AftershocksEleven: FauvistIt’s been a good many years since the last time I went hunting . . . and after the number of Phoenix-sponsored wildlife studies I’ve worked on, I haven’t got any plans for it, not unless it’s a question of survival. If that does happen again – and it might – well, I’ll just have to figure out the right spot for me on the food chain. It doesn’t have to be right at the top, but that sure beats the bottom.
But I grew up in hunting country. Back then, it wasn’t about trophies and boasting over beer; it was about getting food that didn’t cost money, although you paid for it in time and sweat and icy feet and getting up before dawn in all kinds of weather. I was twelve when I bagged my first deer – almost a hundred pounds of meat in the freezer, and some of the worry lines in my mom’s face smoothed out for a while.
On the other side of things – this wasn’t the first time I’d been hunted, either. It probably won’t be the last.MacGyver made sure Buck wouldn’t be able to follow him, although he left the man’s unconscious, trussed body out in the open, where searchers would be able to find it easily. He was uneasily aware of the weather, which was growing more broken as the afternoon waned. Ryan was nowhere in sight; he must have recovered enough while Mac was struggling with Buck to get up and stagger off.
He put up a hand to push the hair out of his eyes, and gave a strangled yelp: the cut on his head had stopped bleeding, and he’d already half-forgotten it was there. He used Buck’s hunting knife to cut loose a long strip of dark cloth from the cotton lining of Buck’s field jacket, and tied it around his head. It would do for the moment.
Mac picked up Buck’s rifle and removed all but the single chambered round, spilling the cartridges into his hand.
Can’t just toss ‘em – the lead’s toxic to wildlife . . . He found himself studying the rounds in his cupped palm.
MacGyver rarely paid any direct attention to the way his overactive mind hummed along in the background, incessantly examining and cataloguing his surroundings. When he needed it, the awareness of available resources always seemed to be there: but he’d found out very young that it seemed to work better when he didn’t focus on the process. One moment, the bullets in his hand were solid metal objects:
shape – cylinders, one end flat, one pointed; composition – metal: lead, copper and brass, nonferrous, toxic, low melting point; polished, reflective; about 55 grains of powder in each cartridge; size, weight, density – in the next moment, they were simply hunting ammunition, central to an entire way of life. Each one could take a deer, or even an elk, and feed a community.
The next moment, the solid chunks of metal lost all semblance of innocence. With LA drowning in handguns, Mac had taken some deep-rooted comfort in the awareness that somewhere, away from the asphalt and the gangs and the grinding dehumanisation of the deadly struggle in the inner city, there were still places where guns were tools instead of weapons. Deep inside, he now felt a blaze of rage and a sense of near-blasphemy. It seemed a horrible perversion, to take a hunting rifle and set out to use it for murder – to stalk a human being as if he were just another kind of game animal.
And there were still two more hunters looking for his trail.
Mac stuffed the ammunition into his jacket pocket as if it had begun to burn his fingers. The Remington was equipped with a fancy scope, an illuminated 4x-16x AO with a bullet drop compensator. A moment’s work on the mount with the screwdriver blade on his knife, and the scope unclamped from the rifle. He pocketed that too.
MacGyver aimed the gun at a nearby rise of ground and fired off the one remaining shot, grimacing as the report shattered the uneasy quiet of the woods.
That oughta put the others a little off guard – if they hear just one shot, they’ll probably figure Buck caught up with me.He pulled the bolt out of the Remington and pocketed it as well, then slung the rifle into the heart of a thicket of whitethorn and chamise. Without the scope and with no fixed sights, it couldn’t be fired accurately at any distance; but without the bolt, it couldn’t be fired at all, even if another hunter had compatible ammunition.
He turned his attention to the broken line of Ryan’s flight.
He sure left a nice clear trail – he musta gone to fetch Don and Travis, or to warn them – oh, man. Does he remember there’s a ravine in the way?The clear sign led, somewhat erratically, back in the right direction. It reached the ravine along one of its steeper sections, where the walls fell away in sheer rock slabs, with few ledges or opportunistic bushes to offer handholds.
Aw, dang it.Mac heaved an exasperated sigh as he studied the prospect, trying to pinpoint exactly where Ryan might have attempted the descent. For a very long moment, the skin on his shoulders and back seemed to tighten up and pull back, as if his own body was trying of its own volition to shy away from the brink of the cliff. It took a deliberate act of will to break himself out of the freeze and step out towards the edge, his feet dragging slightly, tennis shoes scuffing against the rocks.
