Christ, he had to get back to her.
He struggled to sit up. A surge of nausea filled his throat, but he managed to swallow it. There was a shocking amount of blood on the snow. His face was bathed in a cold, clammy sweat, while his shoulder felt as if it had been branded.
What seemed like a lifetime must have been only a few seconds. When he opened his eyes again and tested them against the glare, he saw Dutch Burton toss aside the transmitter of a two-way radio, which explained the origin of the tinny voice.
Dutch launched himself off the embankment as though he were about to fly. He landed hard on the roadway, but that didn’t slow him down. Tierney barely had time to raise his one useful arm before Dutch was on top of him, pounding him with his fists.
“Listen, Dutch.” Tierney was surprised by the raspy weakness of his own voice. He doubted Dutch could even hear it. In any case, he was in no mood to stop and listen.
The police chief let fly with a right hook that caught Tierney in the cheekbone. He heard his skin split. His blood spattered Dutch’s face. What the hell was wrong with his face, anyway?
Tierney deflected a second blow. “Lilly—”
“You killed her. God damn you!”
“No! Listen to me.”
But Dutch was beyond listening. His eyes were ablaze with unmitigated hatred. There was no doubt in Tierney’s mind that if he couldn’t defend himself, the crazed son of a bitch would kill him.
Drawing from resources he had believed were used up, he began not only to defend himself against the attack but to fight back. He had several grudges against Dutch Burton, and they fueled him with renewed strength. He managed to wedge his knee between himself and Dutch. He pushed with all his strength.
Dutch rolled aside long enough for Tierney to reach for the pistol he had dropped earlier. But reflexively he reached with his right arm, which was hanging uselessly from the shoulder socket that had been shattered by the rifle bullet.
He screamed in pain and struggled to stand up, then managed a few stumbling steps.
Dutch grabbed him by his sprained ankle and yanked his foot out from under him. He went down like a sack of cement. Dutch flipped him over onto his back like a fish he was about to gut. Once again he was on top of him, this time with both hands wrapped around his throat, thumbs digging into his Adam’s apple.
Dutch’s clenched teeth were smeared with blood, and Tierney was glad to see it. At least he’d landed a few awkward left-hand punches.
“Did you fuck her?”
Any compunction Tierney had had against fighting Dutch ended there. What kind of man who had just heard that his wife was dead asked that? He was more concerned about his own damn pride than he was about the fate of a woman he professed to love.
“Did you?” he bellowed.
“Dutch, the helicopter.”
Tierney heard Wes Hamer’s warning shout as though from a great distance, but Dutch seemed not to have heard him at all, or if he did, he wasn’t heeding him. Saliva, blood, and sweat dripped from his face onto Tierney’s. The cerulean sky overhead was growing dark around the edges. Tierney blinked but couldn’t get rid of the black dots that sprinkled his narrowing field of vision.
He was going to die if he didn’t do something. And now.
Dutch was straddling his waist, putting all his weight behind his hands. Tierney’s right arm lay useless at his side. His left was almost as ineffectual. The feeble blows it was delivering didn’t faze Dutch.
Tierney took the only chance he had. Raising his knee, he paused to channel all his strength into his quadriceps, then slammed his knee into Burton’s exposed crotch, hoping to catch him beneath his scrotum.
Dutch howled. Immediately his hands fell away from Tierney’s neck. Tierney bowed his body and threw the other man off, then rolled on top of him, successfully reversing their positions. He pressed his left forearm across Dutch’s throat like a crowbar.
With more coordination than he believed he had in his right arm, he picked up his pistol and fired it at Wes Hamer, who was charging across the road toward them. The blast caused Wes to skid to a halt. “Throw down the rifle or the next shot counts.”
It was a weakly issued threat, but miraculously it worked. Wes dropped his rifle.
But then Tierney realized that Wes wasn’t afraid of him. It was the helicopter, getting louder, coming closer, carrying witnesses.
“Who was that on the radio?” he asked Wes in a breathless pant.
“Ritt. William Ritt.”
Ritt? Pale, scrawny, William Ritt? That weasel?