Killer Summer (Walt Fleming)

by Ridley Pearson

  3

  From thirty-five thousand feet, the two pivot-irrigated parcels of farmland looked like large green eyes above a smile of curving mountains. Summer Sumner peeled herself away from the window of her father’s prized Learjet to glimpse him across the aisle, contemplating a laptop open on the collapsible mahogany table that separated a pair of leather club seats, each the size of a recliner. His Airphone was pinched beneath his chin. The Lear could seat eight, including Mandy, the flight attendant. Mandy wasn’t on this trip, however, which told Summer more about the family’s financial picture than her father, Teddy, probably intended.

  Summer relished her father’s panic-stricken expression, as he ran his two-hundred-dollar fountain pen across a notepad. He wore his fatigue well; few would have guessed he’d celebrated sixty a few years earlier. The golf tan helped. So did Tanya, his personal trainer. Summer enjoyed hearing the tension in his voice. She turned her attention back out the window, but secretly kept an eye on him in its reflection. “If you know yourself but not your enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.” And he thought she never listened to him.

  “How much?” Teddy Sumner barked into the Airphone. “What exactly are we talking about short-term?” He danced the pen through his fingers, like some kind of circus act. To her, just another example of too much time spent at a desk.

  He dared a look in her direction. She hoped he wouldn’t say anything. She had no intention of ever speaking to him again.

  “Okay, seven’s doable,” he said. “How soon?” He listened for a moment. “No, not possible. A month at the earliest. Sixty to ninety days, is more like it.” He grimaced. “Listen, I would if I could, but this is my last trip on it. Let me get this straight: seven will put a clamp on it. Two-point-two to tie it off ?” He ran his hand across his mouth, a gesture signaling pent-up frustration and potential anger. They knew each other all too well.

  Summer wasn’t about to start feeling sorry for him. He’d explained their financial situation as being “fluid.” But she knew more than she should have: he’d cobbled together some television-commercial work to help pay preproduction costs of a feature film that was never going to get off the ground. He owed payments on several loans, all of them large. He couldn’t face that he was a one-hit wonder. Mastermind had been his only success, and without the foreign box office even it would have failed. Compounding his frustration, no doubt, his wife had started up that film, not him. Summer’s mother had been the successful filmmaker, and she was gone now. Gone for good.

  She squirmed in her seat, wishing he’d allowed her to stay behind in L.A. She’d given in too easily. He had an Eleanor Roosevelt quote for that: “No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.” So when had she given him her permission, anyway?

  “I know, I know, I know,” he repeated into the phone, his unpredictable temper barely contained. “I will, okay? Listen, we’re landing in a minute. I’ve got to hang up.” He paused. “Yeah, okay. You too.” He hung up.

  She braced herself for what was coming. She became his verbal punching bag when things went south, which, basically, was all the time. He would apologize later, as if that made it all okay.

  “So,” he asked, “what do you think? Pretty, isn’t it?”

  She didn’t breathe. She’d not expected a tour guide.

  “Are we going to go through the whole weekend with you not talking to me?”

  He got his answer.

  “It’s not right, not at seventeen. Somewhere inside, you know that. And don’t compare it with my meeting your mother because that was completely different, and we both know it. It was at a country club, our parents already knowing one another, having socialized together. It wasn’t some twenty-two-year-old Brazilian on the tennis circuit. Guys like that, sweetheart . . . that’s not you.”

  But your hooking up with Tanya . . . she felt like saying. What kind of training was she supposed to be helping with, exactly?

  “You’ll like it up here. It’s like Telluride, only . . . better. More to do. Really nice people. And, I promise, there’ll be all sorts of kids around. Everybody brings their kids along on these weekends.”

  She hated him calling her that.

  “I can still get us into the mixed doubles tournament. You know, we can whip some butt with that serve of yours. It’s all for a good cause.”

  She thought it unfair that silence was her only available weapon. No matter how effective it was—and it was effective—she felt robbed of a voice. He treated her like she was still thirteen and that it was still B.C.: before cancer.

  “Don’t sulk,” he pleaded. “Please, Summer, don’t do this. I’ve got enough problems”—she mouthed his next words as he said them—“without you acting like this.”

  So predictable.

  In the world according to Teddy Sumner, she was the cause of everything bad that happened to them. Somehow, he always managed to bring it back around to her.

  Her head slipped too close to the window and her breath fogged the plastic. She doubted it lasted long enough for him to see what she traced into the fog with the tip of her index finger.

  An L ... for Loser.

  4

  Match the hatch. Walt, closer to the bridge now and still knee-deep in the river’s chilly current, tried to fix his eye on any one of the few million swirling insects long enough to snatch it. He swiped his stubby fingers at one and managed to grab it but squeezed too hard and crushed it. Unidentifiable.

  The idea was to match a live insect to a fly in his kit. He considered using the ubiquitous caddis fly but was afraid Kevin would criticize him for being lazy. The cycle of most flying insects included four stages: an emerging stage, where it rose to the water surface as an embryo; the parachute stage, where it opened its delicate wings to dry; the reproduction stage; and then the spinning stage, where it fell, propellerlike, to its death. Not only was Walt matching the fly to the insect species, but was matching it to the correct life-cycle stage. He found the whole process slightly depressing since it served only to remind him of his own life cycle: he’d risen through the water of his youth, lost his mate, stopped reproducing, ending up with two young bugs—twins, no less—to raise on his own. How far was he from the final spinning stage, he wondered, a thought that didn’t preoccupy him but did rear its ugly head occasionally. Like now.

  Beatrice, his two-year-old Irish water spaniel, sat patiently on shore, eyeing the river mischievously, wanting to join Walt if for no other reason than out of obstinate loyalty. Walt told her to stay, and she obediently lay down and crossed her paws. With her moon eyes and forlorn expression, she could, and did, play him.

