Jess could hear the men coming. They didn’t exactly make a secret of their approach.
She was shot bad, but not fatally, she didn’t think. The bullet had caught her high, but it hadn’t hit anything vital. She would never throw a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball, but if she could find her way down the mountain, she would probably live.
Jess set her back against a pine tree and wedged herself into the earth so she was looking out from the forest toward the river chute and the rocks, and she listened to the sound of scree kicked down the mountain as the men who’d fired on her made their way toward her.
Upslope and blocking her view was a huge slab of mountainside completely bare of dirt; it rose at least twenty feet in a sheer, immediate climb, forcing the trees of the forest to skirt around it, away from the river. As it was, it made for decent cover, and Jess stayed beneath it and tried to make out by the sounds of the men how many of them were coming.
It was Logger Fetridge who poked his head around the side of the face first. Jess had just enough time to recognize him before she pulled the trigger on her shotgun, sent him flying backward into the sunlight and the river. The sound of the shotgun echoed with an intensity that might have brought down the mountain; she braced herself for either landslide or counterattack, but neither was coming.
Directly ahead of her lay Fetridge, flat on his back now and staring up at the sky, and she could see his chest moving and hear his labored breathing, and she knew he was dying and she didn’t feel remorse.
According to Jana Marsh, it was Fetridge who’d done it, murdered Brock Boyd with that .38 revolver. He’d pulled the trigger and then he and Dax Pruitt had wrapped up the body in the back of Pruitt’s Silverado, tidied up Boyd’s house as best they were able. They’d taken Jana’s money and told her to go home, which she’d done, and they’d driven off and tried and somehow failed to make Boyd disappear.
Twenty thousand dollars, Jana’d said.
Jess thought about the other casualties: Charlene Todd, who’d had her throat cut by Fetridge’s men; Chris Jordan and Dougie Bealing, who’d played their own roles in this tragedy and died for it too. And Tyner Gillies, who still clung to life in that Port Angeles hospital. And who else had been claimed by the violence on this mountain this morning?
Jana Marsh maintained that she hadn’t killed Bad Boyd, that it was Fetridge and Dax Pruitt who were responsible, but Jess knew that Jana was wrong. Jana’s money had killed Boyd, and the others too, and Boyd may have deserved it, but the others surely didn’t. Maybe not even Logger Fetridge.
But there was no time for reflection, not now. Jess could hear the second gunman out there somewhere, could sense him in how the birds and the air remained still while pebbles shuffled on dirt above her head. She could sense the man as she’d sensed the insurgents who’d waited to ambush her team on patrols in the Hindu Kush; after a while, you tended to get pretty good at reading the land, picking out what belonged and what didn’t.
Jess knew this second gunman wouldn’t be so careless as to leave himself open as Logger Fetridge had.
She pushed herself to her feet—her wound hurt now, a hot poker of fire through her breastbone, but she stifled any complaint—and tried to move as stealthily as she could, back farther into the forest, to where the slope of the mountain outflanked the bare face, where she could pull herself higher using trees and exposed roots and handholds and footholds.
She heard the man call out her name. “Jess?”
It was Pruitt; she recognized his voice. She kept her mouth shut and didn’t reveal her position, climbed the slope of the mountain until she’d gained enough ground that she stood level with the lip of the bare face.
“Jess, I don’t want to hurt you; I swear it,” Pruitt called. “You let me get past you, and I’ll be on my way. We’ll forget we ever saw each other, okay?”
She couldn’t see Pruitt yet, and she didn’t answer. Didn’t know if the man was telling the truth or trying to game her and didn’t suppose it mattered. He’d tried to kill Lucy, after all, and brought violence on her friends and fellow lawmen farther up the mountain. She wouldn’t let him walk off of this mountain, not without confrontation.
She edged out from the forest toward the rocky chute of the river path, swinging the shotgun left to right, slowly, in case Pruitt appeared. The forest ended in rocky spill, and she couldn’t see her target; he’d dropped, she surmised, while she’d climbed, and now he must be near the base of the cliff face, where she’d shot Fetridge.
Jess edged out toward the lip of the face, intending to lean over the side and rain buckshot down on Pruitt from above. But then she slipped, slightly, her boot losing traction in the dirt and the dust, and she nearly bailed out and toppled over the edge, when Pruitt surprised her.
He poked his head up from the other side of the outcrop, not down below as she’d figured but hiding just alongside it. Jess watched in slow motion as he swung his rifle around. She fought to regain her balance and turn the shotgun on him too.
Pruitt fired first. Jess fired back. Heard Pruitt cry out and go down, and then she was falling too.