Greg Iles - The Quiet Game

I grab my hip pocket. “Still there.”

“Cash?”

I nod. I brought two thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills for just this reason, so I couldn’t be traced by credit card charges.

“You may have to hide out until you get a morning flight. Denver maybe. Do whatever you have to do, but stay out of sight.”

A yellow light appears from the darkness ahead, hovering in the air to my right, about fifty yards away.

“That’s the campground,” Stone says. “Come on.”

We separate and fight our way to the south bank. As my hands collide with cold rock, I hear a screech of brakes ahead. Crawling out of the water, I realize my legs are nearly numb.

“They must have driven like banshees to get here that fast,” Stone says through rattling teeth. “Tear off a piece of your shirttail.”

“What?”

“Your shirttail.”

In my weakened state, tearing the soaked cotton is like trying to rip a phone book in half. As I struggle with the hem, Stone jabs a stick through a stretched-taut place and rips off a long piece.

“What do you want me to do? Make a surrender flag?”

He hands me the fabric and rolls over on his stomach. “Wad up a hunk of that and jam it into my wound.”

I tear off most of the shirttail and squeeze it into a tight wet tennis ball of cloth, then crouch over Stone’s back. Garbled voices float to us from the direction of the campground.

“Where are you hit?”

“Left cheek of my ass. Took out a plug of muscle, I think.”

I feel along his left buttock until my fingers mush into a warm opening. Stone doesn’t even flinch. The hole is ragged, but it runs across the buttock at an angle, like a deep grazing wound. The swelling below it is considerable, though, and it’s bound to get worse now that he’s out of the cold water.

“Hurry!” he grunts.

I squeeze the cloth into a tighter ball and hold it against the opening. “Ready?”

“Do it.”

In one hard stroke I depress the cloth into the hole as he tenses beneath me. It reminds me of helping my father pack a decubitus ulcer when I worked for him in high school. Now I need something to hold the packing in the wound. Removing my soaked windbreaker, I pull off what’s left of my shirt and slide it under Stone’s left leg, then tie it over the hole.

“That’s the best I can do for now,” I tell him, pulling my jacket back on.

“What’s the name of the bar?” he asks, rolling over. His face is even whiter than before.

“The Silver Bell. Bartender’s Tiny McSwain.”

“Good. Move your ass, kid.”

“What are you going to do?”

He drops one hand to his waist, where the butt of his. 45 glints dully in the dark. “Slow those bastards down for you.”

“I’ll stay and help you, damn it.”

“You can’t help me. You don’t have a gun. You’ll help me by getting your ass back to Mississippi and nailing Portman’s hide to the barn wall.”

“Stone-”

The old agent grips my arm with more strength than I thought he could possibly have left. “No matter what you hear, keep running. I mean that. If it sounds like the goddamn O.K. Corral up here, you keep running until you reach that bar.”

“There’s only one way I’ll go.”

“How’s that?”

“If you promise to testify.”

His laughter is full of irony. “Boy, if I survive this night, wild horses couldn’t stop me from testifying. Portman gave the order for these sons of bitches to kill us because he thought I was going to testify. Well, now he’s right. If I’m alive, I’ll get to Mississippi. I’ll drag Portman’s ass down from the mountaintop if I have to tear the whole mountain down with him. Marston too. Now, get your ass out of here.”

I get to my knees and look through the trees to the south.

“Don’t come back,” Stone says quietly. “Not with Tiny or the sheriff. After you leave, everybody up here but me is a target. That’s how I want it. The whole thing’ll be over by the time anybody could get here, and if I don’t come out on top, whoever came would die for nothing. If you come back, I’ll shoot you myself.”

I grab his upper arm. “The trial starts in thirty-six hours. You get your ass back to Mississippi. You owe it to Del Payton.”

He nods in the dark. “That I do, Cage. That I do.”

My run to the town is a benumbed nightmare of falls and slides and collisions with trees, an endless march into a killing wind, but I never consider resting. Dwight Stone is offering up his life to cover my escape.

The first gunshot echoes down the valley behind me as the glow of Crested Butte appears like a mirage in the distance. All my instincts say, turn around, go back, and help Stone. But the old soldier’s tone of his last order keeps me going. Over rock. Through snowdrifts. Past a black mirror of a lake. Through thickets, thorns. Plodding forward into the relentless wind, ever forward, until at last I am sliding down a white slope toward a geometric heaven of lights and warmth.

When I reach the level of the buildings, I circle to my right in a broad arc that takes me around to the south entrance of town. Muted television dialogue drifts on the air, and the occasional sound of a car motor rumbles from between the buildings.

Crested Butte looks less like a cowboy town than a nineteenth century New England village plopped down in the mountains. The buildings along Elk Avenue have Victorian facades, and flowers line every street and window box. The windows are mostly dark, but as I move along the street, a shopkeeper backs out of a doorway, gives me a furtive glance, then locks his door and hurries to a truck parked across the street.

Twenty yards farther on, a yellow funnel of light appears down a side street to my left, illuminating a wooden bell painted silver. I turn down the alley and crunch through the snow as fast as my tingling feet will carry me.

The Silver Bell has old-fashioned swinging doors. It’s a rustic place that caters to locals, not a “ski bar” fluffed up for the tourist trade. There are three people sitting at the bar and two loners at the tables. All look like serious drinkers. Behind the bar stands a giant of a man with a gray-flecked black beard.

He has to be Tiny McSwain.

As soon as he sees me, he moves around the bar as though to throw me out. Before he can, I hold up my hands and croak:

“If you’re Tiny McSwain, Dwight Stone sent me.”

He stops, his eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”

“Better for you if you don’t know. Stone told me you’d help me.”

“Somebody heard shots up near the mesa,” he says suspiciously. “Was that Dwight?”

“It was the people trying to kill him. Him and me both.”

“I’ll call the sheriff. Where’s Dwight?”

“He’s back by the creek. He told me not to call anybody. He said everything would be over by the time anybody could get to him, and if not, they’d get killed for nothing.”

“Those his words?”

“Near enough.”

Tiny nods. “Then we don’t call anybody.”

“There are at least two men up there, probably more.”

“Stone’s a tough old boy. What did he tell you to do?”

“He said tell you to take me to an airport.”

“Which airport?”

“Denver. And he said do it quick.”

Tiny motions for a T-shirt-clad woman at a table to get behind the bar, then takes a set of keys from his pocket. “Let’s go, friend.”

“Hey,” calls the woman. “Where are you going, if anybody asks?”

“If anybody asks, me and this guy went back up the Slate to help Dwight.” Tiny McSwain looks at his customers, who are staring indifferently at me. “Nobody else says different.”

Blank nods from the drinkers.

“My Bronco’s parked out back,” he says. “Let’s go.”