Max’s screams pierced the clear mountain air. Her throat and lungs were beginning to hurt, to burn.
The eleven-year-old girl was running as fast as she could from the hateful, despicable School. She was strong, but she was
beginning to tire. As she ran, her long blond hair flared behind her like a beautiful silk scarf. She was pretty, even though
there were dark, plum-colored circles under her eyes.
She knew the men were coming to kill her. She could hear them hurrying through the woods behind her.
She glanced over her right shoulder, painfully twisting her neck. She flashed a mental picture of her little brother, Matthew.
Where was he? The two of them had separated just outside the School, both running and screaming.
She was afraid Matthew was already dead. Uncle Thomas probably got him. Thomas had betrayed them and that hurt so much she
couldn’t stand to think about it.
Tears rolled down her cheeks. The hunters were closing in. She could feel their heavy footsteps thumping hard and fast against
the crust of the earth.
A throbbing, orange and red ball of sun was sinking below the horizon. Soon it would be pitch-black and cold out here in the
Front Range of the Rockies. All she wore was a simple tube of white cotton, sleeveless, loosely drawn together at the neckline
and waist. Her feet were wrapped in thin-soled ballet slippers.
Move.
She urged her aching, tired body on. She could go faster than this. She knew she could.
The twisting path narrowed, then wound around a great, mossy-green shoulder of rock. She clawed and struggled forward through
more thick tangles of branches and brush.
The girl suddenly stopped. She could go no further.
A huge, high fence loomed above the bushes. It was easily ten feet. Rows of razor-sharp concertina wire were tangled and coiled
across the top.
A metal sign warned: EXTREME DANGER! ELECTRIFIED FENCE. EXTREME DANGER!
Max bent over and cupped her hands over her bare knees. She was blowing out air, wheezing hard, trying to keep from weeping.
The hunters were almost there. She could hear, smell, sense their awful presence.
With a sudden flourish, she unfurled her wings. They were white and silver-tipped and appeared to have been unhinged. The
wings sailed to a point above her head, seemingly of their own accord. Their span was nine feet. The sun glinted off the full
array of her plumage.
Max started to run again, flapping her wings hard and fast. Her slippered feet lifted off the hardscrabble.
She flew over the high barbed wire like a bird.
F
IVE ARMED MEN ran quietly and easily through the ageless boulders and towering aspens and ponderosa pines. They didn’t see
her yet, but they knew it wouldn’t be long before they caught up with the girl.
They were jogging rapidly, but every so often the man in front picked up the pace a significant notch or two. All of them
were competent trackers, good at this, but he was the best, a natural leader. He was more focused, more controlled, the best
hunter.
The men appeared calm on the outside, but inside it was a different story. This was a critical time. The girl had to be captured,
and brought back. She shouldn’t have gotten out here in the first place. Discretion was critical; it always had been, but
never more than right now.
The girl was only eleven, but she had “gifts,” and that could present a formidable problem outdoors. Her senses were acute;
she was incredibly strong for her size, her age, her gender; and of course, there was the possibility that she might try to
fly.
Suddenly, they could see her up ahead: she was clearly visible against the deep blue background of the sky.
“Tinkerbell. Northwest, fifty degrees,” the group leader called out.
She was called Tinkerbell, but he knew she hated the name. The only name she answered to was Max, which wasn’t short for Maxine,
or Maximillian, but for Maximum. Maybe because she always gave her all. She always went for it. Just as she was doing right
now.
There she was, in all her glory! She was running at full speed, and she was very close to the perimeter fence. She had no
way of knowing that. She’d never been this far from home before.
Every eye was on her. None of them could look away, not for an instant. Her long hair streamed behind her, and she seemed
to flow up the steep, rocky hillside. She was in great shape; she could really move for such a young girl. She was a force
to reckon with out here in the open.
The man running in front suddenly pulled up. Harding Thomas stopped short. He threw up his arm to halt the others. They didn’t
understand at first, because they thought they had her now.
Then, almost as if he’d known she would—she took off. She flew. She was going over the concertina wire of the ten-foot-high
perimeter fence.
