Nevada Barr - Blood lure

Rory'd been put to cooking, Anna guessed. In a rage the man with the flashlight had kicked over the stove, burning Rory's hands in the process.

"Goddamn it," the man bellowed. The light swung like a sword, piercing the darkness several feet to Anna's left. Staring right at her, Bill McCaskil screamed, "Come out now or I'll blow their fucking heads off!"

The McCaskil who held the rifle and the flashlight was a different man than the shifty Lothario Anna remembered. Days alone in the wilderness had had an adverse effect on the city boy. His beard was rough, his hair matted and spiky by turns, his clothes dirty. The biggest change was the eyes. McCaskil was scared, scared to the point of unreason. Even in the dim backwash of the flashlight Anna could see his irises were entirely ringed in white as his facial muscles pulled the lids away. Whatever edge he'd been running toward when he came to Glacier, McCaskil had been pushed over it.

A crazy man, a scared crazy man, with a rifle and hostages. In law enforcement this was what was referred to as a worst-case scenario.

"Out," McCaskil cried in a voice ugly with fear. He swung the rifle toward Rory and Joan, and Anna raised her hands, stepped forward. She never made it into the light. McCaskil was wheeling, screaming, the flashlight raking the trees. He'd not seen her.

"I'm not going to hurt him." His voice became wheedling as he turned. Silence followed, deepened by the darkness and the trees. "Balthazar's mine!" he shrieked and Anna flinched. Whomever he shouted for, it wasn't her. Joan and Rory must have told him they were alone. Anna blessed them for their courage and began creeping around the circle. McCaskil was beyond negotiation even if she'd had anything to negotiate with. Running away was the best option. With the cover of night she could do it easily if she left Joan and Rory.

A gut-numbing roar froze the cowardly thoughts; bear- thebear- close by. McCaskil screamed high and shrill, and the rifle at his side fired, the glare of the muzzle harsh and bright and then gone, leaving a red wound seared across Anna's night vision.

"I'll kill them. You'll have killed them," he screamed into the night. "Like you killed that Van Slyke woman. Butcher. I'll do it."

A great gush of terror brought the contents of Anna's stomach into her throat and she had to fight to keep from retching. The slicer of faces was somewhere in the darkness with her. He, and a great bear that seemed to have an agenda of its own.

Run away, run away,she thought and moved to the next tree, closer to Joan and Rory.

The two of them sat shoulder to shoulder about fifteen feet from the mad McCaskil. Ranting, a second round fired, the thrashing of his booted feet as he made short, aborted dashes at sounds only he could hear, covered the noise Anna made as she moved.

The west-facing slope was dryer than the valleys, and there was little undergrowth, not much in the way of cover but shadow and luck. Behind Rory and Joan, several yards in the woods, Anna parked herself in the shelter of a tree that she hoped was wide enough to hide her should McCaskil's light come back around. Her shirt was gray, her shorts green- all to the good-but in the near-perfect darkness under the pines, should light touch on her bare arms, her legs or her face, they would shine like beacons.

Making herself small in mind if not in body, she wriggled out of her day pack and set it squarely in front of her where probing light would not fire its burgundy hue in a dun and green landscape. Working by feel, Anna groped through it. Her breath was coming in short shallow gasps, audible, panicked. Her scalp was tingling and she was losing sensation in her hands and feet. Hyperventilating,she warned herself. Too scared.Lifting the pack to her face in lieu of the traditional paper sack, she breathed into it, then out. The smells of her short history in Glacier were all there: peanut butter, skunk, sweat, fish guts, grease, dust. The skin on her head loosened, her heart ceased to pound in her ears, her fingers began to feel like fingers. Ten breaths more, counted out over a brief eternity, and she put the pack down again. In her hand were the wire cutters, quicker and more sure than a Swiss army knife dulled from years of promiscuous use.

The light flew erratically past. She waited a moment for the sound of a rifle shot and the sudden blasting away of an exposed elbow or knee, but she'd not been spotted. Further out into the trees, drowned in the impossible ink of a woodland night, she heard the stealthy sound of padded feet moving over duff.

Nothing she could do about that. She pushed it from her mind.

A quick peek let her know McCaskil had turned again and faced away from her. He stopped shouting. In a voice dead calm and more frightening because of it, he spoke to the darkness, "In one minute I will kill the boy. You can save him. Balthazar's life for the boy's. One minute." He began counting down in a loud voice.

Out of the frying pan, Anna said to herself and rolled from the cover of her tree. Ignoring the burst of pain in her injured knee, she moved as rapidly as possible toward the others. In seconds she knelt behind Rory. "Not a sound," she hissed in his ear. She showed him the wire cutters and he understood. Quickly and quietly, he swung his feet around.

Joan's head turned. Without light Anna could not read her expression. She trusted in Joan's good sense. What she could not know was how much of it fear had eaten away. As there was nothing to be done to reassure either the researcher or herself, Anna ignored her.

Closing her mind to the possibilities, Anna felt at Rory's ankles. Thin, hard plastic; McCaskil had bound his prisoners with the disposable cuffs policemen carry as spares. Clearly he'd come prepared. Though virtually impossible to break, he couldn't have picked anything more vulnerable to fence pliers, and Anna was grateful.

"Twenty-nine," McCaskil called. "Twenty-eight."

Snip, snip.

Anna clipped a bit of Rory's flesh along with the plastic and he hollered, "Ouch!" The wretched rotten boy actually said ouch. "Sorry," he whispered too late.

"He's turning," Joan hissed.

"Run," Anna said and pushed Rory to his feet, "run!" She shoved at unidentified bits of boy anatomy as she scrambled to her feet to follow.

A hailstorm of words, shrieked and screamed from what sounded like the throats of a multitude of demons, rained down. McCaskil's threats, Rory's squeaks, Joan's exhortations and Anna's own sailor-like vocabulary of meaningless obscenities. McCaskil's flashlight shivered and snapped. In her mind Anna heard Teddy Pinson, an old college friend, intone, " 'The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!' "

Rory disappeared in darkness followed by a gunshot close and loud, a blow on Anna's eardrums. Cutting through trauma-induced deafness came a scream. Anna's mind folded down in confusion. The metallic swallowing sound of a bolt-action rifle and another round was chambered. Anna'd fallen. Had she been shot and screamed? Had the bullet found Rory in the dark? Before enough time had elapsed to draw a full breath, Anna knew she'd not been hit. Her knee had given out as she'd lunged for the cover of the woods.

"No!"

That was Joan. Anna rolled and the butt of McCaskil's rifle pounded down, not the killing blow to the back of the head he'd intended, but a glancing strike to the shoulder that made Anna cry out.

McCaskil had thrown aside the flashlight. The beam ran along the ground catching up the rust of the needles, illuminating the man's booted feet. Anna bunched up her weight on her left hip and kicked out. The sole of her boot connected with McCaskil's ankle. Fierce pain shot up from her bad knee but she scarcely felt it. McCaskil went down on one knee.

Writhing across the slippery bed of needles, as single-minded as a sidewinder, Anna struck out again, connecting this time with his shin. The man bellowed in rage and fell back on butt and heels. No time to rise and shine. Knowing she had more strength in her legs than her upper body, Anna propelled herself after him. Crablike, snakelike, scuttling like a scorpion, hoping like any low and little thing to strike quickly enough and with enough venom to survive one more day.