"Maybe," he said, "but if he comes here, finds nobody home, he'll go to his hidey-hole, if that's what it is. We wait by that rope, maybe we get him."
What the hell, I thought. It might work. "Backup?" I asked.
"Too much noise," he said. "Besides, we got four against one."
I couldn't argue, and I wouldn't be Lone Rangering anymore, either.
It took us almost thirty minutes. The sheriff's definition of walking was just a hair slower than my definition of a comfortable jog. I didn't want to deal with that slide of rocks and scree in the dark, so we turned left in the entrance to the pass itself and went up the backbone of the ridge instead. I knew our target might be going directly to the rope from the river side, which meant we might just collide on the ridge. The sheriff didn't seem to care, but I had Frick and Kitty cast out ahead as scouts, which should give us a little warning if we were approaching a head-on. The clouds had disappeared, so we could see much better. That was a good news and bad news deaclass="underline" so could he.
I took the sheriff to the side from which I'd seen the rope the first time. It was still there, twenty, twenty-five feet across the shadowy defile. We worked our way back up the hill to the top of the notch and then back down the other side, being as quiet as possible now in case this had been his destination and not our playground over there on the big hill. The dogs found the rope and its anchor first. The sheriff pointed silently to the anchoring arrangement to make sure I recognized that it was professional climbing gear. Lots of stainless steel and complex knots. Then we backed out of the immediate area and into some trees uphill of the rope anchor. The sheriff said we should separate.
"We want to take him in, or just take him?" I whispered before we took up our positions.
"I'm here to apprehend a suspect," he said, "but if it turns into a gunfight, I'm gonna be standing when it's all over. What you got in that shotgun?"
"Heavy game load."
"Can you hit him from here with that. 45 if you have to?"
"Yup."
"Me, too," he said. "I'll go down the other side, set up directly across from the rope. He shows up, I'll light him up with my Maglite here. Then I'll do a standard yell-down. He just stands there, take him down with the dogs. He pulls, oh, well. Okay?"
"Works for me."
I kept the shepherds with me while the sheriff went down the hill about fifty feet and faded into the shadows of the tree line lining the cut in the hillside. Tactically, we were set up correctly: If any shit started, our guy would have two separate shooters to deal with, one he knew about, one he hopefully didn't. We might have to wait a while if he was headed first to Glory's End or the stone cottage. Of course, it could have been a poacher we'd heard down on the river, some guy running his trotlines after dark. I didn't think so, though, and neither did the sheriff.
I settled into the weeds and put my back up against a tree trunk. I'd put Frick on a sight line between me and the rope anchor, about halfway down. I kept Kitty with me. Even though it was a pretty fair ambush setup, it was comforting to have that big warm furry thing right at my side. Besides, I knew that Frick would give warning with her ears, while Kitty, still new to hunting games, might bark.
An hour passed, an hour during which I changed position against the tree trunk, sat back, sat forward, knelt on one knee, stood up, and did everything else I could to stay awake and alert. Kitty was curled in a ball, but with her head pointed down the hillside and her eyes on Frick, whom I could no longer even see. The moon traversed the sky and began sinking toward the western ridge of the property beyond the big house. At some point, I told myself, I'm going to fall asleep . I think my body knew that we had made a lot of assumptions about where the man who'd gone thump in the night might be going. He might even have been getting back into his boat, having been up in the barnyard listening to us.
Then Kitty was rising to a standing position, her ears forward and her body starting to tense up. I put a hand on her neck just to let her know I was watching.
Something moved down the hillside. A figure, man or woman I couldn't tell, but definitely human. I got ready to fire the dogs at him. For an instant, the figure stood at the edge of the rock face. Then it knelt down. I heard a loud click of metal on metal, and the next moment, it was gone.
Where in the hell was the sheriff?! Why hadn't he lit the guy up and made his noise? Had my stalker taken him out first?
I couldn't see Frick, but Kitty was relaxing, which probably meant that Frick didn't know what to do. Neither did I. The sheriff solved it for me a minute later, coming down the hillside from behind me, making just enough noise that both the dogs and I could hear him approaching. He raised a hand as he walked up.
"I know," he said softly. "I changed the plan. I thought about what you'd said, about backup. He could have done the same damn thing the moment I lit him up-dropped down that rope where neither one of us could get a shot at him. This way, we know where he is. Now I'm going to get me some backup."
Get me some backup. Not "us." I realized that what had really happened here was that the sheriff's professional standards had reasserted themselves. It might sound good to say take the perp out, but in reality, the law was different. Also, it wasn't like I could argue. As far as he was concerned, this was probably the guy who'd shot the Craney woman in the barn. He had every right to tell me what I could and couldn't do as long as he was pursing a murder suspect in his exclusive jurisdiction. Still, I wouldn't have minded putting a few rounds down the hillside. It might have caused the guy to drop into that gorge without the benefit of his rope. Frick rejoined us, looking annoyed that she hadn't gotten to bite anybody.
"Right," I said. "It's your patch."
"You're thinking like a sheriff's office lieutenant again," he said approvingly. "When in doubt, bring a crowd."
"Absolutely," I said. "I'll wait here with you until your guys show up, but after that, you don't need me here anymore, do you?"
He hesitated for just a second. "No," he said. "We'll get set up and then send some SWAT people down that gorge to see what they find."
There was an unspoken question there, as in, Don't you want to know what we find? The truth was, I was really tired. I knew that it would take a few hours for them to get set up properly and get more people in position along the ridge to watch for a second way out. They'd be polite, but I also knew I'd just be in the way.
I let him do his thing on the radio with his operations center while I walked back down to that rope anchor. The gorge was at least a hundred feet down, maybe more, and very narrow, perhaps only man-wide at the bottom. The sheriff might have had a shot, but the moment he slipped onto that rope, I would not have been able to get a bead on him. The shotgun might have worked, but I didn't really have cause to shoot the climber without knowing who he was.
We'd been speaking as quietly as we could, so I didn't think our ghost would have been aware of us down there, unless he'd put some more electronics in place up here on the rim. So what had he done: clipped on his descenders, kicked off the rock rim, and gone down in one smooth descent, applying some brakes only as he neared the bottom. Then stepped off the rope and into-what? An old ventilation shaft? A breakthrough collapse in the cave walls? I knelt down at the edge of the crack in the hillside, experiencing a mild wave of vertigo as I looked down into the deep darkness below.
Once I saw the blue lights flickering out on the two-lane, I told the sheriff I was going to take my dogs and go back to the stone cottage. He nodded, but he was preoccupied with getting his people in position. I climbed up the ridge to the granite road to watch for a few minutes and then headed down toward the farm road. Then I stopped.