I WAS SURROUNDED by death. Surrounded by blood. The sun had moved to a new angle, making the red streaks on the rocks all around me glow in the light. I tried to stand up, felt everything spinning around me, and I went down hard on my knees. I stayed there for a long time, taking one breath at a time, waiting for everything to stop turning.
The explosions were still pounding in my ears as I stared down at the dirt on the canyon floor.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
When the spinning walls finally slowed down, then settled back into place, I looked up at the far end of the canyon, the last spot Livermore had stood before turning to leave. I put one foot on the ground to push myself up, feeling a sudden pain rip through my left knee. Blood had soaked through my pants, and I saw a half dozen small round holes in the fabric. There were three more holes in my left shirtsleeve, more blood soaking through. Whatever had been in those explosives, I’d been grazed on the left side, and somehow nowhere else.
I tried to stand up again, starting with the right leg this time. When I was finally upright, I leaned against the canyon wall for a while, testing out my left leg, slowly putting weight on it until I was sure I could walk without going back down again.
I knew Cook was dead. I checked on the other men in front of me, one by one. Livermore had destroyed them, every single man, ripped apart their bodies with the shotgun.
Right here, I thought as I came to a hole in the canyon wall. There was a metal pipe set into the rock, four inches in diameter. About five feet above the ground, the perfect height for a head-and-neck shot. The metal was blackened now and still smoking. If you set the right kind of charge in here, it would blow horizontally. And if you knew to hit the ground in time, and cover your ears . . .
How much time did he spend setting all of this up? How many days did it take for him to put this all together, before he was captured?
The ultimate escape plan.
I picked up the radio the van driver had dropped. It still had power, but I heard nothing but static. I went back to the trooper who had taken my cell phone, pulled it out of his pocket and checked the signal. It was just as useless.
He planned this so carefully, I thought, not only does he tripwire enough explosives to kill seven men, he also triggers some sort of battery-operated radio jammer.
I stood against the wall for another minute, looking up and down the canyon, trying to see it from his point of view, trying to imagine how any man could see this place and come up with such a plan. And then pull it off so flawlessly.
Until he got to you, I said to myself. He had that shotgun pointed right at you. All he had to do was pull the trigger.
That was when it hit me.
Wait a minute . . .
I did a quick count of the dead bodies I had checked.
Where’s Halliday?
I remembered him being at the back end of the line. I backtracked through the canyon to the point where it broke into a slight curve.
Halliday.
He was sitting with his back against the wall, looking at me. There was a great streak of blood across his face, more blood on his chest from injuries I could only guess at. As he raised one hand, I could see that he was missing the last two fingers.
I went down on my right knee beside him, tried the radio again. Tried my cell phone. Still nothing. The road was half an hour away.
“We have to get you out of here,” I said.
He shook his head, but I wasn’t going to leave him there. I went back and found another man’s jacket, or what was left of it, came back and wrapped it around his hand, tying it as tight as I could. Then I went back and opened the state man’s pack and looked inside. The explosives had ripped right through the bottles. I found one that had an inch of water left, came back and made Halliday drink it. I put one arm around him, holding myself steady with my other hand against the wall.
“Come on,” I said. “You have to get up.”
He cried out in pain as I half pulled, half pushed his body into a standing position. He slumped forward against me and took what sounded like a man’s last breath. Then he seemed to gather some kind of strength from God-knows-where, and he looked in my eyes as he leaned his head back against the wall.
“Can you walk?”
He didn’t respond. But it was time to try. I guided him away from the wall, watching him take one slow step, then another. It took us a full minute to get out of the canyon, back into the sunlight. I felt it burning on the back of my neck.
We took another step. Then another. The blood dripped from his ruined hand. I lifted up his shirt for one moment, saw a hundred small holes spread across his chest and abdomen. Like mine, each hole was bleeding. But he had a hell of a lot more of them. There was no way I could stop them all.
“We’re going to make it,” I told him. “The road’s not far.”
We both knew that was a lie. But we kept going.
“Just had a grandson,” he said to me. His breathing was ragged and shallow.
“Don’t talk. Tell me later.”
“No.” He leaned against me, so hard he almost pushed us both over. “You have to tell him . . . And my daughter . . . Tell them I’m sorry. Tell them I love them.”
We made it another twenty yards. Then he slid to the ground. I tried to pull him up again. He shook his head.
“You tell them,” he said. He coughed up blood, and it fell from his chin, onto his neck. “Promise me.”
“I will,” I said to him. “I promise.”
I moved over so that my body was sheltering his face from the sun. I held his wounded hand tight, trying to stop the bleeding. But his shirt was soaked with more fresh blood now. Every movement he made, it made his heart pump more blood from his body. He was struggling to breathe.
I sat with him like that for another minute. Maybe two. He looked up at me one more time and gave me something almost like a smile.
Then he died.
I laid him back on the ground and closed his eyes. I stayed there with him for a few more minutes. Then I finally got to my feet.
I made it about five steps before I had to stop and throw up in the dirt. I emptied myself until there was nothing more than a dry convulsion coiling through my body. I stood up, wiped off my mouth, and kept walking.
My head was pounding, making me dizzy enough to wonder if I was even going in the right direction. It was all rocks and dirt and scrubby little cactuses and nothing else.
I could get lost here. Make it out of that canyon alive, but then die trying to get back out to the road.
I found what I thought was the trail, but now my left knee was radiating with pain. I didn’t want to lift up my pants or take off my shirt. I knew it would be just a minor version of what the explosion had done to Halliday’s chest.
The sun had already started to grind me down again and turn my throat to dust. I wondered where Livermore was at that moment. Somewhere on the other side of the canyon. If he was smart enough to set up that ambush, then he was smart enough to leave himself a cache of water for his way out. Some new clothes so he could ditch the orange. Money. A cell phone with a separate battery to recharge it if it was dead. It would be so easy to hide just about anything in these rock piles. He might even have a vehicle hidden nearby, within walking distance. That was how empty it was out here.
The sun kept beating down on me with every step, making me more thirsty than I’d ever been in my life. My knee kept throbbing, and I started to get dizzy again. But I kept moving. I heard nothing but the silence of the desert and my own footsteps.
And the explosions. Still roaring in my ears.
The road finally came into view, waves of heat rising from the vehicles that were still parked there, exactly where we had left them. I went to the agents’ car and tried the doors. They were locked. The van was locked. The state car was locked.
I went and found a rock the size of a softball, went back to the agents’ car, and hit the driver’s-side window, right in the center. It exploded into a thousand glass pebbles. I reached inside and hit the door lock, opened the door, and sat down behind the wheel. I grabbed the radio receiver and hit the transmit button.
“Code thirty, code thirty,” I said, bringing back from my memory the one code you never wanted to hear on a Detroit police radio. “Seven officers down.”
I let up the button and waited for an answer. The airwaves crackled.
“Please respond,” I said, hitting the button one more time. “I repeat. Seven officers down.”