Blood on the Tracks (33 page)

Another fifty yards, another dead man. This one with his throat smiling. Nik had been close enough to the group with Gentry not to risk a shot. Or maybe it was just that he was good with a knife.

Man’s gotta breathe.

Maybe all of us were half crazy. All of us former Marines, soldiers, pilots. Maybe we all came back from our wars infected with something dark and secret. Something that multiplied in the fertile silence of our hushed hearts.

Clyde stopped so suddenly I almost tripped over him. I crouched and watched as he circled back the way we’d come then trotted forward again, nose to the ground and then up in the air as he worked to pull whatever scent had alerted him. But the wind scattered the scent cone, spread the molecules to nothing.

He trotted back down the trail, and I followed.

The trestle bridge grew larger, filling the southern horizon. To our west, the gorge released a thin, chill breath of ice. Unease pricked at my skin. I crouched again and downed Clyde next to me. I looked up and down the hillside. The wind dropped, and for a moment the entire world lay wrapped in silence, the night a velvet glove.

Beside me, Clyde shivered. I felt it, too. A baleful presence. Someone nearby, their eyes on our skin.

I groped for Clyde’s lead, intending to back us off the trail.

A burst of light hit my face. I pushed Clyde hard, trying to knock him back into the darkness.

His feet scrabbled on the icy ground and then he whirled and leapt into the space in front of me, a furious growl in his throat.

“Clyde!”

There came the flat report of a gunshot, and Clyde went down.

I rose and tried to run to him, but there came another crack, and something slammed into my chest with the heft and speed of a man swinging a baseball bat.

My rifle skittered away as I fell, the pain in my chest burning through my lungs until no breath remained. I skidded along the snow-packed slope toward the abyss. My right foot caught on something; the sudden braking spun me around and shoved me against a rocky outcropping.

Clyde
,
I screamed without a voice.
Clyde!

A figure appeared above me, silhouetted against the moon-hazed sky. A man, tall and lean. He flicked a light on my face then flicked it off again. In the darkness, his breath hit my skin like the scratch of wool.

He reached out a hand and felt under my coat. Found the vest.

“Well, well, well,” he said.

You’re not breathing, Parnell
,
said the Sir.

I’m goddamn trying, sir.

“The lady cop, riding to the rescue,” the man said. “But who’s going to rescue the lady cop?”

The Sir squatted next to me.
Get. Up.

A trickle of air slid down my windpipe. “Clyde?”

“What’s that?” asked the man. “You got something to say?”

The light returned to my face, panned down my inert body. A headlamp. This time I caught a glimpse of the man behind it.

Narrow face, high cheekbones, a domed forehead. The face that had stared at me from a piece of paper until I’d memorized every feature.

Alfred Merkel, aka Whip.

In person, he was more imposing than I’d imagined from the artist’s sketch. Violence sizzled off him with a chained ferocity. Muscled beneath his camos, his bare head smooth, he sat on his heels and regarded me with the languid confidence of a predator. His gray eyes held glints of amber, like sparks off flint.

Score one for the Burned Man, giving this guy his licks.

The light returned to my face. “That your pal up there, picking off my men?”

“My dog,” I whispered.

“That your dog I shot?” He hawked up phlegm, turned his head and spit. “Looks like the fucker’s dead.” He swiveled his gaze back to me. “Was supposed to be you.”

My face and chest grew hot with rage and grief.

“I will put you down,” I said. “For my dog.”

“That right?”

“And for killing Elise.” Testing him. Testing my own theories.

Whip’s eyes went to slits. His breath hung in a cloud between us. He seemed to be thinking. Probably not something he was used to doing in a hurry. He reached into his boot, came back with a knife.

I pulled my thigh to my chest then shoved my foot into him with everything I had.

He flew backwards.

I scrabbled to get my feet under me, thinking I would kill him. Then I would go to Clyde and fix whatever was wrong. Because Clyde couldn’t be dead.

