Grumpy had taught both his grandsons the art and science of gun fighting, long before Cutter had joined the Army or come aboard with the Marshals Service. Speed and accuracy both counted, Grumpy always said, but neither were worth a damn by themselves. “You might have the skill to shoot the nuts off a fruit fly at a hundred paces while sighting over your shoulder with a dental mirror,” Grumpy would say, “but if you can’t do it fast, that kind of pinpoint accuracy is worthless.” It might not win many trophies, but exceptional speed with decent accuracy was far superior to decent speed with exceptional accuracy.
Tough Guy’s face darkened. The Glock rose a hair.
Action was faster than reaction, but Cutter would have to draw, acquire his target, and fire. Tough Guy simply had to squeeze the trigger. Cutter relaxed his hands, letting them sag a couple of inches. He took a fluttering breath, which Tough Guy took for fear.
They stood a dozen yards apart. An easy shot if Cutter hadn’t just been submerged for two minutes in muscle-cramping water.
Cutter picked a spot on the man’s chest. Took another breath. Settling himself. Hearing Grumpy’s no-bullshit voice in his ear.
Demonstrating with his shot timer, Grumpy started every range day the same. “A BEEP will be your signal to fire. When you hear the B, I want your gun hand dropping to that holster – the gun should be out and shooting your target by the EEP.”
Water splashed again to Cutter’s right—
“B…”
Cutter’s hand dropped to the Colt. Muscle memory acquiring the same grip his fingers had formed thousands of times. The pistol cleared his holster at the same moment Tough Guy’s eyes flicked toward the splash—
“…EEP.”
Cutter shot him twice. The first round went low as the Colt was still coming up, slamming into his pelvis. The second punched a neat hole just left of center mass.
Cutter felt like his shots were on target, but he didn’t stand and wait for a postmortem. He sprang for the cover of the support column as soon as he’d fired his second round.
Tough Guy cried out, the kind of bellowing roar a man made when mortally wounded. He was dead on his feet, but not yet out of the fight. Firing twice as he fell, he put two rounds into the rock directly beside Cutter’s face, spraying his eyes with razor-like fragments of granite.
Cutter ducked behind the column, touched his cheek, felt blood. He couldn’t open his left eye at all. The vision in his right was dim, blurry.
He heard Tough Guy fall, his pistol clattering to the rock with its distinctive polymer Glock rattle.
“Cutter!” It was Lori Maycomb’s voice. Through the haze, he could see she was leading Donita Willets.
“Dollarhyde made it up to that ledge,” Willets said.
“Tough Guy?” Cutter said, more than half blind now.
“You mean Dallas Childers?” Lori said. “You got him. He’s down. Seriously, we have got to go now! When Dollarhyde makes it out, they’ll blow the ledge. The whole place is coming down on top of us.”
Chapter 54
Lola Teariki stooped to study a boot print that had crushed a mushroom underfoot. Streaks of bright red oozed from the flattened remnants of the bone-white fungus.
“This looks like blood,” she said.
Detective Van Dyke worked a flank position, slightly ahead of Teariki a few yards to the side of the presumed trail. Her sidearm was out, where Lola’s remained in its holster. Van Dyke took her eyes off the shadows ahead long enough to glance at the track.
“It’s called bleeding tooth,” she said.
“Tooth?”
“A kind of fungus that grows around here,” Van Dyke said.
“Bleeding tooth. Devil’s Tooth. Looks like drops of blood oozing out of that gnarly white flesh. Pretty gross if you ask me.”
“Something new every day,” Lola said. She was already moving, looking for the next discernable track.
The trees were smaller here, more widely spaced. Mottled shadows from the thinning canopy shifted with the breeze over a carpet of mossy ferns and stones. A few more steps revealed the entire side of the mountain, hundreds of feet across, was an old tailing pile. The guts of the mountain, now long grown over.
A raven ker-lucked in the treetops.
Van Dyke stopped in her tracks, raising her open hand.
Lola froze, listening. Wind rustled the spruce bows. A halfhearted rain pattered here and there on alder and ferns. Then she heard it too. Voices.
Now she drew her pistol, carrying it muzzle down, away from Van Dyke.
The women sidehilled slowly, stepping over and around fallen trees and mounds of rock. Springy moss and a recent rain masked their approach, but they needn’t have bothered. Less than a half minute later they stood at the black mouth of a mine tunnel cut into the mountain. Two men, just inside from the sounds of it, were engaged in a fierce conversation, oblivious to the rest of the world.
“Throw me the damned thing,” a deep voice growled.
“You put a knot in the rope!” This one was strained, higher. Angry-scared.
“Insurance,” the gruff one said. “Didn’t want Childers sneaking up and cutting my throat. I hear pretty good, you know. Now pitch the rattle up to me.”
“You’ll leave me,” the scared man said, panting. “Pull me up.”
“I will,” the growler said. “But you’ll need both hands. Throw. Me. The. Rattle.”
Her Glock hovering just below her sight line at low-ready, Lola began to cut the pie, sidestepping slowly around the outer edge of the mine portal, bringing the dim interior into view inch by inch. Van Dyke did the same from the other side.
“Grimsson!” the tight voice said, frantic now, hollow inside the mine tunnel. “Wait! You’re throwing away a fortune. Half a million according to the archeologist.”
Lola recognized the terrified voice as Mr. Dollarhyde, from the Valkyrie Mine Holdings offices.
“Hand it to me, Ephraim,” Grimsson said. “Then I’ll pull you up.”
“Okay,
