Willing Hostage

  “I hate him. He adopted me. I hate you. You got me into this. And where for God’s sake are you going? And why am I going with you? I can’t carry this load on my back much longer.”

  He gurgled a low laugh. “We’ve just begun, Leah Harper.”

  They climbed an earth embankment to find moonlight glimmering on a board sign, making the print, merely etched into the wood, stand out dimly white.

  “Flat Tops Primitive Area. No motorized vehicles,” Leah read aloud.

  “Warning,” she continued. The sign was worn. “Something about trails and in the open … and beetles. Beetles?”

  A dog growled not far away and a voice snapped, “Sasha!”

  Goodyear climbed Glade’s face.

  “Sorry,” said the voice. “Come along, Sasha.” The dog followed the figure into a streak of moonlight on the road below. It was indiscriminate in shape, but big. Thank God, it was leashed.

  “Come on,” Glade whispered and she followed him into the trees.

  “I’m so stiff after today I hurt everywhere. It’s the middle of the night.”

  “You’ll loosen up.” He moved ahead of her briskly. “And it’s only nine o’clock.”

  The trail was a narrow path between trees. In the shadows Leah stumbled over rocks and tree roots she couldn’t see.

  “Pick up your feet,” he ordered.

  “I can’t walk this fast. Slow down.”

  Glade stopped ahead to wait for her. Wind moaned down the trail and they were surrounded by cracking, creaking groans. Leah grabbed his arm. “What’s that?”

  “Dead trees rubbing against live ones. They fall over against their neighbors sometimes when they die. Wind makes them rub.” His entire face was in shadow as he turned his head from side to side. “Seems to be an awful lot of deadfalls in among the trees. Some kind of pine beetle’s been through here, killing trees. That’s what the sign was about.”

  His long legs carried him so fast that several times he was out of sight ahead of her and she had to run to catch up, panicked at the thought of being left alone. Although she didn’t feel that comfortable with him either.

  They crossed streams, fallen trees, and open meadows where bogs sucked at their boots. The weight on Leah’s back dragged on her shoulders, her head felt as if it would tear itself open. Dead trees creaked eerily with the slightest breeze. And then one splintered, cracked, and thundered to the ground somewhere. Leah could feel the earth under her feet vibrate with the impact.

  “What if one of those trees fell on us?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt for long.” He started off with Goodyear blinking back at her over his shoulder.

  What kind of a man was he? A man who could slug a woman in the stomach and who had admitted he’d killed, but who carried a twenty-ton Siamese up a mountain because he couldn’t bear to do away with it.

  “And what kind of woman am I?” she thought. “Even to be up here with this man?” But she hooked her thumbs under the padded straps of her pack to take some of the pressure off her shoulders and plodded on behind him like a squaw. Leah found the wilderness around her more frightening than anything human, including the man ahead of her.

  The distinct odor of skunk … Leah’s eyes moved to either side of the trail. Dead trees stood naked and ghost-white next to their shadowed pine-covered neighbors. When they had passed the skunk smell, other odors took over—sharp pine and the softer scents of earth, leaves, and mold. The sour smell of horse droppings on the trail and a faint fragrance of flowers.

  After an hour Leah’s lungs burned. She fought for air but it seemed thin and unsatisfying. Her feet ached, her knees felt rubbery. Her heart pounded at her ears until she couldn’t hear her boots hitting the ground. The pack seemed to tear her shoulders away from her neck.

  And still he moved ahead of her. She could see her breath on the crisp air but felt the dampness of perspiration on her face and under her arms.

  Finally, Leah sat down in the middle of the path and burst into tears.

  Glade lifted the pack from her shoulders, offered her water. “Not much farther now.”

  Goodyear crawled up her legs and stuck a cold inquiring nose in her hot face.

  “I’m going to die,” she blubbered. “My heart can’t beat right.”

  “How long have you been in Colorado?”

  “Four days.” It seemed like four years. She hadn’t thought of her mother for hours.

  “You’re not acclimated yet. Here, eat this.”

