CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (51 page)

"It might be wishful thinking, but it could be his."

"Well, it's true Carla could have done that to him, she's a strong girl, but we don't know for sure, do we? So we have to face the facts. If it's his eye, he's gonna be in a heap of trouble if he ain't already. If it's hers, then our chances of saving her are mighty grim."

"What do you mean?"

"I was in the World War, Sully--remember that war, the really bad one?" He paused, reconsidered. "Well, they're all bad, but what I'm saying is I've seen bad, mortal wounds. To spell this out for you--if Carla's lost her eye, she's most likely dead by now or will be soon. She's awful little. No matter how strong her will to live, that kind of hurt causes shock to the body so great it takes hospitals and doctors and surgeons to repair it. But if as you suspect the eye was Lansing's, then we have a chance. Mind you, not a good one. Burdock's one helluva big area to get yourself lost on, and it's pure wilderness. And they've got a very big head start. Another thing..." He paused to stare over Sully's head. "Another thing is he may be hurt and on the run, but he's a genius. He could outsmart us."

"What? You know he's a fucking maniac, Flap. you know him."

Flap shook his head, frowning ferociously. "He's smart, Sully, that's a given and you best accept it before we start after him. He's been killing people most of his life. He's lived in Georgia four years doing what he wanted to do without getting hisself caught. You ain't dealing with no maniac no matter how it may look to you. He's crazy in only one way--he likes to kill and cut on people. That don't mean he don't know sheep shit from wild honey. He knows what he's doing going up on Burdock. This is a man with purpose. And with that being the case, this could turn out to be more than a Boy Scout hike. We could get killed. Easy."

Sully pondered Flap's assessment of Martin Lansing and of Carla's chances of survival. His lust for revenge had clouded for him the reality of her situation and his own possibilities of saving her from Lansing's knife.

"But you told me last night...you told me I had to have hope..."

Flap glanced from Janice to Sully, spread large, strong hands in the air before him. "Have I said to give up hope? I haven't misspoke myself again, have I? I'm just setting this out so we all understand what we're doing here. If you take off thinking you're gonna outwit Martin Lansing when all along he's been outwitting us, then you might as well know we're doomed before we start, right from the git-go we're the underdog. Give this killer the benefit of intelligence. It's how we're going to beat him."

"Okay, I understand. But Flap, I have to know something. We won't come down off Burdock until we find them, will we? I'm not giving up the way the sheriff did."

"Nope, we won't come down. If we prove unlucky, we may never come down. You have to know that, too."

Sully resumed eating his breakfast. Despite the warnings, he felt better about finding Carla than he had since he first discovered her missing. He just wished he was as physically chipper as old Flap appeared to be at six o'clock in the morning.

LANSING

It had been the longest haul of his life; longer than it ever took him before to get to his place on Burdock. Of course, Carla slowed him, his eye hurt, and the sullen sickness whose symptoms came and went added to wearing him down. Just the same, he did not know if he could muster the necessary strength to reach the rock ledge when it finally came into view.

He had kept them going throughout the night. The climb was treacherous enough in the daylight, but in the night their progress was that of a tortoise. Carla did not whine or beg, but she cursed him every chance she got, and he resigned himself to the sound of her belligerent, grating voice.

Late in the night he stopped and used a can of Sterno to heat lumpy, tasteless beef stew. Carla refused the food at first, but once he began to eat, the scent of the mixture of beef and vegetables permeating the air, she changed her mind as he knew she would and snatched a tin cup of the stew to wolf down.

By dawn they were close to arrival, although the lodge was not yet in sight above them. He had to let Carla go to the bathroom, and she mocked him in a piercing voice as he stood with his back to her. Did she not understand he had no wish to scrutinize her body? When she was finished, he pressed onward, the rattling in his chest left over from the damp night traveling sapping him of much needed energy. Whenever the thought floated up from the deepest recesses of his mind that he would not make it this time, he squelched it as a traitor and plodded on like a dumb animal who knows no other way.

As weak light poured down over the forested mountain, Carla said, "You look like hell. That bandage over your eye is dirty and soaked with blood. You're going to die, Lansing. You're going to buy it before I do. And then you know what? I'm outta here."