In response to the sound, Ryan’s voice came up out of the ravine, pinched and frantic. “Buck? Is that you?”
Mac felt his temper flare again at the sound of the voice, and had to bite back his first impulse. He didn’t know whether he wanted to walk away, drop rocks, or just stand over the other man and swear. He compromised by doing nothing.
“Buck! Answer me, damn it! I tried to climb down and I’m
stuck! My feet keep slipping! I can’t hold on much longer . . . ”
Mac finally replied. “Y’know, Ryan, you really wore the wrong shoes for this kinda exercise.”
“
MacGyver?” Mac heard a scrabbling below him. “
Exercise? Is
that what you call this?”
“Sure. It’s a new field test for operatives,” Mac said drily. “It’s called ‘Easter Eggs’. The first team – that’s me – goes out into the woods and hides Nazis under the bushes. Then we’ll time how long it takes the Forest Service rangers to find them all. Sound like fun?”
“MacGyver – Mac – it-it’s not what you think . . . about Ruth, I mean, I didn’t know . . . ”
“
Save it.” Mac was unslinging the rope and setting knots towards the end. “I’m gonna drop a rope down to you. When it reaches you, don’t put your weight on it all at once. You understand? Get a good hold on it, but then use it to steady yourself so you can walk yourself up the cliff.”
“You’re asking me to climb up a rope?”
“Well, yeah, unless you’re on the verge of figuring out the whole flying business. You really picked a bad stretch of cliffs to try to go freeclimbing on.”
“MacGyver, give me a break.” Ryan’s voice sounded leaden and miserable. “I was the kind of kid who got beat up because I couldn’t climb the rope in gym class. Can’t you lower me instead?”
“You’re way closer to the top than you are to the bottom. And, Ryan, you really oughta think about this: I’ve got
no reason to trust you, and I don’t want you runnin’ around loose. So it’s my way or the highway – or, in this case, you can choose between a short climb or a long fall. Which is it gonna be?” Mac didn’t wait for an answer; he started paying out the rope. He could feel when Ryan caught at it awkwardly, and he set his footing firmly as the younger man’s weight shifted. “I put a set of butterfly loops in about five feet from the end – grab hold of those. They look kinda like the hanging straps on commuter buses. Use those to steady yourself while you get your feet placed for the climb.”
He felt the load on the rope steady. Ryan had taken the line. “You got a good hold on the rope?” Mac called out.
“Y-yeah . . . ”
“You sure?” Mac shifted position so that a few inches of the rope suddenly slipped closer to the edge. He had belayed the rope around a sturdy pine, and it was quite secure; but Ryan couldn’t see that.
He heard the young man screech with terror. “Ohmygod! The rope’s slipping . . . wait, no, it’s stopped . . . ”
“You holding on tight now?” Mac paid out a few more inches in a sudden spurt, bringing it up to a halt again with a sharp jerk. He heard Ryan wail.
“What the hell are you doing? I’m going to fall!”
“Not if you hold on tight.”
“You’re doing this on purpose!”
“Ya think?” Mac could feel the tension on the rope between his fingers as Ryan clutched at it.
“Stop f*cking around! Pull me up!”
“Hmm. I don’t know about that . . . ” Another few inches.
“MacGyver. What the hell are you
doing? Don’t do this. They say you’re not like this.”
“Do they? Y’know, I keep wonderin’ who ‘they’ are. I bet ‘they’ told you I don’t use a gun.” Mac’s voice was a soft, deadly murmur. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe
I don’t need one?”
“MacGyver,
please. For god’s sake! You’ll kill me if you let me fall!”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Mac replied cheerfully. “It’s only about twelve, maybe fifteen feet, y’know. Twenty at the most. How far down are you right now? You’ll probably just break a leg . . . or maybe both legs. Depends on how hard you land.” There was a deathly silence from below, except for the occasional whistling gasps of fear. “Of course, you wouldn’t be able to walk . . . you’d be kinda stuck there till help came. How much can you count on your Nazi friends, Ryan?”
“They’re not my friends, damn it!”
“They aren’t?” Mac sounded distressed. “Man, you could be in real trouble, then. Especially if you end up at the bottom of this ravine . . . and I’m the only one who knows where you are . . . and they shoot me, since that’s what they’ve got in mind . . . well, it could be a while before anyone finds you.” Mac twitched the rope. “Didja notice it’s getting pretty cold when the sun goes behind a cloud? It’ll drop below freezing right after the sun sets.”
