Atlanta Extreme (17 page)

Shaking her head, the woman stepped back just as the entire door seal was blown off by some heavy-caliber weapon. She had so narrowly escaped being hit that Hawker stood frozen for a moment—but then rocks near his feet exploded as the rifleman turned his weapon toward Hawker.

The vigilante jumped to the ground, rolled, and zigzagged into the brush. Twice more, the rifleman shot at Hawker, once severing a branch from over his head. But the vigilante continued to make his way around the rim of the valley toward the place where the rifleman must be hidden. The sun was behind the western snowy peaks now, and a frigid wind blew down from the ice capped heights.

It was ridiculous to look for a lone man in these thousands of acres of woods, but the vigilante ex-cop continued. There was a chance—however slim. And he had to take it.

Finally, he was near. He knew he must be near. He could see the eastern side of the cabin now, could see that the woman was too frightened or too smart to show any lights inside. He pictured her and the two children huddled in a corner beneath a blanket, the way pioneer women had waited in terror for Indians so many generations before.

Hawker stopped on the mountainside, waiting. Below him, the valley, the river, the wild flowers, and the log cabin became a fantasy world of rich light as the sun set—then ever-weakening light until the sun was gone, leaving the valley in a cold and lonesome afterglow.

From his canvas backpack he took a pair of Steiner military binoculars and searched the hillside. The Steiners were the best nonpowered night vision glasses in the world. The wide lenses sucked in all available light, highlighted detail, and transformed grays to whites so that looking through them at dusk was like looking through normal glasses at midday.

Hawker saw the man then: a lone figure standing against an aspen tree, his rifle resting on a low branch as he aimed toward the cabin in the distance.

Obviously, the man was waiting for one last shot, hoping, perhaps, that the woman would light a lamp and cross before a window.

But now it was Hawker who had the last shot. Quickly, he put the Steiners away and raised the Cobra crossbow—but he didn't fire. Through the binoculars, the man had been clearly visible. Now, looking through the narrow hunting scope, he couldn't find the man, who was invisible in the gloomy dusk.

Damn
, Hawker whispered.

He would have to get closer if he wanted a shot. Much closer.

The vigilante slipped the backpack over his shoulder, adjusted the Colt Commando, then set off slowly down the mountainside. The temperature had fallen with the sun. His hands felt clumsy in the cold, and his breath fogged before him. Every few dozen yards he would stop and look through the Steiners again to make sure the gunman had not moved.

The gunman stood immobile, confident that he could not be seen.

Finally, when Hawker was sure he was close enough, he stopped behind a great tall pine and put the backpack and the crossbow on the ground. He took up the binoculars in his left hand and steadied the assault rifle in the other. The Colt Commando could fire its twenty-round clip in the blink of an eye—eight hundred rounds per minute, if you could feed it fast enough. All Hawker had to do was get a rough sighting through the binoculars, then spray the darkness with the Commando. The gunman would not survive.

Hawker peered through the Steiners, ready to fire—but the assassin was gone. The vigilante swept the glasses back and forth, hoping he had searched the wrong tree or the wrong ledge.

No, the gunman had definitely left.

Shaking his head in disgust, Hawker reached to retrieve his backpack—then threw up an arm against the dark shape that was descending upon him.

The man had been waiting for him, waiting in the shadows on a head-high ledge, and he jumped on Hawker with a jarring impact, driving him to the ground. Then they were rolling, the two of them tumbling down the mountainside in the darkness, fighting for their lives.

The man had a knife, a dark-bladed hunting knife, in his left hand. The vigilante got his own hands up in time and locked them around his attacker's wrist, unable to do anything but hold the knife inches away from his face as they rolled down through brush, over rocks. Then there was another terrible impact, and the vigilante was floating free; then he landed with a
whoof
on the other side of the shallow precipice that the two of them had hit.

Hawker got painfully to his feet just in time to duck the savage kick that the assassin threw at his head. The vigilante timed the next kick and caught the man's leg in midflight, twisting and lifting at the same time. The assassin gave a little squeal of fear as he flew through the air, landed, and rolled upright. Hawker went after him immediately. In the darkness, the man's face seemed grotesquely wide; it made a skin-slap sound as Hawker drove his right fist into it again and again.

