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Chapter 22

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“Because brothers don’t let each other wander in the dark alone.” — Jolene Perry

Sam

The mineshaft was right where Stone said it would be. A narrow channel led to a rough rectangular opening cut into the side of the mountain. Old-growth forest and dried brush concealed the entrance until we were right up on it. A plank door, eaten around the edges with wood rot, lay like a doormat at the entrance.

“I pulled... the door off,” Jade panted. “So I don’t think... there’s any bears inside.”

“Good.” I hated to think what a puny .223 round would do against a bear—any bear, brown, black, grizzly, koala, or teddy. I had no faith in any rifle cartridge smaller than .30, and these high-velocity .22s didn’t come close.

I limped into the shaft behind Jade. The knee had begun to cooperate as we moved uphill, and I could put more weight on it. Flexing was out of the question. We continued another ten yards into the darkness—and by “darkness,” I meant the mother of all Dark-Ness. The phrase six feet up a well-digger’s ass came to mind.

“Far enough,” I said, and Jade agreed. We settled Marlon, and I collapsed next to him.

Night pulled a curtain across the entrance, lighter blackness compared to the utter blackness farther down the shaft. A musty draft, as if the earth exhaled, puffed from deep in the mine, bringing with it the odor of rotting timbers and old bones. Or maybe I imagined that last part.

“Anybody want to hear a ghost story?”

Jade’s disembodied chuckle echoed. “No.”

“Hand me the backpacks, would you?”

By the hooded light of my Mini Maglite, I examined the contents of the pack I’d recovered from the agent by the stream. The .223 had no problem bringing him down, but then, I’d put three in his chest at spitting distance. I found an ID case on top.

“Reuben Naranjo,” I read. “Know him?”

“Uh-huh. Young guy. Followed Bartlett around like a puppy; always looking to get the boss to notice him.”

“Well, he died trying to make an impression.” I rooted deeper in the bag. “Oh, ho. What do we have here? Thank you, Reuben.”

“What?”

“A one-burner camp stove, with a propane bottle attached. No cold supper tonight. And more freeze-dried crap. You like turkey tetrazzini? Or beef stew?”

“I’d eat the ass out of a dead horse right now.”

A breeze shifted the trees, and leaves whispered. Something skittered near the mine opening, and I switched off the light until I was sure nothing wicked this way wandered. After a count of thirty, I went back to searching.

“Another sleeping bag. A compass. Two water bottles, both empty. A map! Bless you, Reuben.” Something down in a corner crinkled under my fingers, and I tugged loose a small baggie containing what we law enforcement types liked to call “a leafy green substance,” a pipe, and a Bic lighter. “Well, lookie here. It seems Reuben the ATF agent liked to smokey a little dopey.”

“Yes!”

I turned the light on Jade, who seemed very happy for someone stuck in a cave. “What? You feel like getting high?”

“Painkiller,” Jade prompted. “We can give it to Marlon. Make a tea or something?”

“Hey!” Marlon’s voice wavered. “I don’t do dope.”

“Shut up, Marlon. Good idea.” I rooted around until I found our water bottles. One was completely empty; the other contained about a cup. “Need water. Feel like a hike back to the stream?”

“No, but I will anyway.” Jade sighed and scrubbed both hands in her shaggy hair. She’d peeled down to her damp T-shirt, which clung to her body in interesting ways when she lifted her arms. I focused the light onto the camp stove and read the directions. Twice.

“Take a look at Marlon,” I suggested. “I’ll get some marijuana tea brewing.”

“Sure.”

Jade wrestled with the zipper on Marlon’s bag—it had twisted and snarled during our nature walk—while I fired up the stove and set our last cup of water to heating. Never imagined I’d be making a teapot of, well, pot tea.

The blue flame illuminated the mineshaft with a surreal, film-noir look. Rough-hewn sandstone walls closed in from both sides and the low ceiling. Deeper in the shaft, I made out the first support timbers, which really looked more like lack-of-support timbers at their current stage of decay. No way I was going any farther down this particular shaft. I would fight it out, hand-to-hand, with all the crooked feds and pissed-off bears in New Mexico before I ventured deeper into the Pit of Doom.

Everybody had their own anxieties, closets full of personal monsters. Being buried alive in the dark took up a good chunk of mine, wedged on a shelf between being trapped in a sinking submarine and dealing with health insurance screwups.

