Scott Free (37 page)

There was.

 

F
OUR MINUTES LEFT.

Scott crawled on his belly along the base of the gulley, surrounded on both sides by steep wooded walls. The wall on his right rose only five feet before giving way to the denuded Orphan's Holler. The steeper slope on his left rose much, much higher—as high as the mountain ridge—and he knew that those were the woods where Isaac lay in wait. Somewhere.

The boy moved as quickly as he could, in the kind of army crawl that he'd used as a kid playing war with his friends. The snow seemed heavier down here, wetter. Ice crystals tore at the exposed flesh of his right hand.

The cover was even better than he'd hoped. By staying low and moving quietly, he felt invisible.

He heard a
crack
at the same instant that he felt the vibration under his belly. In that instant, the gulley and its vegetation made sense to him. He was crawling along a creek bed, so pristine with its frosting of snow, even as water still ran swiftly underneath.

The ground popped again, and before he could react, the ice under his elbow gave way, initiating a chain reaction that progressed with frightening speed. Before Scott could scramble even a few feet, more of the ice gave way, and within a second, his face was underwater. His hands found the bottom of the creek bed, and then his feet, but by then he realized he was standing, and he quickly ducked back down into the freezing water.

Completely soaked now, and terrified of the noise he'd made, Scott scrambled for solid ground at the right-hand wall. He ran in a half-crouch to the base of a stout conifer, where he placed the thick tree trunk between him and where he thought Isaac to be.

The killer had to know where he was now. He'd have been deaf not to.

The trembling started immediately, uncontrollable muscle spasms that shook his whole body and turned his teeth into rows of castanets. Within seconds, the water on his coat and his pants refroze. When he moved his elbows, the icy film popped.

He had two minutes left. When he heard no gunshots, he pressed on, slipping and falling repeatedly on the snowy banks, trying desperately to stay away from the buried torrents of the creek.

One minute. He found another towering conifer and rested for just a moment before scaling the gulley wall to dare his first peek. He'd come a long way. There was his mom, right out in front of him at two o'clock, and about twenty yards away. She looked dead in the crimson-stained snow, and for a horrible, sickening moment, he wished that she were. That would free him to get the hell out of here.

Then her legs moved. It was a useless bicycling motion that made Scott wonder if she thought she was running away. Above the noise of his own staccato breathing, he heard her agonized moan.

Bile burned his throat. One way or another, it was going to end here. He looked around. Sherry lay among deadfalls and broken trees, but essentially out in the open, even as shelter lay a few yards away. If he could somehow dash out there and drag her into the shadow of one of those deadfalls, or even behind the tree she was shackled to, he could at least buy them some time. Maybe—

A familiar laugh broke the silence, slicing Scott's innards like a hot knife. He ducked back behind his tree. “Why, Scott O'Toole, is that you?” a familiar voice yelled. It wasn't nearly far enough away. “Glad to see you made it.” He laughed again.

Think!
Scott screamed at himself.

“You might as well show yourself now,” Isaac said, his voice the very essence of reasonableness. “Save your mommy a lot of additional pain.”

Scott dared another peek around the tree. They were screwed.

 

B
RANDON FOUND A SPOT
at the crest of a hill where the snow at the base of a fir tree was all churned. Scott had obviously spent some time here, and over there to the left, Brandon saw the boy's tracks leading off toward a gulley that appeared to run the length of the slope.

“Why, Scott O'Toole, is that you?” a voice boomed from out of the woods. Brandon ducked for cover, then peered out to see what was happening.

“…Glad to see you made it.”

For an instant, Brandon thought that the voice was talking to him, but then he realized the truth. Down there on the slope, he saw the smear of red snow, and in the middle of it, he could make out a splash of neon green—the color of Sherry's favorite ski jacket. That's when he understood everything.

“…Save your mommy a lot of additional pain.”

“Holy God,” Brandon breathed. Something moved in the gulley to his left, and Brandon brought James Alexander's rifle to his shoulder. If that was DeHaven, he was dead.

“You want me to count to three, Scott?” the voice yelled. “I can do that if you'd like.”

Brandon jumped as if jolted by electricity and instantly broke his aim. Jesus, he'd nearly shot his son. The voice was coming from a different place entirely. He shifted his eyes to the opposite slope, to the woods. Of course, that's where a sniper would stake his claim for the best shot.

“One…”

Brandon pressed the rifle against his shoulder and scanned the area of the voice with both eyes open. He had to be there somewhere….

“Two…”

There! A flash of light. Too bright to be a muzzle flash; more like a camera strobe. Light reflected off a sniperscope. That had to be it. He still couldn't see the shooter, but he knew just from the syntax of the count that they were coming up on—

“Three!”

Brandon pulled the trigger.

 

S
COTT JUMPED AT THE SOUND
of the shot. It came from the wrong direction! Had Isaac moved his position? How could he have done it so fast? He jerked his head from behind his tree for another quick look at his mom, and nothing seemed to have changed. What—

Then another report boomed, this one from Isaac's hill, and it was answered a second later by another from behind.

Holy Christ, it was the Good Guys!

Scott moved totally by instinct, driven by fear and the distant knowledge that whoever had come to his rescue had bought him his only chance. He dashed out of his hiding place, into the open, his stride made awkward and lumbering by the stiff ski boots. He could see his mom right there, bleeding in the snow, just ten feet away. Another shot boomed from behind, answered right away by one from Isaac, which in turn was answered by another from his rescuer.

