There she was, huddled in the shadows, crying.
He ran to her, snatched her up, feeling her warmth and the strength of her young body. He kissed her feverishly.
“Oh, God, baby, oh, thank God, you’re all right, oh, sweetie, what happened, where’s Mommy?”
He knew his wild-eyed fear and near loss of control were not helping the girl at all, and she sobbed and shuddered.
“Oh, baby,” he said, “oh, my sweet, sweet baby,” soothing her, trying to get both himself and her calmed down, back in some kind of operational zone.
“Honey? Honey, you have to tell me. Where’s Mommy? What happened?”
“I don’t know where Mommy is. She was behind me and then she wasn’t.”
“What happened?”
“We were looking at the sunrise across the valley. Mr. Dade was there. Suddenly he blew up. Mommy screamed, the horses bucked, and we turned and rode for safety. Mommy was — oh, Daddy, she was right behind me. Where’s Mommy, Daddy? Oh, Daddy, what happened to Mommy?”
“Okay, sweetie, you have to be brave now and get a hold of yourself. We are going to have to ride out of here soon. You have to settle down and be calm. I’m going to go look for Mommy.”
“No, Daddy, no, please don’t go, he’ll kill you too!”
“Honey, now, you be calm. I will take a look-see. You stay here in the shadows. When you feel up to it, gather your horse and get Junior’s reins. We will be riding like hell out of here very shortly. All right?”
His daughter nodded solemnly through her tears.
Bob turned, whipped off his hat, and slithered along the wall of the pass toward the light. As he neared it, he slowed … way … down. Fast movement would attract the eye, draw another shot if the bad boy was still scoping. Swagger thought he wouldn’t be. Swagger thought he’d hit his primary and his secondary and the girl couldn’t figure in anything, and so he was beating it to higher elevations or his pickup or whatever. Who knew? That had to be figured out later. The issue now was Julie.
He edged ever so slowly toward the light, at last setting himself so that he had a good vantage point. Some dust still hung in the air, but the sun was bright now. He could see poor Dade about one hundred-odd yards away, right at the edge. From Dade’s broken posture alone it was clear the old man was finished, but a monstrous head wound testified to no possibility of survival. Bad work. Expanding bullet, presumably fired in through the eye or something, a cranial vault explosion, gobbets of brain and blood flung everywhere.
He looked about for a sign of his wife, but there was none. He saw her horse over in the shade, calm now, chewing on some vegetation. He looked about for a hide in case she had gotten to one, but there were no rocks or bushes thick enough to conceal or protect her. That left the edge; he tried to recall what lay beyond the edge, and built an image of a rough slope littered with scrub vegetation and rocks, down a few hundred feet to a dense mess of pines where the creek ran through. Was that right, or was it some other place?
He thought to call, but held back.
The sniper hadn’t seen him yet.
There really wasn’t a decision to be made. He knew what had to be done.
He slipped back to where Nikki, who had now collected herself, stood with the two horses.
“Do you have any sense of where the shots came from, sweetie? Did you hear them at all?”
“I only remember the last one. As I was riding and had reached the pass. It came from behind.”
“Okay,” he said. If the shot came from “behind,” that probably meant he was shooting from across the canyon, on the ridgeline that ran anywhere from two hundred meters to one thousand meters away. That jibed with the position of Dade’s body, too. Whatever, it meant the shooter was cut off from where they were by the gap between the mountains and wouldn’t be able to reach them from here on out, unless he came after them. But he wouldn’t come after them. He’d fall back, get to safe ground, hit his escape route and be out of here.
“All right,” he said, “we are getting the hell out of here and beelining straight for home, where we’ll call the sheriff and get him and his boys in here.”
She looked at him, stricken.
“But, Mommy — she’s out there.”
“I know she is, honey. But I can’t get her now. If I go out there, he may shoot me, and then what have we got?”
He didn’t think he would be. He had worked it out to the next logical step: whoever had done the shooting, his target was not Dade Fellows but Bob Lee Swagger. Someone had reconned him, planned the shot, knew his tendencies and lay in wait from a safe hide a long way off. It was a sniper, Bob felt, another professional.
“She might be hurt. She might need help bad.”
“Listen to me, honey. When you are shot, if it’s a bad hit, you die right away, like poor Mr. Dade. If it ain’t hit you seriously, you can last for several hours. I saw it in Vietnam; the body is very tough and it’ll fight on its own for a long time, and you know how tough Mommy is! So there’s no real advantage to going to Mommy right now. We can’t risk that. She’s either already dead or she’s going to pull through. There’s nothing in between.”
“I–I want Mommy,” said Nikki. “Mommy’s hurt.”
“I want Mommy, too,” said Bob. “But sweetie, please trust me on this one. We can’t help Mommy by getting ourselves killed. He may still be there.”
“I’ll stay,” said Nikki.
“You’re such a brave girl. But you can’t stay. We have to get out of here, get the state cops and a medical team here fast. Do you understand, baby girl? That’s what’s best for Mommy, all right?”
His daughter shook her head; she was not convinced and nothing would ever convince her but Bob knew in his Marine heart that he had made the right decision — the tough one, but the right one.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It had to happen sooner or later and he was glad it happened sooner. It had to be gotten out of the way.
“Mr. Swagger,” said Lieutenant Benteen, the chief investigator of the Idaho State Police, “would you mind stepping over here for a second, sir?”
Bob knew what was coming. As he stood on the escarpment, two and a half hours had passed since the shooting. His daughter was with a female state police detective and a nurse back at the house; here, an investigation team and coroner’s team worked the crime site, while below a team of sheriff’s deputies struggled through the trees and underbrush for a sign of Julie Swagger. Across the gorge, detectives and deputies looked for evidence of the shooting site, ferried there by a state police helicopter that idled on that side of the gap.
“I figured you would be talking with me,” said Bob. “You go ahead. Let’s get it done with.”
“Yes, sir. You know, when a wife is killed it’s been my experience that ninety-eight percent of the time, the husband is somehow involved, if he didn’t do the thing himself. Seen a lot of that.”
“Sure, it figures.”
“So I have to ask you to account for your whereabouts at the time of the shooting.”
“I was on the other side of the pass, riding up to join my wife and daughter. We usually go out for an early morning ride. Today we had words, and I let the girls go alone. Then I got mad at myself for letting my damn ego seem so important, so I went after them. I heard four shots and rode like hell, to find my baby girl in the shadows of the pass. I looked out and saw poor Dade. I decided the best thing was to get Nikki back to the house, where I called you all and you know the rest.”
“Did it occur to you to look for your wife?”
“It did, but I had no medical supplies and I didn’t know if the shooter was around, so I thought it best to get the girl out of here and call in the sheriff and a medical team.”