Shorts - Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can't Put Down (13 page)

The sun is brutal, burning the sky white. The windows are open, and the sweat slicking your chest feels familiar. “It’s good.”

Cooper nods.

“How many?”

“At least two.”

“Armed?”

He nods again. You take a breath, look around. Electricity crackles and snaps between your fingers, the same old feeling you used to get as the squad mounted up. With terrain like this, there’s no reason even to discuss the plan. “Okay,” you say.

Cooper opens the door, pauses. Turns to look at you. “Nick—”

“Forget it,” you say. The two of you share the kind of look that only men who’ve gone to war together can. Then he slides out of the car and walks over to the stairwell, leans against the wall.

You sit behind the wheel for a moment, listening to the relentless hammer of the heavy metal guitars. Remembering Fritz, the gunner for your Stryker’s forward weapons team, a skinny kid with a Missouri twang and a pinch of Skoal perpetually in
the pouch of his lip.
Two hundred and ten beats a minute,
he’d said, and smiled. At the time, you’d thought he was talking about his heart.

You turn off the engine and get out. Stand for a moment in the sun, the same sun that lights the other side of the world. You twist the passenger mirror up at an angle, then take a breath, go prone and wriggle underneath the truck.

It isn’t long before you hear a car climbing the ramp. The sound gets louder, fainter, then louder again as it winds to the top. You take a deep breath and remember the best night you ever had, how you mastered your fear and let yourself believe.

The problem with the best moment of your life is that every other moment is worse.

The car is a BMW. It cruises up the ramp smooth and soft. You keep your face pointing down, watching out of the corner of your eye, trying to picture a basement room with a dangling bulb and a heavy door. The car parks about twenty feet away, near the stairs, where Cooper stands with his hands in his pocket. Gently, you slide out from under, keeping the truck between you and the men, using the mirror to see.

Two of them, one in a suit, no tie; the other, bigger, in jeans and a muscle shirt. Muscle Shirt gives a casual scan of the parking lot. He doesn’t look concerned, lacks the edgy readiness of a man expecting trouble. Still, when he turns his back, you see a pistol tucked into his belt. Cooper raises one hand in greeting, says something you can’t hear.

Keeping low, you ease around the back of the Bronco.

Your heart slams in your chest, and you can taste copper. You slide one foot forward, then the other. The distance is only twenty feet. A couple of car lengths. It seems like miles. You feel strangely naked with your hands empty. Step, beat, step.

The man in the business suit says something to Cooper. You
screen it out. Fifteen feet. Ten. The sun fires jagged glints off the polished BMW.

You’re almost to the man in the muscle shirt when he turns around.

The stars in the desert night were unlike anything you’d ever seen. They flowed across the sky like God had spilled them. Growing up in Chicago, the stars you saw were man-made, skyscrapers turning the night purple. Even when you went camping out in Wisconsin, it was nothing like this.

Sometimes, when things got bad, you closed your eyes and thought of those stars. Imagined yourself on a rise, alone, arms out, a figure cut from the sky. Looking upward. Waiting to be pulled into them.

Hoping.

Muscle Shirt’s eyes go wide, and he starts to speak, but you don’t hesitate, just take three quick strides and snap off a jab that catches his chin. Your bare knuckles sing. Adrenaline howls in your blood. The fear is gone. You feel better than you have in months. You throw another jab, and he gets his hands up in a clumsy block, and then you crack him hard in the side of the head, near the temple, a wildly illegal blow. His eyes lose focus and his legs wobble, but it’s in you now, the rage, the anger that swelled every time a mortar landed on the FOB, every time a man in a terrorist-towel stepped out of an alley leveling an AK, every time the counselor at the VA said that what you were experiencing was typical, that it would pass. You swing again and again. His head snaps back and blood explodes from his nose and he’d fall if only you’d let him.

A loud gasp pulls you from your trance. You forget Muscle Boy. Turn to the man in the suit and start his way, and in a panicky voice he says, “Cooper, what is this—” and then you break his nose. He whimpers and drops to his knees. He looks
up with wide, scared eyes, one hand on his nose and the other up to ward you off, like a child menaced by a bully.

