Chapter 27 #3
“Yada-yada-yada,” she said, stepping over and picking up Peter’s .
45. She ejected the clip, dug into the pocket of her blue winter jacket, and produced a handful of bullets.
As she reinserted them, one by one, into the clip, Paul McCaw slowly came walking out of tunnel “12” holding his Sedgley Springfield hunting rifle.
“Hey, Goldie,” he calmly said, ducking to avoid the string of lights going across the tunnel entrance.
“Ay, Paul. How ya doin’?”
“Hey, Mayor,” he said, looking down at Banyan. “Sorry about the knee.”
“You shot me, you asshole!” Banyan painfully yelled.
“I hope you didn’t have to wait too long,” Goldie said, still loading bullets.
“Not too long,” Paul said, straight-faced.
“Saul sealed up the entranceway behind me, and we was real careful about tracks. I had a flashlight and followed your instructions. I just hunkered down yonder and waited by them long planks on the floor. The lights came on about twenty minutes after I got here.”
“Y-you waited in a dark mine to ambush us?” Charles asked between tears and gritted teeth.
“No different than waitin’ in a duck blind or a deer tower. Besides, I had jerky.”
Goldie put the last bullet in place, then slipped the clip into the handle. “What long planks?”
“There’s a couple long planks in tunnel “12,” and I figured people musta used them to get across the collapsed floor of tunnel “22.””
“Perfect,” Goldie smiled, mocking herself. “Now I find out there were planks. Where’s Saul?”
“Probably about to entertain Tully,” Paul figured.
“Okay,” she said, pulling back the chamber and cocking the revolver. “I’m gonna go after Peter. You mind babysittin’ the mayor? Peter said there’s a first aid kit in the backpack.”
“Not at all. We’re gonna need a new mayor, and I wanna pick his brain. I think I got the personality for politics.”
“Well, you are a giver,” she agreed.
“True,” he said, unemotionally.
It took several minutes for Peter to emerge from the mine entrance.
When he did, he was breathless and tired.
Stepping over the railroad ties and tasting sweet air again, he paused, bent over, and took several deep breaths before he was even aware of what was happening around him.
Over by the old mining office, he finally noticed that Tully had been bound and gagged by Saul McCaw.
Tully lay on the ground, a scarf wrapped around his mouth, his hands tied behind his back, and Saul was just finishing tying his legs.
As the captive grunted, Peter saw that Saul’s rifle was leaning against the office wall.
When Peter and Saul saw each other, Saul went for his rifle, and a burst of adrenaline kicked in for Peter.
The younger Banyan ran down the dirt road toward the chained gate and the covered bridge; no longer thinking about leaving footprints in the snow, going a back way, or even the newly tightened chain on the gate.
He just wanted to escape. Figuring he had to keep an eye on his prisoner, plus knowing Peter was too well known in town to hide for long, Saul decided not to pursue.
As Peter rounded the bend in the road heading toward the gate, he was totally unaware that just on the other side of it, the barefoot woman in the white summer nightgown who carried a rope with a noose was walking toward him.
She passed through the wire gate like smoke through a screen door.
The two passed by one another only inches apart; she headed up the road toward the director’s house, leaving no footprints, and he chugged through the snow toward the fence.
Coming to the chained gate, Peter rattled it frantically, then started to climb over.
But he abruptly stopped when he saw Eli’s black-and-white Ford come down the end of the covered bridge and make a sharp left turn to head up his way.
Eli had the bubble light on top of his car on, and Peter knew this couldn’t be good.
Hopping down from the gate, he turned and started to run back the way he came.
Within another twenty seconds, he unknowingly ran right through the apparition, still making her way up the road.
When he did, a shocking chill ran through his head like a sudden brain freeze.
With a yell, he stopped, fell to his knees, then to his hands with a numbing shortness of breath.
Simultaneously, Eli’s cruiser burst through the chained gate and slid to a snowy stop a few yards behind him.
As the oblivious, sad, blonde-haired woman continued onward to her daily rendezvous with death, the sheriff jumped up out of his car with a revolver in hand and limped up the road to a shivering Peter still on all fours.
“Howdy, Peter,” he drawled.
A few seconds later, Goldie appeared at the bend of the road, running toward them.
She stopped, still holding Peter’s .45, saw him on the ground, then saw Eli standing behind him.
She also saw the woman in the white nightgown silently turn and head up the path toward the director of operations’ partially opened front door.
She watched her slip inside, then turned her eyes to Eli.
He smiled, put two fingers to the side of his head, then saluted in her direction.
Seeing the corny cowboy gesture, a big smile started to stretch across her gum-chewing face.