The Hunted

by James Phelan

  “How’d you two get my name?” Dylan asked.

  “O’Halloran’s,” Squeaker said. “The owner wrote it down for us long after we’d asked. He trusted us but not others in the room, and he was right about them too.”

  “What’d this barman look like?”

  “Ex-Navy,” Walker said. “Girl riding an anchor tattooed on his arm.”

  Dylan nodded. “Yeah. Okay. That’d be Brian. He knows Murphy. And I know Brian too.”

  “Please, Dylan,” Squeaker said. “This ain’t for us nor you, it’s all for Murphy and his family. He doesn’t know it and I’m sure won’t accept it easily, but he needs our help, and at the very least, he needs our warning.”

  “You tell me one thing, and you be right honest now,” Dylan said, distaste evident on her face. “This thing, this threat of killin’ a man and his family—has it got anything to do with drugs?”

  “No,” Walker said. “Nothing to do with drugs.”

  Dylan looked at him. Then at Squeaker.

  “I’ll gas your bike,” Dylan said. “And draw you a map. And you’ll need to take some food, too, a blanket and tarp, and some matches and fire-starters to make camp, in case you get lost and I gotta go in tomorrow or the next day and rescue your sorry arses.”

  52

  Grant answered his phone on the second ring.

  “AD Grant.”

  “Grant,” Levine said. “We’re closing in on Murphy, and Walker, fast. We’re headed for . . . what’s it called, Woods?”

  “Old Pelts Road.”

  “Old Pelts Road,” Levine repeated. “Should be there within a couple hours.”

  “Send me GPS coordinates once you’re there,” Grant said. “I’ll get that help I mentioned to you asap. They’re already mobile.”

  “Who’ve you got coming, boss?” Woods asked. “Staties?”

  “A good crew, don’t you worry,” Grant replied. “Just check in every half-hour, and when you’re closing on Walker or Murphy, hang way back and let me know, and I’ll have my team of heavy hitters go in and do their thing, copy?”

  “Copy that,” Levine said.

  “Good job, the both of you,” Grant said. “You’ve done in a few days what other agents couldn’t do these past couple of weeks.”

  “What can I say?” Levine said. “When you need the job done, you need a couple of agents with decent pairs of eyes to see what others can’t.”

  “Yeah, decent pairs,” Woods added. “Big hairy ones.”

  Grant said, “Keep me posted.”

  The call ended.

  Levine shot her partner a look.

  •

  Walker and Squeaker followed the road for eleven easy but slippery miles, the hardest part being that the bike’s tires were made for sealed roads—and that was nowhere near what they were driving on. He got the bike up to third gear only once, and that lasted about ten seconds. Old Pelts Road was originally topped with gravel, now in most places washed smooth to the dirt, a type of clay that turned to sticky glue in the damp bends and gullies while the uphill climbs were corrugated and torn to shreds by the rains and whatever trucks used it.

  Walker pulled up the Harley where the road stopped. An old abandoned mine shaft was boarded up. Some long-ago-rusted machinery stood forlorn. Hardwood timber stumps were all that remained of whatever buildings had been here up until fifty or so years ago. There was a clearing amid the old wreckage and newer growth, big enough for Dylan to turn her truck around. Splitting off to the east through the forest ran a track that could accommodate her four-wheeler or a serious off-roader, twin grooves of chunky tires having worn through the foliage.

  “Can we take the bike up there?” Squeaker asked.

  “Yep,” Walker said. “Hang on tight. I’ll have to take it as fast as I can and keep it that way, so that we don’t get bogged down and never get going again.”

  “Good luck with that,” she said.

  “If it tips over, go with it,” Walker said. “Don’t put out a leg or arm to try and stop it—this hog will snap your bones.”

  “What am I, stupid?”

  Walker felt her thighs tighten against his, and her grip on his hips moved so that she wrapped her arms around his waist. He tapped his toes to put the bike into first and gave it juice as he let out the clutch. Soon they were in second and he held it there, keeping the engine revs between five and six thousand RPM, the back wheel zigging and zagging over the broken and slimy track of mud and mossy ground cover.

