The killer was psycho, dangerous, and very skilled. His first reaction was that they were going to die. The car wasn’t moving. Maybe the killer was waiting for the people he had called.
He heard a faint crash. When he realized what that meant, it sickened him. In another minute he heard another faint crash.
“Do you know who the killer is?” He waited a minute, impatient over Isabella’s silence. “Well?”
“He has to be from the cartel.” Her voice was gruff.
“You sent Jack and Christie to kill the cartel people that killed Marita.” She didn’t answer, and he said, “Look, I need your help. I’m losing blood and getting weak. We have to stop that right away.”
“Why should I help you? You made it possible for that man to kill my brother!”
“Your family made it possible.” His jaw clenched. “You put my whole family at risk, and because of you I’ve been shot and you stabbed me!”
She didn’t reply.
He cut off another angry outburst and said calmly, “If we don’t work together, we won’t have any chance of surviving this.”
More silence. Then a sullen, “What do you want me to do?”
“Bandages.”
He was aware of her slowly turning to face him. In moments he could feel her breath on his face.
The car began moving.
Her voice was matter-of-fact. “Just so we’re clear, I was trying to stab your heart. I missed.”
“Lucky me.”
“I’m not sorry for hurting you,” she said.
At least she was honest. “Truce?”
“For now.”
“Before you bandage me, can you look for an emergency trunk release? It’s usually a small handle where the hood joins the frame. It might be attached to the underside of the trunk with a clip or Velcro.”
“I know what they are.” She sounded annoyed.
“Feel behind me too. See if you can push out the back seats. Don’t pull the release or do anything with the seats now that he’s driving.”
“I’m not stupid.”
He almost gave a sarcastic reply, but instead said, “Sure.”
She had to squeeze over him. As she searched for the release and checked out the back seats, he groaned over the pressure against his shoulder. He noted that she offered no apologies for causing him more pain.
In moments she moved off of him and resumed her position on her side. “No release, and there’s a solid metal plate between the trunk and the back seats. There’s no way to get out.”
He sighed. The killer had modified his trunk to hold prisoners. “See if you can rip my shirt into strips.”
“I will cut my blouse into strips,” she said.
“Did you say cut?”
“I picked up the switchblade and shoved it into my bra when I helped you up. You were lying on it.”
“Great!”
“I don’t need your praise.”
“Of course.” He was already tired of her.
He heard her cutting her blouse. He started using another technique Steel had taught him. Imagine every possible scenario you can think of, and then pick the one that feels like a winnable strategy and rehearse it endlessly. They had practiced a hundred times how to escape from this situation in the VR sims too.
He couldn’t wait to wipe that stupid smile off the killer’s face.
CHAPTER 26
Clay could feel worry burrowing into his gut. It was hard to shake it off. It was early evening—still light out. Closing in on twenty-four hours since Harry had gone missing. And they had nothing to show for their efforts.
As the eldest brother he felt responsible for his siblings. Dale and Harry would find that laughable, as capable as they were of taking care of themselves. But the feeling was still there nonetheless. Christie would understand it more. Women seemed to be more nurturing.
Christie and Jack were in a nightmarish situation, and the stress in his sister’s voice told him Harry was in trouble. The idea of losing a brother and sister over the next few days choked him up.
Being tired didn’t help. Dale had rented a second car so they could cover more ground. They had driven north all night and all morning, eventually heading back south and driving east and west on side roads. For most of it he had felt aimless.
They should have brought the police in right away. Steel was operating as if this was one of his covert Ops. The police might have found Harry already. Several times he thought about calling them himself, but the kidnapper’s threat that they were ready to die for their plan made him hesitate.
If the kidnappers were stopped by the police and Harry died, he would never forgive himself. The threat of releasing their photos to the cartel concerned him too. Their lives would never be the same.
Continuing west on highway thirty-four, he waited for a call from the kidnapper to get directions to find Harry. He didn’t believe it was going to happen.
His phone beeped and he answered.
“They call yet?” asked Dale.
“Not yet, Dale. I’ll let you know as soon as they do.”
He hung up, feeling as impatient as Dale sounded. His brother had been calling every five minutes. Dale loved Harry as much as he did. They were close as a family. That the three of them had somehow survived their tours in Afghanistan without serious injury had been lucky. They considered themselves a miracle family.
Christie’s brush with death last year had put tears in his eyes. He had never thought things could get that dangerous stateside. Now he knew.
He had looked forward to hiking in Estes with his siblings, but now he just wished he was back in Montana with his wife and children. Home was his refuge and the center of everything he ever wanted in life.
As much as he liked Christie’s partner, Steel, the man had brought danger to their family. Steel was what Clay had always admired, the soldier’s soldier. Special Ops. A true hero dedicated to protecting the innocent and their country. And last year Steel had taken down a presidency, remaining nameless in the process for security reasons.
But now Clay found Steel’s career less than appealing. He didn’t want his siblings to worry for the rest of their lives about some unknown threat from Steel’s past. Worse, the current situation could even place his own wife and children, or even his parents, in danger.
