The Nightmare Thief

by Meg Gardiner

  “So the real Edge guys, they’ll be looking for us.”

  The river whispered in the background. She looked wired and hopeful.

  “No,” Autumn said.

  “Why not?” Peyton said.

  “Because the hijackers got rid of the team from Edge.” Autumn looked at Kyle. “Back at Candlestick Point you kept calling, and they didn’t answer.”

  Kyle stared at her. He had an intense gaze, his eyes a hard brown with an almost golden ring around the edge of his irises. His gaze wasn’t a thousand-yard stare, but it was depthless.

  “She’s right. They’re toast,” he said.

  Peyton shrank into herself and worried her bracelet again. Autumn’s eyes seemed haunted. A weighted silence pressed on them.

  “But we didn’t show up at the hotel,” Peyton said.

  Autumn said, “We aren’t scheduled to check in yet. Nobody’s looking for us.”

  “But . . .”

  “Peyton, why would anybody search for us in the Sierras? The game’s supposed to be in the city.”

  Jo said, “How long will it be before somebody in San Francisco knows something’s wrong?”

  Autumn looked stricken. “None of our families expect us to call until the end of the weekend.”

  “You mentioned a hotel.”

  “The Mandarin Oriental. But if we don’t show up, they’ll just cancel the reservation.”

  Lark said, “They wouldn’t call the police. That’s for sure.”

  Peyton looked helpless. “Won’t somebody?”

  Autumn turned. Her face was angry, and she looked fed up. “We’ve been abducted. Don’t you get it? They figured a way to grab us so nobody would notice.”

  Peyton said, “You mean nobody knows where we are?”

  Jo shook her head.

  Gabe raised a hand. “Help me understand what happened earlier. You went to the beach at Candlestick Point.”

  Kyle picked up a stick. “Yeah. Then this new gang showed up, wearing ski masks.”

  “They hijacked the Edge Adventures team and then hijacked your group.”

  “That looks about the size of it,” Kyle said. “I thought the trip up here was another twist in an evolving scenario. Coates kept switching things up at the last minute—I figured this was just another curve ball.”

  Gabe held out his hand. “Give me that stick and get yourself a bigger one. Get seven bigger ones.”

  He took out his buck knife.

  “What’s that for, Chief?”

  “We’re not going to sit here unarmed. We’ll carve spears.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Kyle ambled toward the trees.

  Jo said, “They ambushed you at Candlestick Point. Why not grab you on your way to class at USF? Why grab everybody on your birthday party weekend?”

  The wind swirled through the gorge. It was beginning to feel chilly. Jo was beginning to feel chilled emotionally again. Why take the whole party?

  Autumn’s hair haloed in the breeze. “Because the police were informed it was a game. They wouldn’t interfere.”

  Gabe and Jo both gaped. Simultaneously they said, “What?”

  “That’s how Edge runs mock abductions. They call the cops beforehand, so nobody tries to make an arrest.”

  “You gotta be kidding me,” Jo said.

  Autumn hunched into herself. “It made perfect sense at the time.”

  And it had horrific implications. Jo glanced at Gabe and could tell that he was thinking the same thing.

  She saw why the hijackers had grabbed the whole group to begin with. But with Autumn under their control, why hang on to the extra captives?

  There was no reason to keep all of them around. They had been taking them into the wilderness to get rid of them.

  The kids were out of the frying pan, for the moment. But they were skirting the edge of the fire. She didn’t want to state things so baldly, not yet. But she needed to convey her sense of urgency.

  “Nobody knows where we are except us and Von. And if Von climbs the hillside up to the logging road, he’ll flag down his buddies or contact them by phone.”

  Autumn’s shoulders rose and dropped. “What do we do?”

  “We have to contact the authorities.” Jo looked at Gabe. “Somebody has to go for help.”

  Gabe stepped forward. “We’re in a survival situation. So listen up. I’m going to tell you about SERE.”

  “What’s that?” Dustin said.

  “Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape. It’s the military’s survival training. And you’re about to get a crash course.”

  “Out,” Haugen said. “I’m driving.”