I shivered.

Jade made a distressed noise, and I shuffled next to her.

“Oh, hell,” I said. Marlon’s left leg had swollen to three times its normal size, looking like an over-stuffed sausage in his uniform slacks. I never knew polyester could stretch that much. The bandages around his arm were stiff, but no fresh blood had leaked through.

He groaned and shifted. Marlon’s eyes were open and focused, but reddened, and a stout reek of old sweat and coppery blood rose from his body in waves.

“We need to split the seam on these pants,” Jade murmured. “And rewrap the bandages on his arm.”

“Agreed.” I handed her the tiny flashlight. “Go get some water. Carefully. Take your pistol and be as quiet as a mouse. I’d go, but climbing up and down that ledge would be too much for my knee right now. I’ll take care of Trooper Boggs. We’ll figure something out when you get back.”

She sniffed and nodded before scooting away. I waited while she collected the water bottles, stuffed them in Bragg’s empty pack, and crabbed toward the door. She paused at the entry, and I could just make out the white oval of her face when she looked back.

“Be careful,” I urged. “Watch out for Bartlett’s crew. It would be stupid to get caught now, after all this.”

“Okay,” she whispered and disappeared.

I split the seam on Marlon’s pants, wincing at the swollen flesh underneath, then cut strips from Bragg’s old shirt, fashioned more bandages, and wrapped those around his upper arm. Boggs watched me without saying anything, a sheen of sweat dampening his face.

I fiddled with the flame on the stove. The water stubbornly refused to boil while I watched, so I concentrated on laying out our meager equipment and otherwise piddling around the campsite, straightening this and arranging that. I refused to think about there being only one extra sleeping bag.

When I looked back at Marlon, his eyes were locked on mine, and his throat worked.

“Help.” His voice, when it came, had a dry rasp and little sound. Poor guy. He probably had some deathbed confession he wanted to make, or he wanted to ask me to look after his mama or tell his friends how he tried.

I leaned closer. “What is it, buddy? What do you want?”

“Sam,” he husked. “I need to piss like crazy.”

~~~

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Jade

RETRACING THEIR ROUTE toward the creek, Jade made the trip in short bursts: a few steps forward, stop and listen, then a few more. She kept low and moved when the wind blew, hoping to mask her sound with the rustling of the trees. Pausing at the ledge where Sam had fallen, she listened hard.

An owl queried her presence. Night bugs sang in harmony with frogs. A few stars flickered on, pinpoints in a blue-black sky. Scents of pine trees, water, and her own unwashed body competed for her attention. What she wouldn’t give for a hot shower, followed by a soak in a deep, soapy tub. A glass of wine. A velvet robe. Firm bed with a dozen pillows and one of her grandma’s quilts.

“Wish in one hand, spit in the other.” Another of Daddy’s favorite sayings. While I’m at it, I may as well wish for a tall Texan to share that big four-poster.

Sam Cable. Jesus, could things get any more complicated? She had to develop a crush on the man assigned to take her to jail. He and Marlon both were a pair of the best men she’d ever met. Real Good Guys, capital letters intended. “Keepers,” her mama would’ve called them.

Jade let herself down the ledge, lowering her body in a reverse chin-up until her feet touched the ground. Enough light filtered through the trees, she rarely needed the palm-sized flashlight. The bulb had yellowed as the battery drained; she didn’t want it to run out at the wrong time or for Reeder—or, worse yet, Mack—to spot it. That one was the polar opposite of Good Guy. Would things have worked out differently had she met Sam before she hooked up with Tommy?

With the oncoming night, the temperature had dropped like a bad cell connection: suddenly and without warning. Jade shivered, wishing she’d put the flak vest back on, or at least the extra shirt she’d worn all day. What had possessed her to take it off in the first place?

Jade grinned and crept toward the sound of running water, sneaking forward in rolling steps, heel-to-toe, to avoid bringing her weight down on loose twigs. Admit it, she thought to herself. You wanted to show off the girls, catch the big hombre’s eye. Worked too.

Not that she needed any reassurance of the Ranger’s interest. The attraction felt as inexorable as planetary motion, gravity tugging her insides and dragging her closer to the heat of a fiery sun. She had sensed Ranger Cable becoming aware of the growing attraction, as well. The big man’s eyes lingered more and more frequently, and he’d lost the stern resolve of a law officer toward a criminal.

Jade had been aware of male interest since she was twelve, and rarely had she returned it, which included Tommy Grace. She’d rejected the high school boys who came sniffing around her ass like dogs in heat, and most of the boys in college and law school. Her first time had been clumsy, awkward, and messy, an act completed to check off a box on her to-do list. The rare recurrence of the act of sex had been more to seal a deal than for any emotional need on her part. Her thing with Tommy Grace had been strictly business.

Jade found the stream by stepping in it; the water’s edge was hidden in shadow. She waded into the deeper, faster-moving flow, reasoning it would be cleaner and contain fewer parasites. The chilly water soaked her legs up to the knees, and she clamped her jaws to keep her teeth from chattering.

The burbling water masked sounds; she could hear nothing over it. Jade strained her eyes, trying to pick up any hint of human presence, and sniffed the air like a wary deer. After all, she reasoned, wasn’t Bambi’s mother shot while taking a drink?

Jade filled a water bottle, drank, then refilled and capped it. She put it away before filling the rest.

Taking care not to slosh, Jade slipped out of the water and followed the now-familiar path leading to the ledge. Her feet squished like icy-cold fish stuffed in soaked paper bags. It was hard to tell what felt worse, the aches and pains of the day’s hard travel or her freezing feet.

Resting in a dank mineshaft had never sounded so good. She looked forward to getting back. Who knows, maybe I can get Sam to warm my feet for me.

And then what? Jade asked herself. She’d never been in this situation before, actually liking a guy and wanting to get to know him better. What would happen if she had to choose between going to jail or shooting the Ranger and running?

No answer appeared.

She found the ledge and, after rebuilding the rock cairn, shinnied over the edge with a jaw-clenching effort. Jade lay on her back and stared at the star-dotted sky. A meteor zipped across her field of view, so fast that she thought for a second she’d imagined it.

Ranger Sam Cable. A guy she would really like to know a lot better. A guy who, in a different life, she could see being a keeper. Interesting to see how a relationship with somebody she actually liked might turn out. It was too bad, really.

