Chapter 15
Mac's heart drummed a staccato rhythm in his chest, but he made himself to appear calm. His first concern was for Puck. The dog had been led away from him, and when he was forced into the passenger seat of a sedan, Puck wasn't there. Mac's hands were not tied; evidently it was assumed that his blindness was enough to keep him contained in the car. Mac considered hopping out when the car was paused for a stoplight, but he wanted to gain more information and hopefully rescue Puck, so he stayed where he was.
"What's this about?" he demanded angrily of the driver of the car, who didn't answer. Instead the metallic muzzle of a .45 touched the back of his head behind his left ear.
"I'm tryna help you guys," he said angrily.
This time a man in the back seat whose voice Mac didn't recognize but who obviously held the pistol replied sarcastically, "by calling the Phoenix Foundation."
Mac's hands, flat on the vinyl seat beside him, bracing himself as the car swung around turns in the road, grew suddenly cold. He wondered how they had known the number he dialed. He thought of Pete and pressed his lips together. Calling was a mistake, he realized. They had followed and waited. He thought with grim amusement about the lady giving the "over there" directions and if several thugs watching, waiting like circling sharks for him to do exactly what he did. Anger at himself flared up inside him, and an overwhelming mixture of frustration and grief. If he could see, he would never have held a tail that long. He could shake them off, double back, duck into doorways and know for sure that he was clean. His jaw clenched.
Then he calmed himself. Beating himself up would do no good. It wouldn't change his situation at all, and might prevent him making the most of it later on if a situation presented itself. Right now he needed to focus, to think.
He concentrated on gathering information about the route his abductors took. He noted that the traffic sounds around the sedan were still fairly heavy, and the car moved briskly with few turns. He guessed they were on a freeway, which was punctuated every now and then by the higher pitch of a bridge.
The sun shone in the windshield onto his knees, so he could roughly make out their direction as heading east. He thought about a map of western Montana, but didn't have enough details memorized to know what might lay to the east of Missoula. He'd have to wait and see.
"Where's my dog?" he asked petulantly.
"Oh, Frankie's taking good care of him," said the driver with a grin, and Mac couldn't tell if the words were intended to be calming or threatening. Regardless, Mac smiled inwardly. He had now heard both men's voices.
The car swung to the right and slowed. There was a sharp left turn. The road they now took grew more and more winding, as well as getting steeper as they traveled uphill. The sun on Mac's right flashed through trees.
After maybe 30 minutes, the driver pulled onto a gravel driveway that lasted for 100 slow yards and the car rolled to a stop.
"Out" said Mr. Gun and Mac fumbled for the door handle. He finally found it, and opened the door slowly, not knowing if it might hit a car or tree that stood close to where they parked. The area seemed clear, so he unwound his long frame and stood up, pushing his shoulders back against the tension he'd unconsciously held between his shoulder blades.
Two other doors opened, and soon Mac was joined from behind by Mr. Gun, while Mr. Driver's footsteps receded quickly off to their left. Mac had time to notice that he stood in the sun but was surrounded by the heady aroma of evergreen trees when Mr. Gun poked his .45 into the small of Mac's back.
"Walk," he ordered.
"Uhm, where?" Mac asked reasonably.
Mr. Gun made an impatient sound in his throat and with his free hand grabbed Mac's upper arm. To Mac's surprise, it was his right arm, meaning that the gun was in the man's left hand. Since most people held a pistol in their dominant hand, this fellow was evidently left-handed. There was something odd about the grip on his arm too, as if the man used only one finger and his thumb, but Mac had no time to ponder this because Mr. Gun push-guided him forward over the slippery crunch of evergreen needles.
They arrived at a shack, which Mac discovered when his forehead and right need hit a rough wooden wall. He gave a short grunt of pained surprise. If he hoped for an apology from his companion, he was disappointed. Instead, Mr. Gun busied himself with a padlock.
Mac considered breaking and running. But there was the gun. And he didn't fancy smacking into a tree. So he stood still while Mr. Gun fiddled with the lock, cursing under his breath when it resisted his efforts. Eventually, he got it open and gave Mac a push toward the interior of the building. He must have forgotten Mac could see nothing useful because he didn't bother to warn him of the tools and implements scattered around in the shed, and Mac took a hard hit to the right shin that caused him to stumble forward, grazing the back of his hand on something sharp as he went down in a tangle of rough wood and metal.
Mr. Gun was in a hurry, so he didn't apologize but shut the door, snuffing all of the daylight in the small room. Mac heard the hasp close and the padlock click shut.
Once Mr. Gun's footsteps had crunched away, Mac listened to the silence around what seemed to be a tool shed. He sat all the way down, wincing as he rubbed his shin, noticing that it was sticky with blood. His hand, too, was bleeding, but just slightly with the parallel scrapes along its length. He reached gingerly up to determine what had scratched him and felt the long, ugly, sharp teeth of a two-man crosscut saw. The item he had tripped on was a rusty wheelbarrow with wooden handles.
