Chapter 19
Sapphire
Gravel shifted beneath our feet, making every step a test in balance as we slid down the steep embankment. We were halfway down when I paused to lean on the trunk of a ghost gum and raised my binoculars.
A gunshot crack rolled across the country.
Single round. Pistol, not a rifle.
We all froze, except Mitch. He went down on one knee in the dirt and yanked Cassidy down with him.
Kayden’s good hand closed around my elbow, gripping me hard.
“That must be Bob’s gun,” Mitch said. “Frank would have his shotgun.”
“How can you tell?” Cassidy asked.
“Different sound. Pistols snap. Shotguns boom,” I said.
“Yeah. You’ll know the difference when Frank’s goes off,” Kayden added.
Below us was a field of flat ground covered in giant red rocks. We hadn’t seen Bob or Lyle since they’d slipped around the two massive boulders that concealed the cave.
Another single crack rolled out of the cave mouth.
Then two more shots sounded in quick succession. Snap snap. Same flat pistol.
The country swallowed the echoes and went back to its slow, steady hum of cicadas and wind.
Another crack split the air, but it sounded different. Closer, maybe. Or muffled by something.
And then someone screamed.
High-pitched. Brutal. Terrifying.
“Jesus.” Cassidy’s eyes flew wide.
My hands went cold. I’d heard gunshot victims’ screams before in training tapes and during a domestic dispute in my second year on the job, but this was different. I was going to remember this scream for a very long time.
“That must be Lyle,” Kayden said, shaking his head. “No way would Frank scream like that.”
“Nor Bob,” I added.
Using the binoculars, I scanned the boulder field.
From here on, we would lose the elevation that had let us see the men.
All I could pick out now were the rocks themselves, scattered like spilled marbles down the lower slope and the patches of scrub between them.
No movement. No flash of color. No Lyle. No Bob.
“How far to that entrance?” I asked Kayden.
“A klick,” he said. “Maybe a touch over.”
A kilometer of country between us and that cave. Country that looked flat from up here but probably wasn’t. We’d already hiked five miles, and we were all suffering in this heat.
Kayden hadn’t complained once, but he had gone gray under his tan, and fresh blood was coming through his shirt sleeve.
“Kayden, let me take a look at your wound.”
He waved me off. “I’m good. Keep going.”
“Just sit. Two minutes. Mitch. You got a first aid kit in that pack?”
“Always.” Mitch swung the pack off his shoulder.
“I’m fine,” Kayden said.
“Kayden Branson, sit down on that goddamned rock, or I’ll leave you here.”
He swore under his breath and sat. But he kept his rifle across his knees and his eyes on the rise ahead.
Mitch pulled out a field kit and handed it to me. Then he scrambled to the top of the rise, lay on his stomach, and pulled out his binoculars to scan ahead.
“Take your shirt off,” I said to Kayden.
He eyeballed me. “I’m okay, Fire. We need to—”
“Don’t.” I gave him a flat look. “Get it off.”
He shrugged out of the long-sleeved plaid and dropped it across his lap.
I rolled the bloody sleeve of his T-shirt up over his bicep.
The bandage I’d wrapped last night was soaked through, with fresh blood running down his arm.
I pressed two fingers above the wound. The skin was hot.
Shit. That, too, should be settling down by now.
“You should be in a hospital.”
“Yeah. Add it to the list of things I should be doing.” He met my eyes. “I’m not going anywhere, Fire. So, patch me up, and let’s keep moving.”
I tore open a fresh field dressing, and working fast, wrapped it tightly over the soaked bandage. It wasn’t enough, but it would have to do.
“Thanks,” he said, pulling his bloody shirt back on.
As I shoved the equipment back into Mitch’s pack, Kayden crawled to Mitch’s side, and peered through his binoculars.
None of them were cops.
Two of them hadn’t been trained for what we were walking into.
And all of them were Bransons. If Bob saw a Branson coming over that rise, he’d shoot fast.
If he saw me, he’d shoot faster.
I’d watched him corrupt crime scene evidence, and I’d put a gun in his face yesterday.
He knew I’d do everything in my power to arrest him. So now, he had nothing left to lose by killing me, and everyone with me.
I lowered the binoculars and turned to the three of them. “Listen up.”
Cassidy raised her water bottle. Mitch got up off his belly. Kayden watched me with that intense focus he got when he was about to argue.
“Bob will kill any one of us on sight. He’s gone past the point of pretending he’s a decent guy.
The second he sees us, he’s going to shoot, and he is not going to miss.
” I kept my voice flat, the way I’d been trained to talk in stressful situations, the way Bob himself had taught me for years.
“I’m the only person here who can legally fire at him.
And I’m the only person here who will. Are we clear? ”
Kayden’s jaw was working.
I aimed a glare at him. “Are we clear, Kayden?”
“Those men are dangerous, Fire.”
“I know.” I held his gaze. “And I am asking you to trust me to do my job. If you go in front of me, I’m going to be trying to keep you alive instead of doing what I’m here to do, and that’s how all of us end up dead.”
He didn’t answer, but his shoulders dropped half an inch, and that was as much as I was going to get.
“You all stay behind me and stay low. If I tell you to drop, you drop. If I tell you to run, you run. No negotiation.”
