Rifle season, p.6
Rifle Season, page 6
* * *
She was packing gauze in the wound and applying pressure when a hushed commotion erupted and Brian Kearny entered the exam room. He wore jeans and boots and a stockman’s vest flecked with llama hair because he raised the animals just outside town. An ex–army doc with multiple forward combat deployments, he wore his gray hair in a ponytail and the weathered calm of a man in his element. Not unlike a seasoned frontline commander steeped in life-and-death decisions.
“Who’s the DIY marksman?” he asked cheerfully as he scrubbed in and gowned up.
“Forty-one-year-old male positive for opiates with a contact wound on the right foot. Entry at the fifth metatarsal, exit through the plantar fascia. Said he used a three-hundred-grain soft point.”
Kearny checked the patient’s oxygen-masked face to get a bead on skin color then leaned over the table, moved the sooty flaps of skin aside and peered closely at Jamie’s craftsmanship. Wet light leaked in from the exit wound. “Nice work. What else we got besides a foot with a view?”
“Diabetes, hypertension and uh, asthma,” said Jamie, trailing off, suddenly fixated by the wall clock’s spot-on resemblance to a time bomb. The sweep of the minute hand counting down to some catastrophe she could only guess at. Maybe she went too far by leaving Mace alone. He could be hanging from a rafter out in the barn, pulse feathering to nothing. Vince howling and jumping, unable to save him. The official time of death would be 3:48 p.m. Then she reminded herself of Mace’s battered but rock-ribbed arrogance. He wasn’t wired to kill himself. Not like that anyway.
The surgeon noted her rigid focus on the clock. “We cutting into your day?”
Jamie heard him and started to explain but a dizzying anger gripped her throat. She looked down at the exploded appendage realizing the refuge of her profession had finally been breached. Mace’s self-immolation was in the room. His disease was fouling the air like a ruptured sewer line.
Kearny saw her sickness clear as day and all that down-home cordiality vaporized into a do-not-even-think-of-shitting-me stare. “Are you one hundred percent squared away, Ms. Winters?”
The question slapped her back into the beeping hyperreality of triage. “You bet,” she said.
He graded her condition a few more seconds, head cocked, no stranger to the effects of fatigue and stress. “I’ll need the stone-cold hot-shot version of you to save this foot.”
“And you got it.”
“Outstanding. Get him ready for the OR.”
Jamie turned to with a vengeance. Channeling her rage into a laser focus that was invulnerable to anything less than an asteroid tearing out of the sky and killing half of Montrose.
SEVEN
Mace slept through Thursday morning and late into the afternoon. Would have kept right on snoozing if he hadn’t heard the dog. He ran downstairs and saw the shepherd running from window to window. He looked outside but didn’t see anything. He opened the front door and Vince ran out, right into the waiting arms of that same huge mountain lion. The cat eviscerating the dog from neck to nuts and ran for timber dragging its kill. Mace reached behind the door for his 12-gauge pump but it wasn’t there. So he sprinted after the lion, bellowing in grief until he landed on the bedroom floor. Vince ran up the stairs and found him sprawled on his back sobbing at the ceiling.
After a thorough licking, the dog allowed the man to get to his feet, hobble over to his closet and get dressed. Then the two of them went down to the charred kitchen where Mace made cold instant coffee with a double dollop of vodka before retiring to the porch to assess his immediate future. The sun was fading, smearing the peaks with bands of magenta but Mace saw nothing pretty. The oncoming darkness was moving quicker than usual. Sliding toward him with great clawed hands. Running into town for a load of food and alcohol suddenly made urgent sense.
He considered taking the dog but the power of the nightmare made him leery of leaving Vince in the truck bed. The shepherd hated being cooped up in the cab and barked long and loud if he was. So Mace turned on every light and made sure every point of entry was secure then locked the front door on his way out, leaving Vince watching from a window. He drove through the gate, locked it behind him and stood there scrutinizing the world in every direction trying to isolate the source of his dread but nothing took shape. Then he headed out, one eye on the rearview.