His folks lived on an idyllic ranch in Montana, their values and lifestyles simple. Solid. Their whole family lived that way. Christie seemed to have strayed the most. But they had all served in the military in some capacity, emulating their father’s abiding loyalty to it as a veteran.
The one thing Clay did know about Steel was that the man would do anything to protect Christie and their families. And from what Christie had told him, enemies always underestimated him.
He rolled down his window, letting in the cool mountain air. It was quiet. The new blacktop kept his tires quiet too. The peaks to the west, south, and north were all beautiful, rising up in gray, brown, and green collages that normally would have inspired him.
One thing he dreaded was having to tell his parents that one or more of their children had died. He aimed to make sure that didn’t happen.
His phone beeped. Meera. “Hey, love,” he said.
“Hi, darling. News?”
“None.” He was glad to hear her voice.
“Don’t give up. You can find him, Clay. I know you can. I believe in you. Always.”
“Thanks.” Her ability to be direct was one of the many reasons he had married her.
Named after a great female Hindu mystical poet—whose work was popular in India—Meera was also a poet. She actually made a living from her writing. Her unflinching support never failed to amaze him and always made him feel better during rough moments.
“Tell the boys I love them and that I’m having fun,” he sa
id.
“They would be proud of their father, as I am.”
“Thank you, Meera.” His boys were twelve-year-old identical twins that he adored.
“I’ll let you go so you’re not distracted, Clay.”
“I miss you. Tell the boys that too.”
“Always, love.”
He hung up, feeling inspired. She did that for him.
Somewhere ahead he heard a sound that seemed out of place. Almost like a faint crash. Maybe a car accident or road construction.
He was heading toward Estes Park, east of Rocky Mountain National Park. The crisp air was in the sixties and a mass of gray clouds was just beginning to cover the peaks.
He called his brother. “Hey, Dale, I just heard something. I’m going to check it out.”
“What was it?”
Dale sounded eager for anything other than the same old lack of news.
“I don’t know. Stay close by until I can investigate it.” He stomped on the gas, his imagination running wild with speculation. And hope. Saving Harry also meant saving Christie and Jack and ending this mess.
A half mile later he heard several distinct crunches, similar to what he had heard before, but louder. He was getting closer. Slowing to a crawl, he listened carefully. Nothing.
He stopped on a short straight stretch of road and rolled down all the windows.
A car appeared far ahead of him on a distant curve on the road, also heading west. Expensive. Black. Tinted windows. It disappeared around a bend.
He didn’t recognize the make or model from where he was parked. Dale would have been able to. He hadn’t seen the car before and wondered where it had come from. Maybe a scenic overlook. It wasn’t a pickup so he doubted it was the kidnappers.
He kept driving, accelerating and listening.
In a half mile a dirt road appeared to the left. It was narrow and hard to see at first, but on instinct he braked hard and backed up. The road felt about right for where the sounds might have come from. A fifty-foot-high rock wall to the right and a steep drop-off to the left bracketed the road. It couldn’t go very far in because there were cliffs and peaks all around it. In fifty yards the road turned right, past an outcropping that hid the rest of it.
Maybe it led to a private residence. But there was no sign posted. The road had no guardrails. The idea of having to back out on it unnerved him. He hated heights. Like driving on a road such as this, or standing next to a drop-off. But Harry’s life was on the line.
He gripped the steering wheel and turned onto the road. The vertical rock wall to his right was about two feet from his car, and he had no more than two feet from the steep slope on his left side. He kept his eyes glued to the center of the road.
When the road veered right, he followed it at a crawl, sweat running down his back. The road narrowed so that he had only one foot of clearance on both sides of the car. He kept the passenger sideview mirror almost scraping the pale rock on the right side.
After fifty feet he had to stop. His bunched shoulders and clenched fingers needed a rest. Cautiously he cracked his door. A drop of five hundred feet greeted his eyes. He hastily shut the door, dizzy and nauseous.
“Geez!” He wished he had walked in instead. Now he was committed. He might be walking out, because there was no way he was backing out.
White knuckling it, he drove, holding his breath as the road narrowed a little more. Sweat beaded his forehead and soaked his shirt.
“You stupid idiot,” he said to himself.
He envisioned the left wheels of the car slipping off a crumbling edge and his car tumbling down the mountainside. He was sure he was going to die.
“Idiot!” he repeated over and over.
For a moment he thought of his life. Math teacher, husband, father. All he wanted in life was to be a good family man, and a stupid decision was jeopardizing that. “Idiot!” he said again.
But in another fifty feet, just beyond a big overhang of tall rock, the road veered right a second time, ending in a decent-sized circular dirt space. Big enough to turn around in.
Stopping the car a short distance in, he exhaled and sat back. “Clay, you have survived another day.”
