The Nightmare Thief

by Meg Gardiner

  “Step one—acceptance. I’m proud of you, Peter.”

  Sabine frowned at him. Don’t toy with Reiniger, the look said. He ignored her. This was the culmination of years of planning. It was a moment to be savored. Sabine could fret about the problems up the road. He deserved this moment.

  “Now. Step two. You won’t call the cops, or your kidnap insurers and their security Neanderthals, because if you do, the rest of Autumn’s companions will die.”

  “You can’t kill them.”

  “Do not interrupt me. Autumn’s companions will die first.”

  He paused to let the statement sink in. “I don’t believe that you have a moment’s concern for Autumn’s friends. You wouldn’t care if Lark Sobieski or Noah Holloway died in a private rescue attempt, as long as Autumn came home.”

  He slowed his speech. Modulate, he told himself. No vocal inflections, no clues. Just the plain facts.

  Sabine tapped her watch. Cut it short. He couldn’t risk the chance that Reiniger had, despite his orders, alerted his corporate security team to find Coates’s phone. He needed to get off the line. And then to toy with Reiniger some more.

  “But if I spot the FBI’s hostage rescue team preparing to deploy or even some steroid-juiced bodyguard getting ready to storm in and rescue your daughter, I will execute the rest of Autumn’s companions one by one. She’ll watch. And I’ll tell her it’s your fault.”

  Reiniger didn’t respond.

  “And if Autumn comes home after being liberated, it won’t be for long. My operatives will find her. They’ll kill her. And they’ll do it while you watch.”

  He let Reiniger think about it.

  “Still considering?” Haugen said. “I don’t think you want the SEC to start digging around in your business doings, either.”

  “Bastard.”

  Superb.

  “What do you want?” Reiniger said.

  “I’ll phone back in half an hour.” He allowed himself the smallest of smiles. “When I do, be sure you have a pen.”

  24

  Jo walked to the back end of the wrecked Hummer, where Autumn and Peyton were piling up survival supplies.

  Two lighters. Half a dozen plastic water bottles. A case of Budweiser.

  It was a start.

  The wind gusted up the gorge, rushing through the darkened pines and shirring the dark steel surface of the river. Peyton sat down on a rock. Hunched over, in pain, she looked bedraggled and small. It made her look younger, emphasized her nerves and fright.

  “When it gets dark, predators’ll come out,” she said. “Maybe cougars.”

  Jo had wilderness experience, thanks to years of rock climbing and backpacking trips in the Sierras and Cascades. Though it was nowhere close to Gabe’s training, she knew the basics. She knew that things could go wrong at the snap of a finger and that nothing should be taken for granted. Life and death were only fragile, irrevocable breaths apart.

  And she knew that there were real, and tough, psychological aspects to survival in a wilderness emergency. Gabe knew it too: He’d been trained to recognize it in himself and his men and women. But he was busy taking care of perimeter defense. Jo kept an eye on the roiling emotions around her. Pain. Thirst. Cold. Fatigue. Isolation. Fear.

  Hopelessness.

  “Cougars are highly unlikely to attack a group of people,” she said. “They—”

  “Scorpions. Snakes. They crawl into empty shoes and sleeping bags. Don’t say it’s unlikely—when I was little I almost got poisoned by a rattler on a family camping trip.”

  “We’re going to stick together and keep our eyes open. We’ll protect each other,” she said.

  Gabe came up behind her. “Worrying about everything?”

  “Of course. And, yes, I have read the U.S. Air Force survival manual.”

  Autumn said, “Anything we don’t have to worry about?”

  “Shark attack,” Jo said. “We lucked out there.”

  Peyton pulled on a lock of her blond hair and wound it compulsively around her finger. The movement hurt her fractured clavicle, and she grimaced. “I can’t believe this is happening to us.”

  “You were expecting an extreme reality experience, right?” Jo said.

  Autumn glanced at Jo and actually laughed. “And now we’re getting it.”

  “Yes. Though you should ask for your money back.”

  “But you weren’t expecting any of this,” Autumn said.

