arrangement, just assumed it, and it was a good one. Ethan could tell, based on the volume of Patrick’s voice, that the man changed his pace now and then, sometimes stopping entirely, and Ethan imagined that was because he was scouting the darkness and responding to what he heard or felt or saw. Patrick knew something about tracking, there was no question.

And yet he’d been unable to find the boy. It wasn’t an irrelevant point, Ethan thought. Not at all. Ethan had spent time with Connor. The kid was fit, and he would have been running hard on adrenaline, but he was not adept at woodcraft. So how had he vanished?

“One bit of information I was able to glean before things took an untidy turn,” Patrick said, “was that the gentleman had decided to return to the fire lookout.”

“And why was that?”

“He didn’t have a chance to clarify, unfortunately. But I can tell you from my own experience that the boy’s trail was clear enough until the searchers were redirected by the lookout.”

“Then I’d say maybe the lookout lied.”

“I’d suggest we stop at the lookout, then. See what the situation there is and see if perhaps we can get a different version of events than the searchers received today.”

“I think that sounds fine,” Jack said. “Ethan? Your opinion?”

For a moment he wasn’t going to speak, had decided he was done responding to them, but then he thought of the woman from the fire tower and the possibility that the men were right, that she’d lied. There would have been one reason only for her to lie, and that was if Connor had convinced her to. If she’d lied to help him, it made sense.

“We don’t need to stop at the tower,” he said. “That would be foolish. We only need to consider that she lied.”

“And how better to know if she lied than to ask her?” Patrick said. “All due respect to your considerable skills, of course, but I doubt that you’re going to sniff the bark of a hemlock tree at just the right angle and know more about the lie than she does, Ethan.”

“It’s foolish,” he repeated. “A needless risk. She lied for a reason, just as you say. That means she’s prepared on some level. Nobody lies to a group of searchers about a missing child without cause. What do you
think
the cause is?”

Jack spoke in a mock whisper. “I suspect Ethan is suggesting that the boy has warned the lady of our imminent arrival, Patrick.”

“A damned clever man, he is. His talents are wasted in his current profession, I might say. Should have been a detective. Think of the lives that might have been saved.”

“Well, he’s trying to save one tonight. Give the lad a chance.”

“I’d love to. All the same, though…I simply feel we should speak with her directly. You understand?”

“I do. Allow me to convey it to our guide.” Jack cleared his throat and then spoke in a mournful voice. “I suppose we are going to meet with dissent here, Ethan. While your perspective is certainly appreciated, you have to grant my brother and me a little leeway. We are given to somewhat different methods of tracking than those to which you are accustomed. Surely, in time, we’ll all figure out how to work together. But for now, there must be a give-and-take, don’t you see? A bit of patience.”

“There’s no need,” Ethan said again.

“Patience,” Jack whispered, and nudged him with the gun.

I
t took only Allison’s
signature to get them out of the hospital. She heard the words
risk
and
liability
on a loop as she nodded her head and said that she understood and signed her name again and again, an awkward, unfamiliar signature, crafted with her left hand.

They had given her pain pills but she didn’t take any yet. Not at the start. She wasn’t sure how bad the pain would get, and she’d always been taught that it was wise to save your bullets.

“Why didn’t he leave a way for you to contact him?” Jamie Bennett asked as they left the hospital. “It doesn’t seem like Ethan.”

Allison didn’t like how she said that—she didn’t know the first damn thing about Ethan—but she couldn’t argue either. It
wasn’t
like Ethan.

“I think he expected it to be fast,” she said.

“But it hasn’t been.”

“No.”

Jamie had rented a Toyota 4Runner instead of a Chevy Tahoe this time, but if she was less inclined to run a foreign car off the highway than a domestic one, it wasn’t obvious. Allison endured three stomach-clenching, tire-testing whips through the switchbacks before she said, “Imagine how Jace is going to feel when they rescue him and he comes home to find a dead mother.”

“What?”

“Slow down, Jamie. Slow the hell down.”

“Sorry.” In the pale light from the instrument panel, Allison saw the blond woman’s jaw clench. “It’s just that I don’t know what’s happening,” Jamie said. “He’s out there, and he’s alone, and…or maybe he’s not alone. Maybe not anymore.”

The way she said it, she obviously wasn’t thinking of her son’s having been rescued.

