The Fool's Run

hillside, they chose the cover, but the leaves underfoot were giving them fits.
    I beeped LuEllen and said, “Two. Two.” She returned with, “Two.” A few minutes later she beeped back and said, “Blonde.” I returned the call. The Blonde code meant Maggie was on the way in, alone, as far as LuEllen could tell. I looked at my watch. Two minutes since I spotted the first movement. I began scanning the woods behind the two men I had already spotted, looking for a backup. LuEllen should be running down the hill. . . .
    The shooters were only sporadically visible as they moved closer, about fifteen feet apart. Then one of them lifted a handset from his belt and listened. I clicked around the channels on my CB, but there was nothing. Their sets were more sophisticated than ours and probably used dedicated channels.
    Their conversation went on through several exchanges. It meant, I hoped, that Maggie had seen LuEllen running across the hill and believed we were at the bottom of the road. The man with the handset hung it back on his belt, said a few words to the other, and they moved up, a little quicker now. They were only fifty yards away, coming up to the ravine. They stopped on the lip, looked down at the creek, talked for a moment, then turned uphill.
    As they got closer, I eased the M16 into position over a low tangle of vines and brought it to bear on the bridge. My heart was thumping wildly, and it was suddenly hard to breathe.
    The first one stopped below the bridge, where I could see only his head, and waited for the second one to come up. When he arrived, they talked for a second, and I was afraid they would decide to cross the bridge one at a time, providing cover for each other. Then they both scrambled up on the road, crouching, their heads turned down toward the cabin. The big guy dangled an Uzi from his right hand. Ratface was two steps behind him, carrying a police shotgun with a pistol grip below the stock. With my cover, the Uzi was more dangerous, so I decided to take the big guy first. Once on the road, they moved fast. Staying low, they scuttled onto the bridge, using the low railing as concealment from the cabin.
    I let the big one get two-thirds of the way across the bridge, held the M16 at waist height, and when he was about to intersect the sight, I pulled the trigger. An M16 doesn’t roar so much as clatter; it clattered in my face, and the first squirt pitched the big guy over. I tracked back to where Ratface had frozen for a split second, and I was almost there when he simply leaped off the bridge, head first.
    The move was so startling that I half stood and instinctively dumped the rest of the clip under the bridge, punched out the used clip, and fed in a new one. There was no thrashing around in the brush below the bridge, and I said, “Shit,” and started sliding to my right toward the road.
    The beeper on my radio went off. I said, “What?” and she said, “Maggie’s out of the car and heard the shots. She’s just standing there.”
    “Well, we got problems,” I said. “It’s the right guys, but one of them jumped off the bridge and he’s on the loose. He may be hurt. It was a hell of a fall, and I sprayed the place down.”
    “I’m coming down,” she said.
    “You keep an eye on Maggie,” I said.
    “Fuck that.”
    I tossed the radio on top of the backpack and crawled along the upper edge of the road until I was thirty yards from the ravine and around a shallow curve. There was no sign of Ratface. If he was uninjured and sat tight, he would be almost impossible to get at. On the other hand, he might be unconscious under the bridge, helpless from the fall. Either way, he might not expect me to be on his side of the road. I moved up the road, ran across, then dropped flat on a game trail. Nothing. Moving slowly, slowly, I turned back toward the ravine. Still nothing. I stopped, waited, moved up, stopped.
    I was fifteen yards from the bridge when Maggie gave him away. They had radios, handsets, and his had been clipped to his belt. She beeped him. I heard the beep, high and electronic, as distinct in the woods as a raven call would be in a computer lab. It came from the near bank of the ravine, over the lip. Was he still with the radio, or had he dumped it? There was no second beep, and I crouched, watching, ears straining.
    LuEllen broke the impasse when she came down the hill over my old position. She touched a tree, or stepped on some brush, and Ratface heard it and