“Oh my god . . . you’re going to leave me to freeze to death . . . ”
“Oh, don’t be so worried. Your suit’s wool, right? And so’s the coat. No, you’re not gonna freeze to death. And there’s still some pockets of snow down there, so you probably won’t die of thirst, either. And starving takes a real long time. Did you know that?” Another twitch of the rope, dropping Ryan another inch. “That’s why they had to gas them in the death camps, you know. Starving took too long. It wasn’t efficient. The Nazis were real big on efficiency.”
Mac felt a change in the silence below.
Capitulation.
“Who’s Rolf Schmidt, Ryan? He’s gotta be a relative, right? Uncle? Grandfather?”
“He’s my grandfather.” Ryan’s voice was faint and broken.
“Is he the Professor?”
“What? What the hell are you talking about?” Mac felt a movement in the rope and guessed that Ryan had roused himself and was trying to clamber up. He twitched the rope again and felt the movement freeze at the other end.
“Why’d you do it, Ryan?” Mac didn’t try to hide the bitter regret and anger in his voice. “You’ve been at Phoenix for almost a year. Didn’t that mean
anything to you? Were you a Nazi all along?”
“God
damn you! I’m not a Nazi!”
“Then why are you workin’ for them? Your grandfather’s a Nazi, you know.”
“He is not! He – he just – god damn you, I had to save him from your f*cking witch-hunt! You’d have – he said you’d have his citizenship yanked, and he’d be sent back to Germany and tried for war crimes.” Ryan was almost sobbing. “What the hell was I supposed to do? Let you kick him out of the country?”
“Didja ever think that he might deserve it?”
“It was years ago! You think he had a choice when he was younger? He was . . . ”
“Lemme guess.” Mac’s voice had a cutting edge much sharper than the biting wind. “He was just following orders.”
MacGyver could feel a trembling in the rope in his hands, as if Ryan’s sobbing was sending shivers up the line. “You don’t under
stand . . . ”
Mac took a deep breath. He needed more information while he still had the upper hand. “So you saw Grandad’s name in the files, and figured you’d just do him a favour, huh?”
“I – I told him about it – he’d been edgy ever since the arrest last fall . . . I didn’t even know he’d really been involved in the war. He never talked about it before this . . . he
begged me to make certain he’d be safe. What was I supposed to do? I thought it was all settled. I told him nothing was going to happen with the Brandenburg files . . .”
“Yeah, you tried to make sure of that, didn’t you?”
“For god’s sake! Those files were nothing but a mass of liabilities – it’s not like you could ever have
used any of it!”
“ ‘
You’?” Ryan didn’t answer. Mac pressed on. “So Phoenix is ‘you’ now, huh? Not ‘us’? Was it ever ‘us’?”
“Ms. Prajna agreed! The head counsel accepted that the liability was too high!”
“Based on your assessment?”
“M-MacGyver . . .
please . . . ”
“What about Hunter? You tried to erase his name from the list too. Why?”
“G-Grandfather asked me to do it . . . h-he asked me if Hunter was in the files, and I checked and told him yes . . .”
“Oh, so you were just followin’ orders too? So much for your confidentiality pledge, huh?” Mac waited for a moment, but Ryan didn’t respond. “How long has he known Hunter, anyway?”
“I – I don’t know . . . I think he mentioned him a couple of times . . . I didn’t really pay attention. I figured it was coincidence, them both being in the damned files, but Grandfather was so worried . . . ”
“And it’s just coincidence that Grandpa’s buddy is a neo-Nazi?”
“I had no idea about any of that!”
“Was it your grandad’s idea to have Ruth killed? Was she that dangerous to him?”
“Killed? What are you talking about? They wouldn’t have – no, they couldn’t – ”
“Ryan, there’ve been three attempts on Ruth’s life in the last three months. Not counting the kidnapping.” Mac gave the rope a jerk. “And
you led them right to her in the hospital. Did you help them snatch her?”
“I didn’t know they were going to do that!”
“What did you
think they were gonna do? Ask her for an autograph? Interview her for White Supremacist Weekly?”
Ryan suddenly seemed to find a second wind. “Oh, don’t you get all holier-than-thou on me. Ruth fought in the same war as my grandfather. How many people do you think
she killed? The only difference is that her side won. Otherwise, it would be Grandfather with the medals and Ruth being tried for war crimes. Did
you ever think of
that?”
