Cold Lake (26 page)

Rachette stared at Patterson and Wolf’s drawn faces, and like the blood that seeped from his shoulder, felt the hope that he might live to see another day drain from his body. He no longer had the strength to press on his own wound, and he no longer cared. He was on the way out and he knew it. The cold was so absolute, but his chin no longer bounced from shivering. That had to be a bad sign.

All he cared about now were the wellbeing of his two partners. Now that he sat on death’s door, he could see so clearly now that these two people were everything to him. Nobody else came close.

And now the barrel of a gun was pushing his two friends toward the edge of a cliff.

And now he could see so clearly what he had to do.

Patterson was saying something with her arms raised, probably trying to bargain their way out of it somehow.

He looked at Wolf. Such a God among men was this Sheriff. Such a man of honor and dignity. Such a … Rachette did a double take, because Wolf had just slung the rope off his neck and dropped it on the ground.

For a moment it was like Rachette was watching nothing of significance, like he was staring at water swirling down a drain. But then he blinked and widened his eyes, because
Wolf was doing something,
he realized. Because the rope was on the ground, but that was not everything, because Wolf was grasping the end, and he was twisting it in his fingers.

Hannah was preoccupied with talking to Patterson, noticing none of it. But how long could that last? He had to act.

Rachette pushed air with all his might through his lungs. “Hey!” He looked at Patterson and winked.

Patterson frowned and shook her head.

Hannah stopped marching at his friends and turned to Rachette.

“You know what?” Rachette cleared his throat, tasting blood in his mouth. That had to be a bad sign. “You know what I told these two? Kimber? Hannah? Or whatever the hell your name is?”

Hannah walked away from Wolf and Patterson and stopped at Rachette’s legs, tilting her head.

“I told these two you were a crazy bitch. And I was right!” Rachette let out a long annoying laugh that really started him laughing uncontrollably. “Remember when we made out that time?”

Hannah shook her head. “No. I don’t.”

“Because you’re a crazy bitch.” Patterson lifted her chin. “My partner’s rarely right, but this time he’s spot on. A crazy bitch.”

Hannah stopped and looked over at Patterson, frowning like she’d just taken a bite out of a lemon. With a shake of her head she let her lip curl in amusement, and then her face dropped.

Rachette watched in sickening horror as Hannah raised her pistol.

“No!” Rachette screamed as fast as he could. “Me! Me! Me!”

It was no use. Without hesitation, Hannah pointed her pistol at Patterson and pulled the trigger.

The gun roared and Rachette turned his eyes away at the last second, seeing the bright flash of light illuminate the side of the house, like a flash of lightning. As the echo of the shot faded into the distance, his eyes welled up like an instantaneous chemical reaction.

He inhaled and stretched his mouth, and then he screamed. “Ahh—”

“What the hell?” Hannah yelled.

Rachette blinked and looked down. Patterson was still standing. Unharmed.

Wolf, Patterson, and Hannah stood in more or less an equilateral triangle formation, with Hannah as the point nearest the house, swaying her pistol between the two of them, pushing them ever closer to the cliff, all the while keeping a reasonable distance for her safety.

When Wolf had found the end of the rope that was coiled around his neck and started tying the knot with his right hand, he exchanged a glance with Patterson.
I need a diversion
, he screamed with his eyes.

Wolf could only assume Patterson had read the situation correctly, because without a second’s hesitation she began sniveling.

“Please,” Patterson spoke with heart stopping pain and passion in her voice. “We didn’t bring up the rest of our squad because we want to help. Listen. It’s the—”

“You know what?” Rachette squirmed to life from his position on the ground. “You know what I told these two? Kimber? Or whatever the hell …”

Dammit.

Rachette had come up with a plan of his own.

Hannah snapped out of her hypnotized glare at Patterson and turned to Rachette.

