Obsession Falls (2 page)
Rich tourists. She knew the type, city folks who could not believe that every road in America wasn’t paved for their convenience. She wondered how far they would go before the washboards defeated them, or before they destroyed their car’s oil pan on a protruding rock.
They passed out of sight behind a boulder as big as a house, where the road cut through the meadow, and there the sound of the engine cut out.
Probably they had a picnic lunch. They’d dine and head back …
She glanced at her watch. Two thirty. Pretty soon, she needed to return to her rental Cherokee, too. It was a good two-plus-hours’ drive back to town. But first … she started walking deeper into the woods, looking for something less imposing to sketch. A tree, maybe. Or a bug.
On the road, two doors slammed.
One man spoke, coldly, clearly: “Get him out of the trunk.”
Taylor stopped.
Him? Out of the trunk?
She didn’t like this guy’s tone. She didn’t like his words.
Who, or what, was in the trunk?
“Do you think this is far enough?” The other man sounded itchy, nervous.
She started walking again.
None of her business …
“How the hell much farther do you want to drive on that miserable crapfest of a trail? Jimmy said to bring him up here, find some place lonely, finish him, and dump the body—”
She froze.
“Isn’t this lonely enough for you?”
“I guess—”
A thump.
“Yes!”
Finish him? Dump the body?
She felt disoriented. Birds were twittering. Above her, massive Douglas fir trees wrapped the heavens in their branches and sang a song to the wind.
And someone within her earshot was talking about …
dumping the body
?
“Then that’s what we’re going to do,” the first guy said. “You want to argue with Jimmy?”
“No. No,” the other guy stammered. “Not that scary bastard.”
Some guy named Jimmy had hired these guys to …
The trunk latch opened with barely a sound.
A child’s scream filled the air.
This could not be happening.
Taylor could not be up here, alone in the most peaceful place on earth, trying to get back her artistic mojo, and bear witness to a murder. A child’s murder.
The second man said, “Jesus Christ, he hurled all over the trunk. I’m going to have to take this to the car detailers to get it cleaned up.”
“No, you’re not. How are you going to explain barf in the trunk? Tell them we were hauling a kid in there? Clean it yourself.” The first guy had a baritone voice, and when he rolled out the orders, he did it with authority.
Above the voices, the child’s wail became sobbing, punctuated by gasps for air.
Taylor did not want to be here.
But she was.
Chills ran up her arms, and she felt like hurling, too.
She left the protection of the trees and moved quietly into place behind the boulder.
She was safe here. She was. The boulder was as big as a house. Dense. Tall. Rolled into place by some ice age glacier.
She was safe.
She was a fool.
With her back against the rough stone, she slid and looked, slid and looked. Finally the car came into view.
And the men.
And the little boy.
And the guns.
Pistols, big pistols, held with casual familiarity in the men’s hands.
One guy was bulky and narrow-eyed. He was in charge.
One was thin and muttering. He held the boy by the scruff of the neck and shook him like a terrier with a rat.
The boy … the boy was about eight, white-faced, dark-haired, covered with vomit. Terrified.
Taylor was terrified, too. Her hands trembled. Her knees shook. Her heart thundered in her ears.
But she could still hear the casual slap Mr. Skinny gave the boy.
“Shut up,” he said.
The boy sobbed more softly.
She looked again. She recognized the big guy. Seamore “Dash” Roberts, running back, Miami Dolphins, big scandal, jail time, a career that barely survived in arena football … yeah.
The other guy wasn’t anybody. He was just, you know, sweaty.
Both guys wore suits. Up here. In the land of ranchers, Ford trucks, tourists, and the occasional tree-hugger. So these men in the suits were out of place. But they didn’t care. Because they were here to kill the boy and get out.
Good. Good. She could ID these guys … when she got down to the police department.
After they’d murdered that little boy.
“Where do you want to do it?” Mr. Skinny asked.
Dash glanced around.
Taylor flattened herself against the rock.
“There, by that tree stump.” He pointed. “That way we can prop him up. He’ll face the road and when McManus shows up, he’ll see him right away.”
“Let him search.” Mr. Skinny laughed.
The boy’s crying gave a hitch.
She glanced again.
He was terrified. Yes, he was. But he was also eyeing the men, looking around at his surroundings, like he knew he had to make a run for it. Like he knew he had to save himself.
“Christ’s sake, think about it.” Dash again, snappy and scornful. “There are wild animals up here. Wolves. Coyotes. We hide the body, they’ll drag it away and eat it. Jimmy will be furious. He’s paying, and he wants the most bang for his buck. Shock. Horror. All that crap.”
“He really wants to get this dude’s attention, doesn’t he?”
“You don’t want to get on Jimmy’s wrong side. He knows how to handle business.”
The child shivered convulsively. He wore a school uniform. A school uniform, for shit’s sake, with slacks, a pressed shirt, and a tie. He was old enough to know he was going to die, and young enough not really to understand.
Well. Who did understand? She didn’t. She wished she could help him. But there was no way. She wasn’t carrying a gun. She couldn’t just run at these guys, guys who were obviously professional hit men, and save the kid. All she would do was die, too. That wouldn’t help the boy. She could do nothing but watch helplessly.
Even as she thought that, she was quietly, relentlessly tearing the sheets out of her drawing tablet. They were eight-by-eleven, good-sized sheets of paper with whipped cream clouds and ingrown toenail mountains.
She didn’t have a plan.
Or rather—it was a stupid plan.
But the wind was blowing. The stand of trees was no more than twenty yards away. If she ran fast enough and dodged quickly enough, she could get away. And she couldn’t stand to live the rest of her life knowing she didn’t make even the most feeble attempt to save a child from murder by two professional killers.