His foot slipped as he pulled to a stop in his mother's blood and he went down hard. A second later, he was on his knees, looking down at her. Sherry's eyes were open and alert, but her color was all wrong, her skin just a few shades darker than the snow. There was slack in her chain; might be enough to pull her to the base of that deadfall. It wasn't much, but it was something.

“I got you, Mom,” he said, and she smiled.

He pulled her by her good arm, but she started yelling anyway.

 

B
RANDON COULDN'T BELIEVE IT
. What was Scott doing? Was he out of his mind?

He saw his son leave the safety of the gulley, and in the same instant, he saw Isaac DeHaven, dressed in white and black camouflage, stand and step out of his hiding place. Brandon aimed and he fired. DeHaven ducked back down. He worked the lever, ejected a casing and fired again. Brandon knew his bullets had to be coming close. For the time being, all he needed was to keep the man's head down; keep him from taking the easy shot at Scott.

Isaac's scope glinted again, and in an instant, a bullet passed close enough to Brandon's ear that the concussion rattled his brain. Brandon dropped to his knee and tucked the left side of his body behind the fir and took aim again.

Those seconds were all that Isaac needed. Brandon watched in horror as the gunman, listing awkwardly to his left, hoisted his own rifle with one hand and fired into Scott.

 

T
HEY'D MADE IT
! The deadfall was a big one, maybe two feet in diameter. If they crouched down low enough, pressed themselves flat against the snow, maybe—

Isaac appeared from nowhere, charging out of the woods, his face spattered with blood, his gait a bizarre, halting thing. In that instant, Scott knew that his plan had been terribly flawed. The killer had the high ground. All the advantage. This whole charade of heroism meant nothing.

Scott saw the muzzle of Isaac's gun raise, even as the man kept running forward.

The pain registered in the boy's mind as a molten railroad spike through his chest.

 

B
RANDON SHRIEKED AS HE SAW THE BULLET
blast through his son. “No! Goddammit, no!”

As Isaac struggled to a halt to take another shot, Brandon brought the .30-30 to his shoulder one more time. This time, his shot found its mark for sure. DeHaven's rifle flew from his hands and the murderer backpedaled a few steps before landing heavily on his butt.

The bastard just sat there on the hillside, as if surveying the damage he'd wrought. He presented a perfect target. Blind with rage and sick with panic, Brandon jacked the empty casing into the snow and pulled the trigger one last time.

The hammer fell on an empty chamber.

 

C
OLD.

Noise.

Unspeakable pain.

Scott lay facedown in the snow, dimly aware that he was supposed to be dead now. And as he tried to move, he remembered why.

Isaac's bullet had entered just below his collar bone, shattering it, and blasted out through the middle of his shoulder blade. For all that, and for all the blood, the pain was different from what he'd always imagined a bullet wound would be. There was a certain numbness to it. A dull heaviness on his left side that grew sharp and bright only when he moved.

His mother lay on the ground near him, smeared with blood, but he couldn't tell which was hers and which was his own. She looked terrified. She looked as if she were dying.

Scott worried about his breathing. It was all wrong; it sounded noisier than usual. He was in trouble. Serious, serious trouble.

But he wasn't dead. Not yet, anyway.
Why?
he wondered.

He had to move. He had to get away, to confront Isaac, to end this, once and for all. As he dragged himself to his knees, he saw Isaac over there on the hill, not seventy-five feet away. He looked as bad as Scott felt, moving awkwardly in the deep snow, leaving a crimson trail behind him. What was he doing? He wasn't walking toward Scott, but rather toward a spot between them—toward the rifle that lay up against a deadfall, its stock in the snow, barrel pointed straight toward the sky.

Scott didn't understand, but he assumed that Isaac had somehow tossed it there. Maybe when he was hit.

Now, it was up for grabs, anybody's ball. And the one who got there first got to walk away.

Or maybe just got to die last.

Scott howled like a speared wolf as the mosaic of bone that was once his left side shifted and the fragments rubbed against each other. He tried to stand, but his legs wobbled. Like a newborn fawn, he tentatively raised himself to his feet, gathering his balance, trying not to notice the heavy drops of blood on the snow, the spreading stain on his coat. He nearly toppled over, but sheer will kept him upright—a harsh resolve fueled by the horror of falling on his ruined side.

The snow was so light here. A mere whisper of powder, despite its depth. As he stumbled forward, the flakes seemed to flee from his shins. He moved closer and closer to the rifle, and finally it was in his hands. He had the sense, though, that he'd won a one-man race; that Isaac was no longer playing.

This was a different weapon than the one he'd hefted in the escape tunnel. This one had weight and length. It looked like a killer's weapon. The weight of it in his right hand seemed to be pulling his left side apart, and as he braced the butt against his thigh, he wasn't at all sure that he'd stay conscious for much longer.

Isaac stood ten feet away, swaying like a drunk, seemingly mesmerized by the blood leaking out of his own body. When he noticed Scott watching him, he gave a wan smile. “I don't even know where the hole is,” he said.

Scott's vision blurred and he shook his head to clear it. He could see the hole just fine. It looked to be low in his abdomen, on the right side.

“You're about to do a terrible thing, kid,” Isaac said. “Killing a man is a terrible thing to live with.”

“You do it,” Scott croaked. It seemed as if he heard his own voice a few beats late, like watching a bad foreign film, where the lips and the audio don't match up. “You live with it just fine.”

Isaac smiled. “You call this living? What do you say we declare this one a draw?”