Wolf blocked out everything and concentrated on the knot in his fingers. Easily enough, he twisted the rope with one hand into a regular knot and tightened it, but he needed two hands for the pretzel twist, push through of the end of the rope and final cinch to complete the slipknot.

Hannah’s expression changed, like she was about to act, and by the looks of it, Rachette had seconds to live.

Abandoning stealth, Wolf looked down at the end of the knot, cinched it tight making it complete and ready to use, and then pulled open the loop with a quick motion that burned his thumb.

Hannah was too far away to bum rush, she’d made sure of that and had been keeping a smart distance away from Wolf and Patterson the entire time. This was the only plan that kept his deputies safe. If Wolf missed? Then a bum rush would be his plan B. That would be a suicide plan. This plan, Wolf told himself with little conviction, was
not
a suicide plan.

As Wolf dropped the climbing rope loop to his side and twirled it once, Hannah aimed at Patterson.

Wolf stepped at Hannah and let the rope fly with a side-armed toss his father would have been proud of. The loop wobbled and widened at the perfect moment, as if guided by a higher power, and looped over her gun arm and around her torso. He pulled back as hard as he could, cinching the makeshift lasso tight and yanking Hannah off balance.

Hannah stumbled toward him, the same instant her gun erupting with a deafening boom. She landed hard on her palm and knee, and then looked up with a dumbfounded look. “What the hell?”

Wolf had no time to attack.

Without hesitation, she raised the pistol and aimed it at Wolf’s center mass, and then squeezed the trigger.

Something bounced in front of Rachette, a line of rope or a cord, and for a second he blinked through the tears, trying to focus on what it was. He felt a surge of excitement, because it was the rope that had been in Wolf’s hand. One end was a loop, now cinched tight around Hannah’s upper arms and torso, and the other end was in Wolf’s hand.

A lasso,
he realized. Wolf had thrown a lasso made from the rope and pulled her down.

Before Rachette could form a smile, Hannah’s gun roared and spit fire once, twice, three times. Her teeth were bared as her arm kicked back with each shot. Then she dropped her gun and grabbed at the rope with both hands, wriggling like it was a piranha biting at her skin.

Rachette turned to look at Wolf, but he was not where Rachette expected. He was zigzagging, running away as fast as he could.

But he was going the wrong direction.

And then Wolf was gone, twisting as he flew down and out of sight over the edge of the cliff.

The rope was fluttering limp, and then with the sound of a tightening guitar string it pulled laser beam straight, one end scraping on the top edge of the cliff, the other a contracting loop around Hannah’s torso.

Hannah let out a panicked squeal as she was flung in a blur towards the cliff’s edge. Rolling in a thumping tornado of limbs, she barked an animalistic noise as she smacked back-first against a tree. For an instant she was velcroed to the trunk of the pine, her on the right side of the tree and the rope stretched around the left. With a slack mouth, she stared vacantly at Rachette, blinked, and then was pulled over the edge and out of sight.

As Wolf leaped head-first off the cliff, and as the wind rushed past his ears, and as his stomach floated, and as death rushed up at him at 9.8 meters per second per second, he thought about a man named Claus Vaadner.

Because for the last six years Claus had been a legend in Rocky Points—because everyone in town knew the story of how one day Claus had cheated death with the aid of dumb luck, and a pallet of ceramic roof tiles.

Six summers ago, Claus had been installing Italian clay tiles twenty five feet above the ground, working on the roof of a two-story luxury house in the hills to the west of Rocky Points, when he slipped and fell over the edge. Luckily for him he was tied off, but unluckily for him, he had tied himself to the pallet, which was more than half empty and weighed less than he did.

Fellow workers, with the aid of a few beers, told, and still tell, the tale how Claus dangled over the rocky ground, screaming frantically as the pallet gave way and slid toward the edge of the roof above.

