Willing Hostage

  “You’re not going to shoot them?” She turned to meet a hard level stare.

  “Not them. We didn’t scare them up.” He pointed ahead.

  A helicopter, similar to the one that had dangled her into a mountain lake, sat in tall grass. Several men were running toward a boat like theirs on the edge of the river.

  Brian and Charlie were in the boat and another man pushed them off.

  Leah saw Brian raise a paddle and Charlie raise a rifle.

  “Stop, Wyndham, or we’ll stop you,” Peter Bradshaw yelled from the shore.

  “If you want the papers you’d better pray we get to Split Mountain Ramp!” Glade’s paddle propelled them faster. But no shot was fired.

  They rounded a bend in the river and Glade said, “Up on the rim and paddle like hell!”

  Leah did as she was told and the Yampa responded by closing in its cliffs to narrow the water and speed up its mad rush. But it wasn’t long before it stretched out again and their pursuers appeared behind.

  “Damn fools,” Glade muttered. “I wonder if either of them know how to run a river.”

  Leah was soon in the abyss of another angry rapids and then helping to pump out a wallowing boat. She watched with satisfaction as the boat behind her struggled through white water.

  Brian and Charlie made it, though, following doggedly. Charlie had exchanged his rifle for a paddle.

  “They can’t risk drowning the papers—or me in case I haven’t got them yet,” Glade explained and then said softly, “Leah, there’s a suck hole ahead. Don’t panic, but we’ve got to paddle to the right … and we’ve got to start now.”

  She was on the gritty sun-scorched rim and paddling when she saw the low spume of water ahead, grayish below and thinning to white spray above. It didn’t look that hazardous but she’d learned to respect the quiet warning in his voice.

  Her wrists felt weak and her heart raced. She forgot the boat behind her as she fought the Yampa River.

  They cleared the spume by several feet and she looked back to see a boulder the size of a house on the other side of it. The river glanced off the top, causing the spume and creating a hole in the water below … a deep hole with water rushing down in swirling vortexes on each side.

  If they’d been torn from the main current and sucked into the hole they would probably have capsized or been pushed up against the face of the exposed rock and trapped there while the water spewing over from above filled the boat. To paddle out of the hole, they’d have had to paddle uphill as well as against the swirling vortex-created currents.

  She watched for the boat behind them to try out a suck hole, but the Yampa made one of its unpredictable turns and she lost sight of it.

  “If that doesn’t get them, Warm Springs will.” Glade’s voice was casual.

  The Yampa moved on … slowly one minute with side canyons and forests, furiously the next and shooting them between narrow cliffs. The river was as unpredictable as her spy and Leah lived from one minute to the next. She didn’t think about a future she couldn’t believe existed but gritted her teeth for the next challenge, proud to be alive when they had endured an obstacle.

  A sign slipped by on the shoreline, brown with white lettering, WARM SPRINGS. She glanced over her shoulder to see Glade drawing duffel strings around the cat’s whiskers, heard the mighty clamor of a river gone crazy somewhere ahead, felt the excitement under the boat.

  The Yampa swung in a wide curve and spilled into a canyon of sun-dazzled spray.

  A great heap of rocks lay in a jumble on one side, narrowing the channel of the gorged river to forty feet or less. Leah looked down on Warm Springs as the river took a sudden fall to reach it.

  Needing reassurance, she glanced quickly back at Glade. He sat astride the other side of the boat, his paddle raised, his lips pulled back from his teeth, his eyes eloquent with anticipation.

  The Yampa bellowed anger at being throttled through the narrow chasm and the boat rushed toward the fury of spray as the river speeded up to get through the narrows and out to the freedom of a flooded riverbed.

  Water hurtled against boulders and shot into the air, it flew like projectiles off the cliff face. The front of the boat lifted as if mounting a roller coaster.

  The downward swoop lifted her hair from her shoulders and she took a deep breath before an avalanche of water cascaded in heavy lumps from above, splashed up from beneath and flew at her from all sides.

