Borderline (20 page)

No rocks neatly to hand, she sprang on the shooter’s back. Wrapping one arm around his throat, her other hand grabbing at the six-shooter in the holster, she tucked her head tight against his shoulder where he’d have trouble hitting her and squeezed. Knuckles whipped across the side of her face and she felt the blood start. She squeezed harder.

With a grunt the man reeled backward, smashing her against the wall of the ever-present, unforgiving prison of shale she’d been sentenced to. Air gusted from her lungs and she couldn’t pull it back in. The panic of suffocation did what metal to her skull had failed to. Losing her grip on the man’s throat, she fell. Silhouetted against the curtain of stars and faint moonlight she watched him stoop quickly, then rise. He’d retrieved the flashlight. Crouching, he cocked his arm back and swung at her head.

A black shape crashed into him and the flashlight went flying. The wind that had been knocked out of Anna came back in a rush. Crawling between the kick of boots and the slash of river shoes, she retrieved the flashlight and rolled free of the fracas. Again on her feet she swung the flashlight like a baseball bat at the shooter’s head. The fight turned and her blow glanced off his temple and cracked into Paul’s hand. Paul cried out in pain. The shooter slumped to the ground.

“Thank you, love,” Paul gasped. Both of them were panting heavily.

“Gun,” Anna managed.

Paul knelt on the man’s shoulders and Anna unsnapped the keeper and pulled the gun from the shooter’s holster. Not a six-shooter. A nine-millimeter semiautomatic, the kind she’d carried most of her career. Why hadn’t he drawn it? After Lori and Carmen, she doubted he had any feel for the sanctity of life.

“We . . . tie . . . him . . .” she gasped.

“With what?” Paul backed off the shooter’s body and he and Anna slumped together against a rock trying to breathe. Wrists braced on knees so she wouldn’t drop the thing, Anna held the gun on the man who was now their captive—or their corpse, depending on how hard the flashlight had hit him.

“Good point,” she said. Every scrap of anything that could make rope had been sacrificed already. Anna was barely decent in her ripped shirt, and Paul’s pants were riding at an inner-city half-mast without his belt.

Anna’s and Paul’s breath began to even out. The gun stopped shaking in her hand and steadied on the downed man. The shooter had fallen forward and lay on his side, half curled around a beach ball-sized rock, his face in the angle between the proverbial rock and the hard place. One leg was bent over the other liked those of the hanged man in the Tarot deck. One arm was cocked behind him, palm toward Anna and Paul. The other was out of sight. All in all it was a good position as far as Anna was concerned. There would be no sudden leapings up from that tangle of bones and flesh.

“Do you think he’s dead?” Anna asked. The question was one of indifference to her and that indifference sent a jolt of horror through her that started the edges of the pit in her soul bleeding. She felt herself starting to fall and was only stopped by the sharp rap of the pistol barrel against her scraped shin. The external pain snapped her from the internal. Paul was looking at her with concern, his eyes unreadable in the faint light.

“Hand fell asleep,” Anna said as she retrained the weapon on the body at their feet.

Paul looked back at their predator-become-prey. “I sure hope we didn’t.”

Anna envied his hope. His voice was rich with compassion for the guy who’d stalked and murdered two girls and tried to murder them. Paul would have killed him if he’d had to, to protect himself or others, but he was genuinely happy it might not have been necessary. Anna tried to care and failed. She cared that she failed, maybe that counted for something in the final reckoning.

“Unh,” emanated from beneath the stone beach ball.

“Not dead,” Anna said.

“Hallelujah.”

Anna was heartened at the surge of, if not joy, then relief she felt when life was confirmed.

Paul had switched the flashlight off when they’d collapsed against the rock. He turned it on now and shined it on the groaning man.

The crabbed hand behind his back twitched then began to be pulled under him, reminding Anna weirdly of the witch’s feet sliding under the house in Munchkin Land. Keeping the gun trained on the shooter, Anna pushed herself to her feet, grunting as if she, too, were stirring from a death sleep. Paul stood as well. Anna heard the companionable crack of his knees.

She had intended to grow old with this man. She hadn’t planned on doing it all in one night.

