Grove was on the ground all of a sudden and could barely see the woman with the field glasses collapsing, folding into the dirt ten yards away, her neck breached and gushing blood as black as india ink in the deceptive light of the storm. She convulsed once and then stiffened in shock and imminent death, her hand still gripping those pathetic field glasses as her carotid leaked all over the mire. Ackerman was a blur on the side of the hill behind the victim as scores of firearmsâmaybe hundreds, it
sounded
like hundredsâsuddenly began discharging from all points across the parking lot.
The light and noise lit up the storm. Grove ducked down and covered his head. Zorn dropped to the ground not more than ten feet off Grove's flank. Out of the corner of his eye Grove saw the battlefield firelightâcountless yellow lumens popping like phosphorous in the dark. The birch trees boiled. Contact sparks traced across the adjacent woods. The sound had a magnificent ugliness to Grove's earsânothing like the cowboys-and-Indians fireworks-crackle of the movies.
This
sound was a dirty, metallic pummeling sound.
Ackerman had vanished.
The gunfire ceased.
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“We need medical attention over here. Somebody get a doc over here, now, now!”
Grove bellowed at the top of his voice, but he could hardly hear it in his own ears, they were ringing so badly. He managed to rise to his feet and lumber over to the field-glasses lady, who was soaked in her own blood, twitching in the mucky puddles of the parkway, her gray face contorted with agony, her eyes pinned open.
Grove dropped his gun and pressed his hand down on the woman's neck to stanch the bleeding, and he felt the fluttering, wounded-bird pulse of the woman's heartbeat, and knew, he
knew
, the lady was gone, she had only moments left. Thrusting his bare fingers down into her blood-clogged throat, Grove cleared her airway and began a futile attempt at CPR as movement and voices swirled all around him. Terry Zorn flashed by Grove, vaulting across the parkway and hurtling into the woods after Ackerman.
“Zorn, goddamnit, wait!”
Grove howled through the rain.
“I told you, we're not tactical!”
The next few seconds were critical for Grove. He looked down at the portly woman's blood-spattered face and saw her mouth moving, eyes blinking, no sound coming out of her other than a faint clicking noise in the base of her throat, and Grove's midsection seized up with a poisonous cocktail of rage and misery, because he was looking into that dying woman's eyes, and he saw only pathos there, he saw only the hardscrabble life of a working-class mother with too much eye shadow caking her aging lashes, and now somebody in a white jacket was yanking Grove off the woman, and Grove tumbled backward onto the edge of the gravel, rolling onto his side and clawing for his gun.
Terry Zorn's cowboy hat lay on the ground a few inches away, dented by a muddy footprint, and for some reason the sight of that hat lying there did something to Grove, and he rose up and started lurching toward the forest, the revolver hot in his hand now. He could barely hear the frantic voices of the other investigators converging on him.
Grove ignored all the warning cries and plunged headlong into the woods.
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Zorn kept his automatic pointed out in front of him like the prow of a ship cutting through a storm as he charged up that narrow mud path between thickets of spruce and ferns, the rainy darkness enclosing him. He could barely see the bleary shadow of the killerâ
sense
was a better wordâabout twenty yards or so ahead of him, fleeing into the wooded hills, something bouncing around inside the back of that jacket.
Voices pierced the storm. Zorn ignored them, gripping the gun tightly in both of his wet hands, the classic cradle-hold they teach you the first day on the range. He leaped over a deadfall and nearly stumbled, but somehow he kept his balance. His bald head was cold and crawling with adrenaline. His eyes stung. But he kept churning forward through the thickening foliage, his faltering gaze riveted to that ghostly outline of the killer moving through the undergrowth ahead of him.
The path ended, and the forest seemed to close down around Zorn like a black corridor. Rain sluiced down through endless columns of cedar, birch, and hemlock. Lightning flickered, the birch, bark momentarily gleaming in Zorn's peripheral vision like bleached bones.
Ackerman was getting away. Zorn could see the silhouette receding into the deeper growth in the distance, and the Texan tried to quicken his pace, but it wasn't easy now. He was cobbling over rain-slimy rocks and rot-wood, squeezing between bottlenecks of branches, moving deeper and deeper into the uncharted darkness of unincorporated Clark County, the steely tendrils bull-whipping at him as he passed.
One shot
. That's all he needed. One clean shot and he could drop this sick son of a bitch and save the taxpayers the expense of further investigative hours and legal fees and appeals. And he kept thinking this as he tore through the woods, careful not to slip on the greasy exposed roots or partially buried granite facets. He had two extra nine-round magazines jiggling around in his raincoat pocket, which meant he had a total of twenty-seven roundsâincluding the clip already seated in the Desert Eagleâwhich should be more than enough firepower to get the job done. He would go for a head shot. The takedown would settle all accounts, obliterating Zorn's earlier mistake. Tom Geisel would be proud. So would Zorn's VFW daddy back in Tennessee. Even Grove would have to admit that Terry Zorn was a force to be reckoned with.
