21

“I have you now, you bastard.” Slocum did little more than mumble it into the scarf wrapped tight around his face. He jacked a shell into play in the rifle and lumbered forward.

Since he awoke, he’d been vaguely aware that the landscape this high up in the rocks had become much the same as it always looked in the high places he’d ever been to. But there was something extra about this place that seemed almost more barren and forlorn than anywhere else he’d ever been.

Slocum didn’t really know just what it was that made it so, but the chief’s words about the place not letting you go, about calling you back, kept ringing in his head, echoing like a ricochet shot inside his skull.

And now that he heard the shouts of the only creature on earth other than himself to be in this place of desperation, one killer by the name of Delbert Calkins, Slocum felt—despite the fact that he wasn’t a particularly spiritual man—as if he’d come to a place of reckoning, a place where two would meet and one would win. But would one be able, or even allowed, to leave?

I aim to find out, he vowed. And he trudged on, his eyes fixed on the gray, shadowed place before him. From this vantage point, he saw that there was no place to go—the great rock walls narrowed to nothing. Unless there was a slim opening that led through the mountain to the other side, this was as the chief and his men had said—a dead end. In more ways than one, mused Slocum.

Another few yards and Slocum saw movement in that grim place far ahead. But it hardly looked like a man’s movements—something kept scrambling up, then sliding back down a long slope of scree and jagged rock, hunks of the cliffs above that had sheared off over time.

Didn’t look like a man, and yet it had to be Calkins. Slocum was just too far away yet to see whatever it was clearly. He doubled his pace, but crouched, too, as he moved forward. He had no desire to spend the entire day up here—let alone another night. The sooner he dealt with this madman, the better it would be for them all.

He was thankful for the new layer of thick snow that had fallen in the night, because it helped dampen the sliding, clattering sounds his snowshoes made against the crusted surface of the trail. The minutes seemed to tick by slower. The closer he drew, the more distinct the sounds from the creature became. And the creature, it was now obvious, became a man.

All other logical reasons aside, it had to be Delbert Calkins because Slocum wanted it to be him, needed it to be him. Something inside him demanded it. He’d been through too much on this long, sometimes foolish trip, and he’d be damned if he was going to be robbed of this chance now.

Slocum became acutely aware of his breathing, hard and labored and edged with a wheezing from the effort he’d expended so far, efforts that were already depleting his lowered levels of strength and ability. He had never been more aware than now of his injuries from the grizzly. He tried to block out thoughts of the healing wonders of Sigrid and her ointments, massages, and sauna.

Slocum followed the trail along a sharp upturn, around a massive blackish tumbledown boulder. Then the trail switched back sharp to the left, upturned again, and he found himself in easy sight of the man. He was within fifty yards or so, and what Slocum saw amazed him and filled him with rare hope.

So this was Delbert, once and for all. He was blond and had his back turned to Slocum. He also didn’t appear to be an overly large man, but of decent build and average height. He was coatless, his outer garments—a fur wrap from the Indians and a wool mackinaw—having been tossed aside in a pile halfway between himself and Slocum.

Calkins stood facing the scree heap, his arms hanging by his sides, his shirt untucked, his arms rising up and down with his heaving chest. He’d obviously been working hard at getting up the pile, and it was just as obvious to Slocum that he’d been unsuccessful, judging by the churned mess of the slope before him.

Slocum kept walking forward, leveling his rifle at the man at the same time. Suddenly the man began shouting at the top of his voice. He bent double, clutched his head with clawing, desperate hands, pulled at his hair, then shook his cold-reddened fists at the defeating slope before him. The entire time he faced the pile, keeping his back to Slocum and the trail.

Slocum used the man’s shrieking fit to close the gap between them by half. He ended up just shy of the discarded coat—the sleeves were inside out and mittens and snowshoes lay some yards off in opposite directions, as if ripped off and thrown away in anger and haste. Just before he guessed he’d be heard, Slocum stopped and raised the rifle higher, curled a finger around the trigger.

When he spoke, it was with a hard and sharp voice that cut the air. “Now Delbert . . .”

His sudden words scared his prey into a scream even as he turned to face Slocum.

Slocum continued: “Should you make it to the top of that scree heap—and I’m not saying you will—were you planning on coming back down for your coat? Seems unlikely, but then again, so is everything you’ve done in the past few weeks.”

