The Gift of the Dragon (2 page)

Tonight, it seemed just another dark, anonymous highway—with her father’s murderer on the road somewhere behind her.
 

She had almost died when she had seen Callan Grant at the airport getting his bags as she had walked by the baggage claim to the rental car counters. Hiding behind her hair, she had sworn at herself for taking a direct flight from Tampa to Portland, leaving an easy path for him to follow. Sara had gotten her car and rushed out of the airport, hoping to be far enough ahead of him that he could not pick up her trail, at least not tonight. She knew well his expertise in finding people. She knew herself to be not all that good at deception.

Sara repeated her plan, steeling herself for what she must do. She would give Alice her precious gift, the thing her father said to keep from his killer at all costs. Then, she would run as long as she could run and lead the bastard far away.
Far away from Alice.

Alice would not let her follow that plan if she found out about it.
Lying to Alice will not be easy
. She rehearsed her words as the green mile markers passed by in the night. Twenty minutes later, she saw the sign she sought and turned in to the park that sits where the half-mile-wide Bonneville dam divides the Columbia.
 

Sara drove to a parking area next to a spillway with water roaring through it. Alice had brought her here many years ago when trying to get Sara excited about engineering and math. Alice had told her then that over eighty-five million gallons of the Columbia’s water ran through this spillway each minute. Ten-year-old Sara had said then that it seemed like a pitcher pouring a thousand streams.
 

Tonight, Sara’s heart filled with joy as she saw a dark-haired woman of medium height emerging from a battered yellow Volkswagen Beetle.
 

 
“Alice, you made it!”
 

“Hi, Sara, I remember your pitcher. Now why am I here instead of in my pleasant bed in Warm Springs?”
 

Sara wanted to throw herself into Alice’s arms and tell her everything. Her father’s death, the killer chasing her, that she had eaten nothing but airplane snacks all day. She got a hold of herself.
Stick to the story, give Alice the necklace, then run and lead Callan far away!

“Alice, I need you to trust me. This won’t make sense…” Sara had to shout to hear herself above the sound of the river. The spray made the August night feel cool and the air smell like fresh rain.

Alice shrugged. “It would be nice if something made sense for a change.”

“I know. You must think I’ve gone crazy, calling you from Tampa and begging you to meet me here. I have to give you something.” Sara took her father’s necklace and pressed it into Alice’s hand. “My dad’s been killed, Alice. He gave me this. I need you to take it.”
 

Guilt filled Sara. Many years ago, Alice had made it clear that she wanted no more of the backstabbing, violence, and lies their families had lived with for so long. Alice had taken Sara away with her then to the green wilds of central Oregon to get them both away.

If she takes the necklace, it’s going to drag her right back into all that.

Alice looked at the gift, her eyebrows rising. The streetlight made the scene look like an old movie. Everything appeared black or white or a shade of gray. “This is beautiful, Sara. Is it a dragon?”
 

Out of the darkness, another voice spoke, deep and harsh. “It is beautiful. And you need to give it to me!”

A man with black hair emerged from the foggy spray on the other side of Alice’s Volkswagen. He held a huge gun at arm’s length, weaving it back and forth between them like a dancing cobra. Alice shoved the silvery dragon necklace into the pocket of her cutoff jeans and spun to face the man.
 

Alice is going to take him on!
She probably thinks this is just some drink-addled backcountry mugger.
Sara needed to do something, or he would kill Alice, take her father’s gift, and do what he wanted to with Sara.
He is going to do that, anyway.

Yelling, “Callan, stop!” Sara reached into her jacket pocket, pulled out her cell phone, and pointed it at him as if it were a gun. Callan turned to her, and then the black oval hole at the tip of his pistol turned round as it pointed between her eyes. She saw a bright red flame, she heard a loud crack, and then she saw nothing at all.

Callan

As Sara reached for a gun, his training took over, and without allowing for thought, his finger pulled the trigger of the big Smith & Wesson 500. He rolled his shoulders with the recoil, rapid-firing three hollow-point bullets into her head at close range. Blood and gore exploded from Sara, making a silver fog in the harsh glare of the lights. At the same time, her friend leaped up onto the rail along the spillway to get around the Beetle and reach him. In the light, Callan recognized her.
I killed her already!
Yet she came flying out of the mist with the whites of her eyes shining and her hands clenched into claws.

He tracked her and fired. Then his brain caught up with his reflexes and he yelled, “Stop!”

Realizing what just happened, Callan raced toward the falling woman, grabbing for her as she slid backward off the railing and into the foamy torrent below.
 

Where it rushed from the concrete arms of Bonneville Dam, the Columbia ran swiftly and carried the woman’s body with it. The thing Sara gave away went with her. He glared at Sara’s body, her head a ruin, her lovely face gone. He almost loved her once before she betrayed him. He kicked at Sara’s outstretched hand in the darkness, looking for her weapon. Her dead fingers held no gun—just a black, flip-style cell phone. He stared at it as the mist swirled around him.

Alice

The Columbia rolled on. Though down some from the spring peak, when the snowmelt of the Rockies and the Cascades rushes to the Pacific, its flow in August was still formidable. The narrows below the Bonneville Dam’s rock walls force the river through a thousand-foot-wide channel, and the foaming water rages through there. In the late summer, when it escapes the Cascade narrows, the river’s current runs at an average speed of four miles per hour. In five hours, a body that fell from Bonneville dam would arrive near where the Lewis and Clark Highway touched the river on the Washington side.
 

