On the Road Again -- Section 02 ... sort of

[This isn't really the part that comes next in the story--in fact this is a few chapters on, I expect--but it was the next thing that showed up for me to write. It's what I wanted to write next, I guess, which isn't a bad reason to write something. If it's exciting to me, it's more likely to be exciting to my readers.

[Anyway, imagine that Lance has done some snooping, has been to the Long Road and back, has found out who Annabel Fox is looking for, and has followed her up into the mountains around our Rocky Mountain city (somewhere in Colorado, a major metropolis, but not Denver--it's a made-up city), and has tracked her to the slope just above the cabins of the Pine Dogs.]

    “Annabel,” I whispered, guessing that the shadow in the dark was her. Apparently I had guessed right, because she spun around in her crouch, her face catching the light from the moon that was still hanging onto the tops of the mountains, and in the heartbeats after I learned a pair of new things, both jarring like a blow to the ear.
    The first was that Annabel Fox was much better looking than her father. More beautiful than her mother, even, and I’d always admired Maureen--one of those women who make accidental outfits like sweats look like she meant every bit of them. Of course, as I was seeing his daughter for the first time since his death, I’m sure I was picking up more than a little on John’s paternal instincts banging around inside my head, but I had been single and alone long enough to recognize a good jolt of female appeal when I saw it. Her hair was dark--probably just the night--and her face was pale--though everything was pale in the moonlight--but whatever the special effects, the sight of her hit me just below my sternum and my breath went away. For that moment it didn’t matter that I was old enough to be her father, and then an instant later I reminded myself that it did matter (which shook my thoughts out of their rut), and then I learned the other disturbing thing.
    No matter how often I face the end of a loaded handgun, it is always a new experience.
    “I’m a friend,” I said, slowly and calmly, my hands up, palms out. My adrenaline had been solidly pumping since I started sneaking around the Pine Dogs’ compound, but the way the gun was shaking in her hand, facing Annabel gave me a fresh jolt that made my knees shake as I crouched there. “I don’t want to surprise you, but I’m about to kneel down now so that I don’t fall over, startle you, and get shot.”
    “Who are you?” she asked, a whisper that the wind almost covered up as it pushed through the pine branches around us.
    “Dropping to my knees now,” I whispered back, still valiantly hanging onto my shaky crouch. “Don’t shoot...and...there.” I eased down into some strange fake-Japanese bow of surrender. “Like I said, I’m a friend. Lance Graywall. I did work for your mom and dad--all the plants and things around your funeral home. I run a greenhouse on the East side of town called Every Living Thing. It’s not much, but,” I shrugged, “it keeps me eating. Gas in the car. Stuff like that.” Why was I telling her about my greenhouse? Details about life are trustworthy, I decided, though I could have been lying and how was she to know? “Point is, I’m here to help you.”
    “You want to kill these guys, too?” she asked, and her face made me want to cry. She was angry--rage was painted across her face in broad strokes from a dark brush--but she was also terrified, the deep kind of fear that crawls into your heart and dies there, and rots, and never leaves. I knew that fear.
    “Not that kind of help. You don’t want to kill these idiots.”
    Her grip on the gun tightened. “Yes, I do.”
    I wrinkled my nose. “Nah. You don’t, not really, but don’t misunderstand. I’m not criticizing here. You fully intend to go after the people who killed your parents, and I can respect that. You’ve got the heart of a fighter. Props to you.”
    She blinked in the moonlight, dry lids over damp eyes. “You’re an idiot,” she said.
    I leaned back. “That’s a rather abrupt judgment, don’t you think?”
    “I’m not a fighter. I just have to do this.” Someone in the cabin behind her laughed, a loud, bragging sound, and Annabel started to turn away.
    “Fine,” I said, grabbing her attention back with my voice. “So you’re not a fighter. You’re just smart. You see a threat and you know that you need to get rid of it, or you think the police won’t get them so it’s up to you, or whatever it is, this is what you feel you have to do. Justice prevails, God speed the right, and that is probably all true, but I’m not here to help you kill them.”
    “Then go away.”
    “I can’t.”
    “Why not?”
    “I promised your father.”
    I could hear John talking at me, that pressure somewhere in the back of my frontal lobe that is a sure sign that the riding dead are upset. I was probably doing this all wrong, at least from the perspective of Annabel’s loving father, but there are some things I figure you just can’t do by committee, and right then I decided that talking a homicidal teen down off a mountain was definitely not group work.
    Annabel’s mouth was tight. “They killed my parents.”
    I nodded. “I saw it.”