Delbert Calkins faced him, his face a red, sweaty thing, eyes bulging from rage and exhaustion, his shirt sagged half-open. He seemed to take a long time to figure out just what it was he was facing—a man with a gun. A man who knew his name.

Surely he’s aware he’s still being followed, thought Slocum. He said so to the Cree.

Then the blond man smiled, a fake grimace that pulled the dropped ends of his mustache wide. One hand rose a few inches as he spoke. “I have been expecting you, though I had hoped you’d be dead or would have grown bored with bothering me.”

Slocum saw that the untucked shirt half concealed a holstered pistol. He raised his rifle an inch, wagged the end. “Keep your hands still—in fact, raise them high. I know you can do that, Calkins. I saw you holding your head as if it were about to explode just a few seconds ago.”

That seemed to strike a nerve in the angry man. His pasted-on smile dropped away and his eyes burned like black coals at Slocum. He slowly raised his arms to chest height.

“Higher, Delbert. Put some effort into it. Or are you too tired from jousting with that hillside?” Slocum stepped once, twice toward the discarded coat. He kicked it with the edge of a snowshoe. “Aren’t you cold, Delbert?”

“Don’t touch that!” the man shouted, his lips pulled tight against his teeth. The veins in his neck and on his temple stood out, throbbing.

“Oh?” said Slocum, dragging out the word and doing his best to sound infuriatingly calm. From Calkins’s trembling face and clenching hands, it was working. “Hands higher, Delbert. Otherwise I may be forced to shoot you.”

Calkins snorted as if he’d heard a lousy joke, shook his head. “She sent you, didn’t she?”

“Who might that be, Delbert?”

“That little rich bitch. That foolish brother of hers should have let me be. And her father, what a waste—all that money and he just sits on it. Doesn’t like to gamble, he told me. Have you ever heard such a thing? Doesn’t approve of it, didn’t approve of me. Ha! I showed them.”

Slocum said nothing, just stared at Calkins.

The two men quietly regarded each other for a few moments, Delbert’s breath not slowing much, as if he were a steam train working hard on an uphill grade.

“There’s no way through here, you know,” said Slocum finally. “No way at all.” The effect was startling and immediate.

“You shut your mouth! There has to be a way out! Has to be! I—”

“You what, Delbert? You want it to be, so therefore it has to be?” Slocum shook his head. Even as he thought it, he knew that not long before, he had wished for this man to be Delbert Calkins and he had been.

Slocum guessed that Sigrid and the chief would agree that wishes could be powerful things, but not when you’re faced with a big old rock wall.

“Look,” said Calkins in a calmer voice. “I don’t know who you are, but you don’t have any right to follow me. Why are you bothering me? Why is this any concern of yours?”

Slocum mentally ticked through all the reasons that he knew of—murder, multiple thefts, being downright nasty, using people for nothing more than personal gain, and so many more reasons. But he finally said, “Because you peed in the water supply of the village of my friends.”

For a moment, he guessed he’d surprised Delbert Calkins. The man stood wide eyed. Then he laughed, bent double, and slapped his knees, howling. Too late, Slocum saw the reason for these theatrics—Calkins had snatched up the pistol and worked to shuck it from his holster, but his untucked shirttail got in the way. It slowed him down a few beats behind Slocum.

But Slocum knew he couldn’t shoot him. Not because the man didn’t deserve it, not because he wouldn’t be justified in killing him right here and now for drawing on him. But because the chief’s words once again came to him. This was a foul place filled with bad medicine. At the same time, Slocum caught quick sight of the massive rafts of snow towering over the gray gloom of the pass that never was a pass.

He ran forward, his snowshoes more of an impediment than ever, his rifle held out before him, ready to shoot if he had to. “No, Delbert! Don’t shoot! You do and we’ll both die.” He could tell that Calkins was a little surprised that he hadn’t shot him, that he’d let him nearly pull his gun free.

“That’s the idea, isn’t it, bounty hunter?”

Slocum shook his head and spoke urgently in a low voice. “Haven’t you ever heard of an avalanche? You pull that trigger and not only will you never make it any closer to the pass you feel for sure exists, but you will never leave this foul place alive. Nor dead either, I’m sure of it.” Slocum was sure he got through to the man, but he was equally sure that Calkins was too bullheaded or too far gone to acknowledge the truth of what he was telling him.