The hand vanished beneath the torso, seeking the empty holster pinned beneath the hip.

“We’ve taken your weapon,” Paul said quietly. “Do everything carefully and slowly.”

Anna relaxed her eyes and flexed her fingers on the butt of the gun. Annie Oakley, she thought absurdly. She shook her head to clear it of witches and sharpshooters.

“I hear you,” returned a voice muffled by rock and earth. “Easy it is. I’m going to sit up, okay? Real slow.”

The shooter didn’t sound calm, precisely, but he didn’t sound psycho or hyper the way Anna had thought he would. His voice was as quiet and rational as Paul’s had been. He was trying to calm and reassure them so they wouldn’t shoot him the first time he blinked. This guy wanted to stay alive.

“Okay,” the man said in the same calming tones. “I’ve got my hands under me now. I’m going to do sort of a push-up then get myself into a sitting position here. Real slow. That okay with you folks?”

Folks. What kind of cold-blooded killer of young women caught red-handed and coldcocked with his own flashlight called his captors
folks
? Anna and Paul exchanged looks.

“Go ahead,” Paul said. He didn’t add any warnings or caveats. He seemed as nonplussed as Anna.

The calming, folksy cooperation was making Anna nervous. The guy had done this before, he knew from experience—or instinct—how best to put his enemies at ease.

“We are not reassured,” Anna said, and her voice was cold and flat. “Do not make the mistake of thinking that.”

The man, halfway into his push-up, froze, and Anna wondered if he was changing his plans or if her tone had frightened him as much as it had her. It was not a good thing to channel the grim reaper, especially when one had been avoiding him most of the day.

“I hear you,” the man said, easing himself onto one hip and gathering his long legs in front of him so he was sitting, shoulders against his round rock, hands, palms up, one on each thigh like innocence on display.

He looked the cowboy Anna’s quick perusal of his camp had suggested. Tall and lean with black hair worn long over his collar and a black mustache Tom Selleck would have been proud of in his
Magnum P.I.
days.

“I’m Freddy Martinez, the river district ranger here in Big Bend. You folks get caught in the flash flooding?” He didn’t sound like a man with a gun trained on him. He sounded like a ranger at an evening program talking about environmental concerns.

Paul blinded him with the flashlight. He didn’t raise his empty hands to protect his eyes. Too wary for that. “You’re a park ranger,” Paul said.

“For twenty-two years, most of it right here,” he answered. “I started out as a river guide for a commercial outfit out of Terlingua. I’ve been on the Rio Grande all my life.”

“Do you have any identification?” Paul asked.

“In my saddlebags.”

Anna didn’t need an ID. He had “ranger” written all over him. Though he wasn’t in uniform, he had on an old cordovan uniform belt, only with the buckle changed out; his boots were NPS uniform boots, recycled for casual wear when they got too scruffy for work.

“Where’s your rifle?” Anna asked.

“No rifle. Just the Glock,” he said. “And you got that.”

She hadn’t seen a rifle in the camp, but he could have thrown it away. “He has a camp up top,” Anna said. “We need his water and I need to check on—” She started to say “the baby,” but thought better of it. Hostages in small packages were easier to deal with than older, crankier ones if it came to anything like that.

“You want me to go first?” Freddy said. “If you get up on the rock behind you, you’ll be able to keep a bead on me when I get up the lip so whoever comes second won’t be in danger from me.”

It annoyed Anna that he was being so helpful.

“Good plan,” Paul said. “Lead on.”

As the ranger stood, he weaved slightly and Anna’s finger tightened on the trigger. It wasn’t a feint but a hangover from the clout he’d taken on the head. He righted himself and hefted his considerable length up over the lip of the canyon. Anna kept her sights on him until Paul was up, as well, and Freddy had stepped away and sat down without being asked to.

Anna quickly covered the distance and scrambled up, Martinez only out of her sight for a second or two. Still she was levitating on what had to be the very last drops her adrenal glands had in stock when she stood again on the desert floor. Martinez had not moved.

