James Burke - Light of the World

She walked to the front of the Audi and stared up the hill, the wind blowing her hair over her face. The figure turned and walked back in the shadows, then reemerged with a woman wearing shorts and a T-shirt; a drawstring bag had been pulled over her head, and her wrists were fastened behind her.

Felicity began walking up the hill, her eyes lowered, stepping carefully over the holes burrowed between the rocks by pocket gophers and badgers. The sun had disappeared from the sky entirely, and she felt as though a cold wind were blowing through her soul. Give me strength, give me strength, give me strength, a voice chanted in her head.

She heard the rumble of the twin exhausts again, echoing in a canyon, trailing away into the trees. She was forty yards from the man on the hill and could see his wide shoulders and the tropical shirt that he wore inside a cheap tan suit. He held his captive by the arm with his right hand and began cupping the fingers of his left, indicating that Felicity should keep walking toward him.

“You have to let her go first,” she said.

He stared at her without replying. Behind him, up on the logging road, Felicity could see a gray SUV, a spray of rust on one side. “I’ve done what you asked,” she said. “Release the young woman and I’ll go with you.”

A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. He walked the woman thirty feet away, upwind from where he had been standing. He eased her into a sitting position on top of a fallen tree trunk and returned. The bound woman was out of earshot. Still he did not speak. He turned up his palms as though they glowed with spiritual grace.

“She’s never heard your voice or seen your face?” Felicity said.

He shook his head, his grin in place.

“You’re Asa Surrette,” she said. “You’re older than your pictures, a little more coarse. Your hair is dyed, but you’re him.”

“Nice to meet you in person. Please get in my vehicle. I’m looking forward to our association.”

“You had all of this planned.”

“Of course.”

“Why do you want me?”

“I think we knew each other in another life. I knew it when I first saw you from afar. I could smell the heat in the sand and the ring of swords on copper shields. I could hear a crowd roaring. Sound familiar?”

“What you’re describing are the symptoms of schizophrenia.”

“Could be. But as Charles Dickens wrote, ‘It’s a mad, mad world, Master Copperfield.’ ” Then he seemed to hear the twin exhausts, too. “You didn’t try to get clever on me, did you?”

“If I’d wanted to do that, I would have called the FBI.”

“I suspect that’s true. Well, let’s leave Rhonda to find her way out of here and toggle on down the road.”

“I have to use the bathroom.”

“You are a strange duck, aren’t you?”

“Do you mind turning around?”

“You’re cute,” he said.

She kept her eyes on his, her expression flat.

“Go ahead. I’ll just step up here a little ways,” he said.

She squatted in the leaves and pine needles, her back to him, her dress spread. She reached between her legs and pulled Love Younger’s leather punch from the tape on her thigh.

“Finished?” he said.

“Yes,” she replied, standing erect.

He extended his hand, leaning forward, his eyes merry. “You’re very pretty. A nice little package.”

She let him take her left hand in his. “Is the place we’re going very far?” she asked.

“What do you care? I’ve got you, you little whore.”

“Asa?”

“What do you want?” he replied.

“Here’s something for you,” she said.

The T-shaped handle of the leather punch was snugged tightly against her palm when she drove it into his face, the point sinking cleanly through his cheek, her knuckles touching his skin. When she pulled the shaft free, his eyes were popping, and blood was spurting from his mouth. On the edge of her vision, she saw the waitress trying to walk downhill, the cloth bag still over her head. Felicity drove the leather punch at his throat.

He knocked it aside and struck her with his fist. The blow exploded against her eyebrow and the bridge of her nose, tearing something loose inside her, blurring the trees. As she rolled down the slope, she could smell the drowsy odor of leaves and pine needles and the raw damp ground, and she wanted to crawl inside a cocoon and remain there in the coolness of the afternoon and the swaying of the trees for the rest of her life, secure in the knowledge that she had done all she could and her ordeal was over.

That was when he lifted her to her knees, his clothes exuding an eye-watering fecal stench, the bloody drool from his mouth matting in her hair. She blacked out as he dragged her up the slope toward his vehicle, hardly aware of the grinding sounds that issued from his throat or the fingers that sank like talons into her skin.

Gretchen Horowitz had followed Felicity’s Audi from Missoula and lost sight of it after taking the exit by the Alberton Gorge. She made a wrong choice at a fork and ended up in a blind canyon, then had to retrace her route, and only through dumb luck did she see the Audi a hundred yards away, parked in a bare spot by the side of the road.

Wherever she traveled, she kept several weapons in a long steel box welded to the floor behind the seat, one of which was a scoped K-98 German Mauser. She left the truck in a grove of pine trees, the rifle slung on her shoulder, and crossed the dirt road and worked her way uphill until she caught sight of Felicity Louviere standing below a switchback. Felicity was looking up at a figure who stood in the shadows. Gretchen unslung the rifle and dropped to one knee behind a boulder, gazing through the telescopic lens at the bizarre scene on the hillside.

A bound woman with a cloth bag over her head was sitting on a log, wearing only a T-shirt and shorts, her knees skinned. Gretchen moved the lens from the bound woman to Felicity. She unlocked the bolt on the Mauser and slid it back, then eased an eight-millimeter soft-nosed round into the chamber, locking down the bolt soundlessly with the heel of her hand.

The K-98 had never failed her. It was amazingly light for its size and era, deadly accurate at long range, even with iron sights, the bolt action as fluid and smooth as water. She had no doubt that the third person was Asa Surrette. But the light was bad, his outline dissolving into the shadows when Gretchen tried to lock him inside the crosshairs of the scope.

Then he stepped forward, extending his hand. His unshaved cheeks and the prune-line furrows in his throat and his boxlike head came into focus inside the lens. She took a breath, releasing it slowly, her finger tightening inside the trigger guard. In under a half second, the eight-millimeter round would strike home with almost no trajectory, coring through the brow, flattening inside the brain, cutting his motors, extinguishing all light from his eyes, before he ever heard the report echoing through the hills.

It didn’t happen. Felicity decided to take matters into her own hands and attack Surrette with a tool of some kind, and she made a mess of it.

Gretchen took her finger from the trigger guard, her right eye focused through the scope, and watched the situation come apart.

Take the shot, she heard a voice say.

I’ll hit Felicity, she answered.

Do it. She screwed things up.

My head hurts. I can’t think. Just shut the fuck up.

She saw Surrette hit Felicity, and she tightened the stock against her shoulder again, sure that this time she had a clean shot. She didn’t. Surrette grabbed Felicity as he would a slab of beef and wrestled her to his vehicle, blood leaking from his mouth. He opened the driver’s door and began stuffing her inside, at the same time driving his right fist into her ribs and the side of her head.