Lone Creek

41

We found Laurie a hiding place up in a rock pile with a good view of the terrain, just in case Balcomb knew where we were or someone had heard the pistol shot. We made her comfortable with sleeping bags, food, and water. Then Madbird and I took John Doe for a hike deep into the back country, shoving him stumbling along with his elbows duct-taped tight together behind him and more wraps of it as blindfold and gag. Madbird had done this before. He stayed quiet and so did I. I wasn't about to intrude on what he might be remembering.

The way he'd engineered this left me helpless with admiration. Like I thought, he'd called Balcomb and offered us up for ten thousand dollars.

"Hot enough to fuck twice," was how he described Balcomb on the phone.

But Madbird had refused to identify himself, or give up our location, or meet face-to-face. Instead, he'd insisted that John Doe drop the money where the dirt road to here turned off the highway, and wait a few hundred yards away. Madbird then had appeared out of the woods, riding my Victor for maneuverability, scooped up the cash, and led John Doe to this spot. He'd marked it by throwing a towel on the roadside, then hauled ass. John Doe couldn't kill him before that, not knowing where the place was, or catch him afterward. A half mile farther, Madbird had dumped the bike and run back through the woods. John Doe had been wary, probably on the lookout for exactly that. Before he'd moved in on us, he'd hidden and waited ten minutes. With only the pistol, Madbird hadn't been able to get close enough for a decent shot until John Doe decided he was safe and got busy with us.

Five thousand bucks was a lot of money for me, especially if I figured it by the hour. Better still, another hired gun disappearing was going to drive Balcomb nuts. The more frustrated and desperate he got, the more likely he was to make a mistake.

After we'd marched John Doe four or five miles, we came to a rock shelf above a steep, deadfall-choked ravine.

Madbird gave me a nod and said, "This'll work. Tape his wrists."

He sliced John Doe's elbows free, at the same time torquing his wounded arm up into a hammerlock. John Doe thrashed and snarled into his gag. The round hadn't lodged in his triceps, just torn a gouge, and the bleeding had pretty much stopped. But it must have hurt like a bitch. Madbird shoved him face-first against a thick Doug fir. We forced his wrists around it so he was hugging it and I taped them together good and tight.

I'd been following Madbird's lead, assuming half-consciously that John Doe wouldn't be coming back with us, but not thinking about specifics. Now that the moment was here, my heart was starting to pound again. I tried to slow my breathing, reminding myself of what he'd been about to do to Laurie and me.

Then it occurred to me that you didn't need to bind somebody to a tree to shoot him.

John Doe seemed to be realizing the same thing. He craned his head around at us, cheeks puffing in and out like gills as he tried to mouth threats or pleas through the tape.

Madbird unsheathed his knife again-a scalpel-sharp, crescent-bladed Puma game skinner.

"Time you learned how to do this," he said to me. "I'll get you started, then you take over."

Learn how to do what? I tried to say. But my breath stuck in my lungs. Madbird put his left hand on top of John Doe's head like he was palming a basketball and slammed a hip into his back, pinning him against the tree.

"You grab hold here," Madbird said. He closed his fist and jerked the head back by the hair.

Then he pressed the knife blade just under the far left edge of the hairline.

"And slice toward you, nice and careful."

John Doe squealed, an impressively loud sound considering the duct tape.

My stopped-up breath exploded out of my mouth.

"Jesus, Madbird! Wait!"

He glanced over his shoulder at me, annoyed.

"You ain't got to yell, I'm standing right here."

I floundered to explain. "Shouldn't we at least kill him first?"

"What's the point of that?"

"Well-it just seems like, you know, common courtesy."

He lowered the knife and stepped away, shaking his head.

"Fucking white people. You already tell us how we're supposed to do everything else, and now this?"

John Doe was trying to hop around the tree, or maybe climb it. A thread-thin red streak a couple of inches long had appeared on his forehead where the blade touched and blossomed into a dribbling stream of blood. Madbird thunked the knife into the bark beside his face, raising another squeal.

"Your call," he said to me. "But if you don't mind a little advice, you're gonna have a problem. His hair got some kind of greasy shit on it." He sniffed his left palm and wiped it disgustedly on John Doe's back. "You got to reef on it pretty good to tear it loose, 'cause of all them roots going down. So I brung some dikes. It's kind of cheating, but I ain't gonna tell." He felt around in his pockets and pulled out an old pair of lineman's pliers, their scarred plastic grips wrapped with electrician's tape, and slapped them into my hand.

