Saving Jason (26 page)

I
stopped running when I reached the ridgeline. The helicopter sat in the center of the bowl of the valley, rotors spinning slowly. Three figures were spread across the bare front yard of the old house. They were being cautious, moving slowly up toward where they had heard the last shot. I dug out the binoculars and focused on each one.

They were all young—early to mid-twenties—dressed in sweatshirts and jeans. I did not recognize any one of them, but they could have been part of the crew who had taken Aimee and me. If they weren’t, they were stamped from the same mold. They were already sweating copiously. They were nervous. They didn’t belong and they knew it.

All three were armed with long weapons—two rifles and a shotgun. How would the dynamic change now that I was no longer in custody? Would they try to take me alive, or had this become a simple manhunt? I didn’t want to be around to find out. I dropped the binoculars. I was well within range of one of those rifles. If they saw the glint of sunlight reflected off a lens, I would make an easy target. I got down on hands and knees and crawled over the top of the hill. I didn’t get up again until I was well out of sight.

Once on the far side of the hill, I took my bearings. The cliff wall was an easy marker. If I kept that rock to my right at an ever-increasing angle, I would eventually run into the wide arroyo. I pictured the map in my mind. There was a long ravine a mile in front of me. I would need to keep more to my left to pass around it. I’d never be able to climb down into it and back out again. It was too steep and too narrow.

I took a sip of water and set out. Three miles. Minutes in a helicopter. Twenty-three minutes on the lap track at the Y. Twice around
the reservoir. I’d done one lap in under ten once. I’d been a good bit younger.

Three miles—not quite a 5K—in midday sun in the desert. The rarified dry air at more than seven thousand feet making each breath an effort. Three miles pursued by killers with weapons that could kill at a thousand yards.

A single shot rang out. I froze. The sound echoed softly and when it faded it left a silence more intense than before. The single shot had not been for me.

Willie had become a dangerous liability for them. If I got away, Willie would be a wanted man. A wanted man with the need for hospital care. And probably willing to trade a name for leniency. Dangerous. He had to be eliminated.

I picked up the pace.

Crossing the searing heat of a shadeless rock outcrop, I had the thought that the men behind weren’t trackers. They were just meathead toughs from Long Island. They were dealing with the same heat, thin air, and lack of familiarity with the land as I was. My odds improved.

The band on my cap was becoming a tourniquet around my head, squeezing and interfering with blood flow. I needed to take it off. If I took it off, I knew that I would feel better instantly. My shirt, too. I staggered to a stop and tried to remember how to manipulate buttons.

Damn. Water. I needed to drink more water. Skeli told me that all the time. Keep the damn hat and shirt on and take another sip. And keep moving.

I heard the helicopter. They were searching the last valley. I was long gone from there. They would spend valuable time learning the inefficiencies of tracking from the helicopter.

Keep moving. Drink water. The wound on the back of my head was bleeding again. Rivulets were running down my back. Skeli would say that I should have it looked at.

The thought of Skeli gave me a lift. I would see her soon. Another day at most.

Robertson. He would have taken the Kid back to the camp. The Kid was safe. Hungry, tired, scared, and thirsty—but safe. Hal? That fall had looked bad. Robertson would have had to send in a medevac team with stretchers. But shots had been fired. Would he have pulled his people instead? They were volunteers—heroes, not superheroes.

Where was the cliff? I’d lost it. The trees were taller, blocking out the horizon and much of the sky, but not sturdy enough to climb. Up ahead, I could see another hill. From that vantage, I would certainly get a sight of the rock.

Was I lost? Or just disoriented? Dazed by loss of blood or because I wasn’t drinking enough?

I pushed through some thick sagebrush and found that my foot dangled over a forty-foot drop. The ravine. It felt like stepping into an empty elevator shaft. I threw myself onto my back and landed with one leg hanging over the edge. Safe. I did a quick inventory. All body parts were still attached. My hat and sunglasses were where they were supposed to be. The binoculars I had been holding in my left hand were gone. The sunscreen, too. The power bars were gone. I had only one water bottle. The other was forty feet down a crevasse in the earth that looked like the mouth of a Venus flytrap, waiting for a trusting fool to crawl down into it, only to be swallowed forever.