The anger and power vanish. You lower your fists. Then Cooper pushes past you, flips Muscle Shirt over. Grabs the pistol from his belt and comes up fast. The man in the suit screams.

You say, “No—” and then there are three explosions and the man stops screaming. Cooper turns to the one on the ground and fires three more times, two bullets in the center of mass and one in the head, just like they taught you in basic.

And you stand there, hands trembling, a shattered body on either side of you as the sun beats down.

“Nick,” Cooper says.

You stare.

“I had to. It’s done now.” He takes off his hoodie and uses it to wipe the sidearm clean. He drops it next to one of the bodies, then starts for the Bronco.

You look at what’s left of their heads.

Then Cooper says, “Nick!” His voice sharp. “Come on. Move your feet, soldier.” He walks around to the other side of the Bronco and opens the door.

You bend and do something without really thinking about it, and then the sun carves your shadow in concrete as you walk to your truck.

The drive out of Las Vegas is a surreal falling away, first the casinos and bright lights, then the subdivisions that spring up overnight—all those houses, all those people, all the same—and then retail and then diners and then garages and then warehouses and then nothing. Just dirt and sun on either side of US-15.

Cooper is all energy, the window open and fingers tapping, his whole body vibrating like a tuning fork. “Fuck, that was intense,” he says, grinning. “I knew you’d boxed, but you beat the
shit
out of those guys.”

Your fingers on the wheel are raw and dark with drying blood. He slaps the side of your truck in time with the heavy metal screaming through the tinny speakers. “Where we going, chief?”

You press the power button on the stereo. Cooper looks at you. A long stare. Some of the energy falls away. “I had to.”

You say nothing.

“I had to show Vance that coming after me is a bad idea. That it will cost him.” He scratches his chin. “Now we can deal. I’ll even pay him, when I get the money.”

“The guy,” you say. Hot dry air roars in the open windows. “He knew your name.”

“Who? On the parking deck? So what?”

“You told me you’d never met him. But he said, ‘Cooper, what is this?’”

He shrugs. “Vance must have told him.”

“It sounded like he knew you.”

“He didn’t.”

Your hands tighten on the steering wheel. You wait. You know Cooper. Silence he can’t take.

Finally, he laughs. “Ah, shit, okay, you got me.” He turns to you. “I did know him. But the rest of what I said, it was true. And Nickie, thank you. I mean it. I always knew I could count on you.”

You nod. It was true. He had always known that. You ride in silence for another couple of moments, then pull off at a lonely gas station. “I’m thirsty.”

“Get me something, would you?”

In the minimart you snag a couple of Gatorades and a pack of beef jerky and a can of lighter fluid. The woman behind the counter is as old as death. When she counts out your change, the motion of her lips fractures her cheeks like sunbaked mud. In the Bronco, Cooper has his feet on the dash. As you put the truck into Drive, he opens the jerky, says, “You got a destina
tion in mind, or we just cruising? Because the chicks, man, they’re the other direction.”

The highway is nearly empty, cars strung out like beads on a necklace. You open the Gatorade and take a long pull. After a few minutes, you take the exit for US-93, a two-lane straight into the cracked brown American desert.

“Seriously, Nick, where we headed?”

“What were you doing when I came in?”

“What?” His eyebrows scrunch. “Came in where?”

“In Mosul. The apartment. When I came in, you were bending over the guy’s body. What were you doing?”

He cocks his head. “I was checking for a pulse.”

“I’ve thought about that a lot since I got back. The way you were bent over him. It was strange.” You set your drink in the cup holder. “You weren’t looking for a pulse, were you? You were going through his pockets.”

“That’s crazy.”

You say nothing, just look at him sideways, put it all in your eyes. For a moment, he keeps it up, the facade, the Cooper Show. Then he says, “Huh,” and the mask falls away. “When did you know?”