  The bumps and twists ran through the front shocks and handles and up his arms. The forest around them was quiet but for their bike and the sounds of birds. The bike was loud, the throaty roar pure and genuine. His father had had a similar road bike once, which he’d restored over several years in the garage. Walker smiled at the thought, wondered what had become of it, with his mother having been in assisted living for a few years and his father’s “death.” Should I tell her about him? Walker had not visited his mother, who had dementia, for a year. She had her sister, he knew, who still visited every day. But with every visit he’d managed before he had to leave the country, there was less and less of her present, which he’d never thought possible, for how do you lose more of something that’s already lost?

  Maybe David visits her. She’d be none the wiser. At the funeral, she thought she was just sitting in a park for an hour. He had to take her from the wake early, because she had started to fret and panic.

  Meanwhile, his father had been out there, doing something that Walker himself would do soon after. Fake a death, because of Zodiac.

  He knows about Zodiac because he was there, in its inception. He’s implicated in it all the way.

  But which side will he be on, in the end?

  Then, Walker stopped thinking about anything but riding and applying the brakes. Ahead, the track ended.

  53

  “Can we stop?” Squeaker said, slightly out of breath. “Toilet break.”

  “Sure,” Walker replied. He was tired too, but not from the hike, which had been near-on an hour.

  It was the tracking.

  Murphy was smart. He’d taken many routes from the spot where the off-road-vehicle track ended and Dylan left the supplies. At least four distinct routes set off from that point. Those four soon split into several more, leaving maybe thirty paths in the realm of possibility.

  It was tiring work to keep up, identifying which track seemed the freshest.

  Assuming it was just Murphy making these tracks. For all Walker knew, there could be a few families out here, living in log cabins away from the grind of mortgages and microwaves and the American way, trekking it for that waypoint. Or hunting parties. Or scouts for logging companies. Or Parks people. Or conservationists. Walker did what he could—he took what seemed the freshest, reading signs from the tracks on the forest floor and the occasional broken branch and flattened plant here and there, the wrecked foliage not yet dried up or dying off. Whoever made this track had worn military-style boots, a couple of sizes smaller than Walker’s, but they were deep, the wearer heavy, as he or she walked with a fully laden pack.

  “We’re going to get lost in here,” Squeaker said, having relieved herself behind a tall pine. She crashed down to the ground with a thump onto her butt, chewed a piece of jerky and drank from a water bottle. “Dylan never saw Murphy’s house. Never went beyond that point back there where her four-wheeler and our bike had to stop.”

  “Yep.” Walker hadn’t taken her hand-drawn map, just glanced at it and burned it in front of her. It had a vague indication of when she thought it might be.

  “Yep. We’re going to get lost.”

  “Lost, no.”

  “You really think you can find it? Out here?”

  Walker nodded.

  “Okay,” Squeaker said.

  “Okay?” Walker asked her.

  She nodded. “I trust you.”

  As he helped her to her feet, she fell against him. She looked up into his eyes. “Walker?”


  “Yes.”

  “Jed?”

  “Yes, Squeaker?”

  “Do you think I’m pretty?”

  “Sure.”

  “But?”

  “But nothing. You’re cute.”

  “Cute?”

  Walker nodded. “I’ve told you. You’re too small and too young for me.”

  “I mean after all this,” Squeaker said. “I could come with you, to Philadelphia.”

  Walker smiled. “I don’t live there anymore. Haven’t for nearly twenty years.”

  “Oh. Where do you live?”

  “Nowhere, really.”

  “Everyone lives someplace.”

  “True,” Walker said. “So, I guess I live in whatever place I’m at.”

  “So, where are you now?”

  “Some forest in Missouri.”

  “Don’t be a prick.”

  “I’m being honest. I’ve not lived in the same place since I joined the Air Force. Since then, at least every year, sometimes several times a year, I’ve been in a different place, a different country, living out of a pack.”

