Chapter Forty-Seven
Forty-Seven
Court felt like they’d been running a long time, but finally they made it to the utility road that Court had seen on Google Maps.
He called out to the girl, who was now twenty feet or so ahead. “Hang on.”
She pulled up, Court pulled his neck gaiter back up to his nose, and then he put his hand to his AirPod. “Six for Night Train. You with me, brother?”
There was no response. The girl looked at him, so he motioned to her to follow the trail down the hill towards the two-lane road.
“Night Train?”
He heard coughing now; the signal here on the mountain was poor, but he thought he heard the sound of grunting.
Andie looked up at him. “Everything okay?”
He nodded, still listening to his earpiece for any news.
She said, “Who are you?”
“Me? I’m…I’m just a guy helping out.”
Andie said, “Are you a cop?”
“Sure am.”
“What’s your name?”
Court thought a moment. Finally, he said, “Starsky.”
“Starsky?” The young girl was clearly bewildered by the name.
Court said nothing.
“You don’t look like a regular cop.”
“That’s because I’m not a regular cop. I’m an awesome cop. I’m also the kind of cop that doesn’t like a ton of chitchat, so let’s just walk for a few minutes, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, and the teenager adhered to this agreement.
For about twenty seconds.
“Why did all this happen?”
Court sighed. Said, “A simple case of mistaken identity.”
“You mean…like, they had the wrong kid?”
“They most definitely had the wrong kid.”
“Are they dead? The guys that took me?”
“They’re not going to bother you anymore.”
She walked in the dark a moment, then looked at him. “Because they’re dead?”
Their feet crunched the snow. “You can just go back to your life like nothing—”
“You can just say they’re dead. I know they are.”
A few more footsteps crunched. “Yeah. They’re all extremely dead,” he said, but he wasn’t sure about that.
Into his earpiece he said, “Night Train. Go for Six?”
—
Zack Hightower’s eyes didn’t really clear up enough to see until he was moving down an icy slope on his back, skidding at high speed, with a man on top of him.
He knew he was fighting Lancer, he knew Lancer had been disarmed, but the man was under at least as much of the effects of the bear spray as Zack himself was.
The man coughed as he rained punches down in those brief moments of contact while the two of them slid, rolled, and stumbled down the long and steep driveway.
Zack went airborne a moment, crashed down on his right shoulder, then rolled end over end, striking against Kincaid’s similarly tumbling body right before hitting the ice again on his back.
He tried a punch of his own as the two of them kept careening down, whiffed his swing, and then Kincaid landed an elbow into the side of Zack’s head.
Zack had his knife on his belt, but his hands were too occupied trying to break his fall with each of his contacts with the ground or thwarting the blows from the man falling along with him.
For a moment both he and Kincaid were on their backs, next to each other and sliding as if down an Olympic luge track.
He started to take the opportunity to go for his knife, because even though they were by no means at the end of the driveway, he expected this might be his only chance to get a lethal weapon in his hand for a moment.
But then it occurred to him. Lancer would have a blade of his own, and he was probably coming to the same conclusion.
Zack brought both hands up and crossed them into an X, just as Scott Kincaid flipped towards him in the air, a blade shining in the moonlight in his swinging hand.
Zack blocked it with both arms and grabbed the man by the wrists, and just then both struggling fighters’ feet hit a snowbank as the driveway curved to the east.
The momentum slung them into the air. Zack kept his hold on Kincaid’s wrists while they tumbled into trees and snow-covered brush.
Scott Kincaid ended up on top; he leaned onto his knife with all his might, but Zack brought a knee up into the man’s hip, knocking him off balance.
Kincaid went into the air; Zack held on to the man’s arms for dear life, and when the disgraced Navy SEAL slammed his back against a pine tree, the impact forced him to let go of the knife.
The blade fell and hit Zack in the shoulder, cutting him but doing no real damage that he could immediately feel.
Zack Hightower was utterly exhausted, but he rolled onto his side and grabbed the knife, and just as Kincaid leapt into the air towards him, Zack swung the big blade in a slashing motion in the air.
The knife swept across Kincaid’s midsection, cut through his coat and his shirt and his stomach. Opened him up deeply, and the man rolled over and past Zack, then tried to climb up.
Zack lunged again, landed on top of the man, and stabbed him in his midsection.
Kincaid’s wide eyes, shining in the moonlight like the bloody knife in Zack’s hand, stared up at him in disbelief.
Zack straddled the wounded man, raised the knife high over his head. “That’s my girl you fucked with, you son of a bitch!”
He dropped his full weight down onto the man, the blade leading the way, and it sank deep into Scott Kincaid’s heart.
—
A noise off to Zack’s right pulled him out of his rage. He looked to see Pete Delaney sliding down the driveway, moving quickly, but in a much more controlled fashion than Zack and Lancer had just done.
He climbed to his feet at the edge of the snowbank. Stared down at Zack through the broken bushes, took in the dead man lying on his back in the snow.