“I guess I knew then. In Mosul. I just wanted to believe you.”

Cooper nods. “See, I knew I could count on you.”

“What I want to know is
why.
”

He sighs. “I had a sideline going with the guy—weed, meth—but he got unreliable. Always talking about Allah, you know.” He shrugged. “And today, well, I really did owe Vance ten grand.”

“That why you shot him? He was the one in the suit, right?”

“You don’t miss a trick, Nickie.”

“Why bring me into it?”

“I couldn’t be sure how many guys he’d have.”

“No. Why
me?
”

“What do you want me to say?” He shrugs. “Because you buy the whole lie. You win the Golden Gloves and to celebrate, what do you do? Get drunk and nail your girlfriend? Not you. You join the army.”

“You used me.”

“You let yourself be used.”

“I could go to the cops.”

“They’d arrest you, too. But you know what?” He shakes his head. “That doesn’t matter. You didn’t do that in Iraq, and you won’t here.
That’s
why I came to you. Because you’re predictable, Nickie. You never change.”

The moment stretches. You remember your trainer saying all you had to do was believe. Remember the feeling of being part of a team, a soldier, and what it got you, a diagnosis of PTSD and a rented room in a city you hate and a raw and formless anger that seems some days more real than any version of you that you once thought might be the real thing.

And then you raise the pistol you took from the parking deck and put it to Cooper’s head and show him he’s wrong.

Your knuckles hurt and your lips are chapped. There’s a line from an old Leonard Cohen song running through your head, something about praying for the grace of God in the desert here and the desert far away. Sometimes you’re thinking of Cooper. Sometimes you’re not thinking at all.

When the sun slips below the horizon, you get up off the boulder you’ve been sitting on all day. A quiet corner of searing nowhere at the end of an abandoned two-track, brown rocks and brown dirt and white sky and you.

The Bronco’s passenger window is still open.

You reach in your pocket and pull out the can of lighter fluid and pop the top and lean in the window to spray it all over your friend and the front seat and the floorboards, the smell rising fast.
You squeeze until nothing else comes. You think you might be crying, but you’re not sure.

The butane catches with a soft
whoomp
and a trail of blue-yellow flame leaps around the inside of the truck you once loved. The upholstery catches quickly, and Cooper’s clothing. Within a minute, greasy black smoke pours out the windows, and a fierce crackling rises.

You stand on the ridge of the desert and watch. Another truck engulfed in flame beneath another burning sky, and you still standing, still watching.

And then you turn and start walking alone.

Throughout her extensive career, Carla Neggers has excelled not only at creating vivid characters, but also at placing them in circumstances where Mother Nature is as much of a threat as the killers they face. Whether in the lush Irish ruins of
The Angel,
the frozen mountain range of
Cold Pursuit,
or the salty Maine air of
The Harbor,
the protagonists in Carla’s stories must confront not only the harsh realities of their situation, but also the brutal conditions of their environment.

In this sense “On the Run” is both a classic adventure story and vintage Carla Neggers. On an isolated trailhead in the unforgiving mountains of New Hampshire, Gus Winter and the fugitive holding him at gunpoint will grapple in a life-and-death struggle. The temperature is dropping and both men are feeling the cold’s embrace when this story begins.

“T
his is where they died?”

Gus Winter shook his head. “No. Another half hour, at least.”

The fugitive shivered in the cold drizzle that had been falling all day. “Ironic that you’ll die up here, too,” he said.

“If I die, then you’ll die. Help won’t arrive in time to save you. Just like it didn’t arrive in time to save them.”

Them.

Gus kept his expression neutral. They’d stopped in the middle of the rough, narrow trail for the fugitive to catch his breath. He was compact, thickly built and at least twenty years younger than Gus, but his jeans and cotton sweater weren’t appropriate for the conditions on the ridge. His socks were undoubtedly cotton, too. He didn’t wear a hat or gloves. He carried a hip pack, but he’d already consumed his small bag of trail mix and quart of water.