Once he had his breath back and his heart rate returned to normal, he began searching systematically around himself for useful items. He started with hands and feet searching the floor nearby, and working outward.
The first thing he noticed was that the floor was merely dirt. That had possibilities. On his left, just in front of the wooden wall was a low shelf with items stacked untidily. A metal coffee can held an assortment of nails and a hammer with a wooden handle. Just beyond that, an axe leaned with its long handle against the wall. Mac didn't bother looking for any windows; the darkness in the room told him that light only came in through a crack or two. He thought wryly to himself that his captors probably had assumed that being thrown into a dark shed would deter him when he honestly had hardly noticed.
He hadn't found anything in the shed to stop the bleeding on his shin, and from the smell of dust and motor oil, he decided that any rags he found would probably be dirty. So, he tore a strip from the hem of his T-shirt and bound his leg, below the knee. He tied it outside his jeans, tightly enough to put pressure on the wound but not cut off the circulation in his lower leg. The wound didn't hurt much; it was merely a flesh wound and for that he felt grateful. He didn't need to add a broken bone to his current list of problems.
He continued his exploration of the tool shed. There was a lawn mower, which explained the engine smell. In one corner stood a bouquet of shovels, a hoe and a tool Mac recognized as a Pulaski, used for digging fire ditches and maintaining trails. There was a push broom, and Mac carefully unscrewed the long straight wooden handle to use later, leaning it against the back wall of the shed. There was a chainsaw, trimmers and hand saws and some buckets.
Mac pictured himself using the chainsaw to cut his way free and grinned. Every person within a mile radius would hear it and come running.
Mac touched the wall, trying to determine if one wall was warmer than the others. With the sun lowering past mid-afternoon, he hoped he might be able to tell, but the shed was shaded enough he couldn't tell. He remembered that Mr. Driver had run to the left of the car while he and Mr. Gun had come to the right and hadn't circled the shed when they found it. That meant that the additional buildings nearby would most likely be in the front of the shed and not behind. He ran his fingertips along the weathered vertical boards of the back wall, and when he found a crack, he put his ear to it, listening intently. He heard no footsteps or voices, but he did hear a gentle lapping of water, which might signify a nearby pond or lake.
He listened at the door on the front side of the shack, and heard distant voices. There was another sound that made his heart leap into his throat: the insistent barking of a dog.
Moving again to the back of the shed, he tested several of the boards by pushing firmly with his palms to see if they were loose enough to come off. They weren't. He went back to the front corner and retrieved the claw hammer, bringing along a heavy pair of wire cutters at the same time. He used the claw on the back of the hammer to slip between the lower frame of the wall and the boards on the outside. This time he had more luck. With a squeak, the bottom of the board came off. He pushed gently, experimentally swinging it outward, the nails on the upper end acting like stiff hinges. He wanted to see if anyone would notice.
There was no noise, except the wind in the tops of the tall pine trees and the gentle echo of water hitting a dock.
He tried to squeeze himself through the space left by the board's removal, but found that it was too narrow, so he went to work on the next board. A third soon followed, and he had a crack wide enough to slither out. Once he was through, he pulled out the broomstick and the cutters. He crouched by the wall, pushing the bottoms of the boards more or less back into place.
Moving to the corner of the shed he paused again to listen for the direction and distance of the barks. It wasn't far; only about twenty yards, he judged. The trouble was, he couldn't tell if someone was watching. After the fiasco that morning with the telephone, he thought it was probably best to assume someone was always watching.
He sat on his heels with his back to the shed wall, his teeth clenched in frustration. Although his brown leather jacket and blue jeans weren't bright, they certainly weren't camouflaged.
He wondered how much undergrowth was around. A wise landowner with forested property would keep the undergrowth around the buildings cut back to reduce the risk of fire. If he was lucky, the owner of this place hadn't been so careful. Using the broomstick, he reached out along the ground, moving the long stick slowly to learn what was close. He quickly found several tree trunks and a bush. The tree trunks weren't thick, and didn't have any branches this low, but the bush would provide plenty of cover. He worked himself around behind it until the bush was between himself and the place he judged the other building to be.
Moving slowly and quietly so as not to attract any attention, Mac reached out again with the broomstick, keeping it low to the ground. More brush and trees off to his right gave him his next move. Obviously he was circling around the outside perimeter of the cleared ground. The sound of the lake water grew closer, but he ignored it for the time being, until he discovered another problem. A cleared path from the house to the lake meant that the underbrush providing cover for Mac had a wide gap that he had to cross.