The man swung a looping left hand at Hawker's stomach, swung so slowly that Hawker almost didn't bother to move—but then he felt a deep electric pain explode in his left arm: the man still had the knife!

Hawker ripped the knife free, kicked the man savagely in the stomach, then drove the knife deep into his back as he buckled over. The man threw himself grotesquely onto the ground, clawing at his own back. Within a few moments, he moved no more.

Hawker stood, bent at the waist, hands on his knees, fighting to get his breath. It seemed impossible to breathe in these mountains. How could anyone live up here!

Then he walked wearily back up the hill and found his backpack and the assault rifle. From the backpack he took his tiny Tonka flashlight, twisted the cap, and inspected his left arm. The camouflage material of his jump suit was blood-soaked. He ripped the material away and saw that the knife had only gouged a chunk of meat from the underside of his arm. It didn't seem like a serious wound, but he was bleeding steadily, and Hawker knew he needed help.

He took a handkerchief from his pack and wrapped it snugly around his arm. Then he remembered he had left the knife in the back of the man below—the knife with his fingerprints all over it. With a growling sigh of disgust, he backtracked, yanked the man's knife free, and carried it halfway down the mountain with him before he wiped the steel clean and hid it under a rock.

At the edge of the clearing, fifty yards from the cabin, he stopped. The woman had still lighted no lamps, and Hawker felt a pang of sympathy for the frightened woman and her two children. For all they knew, death was waiting right outside their door.

“Lomela! My name is James Hawker. Can you hear me? A policeman friend of yours in Denver sent me—Tom Dulles. I'm here to help!”

Hawker listened to his own echo fade into silence. A great cold moon was lifting over the snowy peaks now, casting a milky light over the gurgling river and the still fields. Hawker felt the beauty of it like a pain deep inside him, and he realized he must be giddy with shock, maybe even in danger of blacking out. He had to hurry; he needed the woman.

“Lomela! I met your father! I met Robert Carthay, and he told me about the silver mine. You have nothing to fear now. The men who were after you are gone.”

A warm light bloomed in the cabin windows, but now Hawker seemed unable to walk. He felt dizzy; he felt nauseous; his legs seemed unable or unwilling to move away from the beauty of the mountain valley frozen in moonlight. If he could only sit for a while, rest for just a bit, then he could travel.

Hawker leaned toward the ground, and the ground rushed up to meet him. He hit with a thud, then all was cold and fuzzy as a rapid darkness took his brain.

three

Hawker was aware of a great radiant warmth moving through him, a wonderful feeling of heat that embraced his entire body.

Then he was sitting bolt upright, staring into the flames of a hearth fire. He lay in front of the fire with a goose-down comforter over him. The woman stood peering at him, fire-shadows flickering across her brown face.

He lay on the plank floor of the cabin. There were deerskins over the windows, and a kerosene lamp cast a yellow circle of light, showing a wood stove, cane-backed chairs, a hand pump, stacked dishes, and a door that opened into a darkened room.

Hawker felt a dull ache in his left arm, and he remembered the fight he had had with the man with the knife. He used his right hand to rub his bleary eyes. “How long have I been unconscious?”

The woman stared at him, unmoving. There was a blanket across her lap, and her hands were beneath the blanket. “An hour. Maybe longer. You were delirious off and on; you came and went. How do you feel now?” Her voice was too high, too countrified to fit the no-nonsense, almost handsome quality of her face. It was like hearing Ingrid Bergman speak with Minnie Pearl's voice.

“I feel like I've been hit over the head with a sledge,” Hawker said, straightening himself. The blanket slid down over his chest, and he saw that his arm had been neatly bandaged and that he wore only his underwear. “Did you get me in here all by yourself?”

“You helped some. You half-walked, half-crawled. You lost a lot of blood. What happened? Did you get shot?”

“Stabbed. There were four men in the hills. I—chased them away. The fourth man got me with his knife.”

