He leapt from the rocks to a field of green meadow, then dashed across the expanse, exhilarated because he could do so. He even laughed. He was back from the grave, back from hell, free to run.
I beat him! I was right there, right in his lair and he didn’t know it! He’s away, he’s after someone else. Sure. Why not Harold Bly, or that Doug character? There are plenty of people in that town who deserve it more than I do. Maybe Tracy was right: maybe the mark will fade if I only get away from here. He looked down to check.
There was a black stain on his shirt. He touched it, and the black slime came off on his fingers. There was no pain.
The moonlight went out. A shadow passed over him like a cloud, and he dropped to the ground, rolling to a frantic stop then lying perfectly still in the grass as a gust of wind swept over the meadow. Scanning the sky, he could discern the stars wiggling in succession over the crest of Saddlehorse.
No, I’m not out of the woods. I’m still in trouble, but I let myself forget. Just like Tracy.
The wound began to ache again and strangely, he felt relieved.
A long, black shadow swept across the face of the mountain. The dragon was circling, searching. It had come so close it had to have seen him.
With a heart stained black and the memory of a sea of bones still fresh in his mind, Steve found it all too easy to believe that monster was tethered to his soul.
He also knew he didn’t have much time.
JEFF NELSON, a good miner the company should have kept, knew what was happening. He’d heard the yelling out in the streets, he’d made some calls, he’d loaded his guns, and he was ready to protect his home and his family. Andy Schuller didn’t even have to bang on his door before Jeff threw it open and aimed his hunting rifle right in Andy’s face. “Back up, Andy!” Andy had five armed men behind him, and Jeff hesitated. “I said back up!”
“Jeff,” Andy started to say, “listen—”
A gunshot made them all duck.
The shot had come from Abel Hoffmeier, one of Andy’s group, a stubble-faced idler who had borrowed the .45 he held in his hand. Abel was wide-eyed at what he’d just done, but then he started to grin.
Jeff had flinched with the rest of them and didn’t realize he’d been shot before his legs buckled under him and he slid down the doorframe to the landing, still clinging to his rifle. The slug that had torn through his heart had left a bloody groove in the doorjamb behind him. His wife Becky started to scream.
Andy and his mob all looked at Abel, then at Jeff, each man sorting out the justice of it.
John Tyler, a trucker, offered a verdict. “He was gonna kill you, Andy.”
Andy recovered from his shock, bolstered himself, and ordered, “Okay, boys, clear it out.”
With a whoop, they stormed into the house as Becky screamed for mercy and the four children started crying.
DOUG AND KYLE had moved the roadblock, and they watched as the Carlsons and Malones drove through with whatever they could carry in two pickups and a car. They’d left quite a bit behind, hoping to come back for it when it was safe to do so.
“Doug!” yelled Bruce Dilly, a miner on welfare who preferred not to mine. “What about all that stuff they left behind?”
“What about it?”
“Well, are they coming back for it?”
Doug gave him a knowing look. “You see something you want, help yourself.”
There was just a moment’s hesitation. “What about Harold?”
“What about him?”
Bruce and several friends thought that over, arrived at a conclusion as a body, and with whoops and hollers raced each other to get there first.
STEVE HAD to marvel. “Jules Cryor never knew how close he was.”
Steve had gotten his hunch from the mountain peaks across the valley and followed that hunch across the meadow, over a rock outcropping, and to the brink of a cliff where he now lay prone in a niche, looking down at the roof of Jules Cryor’s cabin, only two hundred feet below him and not more than half a mile from the dragon’s lair. The cabin appeared to be intact and untouched. Cryor must have met his fate while out on the mountainside, perhaps even lured there by the dragon itself.
Steve had no resources, no weapons, no food. He was alone in the dark on the side of a bare mountain, courting the risk of exposure. He had a tenacious beast hunting him down, taking advantage of some intangible—maybe spiritual—link with him. His friend from the sheriff’s office had been eaten before his eyes. The friend he recognized too late had been shot dead.