* * *
After hitting the liquor store, he put the groaning box of booze in the truck and was about to dip when he saw a large man sitting in the Grit waving a thick middle finger his direction. Mace returned the bird, strolled into the café and sat opposite Glenn. It was full dark now.
“That your idea of community relations?”
“Depends on the citizen,” said the deputy. He had a napkin tucked into the collar of his uniform and was eating meat loaf drenched in brown gravy. He did this without the tiniest spatter of goo. A copy of Farm & Ranch magazine was open next to his elbow. “How’d the photo safari go?”
“How’d you know about that?”
“Ran into Will at the Shell station. Bitching about some fancy pain-in-the-butt client. Said he hooked you up with a couple from Phoenix who wanted a cat pic. You get ’em one?”
“For about two seconds.”
Glenn looked up from his food with a dreamy expression. “Remember those mountain-lion medallions in cream sauce I used to make?”
Mace wished he didn’t. His eyes kept drifting over to the bar but he stayed put, counting the seconds until he could head home and dive into a substance-induced coma.
Glenn read his one-track concentration. “You know your wife’s about to cut you loose?”
Mace snapped his head around and looked at his buddy. Saw him and Jamie talking behind his back. He wrestled his anger down, dug out his cell and made a call. Jamie’s voice said to leave a message but he couldn’t think of one and put the phone away. “Thanks for the news flash.”
“She overdue?” said Glenn.
“Hard to be overdue after you moved out.”
This got Glenn’s attention in a new way. He squinted at Mace. “Up to her mom’s?”
“Yep.”
“For how long?”
“Coming back for Vince tonight.”
“Probably just trying to scare you sober.”
“Well,” said Mace, lifting a fry off the cop’s plate. “The scared part sure worked.”
“Good,” said Glenn. “Speaking of scared, Jamie still have that .38 Airweight?”
Mace frowned. The question was out of nowhere. “What?”
“The Smith & Wesson you got her after her friend got raped changing a tire.”
Mace thought about that. The assault was three years ago and shook Jamie to the core. She wanted a pistol so he bought her the revolver because it was safer and more reliable than a semiauto. “She got in some range time but I don’t know where she keeps it. What do you care?”
“Last thing you need right now is a loaded firearm waiting for the wrong person to find it.”
Mace couldn’t stop a wistful grin. “Gun’s a tool not a rattlesnake.”
“That’s your dad talking right there.”
“Chapter and verse,” said Mace, getting to his feet.
“Hold on,” said Glenn, fork load of meat poised under his chin as he pointed at Mace’s truck. It was parked under a streetlight, plates lit bright. “Your tags expired in March. It’s October.”
Mace stared at Glenn thinking he was paying a little too much attention to certain things but had no idea why. “I’ll look into it,” he said then left.
After he got outside the café, Mace glanced over his shoulder, saw Glenn was absorbed with chatting up his waitress and grabbed a fifth of vodka from the truck. Then he walked north past the post office and stopped in front of a small house with a brown Subaru in the driveway. He cut across the lawn until he was just steps from the picture window facing the street, cracked the bottle and took a slug. The curtains were pulled back revealing most of the ground floor. Martinez’s mother was visible at the kitchen table in the back going through a pile of books. Newspaper and magazine cuttings feathered the pages. He moved closer and determined they were cookbooks.
She was going through the strips of paper one at a time, smoothing them out with her fingertips before reading. Mace wondered what she was looking for. Maybe one of her son’s favorite dishes. Or something special for the man sitting on the couch in the living room holding a remote. His eyes were blank except for the glimmer emitted by a television.
Mace studied the framed photos of the man’s son littering the tables and shelves like he always did. Only one featured Robert Martinez in full Marine Corps dress. The others were taken before the world engulfed the boy and spit him out. The nine-year-old with a spinning rod and a stringer of rainbows on the bank of Ridgway Reservoir. The middle school soccer player sitting in the bleachers with his teammates for the team picture. The grinning senior with his blushing prom date clutching her corsage. Later on, had Mace been asked how long he stood there gazing at the hell he created he would have absolutely no idea.