  Unhappily, Stringer climbed from behind the wheel of the Volvo SUV. Haugen stalked to the driver’s side, clenching and unclenching his fists.

  “Get in the back,” he said. “Sabine, you ride shotgun. Log on from my phone. Hook up the laptop.”

  He jumped in and accelerated away from the truck stop, tires squealing.

  This should not be happening.

  The Hummer had wrecked. Friedrich was dead. Von had escaped but didn’t have control over Autumn’s group. They were stranded at the bottom of the gorge, but not fenced in.

  He pushed his foot to the floor and raced up the highway, accelerating past eighty, eighty-five, ninety. Sabine reached over and flipped on the headlights.

  “We’re still on schedule,” she said. “Reiniger’s plane won’t land for another hour. We have the initial video and the photos of the Edge game runners. Nothing has changed.”

  “And when Reiniger demands proof of life?” Haugen said.

  “He won’t. Not yet. He’ll be in shock.”

  He slammed his palm against the steering wheel. “This should not have happened.” He glanced in the rearview mirror at Stringer. “Why did nobody predict that these college boys might mount an attack?”

  From the sour look in Stringer’s eyes, Haugen knew he was reading the implication accurately: Why didn’t you predict it?

  Sabine tried to stay calm. “Von is maneuvering into position. All he needs to do is get close enough to see them. He can pin them down. One shot, they’ll hear the echo and dash back inside the limo. They’ll cower.”

  Haugen glanced at her. “Get Von on the phone again.”

  “Why?” she said.

  He shot a hand out and grabbed her around the throat. “Now.”

  Quickly, silently, she grabbed his forearm and dug her nails into his flesh. Hard.

  He let go of her.

  “Both hands on the wheel, Dane,” she gasped. The look she gave him was filthy.

  He put his hands at two and ten. His vision was flashing red. He reached back across the SUV to stroke her cheek, and like a cobra she slapped his hand away.

  “I will tell you why we need to phone Von,” he said. “Because he needs to understand the rules of play. They’ve changed.”

  Stringer leaned forward. “How?”

  “One gunshot, fired into the rocks or the river, will scare these kids back into the Hummer. One gunshot fired into somebody’s head will convince them the risks of escaping are worth it.” He wrung his hands on the wheel. “He needs to save his gunfire for when it counts.”

  He looked again at Sabine. “He needs to wait to kill them until I’m on the scene.”

  “Unless they try to escape,” Sabine said.

  “Unless. Then all bets are off.”

  Gabe stood at the center of the semicircle, all eyes on him. “We survived the wreck, but that’s not even half the battle. To evade capture and escape, we need to know who our opposition is.”

  Jo said, “How many people were in the group that took you?”

  “Five,” Kyle said. “And one was a woman. The two clowns who drove us into this gorge, they wasn’t in charge. Another man was giving them orders.”

  Autumn said, “The tall man who drove the speedboat.”

  Kyle appeared to think about it. He nodded.

  Gabe said, “So we should count on at
least four hostiles coming for us, heavily armed and determined to recapture the group.”

  Everybody looked at Autumn. Thinking: or recapture her and kill the rest of them.

  “The quickest way to get help is to contact the local sheriffs. And we still have to find Jo’s and my cell phones,” Gabe said.

  “On it,” Jo said, and headed for the Hummer.

  “We can’t just sit here,” Dustin said.

  “I’m not suggesting it. Somebody’s got to climb out of here. But we can’t all go.”

  “Then what are you saying, man?”

  “Noah shouldn’t be moved unless it’s absolutely necessary. Peyton, you’re going to have difficulty hiking severe terrain. Ideally, we’d move to a defensible position and get under cover. But for now we stay here and protect ourselves.”

  Peyton looked tired and shaky. “How?”

  “Night’s coming. The temperature is going to drop, maybe below freezing. And there’s a storm blowing in.”

  “You gotta be shitting me,” Dustin said.

  “We can’t build a fire because it would pinpoint our location in the dark. If you brought warm clothes, get them. Put them on, keep them zipped up. Stay dry.”

