Alive and Killing (A David Wolf Novel)

by Jeff Carson

  In the end, it wasn’t one of the drunken hormone bags in the dorms that had hurt her, had been the second man in her life to shake her to the core. It had been an honest-to-God madman on campus. The kind of thing you hear about on the news, and flip the channel, or tune out, because it’s just too bad to listen to.

  She’d been on her way home from the library late one night, and a man with a red ski mask had jumped out of the bushes, and attacked her in the lawn of the Geology building. For thirty of the worst seconds of her life, she’d kicked and screamed, and was overtaken, and beaten into a quiet haze she could scarcely remember then or now. Luckily two tennis racket-wielding seniors were walking by after a late match, and saw it happening. When the blur of evil was off her and gone, and she woke up in the hospital the next day, she’d found out that the guy hadn’t raped her. At least that had been something. But he’d stripped her naked, and pulped her face to the point she couldn’t see out one of her eyes for two weeks. That was something, too.

  That something, her second mental tormenting, triggered the beginning of what she referred to as the lesbian period of her life. She knew it was a misnomer. Sure, it was a drastic change of lifestyle that she underwent after the attack, but not so far as she made out with other women. In truth, that image repulsed her now, as it had then. Instead, she’d just dressed the part, wearing baggy flannel and corduroy, cut her hair butch, and done anything to repel a member of the opposite sex .

  For the remainder of her college career she kept a stiff-arm against the opposite sex. And for the remainder of her college career, she built herself a strong fortress around her brittle, shattered inner self. Starting with martial arts training four nights a week her sophomore year, she gradually became stronger inside, as well as out, and by the time she was done with college, she was a black belt in Karate, had majored in law enforcement, and felt the most self-assured she’d been since her father had left those few short years ago.

  For the third, and final blow, she’d finally dropped her lesbian façade and opened herself up to love a man. Brian had been a different sort of guy, charming and funny, and showed his abrasive side only to the worst of people that deserved it. A real looker. The whole package.

  She’d turned him down for months at Quantico, where they’d met, and when they found themselves stationed together in Chicago, she decided she couldn’t fight him any more. She decided she didn’t want to. After a couple years of dating, they’d built a “solid” relationship, and despite the entirely unique pressures of them having the same high-stress, high-pressure job of being FBI Special Agents, they’d gotten married.

  Nowadays, she was disgusted by the thought of her “first love”. Because she’d been the one who’d let the man in. It wasn’t her father leaving, or an attack out of the blue, it was she who had done it to herself. She’d invited him into her life, despite her instincts telling her not to, and watched as he screwed around on her, humiliating her in front of her entire field office in Chicago. It was disgusting to think about—her naivety in thinking a man could be a source of joy in her life.

  Luke thought of these three men at various times in life. It was her past, and was what had shaped her into the special agent she was now, and every once in a while these three men would loom big in her mind.

  But since she met David Wolf, these three men seemed to flash in her brain every minute. It was her instincts talking to her, and she was listening. Wolf was big trouble. Not in the truest sense of the word—trouble. Not like, he was into holding up people at the ATM and doing drugs kind of trouble. He was just, trouble for her.

  But she also knew her troubled past wasn’t doomed to repeat itself, and she was finding Wolf to be a man she wanted to confide in. She was at the end of her rope, and the truth was getting too big for her to handle alone. There was something about Wolf, and though he could definitely be bad news, it sure seemed like he could help, too.

  As they sat in The Mountain Goat Bar and Grill, eating their late lunches, she watched Wolf shovel food in his mouth in silence. After completely humiliating her in the alley a few minutes before, calling her out, now he sat with seemingly infinite patience. He wasn’t pushing her, not asking a single thing. Letting her start.

  So she did.

  “I’d already risen rank under my married name, Luke, and,” she shrugged, “I didn’t want to screw with anything, so I kept it, rather than changing it back to Richter.”

  He looked up from his burger. “Ah okay. To come to Glenwood Springs? Is that considered a step up from Chicago?”