The men watched in complete silence and awe. Their eyes widened. Blood rushed to their brains and made a pounding sound in
their ears.
She opened to a full wingspan and the movement seemed effortless. She was a beautiful, natural flyer. She flapped her white
and silver wings up and down, up and down. The air actually seemed to carry her along, like a leaf on the wind.
“I knew she’d try to go over.” Thomas turned to the others and spit out the words. “Too bad.”
He lifted his rifle to his shoulder. The girl was about to disappear over the nearest edge of the canyon wall. Another second
or two and she’d be gone from sight.
He pulled the trigger.
K
IT HARRISON was headed to Denver from Boston. He was good-looking enough to draw looks on the airplane: trim, six foot two,
sandy-blond hair. He was a graduate of NYU Law School. And yet he felt like such a loser.
He was perspiring badly in the cramped and claustrophobic middle-aisle airplane seat of an American Airlines 747. He was so
obviously pathetic that the pleasant and accommodating flight attendant stopped and asked if he was feeling all right. Was
he ill?
Kit told her that he was just fine, but it was another lie, the mother of all lies. His condition was called post-traumatic
stress disorder and sometimes featured nasty anxiety attacks that left him feeling he could die
right there.
He’d been suffering from the disorder for close to four years.
So yeah, I am ill, Madame Flight Attendant. Only it’s a little worse than that.
See, I’m not supposed to be going to Colorado. I’m supposed to be on vacation in Nantucket. Actually, I’m supposed to be taking
some time off, getting my head screwed on straight, getting used to maybe being fired from my job of twelve years.
Getting used to not being an FBI agent anymore, not being on the fast track at the Bureau, not being much of anything.
The name computer-printed on his plane ticket read Kit Harrison, but it wasn’t his real name. His name was Thomas Anthony
Brennan. He had been Senior FBI Agent Brennan, a shooting star at one time. He was thirty-eight, and lately, he felt he was
feeling his age for the first time in his life.
From this moment on, he would forget the old name. Forget his old job, too.
I’m Kit Harrison. I’m going to Colorado to hunt and fish in the Rockies. I’ll keep to that simple story. That simple lie.
Kit, Tom, whoever the hell he was, hadn’t been up in an airplane in nearly four years. Not since August 9, 1994. He didn’t
want to think about that now.
So Kit pretended he was asleep as the sweat continued to trickle down his face and neck, as the fear inside him built way
past the danger level. He couldn’t get his mind to rest, even for just a few minutes. He
had
to be on this plane.
He
had
to travel to Colorado.
It was all connected to August 9, wasn’t it? Sure it was. That was when the stress disorder had begun. This was for Kim and
for Tommy and for Michael—little Mike the Tyke.
And oh yeah, it also happened to be hugely beneficial for just about everybody else on the planet. Very strange—but that last
outrageous bit was absolutely true, scarily true. In his opinion, nothing in history was more important than what he’d come
here to investigate.
Unless he
was
crazy.
Which was a distinct possibility.
GENESIS
T
HE DAY started to go a little crazy when Keith Duffy and his young daughter brought that poor crushed doe to the Inn-Patient,
as I call my small animal hospital in Bear Bluff, Colorado, about fifty minutes northwest of Boulder along the “Peak-to-Peak”
highway.
Sheryl Crow was singing ever so raucously on the tape deck. I flipped saucy Sheryl off when I saw Duffy walk inside carrying
that poor doe, standing like a dolt in front of
Abstraction, White Rose II,
my current favorite Georgia O’Keeffe poster.
I could see the badly injured doe was pregnant. She was wild-eyed and thrashing when Duffy hefted her onto the table. Half-thrashing,
in truth, because I suspected her spine was broken at midpoint, where she’d been clipped by the Chevy 4x4 that Duffy drives.
The little girl was sobbing and her father looked miserable. I thought he was going to break down, too.
“Money’s no object,” he said.
And money
was
no object because I knew nothing was going to save the doe. The fawn, however, was a maybe. If the mother was close to term.
If it hadn’t been mashed too badly by the four-thousand-pound truck. And a few more ifs besides.
