Page 39 of Battle Mountain

“I’m not sure we can do much for him at this point,” Axel said. “We’re limited in our field resources, and he looks too far gone.”

“Please,” Eisele said. “Just take him and drop him at an ER somewhere. They might be able to save him. He didn’t do anything wrong.Wedidn’t do anything wrong. We were just scouting for elk when we surprised Double-A and those other guys.”

Eisele was surprised how pitiful and fawning he sounded, even to himself. And by the man’s lack of reaction, he’d not made any headway.

“There might be people looking for me,” Eisele said. “That can’t be good for you.”

“Is that what you think?” the man asked. “Why are you so special?”

Eisele hesitated for a few seconds. Would telling Axel that he was the governor’s son-in-law help or hurt him? Would it cause Axel to release him or decide that he needed to take drastic action immediately? Either way, Eisele chose to keep that arrow in his quiver in case he needed it later.

“I’m not special,” Eisele said. “But I have a family. Three little girls,” he lied. He wanted more children. Megan wasn’t as enthusiastic about the idea.

“Don’t you think we all have families?” Axel said. “That doesn’t make you unique.”

Double-A returned with a tray of what looked like meat loaf and mashed potatoes. She placed it on Eisele’s belly. Then she loosened his upper chest restraint and propped several cheap pillows under him so he could sit up and eat. Eisele stared at the plate of food. He wished hewashungry.

“Can you tell me what’s going on up here?” Eisele asked the man. “I swear I won’t say anything to anyone if that’s what you want.”

Axel smiled ruefully and shook his head. Obviously, Eisele’s proposal wasn’t even worth considering.

In his peripheral vision, Eisele could see that Double-A had bent over the next cot and fished out Rankin’s wrist from beneath the covers to check his pulse. She held his wrist for a few moments, then glanced at her wristwatch. “I can hardly get a reading,” she told Axel. “His heartbeat is weak and slow.”

Axel turned to her as she lowered Rankin’s wrist and tucked it back under the sheet. Then, making a sudden decision, Axel raised his own right arm and grasped that crutch with his left hand to hold it steady. He twisted the crutch pad a half turn.

Eisele felt a chill shoot through him as Axel unsheathed a ten-inch stiletto-like pointed blade from the crutch tube. The blade now protruded from Axel’s grip, emerging from between his index and middle finger.

“What are you doing?” Eisele asked. Then, with his voice rising, “Axel?What are you doing?”

Axel ignored him while he plunged the blade into Rankin’sexposed ear and pushed it deep into his brain, nearly to the crutch pad itself. Eisele was stunned. Even Double-A stepped back and gasped as Rankin’s body erupted with spasmic jerks, until it stopped moving.

Axel withdrew the blade and wiped it clean on Rankin’s blanket, then slid it back into the crutch tube. He said to Double-A, “Get the guys to clear this cot. We might need it later.”

Then, without another word, Axel glided out of the room through the open doorway. He didn’t look back.

Stunned and horrified, Eisele glared at Double-A for confirmation of what he’d just witnessed. He couldn’t speak.

“Time for your medication,” she said while plunging a syringe needle into an open bottle of morphine.

Chapter Ten

The neighborhood wasknown as “the Avenues” in Cheyenne, a historic district established in the 1920s and largely made up of single-family brick bungalow houses, as well as a few homes that had been turned into small one- or two-person office locations. Tall mature cottonwoods bordered the avenues on both sides of the streets and the gutters were choked with dried yellow leaves. When the wind blew, which was often in Cheyenne, the fall leaves fluttered down like a golden snowstorm.

Dead leaves swirled in the wind in such volume around Geronimo Jones’s Suburban that they obscured his vision for a moment and he nearly drove by the address they were seeking.

“There it is,” Nate said, jabbing his finger at a small wooden hand-painted sign in the yard of a bungalow that read:

Cheryl Tuck-Smith

Attorney-at-Law

314 N. Reed Ave.

Geronimo slowed down and parked against the curb in front of the law office. The streets were from another era and were so narrow that the big Suburban blocked nearly half of it.

“This thing seems a little out of place in the big city,” Geronimo said to Nate as he patted the dashboard of his armored vehicle.

“It seems out of place everywhere,” Nate said.

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