    She was shaking her head. “No, they didn’t just kill them. They tore them apart. I couldn’t tell which parts were my parents and which were already corpses and--” She wasn’t seeing me anymore, and the mountain around us was gone, too, I knew. She was in the grip of images that she’d be sharing with her therapist for years to come and we didn’t have time for her to be there just then. Of course, doing something dramatic like a firm slap was out of the question, seeing how that would likely get me shot. I toyed with that idea for a moment longer even so, just because I’d always wondered how well a slap would actually work, but my instinct for self-preservation finally pushed that aside. (Besides, she was just a pair of years older than my daughter, and I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to hit her.)
    I decided to try something a little less extreme. “Hey, babe,” I said.
    Her eyes snapped into focus and she glared at me.
    “I know,” I went on, “you’re not my babe in any sense of the word, but I needed your attention. I don’t have the right answers for you right now. In fact, I admit that part of me would be delighted to head in there with you and grind those pathetic bits of rot into rot paste.” Annabel looked puzzled, and I admit, I was confused by what I was saying, too, but momentum was the key in a situation like this; not what you say so much as the tone of voice. “Maybe we’d get one, or two, or five, but we wouldn’t get any more than that, and then the rest would be all over us like a pack of wild dogs.” I didn’t try explaining how exactly like a pack of wild dogs they would be. “So even if I can’t convince you to drop this all together, at least don’t do it now. Come back with me, we’ll talk about it, and then do it smart. There’s no rush in all this. Take the time to do revenge right, and then have the best revenge of all: outlive the sons of bitches.” I cringed a little at my choice of words, knowing Gretchen would have been after me for it, but I figured it was a technical description more than an actual cuss word, so I was okay.
    Annabel was staring at me and the gun had sagged down so it wasn’t aimed so directly at my chest anymore, which I took as a good sign. Also, the pressure from John on the inside of my brain was gone, so I suppose I must have done something right. When I thought about what I’d said, I realized that I had just tacitly agreed that his daughter should commit premeditated murder, but I was guessing that John understood what kind of extreme circumstance I was in and was waiting for his daughter’s answer.
    “You’ll help me kill them later?” she finally asked.
    I shook my head. “I can’t promise that. I have...issues with killing.”
    Her gun was back up. “But you said you wanted them dead.”
    “Believe me, I do.” As I said it, I realized just how powerfully that was true. It wasn’t just  John’s anger at his own murder, or the other voice I’d locked up in my soul, the dark voice I’d carried with me out of the dark road the way an alcoholic hides away a bottle, just in case--it was more. It was anger at myself, at what I had been and what I still was, and the panic that I might become all that again, become like these idiot children in the mountains, obsessed with their rights to power and land and dominance, absurd, childish rights to rule over a kingdom made up of bones and blood and misery. They were hungering after a food that could only make them hungrier still and I wanted to feed them with their own violence until they chocked on it, gagged on it, and vomited up the lives of every soul that they’d taken in their meaningless, mindless war. They looked so small to me, rabbits in their cabin cage, laughing, probably drunk, and I could come to them like an angel out of Hell, and I could make their every wish for violence come true.
    I blinked twice, hard, and rubbed at my face. “I want them dead, Annabel, but that’s one cup you can’t un-drink. Leave it for another day. For now, let’s get off this mountain and back into daylight, and then we can think it through. If you decide to come back, I’ll make sure you come back prepared. I promise you that much.”
    I looked her in the eyes when I said it, and I can’t imagine what she saw--a bit of her father peaking out, maybe?--but whatever it was, it was just enough. The gun aimed down at the ground and brittle edge of ice went out of her posture. She leaned against the rough trunk next to her and let out a long, rough breath.
    “Fine,” she said. “Let’s go.”
    I felt relief for a moment, and then that moment was gone. Really gone. I realized I wasn’t feeling the wind in my face anymore. My hair was caught in the breeze, licking at the edges of my face, as the air rushed past us, down the mountain slope.
    Toward the cabin of the Pine Dogs.
    I lurched up to my feet, scratching my face on the low pine branches and not caring, grabbing Annabel’s arm and pulling her up after me.
    “Run.”
    “Why?”
    “Just do it. Up we go.”
    “Did something happen?” She was pulling at me, looking back down toward the cabins of her parents’ killers.
    “It’s about to,” I said. “Please hurry.”
    “What is going on?” she demanded, which, I suppose, was as good a time as any for the howling to start.