“Do you really mean you chased them away? Or did you kill them?” The woman's dark eyes were totally without emotion or mercy as she asked the question.

Hawker said slowly, “I killed them. All of them. That's what they wanted to do to you, isn't it? You or your kids—it didn't matter to them. Just as long as they had at least one of you alive to use as a bargaining tool.”

“They'd do anything for my daddy's silver mine, wouldn't they? They'd kill, kidnap, lie—anything.”

Hawker nodded. “That's right. And don't forget it.”

The woman let the blanket slide off her lap so that now the vigilante could see the long-barreled revolver she held tightly in both hands. It had been aimed at him the entire time. “Not much chance of me forgetting it, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is,” she said coldly. “Those men were shooting down here without a care in the world at my two babies, who haven't done a lick of harm to any creature on this earth. Men as mean as that don't deserve a trial nor words. All they deserve is a bullet in the head. Now you tell me right now why I shouldn't put a bullet through your head.”

“Because I'm not one of them, Lomela,” Hawker said calmly. “I was sent here to help you. I already told you that. Tom Dulles sent me. Isn't Tom a friend of yours? He was worried about you. He knows how badly Bill Nek wants your father's mine. He knows Bill Nek will stop at nothing.”

The woman seemed unconvinced. “You could have got Tom's name anyplace. You could be making the whole thing up. It's not like I can get on the telephone and give Tom a call. The nearest phone in these parts is thirty miles over rough country.”

“I know that you and Tom were lovers, Lomela. I know that he was in love with you before his wife recovered and made it—implausible—for you and him to continue as man and woman. He told me how badly he felt about it all.”

The woman was silent for a long moment of appraisal before she finally said, “He purely did feel bad; both of us did.” There was a touching, faraway quality to her voice as she continued. “His wife had those brain operations, and then she was in the coma for more than a year, and you couldn't hardly call him still married. There didn't seem to be nothing at all wrong in Tom and me finding each other and falling in love. He took good care of his wife, and I took good care of him. He was a wanting, needing man, filled with loneliness and hurt. But he also knew what was right and what was wrong. And when his wife woke up one day, he knew we couldn't go on.”

“He still cares about you,” Hawker said gently. “That's why he sent me.”

The woman stood and placed the revolver on the mantelpiece above the fire. She stooped and fitted another log onto the grate. Her baggy cotton blouse was tucked into her jeans, and Hawker could see her heavy breasts silhouetted against the fire. “I know he still cares. But it's not like the old way we cared for each other. Now we're more like kinfolk who are friendly to each other, that kind of caring.” The woman turned and looked at Hawker. “I believe Tom sent you. And I surely do thank you for killing those men. Are you going to get in a lot of trouble for it? Or are you a policeman?”

The vigilante almost smiled at the girlish naïveté of her question—as if a cop or anyone else could kill four men without almost certainly getting into some kind of trouble. “I'm not a policeman,” Hawker said. “And, come morning, I'll make sure the bodies of the men aren't found. Unless you talk, there's not too much chance of my getting into trouble.”

The woman nodded, satisfied. “Good,” she said. “I kind of knew someone was up here. I felt it all day. I don't know how I knew, but I did.”

“I was the only one up here all day. The other men got there about two hours before you heard the shots.”

“You watched me and my babies all day long without saying a word?” The woman raised her eyebrows, impressed. But then she realized something. “So you was up there when I took my afternoon bath?”

Hawker nodded. “I watched you through binoculars”—he smiled—“and a very nice bath it was, too. You had quite an audience. The men were there then, too. Actually, you helped draw them out. When you started taking your clothes off, they came out of hiding.”

The woman nodded with emphasis. “Good. Then it was worth running around stark naked in front of a bunch of strange men. I'd do it again if I thought it would help keep my babies safe.”

“Where are your children, anyway?”

The woman motioned toward the darkened room. “In there, asleep. They purely have had some time of it, dodging bullets and worrying about being attacked. There was a time when I used to think that getting divorced from their daddy was the worst thing that could happen to them. I didn't know how wrong I was.”