I made it to a half crouch before Whip came at me, swinging the knife in an arc. I feinted to the right and, as he followed, made a quick jag to the left. My foot slipped on the snow and went out from under me. Desperately I threw myself forward, grasping for anything to stop my fall.

My hands found Whip’s coat, yanked him close.

The abyss opened behind us.

C
HAPTER
27

Nietzsche said that whoever fights monsters should be careful not to become one.

I say, sometimes that’s all you’ve got.

—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

We hit, bounced, caught air, hit and bounced again. Even as we went, Whip was trying to get the knife into me. The blade was the only thing that caught the light as we hurtled into the dark.

I let go of him, tumbling end over end as I descended, careening off snow-covered rock faces and tree trunks in an oddly weightless flight, the heavy snow and gravity carrying me like a wave past anything that could hit me with enough force to stop my downward descent. I heard Sarge’s gun go flying. A second later the radio broke away and smashed against a rock.

And then gravity was done with me. It fetched me up against the trestle’s base and left me there, stunned and panting, flung like a doll on my back.

With a groan, I lifted my head.

A little way north, where the ravine dropped deeper, a small light shone. Whip’s headlamp. I watched it long enough to see that it was moving, but I couldn’t tell if it was approaching or receding.

I dropped my head back and closed my eyes.

I had not known how much of me belonged to Clyde, how much room he had claimed in my heart. He was the one good thing, the one
living
thing, that had come back with me from Iraq. Clyde had held me together as we shared our grief over Dougie, our relief at leaving the war zone, and eventually our sense of purpose—muted though it was—when we returned to work.

From somewhere down the canyon an owl hooted, a throaty roll like water spilling.

I opened my eyes and turned my head, staring into the narrow gash of Devil’s Gorge where the moon managed only a frail light. A little larger now, Whip’s light continued to bob and weave, a ghost light making its way through the underworld.

My body was so filled with pain that I could not separate the hurt within from that without. And I was tired. Tired in Cohen’s way, tired with the weight that makes your bones two inches shorter. I was tired of killing. Tired of death. Exhausted from scraping up against the kind of hatred that makes a man slap a little girl, slaughter a woman, shoot a dog. All I wanted was to lie in the snow and the dark and think about Clyde and Dougie and Cohen until I ran out of thoughts. Ran out of feelings. Until the wind abraded my skin to nothing and I was only disarticulated bones.

Cue the Sir. He was supposed to be here, telling me to get on my feet. Telling me that fifty feet above me, important things were happening. Gentry might be dying. Nik might be dying.

Perhaps the Sir was afraid of heights.

The thought made me laugh. Deep, aching belly rolls that brought tears to my eyes until the laughter began to hitch and moan and turn to a wild weeping.

Then the Sir
was
there. He grabbed my hand, hauled me up. I bit off a scream as my left leg buckled and sent pain rocketing up my thigh. The pain in my wounded arm flared like a beacon. The Sir held me upright.

Not the Sir. Whip.

He bared his teeth and snarled at me through the blood that ran down his face. “Not that it’s any of your fucking business. But I didn’t kill Elise. I loved her. Don’t you fucking hang her death on me.”

He reached for my throat.

I yanked the Glock free, shoved it into Whip’s stomach, and shot him.

He went down, hands tight to his belly, blinking up at me as if he couldn’t figure out how a woman had gotten the upper hand.

“You cunt,” he said.

Something inside me snapped, like an elastic band under too much strain.

I shoved Alfred Merkel down with my bad leg, bent painfully to pick up a rock, and slammed the rock into his face.

Once. “That’s for Liz.”

He shrieked.

Twice. Blood flew. “That’s for Thomas Brown.”

A third time. Bones broke. “That’s for Jazmine.”

By the time I hit him again, his face was no longer human.

“And that’s for Clyde, you fucking piece of filth.”

I heaved the rock away.

I guess I believed him about Elise.

Focus, I told myself. That train’s still coming. Gentry.

Then Clyde.