Three hours ago, he’d jumped from behind a giant boulder just above a seldom-used trailhead up Cold Ridge, stuck a gun in Gus’s face and ordered him to get moving. Now they were on an open stretch of bald rock at three thousand feet in the White
Mountains of New Hampshire on an unsettled October afternoon.

The weather would get worse. Soon.

Gus looked out at the mist, fog and drizzle. The hardwoods with their brightly colored autumn leaves had given way to more and more evergreens. At just over four thousand feet, he and the fugitive would be above the tree line.

Gus said, “Most hypothermia deaths occur on days just like today.”

“That right?”

“It doesn’t have to be below zero to die of the cold.”

The fugitive hunched his shoulders as if to combat his shivering. He had a stubbly growth of beard, which made sense given the story he’d told Gus about escaping from a federal prison in Rhode Island two days ago. His dark eyes showed none of the discomfort he had to be feeling.

Gus wasn’t winded, and he was warm enough in his layers of moisture-wicking fabrics and his lined, waterproof jacket. He wore a wool hat, wind-resistant gloves, wool socks and waterproof hiking boots. His backpack was loaded with basic supplies, but he couldn’t reach back for anything, take it off, unzip a compartment.

If he did, the fugitive had said he’d shoot him.

The fugitive coughed, still breathing hard. Sweat trickled down his temples into his three-day stubble. “I’m not dying of the cold.”

“Try not to sweat,” Gus said. “Sweating is a cooling mechanism. The water evaporates on your skin and promotes heat loss. You don’t want that.”

“You want me to freeze to death.”

“No. I want you to give yourself up. Walk back down the mountain with me.”

The fugitive stepped back behind Gus and waved his gun, a
.38-caliber Smith & Wesson that he must have picked up somewhere between prison and New Hampshire. “Get moving.”

“It’s a good idea to keep moving, but not so hard and fast that you sweat. It’s easier to stay warm than to get warm.”

“Shut up.”

Gus started back along the trail and heard the crunch of small stones as the fugitive fell in behind him. The trail dropped off sharply to their left, and in the valley below, the bright orange leaves of hardwoods managed to penetrate the gray. Every autumn, leaf-peepers flocked to northern New England to see the stunning foliage. Today, in the rain and fog, they would be gathered in front of fires at cozy inns and restaurants, or headed home.

Gus realized it wasn’t his bad luck that the one person in the White Mountains with a gun had found him. The fugitive had targeted him. Watched for him.

Why?

Before long, the valley would disappear in the fog and low cloud cover, and dusk came early this time of year. Even with the flashlight he had in his pack, Gus knew it would be increasingly difficult, perhaps impossible, to see from one trail marker to the next. The fugitive wouldn’t find his way on his own. He didn’t know Cold Ridge. Gus did. He’d lived in its shadows, hiked its trails his entire life—not counting his two years in the army. He’d come home at twenty expecting to get married, have a couple of kids.

Things had worked out differently.

Because of the ridge and its dangers.

“There’s a shoot-to-kill order out on me,” the fugitive said, matter-of-fact.

“No such thing.”

“Liar.”

Gus stepped over a smooth, slippery rock. “The purpose of
deadly force isn’t to kill. Its purpose is to stop you—someone—from killing or seriously injuring someone else. It’s about public safety. It’s not about killing.”

The fugitive snorted. “Why not shoot me in the knee?”

“Shoot you in the knee, and you can still fire off a round or stab someone. Apply deadly force, and you can’t. But if you live—then you live. The purpose was to stop you, not to kill you.”

“You’d shoot to kill me if you had the chance.”

“Toss your gun off the ridge.” Although he wasn’t known for his patience, Gus kept his tone reasonable, persuasive. “Let’s walk back down the trail together. Keeping your gun pointed at me puts you at risk of getting shot yourself. If the police see you—”

“It’s just you and me up here. And the ghosts. Don’t try to fool me. I know we’re almost there.”

Yes, Gus thought as he led the fugitive around a familiar bend in the trail. They were almost there.

