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“What I want to know is why.”
He sighs. “I had a sideline going with the guy-weed, meth-but he got unreliable. Always talking about Allah, you know.” He shrugged. “And today, well, I really did owe Vance ten grand.”
“That why you shot him? He was the one in the suit, right?”
“You don’t miss a trick, Nickie.”
“Why bring me into it?”
“I couldn’t be sure how many guys he’d have.”
“No. Why me?”
“What do you want me to say?” He shrugs. “Because you buy the whole lie. You win the Golden Gloves and to celebrate, what do you do? Get drunk and nail your girlfriend? Not you. You join the army.”
“You used me.”
“You let yourself be used.”
“I could go to the cops.”
“They’d arrest you, too. But you know what?” He shakes his head. “That doesn’t matter. You didn’t do that in Iraq, and you won’t here. That’s why I came to you. Because you’re predictable, Nickie. You never change.”
The moment stretches. You remember your trainer saying all you had to do was believe. Remember the feeling of being part of a team, a soldier, and what it got you, a diagnosis of PTSD and a rented room in a city you hate and a raw and formless anger that seems some days more real than any version of you that you once thought might be the real thing.
And then you raise the pistol you took from the parking deck and put it to Cooper’s head and show him he’s wrong.
Your knuckles hurt and your lips are chapped. There’s a line from an old Leonard Cohen song ru
When the sun slips below the horizon, you get up off the boulder you’ve been sitting on all day. A quiet corner of searing nowhere at the end of an abandoned two-track, brown rocks and brown dirt and white sky and you.
The Bronco’s passenger window is still open.
You reach in your pocket and pull out the can of lighter fluid and pop the top and lean in the window to spray it all over your friend and the front seat and the floorboards, the smell rising fast. You squeeze until nothing else comes. You think you might be crying, but you’re not sure.
The butane catches with a soft whoomp and a trail of blue-yellow flame leaps around the inside of the truck you once loved. The upholstery catches quickly, and Cooper’s clothing. Within a minute, greasy black smoke pours out the windows, and a fierce crackling rises.
You stand on the ridge of the desert and watch. Another truck engulfed in flame beneath another burning sky, and you still standing, still watching.
And then you turn and start walking alone.
CARLA NEGGERS
Throughout her extensive career, Carla Neggers has excelled not only at creating vivid characters, but also at placing them in circumstances where Mother Nature is as much of a threat as the killers they face. Whether in the lush Irish ruins of The Angel, the frozen mountain range of Cold Pursuit, or the salty Maine air of The Harbor, the protagonists in Carla’s stories must confront not only the harsh realities of their situation, but also the brutal conditions of their environment.
In this sense “On the Run” is both a classic adventure story and vintage Carla Neggers. On an isolated trailhead in the unforgiving mountains of New Hampshire, Gus Winter and the fugitive holding him at gunpoint will grapple in a life-and-death struggle. The temperature is dropping and both men are feeling the cold’s embrace when this story begins.
ON THE RUN
“This is where they died?”
Gus Winter shook his head. “No. Another half hour, at least.”
The fugitive shivered in the cold drizzle that had been falling all day. “Ironic that you’ll die up here, too,” he said.
“If I die, then you’ll die. Help won’t arrive in time to save you. Just like it didn’t arrive in time to save them.”
Them.
Gus kept his expression neutral. They’d stopped in the middle of the rough, narrow trail for the fugitive to catch his breath. He was compact, thickly built and at least twenty years younger than Gus, but his jeans and cotton sweater weren’t appropriate for the conditions on the ridge. His socks were undoubtedly cotton, too. He didn’t wear a hat or gloves. He carried a hip pack, but he’d already consumed his small bag of trail mix and quart of water.
Three hours ago, he’d jumped from behind a giant boulder just above a seldom-used trailhead up Cold Ridge, stuck a gun in Gus’s face and ordered him to get moving. Now they were on an open stretch of bald rock at three thousand feet in the White Mountains of New Hampshire on an unsettled October afternoon.
The weather would get worse. Soon.
Gus looked out at the mist, fog and drizzle. The hardwoods with their brightly colored autumn leaves had given way to more and more evergreens. At just over four thousand feet, he and the fugitive would be above the tree line.
Gus said, “Most hypothermia deaths occur on days just like today.”
“That right?”
“It doesn’t have to be below zero to die of the cold.”
The fugitive hunched his shoulders as if to combat his shivering. He had a stubbly growth of beard, which made sense given the story he’d told Gus about escaping from a federal prison in Rhode Island two days ago. His dark eyes showed none of the discomfort he had to be feeling.
Gus wasn’t winded, and he was warm enough in his layers of moisture-wicking fabrics and his lined, waterproof jacket. He wore a wool hat, wind-resistant gloves, wool socks and waterproof hiking boots. His backpack was loaded with basic supplies, but he couldn’t reach back for anything, take it off, unzip a compartment.
If he did, the fugitive had said he’d shoot him.
The fugitive coughed, still breathing hard. Sweat trickled down his temples into his three-day stubble. “I’m not dying of the cold.”
“Try not to sweat,” Gus said. “Sweating is a cooling mechanism. The water evaporates on your skin and promotes heat loss. You don’t want that.”
“You want me to freeze to death.”
“No. I want you to give yourself up. Walk back down the mountain with me.”
The fugitive stepped back behind Gus and waved his gun, a.38-caliber Smith & Wesson that he must have picked up somewhere between prison and New Hampshire. “Get moving.”
“It’s a good idea to keep moving, but not so hard and fast that you sweat. It’s easier to stay warm than to get warm.”
“Shut up.”
Gus started back along the trail and heard the crunch of small stones as the fugitive fell in behind him. The trail dropped off sharply to their left, and in the valley below, the bright orange leaves of hardwoods managed to penetrate the gray. Every autumn, leaf-peepers flocked to northern New England to see the stu
Gus realized it wasn’t his bad luck that the one person in the White Mountains with a gun had found him. The fugitive had targeted him. Watched for him.
Why?
Before long, the valley would disappear in the fog and low cloud cover, and dusk came early this time of year. Even with the flashlight he had in his pack, Gus knew it would be increasingly difficult, perhaps impossible, to see from one trail marker to the next. The fugitive wouldn’t find his way on his own. He didn’t know Cold Ridge. Gus did. He’d lived in its shadows, hiked its trails his entire life-not counting his two years in the army. He’d come home at twenty expecting to get married, have a couple of kids.
Things had worked out differently.
Because of the ridge and its dangers.