EIGHT
Kearney performed the three-hour procedure with Jamie assisting then shooed her starving and elated into the night. She hit the Sonic on Townsend right at closing and sat in the deserted parking lot devouring a bacon cheeseburger while watching greasy wrappers swirl by. She checked her phone and saw a missed call from Mace but no message and checked the sky. It was clogged with fast-moving clouds like real winter weather was coming. Then the last employee killed the drive-in’s lights and she got the same inbound-disaster feeling. She turned on the heat and drove north through town faster than usual, hands at ten and two like something might run in front of her.
She caught a red light at main and sat there feeling watched. The highway to Grand Junction and her mom’s lay straight ahead. Or she could turn left and head west. Get the dog as planned and get eyes on Mace. When the light went green she took the turn. Two miles later she cut over to Dave Wood Road and followed her normal route home. The backcountry quickly swallowed everything man-made on either side. Bats and coyotes darted through the high beams.
When cell service was about to die she pulled over at the same place she always did and called Mace. He didn’t answer but service was spotty all over the plateau and maybe he was out running errands. She left the same message she always did despite herself. “Be there in twenty. Love you.”
Then she took off. Not five minutes later, she was curving toward the bridge over Roubideau Creek when she came upon a body lying in the middle of the road.
* * *
She yanked the wheel left, stomped the brakes and skidded, missing the figure by inches. Then backed up to shield the victim from southbound traffic, hit her flashers and jumped out. Had to be a man by the size of his shoulders and hands. He was on his back, legs tangled, arms flung wide, head lolled to one side. Crossed her mind he was dead or paralyzed. A green-and-white motorcycle lay at the end of a long gouge in the gravel, still ticking with engine heat.
Jamie stuck an index finger under the black helmet with the cracked, silvery visor. His carotid was thumping nicely. His breathing was quick and shallow. “Can you hear me?” she asked.
The helmet quivered in her direction. She immediately stabilized it with both hands and spoke sharply. “Do not move your head. Do not move anything. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” whispered the rider.
She squeezed his right leg above the knee. “Feel that?”
“Feel what?” he said.
“Shit,” said Jamie. She looked around. Decided to run up the grade, gain some elevation and maybe snag a cell signal. “Do not move. Okay?”
“Okay,” said the biker.
Jamie was turning away and rising to her feet when his hands clapped onto her shoulders, spun her around and set an arm bar across her neck with shocking speed and power. She managed a garbled scream before her windpipe crimped. Thinking she was done if she passed out, she kicked a knee out and slammed her heel into his balls. This caused a wheezing gasp of pain and a brief loosening of his arm. She twisted around, kneeing his groin and clawing his neck but it was like attacking marble. Then the biker smothered her arms, twirled her around like a rowdy child and reset the sleeper hold. She rag-dolled in seconds and he tossed her onto the back seat of the Rubicon.
* * *
Hazim grabbed her phone off the road feeling stupid, nuts burning. She was even stronger than he had thought. If that kick had been slightly more accurate she might have broken his grip and gotten away. He could only imagine chasing her through the forest running in all directions. The whole mission would have ended then and there. But it hadn’t and for a reason. After sealing her cell inside a Faraday bag, he got in the Rubicon and turned the flashers off. Then he bashed the Jeep through the willows on the left side of the road. A hundred yards into pine and aspen, he parked it beside the Silverado, grabbed her pack and parka off the rear seat and tossed them in the pickup’s cab. Then he zip-tied Jamie’s hands and feet, cinched a hood over her head and lifted her out.