Rather than making a dash for it, he moved instead more to his right, toward the lake and farther away from the clearing where the house sat. The path to the lake curved, which meant that he finally felt safe to cross it since the bushes closer to the clearing would shield him.
Each time he moved, his heart pounded, sometimes sounding so loud in his own ears that he wondered if he'd be able to hear any pursuit.
It took him maybe an hour to cautiously make his way to the spot where he could feel the presence of a large, blank wall just out of reach.
On and off during the past hour, Puck had alternately barked and whined, and MacGyver silently encouraged him to keep it up, since he used the sound as a beacon to guide his movements.
Just as he neared the wall, still behind a thick tangle of leafy undergrowth, a screen door on the other side of the building squeaked open, and then banged shut again. Footsteps pounded down three steps and then half-walked, half jogged across the clearing to one of the cars. A door opened; there was silence for three heart-stopping seconds; then the car door slammed.
Puck's manic barking intensified. The footsteps, which had been heading back toward the door of the house, changed direction and approached the sound of barking and the spot where MacGyver hid, unmoving.
The man didn't come toward Mac, but began kicking a hollow-sounding piece of wood with a heavy work boot.
"Shut up, you dumb dog," he growled, and kicked again for good measure. Then he turned to retrace his steps back to the front door.
Mac frowned, wondering what the hollow wooden thing was that held his wonderful, amazing, intelligent dog. The man had not used his toe, Mac was sure. The sole of the boot had stamped on the wood. He had only gotten a second to listen between Puck's furious barks and growls.
Once the man was gone, Mac slid from his bush up to the wall and worked his way along the end of the house, growing closer and closer to the noise of the dog.
His right foot struck something, sending a shiver of pain up his injured leg. Bending down to touch it, his hand found a sloping wooden lid, and it clicked in his head: an outdoor cellar! That's what the man had been kicking, and that's what contained an outraged German Shepherd.
Mac crouched on his heels in front of the sloped doors. He ran his left hand along the surface, looking for a crack that joined two doors or perhaps a solid single door with hinges at the top. It turned out to be two, and he felt up and down the crack between the two doors looking for a latch or lock or bar.
As he had suspected, a hasp and padlock about halfway down held the doors securely closed. Mac pulled the wire cutters from his jacket pocket. The lock itself was far too sturdy to cut, but the hasp wasn't. Still, it wasn't going to be easy. Using the snips, Mac twisted and tugged and squeezed the handles as hard as he could and at last the metal gave way. Leaving the padlock where it was, he swung back the left door. A furry explosion burst out and began swiping Mac's face with his wet sandpaper tongue.
"Whoa, there!" Mac held his hands up to ward off the slime.
Just then, the screen door resounded a warning. Mac's mouth went dry. He wanted to smack himself. Of course they would know he let Puck loose because the barking had stopped. The only option left to him was to run.
Puck's harness was nowhere to be found. He didn't have a leash or even a collar.
As several sets of feet pounded toward them around the building, Puck took off, running toward the lake.
Using the broomstick to feel his way and find the path, Mac followed him.
The sound of a pistol being fired nearly brought his heart into his mouth, and the bullet whizzed past his right ear.
His broomstick cane felt the springy resistance that meant Mac had found a bush. This must be where the path curves, he thought. Swinging the stick to his right confirmed that the way there was clear.
The footsteps grew closer behind him. The gun fired again, and Mac felt an instant white-hot ribbon of pain tear through his left thigh, searing muscles and nerves as it pierced a path through his flesh. He cried out with pain.
His knee buckled and he nearly went down but his momentum drove him onto his right leg, and then through another few steps.
He felt the brush of Puck's body running past his knees; running back toward their pursuers, an ominous warning growl beginning deep in his throat.
Puck, as a guide dog, was bred to be docile and friendly; he wasn't bred or trained for any sort of guard work or protection of Mac. Still, for all that, when Mac yelled, all of his protective instinct, inside him from generation before generation of Shepherds, rose up inside him and drove him back to stand between the master he loved and the men trying to kill that master. Puck braced his legs, teeth bared, hackles up, a terrifying growl emanating past those sharp teeth.
The men paused, not long but just long enough. The gun fired again, and Mac felt as though cold water poured over him. Had they hit Puck?
He could not stop to find out.
Just as his knees really began to give way, he stumbled headlong into the lake. The bank dropped off fairly steeply where he had entered just to the left of the wooden dock.
Mac threw himself face-down in the water, using his arms to pull himself down as far as he could toward the silty bottom and away from the surface where another bullet could end him.
A bullet did whistle through the water just to his left, but it didn't hit him.
He stayed down under the murky water feeling desperately for the pilings or cables under the dock, his lungs aching. It felt like years before he found them although in reality it probably only took about fifteen seconds.
He pulled himself under the dock and surfaced to breathe, his head bumping the underside of the board platform.