I walked to the bull pine and wrenched the knife free. By now John Doe was slamming his head against the tree, blowing snot like a mule and maybe trying to howl. I slammed my hip against his back like I'd seen Madbird do, clamped a hank of his greasy hair with the pliers, and twisted up hard. He bucked and gurgled, cheeks bulging. I raised the knife with my other hand and pressed its edge against his hairline.

Then I let go of him, and stepped around to the other side of the tree, and cut the tape on his wrists.

Neil McMahon – Lone Creek

We sat John Doe on the ground, pulled off his stiff new hiking boots, sliced them to pieces, and threw those into the brush. Then Madbird crouched beside him with the knife point to his cheek and spoke close to his ear.

"Now, you go telling anybody what really happened here, it sure ain't gonna make you look good. If I was you, I'd disappear and let Balcomb worry. And you ever come near any of us again, you best believe I'll find you. I used to make my own living killing people. 'Cept it was hunting other soldiers in the jungle-not gunning down unarmed civilians."

John Doe had been clasping his wounded arm with his other hand, but now he raised it shakily to start tugging at the tape across his eyes. Madbird pressed the knife to his cheek again, a little harder this time, just enough to draw blood.

"I didn't say nothing about that," Madbird said. "Leave it on."

He jerked John Doe to his feet and gave him a shove toward the ravine. We watched him start picking his way down into it, mincing and stumbling in his socks.

"I wouldn't go yelling," Madbird called after him. "Lot of griz around. They hear you, they'll come check it out, and soon as they smell blood-like hot sauce on a taco."

"Rattlesnakes are what I'd worry about," I said. "They're going to be sunning on the rocks, and it's breeding season. They get real aggressive."

"You ain't lying. One of them motherfuckers bit me on the thumb one time. Arm swole up twice its size, doctors thought they were gonna have to cut it off."

In fact, the odds were next to nil of a bear taking enough interest in him to attack, and there were few, if any, snakes at this elevation. But it would give him something to keep his mind off his other problems.

Much more quietly, Madbird said, "I never scalped nobody, are you kidding? Never tortured, never raped. Never killed unless I had to." He paused and reconsidered. "Well-maybe if they really needed killing."

I'd picked up fast that the scalping was bogus-a harsh scare to pay back John Doe for his own cruelty. I'd realized, too, that Madbird was leaving his fate up to me.

I hadn't been sure until the last second whether or not I was going to cut his throat.

I wasn't sure why I'd backed off, either. It wasn't from fear of consequences or any other solid reason, like there'd been with Kirk. This terrain was so far from any beaten track, so rough and thickly wooded, that I was near to being lost myself. If we'd thrown him down into the ravine there'd soon have been nothing left but scattered bones, and even if somebody ever did chance across those, identifying him and linking him to me was a possibility as remote as this spot itself. Most likely my reluctance had stemmed from a deeply embedded knee-jerk concept of who I was. Killing Kirk in a frenzy of violence had been bad enough. Cold-blooded execution was unimaginable.

But now I started thinking it was really cowardice-that I'd shirked a grim but necessary duty, and excused myself by calling it mercy.

If ever I'd run into someone who needed killing, it was John Doe.

He was still practically crawling, easily within range of the long-barreled.41 Magnum. It was a very powerful pistol and, especially if you lay prone or braced yourself against a tree, quite accurate. All he'd feel would be an instant of impact to the back of his head, over with too quickly even to cause pain. Christ only knew how much more pain he was going to cause to how many people, maybe including us.

"You think I should do it?" I said to Madbird.

He rubbed the back of his hand against his jaw.

"Whichever way you go, you'll spend the rest of your life being glad of it and wishing you'd gone the other, both. Hard to tell which'll weigh heaviest."

"What about gunning down an unarmed civilian?"

"That ain't a unarmed civilian. That's something dressed up human."

I ran it through my mind again, this time with more focus, and finally got a glimmer of what was really holding me back.

"It's like I'm being offered some kind of free chance in a game," I said. "If I use it to take him out, that's one worry out of the way. But then I've spent it, and I might need it a whole lot more somewhere down the line."

Madbird nodded. "The way things been going, I'd say that's a real good bet."

We stayed and watched John Doe crash around in the brush until he finally disappeared. His odds of making it were pretty good. The Scapegoat was big and wild, but lost people usually survived in these kinds of woods, even for several days under far worse weather conditions. Especially in this climate, his wound wasn't life-threatening. Eventually he'd run into a marked trail, or he could follow a stream downhill if he had enough sense.

Although if he was both stupid and unlucky and kept going north into the Bob Marshall, he was in for a long walk.