He kept thinking about all this for quite a while, putting almost a mile behind him, before he began to slow down. He walked a few more paces before stopping.
He was now alone.
The realization slammed through his gut as he stood in a shadowy little clearing shrouded by a low canopy of spruce and a wall of wild undergrowth so thick it looked as though someone had stitched it out of vines and branches. Zorn's heart started thumping. He was drenched. His jacket felt as though it were pasted to his back, his feet swimming in his boots. He could no longer hear Grove. Nor could he hear the voices of the other cops and ATF guys. The only sounds now were the distant, dieseling belch of thunder and the incessant rain snapping against the tamarack leaves.
Wiping the beads of moisture from his bald dome and his eyelashes, then glancing over his shoulder, he squinted down into the river valley from which he had come and realized he had ascended a gradual rise into a densely forested ridge overlooking the Columbia. The molten gray reaches of the riverâover a mile awayâwere visible through breaks in the sumac. Zorn glanced down at his gun, snapping the slide back and checking the chamber, making sure he was operational.
He started up a jagged pitch of limestone. His boots slipped on the moss and he nearly fell backward, grabbing at a hank of branches overhanging the rocks in order to avoid tumbling back down the slope and hitting his head and dying in shame. Finally he made it to the summit of a craggy plateau that overlooked the river.
The rain was blowing profusely up there, and Zorn had to lift his collar and squint in order to see around that desolate clearing. It was the size of a squash court, the ground a rolling mogul of granite and petrified deadfalls. The rocks looked like tiny tombstones sticking out of that seared earth, glistening from the rain. The surrounding foliage and trees formed a natural barrier, behind which windblown shadows danced and swayed.
Somewhere nearby a twig snapped.
Panic sizzled off Zorn's nerve endings, and he crouched down suddenly, involuntarily grabbing his Desert Eagle with both hands, every muscle in his body tensing up. The hair on his arms stiffened, his scalp crawling. He had just remembered something at the precise moment he had heard the snap of that twig behind him, and the revelation was like a giant lead weight pressing down on his shoulders all of a sudden, taking his breath away, leeching his courage, and squeezing his heart.
It was something he should have remembered from all the profiles, something incidental that now called out to him like the voice of doom on that wind-whipped plateau: the long, slender object bouncing around inside Ackerman's raincoat!
Ackerman had a bow and arrows
.
16
The Bottomless Dark
Ulysses Grove heard two noises in quick succession up ahead of him. The first was a muffled cryâso distorted by the noise of the storm and the apparent anguish being expressed that it was difficult to identify the gender. This choked wail was followed almost instantly by the bark of a large-caliber handgunâa watery blast arcing up into the sky and echoing off the decaying thunder like a sonic boom.
The two noises sent adrenaline bolting down through Grove's arteries as he struggled through a thick, strangled copse of hemlocks, immediately quickening his pace, awkwardly slashing at the hanging branches and wiry undergrowth with the long stainless steel barrel of the .357. The woods of the Pacific Northwest are basically rain forests, and this one was no different. The floor was a matted carpet of resinous, mold-slick ferns and moss, which felt to Grove as if he were trying to run on ice skates.
The ATF guys were behind Grove somewhere, yelling at him through the rain, ordering him back, but Grove ignored their muffled warnings and kept hacking through the foliage as he made his way up the side of the rise, slipping on the greasy deadfalls, the gun throwing him off balance. He could see a jagged precipice of rocks up there, perhaps fifteen, perhaps twenty yards away, and he muscled toward it.
The sounds had come from up there somewhere, and Grove homed in on them. He was drenched. His clothes felt as though they weighed a thousand pounds, but he ignored the handicaps and roared toward the source of the gunfire. A moment later he reached the lip of the plateau, a ragged outcropping of boulders and exposed roots shiny with rain.
He climbed over the slippery rim and into a small clearing of scabrous stone.
“Nnnaahhhâ”
The sound penetrated the rain, and Grove whirled to his left, his gun stuck out amateurishly in front of him, the barrel dripping and trembling. He saw Zorn keeled over in the mud twenty yards away.
Lightning erupted.
Grove's first instinct was to rush over to his partner, but something stopped him, some deeper instinct, something emanating from deep within his primitive reptile brain, ordering him to
get down, get down, getdownget-downgetdown!
