part0031

Hatch woke to the smell of fire. She blinked away the cobwebs and managed to open her left eye halfway. The flicker of firelight entered her vision.

She tried to sit up, but her left arm was tied tight around her waist. She reached for her Kimber with her right. Her holster was empty. She tried to sit up again.

"Easy. You took a bad spill." It was MacIntosh’s voice.

"Looked for it. Didn’t see it. You came down that ice about the length of three football fields and you were moving fast. Picked up what I could. Which wasn't much."

"My eye." She brought her free hand up and felt the softball-size lump on the right side of her face.

He moved forward and crouched as if he were performing an examination. "Took a pretty good beating on that ice. Most of it is superficial ice burn, but the stuff around your right eye, it’s cut pretty good. I'm not sure if it got your cornea or not. I put some antibacterial ointment on the wounds. Cleaned them as best I could with what I had."

"What about Lawson?" Hatch looked around the makeshift camp.

MacIntosh retreated to his previous position. "He’s doing okay."

Hatch followed MacIntosh’s gaze over to Lawson on the other side of the fire, where he was now strapped into a cot. The dressings on his wounds had been refreshed. The man appeared to be sound asleep. His chest rose and fell gently.

"Where are we?" Hatch had trouble bringing up her internal map of the area.

"Old mineshaft. Here, let me help you up." MacIntosh reached over and assisted Hatch. Her left shoulder was sore. "I popped it back in when you were out, but that thing was badly dislocated. I’m pretty sure you tore something."

"Good splint." She admired his handiwork.

As she sat up, the room spun, and she almost fell back to the cot.

MacIntosh steadied her. "That wound is gonna need some stitches. I packed it good, but you really did some damage when you hit that rock like a freight train."

"Noted." Hatch reeled from nausea. She shook it off. "We gotta get him on the move. How long have I been out?"

"I was able to run an IV drip, get some fluids back into him. I have a full med bag. Though, between the two of you, I'm running out of supplies fast."

Hatch now noticed that he had rigged up an IV drip next to the cot. He had basically converted the mineshaft into a triage medical tent, and he'd done well by both his patients.

She pulled out her cell phone.

MacIntosh shook his head. "Good luck getting signal up here."

"Punching the message in so as soon as we get it, I can hit send.” She took a couple of unsteady steps before regaining her footing. The empty feeling in the pit of her stomach vanished, replaced with a steel resolve. “Let’s get him situated on the ATV and get the hell out of here."

"Not gonna be that easy. ATV is trashed. That thing's in about seventeen different parts on the same hill you went for a slide on.”

“Then what other options do we have?”

“The only way we're getting out of here is on foot.”

"How far are we from the main road from here?"

Hatch looked at the unconscious marshal laying on the cot and then down at her splinted arm. "We're gonna have to make it work."

"Just take a second and rest. Let me get him rigged up. I'll tether him like a sled and pull him. It'll be no problem."

Hatch let MacIntosh set about his business as she warmed herself by the fire. She looked at him as he knotted a rope to the ends of the cot and created a pulley system. He checked his knots. He was thorough.

"Why'd you do all this?" Hatch asked.

MacIntosh dismissed her with a wave. "Does it matter?"

"Didn’t matter to cops. Didn't matter to the judge when I told him what they had done to my girlfriend. They still locked me up. The system's broken, and then it keeps breaking other people. That's the way it works unless you choose not to let it. I was put into the foster care system early.

“I didn't know my father, and my mom sold me for drugs, but one thing came out of it. My brother, he was the only thing that kept me going. When I was twelve, I ended up in a foster family, and they had brought me in along with another foster. We were about the same age and, well, at first, we hated each other and fought all the time. We took every bad home experience out on the parents trying to give us a better life and we took it out on each other too. But our parents cared. They never quit on us. And over time, we became a family. The fights we had were fights all brothers have, and over the two years I lived with them, I had my first official taste of family.”

"Why only two years?"

"Car accident killed them both."

"Wasn’t your fault. But what are you gonna do at fourteen? We weren't biological brothers, so like I said, a broken system breaks people. They broke up the one bit of family I had a chance of holding onto and sent us into different foster camps. We kept in touch though we traveled different paths. I saw an opportunity in the Marine Corps, and he got himself mixed up in drugs. But I never stopped caring about him. Planned to help him out. Half the reason I became a medic was because I wanted to learn how to help people, and he was gonna be my first real patient, the first person I really saved."

Hatch wanted to connect the dots. "How'd you end up on that assault case?"

"After I got out of the Corps, I was working as a paramedic and doing all right. I had a family, a girlfriend with a kid on the way. I was off duty and coming home from work when I happened upon a drive-by shooting. Saw some guy gunned down in the middle of the street.” MacIntosh shook his head. “I was the first one there. I jumped out and did what I did. I always keep a med bag with me. Old habits, I guess. Plugged enough holes and he survived."

"I don’t understand how that led to your arrest."

"That's the thing. I guess doing a good deed doesn’t always have a reward because it turned out the guy I saved was some big-time gang leader, and the people who shot him were big-time in their gang too."

It came together for Hatch. "You ruined their hit."

"Might’ve slipped under the radar had the media not gotten wind of it and made a big show of it. They put my name in the newspaper. Put my picture on the front page. Called me a hero. I was at work when they came for me."

The room grew quiet. Even the fire seemed to have stopped to listen.

MacIntosh’s face grew dark. "I wasn’t home, but my girl was.” His gaze shifted away. “They hurt her. When the court failed to prosecute, I hurt them."

"But you didn’t kill them."

"No, I didn’t. I wish I had, though. Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten caught."

"Fast forward for me,” Hatch said. “You were three weeks from getting out on those assault charges. What changed?"

MacIntosh chuckled, though his face looked anything but happy. "Everything. I got news that my brother had been killed. I call him that, you know. People have told me I’m crazy, but he’s the only family I've got. Had…” He took a moment to compose himself. “I had planned to come out and kill Grizz. You’re right, I was three weeks out. You make a lot of enemies in prison, especially when you don’t join up.”

“Pick sides. Join a gang. Anyway, at Spring Creek, there were two big rival Aryan gangs. I had pissed one of them off when I wouldn’t do what they asked me to.”

"What did they ask you to do?"

"He wanted what everybody wants inside there, a favor, a trade. But see, some of these guys that you say no to, they hold a grudge, and I didn’t join up with anybody. My plan was to get in, do my time, and get out. Had been pretty good at it, but three weeks out, they came for me, and I killed them.”

Hatch noted the sorrow on his face. She opened her mouth to speak, but had nothing to offer.

“I'm not proud of it. I tried to avoid it.”

"Sometimes killing is unavoidable."

MacIntosh nodded. "Sometimes it is. When I killed that guy, I gained the attention of Red Winslow. I knew his affiliation with The Way. I figured, hell, I had some time to burn. I might as well get as close as possible, making sure that when I got out of there, killing Grizz would be the first stop I made. It would be a lot better if he welcomed me into his home so I could look him in the eye before taking his life."

"You know, you don’t have to do this.”

He snorted. “Give me a break.”

“You can disappear. Help me get down to where the ATV trail meets the road. I've got a vehicle there. It'll get you into town and you can disappear. I'll tell parole–"

"No," MacIntosh interrupted. "I don’t run from my problems. I face them square on. I run now, then I'm running the rest of my life."

Hatch thought about this and the year she'd spent on the run, only to be working with people who tried to take her life. "Then, let's finish this thing." Hatch stood. Her legs wobbled only a moment before she steadied and readied herself for the mile trek down the glacier.