With no other resources, Steve found that praying to God was taking on great importance.
“Now, Lord, You’ve helped me so far . . .”
Maybe God had. It seemed reasonable that the dragon would have located and killed him by now, Steve thought, and yet, as long as he kept calling on God, the dragon couldn’t seem to get a fix on him. With the acknowledgment of God came a sense that somehow the order of things could be reversed, that destiny could be changed. For the first time, Steve felt a sense of hope.
Hope made fighting for his life worthwhile. It made formulating a plan worthwhile. It made climbing down to Jules Cryor’s cabin to carry out that plan worthwhile.
With careful, stealthy moves, Steve started working his way down to the cabin, keeping his eyes open, watching the sky and surrounding terrain, monitoring the pain in and over his heart.
SHERIFF COLLINS’S wife Francie was worried enough when the phone rang. Hearing the official-sounding voice on the other end didn’t make her feel any better.
“Mrs. Collins?”
“Yes.”
“Mrs. Collins, this is Lieutenant Barnard with the State Patrol, Oak Springs Precinct. May I speak with Sheriff Collins?”
Mrs. Collins made no effort to hide her concern. “He’s not here, Lieutenant. I don’t know where he is, and I’m worried about him.”
“You have no idea where he is?”
“No. He should have been home two hours ago. He hasn’t called. I called the station but the calls are all forwarded—”
“So you talked to the dispatcher?”
“I didn’t want to bother the dispatcher. Lester says that number’s only for emergencies.”
“Okay. Well, listen, we’ll see if we can track him down for you.”
“Thank you,” Francie said. “And will you hurry, please?”
“Will do. Thank you, Mrs. Collins.”
Barnard hung up and looked across his desk at Evelyn Benson.
“Now do you believe me?” she asked.
At least he was ready to hear more.
STEVE CAREFULLY eyed the distance across the deep crevasse and then jumped it, landing on a narrow ledge. Success.
Well, one step at a time, he told himself.
He hurried along, mentally talking to God. “I think You understand. I mean, it was a mutual thing. She wanted me, I wanted her . . .”
He was carrying a box of necessities he’d gathered from Jules Cryor’s cabin, wrapped up in a dark flannel shirt to keep the white box from standing out in the moonlight. Carefully, he stole from rock to bush to niche to rock, then to a lone, struggling pine, making his way back to the dragon’s cavern, constantly checking the sky and surrounding terrain for any telltale movement. And all the while he was moving, he kept talking to God.
But talking to God presented one problem: He could only talk to God for so long before he had to be honest, not only with God but with himself. In some areas, that was a new and difficult experience. “Okay, I’m not saying it was a smart thing to do.”
He reached the meadow just below the cavern entrance, hid among a cluster of small pines, and studied the sky again, then the surrounding terrain. “Lord, if he’s there, help me to see him.”
Steve didn’t intend for that prayer to have a double meaning, but God answered it that way. He didn’t see the dragon anywhere but did hear a little voice in his mind saying, Look inside, look inside.
Sounded like Levi. Sa
me sermon. Same pointing finger.
Maybe he was overdoing the prayer stuff, Steve thought. He shifted his focus toward the rock formations that hid the cavern entrance, then with one mad dash he crossed the meadow and ducked behind the rocks.
“ LEGGO, I saw it first!”
“Get real! You don’t even play!”
Bruce Dilly and Clayton Gentry had both come upon a fine Martin steel-string guitar while ransacking Jeff Nelson’s home, and neither could pass it up or give it up. They were out in front of the house tugging at opposite ends of the black guitar case and about to kill each other for possession.
Another gunshot broke the stalemate. Bruce saw what happened and let go of the guitar. Clayton didn’t see what happened until he turned to run, the guitar under his arm.
A block away, a man lay in the street clutching his side, a pool of blood widening on the pavement beneath him. The television he’d been carrying was now being scooped up by the man who’d shot him.