He slowed his pace, mindful of the slippery rock, and the fugitive moved in closer. “You’re picturing yourself firing your Glock into my chest, aren’t you?”

Gus didn’t own a Glock. “I’m picturing you wrapped up in a blanket in front of a nice fire in a woodstove. Safe. No worries about tripping and falling up here. No worries about hypothermia. No worries about getting yourself shot.”

“A .40-caliber Glock.” The fugitive’s teeth chattered, but derision had crept into his voice. “Isn’t that what you carry, Mr. Senior Deputy U.S. Marshal Winter?”

Gus maintained his steady pace. He saw now what had happened three hours ago.

The fugitive believed he’d snatched a federal agent.

Specifically, Gus’s nephew, Nate Winter, a senior deputy U.S. marshal visiting from Washington. He and Gus had similar builds and were just thirteen years apart in age. Wearing a hat,
carrying a pack, Gus could understand how someone could think he was Nate.

He didn’t correct the fugitive’s mistake.

The trail became steeper, and the drizzle turned to light rain. Behind him, Gus could hear the fugitive shuddering and shivering, cursing at the cold. “You’re in first-stage hypothermia,” Gus said. “Shivering is your body’s way of trying to get warm. Your core temperature is already below normal. You’re still conscious and alert, but you won’t stay that way.”

“I’m fine. Keep walking.”

“As your core temperature drops below ninety, your coordination will become more and more impaired. You’ll become weaker. Lethargic. Confused.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“You’ll stop shivering.” Gus had explained the stages of hypothermia to countless hikers over the past thirty years. “You’ll be at an increased risk of cardiac arrest.”

“It won’t happen—”

“It
is
happening. It’s happening to you right now.”

“I’ll take your gear and leave you. You’ll freeze long before I do.”

“You need me to get you off this mountain alive,” Gus said calmly.

“All I have to do is go downhill.”

“It’s not that simple. You’re in a wilderness area. The main trails are to the south. Even if you managed to avoid falling off a cliff—even if you didn’t run out of potable water—and you made it off the mountain, you’d still be miles from the nearest help.”

The fugitive was breathing hard now. “More lies.”

“I’m just telling you how it is,” Gus said. “And no matter what you do—leave me, take me with you—you’ll still be wet and cold. It’ll be dark soon. Do you know how to protect yourself from the cold overnight?”

“Stop talking.”

Gus pretended to stumble slightly on the trail and deliberately ran into a half-dead spruce tree. A sharp sticklike lower branch dug into his cheek and drew blood. He gave an exaggerated yelp of pain and let a few drops of the blood drip onto the gray granite at his feet.

“Hold up.” The fugitive shoved his gun into Gus’s back and sniffled, but he didn’t stop shivering. “The blood. Clean it up. Use your glove. Do a good job.”

Squatting down on one knee, Gus used the thumb of his black, windproof glove to wipe up the blood, which was already mixing with the rain water.

The fugitive stood over him. “Think I’m stupid? I know what you’re doing. You’re leaving a trail for your marshal friends.” He squinted down at the cleaned-up blood spot. “Back on your feet. Don’t try that again.”

Gus shrugged as he rose up straight. “No one would notice a few drops of blood in this wilderness.”

“A search dog would.”

Gus pressed a gloved finger to the cut on his cheek, as if he didn’t dare let more blood fall onto the trail, but as he started back up the trail, he noted the snapped branch on the spruce with satisfaction. A search-and-rescue team wouldn’t miss it. Just as they wouldn’t miss the other clues he’d left during the past three hours.

His bread-crumb trail.

He’d participated in enough mountain rescues over the years to know how they operated. By now, Nate and his wife and his two sisters and their husbands—all gathered in Cold Ridge for a long weekend—would have realized Gus’s quick walk up the trail had gone bad. They’d do a fast-and-easy search for him before notifying the authorities, who’d launch an official search.

Were they thinking, even now, that he’d simply gone off trail
and fallen? Or were they aware that an armed-and-dangerous fugitive was in the area?

Did they know his name, what he wanted?

