“All misses,” Purdy said. “He’s behind those trees now.”
“You take left. I’ll take right. He moves, kill him.”
“Roger that.”
I was already running; I went down the trail and out into the burn, then cut into the wet high grass and brush growing on the knoll. The rain picked up, giving me more sound cover as I lifted the shotgun and slowed.
“Send one, Purdy,” Butler said. “See if it spooks him out.”
I angled slightly to my right, crouched, and crept around the top of the knoll. The bigger gun went off a good four hundred yards to my left.
“Gonna move,” Butler said. “Get a better angle on him.”
I heard him in the earbud and also with my free ear. I took three quick steps and saw him below me, no more than thirty yards. Butler was facing away from me, lying prone behind a scoped AR rifle at the edge of a drop-off above the river bottom.
When he got to his feet and turned, I had the shotgun pointed at his head.
“Drop the gun or I’ll make your face look like Vincente’s,” I said.
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Butler stared at me in disbelief, then set his rifle down.
“The pistol too,” I said. “Remove it with your thumb and index finger. Slow.”
He straightened up and did as I asked, tossing the pistol.
“Hands behind your head and move away from the weapons, Mr. Butler,” I said, gesturing to his right with the shotgun.
Again, he complied, walking six feet to his left, his eyes never leaving mine. “How do you know my name?”
“I listen well. But it doesn’t matter. M sent you and your men to kill us.”
“I was against it, but he’s sick of you.”
“Is he, now?” I said. “Who is he, anyway? M? And what exactly is Maestro?”
Butler almost smiled. “That’s the beauty and brilliance of this movement. No one at my level of Maestro operations knows who he is. No one at my level wants to know.”
Before I could reply, the big gun downriver fired. The shotgun was blown from my hands.
Butler started to lunge for his weapons, but I was already going for my pistol on my right hip. But it was on the other hip!
I came up with the bear spray instead.
Rather than risk a cloud of pepper gas to the face, Butler spun and leaped over the drop-off. He disappeared before I could get the pistol out of the holster on my left hip.
I ran forward and saw he’d dropped a few yards, landed on his feet, and was now sprinting and weaving pell-mell down the mountainside away from me, heading northeast toward a ravine and the river a few hundred yards beyond it.
I thought about shooting at him but realized it would have been a Hail Mary at best with a pistol. And that sniper was still to my left somewhere, which caused me to go down on my belly behind some rocks. I watched Butler get farther and farther away from me, listened to him grunt and gasp with effort in my earbud.
“Bug out, Purdy,” he said. “Repeat, bug out.”
“I’m gone, Cap,” Purdy said.
I cringed, expecting one last shot from her in my direction. But none came and Butler put even more ground between us, still running at the same angle toward that cut in the mountainside.
And then I saw why through my binoculars. Beyond the ravine several hundred yards and pulled up on the far bank of the river, there was a blue raft just like ours, probably Durango’s. Butler was headed straight for it.
He was a solid two hundred and fifty yards from me when he disappeared over and into the draw. With no idea how deep or how brushy the ravine might have been, I kept my focus on the far side of it in direct line with the river and the raft.
Twenty seconds went by and then, to my shock, I saw M’s man sprinting up the other side of the draw, moving even faster than he’d gone down into it.
He got halfway up and twisted to look over his left shoulder, not back and up at me but down into the ravine.
I could see terror weave through every inch of him.
My own emotions shifted from puzzlement to horror when a massive silver-backed bear charged up out of the draw.
Butler ran even harder.
But the big male grizzly made up the ground between them with blinding speed. He lunged at Butler’s back and knocked him to his knees.
M’s man tried to scramble away, but the bear was on him now, cuffing him about the back and neck with his front paws and claws.
Even from that distance, even through the rain and the wind, I could hear Butler screaming as the bear flipped him over and went for his stomach.
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