by Jeff Carson
His sympathy for her was now completely gone. This room right here had to be larger than his entire single-wide trailer, growing up. He’d been locked in a space much smaller than this while Mom had her boyfriends over—never had any television. No plush bed. Just a single piss-soaked blanket, a garbage bag in the corner to crap in, and a dark wall to stare at for entertainment.
This girl had no clue how easy she had it.
Stepping over to the empty glass of juice, he looked over and froze.
Her eyes were wide open, staring into his, right into his soul. She knew his intentions. It was right there on her face.
He swallowed. “I’ll get more juice. You gotta pee?”
She looked at the television.
“Let me know if you do.” He walked out and shut the door behind him.
Leaning against it, he closed his eyes, wondering why his breath was so shaky. He fought back the panic by thinking of Jim—almost two years old and his future ahead of him. Two years old and a psycho killer taking photos of him from a hundred yards away. Oblivious to the danger. An innocent little kid.
Chapter 30
Venus hovered next to the sliver of moon in the eastern sky. The wind outside had cleared the storm clouds.
A snowplow came into the lot and scraped past Wolf’s SUV, rattling the vehicle. Lauren slept on, oblivious to the passing cacophony of sound and twirling light.
He zipped his coat up to his chin, put on his winter cap, and opened the door. The cold pinched his exposed face and hands. Stepping to the front bumper of his Explorer, he stretched his hands above his head and arched his aching back. Moving his foot back and forth, he decided he’ do a fresh wrap on his ankle to see if it eased the nagging pain.
The eastern peaks were silhouetted against an azure sky brightening by the minute. The mountains to the south were dark monoliths looming over the town of Frisco.
Through the trees to his left he saw a piece of Lake Dillon, a flat white plain with a deer trudging through deep snow at its edge.
“David! David!” Lauren was knocking on the window.
Wolf stepped to his door and launched inside. “What?”
The phone in the center console vibrated and rang a shrill tune.
“Okay, okay.” Wolf settled in his seat, shut the door, and handed Lauren the phone. “Here we go.”
Lauren took a hard breath through her nose. “Hello?”
Wolf bent over and Lauren tilted the phone sideways so he could hear out of the tiny ear speaker.
“Rise and shine,” the voice said.
Lauren said nothing.
“Vail Pass just opened. I saw on the news. So get your ass to Rocky Points already.”
“Where do I go?” Lauren looked at Wolf.
“I’ll let you know when you get closer.”
The line went dead.
Lauren handed over the phone. The phone number was different, from a foreign area code. Certainly not Colorado.
He pulled out his own phone and called Patterson.
“Hello?” Her voice was groggy.
“We just got a call from the guy.”
“Okay. Give me the number.”
Wolf gave her the number.
“My God, a fourth number?” She exhaled into the phone, like she was fighting a yawn and losing. “What time is it? Oh, okay, I’ll get on it and let you know what I can find. It might take hours at this point, though.”
“We’re leaving right now.”
She went silent.
There was a voice in the background.
“Is that Rachette?” Wolf asked.
“Yeah.”
“Let me talk to him.”
“Hello?” Rachette’s voice sounded like sandpaper.
“You guys have everything set?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right. We’re leaving now. With the road conditions, we’ll probably be an hour and a half. I’ll be in touch when we get closer.”
Rachette’s breathing accelerated. “Yes, sir.”
Chapter 31
Wolf and Lauren drove in silence for the first thirty minutes—up the winding canyon west of Frisco, past the sprawling Copper Mountain Ski Resort, and up Vail Pass.
Wolf had finished passing another eighteen-wheeler, his eyes glued to the road, his fingers clenched on the wheel, when he noticed Lauren fidgeting more than before. He wondered whether she was going into shock and thought better of asking how she was doing. He knew the answer to that.
They rode in silence for another few minutes, cresting the pass and coasting down the western side. The traffic was thick, the vehicles in the right lane clearing dual tracks down to the asphalt but crawling at an unacceptable pace, so he kept on the icy packed powder of the left lane, making for a demanding start to what was going to be a very stressful day.
“What happens if you guys lose me?” she asked, finally breaking the silence.
“My deputy put a GPS transponder in the car he’s leaving for me. There’s no way we’ll lose you. Plus, I’ll be following you.”
“And if he sees you following me?”
“I’ll be inconspicuous in a civilian car.” Wolf sounded unconvincing even to himself. “And we’ll deal with that as it comes.”
She closed her eyes. “Okay. So the plan is, your deputies are going to leave a civilian car somewhere.”
Wolf nodded. “Somewhere on the way to the meeting place, which we’ll know when he calls again.”
“Okay. So, you drop me off, I get in and drive the car, you follow me in another civilian car to where this guy wants to meet me. When I meet him, if he asks about the car I’m driving, I pretend it’s Keith Lourde’s vehicle. Because I knew my brother didn’t have any snow tires and it would be dangerous driving up in my brother’s car with all the snow coming. So I asked Keith, who’s the CEO of my family’s company, to give me his car …” She looked at Wolf and shook her head. “This all sounds like a lie.”
