“Everything all right, Ethan?” he called. “Seemed to become a race there for a moment. Why don’t we let my brother take the summit first. He’s always been the competitive sort. It would mean something to him.”
Patrick Blackwell was smiling at Ethan. Understanding some of it, if not the specifics.
“Maybe you can relax a minute?” Patrick said. “You just relax.” He slid sideways on the ledge a few feet, far enough to clear the rifle out of Ethan’s reach, and then he turned and grabbed the rock above him and pulled himself up, one fast springing motion, dragging his rifle over the stone, and then he was at the summit and standing upright again, and at his back was the pile of loose stones on which Ethan had pinned his hopes.
“Come on the rest of the way now,” he said.
Ethan looked at the rock in hand. A slab of stone, useful for holding on to the face of the mountain, useless as a weapon. His weapons were waiting above, and he was below, and he felt as if it had always been that way.
He climbed up and straightened and stood and there they were at the top of the dark world. Patrick Blackwell held the rifle on him until his brother had also reached the summit and then he moved several steps away and lowered his eye to the rifle scope and began to search the slopes. Jack had his handgun drawn and was looking at Ethan with curious amusement.
“You seem flustered,” he said. “Have we troubled you?”
Ethan moved to the pile of stones, the pyramid that marked 10,487 feet in the air. He was facing Yellowstone now, his back to the Beartooths and his home. He looked at the rocks and told himself the job would have been impossible to accomplish even if he’d beaten them to the top, even if something, anything, had gone according to plan.
There will be another chance, he told himself. Getting down, maybe, there will be another chance, another way, a better one.
“Jace, Jace, my old friend,” Patrick Blackwell said, staring through his scope. “So good to see you. So very good.”
Jack turned from Ethan and looked at his brother, and the amusement left his face.
“You can see him?”
“Indeed. He’s with a woman. His friend from the lookout tower, I imagine.”
“You’re sure it’s him?” Jack asked.
“If there’s another pair like them hiking toward a forest fire, I’d be rather surprised, but come have a look. It’s the first time we’ve seen him live, after all. You’re entitled, brother.”
Jack moved away from Ethan and toward his brother. Patrick was kneeling with the rifle braced on the rocks, facing the northern slope.
Why did they go high, Ethan thought, why in the hell did she take him high? I was supposed to be buying them time. I was supposed to be winning this.
Jack walked over, knelt beside his brother, and accepted the rifle while passing Patrick the handgun, keeping them both armed. The right move. They never made the wrong move.
Except for their eyes. For the first time since the hospital, Jack Blackwell’s eyes were not on Ethan. They were on the rifle scope, and Patrick’s followed, both of them gazing north, away from Ethan. He looked down at the pile of stones and saw that his own was no longer on top. Someone had been here since and covered his with a bigger piece, a jagged slab. He reached down and picked it up. He did it slowly and gently, so as not to make a sound. Neither of the Blackwell brothers turned.
“It would seem to be him,” Jack was saying. “An interesting route they’ve taken. Why go up to go down? But no matter.”
“I can take them both.”
“From this distance?”
“Yes.”
They were still facing down the slope, and Ethan had advanced four steps almost soundlessly, though he didn’t know if a sound would have mattered; they had stopped regarding him as a threat at this point and were focused on their quarry. They were close together, finally.
“I hate to see it end from here,” Jack Blackwell said. “But I suppose it doesn’t matter that the boy won’t know. His mother will.”
“Yes.”
“A miss would be bad, if it gives them time to take cover. Prolong things and carry us farther in the wrong direction.”
“I won’t miss.”
“Hate to see you do such fine work for free. I’ll pay you a dollar for each.”
“Deeply appreciated.”
They would have to trade weapons again. It was clear that Jack deferred to his brother in regard to the long gun. There would be a moment of exchange, a moment when both of them held guns but were not prepared to fire them, and that was all Ethan sought. He was five feet away. The rock in his hand was heavy but not heavy enough to slow him down if he rushed at them. He could swing it, and he could swing it with force.
Get the handgun, he told himself, because the handgun could be fired quickly in the chaos. His breathing had slowed even as his heart rate quickened, and he focused on the back of Patrick Blackwell’s skull, because that was where it would have to start, everything would begin and end from the spot where Ethan could place the rock against those bones.
“Earn your dollars, then,” Jack said, and he sat up, both knees planted on the rocks, and passed the rifle to Patrick, who lowered the handgun to make the transfer, and there was the moment, both of them unprepared and vulnerable and finally, finally, close enough together for both to be at risk at the same time. When he began to move, Ethan felt astonished that such an opportunity had presented itself, because he’d never imagined that he could get more than one of them, and yet here they were, his for the taking.
He traded silence for speed over those last five feet, drawing the fist with the rock in it back and then slinging it forward, focused on that skull, ready for it to shatter.
The skull wasn’t there by the time he reached it.
They were fast men. Lord, but they were fast.
He’d surprised them and still they knew what to do; their instinct, these two who made one united force, was always to part. Patrick rolled left and Jack rolled right and then there was distance between them and the guns somewhere in the middle, and Ethan’s rock missed Patrick entirely and found air where he was supposed to be, Ethan falling with the force of the blow. A hand flashed out and found his neck in what was no doubt supposed to be a killing blow, or at least a crippling one, but here Ethan benefited from his own stumble and the hand chopped at the side of his neck instead of the center of his throat.
A choice to be made then, split-second, he had to look either left or right, because you couldn’t do both simultaneously, and so he stayed with the target he’d come for and swung the rock again and this time found success, caught Patrick Blackwell full in the face and felt jawbone shatter beneath the rock, tore the flesh of his own hand on Patrick’s broken teeth as he punched through his mouth. The rock fell free and then Patrick was silent and down in the darkness and somewhere behind them Ethan could hear Jack scrambling.
Guns, he thought stupidly, urgently, there are guns and you need one.
But he couldn’t find one, and it was happening too fast and he knew Jack was quick and deadly and so he did the only thing he could think of and wrapped one arm around Patrick Blackwell and then rolled with him and heaved him upright, thinking that if he had one brother between himself and the other brother’s bullets, he’d be fine. He could feel the metal barrel of the rifle under his arm, pinned against Patrick’s limp body, and thought that if he got a little space and little time, just a little, he could not only equalize this situation but control it.
He was halfway to his feet when the first shot rang out and something scalded his side and knocked him back to the ground. Patrick dropped with him, onto him, and there was a pause before the second shot, because Ethan had now inadvertently achieved his goal-he was shielded, and Jack saw two heads side by side in the darkness, and one of them was his brother’s and he would not take the kill shot until he was sure which one he was aiming at. He’d seen Ethan’s body clear enough for one shot and had taken it, but now he couldn’t take another, not with Ethan lying there tangled with his brother in the dark, and so that most precious thing, time, had been offered to Ethan again-fleeting, but there.