14. Justice
JUSTICE
Ahundred grand.
The number hangs in the frozen air between us like exhaust fumes. I let it sit there. Let the PI think I'm considering it. Let him see me in the dark and read whatever he wants into my silence.
Fifteen yards uphill. Emilia on her knees. The blanket tangled around her legs. The gun half-buried beside her right hand. And this grey-haired professional with his clean grip and his flat trigger discipline standing close enough to put a round through her body before I can close the distance.
Fifteen yards is a long way when a gun is involved.
I count his breaths. Look at the vapor clouds puff from his mouth.
Steady. Even. Four-count inhale, four-count exhale.
Range breathing. This one has training. Military or private security, at least a decade of it, which means he won't panic and he won't miss and he won't make a stupid mistake unless I force one.
"Clock's ticking, Spanks."
I shift my weight. Just slightly. Left foot forward, right foot angled on the rock beneath the snow. The shotgun hangs in my right hand, barrel down, useless at this range with her standing between us. I'd shred them both.
"Hundred thousand." I repeat the number back to him. Flat. Testing the shape of it in my mouth.
"Hundred thousand. Wire transfer or cash, your choice. You walk away clean. No charges, no blowback, no record of this conversation."
The burning cabin throws orange light across the snow behind us.
Sparks spiral up into the black sky. Somewhere below, the first PI groans against his zip ties.
Wind cuts across the ridge and Emilia's hair whips sideways, dark strands catching the firelight, and she's looking at me with those wide brown eyes that hold a question she won't ask out loud.
Will you sell me?
Every man she's ever known would.
The laugh comes from somewhere deep in my gut. Low and rough and ugly, scraping up through me like a seized piston dragging through a dry cylinder. It rolls out into the dark trees and bounces off the rock face behind the burning cabin.
The PI's breathing hitches. Just half a beat. But I catch it.
"Something funny?"
"Yeah." I set the shotgun down. Slow. Deliberate. Both hands open now. "You are."
His eyes narrow. The muzzle shifts a fraction of an inch, tracking from Emilia toward me. That fraction is what I need.
"All the money in California couldn't buy a single hair on her head."
I move.
Not forward. That's what he expects. I drop.
Left knee into the snow, right foot driving hard off the angled rock, and I go low and lateral, cutting across the slope instead of up it.
His training kicks in and he tracks me but the angle change costs him a quarter second of recalculation and in that quarter second I cover five yards.
He fires.
The round splits the air above my left shoulder. Close enough that I feel the heat of it graze past my ear. The report cracks off the mountainside, sharp and flat, swallowed instantly by the wind.
I don't stop. My legs churn through the deep snow, each stride eating three feet of the distance between us. He adjusts. Reacquires. His stance is textbook, weight balanced, arms extended.
He fires again.
This one bites into the meat of my left arm, high on the deltoid. White heat. I don't register it as pain. Not yet. Adrenaline has already flooded my brain with something older than thought, something that operates on pure geometry and violence.
Ten yards becomes five. Five becomes two. His third shot never comes because I'm inside his reach now and the pistol is useless at contact distance. He tries to step back, create space, do what they teach you on the range when a target closes to grappling range.
But this isn't a range. This is my mountain.
My right hand clamps over the slide of the pistol, locking it in place so it can't cycle.
My left hand, bleeding now, warm blood running down to my wrist, wraps around his gun hand and I torque.
Hard. The way I break a rusted lug nut off a frozen axle hub.
Full rotation, no hesitation, mechanical advantage multiplied by two hundred and forty pounds of forward momentum.
His wrist snaps. I hear it before he does. A wet, fibrous crack like green wood giving way. His fingers splay open and the pistol comes free in my grip and I toss it sideways into the dark.
He screams. Clutches his ruined wrist to his body. Drops to one knee.
I hit him with a straight right that starts in my hip and drives through his jaw like a piston through a crankcase. His head snaps sideways. Blood and spit arc into the snow. He goes flat. Face down. Done.
The whole thing takes four seconds.
I stand over him. Blood running down my left arm, dripping off my fingertips, making small dark holes in the white snow.
The wind screams across the ridge and the cabin burns behind us and the world shrinks down to the sound of my own breathing and the small, shaking figure kneeling fifteen feet away.