  Luke laughed. “Yeah, I know. Not exactly the biggest career move. In hindsight, I guess it would’ve just made sense to drop the name.” She took a sip of her drink and set it down. “I guess that leads us to the second point.”

  “And which point is that?” Wolf asked.

  “Why I moved here. I wanted to keep an eye on my mother, her, and Wade Jeffries’s sister.”

  Wolf narrowed his eyes, “So you had met the Jeffries mother and sister before.”

  “Yeah. Seven months ago, when my brother died, or went missing. Or…anyway, I came home for my brother’s memorial service after he disappeared. Then after that I went back to Chicago, and I started doing some digging into my brother’s death, talking to a few contacts I have in the CIA. They said they were in Tora Bora, the caves where they were looking in for Osama bin Laden when the war in Afghanistan started all those years ago.”

  Wolf nodded and looked at his plate.

  “You know the area?” Luke asked.

  “Yeah, I’ve been there.”

  “Then you know. That was the battle of Tora Bora, what? Over a decade ago? And my brother’s up there with his team still blasting tunnels? Why? Didn’t you guys get all that done back then?”

  Wolf shrugged. “In theory, it doesn’t make sense that they were there.”

  “That’s what my contacts said. The whole team shouldn’t have been there.” She shoved her plate to the edge of the table. “Anyway, I came back home for vacation, a few months after my brother’s service, and went to go talk to Wade Jeffries’s sister. I don’t know what I was looking for, other than just someone to talk about it, I guess. About how strange the whole thing was. I didn’t know if maybe she had some knowledge about the whole thing. Maybe a letter from her brother before he’d disappeared, or whatever.

  “And what I found was his sister was acting strange. Like, real strange. She was hiding something, no doubt. I asked her if she’d heard anything from her brother before he went missing, and she said no. But she was lying, plain as day. Her mother was even worse when I asked her. It was so strange. These two were acting like they were covering for Wade. Like he was hiding behind the door the whole time when we were talking, or something.”

  Wolf raised his eyebrows and took a drink of his Coke.

  Luke played with the straw in her own drink, thinking about the way Julie and Wanda Jeffries had broken out in a sweat when she’d asked them about him.

  “And?” Wolf asked, showing his first sign of any impatience.

  “I left.” Luke shrugged. “And then hacked into their emails.”

  Wolf nodded appraisingly.

  “And I found an email buried in Julie Wade’s deleted folder that caught my attention. It said, Don’t worry, I’m still alive, I’ll see you soon. No signature, no nothing.”

  “And the email address?”

  “It was from a generic-named account, like Ed12887, or something like that. But I looked into it, and it was an account created two days after Jeffries and the rest of my brother’s team went missing, created from an IP address in Kabul, Afghanistan.”

  Wolf narrowed his eyes and nodded. “So, it stood to reason, if Wade Jeffries was still alive, which it looked like, your brother was still alive.”

  “My brother was the EOD team leader. He was in charge of where these guys went, what they did.” Luke’s eyes gushed without warning. She realized she hadn’t told a single soul what she’d
been thinking for over four months, not even her older brother, and now that she shared her secret, her burden, a flood of emotion surged through her.

  “So, yeah, he’s gotta be alive,” she wiped her tears, “Gotta be one of these men. And shooting at Sheriffs and their little boys. And killing people. Innocent women.” She shook her head. “God. Dammit. I can’t believe he would…” She screwed her eyes shut. “That’s what I’ve been trying to hide. I knew my brother had to be involved in this, and I just…”

  When she opened her eyes, Wolf stared back at her with a relaxed gaze. It was an unreadable expression that made her uneasy.

  “I don’t know,” she continued, “I thought I could buy some time, and find him, and get him to stop whatever the hell he’s doing. My little brother always listened to me. I was the reason why he was in Afghanistan in the first place. I pushed him to go, and he did. I know you probably hate me, and want to just about kill me.”

