depends on it, which it most certainly does.”
I guess he thought he could make it.
I guess he thought I was in worse shape than I was.
I guess he felt like this was his only chance. In a way, I suppose he was right, but in another way, he was terribly wrong.
The Sig came around quickly in his left hand, but he could have been Billy the Kid and there was no way he could’ve aimed and fired in the time it took me to pull the set and final trigger. I had turned sideways for two reasons, the first to aim the long barrel of the rifle, which, unlike the short barrel on the semiautomatic, would place the bullet exactly where I wanted it. The other was to provide him with the smallest target I could-an old duelist and gunfighter trick.
Maybe I was still affected by my condition, or maybe it was that I simply didn’t want to take his life, but I paused and he fired first. The round went to my left as he overcompensated and drew the Sig’s barrel past me.
I pulled the trigger, and the buffalo rifle delivered its package at a much shorter range than it had been designed for in one hell of a thunderous response.
Nobody flies backward when they’re shot; no matter how large the caliber and how close the shot, they just slump. You die falling down, which is a terrible way to die-it destroys the confidence before it destroys the body, and that must be a terrible thing to be left with in those last few seconds.
I stood there for what felt like a long time as the echoing sound of the. 45-70 subsided in my head, finally stepping across the broken rocks and around his foot. I nudged the. 40 out of his grip with the toe of my boot, bent over what was left of him, pulled off my glove, and placed my fingers at his neck. Nothing.
Must’ve been my day for it.
I looked at his eyes, hazel-green and staring at the granite ceiling, and then reached down with two fingers and closed them, completing the ritual.
The second jolt of adrenaline had produced no tremors, which told me that the surge was only enough to keep me going for a short time and get me back to barely operable condition.
I shrugged the pack off and turned to look at Kasey Pfaff, who, thankfully, was breathing. I could see that she had a monster of a goose egg at one side of her forehead, which might’ve explained why the sounds of the shots hadn’t awakened her. I remembered that I had put my old bone-handled case XX knife in the zippered pocket in my pants, so I took off my gloves, retrieved it, and reached down to cut her free.
I kneeled and propped her up enough to get the bandana out of her mouth. She still didn’t move but made a noise in her throat and then coughed, closed her eyes even tighter, and then opened them, looking up at me. As near as I could tell from the expression on her face, she had no idea who I was-after what I’d been through lately, I wasn’t so sure myself. Covered in soot, ash, soaked with snow and frozen hard with ice, I figured I looked like some sort of golem. “You’re okay, just relax.”
She swallowed, blinked, and continued to stare at me. “The sheriff.”
“Yep, the sheriff.”
She smiled and shivered. “Nice to see you.” Her glance went to the surrounding area, settling on the boot of the Ameri-Trans driver.
“He’s dead.”
“Good.”
I laughed. “Not a nice guy?”
She coughed again. “No, he’s the one who hit me. Besides, he made a deal with the devil for some money, which, by the way, turned out to be nonexistent.”
“Where is Shade?”
She rubbed her wrists where the zip cords had left ligature marks. “He went ahead to the top.”
“Do you know why?”
“No.” She sat up a little and stretched her back. “I’ve been lying here forever. I’m sorry. I think my ankle’s b- busted.”
“You want me to look at it?”
“No, it’s probably just sprained, but I don’t think I’d get very far out there.” She sat up a little more, coughed again, and looked at me with an odd expression. “He’s carrying the bones of that boy we excavated from behind the rock.”
“Owen White Buffalo. I know.” I patted my chest. “He left me a souvenir.”
She nodded and then glanced around some more. “Where’s your backup?”
My thoughts exactly.
She looked puzzled. “What?”
“Excuse me?”
She smiled a crooked smile. “You said something, but I didn’t catch it.”
I thought I’d said it to myself but evidently I hadn’t. I guess I was more tired than I thought. Talking with people was more confusing than being confused by yourself. “They’re coming, but right now I need to go get one of them and bring him in here.” I pushed off the rock. The driver was dead, and she was in no condition to help, so I was back to square one.
I reached over, picked up the. 40 from beside the dead man, dropped the clip, and pulled the action, watching a round fly out, and was amazed when the federal agent snatched it from the air.
She held it in her palm and smiled at me. “My hands are all right.”
“I guess so.” I took the round, reinserted it into the magazine, and slammed it home. I handed her the sidearm and tossed the 9mm from the Junk-food Junkie onto the blanket at her feet. “A full mag in the . 40, but only one round in the 9-I’ll be back in a minute with our reinforcements, so don’t shoot me, okay?”
I stood, readjusted my goggles, pulled my gloves back on, and started out.
He was gone.
Again.
The swale was still there where he’d fallen and where I’d left him, the sleeping bag was still in the semicircle where I had wrapped him, and even the paperback was still lying there in the snow.
No Virgil.
I looked around but couldn’t see any tracks other than mine leading in any direction. I stooped in the trough we’d made and picked up the book and sleeping bag. What if he had become confused and followed me? It was possible that the ever-falling snow had covered his tracks, but there still should’ve been something, anything, showing where the giant had gone.
Surely he hadn’t continued on after Shade; he couldn’t even walk when I’d left him. “Virgil, damn it, this is getting ridiculous!”
My voice echoed off the granite walls. “ Ridiculous! Ridiculous! ”
You said it, brother.
The snow continued to fall, and the faint glow of the late evening sun was opaque, lean, and dying. Sunday; it was still Sunday as near as I could remember-a good day for all of this to end. If I was going to make any time before it got really dark and visibility dropped from twenty feet to two, I needed to get going. I drew the sleeping bag over my shoulder, stuffed the book under my arm, and started tramping my way back to the overhang.
I thought about some of the things that the big Indian had said about my daughter having a daughter. Could it be true? Could Cady have told Henry and Henry have told Virgil on his monthly grocery drops? Why would he tell Virgil? Why wouldn’t anybody have told me? I was used to the clandestine relationship that Henry Standing Bear had with Cady, but this? I had wondered why there had been such a rush to get married, and maybe even suspected, but why hadn’t she told me? Through the exhaustion and confusion, I was hurt.
And where the hell had Virgil gone?
Traitors. The last thing he had talked about was something about traitors-the final ring of hell, the ninth circle, surrounded by giants with sinners frozen at different levels in an icy lake that stretched to the horizons. Most thought that Dante’s hell was a flaming, superheated place, which was true for part of the Florentine’s journey, but in the Inferno, the real hell was an arctic, glaciated, and windblown place far from the warmth of God.