The chief had said that the man had an inner fire, that spark that Slocum also had that kept him from giving up on a thing—no matter if reason shouted contradictions in his ear and logic poked him in the nose.

If what he’d said got through to Calkins, Slocum couldn’t see it on the man’s face. He had to keep him preoccupied, had to keep him from clawing out that pistol the rest of the way. If he knew Slocum wouldn’t shoot him because of the danger from above, Calkins was loopy enough that he would shoot Slocum, and to devil with the consequences.

“What makes you think there’s a pass through there anyway, Delbert?”

“Stop talking to me like you know me. You don’t know me and I don’t know you. Hell, I don’t even like you.” The entire time Calkins spoke he maintained his half-crouched position, poised and ready to pull the pistol free and blast Slocum to hell.

“There sure as hell has to be a way through to the other side, to the promised land of—”

“Of what, Delbert? What’s so great about the other side of those mountains anyway?” Despite the wire-tight tension, he was curious to know why Calkins had come up this far in the first place, and why he thought getting over the mountains would solve all his problems.

“You have to be kidding! We’re a stone’s throw from California—just over that ridge is green, green grass, sunshine, birds, and far down below, where the land levels off, there’s the coast, San Francisco maybe. I’ll take my money and make more money, then I’ll get on a train and head to the Mighty Mississippi and buy me a riverboat and gamble all the time. All the time!”

Calkins shouted out loud now, his voice echoing all around them, spanging off the sheer gray rock and shattering in every direction. “Money and power and fame and women and money and card games and gold and money, money, money! And I’ll be as far from these damned mountains as I can get, back in a city where civilized people live, drinking good wine and smoking the best cigars and eating fancy meals served under silver domes . . .”

The madman’s last remark reminded him of Ginny Garfield and her room service meals. Concentrate, Slocum, he told himself.

“Delbert, the only thing over that ridge up there”—Slocum jerked his chin skyward without taking his eyes off Calkins—“is more mountains. You are about as far from California as you could hope to be. We are in the Canadian Rockies. Far north of the U.S. border, and even farther north of the Northern California border. You are in a world of snow and ice, kid. Give up this foolishness and come back down with me. We can both get a warm meal by a fire, maybe scare up some whiskey. Just look up, Delbert.”

Even though Calkins didn’t rise to the bait, Slocum was sure Calkins knew what was up there—and what it could do. All that snow up there perched like a big curl, like an outthrust lip of defiance, hanging hundreds of feet up on all three sides of the dead-end canyon pass.

“You’re lying, damn your hide!” Calkins’s voice reached a raw, full-throated bellow, spiraling upward into the gray sky, and was answered with a sound like far-off thunder.

Slocum winced involuntarily.

“That scare you, bounty hunter?”

Slocum forced a smile. “Not hardly, kid.” But it had, and he didn’t like where this entire conversation was going—nowhere and fast.

“Then how about this!” Delbert jerked the pistol free of his holster.

Still, Slocum did not pull the trigger, couldn’t risk it.

“What’s the matter with you, bounty hunter?” Calkins screamed it at him. “Bring me that coat! Bring it now!”

Slocum shook his head. “No sir. You want it, you come get it.” Maybe Slocum could lure Calkins over closer, then jam the rifle into his head, knock him out cold.

Just then the building thunder from high above became louder. “Delbert, don’t move,” Slocum whispered at him. “Just don’t say a thing. Let’s get out of here. We can argue later. Come on!”

“That ain’t nothing but thunder, you idiot,” said Calkins, smiling as though he were looking at a defenseless beef animal about to be slaughtered.

“Thunder?” whispered Slocum. “In the middle of winter? On a mountaintop? You damn fool, it’s an avalanche! We need to get out of here!” The entire time he spoke, he backed away from Calkins. “Now shut your mouth and follow me. Otherwise you’ll get us killed.” But the kid didn’t move. Slocum shook his head. “Don’t fire that gun, Delbert.”

Delbert thought for a moment, then smiled. “To hell with you.” He threw his head back, but kept his eyes on Slocum, “You hear me?” he roared. “To hell with you all! There is a way through, bounty hunter. I’ll get there, you wait and see!”

Then he cranked back on the hammer.

Slocum had no choice—even as he yelled, “Nooo,” he dropped to his left side and rolled, touching off the trigger and hoping like hell he hadn’t taken the bullet that sizzled out of Calkins’s gun just before his.