  “No.” Jo nodded toward the limo. “Bundle up and get inside the Hummer.”

  Peyton just sat on the rock. Her eyes were glossy. “We’re going to die.”

  “No. We’re going to get out of here if it’s the last thing I do,” Jo said.

  “Like you guys are the X-Men? Give me a break.”

  “Hey, Peyton?” Autumn said. “Shut the hell up and get in the Hummer.”

  Peyton didn’t cringe, but she frowned, intensely. Good, Jo thought. Get her mad. That was better than caving in.

  “I’m the queen of the weekend,” Autumn said. “Your ruler and your bad boss. So move your pretty pink ass.”

  Peyton stood and headed for the limo, picking at her charm bracelet. Jo looked at Autumn and thought she seemed taller than she’d first imagined.

  When Peyton neared the Hummer she turned her head to avoid looking at Friedrich’s corpse. Jo girded herself. They had an unpleasant task to take care of.

  “We should move the bodies,” she said.

  Gabe nodded. Autumn and Lark looked nauseated. But the idea of huddling in the Hummer, surrounded by brutalized corpses, was too gruesome to contemplate.

  The four of them dragged Friedrich, and then the man in the luggage compartment, away from the vehicle—far enough that getting back inside the Hummer no longer felt disgusting or ghoulish.

  “Thanks,” Jo said.

  The girls didn’t reply. They clattered across rocks and sand to the river, crouched down, and scrubbed their hands, arms, faces, furiously. Jo and Gabe were right behind them. The cold bite of the water felt more than cleansing. It felt emotionally necessary.

  Jo dried her hands on her jeans and checked the time. It had been twenty minutes since Dustin and Kyle struck out across the river.

  “Time to cross the river and try to get a signal on my phone. Don’t know how much elevation I’ll need. Wish me luck.”

  Gabe looked unhappy. “Be careful.”

  She found a spot upriver where the water streamed over the granite like glass, only an inch deep. She crossed to the western bank and darted into thick brush. The last embers of daylight painted highlights and shadows on the steep slopes of the gorge. She scanned it, looking for movement, for color, for flashes of metal. If Von was out there, he was concealed.

  She glanced back across the river. Gabe waved.

  Beneath the trees, she climbed in shadow up the hillside. Keep going. As long as she kept moving she could suppress her fears.

  She climbed a hundred meters and crouched behind a gray boulder. The sky was indigo with the last brush of daylight. But thunderheads were stacking ever nearer, and dusk had drawn a gray veil over the gorge. She pulled out her phone, cupped her hand over the display to hide its light, and pushed a button. The display popped on, hot blue in the twilight. Searching. The wind buffeted the side of her head.

  You weren’t planning any of this.

  How had she and Gabe ended up here, on this mountainside, in such straits?

  Life was riddled with accidents. Chance was a fearsome force in the cosmos. She believed in free will and relished her own patch of accountability, her ability to grab the throttle and adjust course, even in a quantum universe. However, this accident didn’t feel entirely random. This felt like a collision of loaded dice on a craps table. But she couldn’t see who had thrown them.

  One bar on the phone. She had a signal. “Yes.”

  She held the phone gingerly, as though it were a tiny bird’s egg with a fragile shell. She didn’t want to adjust the angle of the
antenna and lose the little symbols on the display. She dialed 9-1-1.

  Call failed.

  “Dammit.”

  She had to get a stronger signal. Tucking the phone in her back pocket, she scurried up the slope, around worn rocks and the rough bark of tree trunks. Pinecones crunched beneath her hiking boots. The thin, cold air caught her as she climbed.

  Halfway up the slope she ducked behind another boulder. She crouched with her back against the stone. It was cold, rough, solid. Birdsong had died and all she could hear was the water rushing in the river below.

  She took out her phone. Heard it ping.

  She had a message.

  Gabe stood on the riverbank, scanning the far side of the gorge. He could no longer see Jo.

  Autumn, spear in hand, walked over. “Something wrong?”

  “Can you spot Jo?”

  Autumn walked upstream. After a minute, she pointed. “Behind that rock.”

  Gabe relaxed, but not by much.