“The ‘only difference’ . . . ?” Mac closed his eyes, pain washing over his face and his mind.
Mac felt a different kind of tugging from the other end of the rope. Ryan had overcome his panic and sense of helplessness. “MacGyver, you can’t treat people like this!”
Ah. Now we get the bluster. “I can’t? Dang. You mean none of this is really happening? You’re imagining it all?”
“God damn you, you know what I mean!”
“And
I imagine that if I let you out of this ravine, once we’re home safe you’re gonna have me charged with assault, and probably sue me for harassment as well.” While he spoke, Mac glanced at the footing behind him; it would probably be simplest to back up slowly while Ryan climbed the ravine wall, but that would put him a longer distance away when Ryan finally reached the top. Better to haul him in like a sack of flour, although it would be more effort. “Tell ya what. Now that we’ve had a nice little talk, why don’t you stop dangling around and get your butt out of there? Get a good hold of the rope, plant your feet against the wall and walk up. It’s nothin’ like climbing in gym class – if they’d had this kind of set-up, more of us would have gotten outta high school unhumiliated.”
This time, Mac felt Ryan begin to move. “If you let me fall, so help me . . . ”
“Y’know, Ryan, you’re not in a great position to be making threats.”
In the end, it took longer to get Ryan to actually start climbing than it did to get him to the top. His worst moment came when he had to drag himself over the lip of the cliff edge; Mac had made the rope fast to a tree, and held out a hand to help pull him the last few precious inches, but Ryan suddenly reverted to mistrust and balked at the offer of help. Finally, he lay face-down on the lichened surface of the rock outcropping overlooking the ravine, gasping and shaking. Mac took his arm and gave him a gentle tug.
“C’mon. You need to get farther away from the edge.”
He led the stumbling lawyer a good dozen yards away from the drop, then left him while he went back to collect and coil the rope. When he returned, Ryan had sunk back to the ground and was staring vacantly into the distance. He glanced up at Mac.
“You’ll have to give me a minute – sorry – I’ll be okay – ”
Funny, I don’t remember asking. “No sweat,” Mac replied easily. “You might as well stay put and get comfortable. You’re gonna be sittin’ there for a while.” He pulled the roll of duct tape out of his jacket pocket.
“MacGyver, what are you . . . ” Ryan eyed the duct tape with a look of horror.
“Like I told you, I’ve got no reason to trust you, and I don’t want you runnin’ around loose. I’ve still got two of your hunting buddies – ”
“They’re not my damned ‘buddies’!”
“Well, they sure aren’t mine! Like I said, I’ve got two more of them to deal with, and not a whole lot of daylight left. I can’t be worrying about what you might get up to once I’m not around.” He squatted behind Ryan and pulled his hands behind him. He could feel the fight still seething in the young man.
“MacGyver – ”
“Oh, don’t tell me – ‘Look both ways before you cross a lawyer.’ Right? You’re about to start talking about, let’s see – harassment again? Assault? Unlawful imprisonment?”
He leaned over Ryan’s shoulder and spoke earnestly into his ear as he taped his wrists. “Maybe I oughta remind you about some of the fine print in the contract you signed when Phoenix hired you. It’s been a while since I read it myself, but lemme see – any violation of Foundation security or confidentiality that endangers or impedes a criminal investigation is a prosecutable offense under California law. And given how much work we do for the LA cops, the DA’s office gets pretty hard-nosed about anyone messing up that way.”
Ryan had grown still, and Mac moved around in front of him and secured his ankles. “So you go right ahead and work on your plans to sue me, or Pete, or the Foundation, for whatever you can come up with. But you’re gonna be filing that lawsuit from prison. You can go ahead and try, of course. You’ll have the same rights as any other convict. I’m not gonna lose a lot of sleep about it myself.”
Three. Or two and a half, anyway.
MacGyver didn’t find Don and Travis where he expected them to be, anywhere on the farther plateau beyond where he’d thrown the doorknob. Not only were they missing, there wasn’t even any sign of their passage.
Huh. Okay, so they never got here. Where, then . . . ?He looked up at the sun. It was westering, and there weren’t many more hours of daylight. Mac visualised the two men as he’d last seen them: Travis brash and aggressive, eager to come to grips with his enemy, Don ill at ease in the tangled maze of the canyons and mesas. They’d been sent into the branch canyon and instructed to work their way around to flank MacGyver’s supposed location.
