The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(133)

“What?” the man said.

. . . 144, 233, 377 . . .

“Stand up straight,” Madison said.

. . . 610, 987, 1597 . . .

“What?”

Cameron shifted, and Madison squeezed the trigger. G-64. Her shot slammed into him and almost spun him out of the man’s grasp, blood spreading on his front. Cameron’s limp body was too heavy to hold, and he slid to the ground.

“He’s no good to you anymore,” Madison said. “He’ll die on the plane.”

Her Glock against his revolver now: both of them dead or both of them alive.

“You’re insane,” the man said, glancing at Cameron facedown on the ground and the blood pooling on the dirt.

Andrews crashed through the undergrowth, trying to get a clear shot, but the plane’s wing was in the way. Under the rumble of its engine, the rotors of the county chopper sliced the air, and sirens wailed somewhere down in the valley, climbing from Maple Falls toward Silver Lake.

Madison wanted it over, and she didn’t care about who blinked first.

“Leave. Now,” she said, counting in her mind how many rounds she’d fired and how many she had left.

Go and let me see to the dying and the dead.

The man held her in his pale gaze and knew she would manage to get out one fatal shot even if he shot first.

“Go,” she said.

The man disappeared inside the plane, and it was rolling before the door was shut, picking up speed as fast as the engine would allow, then lifting up and off the runway and into the purple sky. Her Glock stayed on it until the wheels left the ground.

“Check on Conway—he might have a backup.” She pointed behind her as Andrews ran across the field.

Madison dropped to her knees by Cameron’s side and turned him over, hands awkward and not knowing where to touch. She took off his blindfold and cut off the cuffs with her knife. Red was all over the lower right side of his chest, and his eyes were closed. Liver, kidneys, intestines. G-64 was the shooting target with the illustrated human organs and a scoring system for hitting the most vital: Madison had aimed to score 0.

She pulled up his shirt tails and gently lifted the fabric off the skin. The tear in his side was three inches long and weeping, but her bullet had glanced off him without entering his body.

She heard Andrews opening the pickup’s door, and a second later the headlights came on; he spoke on his radio, a soft and steady stream of words she couldn’t catch.

Madison took off her green T-shirt and pressed it as a thick wad on the wound; she lifted Cameron’s hand and laid it against it. His eyes came open.

“Keep some pressure on it,” she said.

“Conway,” he replied.

She nodded and stood up. In the beams of the headlights the bodies of the guards lay where they had fallen. Conway had turned himself over; his breathing was ragged, but his eyes were clear.

“I’ve taken off him his main, a backup, a knife, and three filled syringes and needles. There’s more in the truck,” Andrews said, and he gave Madison a look. If you want to talk to him, use short words and speak them quickly.

Conway was wheezing; the shot in the back had done a lot of damage.

His eyes found her against the sky, and he coughed.

“Is Jerome McMullen your client?” Madison said.

His lip curled up. He would gladly row himself into hell rather than tell her.

Madison got close to him. “You failed; let that be what you take with you from this field.”

Conway died between breaths, and his eyes didn’t look any different.

The county chopper landed in a spray of dry grass; the sirens were almost there.

Madison knelt next to Cameron and took out her cell. He was still conscious. She dialed.

“Hello,” Nathan Quinn said.

“We found him,” she said.

“You have him?”

“I have him,” she replied, and she passed the cell to Cameron.


The entire field was a crime scene, and there were statements to give, weapons to surrender, and evidence to collect, both there and at the cabin.

John Cameron was airlifted to Bellingham. To Madison’s untrained eye he looked pale and drugged up: she gave the medics Conway’s syringes to test to find out what he’d been given. That concerned her more than the chunk of metal that she had shot at his chest.

Deputy Andrews knew everybody on the ground and introduced Madison to all of them, including some civilian volunteers who had turned up to help.

Madison felt numb: she gave a clear and efficient statement, matched by Andrews word for word, but as the adrenaline dropped to nothing, she found herself nearly incapable of speech. One of the bodyguards had died of two gunshot wounds to the chest; Madison had fired those shots. She stood by the dead man as the medics did their job; it felt right that she should know his face. She had never killed a person before.