Authors: Phillip Finch
He rolled over onto one side, turning his back to
the bass that was thumping through the trees. With one ear pressed to the ground and the sleeping bag pulled over his head, the noise wasn’t so bad. He willed himself to block out what remained. He promised himself that nothing would disturb him tonight. Not noise, not doubts, not nagging memories. He imagined himself rising in a few hours, refreshed and full of energy, walking to the base of the cliff in the moonlight and beginning his ascent. The image brought him peace. He could feel himself getting drowsy, and he let go and fell away to deep sleep.
But he woke right away when the girl screamed.
Sarah Jean saw that there were five men on motorcycles and two women in the van that followed them in. The men wore grubby denims and leather vests with patches on the back that read in Gothic lettering:
DEMONS M.C.
Stockton
The women threw open the rear doors of the van and set out coolers of beer and bottles of liquor. Music began to boom from speakers in the van’s rear doors. The men scattered around the campground, gathering firewood, and in a short time they were standing around a bonfire that blazed flames as high as their heads, lighting up half the campground.
Sarah Jean watched it all from the car. She saw the Demons riding in, gawking at Missy straddling
Wallace as they kissed at the picnic table. The first rider in the pack pulled in just a few camp spots from Missy and Wallace and the Grand Am, and the others followed. Sarah Jean didn’t like having the bikers parked so close to them when nearly the entire campground was empty. It seemed to bother Wallace too. He lifted Missy off his hips and stood, took her by the arm, and tried to lead her to the car.
Mistake,
Sarah Jean thought. Missy did not like to be pushed around. She yanked her arm away. Wallace grabbed her arm again, Missy shook him off harder. He reached a third time. She was ready for it. She swung and hit him, a hard slap that landed square on his cheek, loud enough that a couple of the bikers looked over and grinned.
Wallace left Missy and got into the car.
“Well, this sucks majorly,” he said.
Missy perched at the end of the picnic table, her legs drawn up in front of her, resting her chin on her knees. She looked cold.
Sarah Jean got out and walked to her.
“Missy?” said Sarah Jean. “It’s time to go.”
Missy didn’t answer. She was looking over at the bikers. A couple of them were watching her. They were silhouetted against the campfire. Its flames licked high, throwing up tiny embers that glowed briefly against the sky before they flared out. Sarah Jean had to admit that the fire looked pretty good right now.
Sarah Jean said, “Missy, I want to go home. Now.”
Missy turned and flipped the keys at Sarah Jean’s
feet.
“Then go,” she said, and she hopped off the table and started toward the Demons. One of them held out a beer to her, and she took it and joined them around the campfire. She stepped into an open space between two of the men.
Sarah Jean returned to the car, and when she looked back Missy was dancing at the fire, head thrown back and swaying.
One of the bikers stepped behind her, moving in close. Missy didn’t seem to notice until he wrapped his thick arms around her. She squealed an uncertain laugh. He squeezed her, she started to fight loose, he picked her up. Now she was yelling, kicking her legs, as he carried her to the open rear of the van, with the second biker following.
In the car, Sarah Jean turned toward Wallace. He was staring out the window, stunned and transfixed.
“Do something,” Sarah Jean said. “Wallace,
do something
.”
Missy shouted,
“Help!”
Shrill, sober, scared.
The bikers threw her into the van and clambered in and pulled a curtain across the back.
Like that she was gone, swallowed up. The other three Demons, even the two women, acted as if nothing had just happened. As if nothing were happening now behind the curtain.
Wallace was staring out the window, at the empty space beside the campfire where Missy had been a few moments earlier.
“Wallace,” Sarah Jean said, trying to stay calm.
“We have to get her, Wallace. You hear?”
Wallace didn’t look at Sarah Jean. His face was zombie blank.
“Holy shit,” he was murmuring. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.”
“Wallace, I’m going out there.”
Wallace reached and stopped her as Sarah Jean started to open her door.
“No,” he said. “Stay.”
He got out and sleepwalked toward the van. The three Demons formed a line in his path, blocking him.
