Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [77]
As they pedaled along the base of the mountain that sat at the south end of the lake, they heard a truck in the woods behind them and began pedaling for all they were worth, Muldaur and Zak changing leads while Giancarlo and Stephens drafted. The hope was that the trucks would go north, discover the muddy tracks, and keep going.
32
Driving the Porsche Cayenne, Kasey took the lead, Scooter riding shotgun with his rifle wedged upright between his knees, another rifle in the rear seat, which Kasey could appropriate as needed. Fred and Jennifer followed them closely in Chuck’s Ford pickup truck, Fred manning a rifle out the passenger’s window. Bloomquist followed in the Land Rover; tailing the trio of vehicles, Ryan Perry drove his Jeep with the enormous car-crushing wheels and tires. Why timid little Perry had ever bought that white-trash Jeep was a mystery to Kasey. It wasn’t even his second vehicle. It was his primary set of wheels.
Kasey soon discovered that the road was so narrow, you had to find a turnaround to do any maneuvering, certainly in order to reverse course and head back down. In one sense they were like rats trundling through a series of very narrow pipes. If the cyclists were canny enough to hide in the woods until they went past, it might take forever to get turned around and mount a chase. On the other hand, there were damn few places where four cyclists might conceal themselves in these woods, which tended to be either impenetrable, sloping down the mountain at impossible angles, or all canopy and no underbrush, with nothing but skinny tree trunks showing for hundreds of feet. They found a couple of dead-end spur roads and explored them quickly, finding no trace of the cyclists.
When Kasey spotted Dozer running up ahead, he accelerated and was beginning to close in on the dog when the animal squirmed under a downed tree that lay across the road. All four speeding vehicles came to a sudden halt. Dozer’s nose was to the ground, and judging by his body language the cyclists had not ducked into the woods yet and weren’t far ahead. In fact, at the speeds they were driving, he’d expected to see them before now.
Luckily for them, Fred and Chuck had been toting the chain saw around for weeks to clear some motorcycle trails on the property their family owned near Cle Elum. While Fred pulled it out and fired it up, Scooter ducked under the tree and walked up the road with his rifle. Meanwhile Kasey scouted around and discovered the tree wasn’t a blowdown at all but had been deliberately dropped across the road.
When Scooter came back, he spoke over the cacophony of the chain saw. “They were all in on it. The big guy. The retard. All of them.”
“They must have planned this last night,” Kasey said. “That’s when this tree was cut down.”
Jennifer’s shock was quietly metamorphosing into rage. “They were planning to kill Chuck all along?”
“And me, too,” said Scooter. “Don’t forget they wanted to shove me off the cliff.”
“Are you sure they didn’t do the tree just a few minutes ago?” asked Bloomquist.
“That’s impossible,” said Fred. “It had to take a good long while to get this thing down with a handsaw. Bicycles. Handsaws. Seems like they do everything the hard way.”
“But why did they kill Chuck?” said Jennifer. “What on earth were they thinking? And sending that guy down to get us with the gun? It seems…insane.”
“All I know,” said Scooter, “is Polanski’s a psycho. You wouldn’t even believe the lies he told Nadine to get her away from me.”
“I wonder what other surprises they have waiting for us,” said Perry, beginning to shiver with the excitement and terror of it. Kasey wondered if he was going to make it through the morning without fainting. Kasey wasn’t worried about more surprises. The cyclists wouldn’t be expecting a chain saw, so they were probably lollygagging