  “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I’d never come to Colorado?” And the Yampa jerked her outside leg off the rim and up into her face. Her knee slammed into her chin and she bit her tongue.

  They hung up for an instant, tilting sideways, then the boat slipped off and she was paddling again. But her partner wasn’t keeping up his end of the deal and they glanced off the side of a rock, swung around and rebounded off the cliff wall.

  Leah ducked to escape the cliff’s overhang that would have bashed her brains into the Yampa and fell headlong into the boat, clinging to the ropes and her paddle as the boat crashed into the cliff again.

  Sun, rocks, spray, and cliff face revolved in confusion. All the thrills of a man-made carnival gone crazy and coming at her at once.

  Swoop … dive … swirl … nausea.… She saw a moment of sky. Whirl … buck … bend.…

  Leah saw a spit of land and choked out, “To the right!” But she could feel no help from behind as the tail of the boat tried to tear away downstream. Using every last ounce of strength, Leah fought to meet the shore and get off the demon river. Below the spit, sheer cliff walls closed in on both sides. If they didn’t beach now, they’d lose the chance. Couldn’t he see that?

  Terror gave her muscles a final lift and the boat hit the spit so hard she fell forward on her face and over onto the shore. Grabbing the rim before the boat slid back into the water and skidding backward on her rear, Leah pulled it up onto the rocks and out of the tumult. She reached to free the drawstrings on a rollicking duffel bag and then realized that she had beached the craft alone.

  Glade Wyndham was not in the boat.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Goodyear squirmed out of a duffel that was half full of water and fell off the pontoon to the rocks below. He lay with his mouth open and his sides thumping quick short breaths.

  Leah had no time to help him. A bright orange life jacket had caught on a high rock at the bottom of the rapids.

  Glade lay with his face hanging over into the water, his arms outstretched, shirt sleeves billowing as if he were bloated. The river washed over him, rolling him from side to side and finally rolling his body off the rock.

  Leah grabbed her paddle and ran along the shore as he started to float downstream. She screamed his name and saw him raise his head and gasp for air, his nose streaming blood.

  Stumbling over smooth, slippery-wet rocks she raced to the end of the beach where a slice of tall sandstone-cliff wall cut into the river. She had to reach him before he was swept past that point or she never would.

  She waded in to her waist and found the next step a drop off. She backed away from it, her body reeling with the force of water released at last from the rapids.

  “Glade!” Leah leaned forward and stretched out the paddle as far as she dared.

  Glade flailed water, went under and bobbed to the surface, dark eyes molded a round, blank stare.

  Another orange life jacket appeared behind him. Charlie wasn’t grinning any more. He bounced off the rock that had caught Glade and shot into the air, his mouth forming a circle, his limbs waving in the mist.

  Glade closed a hand on the paddle, but his weight pulled Leah off her feet and the two of them were hurtled against the side of the jutting cliff wall.

  Charlie swept past and disappeared around the edge of the wall.

  Leah found footing and dug in her heels, holding the paddle with one hand and pushing backward on sandstone with the other, as the water tried to pull him away to follow Charlie downstream.

  Brian, clinging to
his overturned boat, shot out of the rapids. “He … lp,” he cried to Leah. Then he too was gone.

  Glade lunged forward until his hands gripped shore and she pulled him in.

  She rolled him over on the rocks above the water and stuffed wads of wet Kleenex from her pocket into his bleeding nostrils.

  Leah drank long from the bottle of chalky Maalox and then capped it.

  The supine cat beside her finally stirred to roll over and hump and retch, as he had so long ago before a plane had chased them all under the bushes. Leah felt suddenly as if she’d known the cat and the man all her life. What had happened to Leah Harper that these two could command a piece of her independence, could insinuate themselves into her dreams, her plan for living? Why had this waited to happen to her until it was too late? Life seemed very precious now.

  Hot sun began to dry her clothes. She sat with knees pulled tight to her chest and watched the man pace up and down the rocky shore, hugging himself and shaking.

  Leah giggled and couldn’t stop it before it turned to laughter.