“Ethan will find him,” Allison said, but her words rang hollow. She knew as much about her husband’s situation right now as this woman did about her son’s.

“Right.”

“We’ll get you back to him.”

“He won’t be happy to see me.”

“What?”

She took another switchback, but gentler this time, actually aware of the brake pedal, and her eyes were hard to read in the darkness.

“Trust me,” she said. “He won’t be happy. Wherever he is right now, whatever is happening, he’s blaming me. And he’s right. It was my idea. Such a stupid one. Thinking he’d be safe from them up here? I sent him away, and I left him alone, and I told him he’d be safe.”

“All that matters is that he does see you. Let’s worry about that right now.”

“Okay.”

Allison had no idea what else to tell her. What did you say to a woman whose son was somewhere in these mountains with killers on his heels, and all thanks to her? Everything that came to Allison’s mind sounded like an empty reassurance. She wondered if it might have been different if she’d been a mother herself. Did you know the code, then, did you have the right keys for the right locks? There had been some days, usually when she was saying good-bye to a group of boys at the end of the summer, when she’d wished she’d had the experience. But she also believed in what she and Ethan had decided years ago—they didn’t need to have children to have an impact on their lives. She’d seen that play out every year.

Then the boys went home. Then it was just the two of them again, for many months. She didn’t know what this woman was feeling, couldn’t, never would. And some dark part of her was relieved by that.

“Where’s his father?” Allison asked.

Jamie didn’t answer immediately. Then she wet her lips, pushed her hair back over her ear, and kept her eyes firmly ahead as she said, “In Indiana, on the phone with his attorneys and the police, trying to make sure that if…that when Jace is found, I won’t have any say in what happens next.”

“Can he do that?”

“I won’t fight it. When I find him, he’ll go home. And home isn’t with me.”

“Why not?”

“Because I didn’t want to be a mother, Mrs. Serbin. I have told this story countless times to countless people, and I have never said that. I have hedged and rationalized and made excuses and told lies. I have not told anyone other than my ex-husband that I never wanted to be pregnant in the first place and that I spent the months after I found out I was trying to talk myself into wanting to be a mother, without any luck. I thought it would just happen, maybe. That the body would convince the mind as things went along. It didn’t happen. I had a child but never wanted to be a mother. How horrible is that?”

They wound onward and upward and neither of them spoke again until they saw the taillights of another car and Jamie was forced to slow down. The change in speed seemed to disrupt the atmosphere in the car, and Allison said, “Does your ex-husband know that you’re here? Does anyone know that you’re here?”

“You do.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re ignoring his calls. Or will he not—”

“I’ve come to bring Jace home. One way or another, I’m going to bring Jace home.”

“Maybe you should call Jace’s father. At least to tell him that—”

“Please stop.”

“What?”

“I just want to find Jace. Can we just talk about how to do that?”

“Fair enough,” Allison said, but she was thinking now about Jace and Ethan, and about the two who were probably already in the mountains, the men who spoke as if time stood still for them while they killed, after which they moved on at their leisure, and she was suddenly certain that she didn’t want to be there when Jamie Bennett found her son.
One way or another
, she’d said. Words from a woman trying hard to be brave, but Jamie had not met those men and she did not know what the other way would be like.

The hail started just after they reached ten thousand feet. By then, Jace was gasping without shame, not even trying to hide how winded he was, and Hannah was stopping to rest every fifty or sixty steps. The warm wind had continued to blow in their faces, thunder and occasional lightning behind it, and now came the hail. It was a shower, and the ice pellets were not small. They bombarded the plateau and rattled off the rocks, and the wind picked up to a howl.

“We’ve got to stop,” Jace said.

“Where?” Hannah answered. She had to shout at him even though he was just a few feet away.

He wanted to have an answer for that. He felt like he should have. What had Ethan said about this? Nothing; that was the problem.

“I could build a shelter,” he said. But he couldn’t. He didn’t have the plastic, and there were no trees nearby for a primitive shelter. Even if there had been, what could he build in this wind? The branches would be torn from his hands. Ethan could do something, but Ethan wasn’t here.

“We stay high,” Hannah told him. “Storms like this blow over fast.”