No food. Acceptable. One bottle of water. Marginal. I recalculated the odds of my survival. They had plummeted from their recent high. I was already feeling the effects of heat prostration and now I would have to conserve even more of my meager supply.

But my head was clearer. The sudden terror had given me another shot of lifesaving adrenaline. If I gave in to the fog surrounding my mind, I was a dead man.

I wriggled away from the drop. At least I knew where I was—not a small blessing. I was covering ground. I may have drifted too much to the right—south—but not by much. The detour around the ravine looked to be no more than half a football field away. I picked myself up and kept putting one foot in front of the other.

As I rounded the end of the deep cleft, I got a glimpse of the rock cliff. I pictured the map again. The arroyo was coming up. The underbrush was more sparse and shorter. I would be able to move more quickly. But I would lose my invisibility. I’d be an easy target for a rifleman shooting from a helicopter, or even from the top of one of the surrounding hills. Weighed against the certainty that I would soon run out of water and soon thereafter drop from the heat, the risk was a necessity. I angled more to my left to reach the open land of the arroyo sooner.

The sudden openness of the terrain gave a false sense of security. My universe was no longer defined by the distance to the next pinyon tree blocking the horizon. In another half mile I would find the collapsed eastern wall where we had crossed just a few hours earlier. From there, the trek to the camp was clear, the trail easier to follow and all downhill.

The helicopter was coming.

I heard the growing blare and began to run without looking back. It was idiotic, atavistic. I couldn’t outrun a helicopter. I was no brighter, and just as terrified, as those javelinas. Only, they could run faster and hide easier. I was trapped in the open.

A shot sounded. I’d once heard an actor in a movie say that if you heard it, you hadn’t been hit. How stupid was that? But I hadn’t been hit. I kept running. I now knew the answer to whether those thugs would kill me if they couldn’t catch me. The path was ahead and to my left. I would have to scramble up through the soft sand that bordered the dry riverbed, and in another few steps I would be safe in among the pinyon trees. I just had to keep moving.

The helicopter passed directly over my head, the pilot confident that, with no trees in the way, he could bring it in that low. It swung around and hovered twenty feet ahead. He wanted to herd me away from the sanctuary of the woods. I refused to let him. I kept running.

The rear window opened and a rifle poked out. I zigged and zagged wildly. They were too low, the wash from the rotors was stirring up a brown cloud.

A second shot. I didn’t care; I kept running. The choice was to stand still and die or to take a chance and possibly live. The dust was in my eyes, my nose, my throat. The helicopter rose up and away to escape the blinding plume.

That was my break. I knew I wasn’t going to get another. I zigged to my left—straight for the trail into the woods. I scrambled my way up the side of the arroyo on hands and knees, and when I reached the top, I rose up and kept on going.

Police, military, and Hollywood stuntmen practice extensively together as teams to make the kind of shot these amateurs were attempting. The shooter sent three more bullets whining off into the desert, none of which came anywhere near me, as far as I could tell. I didn’t slow. In seconds, I was in the trees and out of their sight.

I chose one of the larger trees, and after checking for snakes, scorpions, and other unpleasant fauna, I scrunched down beneath it and waited. The helicopter roared overhead, like a predator robbed of its prey. Four times, the machine swept by, inches above the treetops. I stayed low, took a sip of water, and waited. They would, I was sure, see the futility of trying to find me from the air and finally retreat back to the abandoned farmhouse.

They surprised me. I had not expected such tenacity or risk taking. The helicopter flew back to the flat, relatively clear arroyo and, with a mad spray of dust in the air, settled down just feet above the brush. The rear door opened and the shooter jumped to the ground. He was going to hunt me on foot.