  Wolf sighed and looked past her.

  “I’m sorry,” Luke said.

  Wolf put his elbows on the table, and looked vacantly at the walls. “I guess I see where you were coming from. I had a brother once too, and I would have done anything for him. And I probably would have been itching to kick his ass, alone, if it looked like he was going around killing people.”

  Luke sniffed in response, unsure of what to say.

  “There’s only one thing. Something that doesn’t add up.”

  Luke tilted her head. “Yeah?”

  “The guy I killed at the fire. That wasn’t your brother, or any of the other men on his EOD team that disappeared that day in Afghanistan.”

  Luke frowned, and remembered the description Wolf had given on the trail that day they’d met. Wolf had said the man he killed had had red hair, or really light blonde, with a mouth full of moles. It had startled her to hear that then, as none of the men on the EOD team could have possibly been mistaken to look like that. They all had dark hair, brown, or darker, dark eyebrows, and most definitely did not have moles on their faces.

  “Are you sure?” She asked. “The guy didn’t just have some scabs on his chin, or his lips?”

  “No. The guy had moles. I was only inches away, and I saw them clearly. No mistake. And I remember faces, especially the ones I shoot with a .45 in front of my son. And none of those four faces I saw was the guy I killed at the fire. And…” Wolf let his thought trail off.

  “What?”

  “I just don’t get why they’d fake their own deaths, and come home. What’s in it for them? A life of dodging civilization? A life of dodging any of the people you used to know? And I keep thinking about Jeffries, when we saw him on the trail. He had some serious equipment in his backpack, like bomb material…or something. What was he carrying? Why was he running?”

  Luke turned around in her seat and waved her hand for the check to the bartender.

  The man behind the bar was sweaty and pale, like he wasn’t feeling well at all, but he immediately responded with a nod and walked their way.

  “Thanks,” she said when he dropped it off, then she turned to Wolf. “I think I may have the answers to those questions.”

  Wolf wiped his hands on his napkin. “Oh? And what are those?”

  She scooted out of the booth and put on her jacket. “I need to show you.”

  “Show me what?”

  “Something that came to my house a few days ago.”

  Wolf looked like he wanted answers, but once again he kept quiet and stood up and followed her out the door. That patience of his was becoming irresistible to Luke. And now she was bringing him home. Trouble, she thought one final time as they left The Mountain Goat into the cool drizzle.

  Chapter 33

  Rachette stood in the doorway of a large merchandising tent and looked outside at the steady rain. It wasn’t raining hard, but it was relentless, and it’d been going for two hours now.

  He sipped on a Styrofoam cup of coffee and looked out at Patterson, who had just returned from her secret errand for Wolf, and was now walking with Jack and the big guy from the GSPD, Richter, toward the stage. Jack and Richter were enthralled with a story Patterson was telling with big hand gestures, and they were all laughing. Probably telling a story about how Jack Nicholson had once come to dinner at her house growing up, and pissed in the houseplant.

  “Officer Rachette,” a nasally voice snapped him out of his daydream. Rachette turned to find Charlie Ash.

  “Hello, sir. How are you doing today?” Rachette held out his hand, trying to contain the surprise in his voice, and his movements. He’d spoken to Ash once before in his life, and was sure he’d made zero impression the new chairman of the town council at the time. Now he was coming up behind him and using his name, like an actual acquaintance.

  Ash ignored Rachette’s hand, or he needed a new set of glasses. Rachette suspected it was the former.

  Ash was the same height as Rachette, which was to say he was shorter than average, and Rachette was fine admitting that. His neck had a stoop, reminding Rachette of a vulture, and he wore a red Rocky Points Music Festival baseball cap over his bald scalp. His eyes were intelligent, the color of the gray sky above, behind expensive looking gold-framed eyeglasses.

  “Where’s Mr. Wolf this afternoon?” He asked, still yet to make eye contact with Rachette.

