Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [60]
“Where the hell did you get that?” Giancarlo stepped forward and shoved the muzzle toward the ground before relieving Morse of the weapon.
“I saw it in your gear. I was wondering why you brought it.”
“And I’m wondering why you would pick it up without asking. This is a .357, and it’ll blow a hole in you the size of a silver dollar.”
“Let’s hand it over to them,” said Stephens. “We don’t need it, and it would show, you know, good intent, don’t you think? Kind of like…uh, unilateral disarmament?”
Muldaur gave him a sour look. “You mean unilateral stupidity?”
“I’m not handing my gun over to anybody,” said Giancarlo. “Especially not to a bunch of yahoos who’ve been up all night drinking. And certainly not to a man who just threatened to kill us all.”
“Are you sure he really said that?” asked Morse.
Nobody replied as they all watched Giancarlo bury the pistol in the folds of the rolled-up sleeping bag.
“Listen,” said Stephens, in a moment of uncharacteristic clarity, “Morse is a professional negotiator. He does this for a living. What we’ve got here is a situation that needs negotiating. And whether it’s a business deal or trying to talk some maniac out of a tree, every negotiation is basically the same. Right, Morse?”
“It’s always about getting two sides on the same page. We go down the hill with the pistol, hand it over as a gesture of goodwill, and talk reason to them. I could do that…Giving it to them would be my selling point. I always like to have at least one major selling point. My persuader, I like to call it.”
They walked out to the road and continued discussing their options. When they saw the Porsche Cayenne appear at the head of the spur road below, Zak thought for a moment it was coming at them, but it turned down the hill.
Stephens said, “They’re going for help.”
“He might be going around so he can come back on some other road and get us from behind,” said Muldaur.
“I can’t believe how paranoid you guys are.”
Zak said, “You think about it. Scooter’ll tell his story to the authorities and we’ll tell ours, and they’ll see how drunk Scooter is and get a blood-alcohol reading from him and the dead man. They’ll test us and we’ll come up clean. It’ll be a no-brainer who to believe.”
Muldaur looked at him. “Maybe.”
Ten minutes later the Porsche climbed the steep road and turned back into the spur. It was Kasey’s vehicle, but the driver was William Potter III, aka Scooter. They were still on the hill discussing things. “He wasn’t gone long enough to get into town and back,” said Zak.
“Maybe he told the guard what happened,” said Giancarlo.
Stephens nodded. “It would accomplish the same thing.”
“I don’t think he was gone long enough even for that.”
They decided Stephens would wait at the road and Morse would remain in camp while Zak, Giancarlo, and Muldaur went to see what was going on at the base of the bluffs, if anything. When they got there, the body was just as broken and immobile as it had been earlier. Gazing south along the base of the mountain, Zak glimpsed two people near the dead man.
It was easy to tell from the desultory way they were moving that they had checked out the corpse and were making their way back up the cliffs. Even from where he stood, Zak knew the woman was crying, that for her this day would always loom larger and lonelier than any other. He had a day like that in his past. Almost everybody did.
When they got back into camp, Morse was gone, although his bike was still leaning against a tree. Zak put on his cycling shoes, packed his pockets with Clif Bars, filled his hydration pack from the store of creek water they had purified, and checked his tires and the air in his shocks. He kept thinking about how distraught Jennifer must be and how her story would influence Nadine’s thinking. Nadine might filter her thinking through Scooter’s murky viewpoint, too. The events of this morning would severely impact his relationship with Nadine, possibly in ways he had no control over. It shamed him to realize he was