“That him?” was all he said.
“Yeah,” Zack replied through gasps for air.
Delaney nodded. Then looked at Zack. “You hurt?”
Zack breathed heavily, staring back at Delaney. He knew he’d been cut on the shoulder, had taken blows all over his body, might even have broken bones during his dozen or so rough impacts with the driveway. But he said, “Never better, brother.”
Pete moved through the snowbank, arrived at Zack, and extended a hand. Pulling him off the dead kidnapper, he said, “Nice work.”
“Thanks.”
With only a tiny hint of a smile, Delaney said, “Now…get out of my life.”
Zack glanced down at the dead man, then back to Delaney. “Yeah. Will do.”
Delaney pulled his earpiece out of his ear and handed it over. “Think you lost yours. Your guy has Andie; they’re safe, she wasn’t harmed at all. Your guy keeps asking for you to report your status.”
Zack took the headset, spoke between labored breaths. “Night Train for Six. We’re good here. Lancer’s DRT. We’re heading back to get the vehicles. Pete’s gonna come grab her first; I’m going to police up the cabin we staged in and then follow.”
—
Court had spent the last two minutes assuring Andie Delaney that everything was just perfect, when all the while, all he’d heard was her father telling him that Zack and Lancer had fallen down the sloping, iced driveway and disappeared while trying to rip each other’s throats out.
He confirmed receipt of Zack’s transmission, then he smiled now at the kid, and the kid looked back at him, but he knew she couldn’t see much with his neck gaiter up.
He said, “Your dad is going to pick you up when we get down to the road.”
She nodded, then, after another minute trudging through deep snow, she said, “I can’t believe all those people got killed because they grabbed the wrong kid.”
Court tried to think of words that could help.
Over the crunching of boots in the snow, he said, “They got killed because they grabbed a kid. Listen carefully to me. None of this is on you. Shit like this happens. It most definitely shouldn’t, but it does.
Everything is okay now. I’m taking you to your dad, I’m dropping you off, and you need to forget that this happened. ”
She stopped and looked at him. “Bruh, what are you talking about? It’s gonna be all over the news.”
“No. Actually, it’s not.”
“Why not?”
Court shrugged. “There are things I can’t explain. Somehow, a lot of the details of this are going to get covered up.”
“Why?”
He’d said too much. “Let’s just keep walking.”
He moved on, and she followed.
Soon she was ahead of him again. Court had a hard time keeping up with her in the heavy snow; she was obviously more accustomed to this terrain and these conditions than he was.
Finally, she said, “Do you do stuff like this all the time?”
“Do I use ladders and bear spray to rescue kids from bad guys in the mountains all the time? Almost never, to tell you the truth.”
“You…you kind of act like you do this all the time.”
“Believe me, it’s just an act.”
“Not sure I do believe you,” she said, but she did not pursue the matter further.
—
They made it to the road after another twenty minutes, and Pete Delaney was already there, standing in the flashing lights of his emergency vehicle, his arms wide. He took his daughter, and her snowboard boots were lifted off the ground as he hugged her.
He didn’t put her down for some time, but when he did, she turned back to Court.
“Thanks, Starsky,” Andie said. Court waved and nodded, his neck gaiter still shielding his face, and she climbed into the passenger seat of the vehicle.
Delaney stepped forward in the dark. “Hightower’s five minutes behind me. He’s really banged up, but he won’t admit it. You need to work on that leg. He’s got a hell of a gash, and he’s basically ignored it for the past six or seven hours. He took a knife in the shoulder, too.”
“That body of his has taken a lot worse. We’ll get him seen to.”
“They’re all dead, right?” he asked.
Court said, “I just got one guy, then I got the girl out. I honestly think your bear spray might have saved the day.” With a little chuckle, he said, “Although, in hindsight, maybe one can would have been plenty.”
“No shit,” Delaney said softly.
Court said, “The important thing is, that will never happen again.”
“You’re sure about that?”
Court was not. How can anyone be sure about anything? he thought. He just put a hand out, shook Delaney’s, and said, “You guys get home safe.”
The lights of the Boulder Fire and Rescue truck had just disappeared in the distance when Zack’s F-150 pulled up along the utility road. Court opened the passenger-side door and looked in.
“How bad are you?”
He could see bruising on Zack’s face. There was fresh blood on his leg. A compression bandage on his shoulder jutted out from under his open coat. But he smiled, his fat lower lip cracked, swollen, and bloody, “What did you think of that kid?”
“Rock star.”
“Right?” Zack beamed.
“Reminded me of you. The same vibe.”
“How so?”
“She told me she smacked one of the kidnappers with a toilet tank lid, damn near knocked him out a window.”
“No shit?” he said, pride evident on his face. “Outstanding!”
“You okay to drive?” Court asked.
“I’m good to go.”
The F-150 began rolling through the snowy conditions towards Boulder Municipal Airport.