“It sounds like the truth. Don’t dwell on it. You wanted a safer car. You asked him if you could borrow his. He said sure, here. Done.”
Her chest was heaving as she spoke. “And they leave you a car. What are they going to give you? A bunch of guns?”
“They’ll leave me a rifle just in case, but the plan is to get closer.”
“Meaning …”
“They’ll leave me a lock-picking kit and snowshoes. I’ll have my hand gun and the knife I have on me, and I’ll infiltrate the house.”
She dropped her jaw. “I … wha … so your plan is to infiltrate this house by picking a lock, then sneaking in and taking out two armed men who have guns to my daughter’s head?”
Wolf nodded.
“Jesus … and you can do that? This is something you do? You’re like a one-man SWAT team for your Sheriff’s Department or something?”
Wolf said nothing.
“Have you done anything like that before?”
He nodded. “I have.”
“When?”
“In a former life.”
“In the military?”
He nodded.
She leaned back with closed eyes, the back of her hand against her forehead.
“Lauren, I know you’re apprehensive. By God, I know you are. It’s your daughter. I understand—”
“No, you don’t understand, so don’t say you do.”
Wolf waited for her to sit back again. “But think about it. The guy is giving us no alternatives. We don’t know where this meeting place is going to be. It’s unlikely to be the same place he has Ella.”
“How do you know?”
“Because if I were this guy, a man who’s clearly apprehensive, a guy who wears rubber gloves at all times and routes cell phone calls through foreign countries, I would make sure you weren’t working with the cops before I showed myself. I certainly wouldn’t lead you straight to where I’m holding your daughter without knowing for sure. You had the whole night to make some calls on a payphone, maybe talk to t
he Frisco cops about what’s going on.”
She lowered her hand and looked out the windshield now.
“As far as a SWAT team goes, we don’t have one. So what we could do is bring in a bunch of deputies—some trained better than others in high-stress situations involving hostages. If we do that, bring them crashing into our meeting place, we could spook this guy. If we surround the place and wait for him, he might spot us. You know what he looks like, but we don’t, nor do we know what he’s going to be driving. It’s not going to be the Mackennas’ Jeep Cherokee that everyone’s looking for. He knows we’re looking for that.
“We spook him at all, we don’t find out where your daughter is. Rocky Points is a small town, but not that small. Some houses are miles from one another, out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Okay, okay.” She covered her face with her hands. “So you’ll bring in the cavalry after we’re led to the place she’s being held?”
“If it comes down to it, we’ll bring in the cavalry.”
She opened her fingers and looked at him.
“With this Zeke guy with your daughter, and how unstable he is, I’m not liking the outcome of bringing in the cavalry. The more people we bring into this, the more things can go wrong.”
She dropped her hands and contemplated for a few minutes. “So it’s up to you and your one-man-infiltration plan.”
Wolf’s chest tensed at her skeptical tone.
“I keep thinking that there’s no way he’s going to let us live,” she said. “I can draw him. He’s wearing rubber gloves all the time. Making that Zeke guy do stuff for him. He’s trying to keep his identity hidden. He’s trying to stay invisible from this whole situation. If Ella and I can identify him, then he’s planning on killing us.”
I know, Wolf thought.
He grabbed her hand. “I’m planning on doing the same to him.”
“So wouldn’t it be best to call in the cavalry right off the bat? Otherwise they might be planning on killing us straightaway. If they come in and surround the house, let him know that the jig is up and they know who he is now, then he’ll have no choice but to surrender, or …”
She let go of his hand.
Wolf readied himself to say something, then stopped.
She stared at him, searching his features again like she had on their first date, only this time her face was blank. “I hope you’re fast.”
Chapter 32
Bristol stared at the blip on the map and lifted one earphone from his head, letting in cool air.
“I have to pee!”
He ignored the girl for a few seconds longer, watching as the blinking red dot pulled nearer the section of windy road tagged on the map as Cave Creek.
She pounded on the door.
He pulled off his earphones and walked to the end of the hall.
After he’d unlocked the door the girl exploded out of the room—straight past him and into the bathroom across the hallway.
“What’s going on out there?” Michael Coulter was sitting up, his hair messed on one side, eyes squinting against the morning sunlight streaming inside.
“I’ll get you guys some breakfast. You want some more?”
Some more. Michael Coulter mouthed the words silently and fought the demon Bristol had unleashed with that first euphoric injection less than a day ago.
Michael nodded.
“Yeah?” Bristol gave him a sly smile.
“Yes.”
The toilet flushed and the girl came out of the bathroom, then marched straight back into the room and dove into the bed.
Michael stood from his clump of bedding on the floor and came out.
Bristol handed over the paraphernalia and bag, and then waited patiently while Michael took his fix inside the bathroom. Five minutes later, Michael emerged with paler skin than he’d gone in with and a fresh mosquito-bite-like sore on his arm.
He stumbled inside the room and melted onto the floor under his covers.
