The Hike

by Landon Beach

  Don’t look at the wall.

  -Bonding: must have $10,000 bond or insurance policy: check.

  -Disqualifications: DQ’d if I have committed a felony or misdemeanor involving impersonating a government official, assault, illegal possession or use of a firearm, fraud, selling information or evidence, controlled substances or two or more alcohol-based offenses: check—only one alcohol offense.

  Next!

  -Education and Experience: must have an accredited bachelor’s degree in a field related to professional investigation: check—investigation and security management.

  -Written Exam: No examination required in Michigan: Hell, yeah! Standardized tests can burn there, too.

  Yeah, screw exams.

  -Forms:

  -Application Fees: 750 bones for a license—total bullshit

  -Maintenance: $350 renewal fee—the bastards!

  Go me. I was one sassy lady when I filled this out—oh, right, mom was looking over my shoulder every chance she had. I don’t do nosey!

  -Fingerprinting: have to have it done to be hired by any agency: check, no big deal.

  Done and done.

  Well, whatever the initial reasons were for pursuing a career as a professional investigator, the final and decisive reason was still clear in her mind: She needed to keep busy. An idle mind is the devil’s workshop or some such ridiculousness she had heard in church eons ago. After struggling with establishing a routine when she had retired from the Coast Guard last year, she realized that the saying was a cliché for a reason, the reason being, it was true. She did not do well without structure. After the first week, which felt good because it was similar to vacation—sleeping in, cup after cup of coffee while lounging on the couch in her robe, losing a few mornings and afternoons to the binge-watching of a Netflix show that had been popular while she was still on active duty when she had no time to watch, lunches at a corner café, ordering pizza and wings for a few dinners and washing it down with a good amount of beer, and taking long, hot baths with Epsom salt added—she closed herself off from the outside world—no cable news, newspapers, internet browsing on her laptop, or smartphone use. Her mother did not believe her until Allison added that she had accidentally spilled coffee on her laptop keyboard the first morning of retirement and that her new smartphone had still not arrived, forcing Allison to set up a landline, which, after three telemarketing calls, she unplugged except to give her mother a morning and nightly check-in call. The week had been liberating. It felt good to have no superior to report to, no 4:30 a.m. wake-up time in order to be at morning physical training (P.T.) by 5:30 a.m., no mission to complete, no training cycle to endure, no dive equipment to check, no travel plans obliging her to coordinate bills, yard maintenance, and other details ahead of time, no enlisted personnel or junior officers to mentor and keep in line, and no errands to run—which had always eaten up most of her precious free time. However, she had been shocked at how fast the week had passed by.

  The second week had passed by even faster, forcing her to confront the fact that she was losing weeks to her new sedentary lifestyle. Then, she had stepped on the scale. The eight-pound weight gain was enough to make her abandon her aimless routine and refocus. Additionally, her leg had started to stiffen from not working out. The doctors had warned her that she would need to stretch and exercise the leg at least every other day for the rest of her life or suffer the consequences of immobility and the evils of arthritis. She now believed them. Of course, none of these reasons were the primary reason why she could not afford to remain idle, having days and nights blur together. Those two weeks had brought back thoughts of Keller, which had turned into nightmares involving Keller. She would be back underwater, seeing him look at her wide-open eyes from behind his mask’s tempered glass in the moments before his body blew apart, the great white circling...then she would be awake, screaming, the sheets drenched in her sweat and vanilla-scented perfume.

  She looked up from the screen and over at the picture wall above her couch. Her eyes were watering but not enough to prevent her from making out the dark frame around the photo that, if the overhead light was on, showed her and Keller in full dive gear standing on a dock, ready to jump into the aquamarine water below them. Why keep punishing yourself? Take the photo down and move on. She could not. Her eyes made their way back to her screen, and she dabbed the tears with a tissue as she continued to remember.

  The next morning, she had placed the bedding in the washing machine, set the water temperature to hot, poured in a full cup of Tide Plus Febreze Spring & Renewal laundry detergent, and pushed start. Wearing sweat pants, a windbreaker, and running shoes, she had then exited her house and run a thirty-minute loop, returning home to do push-ups and crunches on the cold grass of her front lawn. That afternoon, she had bought a new laptop and started researching how to become a professional investigator, which was when she had started the list she was now looking at.

  Her cell phone vibrated. Good. She hoped it was some news about her case, but frowned when she saw the number. It was a case all right—the ever-evolving case of her family.

  “Hi,” she said with the slightest hint of annoyance.

  The weathered voice of her sixty-seven-year-old mother, Kathy Rae Shannon, replied, “You comin’ over tonight?”

  “I won’t be able to make it, mom.” Please let this be enough. No third degree, no guilt trip, no smoke and mirrors. “Everything okay?”

  There was a pause. This usually meant some level of disapproval. “You promised.”

  Allison held the phone away from her at arm’s length and exhaled. She counted to three and then brought the phone back to her ear. “I know, but I have good news. I started my first case today.”

  “You just moved in,” her mother said.

  “Yeah, but I work here now, mom.” She swiveled in her chair. “Plus, it’s good that I finally have a case.”