  Jo circled to the wrecked driver’s compartment of the limo, avoiding Friedrich’s crushed body. The door was open, twisted like a bird’s broken wing. She squirmed inside. The interior of the vehicle had deepened into gray shadow.

  She rooted around. She heard voices in the passenger compartment. Lark and Autumn had crawled inside.

  “You okay, Noah?” Autumn said.

  He rocked his hand side to side: so-so. “Had better days.”

  Lark pressed her lips tightly closed. For a second she looked like she might cry.

  Jo said, “You all right back there?”

  Lark shook her head. “Hardly.” Then she got hold of herself. “But we will be. Right?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  Jo crabbed through the wrecked driver’s compartment, flinching away from broken glass and twisted shards of metal. She sifted through trash and debris until, at the bottom of it, she found her cell phone.

  “Got it,” she said.

  The phone was powered up and didn’t look damaged. She dusted it off.

  No signal. They were too deep in the gorge. She kept looking for Gabe’s cell, but had no luck.

  Autumn was looking around the interior of the Hummer. “None of our stuff is here. They took it.”

  “What about the luggage compartment?”

  A freighted pause. “But . . .”

  Autumn glanced at Jo. Her expression practically begged, Don’t make me.

  “I’ll go with you,” Jo said.

  She climbed back through the twisted door into the cooling evening, and trudged with Autumn to the rear of the Hummer. Autumn opened the latch on the luggage compartment. It creaked open about two feet. Autumn moaned and shook her hands, the universal sign for grossed out.

  The army duffel bag was visible. In the crash, the body had been dislodged and slid halfway out. Jo recognized the outfit the corpse was wearing: the tactical black of the hijackers. She didn’t recognize the corpse. His skin was pale white. A gunshot wound pocked his temple.

  “Just got to grit our teeth and grab any gear that’s back there,” Jo said.

  She knew that what she was asking Autumn to do was tough. But they had not one single second to wallow in self-pity. They had to get on with it. Tough was what they had to be. Some of them were going to have to climb out of the gorge past Von—while it was still light, and he might target them through his gunsight. They had to. Traveling in the dark was a recipe for death.

  Whimpering, Autumn reached into the luggage compartment and pulled out a black sports bag. She stumbled back from the Hummer, shuddering. Dropping the bag, she unzipped it and began rustling through it.

  “What . . . ,” she said, her voice shaky. “What is . . . ?”

  Her chest heaved. “What is this doing here?” She straightened. She looked ready to bite somebody. “Who did this?”

  “Did what?” Jo said.

  Autumn pulled a cowboy hat and a lasso from the bag. “The Bad Cowboy. This is his stuff. What is it doing here?”

  22

  For the tenth time, Evan tried calling Jo. And for the tenth time she heard, The number you are calling is out of range.

  She paced across the motel room. She had sent Jo texts and a photo from Ruby Ratner’s flyer. She had received no reply. She should have.

  Save yourself the work—hire a cowboy!

  Ruben Ratner was a handyman and jack-of-all-trades. The flyer offered his services to haul trash to the dump, set up parties, and teach horseback-riding lessons at knockdown prices. But he had no business license and, from what Evan could determine, no record of ever teaching buckaroos to ride the range. That, she thought, was his mother’s pipe dream, a gleam in her prairie-clouded eye.

  She looked at the other flyer: Mrs. Ratner, dressed in singing-cowgirl garb, with an Indian Chief hand puppet. Evan didn’t know whether she had been hired to perform at a single party. The term buyer beware had never seemed so pertinent.

  It was getting dark. Jo shouldn’t still be out of range.

  Maybe it meant nothing. Maybe Jo was sitting by a roaring fireplace in Yosemite, phone turned off, making out with her boyfriend.

  Except that Jo had said she would check in. Evan pulled up the text messages Jo had sent from the abandoned gold mine. Must take cell to Tuolumne sheriffs in Sonora.

  She phoned the Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Office.

  “Afraid I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” the desk officer said.

  “Could I speak to the senior officer on duty?”