Mac took a bearing on the sun and hurried farther back into the hills.
It took him more than an hour to find them. He finally cut their trail running along an entirely different mesa, heading ever farther away from the cabin, the road, and any habitation. He guessed they’d misjudged the bends and twists of the canyon walls and climbed up the wrong side of the wrong canyon, and probably grown too disoriented to be able to work out where they’d gone wrong. Don, by the looks of it, was used to the lowlands of the East coast; once he’d gotten off on the wrong tack, his woodcraft was as likely to betray him as to save him. And Travis was obviously no help at all.
Travis did prove valuable in one way: Mac heard them before he saw them. They knew they were lost, and from the sounds of it, Travis had been carrying on a running monologue of complaint for some time. Without it, Mac might have been caught in spite of his care: they had turned around and were following their own backtrail.
“Don, don’t be a f*cking idiot! I’m telling you, all we have to do is cut over that way – ”
“You got no damned idea where we’re goin’! But at least I can figger out where we been.”
“Backtracking’s gonna take hours! Listen, all we have to do is just cut over across this rise, and I betcha we’ll be back where we started – ”
“Travis, if you bet fer real the way you bet fer braggin’, I’d ask you over for a poker game. ‘Cept I hate the sound of your goddamned voice. Your goddamned ‘shortcuts’ got us here in the first place.” Don stopped in his tracks and peered up at the scudding clouds that were playing peekaboo with the sun, scowling. “Left my goddamned compass back at the cabin – an’ it seems ever’ time we get a good look at the sun, these goddamned hills have switched round on us again!”
He glanced around irresolutely. MacGyver suddenly felt his hackles rise, but not because of the hunters. The woods had grown too still in the last few minutes, and even the wind in the branches seemed hushed. There was a sudden raucous noise of chattering birds, and a flurry of towhees, nuthatches and chickadees erupted into the sky and scattered.
The trees began to sway and ripple in a manner that owed nothing to the gusting wind, and Mac quickly slipped well away from the jumbled mass of rocks where he’d been crouching. There was a stand of mountain juniper nearby – thinner cover, but much safer in case the quake got bad enough that the rocks started sliding.
The first tremor was short, only a few moments of swaying. The one that followed a few moments later was longer, the ground seeming to ripple impossibly, like a boat rocking on a rising sea. MacGyver went down on his hands and knees and gritted his teeth until the lurching subsided. He’d lost count of the number of quakes he’d been through – it was part of living in southern California – but they never stopped being unnerving. It just wasn’t
right for solid ground to wobble like that.
The tremors subsided, and the birds began to settle back into the trees and chirp again; he could even hear a squirrel chattering somewhere.
Back to normal. Much closer, he heard explosive swearing from the two hunters.
Guess that’s normal too.It was Travis’ voice that he heard, as he clambered cautiously back up onto the rocks that overlooked where they’d last been. “Jesus Christ, Don, it was just a little bit of a quake. You get used to them. Get a grip.”
Mac peered down at them, as Don tried to stagger back to his feet. His legs were unsteady beneath him, and he sat down heavily, breathing in gasps, his hands shaking when he tried to brush the dust off.
Man, they sure picked a bad spot to ride out a quake. The hunters had been following a natural track that ran past a granite outcropping, and the tremor had caught them while they were between the stone face on one side and the jumbled mass of boulders on the other.
Real bad if you’re not used to the mountains.Mac fished in his pocket for the scope he’d taken from Buck’s gun. It took a few moments to dismantle it and remove the lenses, but when he was done he had a hollow metal cylinder a little over a foot long with flared openings at both ends.
When he used it as a speaking tube, the sound projected through the scope and echoed off the rock walls, sounding tinny and almost disembodied. His voice echoed cheerfully around the men below him, seeming to come from all directions at once.
“Hey, guys. You havin’ fun yet?”
Don literally jumped, peering around wide-eyed. Travis’ face went purple.
“What the
f*ck – ”
“Jeez, Travis, can’t you let up on the cussing?”
“How the hell did you follow us out here, you little creep?” Travis was still looking around, trying to figure out where the mocking voice was coming from. “What about that shot we heard?”
“That was me.”
Don finally spoke. “I’da swore that was Buck’s gun.”
“It was.”