The hail was drilling down on them, stinging, and Hannah had one hand up to shield her face, but Jace could tell there was no confidence in her. She didn’t know what to do about the storm either. This was supposed to be his job, but all he knew was that they didn’t belong on the peaks in a storm. Great. It wasn’t that easy to get
off
the peaks though.

“I’ll put up that shelter you gave me. We can get in that—”

“We’re
not
getting in that. And it’s for fire anyhow. Not lightning. We’ve got to keep going, Connor.”

He turned and tried to look back into the wind then had to lower his head against the stinging ice. He didn’t like her choice of staying high. Lightning had been one of the first things Ethan talked about when they got up into the peaks. But down below was the glaring glitter of the mountainside on fire and the smell of smoke so strong that it made his eyes water. He didn’t know which choice was worse. He wished he had someone else to ask. He wanted to defer, to avoid making a decision. That was what parents were for. You might not like their decisions, but you had to live with them. Up here, though, with the storms ahead and the men who wanted him dead behind, he wasn’t sure if even his parents could make the right decisions.

“I wonder if my dad knows where I am,” he said.

That got Hannah’s attention. She turned back and said, “I thought they sent you up here to hide you?”

“I mean right now. I wonder what my parents have been told. I wonder if Ethan even made it down to tell them. Because if they were told…” His voice broke and he cleared his throat. “If they were told, why hasn’t anyone come for me?”

“People came for you. We chose to send them away.”

She was right, of course. But he didn’t mean those people. He’d meant his parents themselves, with armed police, the way it had been the night he saw the killings. He’d been scared then, but he’d been in the right place too. With the right people. Everything had happened the way it should have, at first. But then the police couldn’t find the men he’d seen, and now…

“Nobody will ever know what it was like,” he said.

Lightning flashed and showed Hannah’s face in bright white, her eyes dark against her skin, like sockets in a skull.

“I’ll know,” she said. “Connor, your parents sent you here because they thought it was the right thing, you understand that?”

“Look what it’s turned into. This is the right thing?”

He wanted to quit again, the way he had the night before, and the way he had when he saw the man with the rifle through the binoculars. He’d done well for a while. Once they were in the woods and walking, he’d tried to keep his survivor mentality. It was leaving him once more, though, draining away; he was like a battery on empty, and as he squinted against the smoke in the air and let the ice drum away on his skin, he didn’t know if he could recharge it again.

“The right choice can go very bad sometimes,” Hannah told him. “You have no idea.”

He sat down and pulled his water bottle free. He was thirsty, and you weren’t supposed to get thirsty. That meant you’d gone too long without water.
Sip, sip, sip,
Ethan said.
Don’t chug, don’t gulp, just keep sipping.

Now he gulped, drinking as much as he could. Even the water tasted smoky. The wind was full of it and he was glad for the sting because maybe that meant she wouldn’t know that he was trying not to cry. He looked back into the darkness they’d come through, wondering where the men from the quarry were.

“Would you have done it?” he said.

“Sent you here?”

He nodded.

“If I thought it was the safest place.”

“You would have sent me alone. Really?”

She didn’t answer.

“It was my mom’s idea,” he said. “And she left when I was three. I see her on holidays and in the summer. That’s all. And still my dad let her come up with this.”

“Stop bitching,” Hannah said.

“What?”

“You’re here. You’re not happy about how you got here, and neither am I, but that’s not going to change reality. Here’s your reality: I’m not going to let you sit on your ass on a mountain and wait to die. Now get up.”

The next flash of lightning showed her face, and he saw how intense she looked. Angry, almost.

“You don’t get to quit,” she said. “I will by God get you out of these mountains safely, but you don’t get to quit. You’ll go home and tell them what you think and I hope they have the faintest idea, the faintest sense, of what you endured. But right now? Stand
up.
”

He got to his feet slowly.

“Tell me the mistake you’re making,” she said. “You’re full of observations when it comes to my mistakes. Now pay attention to yourself. What mistake did you just make?”

“Quitting.”

“You weren’t actually going to quit on me. I know better than that, even if you don’t. Tell me the real mistake.”

Jace had no idea what she was talking about.

“You’re going to run out of water,” she said. “And once we get close to the fire, it’s going to be awfully hot, and you are going to wish you hadn’t wasted all of your water up here. So refill when we get to the creek, and then ration it. Because despite what you might think, we are going to get down to that fire.”