  “Maw-Maw is here, said she wants to see her muffin.”

  Great. The loaded guilt trip.

  Grace Wilson O’Connor, Maw-Maw, was her mother’s mom and the glue that had held their family together through too many unfortunate turns over the years: her older sister Danielle’s pregnancy at sixteen and Danielle’s defiance when she moved into her boyfriend’s apartment, which had driven her father crazy; the loss of her grandfather, Gracie’s husband, a week before Allison graduated high school; the loss of her father when she was twenty-four while on a classified deployment—she found out a week after he had passed away—and, perhaps the most painful, the falling out between her and Danielle after their father passed away. Danielle was twenty-seven at the time and living with a different boyfriend by then, who, out of all of the losers Danielle had been with, deserved his own special all-star loser category. After continually spending most of Danielle’s monthly paychecks on weed, booze, pizza, and the occasional hooker, he had convinced Danielle to angle in for more than her share of her father’s inheritance. When Allison and her mother said no, Danielle stopped speaking to them. Now, she was married to a salesman named Donnie Marvin, and they lived in Toledo and never visited.

  And so, for these and other reasons, Allison was Gracie’s favorite.

  “You’ll have to give Maw-Maw a hug and a smooch for me,” Allison said.

  “She’s worried about you, child. Doesn’t think you’re getting out enough. Gotta find you a man, she says.”

  Allison rolled her eyes. She was doing just dandy without a man, thank you very much. “You tell her I’m fine—been gettin’ out a lot lately.” One half-truth and one lie. Half-truth: She was fine, except when she thought about Keller. Lie: She had not been getting out much. Her only social events in the past few months were the occasional dinner with her best friend and one gathering to play a version of Monopoly where you collected experiences instead of property—and always returned home. No player actually won the game; it just went on until all of the experiences had been collected. Then, the spirited debate would commence about the exp
eriences that the game had left out. There had been coffee—mixed with Bailey’s—and two trays of weed brownies. The coffee had been good; she had passed on the brownies and had won the game. Promises of a rematch had been made, and, surprisingly, she had been invited to play again last week. She had passed.

  Her mother sighed, loud enough for her to hear, and said, “Okay. But you best be here next Friday for my ribs. You’re still too thin.”

  She had won tonight’s tilt. No sense in handling next week’s business yet. “I will,” she lied, and the phone call ended.

  Allison sat back and exhaled. Clear your mind and focus.

  She took in a breath, held it for five seconds, and then exhaled for five seconds. The case. Concentrate on the case. She sat back up and wheeled the chair to her desk where three color pictures sat, retrieved from Conrad Cranston’s phone, that she had enlarged and printed on 8 ½” x 11” paper. She had tried to reach Brad earlier to tell him about the photos, but he hadn’t picked up, and she had left a short voice message. So far, he hadn’t called back.

  She had scanned the pictures earlier but had not been able to study them in detail. Her first impression had been that they were from a vacation Conrad had taken with a current/former girlfriend and were not of much use. Wherever they had traveled to was warm, beautiful, and she wished that she was there right now and not in her new office. The irony of her thoughts made her chuckle. She had just told her mother that she couldn’t join her tonight because of the case, and yet here she was wishing to be anywhere doing anything but working on the case. Shrugging, she turned on her desk lamp and spread the pictures out on the table, then picked up the first picture. It was a close up of a beautiful woman, perhaps in her thirties, with a building that looked like a round American flag rising behind her. She was slender, had silky black hair, and wore a light blue summer dress with sandals. Because of the angle—the photographer must have shot it from on one knee—her head was covering up everything on the establishment’s name after the letter ‘R.’ Whatever the name was, chances were that it was a bar. There were dozens of people holding drinks in the background, standing around or sitting at tables arranged on a porch. Combinations flooded her brain again as they had before: Rudolph’s Bar, Rhianna’s Bar, Rip Roarin’ Bar, Rest Stop Bar, and so on. Pointless. She put the picture down.

  Picture two was of the woman again, but this time she had sunglasses on and was seated on the starboard side cockpit bench of a beautiful sailboat cruising through cobalt-blue water. The woman’s hair was blowing away from her face, and in her hand was a large bottle of Evian. Again, not much to go on. The yacht had to be over forty feet, however, because the angle that the picture had been taken from revealed the sizable distance from the cockpit to the bow.

  Picture three was the same as picture two except that the woman was now seated next to a shirtless man—lean, tanned, blonde hair—wearing sunglasses and red-colored swimming trunks. A pair of black fins lay on the deck next to his bare feet. Was this Conrad or someone else? Either way, there was a third person present who had taken the picture.

  Allison studied picture three for a few moments more. There were no tattoos that could help identify the two people in the sailboat and no markings on the boat that would give her something to search.

  Staring at the woman in the photographs, she played the recording Brad had sent her.

  “Hey, Brad. It’s Conrad. Look, man, I’m in deep here. They’re on their way. I’m at a campsite at Sterling State Park in Monr—um, yeah, I think it’s Monroe. They’ll take or destroy my cell if I have it on me, so I’m putting it in a plastic bag and leaving it in the tank of the left-most toilet stall in the men’s restroom, code’s my birthday—month then year. Look at the pict—”

  Conrad was cut off momentarily by the sound of what, earlier, she and Brad had agreed was an automobile’s horn.