The fugitive coughed, his shivering constant now. “All right, stop,” he said abruptly. “Take off your pack and set it on that rock there. Nice and slow.”

Gus complied, aware of the Smith & Wesson pointed at him. The fugitive’s hands had to be stiff from the cold, his fingers wet and slippery. If he just dropped the gun, fine. But Gus didn’t want him accidentally firing off a round.

“Unzip the main compartment and dump out the contents,” the fugitive said. “Again, nice and slow. Don’t do anything stupid. I want to see what you’ve got in there.”

Gus did as instructed, shaking out three energy bars, a water bottle, an emergency whistle, waterproof matches, dry clothes, a compass, trash bags that could be used as an emergency shelter.

The fugitive toed a trash bag with his wet sneaker. “That’s a lot to carry for a day hike, isn’t it?”

Gus shook his head. “I always pack more than I think I’ll need. If I use everything, I know I didn’t pack enough.”

“Where’s your gun?”

“Not here.”

“You’re a federal agent. You go armed 24/7. You’re supposed to have a gun.”

Gus didn’t know if that was true or not. He and Nate had never discussed those kinds of details. The fugitive had frisked him for weapons in the first minutes after he’d jumped out from behind the boulder, but Gus hadn’t realized it was, at least in part, due to mistaken identity. “Why didn’t you check my pack for a gun sooner?” he asked.

“I didn’t need to. Touch it, and you were dead, anyway. Let you carry the extra weight of a gun.”

His logic made sense. “Do you want to change into dry socks at least?”

“No. Give me your water.”

Before Gus could comply, the fugitive reached down with his free hand and grabbed the plastic bottle from among the dumped-out contents. He used his teeth to open the flip-top and drank deeply, even with his chattering teeth.

He shoved the bottle at Gus. “Close it. Don’t drink any.”

Once again, Gus did as requested.

“You’re older than I thought you’d be,” the fugitive said. “What’s with the white hair?”

“Hard life.”

“I hate marshals.”

Gus said nothing.

“How much farther now?” the fugitive asked.

“To—”

“To where your mummy and daddy froze to death.”

Gus pushed back a surge of anger and gazed down toward the village nestled in the valley below Cold Ridge, lost now in the gray clouds and fog. He could see his nephew and nieces on that cold, awful night thirty years ago.

Nate, seven. Antonia, five. Carine, three.

Waiting.

“They got caught in an unexpected ice storm. It was all over the papers.” The fugitive sounded amused now. “Can you imagine? A young couple with three little kids, freezing to death up here.”

Gus rose up straight. He’d been twenty and newly home from war. He’d looked at the faces of his young nephew and nieces and wished he could have died up on the ridge in the place of his brother and his wife. Instead, he’d become the guardian to their three orphans.

They were all married now. Antonia and Carine had little ones
of their own. Nate and his wife, Sarah, were expecting their first child in a few weeks. A boy.

If he died up here today, Gus thought, the little ones—like grandchildren to him—wouldn’t remember him. They weren’t old enough.

There was some consolation in that.

The wind picked up and swirled the gray horizon, creating a wavelike effect that had a tendency to disorient, even nauseate, novice hikers. As an outfitter and guide, Gus had encountered hikers of all descriptions in the mountains. Most were eager and well-meaning, determined to enjoy their experience while taking proper precautions.

The fugitive poked his gun into Gus’s back. “Well? Answer me. How much farther?”

“Fifty yards. Maybe a little more. We need to be careful in the fog. We don’t want to walk off the edge of a cliff.” He glanced back, slowing his pace. “You don’t need your gun. I’ll take you wherever you want to go. I won’t run or mislead you. I don’t want you to hurt anyone else.”

“I want your coat,” the fugitive said suddenly. “Get it off.”

Gus paused and shrugged off his pack and coat. The fugitive took it with one hand and put it on over his wet sweater, taking care to keep his gun at the ready.

He zipped up the coat and gave a shudder of obvious relief. “I don’t know why I waited this long.”