Fetridge had seen the woman first. He and Pruitt had followed the trail from the cave to where it met this creek, trickling down between two finger ridges toward the base of the mountain and the ocean. Fetridge was shot and he was struggling, blood soaking both the front of his jacket and the exit wound in the back; he stopped often to catch his breath and rest his legs, leaning against trees or rock or his rifle, his breathing labored and liquid and sickly.
But there was no slowing down. They continued on the trail until it reached the creek, and Pruitt could see that if you followed the boulders that studded the cascading water, you could pick a tenuous path down the mountain.
And that seemed to be Fetridge’s goal, though the poacher slowed even more when the men began their descent. Pruitt watched his friend struggle and saw the futility of the effort, knowing there was no way Fetridge would survive to the bottom, knowing all the same that he owed it to Fetridge to stay beside him until the man dropped.
And that’s what Pruitt did. He descended ahead of Fetridge, and below every boulder he stopped and waited and let Fetridge lean on him as he made his own drop. And at every boulder they would stop and Fetridge could catch his breath, and at every boulder Fetridge’s breath seemed that much harder to catch, and the bloodstains on his jacket grew larger and darker.
“There’s money hid down there,” Fetridge told Pruitt, gesturing in a vague way toward the base of the mountain. “The Cody woman’s money, ten thousand dollars.”
He paused again for breath, and Pruitt waited, and Fetridge grinned at him with teeth stained too, by blood.
“Stashed it in the spare tire,” he said. “My cousin Thumps’s van.”
Pruitt worked his jaw and he thought about this, tried to catch his own breath, his thoughts dizzy now from exertion and lack of water and food. He could picture where Thumps King kept his trailer, could picture the old Dodge Caravan beside it. And he could picture the money, Fetridge’s share of the twenty thousand dollars Jana Cody had given so that they would kill Bad Boyd for her, dispose of the body, and keep her name out of it.
Pruitt could see now how Fetridge aimed to play it. How he hoped to make his getaway when he walked off of this mountain.
But Pruitt watched his friend struggle and knew there was no hope that he’d ever see that money. “You’ll never make it,” he told Fetridge. “Not in your state. We ought to just set and rest awhile.”
But Fetridge shook his head. Fixed Pruitt with a stare that seemed to encompass all of what they’d done, the history they’d created and the violence they’d wrought. “That cash ain’t for me, old boy,” he told Pruitt. “It’s yours now.”
Pruitt looked for an answer and couldn’t find one, and before he could, Fetridge stiffened. Pointed down the chute of the river. “Shit,” he said, his voice raspy. “There’s the law.”
Pruitt turned, slowly. Weary, wondering if his friend was hallucinating now, not expecting there was anyone at all within a mile of where they stood. But down the mountain, climbing toward them, maybe a hundred feet lower: Jess Winslow. Alone, with a gun.
Fetridge was already steadying his rifle on the edge of a slab of granite. Muttering under his breath, taking aim at the woman. His finger tensed on the trigger, and then he glanced over at Pruitt. “Well, hell, come on, son,” he said. “Help me cut her down.”
It didn’t seem right to Pruitt to just shoot the Winslow woman, not without at least giving her warning first, but Fetridge was already drawing a bead on the young deputy, and Pruitt told himself that Jess Winslow was armed and climbing toward them, and that if she’d seen them first she’d have opened fire too, and maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t. Then Fetridge pulled his trigger and there was no time to think anymore; the shot went out and Jess Winslow staggered backward and went down, and Pruitt opened up too, not aiming to kill Jess but keeping his shots close, chasing her out of the open and into the trees somewhere, hoping that would be enough to scare her off and at worst incapacitate her. Let him and Fetridge continue their descent, and maybe they’d make it to Thumps King’s minivan, that ten thousand dollars stashed away.
But Fetridge had a different plan.
“That’s the bitch killed my nephew,” he told Pruitt, and in his eyes there was new life and energy. “Let’s get on down there and pay her back for it.”