Wallace stopped in front of them.
Missy screamed. It was like nothing Sarah Jean had ever heard, a long scream, sheer terror piercing the night.
One of the three Demons drove a fist into Wallace’s gut. Wallace folded and crumpled.
Sarah Jean got out and ran. She headed toward the far end of the campground, the dark end. The bikers and the campfire were at her back. She was running toward the last place she had seen the crazy climber guy before he disappeared into the woods with his sleeping bag. She was thinking that she would have to search through the woods, shout for him and stumble around in the darkness.
But no. He emerged from the pines before she got there.
He said, “Is she playing?”
“No way,” Sarah Jean said.
He ran to his truck, opened the door, took out a
metal baseball bat from behind the front seat. Seeing this, something in the way he held the bat, Sarah Jean got a funny feeling. A good feeling. That he was not a ballplayer but that the bat was there just for a time like this, and he had an idea how to use it.
He took off at a lope toward the campfire.
She’s in the van,
Sarah Jean wanted to say, but then Missy screamed again, and there was no question about where she was or what was happening to her.
Sarah Jean ran after him. She saw the three Demons poising for a fight, one of them holding a length of chain that reached from his waist almost to the ground.
The climber kept moving toward the three bikers, now just a few strides short of where they stood.
The Demon with the chain stepped forward and whipped it in a vicious chest-high arc. The climber dropped in mid-step, ducked under its sweep, rolled. He popped up in a crouch, suddenly behind them, and swung the bat, one-handed, and caught one of the three behind a knee.
The biker fell as if shot through the heart.
The chain swinger turned around, drew his arm back for another swing. From down in his crouch the climber sprung up, the bat in both hands, holding it upright. He drove it straight up, the thick end finding a spot beneath the chain swinger’s jaw as if it belonged there, then continuing upward, jacking the Demon’s head back at an impossible angle.
Down he went.
The third one—
The third one had a knife. He was coming in from behind, blocked from the climber’s view, slashing the knife up as the chain swinger’s body fell away. The tip of the blade swept across the climber’s upper torso. To Sarah Jean this looked like something from a ballet, choreographed, the biker’s momentum twisting him around, the climber leaning away to avoid the knife, somehow keeping his balance, then bringing the bat around and shoving it forward so that the knob at the handle connected with the back of the biker’s skull. It was almost a gentle tap, controlled and precise.
Down he went, number three.
The climber turned toward the van.
The biker women were squealing. Their screeches brought the last two from the van. They came out one after the other, almost too easy. One popped out to look—the bat smashed down across the back of his shoulders, and he tumbled out in a heap. The second one appeared. The climber grabbed him by the hair and pulled him out and rode him, shoving him toward a flat piece of granite embedded in the earth. Sarah Jean was running hard, going for the back of the van, and she was close enough to hear the crunch of bone as the last Demon’s face smashed into the stone.
The climber’s shirt was torn along a diagonal that the knife had traveled, and blood was spreading from a cut. He spun, looked back at the three on the ground.
No, Sarah Jean saw. Two on the ground. One was
rising to his knees, coming up with a pistol in one hand, a black revolver that he brought up at the end of his arm, pointing it at the climber.
Sarah Jean couldn’t say exactly what happened next. At least ten or twelve feet separated the two men. Three good strides. Up came the gun, the climber spun and looked down the barrel. And then…
… then the climber exploded into some wild fast-forward version of movements he had made on the rock, but a thousand times faster now, body twisting, arms and legs shooting out, a water-bug skitter that closed the distance before the biker could react.
All Sarah Jean knew for sure was that on one side of a heartbeat the climber was looking up the barrel of the gun, and before her heart could thump
he had the gun
and the biker was down on the ground, the climber pinning him with a knee against his back while mashing his face into the dirt.
That was with his left hand. His right hand held the pistol. He straightened his arm and thumbed back the hammer as he held the end of the barrel against the biker’s head.
Sarah Jean screamed,
“NO!”