Don and Travis looked at each other uneasily. Tucked up in his perch in the rocks, Mac took the bolt from the Remington out of his pocket and scraped it against the rough metal of the adjusting ring on the scope, imitating the distinctive triple ka-chunk of a bolt-action rifle. The sound wasn’t quite the same, but in the distorting echo chamber of the rocks, it was close enough.
Mac raised the scope to his mouth again and shifted slightly so that the echoes would bounce off a different section of the rocks. “So here’s what’s gonna happen next. You’re both gonna set your guns down nice and gentle, walk a dozen paces away, and lie face-down on the ground till I come and collect you. That’s if you’re willin’ to do this the easy way. Or we could do it the hard way. But if you’re expecting any of your buddies to show up and help – it’s gonna be a long wait. I already took care of them.” The breezy, cheerful confidence in Mac’s voice was edged with icy steel underneath. “Or, if you like, I suppose we can all just hang out till the Sheriff’s department gets here. They’re on their way.”
Don drew a long breath, and his shoulders sagged. Something in the set of his head told Mac what the last few hours had been like for him: the disorienting landscape, the worsening weather, the insufferable Travis, and finally the quake. He looked tired.
Travis looked mutinous. He glared at Don. “You ain’t gonna
listen to this crap, are you?”
Don eyed him. “Travis, I know for goddamn sure that you ain’t got enough brains to season a catfish, so mebbe you’d better let me do the thinkin’ for us both. It’s over. I don’t aim to freeze out here, and I figger it just might be a bit easier on us if we walk back under our own steam.”
Travis’ face turned opaque. “F*ck you.” He hefted his gun and started to turn a slow circle, peering around the circumscribed horizon for MacGyver.
Don lifted his own rifle in turn. Travis heard the sound of the bolt and turned to him, smirking at the thought that he’d bested the other man.
He froze when he found himself staring down the barrel of the Winchester.
“Travis, you heard what the feller said. You put that goddamned fancy cannon of yours down, nice and easy, and you stroll a few paces away and lie down yourself. An’ I’m gonna do the same thing. ‘Bout time we-all took ourselfs a break. Yunnerstand?”
Mac disabled both rifles as before, pocketing the ammunition and removing the bolts. He scowled at Travis’ rifle, a pricey Safari-grade Browning A-Bolt with a highly polished stock and elaborately engraved metalwork.
High-caliber ammo – did he think he was gonna go out and shoot an elephant? He would have preferred to toss the rifles away, or at least the bolts, but they had to be brought back as evidence – and he remembered that there was an open murder investigation in Leimert Park involving the apparently motiveless shooting of a young black mother with a .375 H&H.
He had left the two hunters still lying face-down, their wrists taped behind their backs, while he dealt with the guns. A quick search had relieved them of hunting knives, ammo pouches, and an extra sidearm that Travis was packing – a .44 Magnum Colt Anaconda.
Man, this guy is a walking cliché. Now he slid each man’s disabled rifle in turn behind his back crosswise and lashed each man’s arms securely to his gun. It would make walking awkward, and running even more difficult. His own pockets were getting full; since the two rifles were different calibers, he compromised by stuffing the bolt and ammo from each man’s gun into the other man’s jacket pockets.
Travis immediately began to protest. “You’re gonna cripple me. I can’t feel my hands! You know how much this weighs?”
“You might consider carrying a lighter gun,” Mac replied as he helped Don clamber to his feet.
Don snorted. “Don’t mind him none. His shoulder’s prob’ly all hamburger from gettin’ pounded by that oversized popgun a’ his’n.”
“Where the f*ck is
your gun?” Travis exploded, once he finally got a good look at Mac.
“Don’t have one. Didn’t Ryan tell you?”
“Where’s Buck’s rifle?” Don suddenly asked.
“Most of it’s lying under a bush, not too far from where I left Buck.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Nope. Just made sure he’d still be there when the sheriff comes by.”
Travis’ face looked purple. “Dexter, you goddamned little freak – ”
“The name isn’t Dexter. It’s MacGyver. Ryan told you that too; you just didn’t listen.”
“Don, you goddamned woman, we coulda taken him! He wasn’t even armed! God
damn it!”
“Travis, would you just suck it up already?” Don snapped. “I knew it was gonna end up all wrong when that Hunter laid rough hands on a white woman.”
Travis whirled on him like a rabid dog, snarling. “We shoulda just shot that old Jew-loving b*tch when we had the chance!” He turned to glare at MacGyver. “And you’re even worse! It’s f*cking nigger-loving race traitors like you that’re ruining this great country!”