Exiting the car, he took some deep breaths, his aching hands still trembling. He grabbed his hat and the binoculars he had brought for the hiking trip and walked forward. An excellent tracker, a skill learned from his father on many hunting trips when he was a boy, he scoured the ground.
Multiple tire tracks.
Avoiding walking on any of them, he followed the tracks and saw where the vehicles had parked. Near two sets of tire tracks he spotted bits of red. That alarmed him. He didn’t have to touch them to know what they were.
Dismayed, he stopped to call Dale. “Get up here fast, little brother. I found something serious. Take highway thirty-four west, and about halfway to Estes there’s a narrow entrance to a dirt road on the left. South side. Go slow. It’s dangerous.”
“I’m coming, Clay!”
He hung up, knowing Dale would drive like a maniac to get here.
Examining the ground, he saw boot prints and shoe prints. And marks that could have been bodies dragged across the ground. One set of shoe prints had to be a woman’s. They were too small to be a man’s.
Remembering the crashing sounds he had heard—and feeling sick to his stomach at what it might mean—he forced himself to carefully walk back to his car. Then he strode to the south edge of the tiny plateau.
Even though he could guess where things had probably ended up, he didn’t want to trample the evidence in the dirt. And he wanted to search the whole perimeter anyway.
He needed to see straight down, but he couldn’t make himself lean over the edge to do it. Going down on his knees, he put his palms close to the edge and peered over the precipice.
A drop of two thousand feet greeted him. Nothing but stone. Gasping, he rocked back on his heels and closed his eyes for a few seconds.
Figuring he had a quarter hour before Dale found him, he speedily crawled along the edge. He didn’t want his little brother to see him crawling around on the ground. He would never hear the end of it.
Stopping every five yards to take a look over the edge, he arrived at the northwestern lip in ten minutes. Straight across from where he had parked his car. Nothing to note thus far.
Careful to not crawl over any prints or marks in the dirt, he remained just to the side of the first tire tracks he came to that led up to the edge. He leaned forward and stared.
A smashed up blue pickup truck and a black SUV rested on their sides down the distant slope. From what he could make out there were bodies down there too. No one would have survived that fall. He concluded the victims had been dead before they were thrown over the edge.
He took off his hat and sunglasses. Laying down, he propped his elbows on the edge and scoured the area with the binoculars. “Not you, Harry. Not you. Please, God. Not my brother.”
He counted four black-hooded men and a Latino. It was likely that the Hispanic was one of Harry’s kidnappers. The hooded men were a mystery. They reminded him of Steel’s Ops. Steel had said Colonel Jeffries had sent men to search for Harry so maybe they were U.S. military. Dumped like trash.
Feeling sick to his stomach, he crawled back a few feet , grabbed his sunglasses and hat, and stood up. Anger replaced concern. Harry could be down there, beneath one of the vehicles. But his gut said no. The female partner of the dead kidnapper was missing too.
He remembered the car he had seen ahead of him on highway thirty-four. If it was the cartel, and they had the woman and Harry, they would torture the woman to get the name of the man running Steel’s blackmail. And they would torture Harry to punish Jack and Christie. But how could the cartel figure all this out so fast?
He carefully studied the area by the cliff edge, finding the drag marks w
here someone had pulled bodies along the ground. Whoever had done this was ruthless.
Backing away from the tracks, he retreated the way he had come, walking a few yards in from the perimeter so he felt safe without walking over the evidence.
By the time he reached his car, Dale was pulling the red Malibu in fast. As if he was coming off a racetrack. Dale had always been fearless. Clay had thought it would get him killed someday. But to his credit, Dale also had a strong survival instinct.
Dale’s car skidded to a stop when Clay held up a hand.
Clay strode to Dale’s open window and leaned on it. “Let me get my gun, you turn around. I’ll explain on the way. Keep out of the center of this plateau or you’ll destroy evidence the police are going to need.”
He hustled back to his car, while Dale carefully turned the car around. Clay retrieved the SIG Sauer, and Dale pulled up. Clay tossed his hat in the back seat and got in, realizing he was going to be staring down the edge of the drop-off all the way out.
“What about your car?” asked Dale.
“No way am I driving it out of here, and we don’t have time for you to do it.” He looked at the drop-off, and then at Dale. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
Dale grinned. “Get out and walk behind the car.”
“We don’t have time.”
Dale’s smile vanished. “What’s wrong? What did you see?”
“Death, and lots of it.” He hunched over toward Dale. “Get us on thirty-four heading west. I think I saw the car that has Harry. If I’m right, the driver of that car just killed four of Colonel Jeffries’ soldiers and one of Harry’s kidnappers and dumped them and their cars down the mountainside.”
“Hell.” Dale gunned the engine.
“Don’t kill us.” Clay gripped the dash with his right hand and twisted away from the drop-off. Closing his eyes, he tried to think of something nice. Meera.
“Do you want to hold my hand, big brother?”
Clay knew Dale was probably grinning. “Keep both hands on the wheel, you idiot! And look at the road!”
CHAPTER 27
Steel Assassin Page 13