Although the members of Bravo One Nine were broadly trained, each also had an individual specialty. Arielle was an expert in computers and electronics. Alex Mendonza was a master of vehicles: cars, planes, boats—he could fix them and he could drive them. Winston Stickney knew explosives and
demolition.
Ray Favor was a killer.
Up-close kind of killing, swift and vicious and personal. To an outsider this might have seemed a trivial ability, but it was prized in fieldwork, and few did it really well. Even trained warriors often feel an internal blink of resistance when the killing takes place within the zone of body heat.
Not Favor. He killed with the ease of flipping a light switch.
Sarah Jean didn’t know any of this. But as she watched the climber straighten his right arm and cock the revolver, she knew that he was about to put a bullet in the biker’s brain, no problem. And she knew that she didn’t want to see it.
Her
“NO!”
stopped him.
He paused, turned his face toward her. She could see him clearly in the campfire light. His eyes were hard, so terrible that she almost couldn’t look at them, but she forced herself to do it, make that connection.
She said, “Don’t, mister. Please.”
He stared at her. His face softened a little. Just enough. He lifted the pistol, carefully eased the hammer down.
Sarah Jean ran to the van to put her arms around her friend.
The wound was superficial. Favor knew it as he sat on a table in the emergency room at South Lake Tahoe. He might need some stitches along the pectoral, where
the blade had sliced in about an eighth of an inch deep, but otherwise the wound was hardly more than a deep scratch.
The ER physician was an attractive Pakistani woman about thirty years old. She cut away his T-shirt and revealed a road map of scars. Three were several inches in length, one bisected by the fresh cut. None were in the usual places for a surgical incision. She also found a small circular indentation at the abdomen, with a matching perforation in his back. They were the scars from a through-and-through bullet wound.
“You’ve been making a habit of this,” she said.
“Not lately.”
She swabbed the cut.
“And how are you feeling?” she said.
Favor smiled. “Pretty damn great,” he said.
About twenty-four hours after Ronnie left for Manila, about the time that he should be reaching Manila, Lorna Valencia was seated at her kitchen table. A woman from the village came to her door and entered the house without knocking. Erlinda was her name. They had known each other since childhood.
“You’re awake early,” Erlinda said.
“I can’t sleep.”
“You have a problem.”
Of course, everyone was aware that Marivic had disappeared and that now Ronnie was gone. The villagers knew one another’s lives down to the aching bunion. A disaster like this would travel on the wind.
“Yes,” Lorna said.
“I know someone who may be able to help.”
Erlinda was clutching a small, grimy, spiral-bound notebook. She opened it on the dining table. Inside were handwritten names with addresses and telephone numbers.
She had no reading glasses. She leaned so close that her nose nearly touched the paper.
She ran a finger up and down the pages.
“Here!” Erlinda said. “Give me your phone.”
Lorna held out the cell phone.
“How much load do you have on here?” Erlinda asked. She meant the balance left on the phone’s pre-paid SIM card.
“About two-fifty,” Lorna said.
“We’ll have to make it quick so you don’t run out.”
“Run out? Two hundred and fifty pesos?”
“You’ll need it all,” Erlinda said. “We are calling the United States.”
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” Favor said. “I’m fine. I’m glad to see you—it’s been too long—but if that’s why you’re here, you wasted a trip.”
He was sitting with Mendonza and Stickney and Arielle in a gazebo that sat on a wide lawn between the lodge and the shoreline of the lake. It was late afternoon, the day after his encounter at the Lover’s Leap campground, and a strip of white bandage showed around the open collar of his shirt.
Favor wasn’t talking about his wound, though. He meant his state of mind.
“Ari is concerned,” Stickney said. Stickney’s voice was quiet and low, with a hint of honey-smooth Caribbean vowels. It was a voice that could have belonged to a midnight deejay on an FM jazz station. Cooler than cool.
“If Ari is worried,
we’re
worried,” Mendonza said.
Favor said, “Ari is an alarmist.”
“Ray,” she said. “Mooning around like a sick hound. Crapping out in a meeting. Blowing off a million-dollar deal. Multimillion. Please.”