Grove slammed down hard onto his belly, an evasive military position that his muscle-memory had dredged up from his days in basic training. He kept his arms outstretched, the gun out in front, pressed against the ground, braced and ready, his arms aching. What the hell was wrong with his arms? Why were they aching all of a sudden?
This is a trap, it's a trap. Do something! Do something now!
Another garbled cry rang outâthis one more of a croak, or perhaps a feeble attempt to speakâand Grove realized his partner was dying, maybe bleeding to death, maybe in shock. It was difficult to see any details through the rain. Terry Zorn appeared to be lying supine, his arm raised at an awkward angle, tangled in the weeds on the edge of the clearing. His chest heaved, and his neck looked dark and shiny, as though someone had poured black paint on him.
Grove crawled on his belly across the mossy ground toward Zorn.
Thunder vibrated the air, the ringing in Grove's ears constant now, as he tried to remember the axioms of Israeli counterinsurgency techniques that he had learned in the academy. You wield the gun like you're pointing a finger at the target, and you focus on the back sight, not the front sightâor was it the other way around? Grove's brain was swimming with panic.
He reached Zorn and got close enough to hear the watery gasping noises.
“Ahhhâssssuuhâ”
Zorn was convulsing, his blood-spattered face contorting, something resembling words coming out of his breached throat. He was drowning in his own blood. His neck was punctured all the way through, a broken hunting arrow sticking out of the back, forming a V.
“It's okay, I'm here, I'm here, Terry, take it easy, gonna get you outta hereâ
Shit!”
Grove rose to a crouch, set down his gun, reached for the Texan, and tried to cradle the man's head. Blood was splashing in the raindrops. Tributaries of Zorn's life snaked off from his body, seeping into the moist earth. With trembling hands Grove pressed a flat broadleaf against Zorn's jugular in a futile effort to stanch the bleeding.
Zorn's eyes were blinking fitfully in the rain.
“Ahhmm sahrrrrrrâ”
All at once Grove realized that Terry Zorn was trying to say
I'm sorry
.
“Don't worry about it, man, you're doin' fine, gonna get you outta here, you're gonna be okayâ” Grove glanced over his shoulder, wondering what the hell happened to the ATF guys. Did they get lost? Grove's voice piercing the rain: “Officer down! Goddamn it, officer down! Officer down up here! Somebody get a goddamn doc up here right now!”
Zorn was trying to say something else, craning his neck, bloody lips quivering. Grove leaned down close, the rain dripping like liquid rubies onto Zorn's face.
“S-sorry,” the Texan enunciated barely above a whisper, then let out a ragged breath.
“Terryâ”
Zorn deflated like a balloon in Grove's arms, and Grove shook the man. “Terry!”
Nothing.
“Terry!”
Zorn was a stone.
Grove stared and stared at the man's empty cellophane eyes. Emotion flooded Grove, and all of a sudden he did something that field analysts would later deem reckless and foolish and strictly the act of an amateur: he hugged his friend. The embrace didn't last longâthe blood-steeped rain was sluicing down between the two men, and Grove's fight-or-flight instinct was surging inside him, stiffening the tiny hairs on the back of his neckâbut for that one foolish, amateurish moment Grove felt a tremendous sadness and affection for the Texan. Zorn had been a friendly adversary for years, a casual associate, certainly threatened by Grove. But now, in that single, terrible instant of clarity, the dead man's body still warm in his arms, Grove felt the entire crestfallen arc of Terry Zorn's life coursing through him, the sorrow of it, the father who could not be pleased, the standards that could never be met. Grove's eyes welled. His stomach clenched.
He held his deceased friend for one more brief moment until he heard a new sound emanating from somewhere close by, a sound that defied easy categorization, a sound that penetrated Grove's skull and resonated the strings of his central nervous system like a tuning fork being struck.
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Human emotions are slippery. One emotion can present itself as another. Feelings can project themselves inappropriately. On that rain-swept ridge above the Columbia River, Ulysses Grove slammed up against a painful confluenceâyears of repressing his loss and sorrow over Hannah's death, months and months of losing control over his health and his life and his powers as a behavioral profiler, an endless, painful embrace of a man lost in the line of duty, and that indefinable kernel of preternatural cognition that had been stirring deep inside him. All of it seized up in his gut suddenly and presented itself as cold, metallic rageârage spurred on by that other worldly noise coming from the shadows to his immediate right.
He gently laid Zorn back in the mud and slowly lowered himself back into the “trench” positionâbelly against the ground, arms out front, neck craned. He reached for his gun. The .357 Tracker felt cold and oily in his grip.
Where the hell are those ATF guys, for God's sake?
Grove's hands had stopped shaking. His tears had ceased. The anger steadied him, fortified him. He started crawling toward the noise, his embattled brain attempting to identify it.