Alice spun around and around in the dark deluge. She guessed the temperature of it to be near seventy-five degrees. Just warm enough for a person to survive. Her head seemed to be one solid red ball of pain, and the events of the past few hours were a whirl of fading images. She remembered someone important to her had been killed, the killer wanted her dead too, and that killer might be somewhere on the banks of this river.
Looking for me.

She strove not to forget a number, the phone number of someone… Jenny… who would come get her, save her. She chewed and tore holes in her T-shirt, trying to remember it. Shivers racked her as her body tried to stave off hypothermia. She took off her socks, tied them into sort of a bandage, and wrapped the result around her head. It seemed to slow the bleeding some.

Alice wanted to stay in the river as long as she could stand it to get as far away from the killer as possible. The details of the shooting were slipping from her as if carried away by her blood into the cool water, but she felt that it must be more than a random attack. Something her friend… back at the dam… Sara, had said. Like she knew the man with the gun.
 

After what seemed many hours, Alice could take no more of the swirling and the cold. She stroked toward some lights off to her right. She kept getting caught up in eddies in the current. It took all her effort to keep herself moving shoreward.

Alice thrashed in the water, each stroke bringing her a few inches forward, until her hand finally touched wood. Feeling in the darkness and seeing what she could in the faint light from the half-moon peeking occasionally through wispy clouds, she guessed she had come to some sort of pier. She scrambled up from the cool water, barely conscious. Unable to walk at first, she crawled on her elbows, feeling dizzy and disoriented. Alice had a vision from a nature program of the first amphibian crawling up from the primordial sea to the land. Before that first one must have been another who tried and failed. She felt like that second salamander, slipping backward into the cold and wet.

“Pay phone… collect call,” she whispered fiercely to herself. As she crawled up the pier, she found her legs starting to work. Trying to control her shaking, she got to her feet and stumbled up the wooden planks. She moved slowly but faster than a crawl. The pier ended at a gravel path that led through some trees. The gray stones of the path glimmered softly, reflecting more light than the grass and trees surrounding them. A railing ran along the trail, and she held onto it gratefully. Soon, the gravel ended at a paved road, where a lone streetlight struggled to illuminate a large parking lot. Alice saw a brown sign there that read “Steamboat Landing Park” and then listed some rules about camping and dogs.
 

She might have been forgetting herself a bit more each minute, but at least now she knew
where
she was. “Find a pay phone!” She whispered fiercely to herself. Saying it helped her focus. Alice followed the brighter lights ahead, seeking a phone like an undead person in a zombie movie looking for uninfected flesh. She stumbled, bloody and stiff-legged, up the empty street leading from the park and several blocks into an industrial-looking part of some town. A few cars rushed by, but none stopped. That didn’t upset her, she didn’t want to explain her situation to a stranger anyway.
Not with my bloody socks wrapped around my head!
 

After the second intersection, she saw an orange-and-purple sign marking a convenience store, next to it the welcome blue shine of a pay phone booth, the old-fashioned kind with three walls. She stumbled up to it and managed to hit zero and then started on the number. She needed to check the holes in her shirt a few times to make sure she got it right. Three—then two—and then one. She felt thankful that the number consisted mostly of small digits.
The big hole… is a nine!
Her memories still seemed to be leaking out with the blood, flowing faster now as she warmed up. She grunted what she had to for the operator to connect her, almost stumped by her name.
 

Finally, she heard a voice on the other end accepting the charges and saying, “Hello?”

Alice blurted, “Help. Downriver from the dam, Washington side. Pay phone near a park named… Steamboat Landing. Not doing well. Shot in the head.”
 

The phone asked something.
 

“Don’t want to call anyone else. Please, you come. Shot! I’ll be in the bushes at the park. Near the brown sign. Hiding!”
Stop jabbering at me, Jenny, a man is hunting me!
 

The gentle voice on the phone went on, saying more reasonable things. Alice dropped it.
 

Jenny would come, or she would not.
I might make it back to those bushes.
“If I go now!” She focused on the memory of the park sign and put one foot in front of the other.

Chapter 3, A Fire in the Night

Ian

He looked with disdain at the men disembarking. Heading to an assault in a rented, retired school bus didn’t make him happy. However, in eastern Oregon, an old school bus full of hard-looking people is a common summer sight. The Oregon forests dry out in the summer, and by fall, heat lightning is frequent. By late September, fire crews fighting the blazes regularly used these vehicles to get to fires and to get back to camp when they are done. Or so his local contact assured him. Maybe he just liked seeing Ian McAlister riding around in an old school bus that still read “Grants Pass High School” on the side in faded letters.
 

Ian sighed.
It’s probably the best choice.
After flying into Klamath Falls Airport from Oakland on a chartered Embraer EMB-120 turboprop, a twenty-person team didn’t have that many discreet ways to get from the airport out to the target warehouse. Being a passenger on the plane up from Oakland didn’t make Ian smile either. Though his favorite leisure activity was semi-pro kickboxing, he carried a competitive stunt pilot license.
 

He had started flying years ago as a way to drive his frugal father mad as he spent thousands on lessons and then millions on ever faster and more maneuverable planes. But along the way, he found that he loved being alone in a cockpit where he could turn the radio off and scare the pants off everyone beneath him for a while. On a bus or plane, Ian just didn’t like being a rider. The seats in this bus were thinner and more uncomfortable than the seats sported by the Brazilian-made plane. To make things worse, getting to the top of this mostly barren hill—covered in stumps, small shaggy green trees, coyote brush, broom, and large sharp-edged stones—required a long, bumpy drive on a series of dirt and stone logging roads.
Each new one worse than the last.