The Gorge

CHAPTER FIVE

One of the bombs must have had a faulty trigger, because it had detonated a couple of seconds after the first two. Ace hadn’t expected the wire to set off all three bombs. The sulfuric stench of explosives filled the air, along with shredded bits of leaves. After Ace picked himself off the ground, it took a second to get oriented.

Haircut Number One was prone on the ground, yelling into the radio. “Castle! You down?”

A voice, most likely that of Piss-and-Vinegar, broke through the static and burst from the speaker. No words came out, only an angry moan.

“What’s your 10–20?” Haircut said into his mouthpiece, rising and circling below the clearing, nearly disappearing into the gloom. In the silence that followed the explosion, Ace hustled to keep up. If Piss-and-Vinegar was down, then Ace could nail Haircut during the rescue attempt. Cops and soldiers had those stupid codes of honor that required them to risk their own lives for their fallen buddies.

“Ace?” Clara called from the camp.

Haircut, hearing her voice, headed toward the ledge that opened up onto the gorge. Piss-and-Vinegar must have tried to sneak up on the camp from that side, figuring to hide among the rocks. Haircut stopped, set aside his radio, and sprawled on his belly in the jumble of granite slabs. The bombs had triggered a landslide.

He shouted down into an opening in the rocks. The roar of the river kept his words from reaching Ace, who gripped a dead tree at the edge of the clearing. Though the deepening darkness disguised the sheer expanse of the gorge, Ace could feel it in his gut, and vertigo turned his knees to jelly.

Damn. He would have loved a two-fer, getting headlines in big type, but he wasn’t quite ready for the last hurrah. A cop killing would pretty much guarantee his own execution, and he wanted his death to mean something. The Lord had told him that life was sacred, even if that life was still in its mother’s belly. But all life wasn’t created equal. Ace scrambled away from the agent, glad to put some distance between him and the ledge. He doubled back to the campsite, expecting to find Clara there.

The beans had turned black in the pan, the fire had burned low, and Clara was nowhere in sight. Damned high-toned bitch. Let the Feds have her. She couldn’t tell them much they didn’t already know, and by noon tomorrow the sky above the gorge would be filled with swarms of helicopters. SWAT teams would be jogging behind bloodhounds, and tens of thousands of acres of wilderness would be about as good a hiding place as a cop’s bedroom closet. Come to think of it, killing the two Feds might buy him a day or two, but he couldn’t force himself to face that black gulf beyond the ledge.

He rolled up the sleeping bag and headed along the ridge, going upriver because the terrain was easier. As darkness gripped the forest, Ace had to feel his way through the trees, one arm raised in front of him to ward off branches. The roar of the river provided the only guide, and even its thundering steadiness was unreliable. He came to a clearing and paused, listening, wondering if the Feds had somehow found his trail.

At the edge of the clearing stood a form that blended with the surrounding murk.

Hunched like a monkey, too short and wiry to be Clara.

Friggin’ Feds had tracked him.

Ace reacted the only way he knew, fueled by the anger of being outsmarted. The gun was in his palm before he even thought about it, and three explosions echoed against the trees before he was aware he’d pulled the trigger. From twenty feet away, the slugs should have punched the Fed to the ground. Instead, the form lifted slowly, like a scarecrow on a wire, and drifted through the treetops.

The fucker is FLYING, Ace thought.

Unless secret agents had come up with Buck Rogers backpacks while Ace had been laying low, then something was seriously wrong. Ace fired one more time as the figure cleared a gap in the trees. Its outline was plain against the mottled sunset clouds. It was shaped liked a human, no doubt about that, but it was smaller, knotted up, its arms spread out to reveal short, ragged wings and legs trailing out behind. A keening wail arose from the thing, a cross between the hoot of a gut-shot owl and scream of a gang-raped wildcat.

Ace turned and ran blindly into the woods. Turkey vulture, he told himself. Bald eagle. Kingfisher. Surely all kinds of big birds lived in the gorge.

Except none were as big as a monkey. And this one hardly had any WINGS. And it wasn’t exactly flying, either. It was floating.

There was one other possibility, one Ace kept pushing down to the bottom of his mind, the way you’d drown a pesky kitten. When you did the Lord’s work, you automatically made enemies. Most of those enemies wore sheep’s clothing and hid behind the cross themselves, hypocrites who shunned Ace’s kind while claiming to be pro-lifers themselves. Others upheld the laws of a government that tried to keep God out of every school, courtroom, and library in the nation. Still others didn’t care how many babies were vacuumed and shredded, as long as women got to make their own decisions, even though they were nothing but whores who would spread their legs for any man or doctor who came along.

But those were all human enemies. When you took your marching orders from the Lord, you could expect to run afoul of things with deeper memories and longer hatreds. Them who walked with Satan.

For all Ace knew, that might have been the Devil himself who had put in an appearance. Or maybe, just maybe, it was an angel sent to lend a helping hand.

Either way, Ace’s work must be very important indeed. He ran into the woods.

Fireworks erupted behind his eyelids and his skull thundered. A branch had cracked his forehead, knocking Ace to his knees. Blood trickled down his nose. He wiped at it, but a drop fell onto his lips. It was sweet and rusty. Ace rose to his feet and staggered on through the trees.

Despite the tight sleeve of fear that squeezed his innards, a smile spread across his face.

Important work.