Emilia peers at me. Flare gun forgotten. Fire blanket pooled around her like a nest. Her lips parted, her breath coming in sharp little clouds, her eyes wide and wet and locked on the blood running down my arm.
"Justice, you're hit."
I look down at the wound. Through-and-through on the outside the deltoid. Bleeder, but nothing structural.
"I've cut myself worse on a timing chain."
I zip the second PI's hands behind his back. His broken wrist bends at an angle that makes Emilia look away, and a sick gurgling sound comes out of his throat when I cinch the plastic tight. He pointed a gun at her. He's lucky I left his teeth in his skull.
"Get up."
He can't. His legs are rubber and his eyes are rolling white.
So I grab him by the collar of his tactical vest and drag him through the snow to the nearest lodgepole pine with a trunk thick enough to hold weight.
The bark is rough and frozen, ice crystals catching the firelight from the cabin that's still burning fifty yards uphill.
I loop a second zip tie through the first and cinch it around the trunk.
He slumps against it. Chin on his chest. Blood freezing in a dark trail from his jaw to his collar.
I pat him down. Shoulder holster, empty. Ankle rig with a compact .380 I tuck into my waistband. Two spare magazines. A folding knife. Cell phone with a cracked screen. Earpiece connected to a two-way radio frequency. And a leather wallet, which I flip open.
Nevada private investigator license. Malcolm Breer. Licensed to Apex Security Consulting, Las Vegas. Corporate letterhead. Clean edges. The kind of firm that charges six figures and sends men who know how to set cabins on fire on a mountainside in January.
I drop the wallet in the snow next to him.
The first PI is still face down where I left him, fifty feet downhill, groaning into the frozen ground.
I haul him to a second tree. Same process.
Zip ties, pat down, strip. This one carries more hardware.
Collapsible baton. Pepper spray. A compact semi-auto with a suppressor threaded onto the barrel, which explains why I only heard two shots during the fight instead of three.
He'd fired a suppressed round that I never heard.
I find the impact point later in a tree trunk six inches from where Emilia had been kneeling.
Six inches.
My hands don't shake. They never shake. I strip their earpieces and radios. Crush the electronics under my boot heel. Pull the SIM cards from both phones and snap them in half. Whatever communication chain connects these two to Emilia's father dies right here on this ridge.
The burner phone lives in the bottom of my pack. Cheap prepaid unit I bought in Reno two years ago for emergencies and never activated until now. I peel the plastic off the battery, slot it in, and power it up. One bar of signal. Barely enough, but it'll do.
I punch in the number for the county sheriff's non-emergency line. The dispatch operator picks up on the third ring.
"Modoc County Sheriff."
"Got a fire on the north ridge above Cedar Draw. Two armed men. They're torching structures and discharging firearms."
"Sir, can I get your name and?—"
I kill the call. Pull the battery. Snap the SIM card and drop the pieces into separate pockets. The phone itself goes into the snow. By the time anyone finds it, the serial number will lead to Reno and a dead end.
The cabin roof collapses with a sound like a giant breaking kindling.
A column of sparks vomits into the sky, bright enough to be visible for miles.
That fire will draw attention on its own.
Search and rescue, Forest Service, maybe even a fire crew if there's one stationed close enough to respond.
Between the 911 call and the visible blaze, someone official will be on this ridge within the hour.
They'll find two men zip-tied to trees, armed to the teeth, with accelerant on their clothes and an arson scene still smoldering behind them.
Good luck explaining that to a judge.
I shoulder the pack and turn back to Emilia.
She's standing now. Wrapped in the blanket.
Snow in her hair, on her eyelashes, melting in small bright drops on her cheeks.
Or maybe those aren't snowflakes. The flannel I gave her hangs past her thighs and the sweatpants are bunched around the borrowed boots that are three sizes too big and she's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen standing on a mountain.
"We need to move."
She looks past me at the two men tied to their trees. At the burning cabin. At the blood still dripping from my left arm, black in the firelight.
"Where?"
"Down. The old mining track cuts west below the forest. There's a Forest Service road at the bottom that connects to the highway."
"That's miles."
"Six."