I limped to the trestle, hoisted myself onto the base of the bridge, and ignored whatever I’d done to my knee as I hobbled to the nearest sway brace. I grabbed hold of the brace and crawled up the eighteen-inch-wide span of wood.

At the top of the first sway brace, I pulled myself onto the sill and grabbed hold of the next brace.

Old timber trestles like this one had been built in the 1800s. Many of them had been replaced with steel or concrete or buried in enough fill to support the tracks. But a few of these old bridges remained, a series of vertical posts braced on horizontal sills and supported by angled sway braces. As a kid I’d climbed one, when I was too stupid to know better.

The trestle creaked around me in the wind. I clung to the brace and hauled myself up its length. My knee shrieked with every movement. My hands turned numb as I struggled to grip the weathered wood. The wind tore my hat free and tossed it into the darkness, sending my hair whipping about my face.

But I’d found my rhythm. Reach, pull, drag. Reach, pull, drag.

Then my bad knee gave. My foot slipped off the brace, swung in the emptiness. Before I could bring it back up, I began sliding back down the timber I’d just climbed, gravity tipping my body toward Devil’s Gulch.

Markusson’s ghost nodded at me from one of the sills, his Wiggins police jacket flapping.

Panic later
, he told me.
Panic kills.

I grabbed for one of the posts as I went past. Dug in my fingers and jerked to a stop.

“Is that what happened to you?” I snarled at him.

But he was right.

I pulled my foot back onto the brace and kept working my way up as the moon slipped in and out of the clouds like a ship in stormy waves. I didn’t look down. When my feet slid, I brought them back. When my hands slipped, I pressed my body against the brace. I didn’t think about falling. I thought of Clyde, maybe still alive and waiting for me to fetch him home. Of Gentry, hurt, about to die.

And of Nik.

Liz’s voice whispered in my ear.
He said he couldn’t breathe.

Nik. Who would do anything for his son.

The wind told me when I was near the top, its fury unabated as I cleared the sides of the gorge. Now I could see the actual railway, a latticed span of wooden ties set against an insubstantial sky. A few more feet, then I grabbed one of the ties, hooked a leg up, and peered over the edge of the rails just as the moon went dark.

I strained to hear over the roar of the wind and was rewarded with the low rumble of men’s voices not too far off. A chain clinked.

“Hurry up,” said one of the men.

“I’m trying, goddammit,” came the answer.

I hauled myself onto the bridge. I drew my pistol and inched forward on my elbows and knees.

A little farther on, the forms of men became visible—shadows hunkered on knees or flat on bellies. Someone coughed, closer than the men I’d spotted, and I froze. Only ten feet away, two men lay propped on their elbows, guns snugged close. The wind had kept them from hearing my approach. I pressed against the ties and listened to the roar of blood in my ears. I could shoot them both where they lay. But I wouldn’t get off another shot before one of the other men found me.

I had no idea where Nik was. If he was still in the picture. If he was still alive.

One of the men near me shifted. “Asshole’ll start firing again.”

“He can’t see us, you dumb fuck. Anyway, I think Ty got ’im.”

From the east, a mournful whistle floated through the night. The 1740 freight to Denver approaching a crossroads near Wiggins. Which meant it wasn’t far off.

The sound created a flurry of panic and swearing among the men on the bridge.

I inched backwards, swung my legs out over the edge until I felt the end cap beneath my feet. I climbed back down the brace, went twenty feet to my right, and climbed back up.

When I peered over again, I was looking right at the other three men.

“Leave him!” one of them was saying. “He’s not gonna wake up. Just put him on the rail.”

“Whip wants him to hang. After. Like a message.”

“Oh, Jesus, fuck that. C’mon!”

Chains rattled. “Got it. Let’s go.”

A pair of feet came in my direction. I grabbed an ankle and yanked.

The man screamed as he catapulted over the edge.

Four to go.

“What the hell?” someone said.

I shot another man then dropped below the level of the ties. Up above, the three remaining men unleashed a panicked volley of shots. Rifle fire broke and echoed, but none of it came my way. They must have figured my shots had come from Nik. Now they were aiming for wherever they thought he’d holed up.