Mac had a feeling the hike back was going to be unpleasant.
It was.
Funny about bullies – they always have this amazing radar. They can figure out exactly what bugs you the most, and then they hit you as hard as they can, over and over, right on the softest spots.Travis, after a short time spent blustering and threatening in general, zeroed in on Mac with an uncanny sense of spite and began to tell jokes and ugly stories: a nonstop monologue of unfunny, crude, and malicious pieces, laced with gleeful sadism and racist hatred as well as misogyny and a callous contempt that went beyond insensitivity. MacGyver found himself mentally reciting computer coding algorithms and geometrical theorems in an attempt to block out the stream of verbal bile, and then tried to see how much dialogue from his favourite Westerns he could remember offhand, and translate into Spanish. He wished he could remember more Spanish.
Finally, after a particularly grotesque story about a retarded paraplegic, Don turned a glowering face to Mac.
“Y’got any more of that duct tape? I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles that it was self-defense if’n you’ll just shut him the hell up.”
To his surprise, Mac found himself grinning. It felt strange, as if his face had almost forgotten how to smile. “I don’t think duct tape’s the right approach . . . but since we got a consensus, I think it’s time for a change. Hey, Travis,” Mac called. “Tell ya what. Your stories don’t seem to be what your audience wants, so we’re gonna try a ratings system.”
“What the f*ck you talkin’ about, dweeb?”
Mac pulled out his Swiss Army knife and opened the large blade. “You seem awful fond of that fancy rifle of yours. Well, if you tell a joke or a story, and Don here doesn’t like it, I’ll cut a chunk outta that fancy polished gunstock of yours. And if I don’t like it, I’ll make a few nice deep scratches in that engraved receiver. And if neither of us likes it . . . you get my drift?”
Travis stared at him open-mouthed for a few moments, then slammed his jaw closed and glared.
“Much better.” Mac put the knife away.
They had gone another mile, and Travis seemed to have sunk into a reliable sullen silence, before Mac caught Don’s eye. “Mind if I ask you a question?”
Don shrugged.
“You seem to have a bit more sense than the others – how the heck did you get involved with these guys?”
The older man shrugged again, as best as he could with his arms lashed behind him. “Pastor Hunter – “
“‘Pastor’?”
“Yup. He come out to our church and give a talk. An’ he made sense, y’know? When he was talkin’, it all made sense, though I can’t make out now just why. He talked about the Zionist conspiracy, an’ the Covenants, an’ – ” Don made a face. “I ‘spose it all sounds stupid now, but – well, he sure believed it. Sometimes that makes something mean more’n it oughta.”
“My grandpa told me once that the best con artists are the ones who can con themselves first.”
“Sounds like you got a wise man fer a grandpa, son.”
“I sure do.”
“Well, Hunter said it wasn’t about hatin’ coloured folks, it was about takin’ care of our own. That’s somethin’ I get. I get it real good. An’ – I’d just lost my job. Hunter, he done talked about how they takes jobs away from white folks an’ givin’ ‘em to niggers, an’ well, I saw red. I don’t think I was thinkin’ too good for a while there.”
“What kind of work did you do?” Mac asked.
“Hospital orderly.”
“So when Hunter went after Ruth – ”
A black look crossed Don’s face like a stormcloud. “My wife’s got kin out here, so I come out here lookin’ for work – I thought mebbe Hunter could help me. He seemed like he took a real interest. So he calls me up t’other day, says he’s gonna need help with an old lady what’s just gittin’ outta the hospital.” Don turned his head and spat into the brush. “He dint tell me nothin’ about how he’s fetchin’ her outta there hisself. I ‘bout to fell over when I saw her, she looked so bad.” After a long, painful moment, he added, “She gonna be okay?”
Mac was reluctant to give him the satisfaction, but he nodded. “I don’t suppose you know if it was Hunter who arranged for her to get beaten up?”
Don stared at him. “What? Who the
hell would do a thing like that?”
Dang. They had reached the junction of the main canyon and the ravine that led down from Hunter’s cabin, and Mac had to concentrate on getting his two charges up the rough scramble to the top of the mesa.
If it wasn’t Hunter . . . who was it?
Well before they reached the cabin, MacGyver was greeted by a hail and the welcome sight of a National Forest Service ranger hurrying towards him. He drew a deep breath of relief. The San Gabriels were such a hodgepodge of legal jurisdictions that he hadn’t been able to tell Zak with confidence who to contact – but he’d noticed on his way in where the last ranger station was located. It was a habit he’d developed along with making note of the last gas station: either could be critical to survival.