Stupid plan. So stupid. She was going to get herself killed.
She heard her father’s voice in her head.
Taylor, you can’t outrun a bullet.
She knew it. She really did. But the boy’s crying was getting louder again, the men more silent. They were getting down to business, which was to murder the child and pose him so that guy, McManus, saw him as soon as he drove up the road.
Shock. Horror. All that crap.
When she had freed a dozen sheets of paper, she put the tablet on the ground and stepped on it. Holding three sheets high above her head like unformed paper airplanes, she let the wind catch them, heard them flap, took a breath—and released them.
Taylor ran.
She thought she would hear the sheets of paper as the wind carried them into the meadow. Into view of the hit men. To distract them. From the kid.
To attract their attention. To her.
To give the kid a chance to escape.
Stupid, stupid plan.
She didn’t hear the flap of the papers.
All she heard was the red buzz of fear in her ears.
She zigged out into the meadow into plain sight of the gunmen, then zagged back behind the boulder.
A gunshot. She heard the gunshot. Loud. Sharp. Cruel. Close. To her.
So they’d seen her. Yay.
“Run, kid!” she yelled.
Shouts. She thought she heard shouts.
She glanced behind her.
Seamore “Dash” Roberts came around the boulder, pistol in hand. Moving fast.
She had the lead.
Good.
But he was a running back. Big guy. Got the nickname “Dash” because he was fast.
Bad. Very bad.
To beat him, she had to run straight toward the trees as fast as she could.
To live, she needed to zigzag.
She ran straight.
She ducked.
A shot rang out.
He missed.
Oh, God. Oh, God. Please, God.
He missed because he had a pistol. That was good for her. Pistols were meant for close work. Hard to aim. Best he could do was thirty to forty feet if he was skilled, and he’d have to stop to really get a bead on her.
The forest. She had to get to the forest.
Run as hard as you can.
She reached the shelter of the trees.
She’d made it!
She glanced back.
He stopped, braced his feet, raised his pistol.
She ducked behind a tree.
A shot shattered the bark beside her.
This was okay. This was good. Because if he was shooting at her, he wasn’t killing the kid.
Yeah. Real good.
She ran again, glanced back.
He sprinted toward her.
No. She knew this place.
He didn’t.
She took a left.
Another shot.
She should be counting. He had only six shots … unless that was an automatic pistol, in which case—
This was no time for math.
Run, goddamn it.
There. The foot of the mountain. She took another left, fast and hard, around the rock, and she headed up the steepest incline she’d ever seen. And she’d seen a few.
Another shot. Close.
God. Please, God.
She leaped like a mountain goat over rocks. She ducked under brush.
She couldn’t zig. She couldn’t zag. The path was narrow. It was curvy. It was damn near vertical. There was only one way up this mountain, and she was on it.
So was he.
She could hear him behind her, tearing up the ground as he gained on her.
She had only one way out. One way to save herself.
The cave. In the rock.
Never, ever go in that cave. No one knows where it goes. You could fall. You could break your legs. You could never be found. Never go in. Never.
Her father’s voice. He meant it.
But it was his fault she was doing this. His fault he’d taught her to be responsible and do the right thing.
She dove into the crack in the rock. She wiggled on her belly in the dirt. Fast. Without a whimper. Without a fear of what awaited her.
She was too afraid of what was after her.
The kid had run, too. He’d escaped, too. Because otherwise, this was all for nothing.
Run, kid!
The farther she went into the cave, the tighter it got. Finally there was nowhere else to go except through a passage so low and narrow it was nothing more than a splinter in the rock. But she went.
Belly to the ground, head down, she crawled into darkness. She got stuck. Her butt didn’t fit. She gasped. She wiggled. She pulled. She tore skin off her chin. And she was in. Inside. In a cave, unexplored, where she could tumble and break her legs and die a slow death. She shimmied in, staying low—and fell into nothingness.
Not nothingness. Taylor fell five feet onto … something. Something hard. Stone.
Pain exploded in her right wrist. Blood trickled down her cheek. She covered her mouth and bit down on her scream of pain.
Don’t scream. Don’t scream. He’ll hear you.
But her wrist really hurt. Her cheekbone up by her eye socket—that hurt, too. She’d struck it on the way down. Every nerve throbbed. Every sense flared.
The little boy … had she saved him? Had he seized his chance? Had he run away? Or was he even now lying in a puddle of his own blood, or propped against a rock for McManus to find?
Tears filled her eyes.
Dead. He was probably dead.
Because all she had been able to think to do was toss her drawings to the wind in the hopes of distracting his killers.
She cried. A little. Silently, curled into a fetal position, holding her hurt wrist with one hand, and with her fist over her mouth.
She heard nothing from above in the shadows.
Of course not. That monster would not fit. She hoped.
Okay. Okay, she was safe. For the moment, she was safe.
She worked on her breathing, trying to stop the gasping, the sobbing. She worked on her heartbeat, trying to calm the thump against her rib cage.
She had never in her life felt like this, or been in the grip of such terror. She lived near Washington, D.C., one of the most violent cities in the United States, and she had to come back to the freaking primitive Sawtooth Mountains to get shot at.
Did the boy live? Had he run away? Had he saved himself?
Oh, please, God. Let him have run. Let him be alive.
She groped around, trying to see where she was, where she had come to rest, to find a way farther into the cave, to find a safer place.
She was on a ledge. It stuck out three feet. It was five feet wide. She lay on her belly, extended her good arm into thin air.
Nothing. No way farther in. No way out.
Cautiously, she sat up.
She explored her arm. Bruised. She winced. Or cracked.