And I was leading him directly to the camp, where unarmed volunteers waited. Where, I hoped, my son was recovering, if they had not already sent him on to a hospital. For the first time, I regretted having thrown away Willie’s handgun.

I had a lead of forty or fifty yards and the freedom to run as fast as I could. He would have to move slower. He only knew where I had entered the woods. He was no tracker. Every cross trail would slow him down, as he would have to decide which way to go. On the other hand, he didn’t have to catch me to kill me. I took another swallow of my dwindling water ration and ran.

T
he camp was gone. The horses, tents, the tables, all the equipment had been packed up and hauled off. The searchers had followed Robertson’s instructions to the letter. At the first sound of gunfire, they had cleared out.

I sensed it the moment I came over the rise, even before I had a good view of the clearing. There should have been a change in the air—the scent of hydrocarbons, the hum of a generator. Those were the conscious thoughts that only came later. The first awareness was from the subconscious and it led to despair.

I was done. I could not walk another hundred yards, much less run. Somehow, I had lost the Yankees cap. My head was no longer merely hot, sweaty, and achy—it was starting to cook. There was not a single bit of shade. I should have had gone back under the pinyon trees. I heard the helicopter again. It was too late. They were back. I could no longer move fast enough to hide. It was over. I sank to my knees and waited.

The helicopter hovered for a minute before landing. Dust swirled around me. I shut my eyes against it and held my breath. The noise subsided, leaving a high-pitched whine over the deeper hum of the engine. The dust settled a bit and I chanced a breath. I cracked open one eye. My vision was blurred from sand and dust, from dehydration, and from fear. But I forced myself to watch. I opened the other eye. It didn’t improve the picture.

The rear door opened. Two men got out. They both carried long weapons. A moment later, two more men followed. They spread out
and approached me slowly, heads turning, eyes alert. A tall man came directly over and stood facing me. I wanted to lift my face to him, so that he would know I had at least died bravely, but my neck wouldn’t let me. I stared down at his feet. At his silver-tipped cowboy boots. Marshal Reyes.

I
asked to share a hospital room with the Kid, but they stuck me with Hal instead. He had two busted arms, neither requiring surgery, fractured ribs, and a face that was disfigured with cuts and bruises but would eventually heal. I had a bandage on the back of my head and a bad attitude. I wasn’t the ideal roommate.

“When can I see my son?”

“He’s resting,” the nurse said.

Do they take courses in how not to answer patients’ questions? Or are uncooperative control freaks naturally drawn to the profession? Nature or nurture? What drew me to my profession? It had to be more than a simple desire to make a lot of money. I had been good at it and thought I was having fun, despite the fact that I rarely smiled. It was the intensity of the moment-to-moment existence of a trader, the constant jolts of adrenaline, the soaring elation of having rightly called a market move, positioned my book accordingly, and seen my bet paid off in millions that had all contributed to my addiction to the markets. I missed every bit of it. And when I had lost all of it, through stupidity or cupidity, but either way my own culpability, what had replaced that feeling of total involvement in my life?

“I want to see him.” I may have spoken a bit louder than was strictly necessary.

“You should be resting. And please don’t wake Mr. Morris.”

Hal Morris was on a morphine drip. I could have set off fireworks and not disturbed the man.

“I can’t rest because I’m worried about my son. If I could see him, then maybe I’d be able to relax.”

“He’s in the children’s ward,” she said in a tone that implied someone of my ilk would never be allowed there.

“I’m dehydrated. I’ve got heatstroke. It’s not contagious.”

“You are not allowed out of bed. Don’t make me have to strap you in.”

“What’s your name?”

“Why do you need my name?”

“So I can report you.”

“It’s Janice, and be sure and buzz me if you need anything at all.”

She walked out.

Short of pulling the IV out of my arm and staggering bare-bottomed through the halls looking for the children’s wing, I was stuck.