  “Sounds . . . awful. A person’s got to have roots. Someplace to settle.”

  “You sound like my wife.”

  “Wait—you’re married?”

  “Separated. Some people have no interest in that kind of life.”

  “Marriage?”

  “Moving around without much notice. Never being home.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Her name is Eve.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “Yeah. Look, besides, you get used to it. The moving around. And doing the job I was in, I never had time to think about it.”

  “Special Operations, for the Air Force.”

  “Yep.”

  “Then the CIA.”

  “Yep,” Walker said, leading the way, following the tracks in the damp ground.

  “And you still traveled a lot,” Squeaker said, “with that job?”

  “Yep.”

  “Doing?”

  “You could say that I specialized in wrecking things.”

  “Like Casey did from his bathtub?”

  Walker laughed hard and loud. “Not really,” he said. “I was working to make our country a safer place, at any cost.”

  “Sounds . . . glamorous.”

  “Sometimes it was, nice hotels and all that,” Walker said, pausing to crouch down, picking up the track again as it turned a hard left. “Other times it was far, far worse than whatever the worst thing is that you can imagine.”

  “Being in the bare mountains of Afghanistan,” Squeaker said. “Hot summer days and subzero winter nights.”

  “Yep. That and then some.”

  “I’ve read a bit about it. And Murphy told me some stories. It sounded like an awful place.”

  “It’s not so bad. Though I’ve got to say, sometimes it’s the funk that’s the worst of it—yours and your buddies’. None of you showered or washed in weeks, hiking with hundred-pound packs day in and day out, feet so blistered you get blisters on your bones. And the worst? MREs.”

  “Huh?”

  “Military food. Ration packs. MREs—Meal, Ready to Eat. We’d often trade with another country’s troops—it was more a novelty for them, getting what’s loosely described as mac-and-cheese, or a hot dog, or apple pie.”

  “I like apple pie.”

  “This wasn’t apple pie.”

  “What was it?”

  “Old Chinese newspapers was a popular guess.”

  They walked in silence for another twenty minutes, Squeaker’s footfalls crashing behind him, her breathing a constant rhythm. Walker knew that she’d be valuable, when they got there. That Murphy would be the hardest of all to win over, for an outsider—that it was then she’d prove invaluable. He just hoped she wouldn’t feel used. Meeting her had been a gift, and he had realized straightaway what her later value would be: an instant in with Murphy. A guy like this, choosing to live out here, was going to take some persuading.

  “Tell me about Eve,” Squeaker said, her tone too casual, as if she hadn’t been thinking about this for the past twenty minutes. She dragged her feet a little as she walked, making a ruckus. “Did you marry her young, before she knew your shitty job, then she divorced your ass while you were overseas?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Something like that?”

  “We got married young,” Walker called over his shoulder. “Separated a while back, when she got sick of my shitty job.”

  “You never settled down, tried to have a family?”

  “That was the idea we had. We bought a place in Texas, where she was from, where I was born.”

  “What happened to that idea?”

  “Zodiac happened. Something went down on an op, then I was forced to live off the grid trying to figure out why it happened.”

  “It?”

  “They tried to kill me, so I played along. I died for a year.”

  “Oh. Right. That makes sense.” Squeaker trudged on behind him. “I mean, no, it makes no sense at all. You died? For a year?”

  “Shh!” Walker said.

  He crouched to a stop. Squeaker did too, behind him. The loudest noise was her breathing through her swollen face. He calmed his heart rate. Closed his eyes. Listened. Movement, through the undergrowth, to his three o’clock.

  54

  Walker listened, hard. It was there, then it stopped. Then it started again. And stopped. Twenty yards away. Something or someone moving across their path, deliberately being cautious, brushing by branches and ferns and snapping the occasional small twig. Not coming near. Not moving further away. Parallel to their course.

