Willing Hostage (17 page)

One of the men was the grinning Charlie, who had asked her if she was Sheila her first day in Colorado.

Another, Leah had seen at Ted's Place, too. He'd been eating a hamburger as he crawled into a pickup full of caged dogs. Now he held something out for them to sniff.

“Is that your sweat shirt?” Glade whispered.

“I think so … yes. What'll we do?”

“Walk quietly in the other direction until we can run.” He turned and slipped through the trees and then returned when she didn't follow him. “Come on.”

“Those men aren't goons, right? They're CIA.” It was now or never.

“Yes, but let's not talk about it here.”

“You go. I've slowed you down long enough.” One more day with this man and she'd really be lost.

“What are you saying?”

“They want the property and you. I don't have the property and I don't know where it is. This isn't the group that killed Sheila.”

“Well, no. They wouldn't dare.… Welker knows about you. But …” He studied the group below. “We may have a chance.…”

“No. Go. And with my blessing. I'll give you as much time as I can. Now hurry.”

“I don't like this.”

“It's the only way and you know it. Get your whatever-it-is to the press and … good luck.”

“Please come with me.”

“Glade, they're not even bloodhounds. Just a bunch of nondescript—”

“They treed me a week ago.”

“I'll give myself up before they get the chance.” She took a deep breath and hardened her voice. “I'm probably in as much danger from you as I am from them.”

He still stared at the men and dogs on the meadow. He shook his head slowly. “I don't trust them, Leah.”

“Look, here's my one chance to get out of this.” And away from Glade Wyndham? “When they realize I have nothing to tell them, they'll let me get on a plane and away from Colorado and the goons. And you'll move faster and easier without me.”

“You don't know them. What if they don't believe you?”

“Glade, I can't take any more of this running, or being filthy, or … in the open all the time.” Where the wilderness screamed her vulnerability back at her at every step. “I have to get back to my own world.” Where there were walls and people and reason. Where she wouldn't need a strong man to look after her. “Your world is too dangerous.”

“And my future too dim?” Bitterness, disappointment in his voice? It was hard to tell which.

She nodded and clamped her teeth so that her chin wouldn't tremble.

“You're sure?” All expression, emotion gone now.

“I just want out,” she whispered and closed her eyes.

“Good-bye, Leah Harper.” He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I think you're making a mistake but … good luck.”

Glade Wyndham disappeared through the trees with a half-hearted wave. The last thing she saw was two cobalt-cold eyes peeping from under the flap of his backpack.

She'd forgotten the cat again! Leah shrugged. The man and the cat had more in common with each other than they did with her. But she would miss them.

Leah sat down to watch the scene below through tears. The enormity of her sense of loss did not surprise her, but it did take her breath away. “That's okay, Leah. You've had losses before and you recovered. You've just got to disentangle yourself from this mess.” They would be better off without her. And she couldn't afford them.

The canines had had a good sniff of her sweat shirt. Their handler released them and all four took off importantly … but in four different directions.

Charlie doubled over and slapped his thigh. His companions looked grim. The handler mouthed curses and the dogs returned for another sniff.

Leah giggled silently, cried silently, and finally hiccuped loudly. But the dogs made such a racket, no one on the meadow heard her. She could smell herself but then maybe the wind was in the wrong direction.

The dogs were released again. And spurted different ways again. But one of them, on the far side of the tent, began to howl. Everyone raced across the meadow away from Leah.

She laughed and cried so hard that her empty, ulcerous stomach gurgled warning. But there was no one to hear. Everyone stood looking up a far tree that the dogs were trying to climb.

Finally, one of the men climbed the tree after a boost from a companion's shoulder.

Leah crept back into the trees to answer a call from her bladder, delayed by an overwrought breaking of camp. When she came back, the group below was returning, Charlie clutching his ribs. The dogs walked subdued, heads hanging in shame.