  It was a bar of chocolate that tasted like mousse. “If you think I’m sleeping in some moldy unheated barn or something tonight, you’re crazy.”

  “It won’t be a barn,” he said soothingly, rubbing her legs.

  “I’m dizzy.”

  “Just rest awhile. It’ll be all right.” The man who had chopped her in the neck and tied her to a bed positioned her between his legs so that her back rested against his chest. “Isn’t it beautiful?” His breath tickled the top of her hair.

  Leah made an attempt to focus. Giant boulders lay jumbled and moon-white, like the dead trees, in a field that stretched to the face of a cliff.

  Goodyear crawled out onto a boulder and hunched. Moonlight glistened on the tips of white twitching whiskers.

  “I can’t get enough air.”

  “It’s thinner here than in Chicago, but cleaner. You’re not athletic, Leah Harper. But you’re plucky. You’ll make it.” He leaned against the tree behind him and she moved with him. “Try to relax.”

  The rigidity of the gun in his pant’s pocket made that hard to do. She’d wondered where he kept it.

  A long cliff with a flat top rose straight and rugged to the skyline across the boulder field like an immense uncut gemstone. Moonlit facets reflected dull chalky light.

  Why couldn’t she stop thinking of Sheila? That sight had been even grislier than the one of her mother in the bloody tub. Two such experiences in a little over a week must have unhinged Leah’s mind. Why else was she escaping with a murderer to avoid being murdered? She even believed his fantastic story, what she could understand of it. The tension he carried with him like his gun convinced her that people were out to kill him as Welker had said. His was a life-and-death kind of tension.

  Leah, who had been sweating a moment before, now shivered with cold and he pushed her away so that he could stand. “Let’s get going. You’ll freeze if you don’t move.”

  At the crushing weight of the pack, her body screamed in protest. She hadn’t been this miserable, physically, in her life. Unless it was the night he’d stretched her to the bed. “You enjoy torturing people, don’t you? You steal, murder, torture. I’ll bet you run over little old ladies at crosswalks just for fun.”

  He walked across boulders to retrieve the cat and they were off. Goodyear crawled onto Glade’s shoulder but found he was too big to balance even on that Mr. America expanse, so he maneuvered to the top of the pack behind his bearer’s head and gazed with slit-eyed contempt upon Leah struggling behind. The desire to croak the haughty creature grew stronger each time Leah looked up.

  But she soon hadn’t the strength to strangle an ant. Her heart was back to its palpitation tricks. She gulped for air that wasn’t there and walked into Glade’s pack before she realized he’d stopped.

  He drew her around to stand beside him. “Tell me what you feel, looking at that.”

  She dragged bulging eyes from her ugly boots and saw more trail. “Agony,” she answered.

  The trees had stopped. The trail snaked back on itself across the open mountainside as did some of the roads in this forsaken country and, like them, it went nowhere but onward … and up.

  “Look again.” His voice came as close to dreamy as so hard and passionless a voice could. There was almost a hint of love in it.

  Leah sagged against him and had the vague notion that he hugged her. Dutifully she looked again. Moonlight on a mountainside, an ever-steepening trail, a waterfall splashing below, no human habitation in sight, noth
ing.

  “Paralysis?” she tried again.

  “You are a cold and heartless woman.”

  Leah stopped to cry and catch her breath at every switchback and there must have been fifty of them.

  “Think about all those men who’ve ruined your life and pretend you’re stomping on them,” he suggested. The freak wasn’t even puffing and he had the strength to laugh at her. “But keep stomping.”

  She pretended she was stomping on Glade and Goodyear.

  The muscles in the front of her legs, between knee and hip joints pulled in growing, numbing pain and she worried that they’d lock forever with the next step.

  Leah was dreaming, futilely she knew, of the Holiday Inn, a hot shower, and poached-egg-on-milk-toast when they finally reached the top. The top of nothing but core scenery with a cold, coarse wind sweeping across it.

