Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [82]
“Bastards!” Fred said, firing again. “Bastards.”
“Stop it, Fred! Stop it. Let’s just get on the walkie-talkie and tell Kasey we found them.”
Without taking his cheek off the rifle he said, “They killed my brother.”
It was clear from looking at the road and judging the cyclists’ slow progress that Fred was going to be able to shoot at them for many minutes, and just as clear that they were so far away, hitting one would be next to impossible. Jennifer found a half-submerged log and sat on the dry end, trying to discourage Fred as he continued to crank off bullets at the hillside.
For the first time since he began shooting, Fred relaxed his massive shoulders and lowered the rifle, turned, and looked into Jennifer’s eyes. He had the same starlit blue eyes Chuck had, the same blunt-cut blond bangs, and it gave her a pang to look at him and realize she’d never look into Chuck’s eyes again. She and Chuck had been together for two and a half years, and sure, they’d had their share of ups and downs, but lately it had been more ups than downs. Along with his brother, he had a football scholarship to Stanford and had been looking forward to the next season. After college, he was slated to take a job in her father’s brokerage house. Chuck hadn’t been the sharpest pencil in the box, but Jennifer loved him and for a while now had assumed they would be married by the time they both finished college.
Fred had gone through most of the cartridges in his pockets when Kasey and Scooter located them on the water. “We heard the shooting,” said Kasey. “What the hell are you guys doing?”
“We found them,” said Jennifer.
“Where?” It took awhile for Scooter and Kasey to spot the riders maybe three-quarters of the way up the mountain.
By the time they got to the road behind Kasey and the others, all Jennifer and Fred could see was a trail of dust. Fred drove this time, handling the truck with the rough-hewn manner of someone who’d driven a lot of back roads, manhandling the steering wheel with those big freckled forearms that were so much like Chuck’s. When they caught the others at the three-way intersection, Fred made a dangerous maneuver and passed Perry in his Jeep; driving along the flat road at the south side of the lake, they were now third in line. Fred kept swerving to the side of the narrow road looking for places to pass Bloomquist’s Land Rover next. “The road’s too narrow,” Jennifer said. “Just stay here.”
“I’m going to kill those bastards.”
“If you don’t watch what you’re doing, you’re going to kill us.”
The Porsche had trouble maneuvering the tight uphill corner, slowing all of them before they began the long drag up the mountainside on the same road the cyclists were presumably still on. The view from the passenger’s window was scary, extending hundreds of feet down the rocky slopes with only an infrequent tree here and there to slow their fall should they inadvertently drive off the edge, which is what it felt like they were about to do every time they hit a bump, Jennifer thought. At any rate, they would soon overtake the cyclists.
35
By the time they heard the trucks, Zak and Muldaur had gained a hundred yards on Stephens, and Giancarlo was so far back he was barely visible. It was hard to tell if the trucks were on the same slope they were scaling or alongside the lake, because the megaphone effect of the basin below and the molten-glass water surface magnified noises. A pair of crows cawed from a nearby tree. Hummingbirds continued to dive-bomb them. For almost half a minute an impossibly fat bumblebee buzzed alongside Zak.
Glancing at the heart monitor mounted on his handlebars, Zak saw they’d been climbing twenty-two minutes since the lake, riding as hard as they could for the last fourteen. At this rate he and Muldaur had only another fifteen or twenty minutes in their legs, perhaps a bit longer if they could find some more adrenaline. There was no telling how much longer Giancarlo and Stephens would be able to struggle on.