  “I’m not sure where the Sheriff is at the moment, sir,” Rachette’s instincts were telling him to lie, which would somehow protect Wolf. Ash seemed like a slimy individual.

  Ash finally turned, catching Rachette in the middle of his scrutinous glare, then swiveled and looked out toward Patterson, Jack, and Richter. “I didn’t know the RPPD offered babysitting as a service. That’s a new development I’ll have to discuss with the Council. Maybe a new revenue stream. We could put out an advertisement.”

  Rachette took a sip of his coffee in response.

  “What do you think about the new recruit, Officer Rachette?”

  Rachette raised his eyebrows and nodded. “She’s good. Sharp.” Rachette knew full well Ash’s son had been thrown out on his ass after his interview, and Ash would have to be pretty bent out of shape about it.

  “Well, she’s signed the contract, but it still needs final approval.” Ash sniffed and sipped his own cup of coffee.

  Rachette frowned and flicked a glance at him. “I thought you needed her to be hired to get grant money from the state.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I admit.” Then he tilted his head. “Or, we could have promoted an officer up to sergeant. We would have gotten the same grant money that way. Ratio of commanding officers and subordinates,” he waved a hand, “or some bureaucratic stipulation I can’t remember exactly. But we left that decision up to Sheriff Wolf. And he chose to go with the new hire, instead of,” Ash looked over at Rachette and slapped his shoulder, “pulling those up the ladder who lifted him there.”

  Rachette frowned and looked outside at Patterson, and then back at Ash. He felt his face getting a little hot, and wondered just what the hell Ash thought he was doing, driving a wedge in between he and Wolf in such an unsubtle way. It was ridiculous, and childish. And yet, the sliver of doubt was inserted into Rachette’s mind, and was already working its way deeper. If what Ash was saying was true, why wouldn’t Wolf promote Rachette? Hadn’t Rachette proved himself over the last two and a half years on the force? Maybe not, maybe Rachette was expecting too much in such a short amount of time.

  “Well,” Rachette said, “I’m sure Sheriff Wolf knows what he’s doing.”

  Ash blew out of his nose and brought the coffee cup back to his lips, as if to catch any spittle that might fly as he almost chokes from laughing.

  “That’s one way to put it,” Ash slapped Rachette on the shoulder, turned around and walked back toward the racks of clothing and volunteers setting up tables of merchandise. “I’ll see you around.”

  Rachette didn’t bother replying. Prick.

  Rachette turned and walked outside, and the drizzle c
ooled his hot cheeks. Patterson turned and waved at Rachette, and Rachette gave a little nod in return, wondering just what she had been doing for Wolf, and why he couldn’t have been the one doing it?

  He shook his head and poured the rest of his coffee out. It hissed and exploded into a small cloud of steam.

  Prick.

  Chapter 34

  Wolf checked his wound underneath his hooded sweatshirt as Luke drove them south through town on Grand Avenue. The bandage had a large patch of maroon underneath where he felt his cut, and he hoped it was still stitched together. Now, when he moved his arm, there was a short stab of pain followed by a long, echoing ache to the bone.

  “Sorry about that,” Luke said, keeping her eyes on the road. Wolf swore there was a hint of a smirk on her face.

  He touched the bandage with his index finger, then checked the sleeve of his hoodie. It had a small crescent moon of blood seeping through the dark blue.

  “I have some first aid stuff at home,” she added. “We’ll check it out, and redress it.”

  He nodded and zipped up his sweatshirt. “We need to talk to the GSPD, see what they found on the casing and soil samples.”

  “Here,” she passed him her phone. “You can use mine. Look up GSPD.”

  Wolf navigated through the menus, found the number, and dialed it up.

  It rang twice and a woman’s voice answered. “Glenwood Springs Police Department, how can I help you.”

  “Could I speak to Sergeant McCall, please?”

  “One moment.”

  The phone clicked and a soft music played for a few seconds, then clicked again, and the woman came back on. “I’m sorry, Sergeant McCall isn’t answering. Can I transfer you to somebody else?”