  Autumn peered up the hill. “Should I keep her company? Buddy up?”

  He turned to her in surprise. “Good idea. As long as you stick together.”

  Autumn found the inch-deep granite pan and splashed into the river.

  She had a message. No—messages. That meant she had a signal. Delicately she tried, again, to call 9-1-1.

  Call failed.

  The signal had vanished. She moved the phone around. Nothing. She leaned her head back against the rock.

  If there was any chance of getting a stable signal, it would be at the crest of the gorge. She would have to keep climbing.

  She opened the messages. The first was from Kyle Ritter:

  Made the ridge, got signal, but sketchy. So far only texts going, no voice calls. Will continue. See lights downhill to west.

  She wrote back:

  Halfway up slope, will follow.

  She tried to send, failed, and left it in the queue.

  The next message was from Evan Delaney.

  Evan.

  Jo hadn’t checked in with her after forty-eight hours. Maybe, please—maybe Evan was pissed off and trying to reach her.

  Found owner of Recent Call number from Wylie’s phone. BAD NEWS. Ex-con, violent. Name Ruby Ratner. DANGEROUS. CALL ME

  Her heart pounded. A lead. They had a lead in the murder of Phelps Wylie. But that didn’t matter to her at the moment. She tried to redial Evan’s number.

  Call failed.

  She stood and kept climbing. Was her phone damaged after all—could it receive calls, but not make them? It pinged again with one more message from Evan. She ducked low and stared at the display. And stopped.

  She tried to calm herself, told herself she was seeing things in the dusk, that the shock of the day’s events was causing her to misunderstand.

  She began to run up the slope. She wasn’t mistaken. This was too much of a coincidence, and she didn’t believe in coincidence. Just nasty, colliding chance.

  Past rocks and trees she ran. Her lungs burned. The wind kicked against her, and the first drops of rain pattered through the pines and hit her face. Two hundred yards above her, the hillside peaked.

  No signal.

  The message Evan had sent her was a photo. Taken from Evan’s own phone, it was an image of Ruby Ratner. It had been taken from some kind of cheesy flyer.

  Red Rattler! Horseback riding/roping lessons. Former Pro Rodeo Circuit cowboy.

  Sucking air, she reached the crest of the hill. She aimed west, in the direction Dustin had gone, at a run.

  Evan had sent her the photo of a man in a cowboy hat. He had a white circle around the blue iris of his left eye. It looked like a white snake. He was grinning like the Reaper.

  It was the Bad Cowboy. It was Kyle Ritter.

  25

  Dustin trudged behind Kyle, hands stuffed into the pockets of his sweatshirt. The wind had turned cold. His entire body felt bruised from the crash, and his hangover was pounding.

  “I’m sure I saw the light over there. To the west,” he said.

  The shadows were gone, flattened by the dusk and the lowering clouds. Rain speckled his face.

  They were headed southwest, on the downslope about a mile past the crest of the gorge. The pines were thinning out. As the first fat drops of rain pinged to earth, the smell of dust sharpened in the air.

  Dustin began to jog. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s it. That’s west, right?”

  Kyle kept walking, eyes on the horizon. He took off his baseball cap. “That’s where the sun went down. So, yes.”

  Dustin gained speed on the downslope. He broke out of the trees into an open meadow. Ahead he saw something better. A barbed-wire fence.

  He ran toward it. “Private property. Somebody lives here.”

  Kyle called out from behind him. “Slow down. This could be the Ponderosa. We might still be ten miles from somebody’s house.”

  “What-a-rosa?”

  “Bonanza, for God’s sake.”

  Reaching the fence, Dustin ducked and climbed through. A barb caught and tore his sweatshirt, but he didn’t care. He ran across the meadow. He knew he’d seen a light someplace on the far side, farther down the hill.

  Halfway to a copse of yellow cottonwood trees, he heard the cows. Mooing.

  “Hey,” he called, though he knew hollering at cows was stupid. Cows wouldn’t help him. Behind him Kyle laughed, like he was a dope.

  But cows didn’t stay out all night, did they? Didn’t they have to go back in the barn? And they didn’t have cattle GPS. Somebody had to . . . to . . . round them up.

