Part 6
The bullet had hit Dean.
Walt knew it from the wet catch in the man’s breathing over the open radio and from the way June folded against his chest when the shot traveled through the steel beneath their feet. Above them, someone hauled at the SUV jammed across the bridge. Metal screamed. Rook spun toward the inspection stairs, ready to go back.
“No.” Walt caught the fur at his neck. “He bought us this way. We take it.”
Rook resisted for one hard second. Then June made a thin, whistling sound as she tried to breathe, and the animal turned with them.
The maintenance walk narrowed beneath the Pinewater River bridge, its grated floor glazed with ice. Walt carried June sideways, one shoulder scraping a girder, while wind drove through the lattice of steel. His rescue radio hissed against his coat. Dean did not speak again. Neither did Nolan Pike. That silence was worse than the gunshot.
“Uncle Dean?” June breathed.
Walt could not tell her he was coming, and he would not use hope as another lie. “People heard his radio,” he said. “They know where he is.”
Above them, brakes locked and men shouted through the storm. Beyond the bridge, agencies listening to Dean’s transmission knew where to send help. Walt made himself keep moving toward the child who could still be saved.
At the far abutment, the walkway ended behind the old municipal pumping station. Walt forced open the frozen service gate and staggered into waist-deep snow. June’s face had gone gray around the mouth. Each breath drew the hollow above her collarbone inward.
“Stay with me,” he told her. “Small breaths. Don’t force them.”
He could not carry her another mile. The hospital stood beyond the river bluff, its upper windows visible through the storm, but the access road climbed steeply from the pumping station. Walt reached for the distress beacon he had already tried once, then heard the grind of a diesel engine.
A county snowplow came around the bend with its amber lights turning the snow gold. Walt stepped into the road and swung his headlamp. The plow braked so hard its rear end slid toward the ditch.
Carol Donovan leaned across the cab and shoved open the passenger door. At sixty, she still wore her silver hair in the same short braid she had worn during fourteen years beside Walt in a Pinewater rescue rig.
“Mercer?” She took in the child, the soot and rust on Walt’s sleeve, and the animal behind him. “What in God’s name—”
“Airway emergency. We need Regional.”
Carol’s eyes moved to Rook. “That is not getting in my cab.”
June reached blindly until her fingers found his ruff.
Carol swore, threw a road blanket across the floor, and unlocked the rear utility compartment. “Then he rides behind the seats. If he eats the radio, you explain it to Public Works.”
Rook climbed in without looking at her. He pressed his body along June’s legs while Walt held her upright and Carol called Pinewater Regional on the plow frequency. Her first transmission received no answer. On the second, the emergency department broke through, followed by overlapping voices from deputies and road crews receiving Dean’s incident channel through the statewide mutual-aid relay.
“I heard the confession,” Carol said as she drove. “Half the county heard it.”
She told him state dispatch had bridged the incident channel into the mutual-aid network at Mara’s request. It came alive in every plow, ambulance, and patrol car still carrying the programming. Dispatchers had tried to keep Pike talking while state police traced the transmission. Dean had not merely made a record. He had broken the circle of local silence Graham depended on.
Walt stared at the radio. “Did anybody reach him?”
“State patrol is coming from Red Pine. I don’t know more than that.”
She did not offer hope she did not have. That was one reason Walt had trusted her with dying people.
The hospital appeared at the top of the bluff, all white light and blowing snow. Satellite trucks crowded the front drive. Carol frowned at them, then turned up the volume on the dashboard radio.
Graham Vale’s voice filled the cab.
“June, if you can hear me, Daddy is waiting. The man who took you may tell you that your family abandoned you. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Carol looked at the child in Walt’s arms. On the radio, Graham described his missing six-year-old daughter, taken from a private medical residence by an armed former emergency worker. He asked the public not to approach Walt Mercer or “the dangerous wolf believed to be traveling with him.” The appeal was being broadcast live from Pinewater Regional, where Graham had assembled reporters beneath the sign bearing the Vale Family Initiative’s name.
“He knew where we had to go,” Walt said.
“Then we make sure everyone sees you arrive.” Carol swung past the ambulance entrance and brought the plow straight to the glass-fronted atrium doors.
Reporters turned before the blade had stopped moving. Leah Moreno from NorthStar News was nearest the doors. She recognized Walt from the bulletin, but her camera operator caught the rest: Carol jumping down, Walt carrying a child in an emergency blanket, and Rook emerging behind them without a leash, his head low and his shoulder against June’s dangling boot.
Two local deputies drew their sidearms.
“Put them down,” Walt said. “He has not threatened anybody.”
Rook did not bare his teeth. He stood between the weapons and June and watched.
Carol opened June’s blanket enough to expose the tug at her throat. “You can arrest the old man after somebody gives this child oxygen.”
An emergency physician pushed through security with a respiratory therapist and a gurney. One look at June ended the argument. They moved her onto the mattress, placed humidified oxygen near her face, and rolled her inside. Rook followed until Walt put a hand against his chest.
“With me,” Walt said.
The animal stopped. He remained pressed to Walt’s leg as deputies closed around them, trembling with effort but controlled.
At the other end of the atrium, Graham stood at a podium beside a blown-up photograph of June. His hand remained lifted from the appeal he had been making. For an instant his expression showed no grief at all—only calculation, as if someone had changed the rules in the middle of a game he owned.
Then the cameras found him, and anguish returned to his face.
“June Bug.” He stepped from the podium. “Oh, thank God.”
June heard him. Even through the oxygen and the rush of staff around her, her body recoiled.
A woman beside the podium gave a broken cry. Celia Vale pushed past Graham and ran toward the gurney, then stopped when she saw June’s scar, her chapped face, and one small borrowed boot hanging loose beneath Walt’s wrapping.
“June?” The child looked at her mother but did not reach out. Celia turned to her husband. She had forgotten the microphones, the deputies, and Leah Moreno’s camera streaming the scene live. “Graham,” she said, “you told me she was in Arizona…”
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