“Understood,” Mitch said, steady as he’d been all day.
Cassidy gave a tight nod, her grip white on the water bottle.
“And if I go down ...” I drew a breath. “You don’t come for me. You get back to the chopper. You call Detective Jaxson Callahan from Rosebud. Nobody else. Just Callahan.”
“Fuck no,” Kayden said.
“Kayden.”
“Fuck. No.” His jaw was set. “We’re not leaving you, Fire.”
“He’s right,” Mitch said. “If something happens to you, we’re coming for you. End of story.”
“I’m with them,” Cassidy added.
I should’ve argued, should’ve pulled rank. But every cop instinct I had was telling me they were right. Going in alone against a corrupt cop and a hostile shooter was suicide. And the look on Kayden’s face told me he’d made up his mind anyway.
I groaned. “Okay, but stay behind me. Don’t fire unless absolutely necessary.”
“Done,” Mitch said.
“Okay. We will.” Kayden squeezed my arm.
I unholstered my Glock and dropped the magazine into my palm. Eight rounds in the gun. Two full mags in my belt. Against a crooked cop, a man who knew this country better than anyone, and a grieving brother with a rifle who might or might not still be in the fight.
Not enough.
It was never going to be enough.
I slammed the magazine home and racked the slide. With the gun held low and ready, I said, “Let’s go.”
Mitch hoisted the pack onto his shoulders and led the way.
The descent off the ridge was loose scree under our boots.
Every step I took sent stones sliding ahead of me.
There was no quiet way to get down, and we didn’t have time for quiet anyway.
I kept us tracking down through the gullies where we’d be hidden from the boulder field for as long as possible, though we lost line of sight on the cave the moment we dropped below the crest.
The screaming kept going. It came rolling up out of the country toward us, cresting and falling and cresting again. Whoever it was, they were alive enough to keep finding the breath for those cries of agony. I hoped they stayed that way.
“You still think that’s Lyle?” I asked.
“Yep,” Mitch and Kayden said at the same time.
“Jesus. I wonder who shot him.”
“Could be either of them,” Mitch said. “But if I had to bet, Bob did it. Frank’s saving his shells.”
“But why would Bob kill his own backup?” I asked.
“‘Cause he’s an asshole,” Kayden said.
I raised my hand, halting them, and we stopped at the edge of the gully. “Listen. If it was Bob who shot Lyle, then the dynamic in there has changed. He’s done with his backup. That tells me he’s past negotiation. He’s cleaning up loose ends, and he doesn’t care how it looks anymore.”
“It’s weird how we haven’t heard Frank’s shotgun yet, don’t you think?” Kayden’s face had gone as hard as the rocks behind him.
“Frank came here knowing Bob would follow,” Mitch said. “I reckon Frank’s got a dozen traps set up in there. All he needs is for Bob to step into one, and then Frank will blow his head off.”
Shit, he’s right. “We need to move faster,” I said.
We raced down the gully, across the dry creek at the bottom, and up a rocky shoulder.
The screaming had eased down to a long, broken moaning that the country carried just as well as it had carried the screaming.
Halfway up the next rise, Cassidy eased in beside me. “How bad is this going to be?” She’d lowered her voice so the men couldn’t hear.
I wanted to give her a clean, professional answer. The kind of thing Bob himself had taught me to say when civilians needed managing. We have it under control. Stay calm. Let me do my job.
But I needed to keep it real.
“I don’t know what we’re walking into, Cass. But I know Bob doesn’t plan to leave any witnesses. That’s why I need to find him first. Just stick to what we agreed.”
She nodded, her jaw set. “I understand. You’re a good cop, Sapphire.”
Her comment struck me in a way I wasn’t ready for. Three weeks ago, Bob Ackerman had been the bar I was reaching for. Now that bastard was the man I needed to put in cuffs. Or if he gave me no choice, in the ground.
The country flattened out into a long stretch of scattered boulders and stunted mulga.
The cave was somewhere ahead of us in that mess of stones.
From down here at ground level, with the boulders blocking sight lines in every direction, I had no idea where the cave entrance was. We had to rely on Cassidy now.
She moved up to lead, and I stayed close on her left shoulder with the Glock up.
Kayden was on her right. Mitch covered our six.
The moaning had gone so quiet that I had to strain to hear it now. Lyle was getting weaker, or we were coming in from the wrong angle, and the rocks were eating the sound, or both.
Another shot split the air. We all dropped to our stomachs in the dirt. Mitch got his rifle up before he hit the ground, making me so glad he was with us.
The shot had been fired inside the cave, and I waited for the boom of Frank’s shotgun to come back. The sound that would tell us he was still alive.
It didn’t happen.
My stomach turned over.
“Cassidy. How close are we to the entrance?”
“Three hundred meters. Maybe less. The cave is just past the big gum tree with the split trunk. The entrance is between the two huge boulders.”
“Is there a way to come at it from above?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
A gunshot boomed. Once. Big and low and rolling, a different sound from the pistol’s snap.
One round. He’d fired one round. Either he was conserving shells, or he’d hit his target.
I put my hand flat on the dirt.
We need to move.
But moving meant walking three civilians into the open.
I looked at Kayden. He was watching me, waiting for the call.
God help me, if I got this wrong, we could all die.