Fear No Evil

Chapter 96

I had been moving cautiously north ever since the family went into the narrows, praying to God I’d see one of the cartel men instead of the monster grizzly bear that was stalking in the forest somewhere ahead of me.

The beast’s tracks were no longer on the trail, but I’d seen where it’d left it, pressing down grass and snapping brush and branches as it headed diagonally northeast toward the river. It wasn’t until I stopped to watch our raft go around the bend and into the narrows that I saw movement that became a man carrying an AR rifle about a hundred and fifty yards ahead of me.

His attention was off the trail toward the river and for a second, I thought for sure he’d seen the bear. But then he darted into the trees where he’d been looking.

I took a few more steps and picked him up again, moving through the woods toward a ledge high above the South Fork. He walked out onto the ledge, aimed toward the river bottom, and let go a burst of gunfire.

Someone across the river on the east side opened fire with another automatic weapon. I’d just found the second shooter in my binoculars when a shot from way downriver buckled him.

The narco on my side seemed puzzled by that shot but fired at the raft again. Thanking God for the rain, the green khaki clothes I wore, and the gunman still shooting, I stooped over and ran at him.

He stopped firing and I came to a halt on the backside of a big ponderosa pine tree about fifty yards from him, close enough to hear the action on his rifle clank open when he ran out of bullets.

Footsteps! He’s coming to the trees to reload!

I saw him slip off the ledge, still moving, head down, fumbling to eject and load a new clip. With his attention there and my shotgun still shouldered, I managed to close another fifteen yards on the narco. I stopped and whistled softly his way.

The gunman glanced and saw me with the shotgun aimed at him from thirty-five yards. No way I could miss.

“Drop it or you’re a dead man,” I said in Spanish.

He hesitated, then dropped the AR and the clip.

“Back out on the ledge,” I said, waving the shotgun’s muzzle that way.

He hesitated for a moment before trudging back onto the ledge with me paralleling him, the shotgun’s bead never leaving his center of mass. After taking two steps out into the open, he halted and looked at me.

“On your belly,” I said. “Hands behind your head.”

He lay down and complied. I took my first step onto the ledge, glanced left about forty yards, and saw that the fifteen-foot-wide ledge met a vertical rock wall there, eight feet at the top and maybe six feet wide.

The wall was shielding me and the narco from that weapon far downriver. I went quickly to the cartel man, put my boot on his back, and used extra zip ties Sampson had brought on the trip to bind his wrists.

Done, I peered across the river through the rain, trying to spot Sampson. But I wasn’t seeing him or any movement whatsoever despite the machine-gun fire that had to have echoed through the entire canyon.

“Don’t move,” I told the gunman and turned toward the woods, meaning to retrieve his AR rifle and clip.

Raphael Durango was coming through the trees, not twenty yards away, and aiming a rifle at me.

“Drop the gun, Cross,” he said. “It’s over.”