Claus had been spared a horrific fall, however, because the resistance from the sliding pallet effectively lowered Claus at a gentle rate, depositing him to the ground completely unharmed, as if he’d stepped off a three-foot step-stool and not just tumbled off a twenty-five foot roof. Lucky for Claus, he watched as the pallet flew off the edge and he avoided the cataclysmic explosion of ceramic by diving out of the way.

With a wrench of his body, Wolf twisted one hundred eighty degrees and pulled his legs to his chest, completing three quarters of a front-flip-half-twist, waiting for
his
pallet of tiles to slow his fall.

Now parallel to the ground face down, the steep grade beneath him rushed up through his blurry vision. Just when he began wondering if his makeshift lasso had held, the slack in the rope pulled tight and his outward trajectory shifted downward.

He was halfway through the fall when the rope pulled again against the Grigri cam system which was still locked on the rope and attached to his harness, changing his trajectory once more, this time sending him slamming chest first into the side of the cliff.

The collision was so fast and violent that he felt no pain, but he heard muffled crunches beneath his skin and felt the blows to his body as he tumbled down the rock face.

Completely disoriented, he sensed the ground nearing when his descent came to a complete stop.

The rope ripped at his harness, wrenching him around so he faced the sky. He grunted as his body arched backwards and folded in half, and he felt his feet kick the back of his head, and then an instant later he was laid gently onto his back, on the cool, wet ground.

As the bright world tunneled in from the edge of his vision, he watched the rope drop in an angry coil next to him, and then he felt a rush of wind and a spray of warm blood as Hannah landed next to him with a thud.

Somehow amid the numbness, Wolf found the muscle coordination to turn his head and look.

Hannah was next to him on her back, her head twisted two hundred seventy degrees, her face pointed at his. Eyes wide open but void of life, a web of blood trickled from her temple across her face, and then grew to a river that ran into her open eyeball and poured off the bridge of her nose.

Wolf’s eyelids fluttered once, and then he closed his eyes and felt nothing.

Patterson stared dumbstruck at the precipice. Wolf had been planning something, she could tell that, and part of her was wondering just what exactly Wolf could do to right the situation, but never in a million years was she expecting to witness what she’d just seen.

With a shake of her head she snapped out of her initial shock, realizing there may have been method to Wolf’s suicidal move. By pulling Hannah over the edge, had he slowed his own momentum enough to survive the fall?

She turned to Rachette with wide eyes.

“Go,” he said.

Patterson exploded into movement. Sprinting to Rachel, she handcuffed one of her wrists, pulled her semi-conscious form to the side of the house, clamped it on a water pipe and sprinted to the top of the wooden stairway descending the cliff.

“All units move! Call Summit County and get a medevac helicopter up here now. Sheriff Wolf and Deputy Rachette are down and injured badly. Get the bus over here stat! I repeat, we need ambulances, and we need medevac!”

With thumping footfalls on the creaking wood, Patterson ignored the eruption of voices on the radio, keeping her eye on Wolf’s unmoving form at the base of the cliff.

She got to the bottom, jumped off the trail and flailed across the steep incline.

Slipping onto her hip as she stepped on loose scree and slamming her elbow on a rock in the process, she breathed through the pain with bared teeth, not slowing a second. When she reached Wolf she pressed her fingers on his carotid, feeling the slick warmth of his blood on her fingers, and then the weak rhythm of his pulse.

“Medevac on route,” Patterson heard the radio squawk.

A boat was roaring toward the dock beneath her, Wilson standing with fluttering hair above the windshield.

As she panted, she looked down at Hannah’s body. Her face was turned toward her and Wolf, but she was on her back and it looked like her neck had been twisted almost two hundred seventy degrees. Her head rested in a growing pool of blood, and her face was completely red. As if that was not enough, her chest was still. She was as dead as it got.

Patterson thought about the concussion of air she’d felt against her face as Hannah’s bullet missed by inches, and then she thought about Rachette’s pale face, and then she looked back down at Wolf.

“It’s going to be all right,” she said with little conviction.