  Not even a moldy unheated barn.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “This isn’t what I expected.” Glade slumped to the ground beside her, his eyes sweeping the landscape. “That’s what I get for using a 1927 map.”

  “Not what you expected? Where are we going to sleep?” Fatigue and misery curled like weights around her head.

  “No cover, damn it!” The icy wind buffeted his words away from them.

  If the beetle had been merely busy down below, he’d been deadly here … rolling grassy terrain … a few clumps of trees scattered widely apart and all of them dead.

  “We’ll camp here and walk farther in tomorrow … hope to God it gets better.”

  “Camp? In what? We don’t have a trailer. I don’t see a cabin, even a tent. There’re no people—”

  “That’s why we came here. We’ll camp over there in that patch of trees for tonight.”

  “But they’re dead. They might fall on us.” Even she could hear the note of hysteria in her voice.

  “Leah, those trees have been dead for fifty years by the looks of them,” he said with a grudging patience. “They’ll be some protection from the wind. We’ll take the chance that they won’t fall tonight.”

  “You called me Leah. Just Leah.”

  “Even female operatives don’t go down with a whimper,” he said rudely and stalked off into the wind.

  She left the cat attacking tufts of grass and forced hardening muscles to move after him.

  Glade found her a puffy parka stuffed into a nylon bag in her backpack. But the inside of her bones were cold and nothing short of a scalding two-hour bath could warm her now. She sat on an uncomfortable log, hugging her knees, as he fought the arctic wind to build a fire from the deadwood littering the area.

  “I’m hungry,” she said miserably.

  “You’re a pain in—”

  “I don’t know enough nasty words to describe you, Glade-whoever-you-are,” she snapped back and moved closer to the fire.

  He tried to read the mysterious instructions on foil packages by wind-flickered firelight. Leah was merely waiting for death by the time he’d boiled water on a tiny one-burner stove that resembled a holder for a carafe candle.

  They ate silently—hot chocolate, cheese, sausage, and thin pieces of rye bread. Goodyear wandered in for cheese and sausage.

  “Where do we sleep?” Leah asked resignedly, almost falling into the tiny fire that couldn’t have warmed a thimble against the ice on the wind.

  “Sleeping bags.” He pulled some material from another nylon sack. It puffed and ballooned when he pulled it out as a magician would draw endless scarves tied together from an impossibly tiny container, and blossomed into a sleeping bag.

  “But where do we put the sleeping bags? On the ground?”

  “Yes, city girl, on the ground.” He placed his bag across the fire from hers, stripped down to his shorts and T-shirt and crawled in.

  “But what if it rains?” She was still standing.

  “Won’t tonight. There’s a tent in my pack but I’m too tired to put it up.”

  Leah unlaced her boots. When the wind moved instantly through two pairs of socks, she decided to sleep in her clothes for the first time in her life. She rolled up her parka for a pillow and pulled the bag’s zipper to her chin.

  One hummock of grass hit her between the shoulders; another pushed up the left side of her rump so that the right side pressed down on a sharp rock. The other hummocks lumped themselves in between.

  “Glade, what if the kitty wanders off?”

  “With our luck, he’ll come back.”

  She’d never dreamed that there could be so many stars or that they could seem so close.

  Her nose felt as if it was catching frostbite. What would her poor complexion do without the creams and proper cleansing?

  The scope of the sky and the land around her was terrifying now that the hike had stopped and she could no longer ignore it. She felt diminished, unimportant, frightened.

  And she was alone in this vast wild place with an unexpected man. No one would know she was here. He was good at covering his tracks. That note left with the pickup would hide all trace of the fact they’d even started up the trail. There’d be no vehicle below that anyone could ascribe to them.

  “You really are trying to save my life, aren’t you?” she asked, trying to reassure herself. “Why else would you work so hard to get me up here? Why else would you go to all this trouble … but if you’re a murderer, why—”

  “Have you ever met one before?”

  “No.”

  “Then possibly you’ve misjudged us. Go to sleep.”