  Glade stopped to stare murder. “Will you tell me what is so goddamned funny?” The low deadly voice lost its effect when shaken with tremble spasms.

  “You.” And she laughed again and walked down to him. “You were scared … you … the great big he-man spy. Death scares you, too.” She ducked his sideswipe and, still laughing, sat helplessly on the rocks.

  “Well, what the hell did you expect?” He resumed his pacing. “I came up under the boat twice … there’s no air under there … and almost drowned … and what do I get? A laugh!”

  “Oh, you want sympathy … that’s good. Like I got at Little Joe?”

  Glade lifted her to her feet and she buried her face in his wet shirt, wound her arms around him. His body shuddered against her.

  “I saved your big, dumb life. For what, I don’t know. For the Yampa or the goons or Welker or Bradshaw? Why did I bother?”

  “Leah, we’ve still got a chance. This isn’t Russia or.… There are going to be too many groups vying with each other at Split Mountain Ramp for anybody to quietly do away with us. That’s why I set it up that way.”

  “I just don’t trust anyone anymore.” She tightened her arms and wished that her dark-browed protector hadn’t revealed his fear.

  They were back on the river, Glade using a piece of driftwood for the paddle he had lost at Warm Springs.

  “What’s the next surprise?” Leah marveled at how well her ulcer was withstanding the shocks of the river.

  “Nothing like Warm Springs. But there is Echo Park coming up. There’s access to the river there, too.”

  She sat rigid and silent and tried not to think.

  “You’re upset, aren’t you? Because I can be afraid. Leah, what do you want from a mere mortal? Everybody knows fear. You want perfection.”

  “But you’ve always been so steely. And if we’ve got danger ahead.…”

  “You’d feel better if you had your murderer back.” Resignation in the cold monotone.

  “Yes … no.… Oh, I’m just scared.”

  “Yet you were angry when I killed two goons. What do you think I’m going to do if we meet up with some more of them, try to talk them out of it? Those men at the condominium were skulking around with silencers just waiting to pick me off.”

  “Then how did you kill them?” She turned to the grim lips over the cleft in his chin where the beard didn’t grow, the massive brows, the wide square forehead under dark tumbled curls and thought sudenly, “I’ve never wanted to live this badly in my life.”

  He relaxed a little. “I crept up—”

  “No.” Leah reach a hand over the duffels and past the Siamese. “I really don’t want to know how you killed … I really … didn’t want to love you either.…”

  He took her hand. “You want a fairy-tale lover. Strong and competent and too gentle to defend himself. You sound like the rest of the country.”

  “I just don’t believe in killing.”

  They managed the next rapids like a professional team, but then it wasn’t Warm Springs. While they were still pumping out, a voice hailed them ahead. Brian waved from a rock near shore.

  As they paddled toward him, Brian stood up, looking bedraggled and anxious. He put his hands in the air. “I’m not armed.”

  “I am,” Glade said coolly. “Where’s Charlie?”

  “I lost him.” He ran fingers through thin, wet hair, and when he climbed into the boat, he almost swamped them.

  They proceeded down the river with each man sitting on opposite sides of the rim behind her, but the extra passenger put Leah higher in the air.

  “I … never knew a river could be like this. Thanks for picking me up.”

  And Leah wondered why they had. Everyone seemed to be the enemy now.

  “You really did a job on those goons,” Brian said with awe and not too comfortably.

  “Echo Park is coming up soon,” Glade countered. “Does your boss plan to meet us there? Or Bradshaw?”

  “I think so, but they don’t want to kill you, Glade, honest.”

  “Then why not wait till I get to Split Mountain Ramp? What’s the goddamned hurry?”

  “They’re afraid the goons’ll get to you first. We got word that there were more than the two you took care of and.…”

  “And everybody wants to be in on the kill. Bradshaw and Welker don’t trust each other.”

  “Listen, Wyndham, the bureau wants to help you. If you’d only listen to Joe. You don’t want to end up with the agency and Bradshaw alone—”

  “Where’s Swords?”

  “He’s flying in.”