  Walker turned silently to Squeaker, his finger to his lips. She nodded, then he motioned with that same finger for her to stay put in that spot. She nodded again. Walker shrugged off his pack and put it down, gently, quietly. He took the Beretta from the back of his waistband and thumbed off the safety, then got to his feet but hunched over, keeping low, under the cover of the thickest of the forest undergrowth.

  Moving as quietly as he could he left the path he was tracking and headed to his five o’clock, to go out and get behind the noise. He stopped three times to get his bearings, making his way closer with every cautious step. Every eight or nine paces he stopped completely. Watched. Listened.

  The sound exploded around him. Fast, frantic movement.

  Something fleeing.

  He caught a glimpse of white tail. Deer. A doe and her fawn.

  Walker stood to safety the pistol, then headed back to Squeaker. He found her sitting cross-legged on the near-invisible track, eating a ham-and-cheese sandwich that Dylan had packed for them.

  “Nice,” Walker said, holding out a hand to help her to her feet. “What if that was a bunch of bad guys and shooting started up and things got crazy?”

  “At least I would have died with a full stomach,” Squeaker said, taking his hand and letting herself be lifted to her feet. “Want some? Ain’t no MRE apple pie, but it’s good.”

  Walker took the offered half-sandwich, shouldered his pack and ate as they walked.

  Squeaker asked, “What was it?”

  “Deer.”

  “Yum.”

  Squeaker was silent behind him but for her footfalls and her jacket catching on branches. Then she bumped into him, because he stopped. He crouched down. She followed suit. Whispered, “Another deer?”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “The track,” Walker said. “It stops here.”

  •

  Menzil told his four-man team to stay in the car. There was another vehicle on scene, and he knew who they were.

  He climbed out and approached the house, a timber-boarded thing that got plenty of upkeep from its owner, one of the more impressive women he’d ever seen: blonde haircut as short as a businessman’s, over six foot, broad shouldered. Standing up there on her porch, looking down at the Federal Agents
standing by their Ford, she looked for all the world like some kind of Amazonian statue.

  Menzil walked over to the two NCIS agents.

  “You must be Levine,” Menzil said to her. “And Woods. I’m Grant’s point man on this. My team’s in the truck, ready to roll.”

  Hands shook. Levine appeared nervous. Woods looked hopeful.

  “Where are we at?” Menzil asked them.

  “We just got here ten minutes ago,” Levine said.

  “This woman refuses to talk to us,” Woods said, not lowering his voice as Dylan watched on. “We’ve asked her all kinds of ways about Murphy and Walker.”

  “She’s said nothing to you?” Menzil said, looking up at Dylan.

  “Nothing,” Woods replied.

  “But she knows something,” Levine said.

  “She may know nothing,” Woods said.

  Menzil looked to Woods. There was something there, he decided, in his eyes, in his demeanor. Woods was trouble. He was the type of agent who would grab hold of something and not let it go. He could be a problem. But Menzil had enough problems right now, and he knew that Woods might still prove useful if this Dylan woman refused to cooperate. It would be good to know that he had these two NCIS agents on hand if he needed them later.

  “Okay,” Menzil said. “We’ll take things from here and close in on Walker, who’s clearly closing in on Murphy.”

  “Is Walker our man?” Woods asked. “Is he the guy who’s been killing all these SEALs?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say anything about that,” Menzil said. He turned to his vehicle and motioned to the others. The four ex-US Army piled out, the SUV riding higher without the 900 or so pounds of flesh and bone weighing down the chassis. The four of them stood around the vehicle, their arms folded, their sunglasses on despite the dull overcast day, their combat boots and black tactical outfits—as well as their shoulder span and chest bulk—displaying that they were a Spec Ops outfit.

  “What unit are you guys with?” Woods asked.

  “Can’t answer that either,” Menzil said. “You know how it is.”

  “No,” Levine said, challenging. “How is it?”

  Menzil smiled at her, then looked to the gravel ground.

  “See that track in the mud?” Menzil said, pointing. “Motorbike. Heavy. A couple of passengers. We know that Walker and Murphy’s cousin were on just such a bike.”