  Leah tried to forget the two solid blocks of ice that had once been feet. She rolled over on her side to get off the rock and the sleeping bag rolled with her. “Do you think there might be bears up here? Or wolves?”

  “No. You make enough noise to scare off an army.”

  Silence. The wind moaned, the grass rustled, the dead trees creaked, but to Leah it was still a silent alien world. Her body, excluding her feet, began to warm itself in the sleeping bag, but chilling tendrils slithered in through the opening at the top to her shoulders and crept down her spine, giving her shuddery spasms. “Glade, I’m cold.…”

  “Jesus Christ, woman!” His roar evaporated the silence and suddenly he stood above her in his underwear, blocking out the stars. He knelt with his hands outstretched as if to strangle her.

  Leah screamed.

  “Shut up. I’m just pulling up your drawstrings.”

  The neck of the bag pulled around her face like the casing for a mummy. She was totally trapped now. “What if a wild animal—”

  “Listen to me”—the deadly voice was anything but reassuring as his knee in her stomach pinned her and the bag to the lumpy earth—“I’m running for my life, and now I’m running for yours, too. Help me, Leah, please? Go to sleep, please?”

  “Okay.” What else could she say? She was immobile, lost and miserable in this weird place meant only for wildlife specials on television. “Just get off me.”

  He was back in his bag and, by the sound of his breathing, asleep in seconds. How could anyone human sleep in such discomfort? Maybe murderers weren’t human. But how many said please?

  The fire died to red coals that glowed brighter in each gust of wind. Trees creaked like spooky doors on unoiled hinges. Dead-white branches curled over her like gnarled fingers. Danger rustled behind every tuft of grass.

  A studied, stealthy sound drew gradually nearer the campfire. Leah and her sleeping bag sat up.

  Goodyear slithered toward her with round flashing eyes. He sniffed her bag and wandered off, whiskers twitching, tail alert, throwing a departing yowl over his shoulder.

  Leah slept that endless night in half hour intervals. During waking intervals she heard unexplainable noises and felt the strain of cramped muscles that had drawn her into as tight a fetal position as the bag would allow. She awakened once to see an owl with iridescent eyes glide above her, around and through dead-tree fingers, wings spread and nasty-looking talons curled. And again later to find dawn graying a night
sky and Goodyear wrapped around her head.

  Leah awoke finally to the smell of coffee and to a dead mouse deposited on the foot of her sleeping bag.

  “A secret admirer brought you a gift in the night.” Glade laughed over the steam of his coffee. Even he wore a parka this morning.

  The reason was obvious once she’d disentangled herself from the warm down bed. He’d built no fire. She worked at the interminable boot laces with cramped fingers and then started off to find a tree. “Don’t turn around,” she said. Dead trees provided no privacy.

  There wasn’t an inch on her body that didn’t ache. The pain caused by the mere act of walking and squatting took her breath away.

  When she limped back, he handed her a cup of coffee and dished something steamy from a frying pan on the little stove to a cold metal plate that chilled her hands and the food in seconds.

  “What is it? It tastes like Styrofoam.”

  He picked up a clear plastic bag of pale yellow powder. “It says here it’s scrambled eggs. Cat wouldn’t eat it, though.”

  That indeed was indictment of any food. Goodyear sprawled motionless on Glade’s sleeping bag after his big night.

  If Leah thought this world out of proportion to herself and to reason by moonlight, by day it was twice as much so. The vista was unending. It was like finding herself suddenly set down in the Stone Age. She felt grubby and a little Neanderthal.

  They sat on the rim of the steep sloping valley they had climbed the day before. Parts of the snaking trail appeared below and in the distance tiny lakes reflected an orange glow back at the fireball sun sitting on the ridge to their right.

  The valley was surrounded by mountains with their tops sliced off and, like the one on which she sat, they were mostly treeless. Grass covered them like soft green fur. Patches of white dotted the green.

  “What do you do when you’re not murdering people or stealing things, or is that your profession?” She helped herself to more coffee.

  “I’m a mining engineer.”

  “That sounds a little prosaic for—”