It worked as well as he could have hoped: the man below him startled and snapped his gaze upward, the search for the weapon forgotten.

Dryden was thirty feet above and twenty feet left of the guy, angling down toward him as fast as his body could move. He made no attempt to use the trees as handholds now; he aimed between them, lunging sideways with each stride and letting the shifting soil take him downhill, faster and faster. A barely controlled fall. He was going to hit the guy at thirty miles an hour.

He had covered half the distance when the man’s brain seemed to kick into gear again: the guy dropped his gaze, looking for the pistol with renewed speed. Almost at once his head snapped to the side, his eyes locking onto the weapon.

He dove for it, in the process throwing himself clear of Dryden’s path.

Dryden jammed a heel into the soil, pitched himself sideways to correct his angle. No good—the body-slam wasn’t going to work if the guy was flat on the ground.

In the last instant before he would sail right over the man, Dryden saw the guy’s hands wrap around the pistol. Dryden dropped both his own hands, grabbed two fistfuls of the man’s shirt, and wrenched him off the slope as he went by.

Tumbling again, the two of them bunched together in a single mass, the world going around in a blur. A tree trunk skimmed both of their heads, close enough that Dryden felt it pass through his hair. The gaunt man cried out; Dryden could see him reaching with one hand, pawing at the ground, trying to stabilize their movement.

Which left only one hand holding the pistol.

Dryden ignored the trees—necessary risk—and grabbed for the weapon with both hands. He felt the man respond, panicking, trying to pull it away.

Another trunk, big around as a telephone pole, went past them in the blur.

Dryden got his left hand around the gun’s slide, gripped it tight, and tore it loose from the man’s hold. Got his own right hand around the pistol grip an instant later. Shoved the barrel into the guy’s rib cage and pulled the trigger. Five times—maybe six. The shots sounded flat and dampened, the body itself acting as a silencer.

Dryden let go of both the man and the gun. He flattened himself out again. He skidded to a halt in a cloud of needles and sand. He saw the body thud up against a tree, ten feet farther down, bent around it at the waist.

Silence.

The filtered light beneath the pine canopy was full of kicked-up dust and ground cover, settling out and drifting off in the breeze.

A blue jay called, somewhere in the branches high above.

Through the trees downhill, the switchback road was closer—thirty yards away.