Lansing shuddered, but put one foot before another relentlessly. A feral look crept over his face and his square teeth showed, gleaming. The mountainside was a mosaic of shadows and lights, dancing, dancing in patterns that made him dizzy to watch. He had a suspicion Carla might attack him again, seeing his failing strength, so he stayed a distance ahead of her and when he heard her draw near, he drove himself on faster. He could foresee his plans turning out wrong if he were not always on guard. The proximity of his hiding place was the only reason to press up the mountain. He was endowed with superior intelligence. He could easily outwit Sully or the police if the clanging in his ears would go away and give him rest.

He lapsed into a state of mental inertia, his thoughts on holiday while he broodingly stalked the mountainside to his destination. A miasma of dogged determinism hung over him like a care-worn coat. A craving to succeed dragged him forever up and up toward the clouds, toward the hideaway near the mountaintop.

Finally he spied the rock ledge. It sparkled like a sheet of fool's gold to his weary eyes. Sunlight glanced off its smooth, mottled surface. They crossed the brook flowing at its foot, Carla hanging back so that he had to drag her into the shallow water. The knotted rope hanging down the ledge side swung loosely in the wind. "Turn around," he said.

"What for, so you can kill me when I'm not looking? You said I wouldn't know when it was coming."

"Carla, I don't want to have to knock you out again, but I will if you don't do this. Now, turn around."

She gave him a dangerous smoldering look, then slowly presented her back to him. He let drop the duffel bag from his shoulder and rummaged inside. He brought out a coil of rope. He quickly fashioned a noose and before Carla moved, slipped it over her head.

She spun, her eyes radiating fury. "What are you doing?"

"Now, listen to me. I'm climbing this rope hanging down the ledge. I'm taking with me the other end of the rope around your throat. I want you to remember I have it, that I'll yank you up and strangle you if you don't do what I say. If you raise your hands to take off the noose, I'll yank it tight, you got it? Right?"

She glared at him silently.

"Right. Now, when I get on top of the ledge, I want you to climb the rope up, too. I'm going to untie your hands so you can do it. You move from knot to knot and you'll make it. I'll have the noose rope all the time. You don't do it right, Carla, you won't live to see the rest of this day."

With Carla's hidebound attitude he expected some back talk, but when she spit on him, the saliva striking his shirt to slide down, he was taken by surprise. "Now, why'd you do that?"

Her eyes went glassy, and he could see miniature reflections of himself in their brown depths. "Are you going to cry?" he asked, amazed. He curiously watched blood suffuse her face as she called up an effort to keep from weeping. He was enormously interested, waiting to see if she could defeat the natural flow of emotion.

"It's nice up there," he said lamely. This act of hers confounded him. She had fought every step, her propensity for thwarting him like a ball rolling downhill gathering speed and force. Now she trembled, craning her neck in the noose like a little unfeathered bird in an empty nest.

The fear she exuded was so palpable, he thought he might be able to reach out and explore it with his hands. He pretended to be unfazed while a small bomb detonated in his brain. He had looked out the palace window, put space between himself and everyone on earth. Until this moment he believed people and their emotions, their petty day-to-day strivings, their half-baked attempts to clutch at majesty or fame or glory or material possession, were thankfully removed from ever touching him. When he saw Carla's pumped up, feverish little facade of courage shatter into a thousand pieces, the bomb exploded and with it lifelong strongly held beliefs.

He tumbled lost in a torpid, viscous net of conflicting thoughts. While untying her hands, he utilized all his faculties to pull himself back from looking down over a precipice into a void that jangled with pulsing calamity.

"I'm going up." He roughly pushed her out of his way. He looped the coiled rope over his shoulder and to his chest. "You follow me, Carla."

He did not bother to look down at her as he climbed, secure in the knowledge she was too broken to try an ill-fated escape. He started coughing before he reached the ledge top, and by the time he dragged himself onto level ground, he was hacking and having trouble catching his breath. He peered over the side, jerked lightly on the rope attached to Carla's neck. She looked up at him, squinting against the sun. One perfect jeweled tear clung to her cheek, but an obstinate look crept back into her eyes even as he watched.