  “Hey,” he repeated.

  Behind him, Kyle whistled, like he’d put two fingers to his teeth. Dustin glanced back. Kyle was pointing south.

  A man on a horse was riding across the meadow.

  Dustin’s heart kicked. “Over here.” He waved wildly and sprinted toward the stranger.

  The man on the horse wore a tan cowboy hat and black down vest over a denim shirt. He came toward Dustin at a trot. When Dustin got within a hundred yards, he saw that the man had on rawhide gloves and a scowl. And that he had a shotgun slung next to his saddle.

  Dustin raised his hands. “Man, we need your help.”

  The horseman pulled back on the reins and turned his mount sideways to Dustin. “Is that right?”

  “We’ve been in an accident.”

  The man hauled out the shotgun. “First, tell me what you’re doing on my land.”

  Jo was blowing hard when she reached the top of the ridge. Through the pines, the wind gusted and rain spit cold against her face.

  She looked downhill for any sign of Dustin and Kyle. The forest was too thick. She looked at her phone. Still no signal.

  Her skin was creeping. Kyle Ritter was without doubt Ruby Ratner. Ratner was the Bad Cowboy. Kyle had lied about his identity.

  Evan’s text warned that he was a dangerous ex-con. Jo could read between the lines: He had been involved in the death of Phelps Wylie. His phone number—there on Jo’s display, with his text message to her—matched the number in Phelps Wylie’s Recent Calls list.

  Stop, Jo. Think. Why had Kyle texted her? Did he want to draw her away from the safety of the group? Maybe. But Dustin was in imminent danger. She had to find him and get him away from Kyle.

  And she had to warn the rest of the group and get them to safety too.

  But without a phone signal, all she could do was queue up text messages, and hope she would pass through a zone where a cell tower might pick up her signal and shoot them off.

  Hands shaking, she punched the buttons on the phone.

  To Gabe:

  DANGER Kyle IS bad cowboy, LINK TO WYLIE. Must move group ESCAPE.

  Though she hadn’t found his phone, maybe he had in the time since she’d left.

  She had no mobile phone contacts for the Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Office, and she couldn’t text 9-1-1 for local emergency response. She frantically texted the best cop she knew.

  HELP. Hijacked o
ff state logging road near mile 92, E of turnout for mine trail. Crashed, in gorge. Hostiles armed, coming. TRIANGULATE.

  She addressed it to Lt. Amy Tang of the SFPD.

  Message failed. She told the phone to keep trying. Send the damned thing. Take wing, whenever, soon.

  She put the phone in her pocket and ran down the slope, toward a thinning in the line of trees.

  Dustin stopped in the field, chest heaving, hands raised. The man on the horse sat in the saddle, one hand on the reins, trying to keep his horse from wheeling. He continued to aim his shotgun at Dustin.

  “What are you doing on my property?”

  What was this, a scene out of some old Western? “We were in a crash, a couple miles from here, into this river. People are hurt. We need the cops and an ambulance.”

  “How’d you get here? Didn’t you see the fence?”

  “Man, that’s exactly why we’re here, because we saw your fence. It’s civilization. Sorry I’m tromping on your cow pasture, but my friend’s been shot.”

  The rancher’s horse sidestepped and tossed its head. “Shot?”

  Kyle stepped forward. “Sir, I apologize for Dustin here. He’s been through a real trauma.” He pointed at the Edge Adventures logo on his hat. “I work for an outfit that takes people on adventure outings in the backcountry. Bunch of college kids with me today, and basically we got carjacked. The vehicle’s wrecked in a gorge over those hills to the east, and people are hurt. We need law enforcement in significant strength and rescue evac.”

  Kyle’s eyes were bright and intense. With his hands in the air, he looked like a supplicant. Dustin nodded in agreement with him.

  “So frog march us to your property line if you want. Have your horse there kick our asses halfway back to San Francisco. Hell, invoice Edge Adventures for your time tonight. But once you do all that, phone for help, ’cause otherwise a bunch of folks is gonna die.”