  “That’s me, and I’ve been here since eight A.M., ma’am. Believe me, if anybody showed up with evidence that Phelps Wylie was murdered, I would remember it. And if I didn’t, there would be a record in our log and a cell phone in our evidence locker. There’s nothing.”

  “Dr. Beckett—”

  “I’ve spoken to Dr. Beckett before. She hasn’t been here.”

  Evan hung up, worried. She tried Jo one more time. No luck.

  Grabbing the flyer, she drove to the coffeehouse near Fisherman’s Wharf. The sun was going down. She hoped the place would still be open.

  As she jogged toward the door she saw chairs stacked upside down on tables, and a man mopping the floor. Damn. She rapped on the door.

  The man called, “We’re closed.”

  She cupped her hands against the glass. “I’m looking for one of your baristas—Tina. It’s important.”

  The man leaned on his mop. He looked tired and in no mood to help. Then he turned toward a back hallway.

  “Tina,” he said.

  A moment later, the young woman who looked so much like Jo came out wiping her hands on her black Java Jones apron. When she unlocked the door, her face was perplexed.

  “I need to get in touch with Jo. It’s urgent,” Evan said.

  “Do you need her phone number?”

  “I’ve been calling her for hours.”

  Concern sparked in Tina’s eyes. Then it cooled. “She’s at the Lodge in Yosemite.”

  “Excellent.”

  But even so, Evan began to feel more anxious. If Jo was at the lodge, she presumably had access to a landline. She got the number from directory assistance and phoned.

  The receptionist said, “Ms. Beckett hasn’t checked in.”

  “She hasn’t?” Evan said.

  Tina’s eyes turned wide and shiny. “Maybe they registered under Gabe’s name. Quintana.”

  “Try Quintana,” Evan said.

  “No reservation under that name,” said the receptionist.

  “Thanks.” Evan hung up. “She’s not there.”

  Tina stood worriedly for a moment. “Let’s go to her house. Maybe she left some information there.”

  Autumn held up the cowboy hat and lariat as though they we
re venomous snakes. “What the hell is this?”

  “What’s wrong?” Jo said.

  Dustin walked over and tossed clothes out of the black sports bag. Onto the rocks he threw a gaudy Western-style shirt with red roses stitched across the front. Then a pair of crocodile-skin cowboy boots, dyed sky blue. And a pair of chaps.

  “This is wack,” he said.

  Autumn spun in a circle. “It’s not funny.”

  The others approached. Kyle peered into the luggage compartment at the body. The man’s face was bluish white. Peyton caught sight of it and flinched.

  Autumn shook the cowboy hat in her fist. “This stuff belongs to the Bad Cowboy. It’s a sick joke.”

  “The Bad Cowboy?” Gabe said.

  “Red Rattler. The asshole . . . I hate him. Everybody knows that.”

  Dustin nodded. Peyton said, “We do.”

  Autumn looked pale and fierce in the dusk, her long brown curls swirling in the gusty wind. “Who did this?”

  Kyle turned from the luggage compartment. “Edge Adventures did it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Those clothes, they’re a costume. Edge Adventures supplied them. To me.”

  “Why?”

  “I was supposed to play the role during the weekend. You were supposed to get to confront this character, this Bad Cowboy”—air quotes—“and defeat him.”

  “Are you serious?” she said.

  “Terry Coates, he told me it was a customized element of your reality scenario. You pay to play, so you get whatever toys mean the most to you.”

  Autumn gaped at Ritter and at the cowboy hat in her hands and the lariat. She dropped them like they stank. “How did Edge know about the Bad Cowboy?”

  Dustin said, “Autumn . . .”

  Her face flushed. “Why would he? Why would my dad tell Edge?”

  Peyton rolled her eyes. “Because it’s supposed to be a game. A stupid game, Autumn. Not a phobia. Look at you.”

  Autumn began to blink, rapidly. “This is sick.”

  Jo said, “Can somebody explain?”

  Peyton said, “When Autumn was little she went to a party where this Red Rattler guy was parking cars. He screamed at her when she got too close. He spooked her. He just blew her fuses.”