The four young killers who had holed up in the gas station had given up once their meager supply of ammunition gave out. That happened to coincide with the call from Robertson’s people reporting shots fired up in the hills. The marshals had loaded back into their helicopter and flew to the rescue. I owed those clowns my life.

The door swung open again. Roy Robertson came in wearing a vintage Grateful Dead T-shirt—
Blues for Allah
—and a big smile.

“I just checked on your son. He’s sleeping, but looking just fine. Give him a day’s rest and he’ll be good to go.”

“That nurse won’t let me see him.”

“I’m sure she will in time. I get the feeling she’s a bit overworked.”

“I don’t think I like nurses.”

“I was married to one once.”

“So you know what I mean.”

“The woman was a saint. Next time you want to give that nurse a hard time, just think about your friend over there.” He nodded toward Hal. “It’s going to be at least a month before he can wipe his own ass.”

“I’d still like to see my son.”

“Let me see what I can do,” he said, stepping out into the hall again.

He was back in minutes with a wheelchair and an attached IV pole. He moved my saline bag and helped me into the chair. I discovered that I was stronger than I had imagined. The mind had given up, but
the body had not. That was a powerful lesson I would do well always to remember.

“How’d you manage this?”

“Janice lent it to me.”

“What did you bribe her with?”

“I sweet-talked her. I find it works better for me than resorting to New York manners.”

“Ouch.”

He rolled me out and down the hall to the elevator.

“Have they caught those guys yet?” I asked, as he wheeled me inside.

“They arrested the pilot when he set down in Albuquerque, but he was alone. He could have set those two punks down anywhere. They’re long gone, I imagine.”

“Two? There was a third shooter. The one in the woods.”

“He tried the Butch and Sundance strategy with those marshals. Bad decision.”

The doors opened and he pushed me down another corridor and through a set of swinging doors.

“Who was he? Does anybody know?”

“A young man from back your way. That’s all I heard.”

“And Willie?”

“No sign of him. We’ll have to go back in tomorrow and look for the remains. Any thoughts on where we should look?”

I thought back. The farmhouse. The hill. The distance from the cliff. The lines on the topographic map. “Bring me one of your maps and I’ll pinpoint it,” I said.

A nurse looked up as we passed her station. “Can I help you, gentlemen?”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Robertson said. “We’re looking for the little boy who was lost. This is his father.”

“Room 108. Don’t wake him.”

“I just want to see him,” I said.

She smiled. “I understand.”

The Kid was asleep. Robertson was right. He was fine. He was sunburned, but, despite his pale skin, it wasn’t bad. He must have made it into that cleft in the rocks early in the day. Another few days, though, and he would be peeling. That had the potential to turn into a three-act drama. But he was okay. They had already removed his IV and I saw that he had eaten. The remains of a grilled cheese sandwich and a juice box were on a tray by the side of the bed. What angel of mercy had known exactly what he would tolerate?

“Thanks, Roy.”

“For what?”

“For bringing me here to see him.”

I looked at that relaxed, pale pink face, at peace only when asleep and all of his demons were temporarily at bay, and I vowed that I would never allow him to be in harm’s way again. No matter what the cost—in time, money, or blood—I would give it gladly.

Impossible. It wouldn’t work and it wasn’t fair. My son deserved more. It was a promise I couldn’t deliver. The universe doesn’t work that way. There’s risk in being alive, in crossing the street, taking a cab, eating from a food truck. He wasn’t a bubble boy who would perish at contact with the world. His world held more terrors than most, but that was no reason to give in to them.

I vowed to help make him strong. He was well along on that path already. That was a promise I could keep. One that would make me proud. It wasn’t the easy path. There would be pain—both his and mine. But the Kid could do it. I could guide him. That was the best that I could do. That was the best that I could do for him.

I let Robertson reposition the IV bag while I slid back into my bed. I was surprised at how tired I felt after so little exertion.

“So, after shooting it out with that fellow from Ronkonkoma and rounding up the pilot, they still have no idea who sent those killers after you, do they?”

“That’s all right. I do.”