“I’m Juan Gonzalez, the district ranger. You must be MacGyver.”
“Yup.” Mac shook the man’s hand warmly. “Can you take charge of these two? There’s a few more I left back in the bush – we need to retrieve ‘em before the light fails.”
“If you mean Ryan Smith, Jake Hunter, and Barry MacDonald, they’re already in custody, along with Winston Hunter.”
Mac grinned. “You found my Easter eggs, huh?” He looked in the direction of the cabin and back at Gonzalez. With his husky build, dark hair and coffee-coloured complexion, the ranger looked like a stock character from a Mexican
telenovela, although he was clean-shaven. “Hunter give you any trouble?”
Gonzalez gave Mac a meaningful grin. “Zak Abrams was good enough to warn us what we were up against – so I sent in my deputy. He’s white. Swedish, in fact. About seven feet tall. I mostly use him to scare kids on ATVs in no-ride zones. Hunter came quiet as a lamb – apparently he thought Jens was a deputy sheriff instead of a deputy ranger. We had him in cuffs before he found out the difference.” The ranger looked thoughtfully at Mac’s two captives. “Just as well. You wouldn’t believe the arsenal they had in that cabin. It could have made an ugly standoff if it’d come to that.”
The clearing by the cabin seemed crowded with vehicles, including two Forest Service jeeps; Mac saw with surprise that his own truck was amongst them. He and Zak had stashed it up an unused side track more than five miles back. Zak would know where to find it, of course, but only one other person had a spare key . . .
“Pete!” Mac’s whoop of delight echoed across the clearing. “How’d you get up here?”
Pete had been standing talking to Zak; when he turned, his face beamed with a broad smile of relief. “I caught a ride in on the chopper.”
“Chopper?”
Zak laughed. “Your Pete Thornton is one smooth operator. I made it down the hill to the ranger station, and called Phoenix while Gonzalez was contacting your emergency services. We had to get Ruth to safety, of course – and to a doctor – but I didn’t want to have to shepherd her all the way down to the lowlands. No offense, but I did think you might possibly need a
little bit of help. And if it didn’t turn out that Thornton here had a helicopter on stand-by – ”
MacGyver eyed Pete. “So just when did you scramble the chopper?”
“I had them ready to go starting about ninety minutes after you left – I didn’t see any way you could possibly need it sooner than that.” Pete frowned at MacGyver. “Are you all right? There’s blood in your hair.”
Mac put a hand up to his head – not carefully enough; he had forgotten about the crack on the head Buck had given him. He winced as his fingers found the gash above the cloth he’d tied around his head, and the blood-matted hair around it.
Pete looked over to the nearest Forest Service vehicle; Jens and Gonzalez were releasing the last two hunters from Mac’s contrived fetters and loading them into the back seat of the jeep. Mac heard Travis yelp, and guessed he was getting the duct tape peeled, somewhat roughly, from his hairy wrists.
Mac didn’t even try to feel sympathetic. Instead, he turned back to Pete. “Okay, so now we know where the leak was at Phoenix. Have you rounded up Rolf Schmidt yet?”
Pete shook his head, a disgusted expression on his face. “No sign of him at his house – and his neighbours haven’t been of any help; he wasn’t on good terms with them. A real loner. We’ve asked to have a warrant issued for him. Do you think he was the ‘Professor’?”
Mac shook his head. “His grandson seemed totally confused when I asked – and he’d been pretty talkative at that point.
Darn it, Pete! How’re we supposed to fight an enemy when they’re so disorganised they don’t even know themselves who’s involved?” Mac suddenly looked Pete in the eye. “You still haven’t told me what you’re doing up here. I bet you didn’t come up here for an Easter egg hunt.”
“Well, no. I had intended to stay with the helicopter and escort Ruth back to LA – if only to make certain she didn’t take it into her head to go charge a windmill en route. But we had an unexpected development – they got word to me just before I took off in the chopper.
After we knew that Ruth was safe.”
“C’mon, Pete, spill. What happened?”
“Phoenix received a ransom demand.”
Mac whistled. “How much are they askin’ for?”
What’s the going price for a feisty lady like that?“They aren’t asking for money.”
MacGyver frowned. “Then what – ”
“They want some of the paintings.”