“I’ll be back with some breakfast later,” Bristol said, shutting and locking the door.
He ducked into Zeke’s room next. Sound asleep, Zeke looked paler than ever in the natural light. A thin sheen of sweat veiled his body. The room smelled like an animal den.
Bristol scraped together the paraphernalia on the end table and prepared another dose, using the same careful, familiar movements from his years of preparing his mother’s fixes: pour the dope into the tablespoon, crush it into a fine powder with the other spoon, draw the water from the cup into the syringe, add it to the dope, cook it with the lighter, drop the cotton in the spoon, draw the liquid through the cotton ball, hold it to the light.
Staring at Zeke’s arm, he searched for a suitable place to stick him with it and found more scar tissue, black bruises, and scabs than untouched flesh. Finding a tiny portion of blue vein, he pushed in the needle and depressed the plunger.
Zeke cracked an eye and his lips curled into a smile.
It was all Bristol could do to not vomit right then and there. “See you in a bit.”
Zeke nodded and his eyes rolled to the back of his head.
Bristol locked the door and stepped quickly into the living room and back to his laptop.
The blip was a fraction of an inch further south.
With his chores done for the morning, he donned his coat, zipped it all the way, and fished inside his backpack. He dug through the five phones, each numbered with white paint, and found #2 along with the corresponding battery. Pocketing them, he slammed his laptop shut and shoved it into his backpack. Then he grabbed the Toyota key fob from the hook on the wall and left.
Chapter 33
Wolf and Lauren were south of Brushing, driving through the flat, high plateau just north of Cave Creek. The sage bushes dotting the landscape were now white mounds, smothered under a foot and a half of wind-blown snow from the storm.
The sun blazed through the windshield, and since the sodium chloride from the plows had done its job here, melting the snow to the black top in both lanes, it made for treacherous driving conditions. Mist from cars and trucks in front of Wolf hit the windshield, and every few seconds he had to use the wipers with a dose of fluid.
Lauren was holding the phone in her lap and must have felt the vibration first, because she abruptly turned to Wolf and then came a shrill ring. She was mesmerized by the screen. “It’s a different number.”
Wolf flipped off his radio and twirled his finger.
“Hello?”
Wolf glanced between her and the road.
“Okay … okay. No, I haven’t told anyone.” She looked at Wolf. “Okay.”
She ended the call, put the phone on her lap, and looked ahead. “He says to go through town and out the south end. He’ll call us … me … when I’m out and give exact directions to the house.”
“Can I see the phone?”
She handed it over.
Wolf checked the recent-call list. “That was the same number that called you yesterday. The first number … when you were at work. He’s rotated back to that phone.”
Wolf grabbed his phone and dialed.
“Yeah,” Patterson said.
“We just got instructions from this guy. He wants us to go south of town. When we get there, he’ll call with directions.”
“Okay. South of town? He’s at the resort?”
“Listen, he used an old number. He’s rotated back to the first phone he used to call Lauren at work yesterday morning.”
“Yep, here. I just got a notification email and a text message from the carrier.” Patterson paused and exhaled into the receiver. “Okay … I’ll get back to you.”
She hung up.
Wolf lowered his phone and stared out the windshield.
“What’s going on?”
“She’s trying to trace a location on the number.” Wolf pulled behind an old pickup truck and had to endure the spray on the windshield. “He said he’d give directions to the house? That’s what he said?”
“Yeah.” She looked at him.
Wolf hit the gas and passed the truck. “There’s the ski resort south of town, and then nothing but William’s Pass. I guess he’s holed up in a condo at the base.”
“What are you thinking?”
Wolf shook his head. “It’s just a very crowded area. It doesn’t make sense that he’d go to the base, where there are condos stacked on top of one another and a lot of people. Or he could go south of Rocky Points, I guess. To Ashland.”
His phone rang again. “Yeah.”
“Got a real good hit on this one.” Patterson’s voice was excited. “He’s broadcasting GPS and cell. I’m staring at a dot on top of mile marker 211, right there off Highway 734.”
Wolf frowned. “How big a dot?”
“About a fifty-yard diameter. A pinpoint.”
“On Williams Pass?”
“That’s what I’m getting.”
“What’s on the map? What structures? Is that the ranger station?”
“Nope. Ranger station is another mile up the valley, right near the first switchback on Williams. This is just past the resort entrance.”
Wolf stared out the windshield.
“Sir?”
“Okay. Get Hernandez and Rachette out and on their way. Tell them to leave one car at the resort entrance and do a flyby of mile marker 211. Let me know what they see.”
“You got it. They’re out the door.”
Wolf hung up and put the phone in his lap.
“What? You located him?”
Wolf nodded.
“Then what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just don’t know what’s there. He must be planning to meet you on the road and driving from there. Or you’ll drive him.”
“He’s not calling from a house?”
Wolf shook his head. “There’s nothing there.”
There’d been a rock in Wolf’s gut all morning, a sinking feeling pulling down on his stomach. The rock felt like a boulder now.
“You don’t like it.” Lauren was staring at him.