"Now, Carla. Grab the rope and come up here with me. We've made it home."

All evidence of his captive's weak spell that disordered his world so thoroughly was gone. Carla had regained the contemptuous, mocking, furtive self that had preserved her throughout the night.

He stationed himself on his knees and pulled in the slack on the rope as she obeyed him and climbed up the ledge. When her scraped hands felt for the top, he caught them and tugged her over the sharp edge. She rolled into his lap, within the scope of his arms, and at once they both pulled apart as if scalded. A hiss escaped her lips as she hid her face from him. This was the plucky, churlish girl he knew, the girl he'd selected to spend private time with him. He could kill her now, slip the switchblade from his pocket, flick it open, and bury it in her heaving chest without a qualm, without reluctance or regret. It was the other face she had shown: the fallible, luminous, aggrieved face of helplessness that he could not bear and knew, with an insight that frightened him,
he could not kill.

Could not kill? The idea, a new one, preoccupied him for long seconds while Carla stared out over the drop at the wooded mountain and around them at the floating clouds. When had there been a time when he could not kill? Never. Not in a lifetime of murder. Victims fought him and died for it. People did not give up a right to life without battle, and it wasn't easy to make them give it up to him. Survival was all; this law he knew well. And what had he seen in Carla's face at the bottom of the cliff? A lapse, a blunt, clear refusal to work toward survival any longer. And her wish surfaced like oil through water to baffle him, disorient everything he knew and felt about humankind. Surely, she had not wanted to die? For if it happened again and she welcomed death, he realized now he could not give it to her. It nettled him to come to this conclusion, but he knew it to be as much truth as any invented throughout historical time.

"Where are we?" The wind caught at her short dark hair and flung it away from her ears. There was down on her earlobes, thin and soft. She was vulnerable and as unprotected as a spotted fawn.

"This is my place." He gestured with his hand behind them to a natural rock opening in the face of the mountainside. '"They won't find you here."

She peered into the gloomy dark behind them, and he saw her involuntarily shiver. It made him cold and goose bumps broke out on his arms. He, too, shivered, not from fear of the unknown, but from the lingering sickness.

He gathered the hanging rope up the ledge until he had it all in a neat coil on top. If they came looking they could not see above the sheer rock face to know there was a cave here. Even if they suspected, they could not climb up with his rope put away. If they brought bloodhounds, the brook which supplied him with water would stop the dogs, have them running up and down the rocky landscape trying to pick up the scent. He and Carla were as safe on the ledge as bald eagles who built nests on mountain spires. Even from the air his hideaway was protected by an outcropping above the cave, and unless a chopper hovered level with the ledge, they could not detect him here.

Once he had the ladder rope settled, he moved to take the rope noose from around Carla's neck. He found she had already done it and now sat holding it in her hands.

"I probably should have let you strangle me," she said.

"Hold out your hands, I have to tie them again."

"Screw you."

"Now, don't start bad-mouthing me..."

"I'm not going to help you anymore. It won't be so easy for you now you've got me up here."

She jumped to her feet and backed off at his approach. She glanced toward the dark opening in the rock face, at the high overhanging lip of stone above it.

"There's nowhere to run, Carla." He advanced. She retreated. For each step he took, she matched it. Her resurrected spirit shimmered from her pores like a sheen of sweat. He thought he could almost see her defiance as an aura. She had her head down low and looked up at him from beneath stern, merciless brows.

A crooked smile curled his lips.

"You're not getting my hands, and you're not getting me into that stupid lion's den of yours."

He took another step. She backed away, had to make a turn to keep from going over the edge. She was now backing toward the cave all the while denying she would enter it.

"It's not a lion that lived there," he corrected with the smile twitching at his lips though he tried to stop it, "but cats stayed there before. Wildcat. Same as you, huh, Carla? Isn't that right? Wild as a mama cat, right? You like to use your claws." He touched the dirtied bandage wrapped tight around his head. "You would like to rip into me again, I see it in you face. If you were closer to me I might hear you snarling like a cat. Right?"