Charlie disappeared into the tent and came out with a can that gleamed golden in the sun. He pop-topped it and drank between spasms of laughter.

Leah rummaged through her pack and found a packet of cheddar cheese spread. She dug it out with her dirty index finger and had breakfast. “Mother,” she whispered to the piny air, “wherever you are, you wouldn't believe this.”

The helicopter took off eventually in one direction, the dogs in another. Charlie stayed on the ground, drinking beer. Leah ate cheddar until it was gone.

She had not made a mistake this time. Her mistake had been to blindly follow him to begin with. She had her own life to get on with.

The dogs returned before the helicopter, but without Glade and Goodyear. She was relieved. The sun rose higher. Charlie was on his fifth round at least.

The handler released the dogs so they could urinate. One of them raised his leg directly below Leah and looked up at her. She could have sworn he'd seen her. But he trotted back to camp.

There was a snorting sound behind her and Leah turned to stare into the eyes of a great bull elk. He was startled to panic with pupils dilated and antlers mossy with fur. He was so unexpected, so fine a creature that she sat entranced, almost hypnotized. With all the barking in the meadow, why that elk wasn't miles away in another direction, she'd never know. Leah blinked.

The elk blinked.

The dog had stopped in the clearing to bark for his four-legged friends who came racing toward him. Then the entire pack turned on Leah and the majestic animal behind her.

Leah Harper stood as crashing flight sounded at her back.

She left her pack where it lay and walked slowly down the mountain toward the dogs. Men raced across the meadow. The helicopter sounded in the distance. Leah hoped Charlie and the handler got to her before the dogs recovered from their surprise.

Chapter Twenty-two

Leah sat on a canvas stool drinking coffee and feeling embarrassed about her unwashed condition.

One of the grim-faced men handed her a cheese sandwich and sat on the edge of a cot facing her. “I'm Peter Bradley.” He smiled and it made him handsome, even if his name probably wasn't Peter Bradley. His rumpled white shirt was rolled to the elbows and open three or four buttons down the front to show off the brown hair on his chest. “There are a few holes in your story, Miss Harper. For instance, how did you know we were with the government and looking for this man you say left you this morning?”

“He told me you were CIA men.”

“When? You say he left you before you came upon our camp.”

“We'd seen the helicopter when we were on Big Marvine.”

“Uhm. Now, there's miles of wilderness here. How did you happen to find us?”

“I didn't find you. I sort of … stumbled across you. I heard the dogs and the helicopter—”

“That's handy, that helicopter. This man you call Glade Wyndham dragged you around the Rockies for a week and then just left you alone in the wilderness this morning. Why?”

“I've told you … or them.” She motioned toward the two men who were going through her backpack.

“Tell us again.” His eyes warmed, inviting confidences.

“He said that he had something to do and that I slowed him down. He said if I walked west long enough I'd find a marked trail.”

“Seems kind of cold-blooded, doesn't it? To bring you all that way and just leave you?”

“I … guess so.”

“And yet you're protecting him—”

“No!”

Peter Bradley squeezed his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger. The helicopter and dogs had left again and it was quiet. Now and then a slight clank sounded as her belongings were spread out on a long table. Charlie lounged in the tent opening with his beer can and his grin. A fly landed on her cheese sandwich. Leah was growing tired of cheese.

“Why did you go with him?”

“I told you. He made me go at first and then after we found Sheila … I felt threatened too, so I stayed with him.”

“Why did you feel threatened?”

“Sheila was in
my
car.”

“And yet you walked boldly into this camp this afternoon.”

“Trap”… the very air breathed it. Leah tried not to blink. “He said goons did that to Sheila. I thought you were a different bunch because you had the helicopter.”

“But some days ago you hid from our search plane … left your sweat shirt—”

“I didn't know it was you then.”

“But you knew this afternoon. You didn't suspect your goons, whoever they may be, could have had a helicopter, so you just walked in—after walking haphazardly for miles since early this morning—across miles of wilderness and just happened to stumble in here.” Something about him resembled a less formal, less staged Joseph Welker,

“I heard the dogs.”