The moon hit a stretch of clear sky, bouncing off the snow and turning night into day. A rifle opened up from the east. A man screamed and a body tipped over the edge.

Nik stopped firing. The echoes died away.

I peered over the edge. Nothing moved. I pulled myself onto the bridge, hoping Nik could see it was me. Three dead men lay on their backs nearby. I limped over to Gentry. He lay unmoving, pale as death. Both eyes were blackened, his nose broken, the left cheek crushed. Lips like pulpy melons. Beneath a light jacket, his dress shirt and slacks were black with blood.

I knelt and placed my ear near his mouth, heard his faint breath.

I touched his hair, the only part of him that wasn’t hurt. “We’ll get you out of here, Gentry. Nik and I.”

He made no response.

They had trussed him like a pig. Ankles shackled with cuffs. His wrists likewise manacled. A chain ran from his ankles to his wrists then up past his head, yanking his hands to his face.

The end of the chain had been looped around the rail tie and padlocked closed. I cursed myself for not searching Whip’s pockets before I left him. I knelt on the tie and tried to get my fingers under the chain. But the metal had bitten into the wood, and Gentry’s own weight held it taut.

Markusson’s ghost appeared, sitting on the end of one of the ties, feet swinging over the abyss. Like he didn’t have anything better to do.

I scrabbled back to Gentry and shoved him toward the edge, trying to ease the tension on the chain. Then back to the tie, tearing against the wood with my fingers. The panic now a full-blown monster.

The minutes raced past.

Panic kills
, Markusson offered.

I pulled out the Glock and fired at the padlock. The slug smacked into the housing, but the latch stayed firm. I fired two more times. Nothing. Fired at the chain with the same result.

Nik’s voice came from behind me. “Stand back.”

I stepped away. Nik raised the AR-15 and fired. The housing shattered.

“We’d better hurry,” he said. Deceptively calm.

With no time to do anything different, I gathered the chain and laid it on Gentry’s chest. Gentry’s body bounced over the rail as Nik pulled him away from the edge. I lifted Gentry under his arms while Nik grabbed his feet. We stepped over the bodies of the dead men and headed west, walking between the rails. As I stumbled backwards in the dark, stepping from one snow-covered tie to the next above the gorge, I willed myself to look only at my feet. The standard span from rail to rail, an exact four feet, eight and a half inches, felt no wider than my shoulders.

“Whip shot Clyde,” I said.

“Move faster,” was Nik’s reply. He was breathing hard, a strange, high whistle running through each inhalation.

Man’s gotta breathe.

I focused on my feet again. Images flipped through my mind like a series of photographs.

Elise’s open window, her hair fluttering in the breeze.

Nik rolling down the kitchen window after I’d brought the news of Elise.

Nik ordering me away from Tucker so he could shoot him.

Nik sitting on the front porch, claiming he couldn’t breathe in the house.

Nik, who knew where to find the skinheads. Because he’d known all along who they were, what they were up to.

Nik, who’d lied to protect his son ten years ago. Who would risk everything to keep him from going down for that crime. Nik, who must have believed what I could not. That Gentry had played a part in Jazmine’s death.

His voice brought me back to the bridge. “Don’t slow down, Sydney Rose.”

Beyond him, the train’s headlamp appeared, the locomotive ditch lights joining it to form a brilliant triangle that hung bodiless in the night.

Far to the north, sirens rose and fell. The cavalry at long last. The sheriff. Maybe Denver PD. Maybe Cohen was riding toward me. Maybe he had forgiven me.

Nik stumbled. Held on to Gentry’s ankles. Steadied himself. His breathing sounded like he was sucking air through a straw.

“It was you,” I whispered, even as I was thinking,
Deny it, Nik. Tell me I’m crazy
. “You killed Elise.”

Nik gave another wheeze. “Don’t you slow down.”

I stepped to the next tie, and the next, the ten-and-a-half-inch gaps yawning over something deeper and darker than Devil’s Gulch.