Chương 14
The driver’s side door swung open before the truck had even settled on its suspension.
"You run well for a desk jockey, Hale!" Raymond Vance bellowed. His voice was ragged, choked with fury and dust, but his hands were steady. He stepped down onto the running board, the heavy Colt Python held at low ready in his right hand. His Stetson was gone, revealing a bald crown ringed by sweat-plastered gray hair. "End of the line. There’s nowhere to go but down!"
Victoria was already moving.
She vaulted over the tangled mess of hydraulic lines, ignoring the rust that scraped the skin of her forearm, and grabbed the first rung of the external steel ladder bolted to the eastern pylon. The iron was searing hot under the midday sun, hot enough to raise blisters on uncalloused palms, but she clamped her fingers around the metal and hauled herself upward with brutal efficiency.
Five rungs. Ten rungs.
Below her, gravel crunched under Vance’s heavy leather boots.
"Don't do it, girl!" Vance shouted, his voice echoing off the limestone bluffs behind them. "You climb that rig, you’re just cornering yourself on a platform with no ladder on the other side! You’re twenty feet off the ground! I drop you from there, you break your neck on the rocks!"
Victoria didn't answer. She reached the first landing—a narrow walkway of perforated steel grating suspended fifteen feet above the ground. The metal groaned beneath her weight, vibrating with every step. She ran along the catwalk toward the secondary inspection tower, keeping low beneath the rusted guardrail to deny him a clean silhouette.
A gunshot cracked—sharp, whip-like, terrifyingly loud in the open air.
The heavy magnum slug punched through the sheet-metal siding three inches above Victoria’s left shoulder, showering her hair with flakes of dried orange paint and lead dust. The sound of the ricochet whined away into the heat, singing off the quarry walls like an angry wasp.
"I’ve got five more, Hale!" Vance roared from below. The sound of his boots on the lower rungs of the ladder told her he was climbing. He was heavy, but he had spent his entire life in the rough hills of this county; he climbed with the deliberate, heavy-footed momentum of a bear moving up a tree. "And I don't need a clean confession anymore! Bobby’s down at the shed! Halloway’s down at the shed! Nobody saw what happened out here! I tell the state police you pulled a knife, tried to take my sidearm, and fell into the pit!"
Victoria reached the upper access ladder. Her breath came in ragged, burning gasps, her lungs coated in the fine alkaline powder that hung in the stagnant air above the water. Her wrists, swollen and purple from the tight handcuffs, flared with sharp pain every time she pulled herself up another rung, but the adrenaline surging through her veins burned away the weakness.
She climbed.
Thirty feet. Forty feet.
She hauled herself onto the highest tier: the crusher’s primary discharge platform.
It was an open square of rusted steel grating, no larger than an office elevator, suspended directly over the deepest section of the flooded quarry. Below her, the water stretched out like an opaque mirror of milky emerald green, completely still, hiding eighty feet of flooded depth and forty years of sunken iron. At her back sat the massive, box-like housing of the stone breaker, its jaw-like manganese steel teeth frozen mid-bite, rusted into immobility decades ago.
There was nowhere left to run.
Vance had spoken the truth about the structure. The eastern ladder was the only way up. The western side ended in midair, where an old conveyor belt had long since snapped and plummeted into the water below, leaving only twisted steel cables dangling like severed tendons.
Victoria stepped to the center of the platform. She rested her hands on her hips, forcing her diaphragm to expand, forcing her pulse down from its frantic race to a cold, controlled baseline. She wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her forearm, leaving a streak of red dust across her forehead.
Down on the quarry floor, half a mile away, a cloud of dust was moving.
Chương 15
Victoria looked through the heat shimmer. The county patrol cruiser was approaching along the gravel track, moving fast, its tires kicking up a rooster tail of white powder.
Bobby and Halloway.
They weren't staying at the shed. Whether out of loyalty, desperation, or blind fear, the two deputies were coming to the water.
The rusted ladder shook.
A thick, calloused hand gripped the top rung of the platform. Raymond Vance hauled his bulk over the edge, his massive shoulders heaving as he pulled himself onto the steel grating.
He was breathing heavily, his uniform shirt soaked through with sweat, his face the color of raw beef. In his right hand, the Colt Python was leveled straight at Victoria’s chest. The hammer was pulled back to full cock, the cylinder locked in battery, the weapon balanced with the terrifying, familiar ease of a man who had carried it for thirty years.
"Told you," Vance panted, taking two slow steps across the grating. The rusted platform shivered under his weight, the bolts in the concrete pylon below groaning with a long, metallic screech. "Nowhere to go."
"You shouldn't have fired that shot, Raymond," Victoria said. Her voice was remarkably steady, carrying across the open platform with the cool authority of an interrogator in a climate-controlled room. "That was your second round. You’ve got four left. And you just signaled every person within three miles of this ridge."