He lit a cigarette and walked to the folding table. The size of the tent, the long table and cots, the map pinned to a board—it all reminded Leah of a Civil War movie. This could have been Grant's command tent, except for the modern vehicles outside and the stacks of food coolers lining the walls.

Peter Bradley held the stack of paper money from her billfold under her nose as if asking her to smell it. “A lot of cash to be carrying around on a camping trip.”

“I told you Joseph Welker paid me to meet Glade and tell him about the goons and that the FBI was willing to—”

“Would you like to talk to Joseph Welker?”

Even the men at the table stopped rifling her things to hear her answer.

“No. I just want a ride back to civilization … and to catch the first plane east out of Colorado.”

He seemed surprised. “Why don't you want to talk to Welker?”

“Because he got me into this in the first place.”

“You left your pack with all this money on the side of a mountain to walk in here.” He waved the cash at her again.

“I don't know why I did that. I guess I was tired of carrying it. I'd been walking all day.”

Bradley stepped on his cigarette butt and turned to Charlie. “What do you think?”

“I think she's lying,” Charlie said softly and his grin pulled the corners of his eyelids down so far that it almost closed them.

Peter Bradley stood over her. “There were two sets of boot prints next to your pack. He stood there with you and looked at this camp, didn't he? Your Glade Wyndham? He said that we weren't goons, that we were government. And that was this afternoon, wasn't it, not this morning? And he's not far away, is he?” His hand lifted her chin so that she looked up at him. “He hasn't been leaving this area all day, has he? Just since you walked in here. In other words, he used you as a decoy, didn't he?”

Leah let herself blink back tears that weren't there. “Yes.”

She couldn't have planned it better if she'd made it up herself. Their search would narrow and Glade, who'd left her in the morning, would be well out of it.

But the exhausting questioning went on and it was mostly the same questions. Leah wondered if she hadn't made a mistake, after all. She didn't feel any safer with them than with Glade. Afternoon dimmed to evening. The helicopter and dogs returned. Delicious smells came from the fire that flickered light through the tent's walls. Leah thought she'd fall off her canvas stool if this didn't stop soon.

“Did he make love to you out there?”

“What?” Leah snapped alert. The first new question in hours.

“Did he screw you?” Charlie conjugated fuzzily. He was trying to light a lantern hanging from the tent rigging.

“Is that why you protected him? Why tears came to your eyes when you talked of taking the first plane east? Did he love and then leave you?” Peter Bradley gestured melodramatically with his prepackaged martini. It was still in its pop-top can.

They were treating her like some kind of criminal. “No.”

“No, what?”

“That's not why I want to leave Colorado. Do they put olives in the can and everything?”

“Would you like one?”

“No, thanks.”

“What
do
you want from us, Leah?”

“Dinner.”

He shook his head and then he rubbed it. But Leah had dinner. Steak and roasted ears of sweet corn and baked potatoes and a tossed salad and fresh—not freeze-dried. Government people ate well even in the rough, she observed.

“How do you feel now?” Bradley sat beside her at the long table and poured her a mug of coffee.

“If I had a bath and a real bed I'd be in heaven.”

“Where was he going from here?” Bradley asked as he offered cream and sugar.

Leah sighed. It was to begin again. Would the interrogation last the night? “He didn't say.”

“Did he have the papers on him?”

“I told you I didn't see any papers.”

When she fell asleep at the table, they poured her more coffee. Charlie sat across from her. His bright-yellow shirt kept blurring in front of her eyes and his grin would warp unpleasantly. The lantern hissed and smelled of kerosene. Anyone passing it slung giant shadows up the tent walls.

Charlie left with the dogs and handlers and another lantern. She was so fogged and fuzzy she couldn't tell how long he was gone, but when he return, Bradley looked up. “Anything?”