Ransom X

  *****

  Legacy raced out of the central building and into the flat parking area. He saw the taillights of the bikes winking in the distance like the faraway advertising of grief and defeat, only 9.99 plus shipping and handling.

  “Act now!” he thought, the irony of the moment stored in a compartment of his brain for the retelling of the story.

  But there was something standing between him and immediate action. Another prowler entered the pool of light created by the overhead lamp. The snarling copy of the one he’d dispatched inside. It waited on the edge of the light, uncertain of what to do next. Legacy realized that it was the blood of his partner that was making him so cautious. “He must smell it on me,” he thought.

  Legacy didn’t have time to play games. Decisive action led to a gambit that was all or nothing. He planted his feet in a wide stance, and then began to walk toward the beast. It was a walk and a force of nature all at the same time. No hesitation, no compromise, he approached with the confidence of death on the march, clicking off the distance that separated them.

  The dog began to act anxiously as Legacy continued forward. It skittered left then right – the uncertainty made the creature look like it was limping. Then suddenly something caught Legacy’s attention, the dog seemed to be staring at a fixed point behind him, but as he drew closer he realized that the animal’s eyes were not gazing at something behind him, rather they were riveting deeply into his own.

  A gust of wind came up from behind him and something, a scent or possibly the dead chill of Legacy’s eyes made the difference. The dog fled into the night, vanishing silently back into the shadows. Then, a safe distance away, an almost unearthly howl brushed the wind. It was a vast, empty sound that lasted only a moment then decayed so slowly that it almost never seemed to end.

  Legacy decided later that it wasn’t fear that had ruled their confrontation, as he’d originally thought. It was uncertainty, if the dog had known either that it was going to win or lose the fight it would have engaged, that’s what it had been trained to do. But the commodity that Legacy presented was so unnatural that it brought the dog to an understanding of his foe. The shattered cry that accompanied this understanding could have been for his dead partner or it could have been the harmonic that it felt from that single moment of connection to the crazed human. Legacy felt the sound echo through the night and he knew where the almost spectral sound had originated.

  He knew that it was simple animal fear that drove the dog into the night. But for a long time after that, long after he’d forgotten his own reassuring internal account of the evening, he wondered what was located far behind his own eyes, deep inside, that could be so terrifying.

  He turned his attention to the trail. There was something odd about the way one of the taillights flickered. A deep wide imprint led to the parking area. Blade was dragging something behind his bike. Legacy bent down, seeing something glint in the lamplight. It was sapphire green with glittering specks on one side, yellow ivory on the other. A chip from a painted toenail.

  For one gut wrenching moment he thought that the cargo they dragged away must be bodies, but his mind was jumping forward in an annoying way. It had nothing to do with the fact that Wagner hadn’t been accounted for.

  Legacy’s ranger training, a fog in the backdrop of his life, returned in a split second. It didn’t need to be called upon, it was simply there. His body moved with silent, efficient speed to the end of the driveway. The pattern was rigid, like one of the bikes was dragging a sled, but who was on it? Laura would be dead in the killing room if Blade had access to her. Laura wasn’t a passenger.

  It could be Darci, or Wagner, or both.

  He gazed at his own car sitting in the camp parking lot, worthless for pursuit in this rough terrain. The ruts in the road could easily be avoided along a two-tire line, and these bikers probably knew them like the ridges of the handgrips on their bikes. An unconscious map that allowed them to glide down the mountain and not bump and scrape every turn.

  Legacy took only a moment to dismiss the idea of driving – he followed the sled path back to a building that must have served as a kennel. The smell of gunpowder, thin in the air, gave him the chills. Someone had spent rounds in this room, and he expected neither of the parties who carried firearms to miss their target. The lack of blood hardly comforted him – not only because Legacy would only know comfort if it hit him so hard that it collapsed a lung – also because his ability to process comfort had shut down, and it would remain so until Wagner was safe.

  An observer – which strangely enough there was one, might have thought Legacy’s behavior to be closely related to the dogs that patrolled the compound.

  He covered the field in deft strides. He never stopped for long, his legs propelling him efficiently to the next piece of information, confident that his mind would catch up with his stride during the journey. It was the way that Legacy worked, it was the reason he was such a valuable asset in the field. These moments, piecing together the special identities, relationships and actions of those who stood on this ground in the minutes, hours and years before. He had such a history of the place by the time he found Darci and Wagner’s trail into the woods that he could see the drop-off points for the campers, smell the digestion of an antique septic system in the far lot, and more importantly, he knew that there must be a shortcut down to the bar.

  This was once an active church teen camp after all; there couldn’t be a more traveled route away from this place. Rebellion is the most brutally conformist action of the modern Methodist teen, he thought with a wry smile. It didn’t matter that later he found out that they were Presbyterians – the trail to the bar was still there.

  Wagner was the woman who’d left the lipstick mark on that burning cigarette in the bar. The trail bypassed the long arching dirt road with a rickety bridge over the dry riverbed, but he wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. His pace quickened, sensing that his mind was about to lay in a destination. And then there it was, a plan he may have rejected on merit, but one that his body adopted without question. Wagner had that effect on people – even him. If there was any chance of recovering Wagner from the hands of that madman, it lay in a little madness of his own.

  He let the glow of the building soak into his eyes for a moment longer. Something bothered him about the trailers parked in lines beside the central building. He saw the blast heaters sticking out from the tops, one of the fans churning full blast, rattling hot air into the car below. Why was that one on full and the others hummed at a constant low whirr? Before the question fully formed, he knew the answer. He paused for a moment to scan the ridge for whoever had left the door open.