Chapter 102 - The Blood on the Granite
The mist rising off the weir smelled of sulfur and freezing river silt, thick enough to taste. Vance’s arm pinned me behind the granite buttress as stone dust rained over our collars. Up on the ridge, the rifle cracked again—a brutal, hollow report that slapped against the limestone cliffs and tore through the wet hemlocks.
"Stay down!" Vance hissed, his hand hard against the back of my coat. He shifted his weight, pulling his sidearm from the shoulder holster beneath his fleece jacket. "She isn’t firing wildly. She’s got a spotter up there."
"Julian!" I gasped, coughing through the grit.
Ten feet away, hanging over the roaring drop where the river churned white and furious into the intake grates, Julian’s knuckles had turned the color of lard. His trench coat flapped around his waist like a broken wing. The brass key lay on the slick shelf of stone mere inches from his left hand, glinting under the pale light of the sky like a dropped coin.
"Katherine..." Julian’s voice was barely a croak over the roar of the water. "I can't... my shoulder..."
Another bullet struck the iron cable above him. The metallic twang hummed through the fog, sending a shower of rust into his eyes. Julian cried out, his left hand losing its grip. His body swung violently outward, suspended only by his right arm hooked over the iced steel cable.
"Melissa!" I screamed toward the timber, my voice scraping raw against my throat. "Stop! You’ll kill him!"
A laugh drifted down from the pines—high, breathless, and frayed at the edges with a manic cadence I recognized all too well. It was the same sound she had made on Easter morning when she stood on my porch with an overturned plate of deviled eggs and mud-caked shoes, daring me to challenge her boys.
"Let him drop, Katherine!" she shrilled. "He’s a scavenger! He was always a parasite at Daddy’s table, just like you! Tell him where the Montreal papers are, or I swear to God I’ll put a round through his neck!"
Through the branches fifty yards uphill, the mist parted for a fraction of a second. I didn’t just see Melissa in a stolen down jacket; standing behind her, braced against the trunk of a dead white birch with an illuminated spotting scope, was Bradley Cole—the disgraced former county administrator whose signature had authorized every fraudulent title transfer in Oak Ridge for twenty years.
He hadn’t run across the border. He had pulled her out of the holding cell before the marshals ever reached the turnpike.
"Vance," I whispered, my fingernails digging into the wet wool of his sleeve. "It’s Bradley. He’s the one directing the fire."
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"I know," Vance muttered, his jaw set like an anvil. He reached down and snatched a fist-sized river rock from between his boots. "When I draw his glass, you get that key and pull the old man up. You have three seconds before she cycles the bolt. If you hesitate, Katherine, we all go into that gorge."
Before I could answer, Vance stood, fired two rapid double-taps into the birch canopy, and launched himself across the open clearing toward the rusted winch housing.
