second one appeared. The climber grabbed him by the hair and pulled him out and rode him, shoving him toward a flat piece of granite embedded in the earth. Sarah Jean was running hard, going for the back of the van, and she was close enough to hear the crunch of bone as the last Demon’s face smashed into the stone.
The climber’s shirt was torn along a diagonal that the knife had traveled, and blood was spreading from a cut. He spun, looked back at the three on the ground.
No, Sarah Jean saw. Two on the ground. One was rising to his knees, coming up with a pistol in one hand, a black revolver that he brought up at the end of his arm, pointing it at the climber.
Sarah Jean couldn’t say exactly what happened next. At least ten or twelve feet separated the two men. Three good strides. Up came the gun, the climber spun and looked down the barrel. And then…
… then the climber exploded into some wild fast-forward version of movements he had made on the rock, but a thousand times faster now, body twisting, arms and legs shooting out, a water-bug skitter that closed the distance before the biker could react.
All Sarah Jean knew for sure was that on one side of a heartbeat the climber was looking up the barrel of the gun, and before her heart could thump he had the gun and the biker was down on the ground, the climber pinning him with a knee against his back while mashing his face into the dirt.
That was with his left hand. His right hand held the pistol. He straightened his arm and thumbed back the hammer as he held the end of the barrel against the biker’s head.
Sarah Jean screamed, “NO!”
Although the members of Bravo One Nine were broadly trained, each also had an individual specialty. Arielle was an expert in computers and electronics. Alex Mendonza was a master of vehicles: cars, planes, boats—he could fix them and he could drive them. Winston Stickney knew explosives and demolition.
Ray Favor was a killer.
Up-close kind of killing, swift and vicious and personal. To an outsider this might have seemed a trivial ability, but it was prized in fieldwork, and few did it really well. Even trained warriors often feel an internal blink of resistance when the killing takes place within the zone of body heat.
Not Favor. He killed with the ease of flipping a light switch.
Sarah Jean didn’t know any of this. But as she watched the climber straighten his right arm and cock the revolver, she knew that he was about to put a bullet in the biker’s brain, no problem. And she knew that she didn’t want to see it.
Her “NO!” stopped him.
He paused, turned his face toward her. She could see him clearly in the campfire light. His eyes were hard, so terrible that she almost couldn’t look at them, but she forced herself to do it, make that connection.
She said, “Don’t, mister. Please.”
He stared at her. His face softened a little. Just enough. He lifted the pistol, carefully eased the hammer down.
Sarah Jean ran to the van to put her arms around her friend.
The wound was superficial. Favor knew it as he sat on a table in the emergency room at South Lake Tahoe. He might need some stitches along the pectoral, where the blade had sliced in about an eighth of an inch deep, but otherwise the wound was hardly more than a deep scratch.
The ER physician was an attractive Pakistani woman about thirty years old. She cut away his T-shirt and revealed a road map of scars. Three were several inches in length, one bisected by the fresh cut. None were in the usual places for a surgical incision. She also found a small circular indentation at the abdomen, with a matching perforation in his back. They were the scars from a through-and-through bullet wound.
“You’ve been making a habit of this,” she said.
“Not lately.”
She swabbed the cut.
“And how are you feeling?” she said.
Favor smiled. “Pretty damn great,” he said.
Harvest Day
–6
Five
About twenty-four hours after Ronnie left for Manila, about the time that he should be reaching Manila, Lorna Valencia was seated at her kitchen table. A woman from the village came to her door and entered the house without knocking. Erlinda was her name. They had known each other since childhood.
“You’re awake early,” Erlinda said.
“I can’t sleep.”
“You have a problem.”
Of course, everyone was aware that Marivic had disappeared and that