~~~

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Sam

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU have to piss?”

“You know... piss. Take a leak. Urinate.”

Marlon looked at me, and I looked at Marlon. His hurt-puppy eyes worked on my conscience while I considered the... logistics of how two guys with one working leg apiece could achieve urination in a pitch-black cave.

“Can you roll to the side?”

“I can’t piss on my side, Sam. C’mon, help me up.”

“Wait for Stone to get back.”

“I—I can’t do it in front of a woman!”

“It’s dark; she’ll never see a thing.”

“No way. Uh-uh. I can’t.”

“Jesus, Marlon. Seriously?”

His eyes answered my question.

“Oh hell. Come on.” I sighed.

Struggling and groping in ways I never thought I would grope another man, we made it into a hunched, somewhat upright position, Marlon’s good right leg against my good left. His left arm dangled uselessly as we tottered together like drunken sailors on a three-day leave.

“Okay,” I panted. We wound up facing away from the entrance. “Let’s go that way. Deeper into the cave.” Right where I’d just said I didn’t want to go.

“’Kay.”

We stumble-hopped about two dozen feet from camp.

“Far enough?” I gasped. Hunching over to keep level with the shorter man was testing me in new and interesting ways.

“Sure.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

A pause.

“I can’t unzip my pants,” Marlon complained. “My arm’s busted.”

“What? Well, I’m not doing it for you.”

“Hold on. Wait...”

“What’re you...?”

“I’m trying to... Fuck. Goddamn it, this hurts.”

“Stop, stop, stop,” I commanded. “You’re gonna fall.”

We panted in the darkness. Ghosts of long-dead miners laughed at us.

“All right, stand still,” I said. “Don’t move. I’ll get the zipper, but I’ll be damned if I’ll hold your dick for you.”

“Why don’t you bear hug me from behind? Then I can use my good arm.”

“Good idea.” We completed a complex transition worthy of a Broadway choreographer. “How’s that?”

“Working... on it.” The rasp of a zipper came to my ears, followed by, “Ahh, Jesus, that’s better.” The splatter of mission success went on for a long time. It sounded like Marlon urinated the contents of the Missouri River. I hoped the flood didn’t fill up the mine.

“Okay, Sam, thanks. Let me zip up.”

Yellow light clicked on behind us. “Should I leave you boys alone for a little while longer?”