pilot lowered the big door on the hangar and locked it, loaded the two duffel bags in the rear of the plane, then asked her to sit in the back, Rankin in front beside him. “Got to balance our weight,” he explained. Either he was really good at faking it, or he suffered from chronic good humor.
Or, heck, he loved to fly this plane and was brimming with excitement.
And she was being a crank.
So she smiled at him before she crawled over the front seat and buckled herself in, per instructions.
“This is a Cessna Skyhawk,” Bill told her. “One of the safest planes you could fly in.” He had been teaching lessons for something like the past thirty years in this and an earlier model of the Skyhawk, he added, while also offering charter flights.
She held on tight to the seat belt with one hand and the seat itself with the other as he taxied down the runway and the plane lifted into the air. He banked over Republic so she could get a good look at it, he told her over his shoulder.
Despite her queasiness, Maddy did gaze through the window at the town. People had been good to her here. It wasn’t their fault she’d felt incredibly isolated. Living under an assumed name, she could never be honest with anyone about who she was or what life she’d actually lived. That meant being friendly without ever really making a friend. Still...as time passed, she’d felt safe.
Stepping into that courtroom, on the other hand, would be the equivalent of confronting a wounded grizzly.
“You okay back there?” Rankin swiveled in his seat beside the pilot and still had to raise his voice to be heard over the engine noise.
She summoned another smile. “I’m good.” And...maybe it was even true, because as the plane leveled off, her anxiety lowered. If she didn’t look out the window, she could pretend she was on a bus, say. That worked.
As a result she spent the first half hour brooding about the upcoming trial—and then the gap of time between the two trials. Rankin hadn’t said anything about those weeks, except that she wouldn’t be returning to Republic. Of course, she also couldn’t resume her real life until both the hit man and the Superior Court judge who’d hired him had been convicted.
First thing to face was being “prepared” by the prosecutors. As if she hadn’t prepped her share of witnesses for trial. Of course, her perspective as a defense attorney wasn’t quite the same.
The buzz of the engine at last lulled her into letting go of the troubles that still lay ahead. The pilot yelled over his shoulder to tell her they were flying over the Okanogan National Forest, and would shortly cross the Pasayten Wilderness. She vaguely knew that it took in a swath of the drier eastern side of the Cascade Mountain range. Now she did look out the small window, seeing that sagebrush and juniper hills had been replaced with what she thought were lodgepole and ponderosa pine forest.
She gaped when she set eyes on the first pointy, white-topped mountains ahead.
Bill called out the names as they neared: Mount Carru, Blackcap Peak, Robinson Mountain. Maddy pressed her nose to the small window to see better. She was astonished by the amount of snow, given that this was July. Her awe grew as the snowcapped peaks became increasingly jagged, gleaming white in the sunlight. She could just make out deep cuts clothed in dark green between mountains. A long body of water had to be Ross Lake behind its dam. They flew low enough she could see the oddly opaque turquoise color of the water.
She flattened a hand on the cold window and stared in fascination. Ahead lay a range of mountains that made her think of a shark’s teeth. And yes, in the distance was Mount Baker, a conical volcano like Mount Rainier, and Glacier, another volcano. How could she have grown up as close as Seattle and never visited these wonders? Even Washington’s most famous volcano, Mount Rainier, seemed mostly unreal, floating in sight of Seattle. She’d never once taken a sunny summer day to drive up to Paradise and see the avalanche lilies in bloom.
She glanced at the marshal to see that he was watching her and smiling.
“This really is something, isn’t it?”
“Yes!” It occurred to her belatedly that he might genuinely have been trying to give her a treat.
Oh, and the skinny lake below was called Diablo, according to the pilot, formed by a dam on the Skagit River. It, too, was that startling turquoise color. Over his shoulder, the pilot told her the coloration was the result of the powder from boulders that glaciers ground down. Ultimately, the glacial “flour” washed down the many creeks into the lakes.
They went right over the top of a mountain that was impressive enough, if not jagged like the ones ahead. Those made up the Picket Range, he told her, mountains that had names like Terror, Fury and Challenger, and for a good reason, from the looks of them. The deep valleys between had precipitous drops from the heights, trees clinging to the rocky walls. It was a wilderness that looked as forbidding as the Himalayas or the dense Amazon jungle.
Trying to drink in the beauty not so far below them, Maddy heard the murmur of the two men’s voices but didn’t try to make out what they were saying. She couldn’t seem to tear her eyes off those particularly daunting peaks ahead.
A sudden hard bang made the whole airplane shudder. Fear electrified her nerve endings. It felt like a huge rock had struck them, but that couldn’t be what had happened.
Clenching her seat belt and the edge of the seat, Maddy looked at the pilot, hoping to be reassured. In her oblique view, he radiated tension. But it wasn’t he who riveted her horrified gaze. No, she fixated on the propeller as its blurring speed slowed, slowed...until it quit spinning altogether.
Before that moment of sudden silence, Maddy had never actually heard the thunder of her heartbeat before.
WILL GANNON HAD reached the summit a good ten minutes before, and still he turned in a slow circle to take in the most incredible panorama he’d ever seen. The Picket Range felt close enough to touch and menacing at the same time. One ice-and glacier-crusted spire after another. Mount Baker beyond, and was that a glimpse of Mount Shuksan? Mount Challenger to the north, Eldorado and Mount Logan to the southeast. Rocky ridges, plunging chasms, a sky so blue it hurt his eyes. And quiet. Most of all, he drank in the quiet and the solitude.
He’d chosen Elephant Butte to climb not because it was the best known of North Cascade peaks, or a mountaineering challenge, but rather because most climbers bypassed it. Even on a weekend like this, he could be alone. Later in the summer he might try to find someone who’d like to join him tackling a couple of the more impressive mountains, the ones he’d be foolish to climb alone, but right now what he needed was to pull himself together. After being severely wounded in an ambush in Afghanistan, he’d been shipped back to the States. Being a stubborn bastard, he’d been able to rehab physically. The crap he felt, that was something else. But this...this was what he’d needed. Peace and quiet. The vast beauty of nature.
He shook himself and returned to his pack, where he dug out the makings for the simplest of lunches: peanuts, beef jerky and a candy bar, all washed down with treated water. As pure as the sparkling streams looked and tasted, the water wasn’t safe to drink without being purified.
He let his mind empty as the sun warmed his up-turned face. Nights when he had trouble sleeping he could remember this. Replace ugly memories of gushing blood, missing arms or legs, sharp pieces of metal thrust