It came from the deeper woods along the north edge of the clearing. Grove elbowed steadily toward the wall of spruce and foliage, ready to shoot at any moment. The sound was difficult to place. It was more of a vibration, a gravelly, twenty-cycle
hum
, like air blowing at frantic, uneven intervals through the lowest chambers of a pipe organ, and the closer Grove got to the trees, the more it sounded like labored
breathing
. Maybe Zorn had wounded the killer. Maybe this was part of the trap. Grove didn't care anymore.
He reached the threshold of the forest and rose to a crouch, jerking at every sound no matter how faint, his hands in the weaver position on the gun. The noise had ceased for a moment, and Grove peered through the columns of trees and thickets of vines, expecting an arrow to leap out at him at any moment. He yelled through the rain, his voice sounding bizarre in his own ears, as though it were coming from some one else:
“Ackerman!”
It was black as night in those woods, a world of crisscrossing timbers and rioting undergrowth, so dense it swallowed any remnant of the gray daylight. Grove scanned it over the barrel of the Tracker, backsight blurred, frontsight crisply focused, his arms and tendons as steady as a marble pillar. To his right, something gleamed dully in the ethereal light. Grove blinked away the rain in his eyes.
He finally identified what he was looking at: a sheer plane of rock behind the trees, a natural convolution of granite probably carved eons ago when the Columbia was young and the Iceman was still trudging across the frozen slopes of the Cairns. The weathered face of sediment was obscured by forest and mist, but it clearly framed a deeper shadow in its centerâdown at ground levelâan opening.
A cave
.
Grove braced himself. The noise was coming from that black opening. It was snoring and sputtering, a breathy, guttural wheeze echoing from the darkness. Staying very low, both hands on the gun, licking lips, blinking moisture from the eyes, he started toward the cave.
The noise rose as he approached.
Grove reminded himself that he had a double-action revolver with hollow-points in his hands, and two speed-loaders pressing against his kidneys. Even if he were struck in the carotid with an arrow, he would probably be able to squeeze off a few rounds and vaporize the bastard's face. Rage coursed through him, galvanizing him. The mouth of the cave was a jagged seven-foot ovalâjust tall enough for a grown man to pass. The noise hummed.
For a moment, pausing at the threshold of the cave, heart thumping, rain slanting down, Grove considered waiting for backup. He could linger at the mouth of the cave and cover the exit until the ATF guys arrived to do the cleanup. But as quickly as the thought crossed his mind he abruptly discarded it. What if there was an opening at the other end of the cave? Grove took a deep breath and slipped inside the darkness.
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The dampness slithered around him, engulfed him in its moldy chill. The deep, sepulchral snoring rose all around himâthe sound of a giant bellows. Grove crouched and inched sideways through the darkness with the gun held out.
Lightning flickered outside the cave, just for a moment, just enough to illuminate the depth of the cavern, and it was
deep
, incredibly deep, the far reaches seeming to vanish in the bottomless dark. About ten feet wide with stalactites of limestone hanging down from the ceiling and walls glistening with slime and guano, the cave was moldering stone, with the fossilized remains of an iron rail long since oxidized into crumbs, embedded in the mossy floor.
Grove had a vague memory of hearing about these mine shafts cut into the sides of hills in the Pacific Northwest. He couldn't remember if they had openings at either end. He couldn't remember much of anything right now but a strange fragment of a nightmare clinging to his midbrain:
a pellet of copper, a bundle of grass, a lizard's foot, a curled tube of birch bark, an ash-handled flint dagger.
He inched deeper into the cavern, his eyes watering. The odors of ammonia-rot and something elseâsomething so rancid it was almost sweet, like spoiled meatâpermeated the air. Grove sniffed. He was about to wipe his eyes when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye.
He whirled.
A shadow blurred across the cave behind himâimmediately registering in Grove's brain as
huge
,
massive
, and probably not human, the way it shambled instead of scurried. The gun went up, finger on the trigger. Grove's flesh crawled. He crouched and listened to the low pipe organ noise rising in front of him like an engine.
Lightning flickered, illuminating the cave for just an instant.
An adult male bear was blocking the opening of the cave, its massive incisors gleaming with drool, its eyes rolled back in its head like egg whitesâthat subterranean growl like the lowest, longest, deepest bellows of an organ.
In the momentary strobe-light flicker, Grove was paralyzed with primordial terrorâhis finger frozen on the triggerâas the giant black bear emitted a thunderous roar before gathering its haunches.
Then it pounced.
The .357 went offâtwo silver flashes in the darknessâblasting tufts out of the bear's ear in midleap as Grove stumbled backward over his own feet. He landed on his ass, the air punched out his lungs and the Tracker knocked out of his hands.