High Country Nocturne

Chapter Forty-four

Peralta yelled for me to stay put but I was already crossing the porch in two long strides and leaping down the wooden steps, looking for a body on the ground.

She was gone.

A dark shape disrupted the blackness ahead, moving across road.

My ears still ringing from the gunshots, I was already moving, taking one tree, then another, for cover. But no shots came. Snowflakes hit my face and melted.

The road, in my memory from daylight, was a good thirty feet wide. I ducked behind the nearest pine, but only for a few seconds before I advanced in an infantryman’s crouch, adrenalin bearing me forward. The gravel crunched under my boots, then the surface turned to dirt and I dropped and rolled across the broken ground. It was the right move. I heard a snap behind me as a bullet meant for my head hit a tree branch. I saw the muted flash of her suppressor and fired at it.

As the echo of the Python subsided, I didn’t hear any moaning of a wounded woman. So I propelled myself ahead with elbows, forearms, and knees, crawling across pine needles and hard-packed dirt. I carefully held aside a branch so it wouldn’t make noise and shimmied to a fallen tree trunk. I hoped that I wasn’t lying on a nest of hibernating rattlesnakes. For all I knew, the Mogollon Monster was beside me.

Another shot went over my head. How could she be ranging me in this darkness? I hadn’t seen a night-sight on her pistol and she didn’t have a backpack that might be holding one. Yet I had only seen her for a second. The one constant about Amy Russell and me was that I underestimated her.

Then I saw the white cloud of frozen air coming out of my mouth. I stifled a curse and made myself breathe through my nose. That lessened the mist. I stayed behind the log and slowed my breathing with difficulty.

There was a real monster in the woods. To defeat her, I had four rounds left in the revolver and two Speedloaders in my belt. I didn’t have night-vision goggles. I didn’t have the Maglite. I had no gloves and my hands were getting numb with the cold. This would have to do.

“Amy!”

Silence.

“Amy Russell!”

“Come get me!” Her voice sounded maybe twenty yards away and all the Southern was gone from her accent.

I looked toward her and saw nothing but empty night. I could make out six feet ahead, no more. It was the blackest darkness I had ever seen. If it weren’t for the sound of the river and the snow hitting me like icy leaves, I might as well have been in the bottom of a well.

For all I knew, she was trying to circle back to the cabin. That would have been the smart move. But I stood and descended a rocky slope. Then my feet gave way and I slid ten feet, too loud, and landed at the edge of running water.

No shots came.

The river was about ten feet across here, maybe a little wider. I couldn’t see that far. From memory, I knew a person could walk easily across. Unless it was flooding, this branch of the upper Verde was little more than a creek here.

“How’s wifey, Doctor Mapstone?”

She was to my right, probably across the river. I called, “She’s going to be fine.”

“That’s too bad.”

I called, “Nobody else has to get hurt.”

“You know that’s not true.”

Was she closer, or was I imagining it? Must keep moving. It was my only chance against someone with her training. So I made my legs rise and I surged forward, splashing across the Verde bent low, both hands on the Python. I nearly lost my balance on the small, smooth rocks in the streambed. Across and up a modest slope, a big ponderosa awaited me. I fell behind it and swept my perimeter with the gun barrel.

“I know all about you, Amy…”

“You don’t know anything!” She was angry now. And closer.

The snow wasn’t sticking to the ground yet, but it swirled in front of my face. I stared into the night, trying to detect texture and folds and movement in the blackness.

“How can all this bring back your husband and your daughter? I know what happened to them in Calgary. I know what you did to Chaos for revenge. Did cutting the throats of his children bring back your daughter?”

After a long pause, “I didn’t expect it to.”

“Your family wouldn’t want this, Amy.” I ratcheted my voice down to a conversational tone, tried to keep it steady. “When does it stop?”

“When I get my stones.” Conversational tone. I heard undergrowth snapping to my left.

I said, “That’s not going to happen.”

I smelled Chanel Number Five. A pinecone crunched six feet away. Out of the gloom, I could see she was crouched, aiming at me with a combat grip.

Her face was flushed and her breathing came hard from the run, fog shooting out into the night. She nearly whispered, “You can’t save me. You can’t redeem what happened. You can’t even save yourself.”

I had the Python dead on her, both sights lined up.

“No,” I said. “It ends right now.”

“The world is evil, Mapstone,” she said. “You can’t stop it. You can’t even make a stand against it. I played by your rules and I couldn’t stop it. So either kill me or put your gun on the ground and walk back to the cabin with me behind you. Simple choice. No time.”

The Python was steady. So was my breathing.

In the next nanosecond, as she opened her mouth, I took a breath, let it out slowly, and pulled, letting the smooth action of the Colt do the rest.

A boom, a long flash of red and yellow, and the echo of the explosion ruptured the night.