Bruce was stunned enough to forget the guitar.
Clayton had the guitar and a chance to get away with it, so he ran.
Then Bruce ran—down the street to the next vacated house. He wanted to get there before Clayton or anyone else did.
STEVE HAD only worked with explosives once before, trying to get some stumps out of a small pasture back home. This dynamite Jules Cryor had been using was a little different, but the setup procedure was easy enough to figure out. With the welcome help of a flashlight from Cryor’s cabin, Steve hastily set a charge in the cavern entrance and strung the fuse out for about thirty seconds of burn, hoping that would be enough for him but not enough for the dragon. It was only a guess and nothing better.
Then came another action based on a guess. He jammed a stick in the floor of the cavern and then pulled a piece of toilet paper, courtesy of Cryor’s outhouse, from his shirt pocket. He tore off a narrow strip of the paper and stuck it on the end of the stick, letting it hang down like a flag.
Then—okay. It was working. His hunch was right. The little flag was waving, wiggling toward the cavern. Air was moving into the cavern at this end and apparently flowing out through that other tunnel he’d passed. So this little warning flag might work, if he was lucky and if there was a God and if, in the whole cosmic scheme of things, he was meant to survive this night.
There remained one last thing to double-check. He pulled the lighter from his pocket and flicked it. It worked the first time.
Okay. All set.
“CAR THIRTY, car thirty, West Fork Central . . .”
It was Julie the dispatcher, calling from Central Dispatch in West Fork, the hub office that received all the 911 calls for Clark County and then notified the appropriate authorities. Deputy Brad Johanson grabbed the mike from the dash of the patrol car. “Car thirty.”
“Brad?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you seen Sheriff Collins tonight?”
“No. When I clocked in at the office, nobody was there.”
“Where are you now?”
“About eight miles out of West Fork on 209.”
“We got a call from the state patrol. Collins’s wife hasn’t seen him either, and she’s worried.”
Johanson sneered a bit. He was getting a call from dispatch because Francie Collins was worried? Johanson wasn’t worried at all. Collins was a big boy and could have been sidetracked by any number of things that can come up when you’re a cop. “So what do you want me to do?”
“Go back to the office and see if you can find out anything.”
And interrupt my rounds? “Like what? The sheriff probably got sidetracked. It happens.”
“The state patrol wants to know if there are any signs of foul play.”
“What?”
Julie said it again, slowly and clearly. “The state patrol wants to know if there are any signs of foul play.”
Now that was weird.
“Okay, I copy. I’ll head there right now. Car thirty is clear.”
He found a wide shoulder, made a U-turn, and headed back toward West Fork.
WHEN JOHANSON had clocked in, the office had been quiet, deserted, and clean. Finding no one there was a little odd, but he didn’t give it a lot of thought. Things got quiet around there at night with the phones forwarded. Tracy Ellis, the officer he was to relieve, could have been out on a call. Already in a hurry, he’d signed out car thirty and left to do his rounds.
Now, taking a second, careful look at the place, things did seem a little strange. For one thing, Sheriff Collins’s patrol car was still in its parking slot, and yet he was nowhere around. He always drove that car to and from work, so obviously, he hadn’t driven home. But that being the case, where was he?
The door to Collins’s office was ajar. Johanson nudged it open with his nightstick, used the nightstick to flip the light on, and looked around inside. Nothing looked out of place. There were no notes or appointments scribbled anywhere that might say where Collins was.
Johanson went out to the counter and checked the sign-out sheet for the day. Both Collins and Ellis had signed in that morning, but neither had signed out.
He grabbed the key to the cell block, opened the metal door, and walked down the narrow corridor to the three cells. He could smell a faint trace of bleach and detergent, but couldn’t tell where it was coming from until he got to cell number three. The floor, walls, ceiling, and bars of the cell had been scrubbed clean.
Well, that wasn’t unusual, considering the prisoner they were keeping in here the night before. But he kept it in mind.