A voice came out of the darkness of the camp and Anna wheeled on it, the gun held rigid at arm’s length in both hands. He had no rifle. Maybe someone else did. One horse, one saddle, one sleeping bag. She’d let herself assume there was but one shooter. Sometimes monsters ran in packs.

“Say again,” came a different voice and a crackle.

“My radio,” Martinez said. “It’s in the saddlebag there with the water skin.”

Water.

“You first,” Paul said, and eased the Glock from her fingers.

“That is true love,” Anna said, and trotted over to where the bleats from the radio had come. The ranger had said “water skin” and that’s what she found, the old three-gallon burlap water sacks that she remembered from when she was little. Her parents carried one strapped across the radiator of their old station wagon to refill the radiator when it overheated.

Three gallons, two and a half left. She felt rich and wild and drank deeply before carrying it back to her husband. They traded water for gun and Paul drank.

“You folks lose your water?”

“Yeah,” Anna said as she and Paul traded life for death again and she took another long pull on the water skin.

Drinking restored some of Anna’s strength and most of her mental acuity. She noticed she was now able to understand actual words coming from the radio. Dispatch was sending rescue. Martinez’s eyes followed hers to the radio and for the first time she saw fear in his face. If he was going to try anything it would be now, before the metaphorical cavalry arrived.

Paul still held the Glock. Anna saw the same thought register on his face, the usually gentle planes hardening in the silver light. Giving Martinez a wide berth, Anna returned to where his saddlebag was flung over the bit of log he’d centered his camp around. She dug the radio from the leather bag and keyed the mike.

“This is Anna Pigeon on Ranger Martinez’s radio,” she said clearly. “I am the person who called in the nine-one-one emergency.”

The fear went out of Martinez’s face.

Something about the man wasn’t right.

K
eeping her eyes on the ranger and Paul, Anna talked into the radio, giving details as she walked over to where she had laid Helena on the horse blanket. “Do you want me to give them our exact location?” Martinez called. Anna ignored him. She had no doubt he could describe where they were more precisely but he could also warn them off, say it was a false alarm, send them to the wrong location. She doubted it, but it was possible and, since there was only one huge rockslide in Santa Elena Canyon, she felt telling the rescuers that she was at the top of it should do the trick.

Helena was where Anna had left her, her round perfect face pale and ashen in the moonlight. She hadn’t moved at all, not even to disarrange the T-shirt Anna had tucked around her to keep out the chill. Anna fell to her knees on the horse blanket, the radio falling forgotten from her hand. “Oh, baby, no,” Anna whispered as she gathered one of the tiny hands between her fingers. The baby’s flesh was neither warm nor cold; it felt like a scrap of velvet that has taken on the ambient temperature of the air.

“No, no, little girl,” Anna murmured as she laid her ear on a rib cage scarcely as big as the palm of her hand. Nothing. Nothing. Then there it was, the
thump-thump
of a heartbeat, thready and faint and absolutely wonderful.

“Hurrah!” Anna shouted before she even realized she’d opened her mouth to do so.

“What?” Paul called through the darkness.

“She’s tough, our little cookie.” Anna gently lifted the baby and said nothing else. She’d heard herself and realized she was actually cooing. It was more disconcerting than many things had been on this most grimly disconcerting day.

Anna loved cats because they were beautiful and lazy and deadly and didn’t apologize for any of it. She loved dogs because one could make them happy. People could not be made happy. They could only be made miserable. Human happiness had to come from within. Not so with dogs. Dogs could be made happy with a kind word. With a kind word and a pork chop they could be made ecstatic.

Maybe the same applied to Helena, Anna told herself. Maybe she loved her because Anna seemed able to keep her alive. Not something she’d managed for a lot of people. Keeping people alive was difficult. Making them dead was a piece of cake. The radio left behind on the horse blanket, Anna carried the baby back toward the men and the water.

Martinez stared uncomprehending at the bundle in her arms till in a feat of strength and liveliness that made Anna want to crow with delight, Helena managed to shake a cherry-sized fist at the moon.

“You brought a baby on a whitewater rafting trip?” The horror in his voice sounded genuine. Even though he was still being held at gunpoint by Paul, Martinez half rose. “How stupid can you get?” he demanded.

“Sit,” Paul said.