“I can’t save the doe,” I said to the girl’s father. “I’m sorry.”
Duffy nodded. He was a local builder, and also one of the local hunters. A real knucklehead, in my humble opinion.
Thoughtless
probably described him best, and maybe that was his best quality. I could only imagine how he must be feeling now, this man
who usually bragged on his kill, with his little girl begging to save the animal’s life. Among his other bad habits, Duffy
occasionally stopped by and brazenly hit on me. A sticker on his 4x4 bumper read
:Support Wildlife. Throw a Party.
“The fawn?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “Help me get her gassed down and we’ll see.”
I gently slid the mask over the doe’s face. I kicked at the pedal and the halothane hissed through the tube. The doe’s brown
eyes showed terror, but also unimaginable sadness. She
knew.
The little girl grabbed the doe around the belly and started crying her heart out. I liked the girl a lot. Her eyes showed
spunk and character. Duffy had done at least one good thing in his life.
“Damn, damn,” the father said. “I never saw her until she was on the hood. Do your best, Frannie,” he said to me.
I gently peeled the little girl off the deer. I held on to her shoulders and made her face me. “What’s your name, sweetie?”
“Angie,” she sobbed out.
“Angie, now listen to me, sweetheart. The doe doesn’t feel anything now, understand? It’s painless for her. I promise you.”
Angie pushed her face into my body and held me with all of her little-girl strength. I rubbed her back and told her that I
would have to euthanatize the doe, but if its baby could be saved, there would be a lot of work to do.
“Please, please, please,” said Angie.
“You’re going to need a goat. For milk,” I said to Duffy. “Maybe two or three of them.”
“Not a problem,” he said. He would have acquired nursing elephants if I’d told him to. He just wanted his little girl to smile
again.
I then asked both of them to please get out of the exam room and let me work. What I was about to do was a bloody, difficult,
and ugly operation.
I
T WAS SEVEN in the evening when the Duffys came to the Inn-Patient, and maybe twelve minutes had already gone by. The poor
doe was out cold and I felt so bad for her.
Frannie the Sap
—that’s what my sister, Carole, calls me. It was my husband David’s favorite nickname for me, too.
A little less than a year and a half ago, David was shot and killed in the physician’s parking lot at Boulder Community Hospital.
I still hadn’t recovered from that, hadn’t grieved enough. It would have helped if the police had caught David’s murderer,
but they hadn’t.
I cut along the abdominal line with my scalpel. I exteriorized the uterus, flipping it out intact onto the doe’s open belly.
I cut again, this time through the uterine wall. I pulled out the fawn, praying I wasn’t going to have to put it down.
The fawn was about four months, nearly to term, and as best as I could tell, uninjured. I gently cleaned the babe’s air passages
with my fingers and fitted a tiny mask over its muzzle.
Then I cranked on the oxygen. The fawn’s chest shuddered. It started to breathe.
Then it bawled. God, what a glorious sound. New life. Jeez, Louise, the whole magical thing still makes my heart go pitter-patter.
Frannie the Sap.
Blood had spattered on my face during the surgery, and I wiped it off with my sleeve. The fawn was crying into the oxygen
mask and I let the little orphan snuggle up against its mother for a few moments, just in case deer have souls, just in case…
let mother say good-bye to her child.
Then I clamped off the cord, filled a syringe, and euthanatized the doe. It was fast. She never knew the moment she passed
from life into death.
There was one can of goat’s milk in the fridge. I filled a bottle and popped it into the microwave for a few seconds to warm.
I removed the oxygen mask and slipped the nipple into the baby deer’s mouth, and it began to suck. The fawn was really beautiful,
with the gentlest brown eyes. God, I love what I do sometimes.
Father and daughter were huddled close together on my antique daybed when I came out into the waiting room.
I handed the fawn to Angie.
“Congratulations,” I said, “it’s a girl.”
I walked the family of three out to their creased and dented 4x4. I gave them the can of goat’s milk, my phone number, and
waved good-bye. I briefly considered the irony that the fawn was riding home in the same vehicle that had killed its mother.