After wrapping a blanket around her body, he tucked her into the Silverado’s toolbox and put his ear close to her mouth. She was breathing slow and deep so he left her there and checked the Rubicon’s cargo hold. There was a duffel bag with a parka and snow boots and a trauma kit the size of a carry-on bag. He popped the latter open and put a light on the contents. It was basically a combat surgery kit. Everything from chest seals and abdominal dressings to nasopharyngeal airways and IV antibiotics. He snapped the kit shut, grabbed the duffel and set both in the toolbox alongside Jamie. Then he padlocked the lid and jogged back to his Suzuki.
* * *
He gunned the bike through Roubideau Creek into a thicket of chokeberry, dropped the machine onto its side and covered it with debris. Then hurled his helmet into darkness. It thudded to earth and the night was silent save for a jet whispering toward Denver. He watched his breath frost and felt the wound that should have killed him come alive in the cold. Someone skilled with a Dragunov rifle put a slug through his right lung and dumped half his blood into the mud of Mostar twenty-three years ago. The sniper thought he was dead because there was no be-sure shot. His or her mistake and Hazim’s good fortune. Then pain shot through his bruised nuts and he reminded himself the mission was in its infancy and he’d already committed a serious error. Underestimating the enemy’s will to fight.
* * *
After dropping the Faraday bag with Jamie’s cell in the creek and covering it with rocks, he jogged back to his truck and hauled camo netting from the bed. He draped it over the Rubicon and set a layer of limbs on top of the netting. It would be found eventually but not from the air. Then he climbed in the Silverado, doubled back into Montrose and drove south on Highway 550, letting a sense of elation sink into his racing heart. Surely, God would not allow him to come this far for nothing. Then he realized how presumptuous that was and asked for forgiveness.
He turned east on Buckhorn Road, crossed the Uncompahgre River, killed the lights and pulled on night-vision goggles. Then took a dirt track south, passing rusted combines and rotting cattle chutes. He was passing a ruined corral when a leggy wild dog with a sharp snout and hot yellow eyes crossed in front of his vehicle. A rabbit dangled limply from its mouth. The dog stopped and gave the truck a leisurely appraisal. Unnerved, Hazim tore off his goggles and hit the high beams. The canine seemed to smile at the blinding contraption, as in welcome to the party. Then it vanished like a thought. Hazim doused the lights and yanked his goggles back on.
* * *
Thirty minutes later, he reached a gate with a padlock. He opened it, drove through and locked it behind him. Then drove over a dry streambed and up an embankment into a stand of giant cottonwoods with an understory of greasewood and sumac. They were only sixteen miles south of the hospital where Jamie worked. On the verge of the trees was a derelict 1975 Winnebago Brave.
* * *
Hazim parked the Silverado in the heart of the grove and sat there listening to the trees creak in the blustery night. He’d never felt farther from home even though home had been annihilated long ago. Then he pulled the Beretta M9 from under his coat and walked around the scabby relic. The twenty-one-foot RV’s tires were fossilized in place and plywood had been slapped over all the windows decades previous. Wind-dragged sage and trash were heaped against the fenders. A rusted out steel skirt meant to halt snow from creeping under the chassis was still in place. But a brand spanking new canvas tarp was nailed over the motor home’s door to block light from escaping when opened.
NINE
Mace was driving over the summit of Dallas Divide when he saw the Big Dipper dimming behind a vast ceiling of cirrostratus clouds. By the time he turned onto 60X Road he’d made a vague mental note to check the oil in the generator and stack more wood on the porch off the kitchen. Vague because vodka was a foolish and disarming friend that didn’t give a shit about blizzards.
He turned into the yard, saw no Jeep and no lights. His first thought was the power was out. He killed the engine, rolled the window down and listened for Vince but heard nothing. His second thought was Jamie had taken the dog and turned the lights off. He grabbed his phone, saw the missed call and played the hour-old message saying she was twenty minutes away. There it was. She snagged the pooch and ran. Probably relieved he wasn’t around to grovel and whine. He called her but it went straight to voicemail. He looked at the pitch-black house again and something was so wrong it froze him where he sat. Then an alien sensation washed over him. That of being prey.
