Four Live Rounds

Kalyn felt lines of blood trailing warmly into her boots.

“So,” Javier said, unscrewing the silencer from the Beretta’s barrel, “shall we?”

“You can barely stand, Will.”

“My balance is coming back.” He took the shotgun out of Devlin’s hand.

“You both stay here. How’s your leg?”

“It hurts bad.”

“I know, but you’re lucky, Rach. That flashbang went off right underneath you.”

“What’s a flashbang?” Devlin asked.

“Stun grenade.”

Somewhere beyond the walls of Ethan’s room, a shotgun thundered.

“Is that inside?” Rachael asked.

“I can’t tell.”

Staccato shots responded to the Mossberg, automatic gunfire, which from inside the lodge sounded like beads dropping on a glass table.

Will staggered out into the corridor and closed the door behind him, his ears still ringing, unable even to hear his own footsteps as he hurried down the stairs and into the passage.

The wind shrieked under the brilliant Alaskan moon, building towers of snow against anything in its way.

Will saw the blood briefly—black smears by the lakeshore—before the wind concealed it with snow.

Waves of dizziness washed over him.

He spotted what appeared to be bloody tracks leading away from the lake toward the woods, though in the brutal wind, they were vanishing before his eyes, and would certainly be gone before he could reach the trees.

He collapsed, struggled back onto his feet, and started toward the woods as the tracks filled in, smoothed over and erased by the coldest wind ever to sting his cheeks.

Nine days ago, Kalyn Sharp had come to his home in Colorado. Nine days.

Is it over? he wondered. Nothing would have surprised him now.

He tried to deny the relief lurking in the nether regions of his conscience, but there was something so inescapably fitting about them killing each other, if that was in fact what had happened out here.

Will stopped after ten agonizing steps. He didn’t have the strength to walk into those woods and dig through four feet of snow to find their bodies. He scarcely had the balance to stand. But he went on—tired, so very tired—when all he wanted was to make a fire in the library and fall asleep with Devlin and Rachael in his arms, wake up someplace else.

Talisman

SEVENTY-THREE

Devlin felt the g force push her down in the seat as the seaplane lifted into the air, the inner lake falling away, the lodge and the floatplanes dwindling into toys, accessories to a child’s train set.

The sound of the props intensified, the De Havilland Twin Otter roaring south.

It was four hundred miles to Anchorage. Two hours to civilization. Devlin glanced around the cabin at the surviving women. She reached down, took her mother’s hand in hers, laced their fingers together. Rachael smiled. Between the pair of 620-horsepower engines and no headphones, it was too noisy to talk.

Staring out the window, Devlin said a prayer for Buck Young. The bush pilot had landed on the inner lake yesterday morning, found them, and then flown back to Fairbanks for help.

Devlin turned her attention toward the world below, thinking, Somewhere down there, under all that snow, lies Kalyn. Her father had searched until dawn for their bodies, but the wind had tucked them away for a long hibernation. She registered a flicker of relief and sorrow, would always remember flying out of this wilderness because of the tension inside her, the unresolvable contradiction she would just have to live with, and for years to come would mark this moment, in all its emotional complexity, as her first breath, first heartbeat as a grown-up.

Soon the Wolverine Hills had diminished into forested ripples of earth. She turned away from the window, from this wilderness she would not see again, swallowing to release the pressure in her ears.

. . .

Cook Inlet opened into the Gulf of Alaska, a universe of glittering dark blue water that stretched to the horizon. Devlin watched the paths of ships and oil tankers moving south toward the Pacific and continental America.

The De Havilland banked and descended. They were over land again, and looking out her window, Devlin could see the skyline of Anchorage and, just beyond, the shining, glaciated sprawl of the Chugach Range.

SEVENTY-FOUR

They touched down at Lake Hood Seaplane Base just shy of 1:00 P.M., after taxiing for several minutes over the choppy water. Two seats ahead, a woman began to sob uncontrollably, so loudly that everyone could hear, even over the drone of the props.

A second woman started to cry, then a third. They were all on Devlin’s side of the plane, and when she peeked over the seat in front of her, she saw them staring out the windows.

She looked, too, the glass streaked with windblown lake water. They were approaching a series of docks, and right away, she picked out their destination. A dozen ambulances had backed up to the one on the end, the rear doors thrown open, paramedics standing by with stretchers. Devlin spotted a procession of police cruisers behind the ambulances, lights flashing, waiting to escort the women to Providence Alaska Medical Center. Two fire engines idled beyond the cruisers—they would lead the motorcade. A nearby parking lot was filling fast with cars, vans, three news trucks—giant satellites perched on their roofs, transmitting the scene across the world.

A crowd had formed along the shore. People were taking pictures, shooting videos. Firemen and police officers stood guard behind a barrier of yellow crime-scene tape.

The woman sitting two rows back suddenly shouted, “Oh God, there’s Jimmy! It’s Jimmy! He’s a teenager!”

Devlin noticed that a handful of people had been allowed past the police barrier. They were gathered at the end of the dock—husbands, sisters, brothers, children, parents—and Devlin could see that every one of them stood crying, hands cupped to mouths, some outright weeping and prostrate, others signing “I love you” toward the seaplane.

The engines quit.

Devlin looked at her mother, her father, saw tears running down their faces, too. There was no stopping it, the emotion so sharp, so intense, it seemed to suck the oxygen out of the cabin. The women on the other side of the plane were unbuckling their seat belts, leaning across to look out the windows that faced the dock, searching for their loved ones amid the throng.

The pontoons bumped into the wooden pylons. The base crew went to work tethering the plane, tying down the props.

The families of the women pressed up to the end of the dock, and Devlin watched a man kneel down and reach out over the water, his hand just able to touch the window that framed his wife’s face.