  “I think that’s them. Shit, I hope she got away. Look, just bring a boat. They might be taking me back to—"

  Then came the sound of car doors slamming; again, she had agreed with Brad.

  “God, I hope this is still your home number. Don’t involve the police. Bigtime money.”

  Allison’s eyes flicked back to the picture. “Are you the ‘she’ he’s talking about?” she said aloud, looking at the woman in the photograph.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the ring of her cell phone. It was Mike Martinson, the agency’s cell phone tracking guru, who was a Google software engineer but helped out Michigan professional investigators on the side.

  “Hi, Mike,” she answered, while putting the three pictures back into a manilla envelope.

  “Hey, Allison,” he said. “I’m going to e-mail the file to you with all of this stuff but wanted to call first. Reason is, there’s not much at all. The phone was only activated last week, and there have been exactly three calls and one text message. Two calls were to Brad Cranston—one to his cell phone, one to his house phone. The other was made yesterday to a number that I’ll need more time to track down.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Has this ever happened before?”

  “Usually not,” he said. “I mean, I’m good, but on some investigations, phones and phone owners are harder to track. Like when someone does not want to be located.” He paused. “The one text that was sent from the phone you gave me was to a different number, which is giving me the same problems.”

  “What did the text say?”

  “Three words: Done and safe. Sent at two a.m. three days ago.”

  “Any guesses?”

  “I’d say that the three phones were to be used only for a short time and then destroyed. You see this thing now and again for drug deals or murders. The only reason we’re talking about it right now is because something didn’t go right, and instead of getting rid of his phone, your missing man got desperate.”

  “But why would he take pictures on it?”

  “I never said he was smart,” Mike snickered.

  “True,” Allison said. She wondered if Conrad’s brother Brad would be any smarter. He had sounded somewhat competent on the phone, but the hell with phones. She needed to meet him in person to get a real measure. “His brother is on his way down, and I’m meeting him tonight.”

  “Are you asking me if I’m going to keep working on the numbers this weekend?”

  “Guilty,” she said.

  “Tell you what,” Mike said. “I wasn’t planning on it, but I also don’t like taking a break from a challenge like these other two phones present. I’ll keep at it for a few more hours tonight, and if I can’t crack them, then I’ll pick back up again tomorrow morning.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Whoever Conrad Cranston is, I have a feeling he’s in trouble.”

  “Understood,” Mike said.

  They were about to hang up when he added, “Hey, those photos might not be as useless as you think.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Didn’t you tell me that Conrad told Brad to bring a boat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it might be worth your time, while you wait for Brad, to see if there are any bars within boating distance of Sterling State Park that match the one in your photo. A long shot, but something to do, I guess.”

  Of course, she thought, wondering why she hadn’t made that connection herself. She knew why. Boats and scuba diving: Keller. She had put Conrad’s request for his brother to bring a boat in the back of her mind and left it there. Get over it. You might have to face the water again. “There are worse ways to kill time,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Call you when I have something,” he said and hung up.

  She took a drink of her tea and thought about calling Brad again. No, give him a chance to call you back. She also reasoned that there was nothing about the pictures or text message that he could help with while driving down to her. If Mike had provided information that made the situation more immediate, then, of course, she would have called Brad right away. She decided that if Br
ad called back, she’d fill him in; if he didn’t, then she’d update him when they met at Sterling State Park.

  She set her cup of tea down. Now, about this bar. Allison opened up Google Chrome on her computer—didn’t mind searching for things on her phone but felt more in control with a larger screen. The Google search bar came up, and the great red, white, and blue ‘R’ Bar search commenced. As she began pressing keys, she thought that the odds of identifying and locating the bar were slim.

  She had no idea that the odds would be in her favor.

  9

  St. Clair Shores, Michigan

  4 Days Ago . . .

  FBI Special Agent Patrick Bruno sat in his beloved Irving leather armchair—molasses-colored with bronze nailheads—which had been a present from his wife, Tara, when they had moved back to their hometown of St. Clair Shores, Michigan a month ago from Nashville. He stretched his tired legs—they felt like wet logs—and turned off the lamp next to his chair. The room became an orange and black blur, and he closed his eyes and counted to ten. When he reopened them, he could see out the second-story window into the back yard below. It was after nine, and the sprinklers were twitching away, giving his thick, half-acre carpet of grass an evening drink. He wished he could sit here, watching forever, instead of turning the lamp back on and opening the file folder. It was one thing to fight the mafia on the East coast where he would be taking down men and women he didn’t know. It was another to be in his home town, trying to put away people he did know.

  What if I have to kill one of them?

  Tara’s father was not well, and they had decided to come back home to help her mother. Patrick had been in no rush to ever return to the Detroit area. In fact, the first eighteen years of his life had been dedicated to getting out of Detroit. Why his own parents had decided to remain there was a question that mystified him. However, he had yet to ask them the question. It was nice for his two boys to get to see their grandparents more often, but he had his own reasons for not wanting to return to Detroit. And one of those reasons was in his hand.