Wild Country

Chapter Twenty-Three

Slaughter nearly bought himself a piece of Oregon after accelerating the Ford with the woman slumped in the seat beside him. Suspension systems simply could not cope with these ruts at respectable speed, and Slaughter's long legs got tangled as he bounced against the doorframe on his way out the open door. Slaughter hit on his stomach, sliding and rolling almost to the edge of the precipice. He got a vague impression of the car's underside, rising near him as the front wheels pitched over the grassy edge.

He got up cursing his ruined shirt and spitting weed seed, and hobbled to the verge in time to see the Ford rise into view twenty meters below as it began its second roll, now moving faster on the slick dry grasses, finally beginning multiple flips, shedding small parts in midair. Even after he could no longer see it. Slaughter listened to its progress with satisfaction. It took a good fifteen seconds before the sound of the last impact died away.

Moments later, with Sorel in the Chevy, he craned his neck to see his handiwork. "Can't even see it for-the brush," he said, and spat again. "Good thing our duds are in the trunk; I purely trashed a good shirt — and damn near my hide in the bargain."

"With the bonus I have in mind, you can buy many shirts," said Sorel, turning the Chevy's mapfiche toward himself. "Now get some sleep. We have a long drive over back roads before we reach the old interstate highway. You can take your turn then." Not once, then or later, did Felix Sorel show the slightest remorse over Marianne Placidas. She had been a tool cheaply bought and cheaply expended.

Despite his bruises. Slaughter exulted in a job well done. Before racking the seat back, he saw the deep ravine once more from a turn near the blacktop road. He could see no sign of the Ford. From their high vantage point, it was impossible to see the slight depression where the car had ended its first roll, where its lone occupant had tumbled from the open door into high grass before the car continued its headlong plunge.

Ten minutes later, Slaughter was enjoying the sleep of the innocent and Sorel was figuring their timetable to Portland. Several kilometers behind them a Toyota Scrambler howled up Dead Indian Road, driven with the happy abandon of a maniac or of a man who knew every pothole in the road between Ashland and the high mountain lakes.

Keith Ames had the Toyota's top down to savor all the glory of a fall day and scanned the mountainside above to avoid being surprised by a car coming his way. Blasting along at this pace, he might have passed Sorel eventually, had he not spotted movements in the tall grass high on a ravine, above and to his left. It was some distance from the main road, but when snow began to dust the flanks of Grizzly Peak nearby, Ames would be hunting blacktail in these parts. He slowed the roadster, expecting to see antlers emerge against the sky. What he saw made him forget venison. Like many ex-racing drivers, Ames kept a remarkable memory for the features of roads he flogged. He knew that a path that was almost an access road fed into the blacktop a couple of turns above. "Why the hell," he asked himself as he flicked the gear lever and surged the Toyota forward, "would a woman be crawling up that ravine?"

He would not have much of the answer for some time. He would, however, spend his next twenty minutes driving as he had not driven since dueling a prototype tree harvester against a similar machine driven by a killer, years before. He saw as he scooped the woman into his arms that she was delirious and near death. He buckled her in, trying not to look at the ruined face, hit the blacktop with a squall of rubber, and ignored his usual caution when driving with a passenger because this one was bleeding all over herself and might not live even if he broke all records down Dead Indian Road.

He broke the records, skirting Ashland en route to the city hospital, hanging his inside front wheel in thin air over the verge at every turn because, with its stiffened suspension, the Toyota had enough chassis lean in one-gee sideloads to keep that wheel aloft. On one long straight, he used his radiophone for the emergency freq and had time, before wailing the Toyota through the next bend, to tell them the bare essentials. Still, Marianne Placidas was more dead than alive as Ames burst into the emergency entrance with his gory burden, shouting for his friend, surgeon Dominic Ewald.