He went through the rest of the office and found nothing unusual. The Department of Motor Vehicles testing area looked the same, and so did the office area, the conference room, and the coffee room. Yet his instincts told him something was wrong.
He went back to the counter and leaned on it, thinking. Collins had signed in but didn’t sign out, his car was still here, his office was clean and neat, cell three was scrubbed clean, the other rooms looked undisturbed—
His office was clean and neat?
Johanson went to Collins’s office door again and poked his head in. It did smell rather clean in there. He knelt and sniffed the floor. Yeah. Floor cleaner—a little bit of bleach, too. Somebody had scrubbed this floor just like they scrubbed the floor of cell three.
Why only this office? Why only that cell?
So maybe he wasn’t looking for signs of foul play. Maybe he was looking for the obvious lack of them.
Then he spotted Collins’s jacket on the coat rack and went over for a closer look. The moment he touched it he noticed black smears all over the back, as if someone had used the jacket for a shop towel. He sniffed it and wrinkled his nose at the smell. Where had Collins been to pick up this stuff?
From this corner, he could see behind the open door. And now he saw something.
He used his nightstick to swing the door aside and knelt down to examine a stain on the floor that whoever had done the scrubbing had missed.
He grabbed his handheld radio. “West Fork Central, car thirty, Johanson.”
“West Fork Central,” came Julie’s voice. “Go ahead, Brad.”
“Call the state patrol. I might have something.”
STEVE WAS out in front of the cavern entrance, plainly visible, scanning the sky and the flanks of the mountain, walking nonchalantly back and forth—and talking. Loudly.
“I guess Jennifer needed a gentler hand. You know women, the way they are, you have to make them feel loved and give them flowers and all that garbage. I mean, what did she expect, like I’ve got time for that kind of thing? I earned a living, didn’t I? That should’ve been enough.”
He kept his eyes open, but so far nothing looked out of place.
“I mean, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. I’ve got my life, my career, I’ve got bears to track and tag, papers to write, classes to teach. The very fate of nature itself hinges on my involvement. Jennifer never understood that.”
He paused to listen. No sounds yet.
“And she should have. She was the problem, not me. Hey, if our marriage fell apart, it wasn’t my fault.”
Far to the east, a star wiggled. Then another.
How long should he keep this up? Steve wondered.
“Anyway, maybe it was all for the best. It made me available again, and I can’t knock that. When Tracy came along, I could—” He should have known this part would hurt. “I could—”
Maybe now would be a good time to quit. He couldn’t help thinking of Cliff. It had been so easy to blame him, to be angry with him, to marvel at his impulsiveness, his stupidity . . .
Well, Cliff, better move over, bro, I’m standing in the same place. Guess I didn’t learn much from what happened to you. Maybe, as Harold Bly had said, Steve had just preferred not to think about it.
The wrinkle in the sky was coming his way across the valley. He could see it widening, growing.
Time to get inside. He dashed through the crooked blind of rocks to the cavern entrance then looked up in time to see a definite shape descending. He could hear the rush of wind over the wings.
He ducked into the cavern and around the first corner. Then he waited, his back tight against the wall, every nerve on edge, the lighter ready in his clenched fist.
A puff of wind whistled through the cavern entrance, and the little flag of toilet paper fluttered straight out from the stick. Then the flag settled back into a slow, lazy waving in the incoming current of air.
Steve held his breath and remained motionless, watching, listening for the barely audible sound of the dragon moving over the ground.
A claw clicked against a stone. A wing rustled as it folded. There was a long, even, scraping sound over the gravel on the mountain slope.
Steve remained rooted to the cave floor, fighting terror, fighting the impulse to flee.
He heard a quick, quiet huff of air through huge nostrils.
A pebble fell from somewhere and plinked on the ground.
Steve craned his neck just enough to check the dynamite placed against the wall of the entrance. A shaft of moonlight had found a path through the rock blind and washed the cavern wall silvery gray.