  “He’d better be.”

  And then they passed Charlie. He floated in a slow death circle in an eddy near the shore, face down and unresisting, his hair streaked with foam. Leah swallowed and looked away. The Yampa had given her retribution. It was not a pleasant feeling.

  “Leah, there’s a paddle coming up on your side. Grab it,” Glade said calmly as if Charlie’s body did not exist.

  Cottonwoods and sandbars appeared around a curve in the river.

  “You’ve got to trust the bureau,” Brian continued his argument.

  “Echo Park,” Glade announced softly.

  A mountain rose in the middle of the river with sun glaring down on it so hard it almost made sound. A looming formation of sandstone and across from it a haven of grass and giant trees in a long valley. Leah heard birds singing and longed to beach the boat there forever in peace and rest and off the rampage of water.

  But she changed her mind when they skirted a sandbar and the river turned at the base of the barren mountain.

  A truck parked along the shore of Echo Park and in the water next to it an empty rubber boat … She turned to warn Glade just as Brian said, “The bureau is your only chance. You can’t trust the agen—” He stopped with a surprised jerk as a cracking sound echoed back from the sandstone mountain. A small … reddish hole appeared in the middle of his face. His knees rose to hide the hole as he tipped off the pontoon rim and disappeared.

  “Paddle!” Glade screamed at her. “Keep your body moving back and forth.”

  Leah wanted only to scrunch up in the bottom of the boat, close her eyes, and hope to ride it out. But the weapon that made that hole in Brian’s face could deflate the boat and put a hole in her easily. She thought of Sheila and paddled any which way, bobbed forward and back, and they moved like a car gone wild with a drunken driver along the edge of Echo Park.

  One second she was looking at a swirl of sky with sandstone mountain jutting into it, and the next—murky river and black rubber. “A bullet would be a faster way to die than drowning,” she thought and heard the clapping of helicopter blades over the sound of her heart and the Yampa. Brian’s friends had arrived too late.

  The helicopter lowered behind cottonwoods and two men with long weapons broke from the trees and ran toward the boat tethered to the shore.

  “Now, straight ahe
ad and balls out!” Glade commanded. “Pray for rapids so they’ll have to paddle instead of aim. The cavalry has saved us only for the moment.”

  Where the sandstone mountain ended, another river joined them and they swooped ahead on the force of the combined waters.

  “Where’s Goodyear?”

  “Our feline crawled into the bag when Brian left us. Faster, Leah, they’re gaining. Be prepared for dodging tactics again when I yell.”

  They zoomed ahead. The river and Glade’s strong arms sent them on so fast, Leah felt her paddle wasn’t contributing much.

  “I didn’t want to love you either,” a voice announced behind her. “And I wish I’d never gotten you into this.”

  “Can’t you shoot back?”

  “I don’t have the range they do.”

  The river dropped in a whoosh with the familiar roller-coaster feeling but without the rapids and Leah heard the rifle’s snap.

  “Leah, are you hit?”

  “No.”

  “A bullet just slammed into the bag behind you. Move from side to side this time, keep your head low, and dodge!”

  Her spine prickled, waiting for the searing bullet. She rocked back and forth and river and sky and trees whirled in front of her.

  “Suck hole ahead,” he yelled. “Guide to the left!”

  Aching muscles paddled on adrenaline, sweat pierced pores to join the mist flying back at her off the rim. Her breathing and heartbeat drowned the sound of the Yampa and a spume of water loomed ahead.

  There wasn’t much room to maneuver between the approaching suck hole and the cliff face that formed the bank. They headed straight toward the cliff wall.

  “Back off!” Glade yelled.

  She fell into the boat to escape the scraping stone.

  “You’re strong enough when you’re scared,” Glade gasped.

  The other boat approached the suck hole.

  Both men paddled now, both wore life jackets. The one in front had more nose than the other and was more slender. His hair lifted as the boat scraped the mammoth boulder and swung around to enter the suck hole backward. Glade had been right. She knew them when she saw them. They were the men Leah had seen in the restaurant in Craig.