The Gorge

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In many ways, losing a partner was worse than taking a bullet yourself.

In addition to the shame of letting Ace Goodall slip away, Jim Castle now had a permanent black mark on his record. Assuming The Rook was actually dead. Castle didn’t quite accept the image of the winged creature carrying a grown man into the sky as easily as a hawk might rip a mouse aloft. But The Rook’s yell of pain had been real, and against the small, still sounds of the night and the susurrant river, it seemed to echo off the trees and around the hard shell of Castle’s skull.

Agents accepted the possibility of dying in the line of duty. That was part of the excitement of the job. The rush of adrenaline came with the territory, and premature and eternal retirement was an occupational hazard. But just as airline pilots believed their next flights wouldn’t be that one-in-a-million with an unhappy ending, in the back of their minds, all agents believed it wouldn’t happen to them.

And if you lost a partner, you expected it to happen by the book: a car crash during a high-speed chase, a shoot-out in a hostage situation, or an explosion during a security detail. Maybe even through someone else’s goof, like the failure to see a trip wire. You didn’t expect some deformed bird of prey to pluck your partner from the sky and dangle it like a rag doll.

But was it a bird?

Of course it was a bird. A giant one, sure, a bizarre backwoods species so rare that it hadn’t been discovered. New animals popped up all the time, mostly just before they became extinct. The Amazon jungle was full of This isn’t the Amazon. This is the Southern Appalachian Mountains. The world’s oldest mountain range, like The Rook said, but these peaks had been prowled by the Red Man, the White Man, and maybe even the Little Green Men From Mars, and no one had ever reported such a man-eating fowl.

Castle had moved away from the collapsed section of hillside. He wanted to be as far away from the scene of the attack as possible. He’d collected their backpacks and gone to Goodall’s camp, figuring to wait out the night, collect what clues he could find in the morning, and hike back to civilization. Once there, assuming he could make it without The Rook’s compass and memory, he’d file a report, turn in his badge, and check himself into an orderly brick building with daisies bordering the porch and grass that stayed green year round. A clean, well-lighted place, with bars over the windows through which no giant birds could crash.

The forest at night had taken on a menacing quality. A skein of clouds filtered the quarter moon, and the tall branches were like wicked arms twisted by a thousand winds. Leaves rattled in the underbrush, and each new scraping sound hearalded the stealthy approach of the bird-beasts. He found a rough trail, one not marked on any map and likely the path of both prey and predator, and followed it along the ridge.

His backpack held a flashlight, but he was afraid to use it. The light might summon the creature-or creatures, if the thing in the hole had been of the same species as the flyby nightmare-and with the night closing in, his years of training failed him and he became the lost boy in the big, cold bed, the shadows holding terrible monsters. Only this time, he didn’t have a mother who would come running when he called. Not that he’d called her often. Even then, he’d had a deep streak of pride that battled his fear. Here in the Unegama wilderness, there was no one to peek into the dark spaces and declare them safe.

He wondered how much he would fudge the report. The Rook was relatively young and had never married. No kids. That should have been a comfort, but somehow the lack of survivors made his death (and Castle couldn’t accept any other outcome) all the more empty, as if his genetic soup had poured into the ground and been lost forever.

Yes, the report would be fiction. It had to be. The Rook would fall from a cliff, in hot pursuit of Goodall. That might earn him posthumous recognition and save Castle some shame. It would also send extra personnel into the area as they looked for a fallen hero along with the mass murderer who had caused The Rook’s death.

Except they couldn’t save Castle. Whether he made it through dead or alive.

The rough animal trail turned into a rippled wash of soil, the erosion of centuries creating a series of natural steps down an embankment. Water flowed downhill, and the river eventually joined up with Lake Chotoa. The lakeside was densely developed, though mostly for summer homes. Few people would be there this time of year, but Castle would get help. There were probably even cell phone towers there. With the radio batteries dead, the cell phone was his only means of communication. But the phone had been rendered useless here in the gorge, blocked from signals and isolated from other systems. Reaching the lake might again connect him with the real world and its sane, solid angles. A world without man-sized, man-eating birds.

Castle scrambled down the wash, senses tuned to the crunching leaves beneath his boots. The hair on the back of his neck stood up, and his ears strained against the soft roar of the river for any odd sound Like the flap of giant wings -

Such as Ace Goodall’s footsteps.

Goodall couldn’t have gone far, even if he’d fled camp shortly before sunset. The Bama Bomber would be slowed by his gear, and he may have hooked up with the woman again. The Rook said Goodall’s assessment revealed a man in desperate need of attention, the kind who probably clipped newspaper articles about his crimes. Such a pathetic mind would crave the company of someone who would see him as a hero, and in turn Goodall would be compelled to show off with increasingly reckless and aberrant behavior. It would be the desperate codependence of a sadist and masochist, The Rook had said.

The two had undoubtedly planned the trap. The girl by the camp, posing as bait, while Goodall hid in the woods with three kinds of weapons. The Rook had even warned that Goodall might use her as an unwitting guinea pig, pack a sleeping bag with explosives, and detonate it as the agents closed in on the camp. Castle and his partner had been ready for all contingencies but one: a wrong step, a big kablooey, and the unleashing of an unnatural beast.

The wash bottomed out on a wider section of trail, one that was still primitive but passable. If Goodall and the girl were reunited, they’d be moving slowly. Like him, they were probably headed for the river, wanting to take the fastest possible route to escape now that their whereabouts were known. Perhaps Castle could catch up with them and take down Goodall. No one would blame him for killing the subject. Goodall was wanted dead or alive, with a $100,000 bounty out for information leading to his arrest and conviction. Killing the murderer would maybe ease some of the acid that roiled in Castle’s gut, the juice of failure and fear.

Forget the bird-beast. Forget The Rook. Forget little Jimmy Castle, the kid who shivered under the blankets. This one’s for law and order.

Yeah, sure. Let’s fall back on that one. Duty.

Because you know what’s under the bed, and you’re too afraid to peek.

Castle drew his Glock and jogged silently through the murk of night, not buying his own line of bullshit.