  Still studying the swirling insects overhead, Walt was suddenly distracted by the rattling of a tow truck crossing the bridge. It had a Taurus on its hook. But what business did a loaded tow truck have heading west out Croy Creek Road? More to the point, the truck wasn’t local—Walt knew both towing services in the valley—which incited his curiosity. There was nothing west of this bridge but a few dozen McRanches and the valley’s animal shelter. What could possibly be the point of towing a vehicle out of town?

  All these thoughts flashed through Walt’s mind as he swiped at another insect. Instead of looking into his hand to see if he succeeded, he eyed the tow truck and its catch.

  He briefly saw into the Taurus.

  It might have been a trick of the evening light, or maybe a reflection in the glass, but the disturbing image lingered: the driver slumped behind the wheel. It was not only illegal but downright dangerous to ride inside a towed vehicle.

  Walt grabbed for the radio and checked in with dispatch. “Have we got anybody in the vicinity of Croy Creek?”

  He had to wait for a response from the dispatcher, the mountains wreaking havoc with radio reception. He headed for the river’s edge hoping to improve communication.

  “Hey!” Kevin complained. “You’ll put the fish down!”

  “Sorry . . . Got to run.”

>   “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “You’re leaving me?”

  Just then, the radio spit static.

  “Negative, Sheriff. No patrols in town at the moment.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Walt called out to Kevin.

  Kevin moved to the opposite shore. “Forget that,” he said. “I’m coming with you.”

  Walt broadcast over the radio that he was pursuing the wrecker, requesting backup.

  “You stay,” he told Kevin. “Maybe with me gone, you’ll actually catch something.”

  Walt scrambled up to the bridge, the waders bulky and awkward. Beatrice, seeing this, sat up, electric with anticipation, her eyes pleading for Walt to call for her.

  Kevin, moving faster in waders than Walt, reached the Cherokee first.

  “No way you’re ditching me,” Kevin said.

  Beatrice trembled at the water’s edge.

  “Suit yourself,” said Walt, grabbing for the driver’s door, “but it’s only a traffic violation, some yahoo from out of town. You’re going to wish you’d stayed here.”

  Pointing back down toward the river, Kevin said, “You can’t just leave the gear.”

  “I can and I will,” Walt answered, stripping off his waders and dancing out of them. He climbed behind the wheel in stocking feet. “We don’t have all day.”

  Kevin stuffed his rod into the back, and climbed in front, still in his waders.

  Walt whistled for Beatrice, who raced to the vehicle, throwing dirt in her wake. She jumped into Kevin’s lap, pressing up against him.

  “That’s her spot,” Walt said.

  “You think?”

  The road ran nearly perfectly straight, due west. Walt worked the Cherokee up to seventy miles per hour, the wrecker now nowhere in sight.

  “We can’t catch a tow truck? You want me to drive?”

  “I’m dying of laughter over here. How ’bout you use your eyes instead of your wit?”

  Kevin kept his attention on Walt.

  “Did you happen to see those pronghorns back at Democrat?”

  Walt glanced at his nephew.

  “They were moving along real good,” Kevin said. “They were up and going before we came along.”

  “What would a wrecker be doing up Democrat Gulch?” Walt asked. “That makes no sense.”

  “Chop shop, maybe? Tow it out there and cut it up?”

  “A Taurus? Nah . . .”

  But a moment later, Walt slowed and threw the Cherokee in a U-turn. He drove off the road and navigated through the scrub.

  “We should have seen lots of dust if they went out there,” he said, “that’s a dirt road.”

  “Not if they stopped somewhere,” Kevin said.

  The ride turned loud and shaky as the Cherokee’s four-wheel drive bit into the dirt road rising up Democrat Gulch. When Walt took the first rise a little hotly, the fishing rod slapped the window frame, and Kevin’s sunglasses flew off his face.

  Walt sensed trouble. The pieces of the puzzle just didn’t fit together: the wrecker coming out Croy Canyon, the person behind the wheel of the Taurus, the wrecker heading up Democrat Gulch.

  Kevin was right: it felt more like auto theft than anything else. But a Taurus? The economy really was tough.

  “You’re going to stay here in the Jeep,” Walt announced, his plan already forming.

  “You keep driving like this, there won’t be a Jeep,” Kevin said, gripping the panic bar.

  Walt slowed it down some for the next hill, not for Kevin’s sake but because the clear Idaho air was faintly clouded by a shimmer of dust. As the Cherokee crested the hill, Walt cut the wheel sharply, skidding to a stop a few feet short of the back of the Taurus.

  The road narrowed here, and though the wrecker and Taurus were pulled to the side of the road they still blocked it.

  Walt spotted two men, one working the wrecker’s hoist to lower the Taurus, the other on foot already fleeing, heading for an aspen grove. Seeing the Cherokee and its rooftop light rack, the other took off.

  The man behind the wheel of the Taurus was either dead or unconscious.

  Walt calmly reported the situation to dispatch, then dropped the mic on the seat.

  “Stay!” he called to Beatrice. “You too,” he added for Kevin’s sake. Then he threw open the Cherokee’s door and hit the ground in his stocking feet.

  He ducked when he mistook a sputter of an engine starting for small weapons fire. Two camo-painted ATVs raced out from the aspen grove and headed away from him. Walt snapped a mental picture, trying to grab any identifying characteristics he could. But the two men had their backs to him, and the ATVs were commonplace.

  He hurried back to the Cherokee, climbing behind the wheel before realizing Kevin’s door was ajar. The boy was curled in the dirt in front of the Taurus’s open door.

  Beatrice was pacing nearby, refusing to go closer.

  She smells something, Walt thought.

  For a fraction of a second—only a fraction—Walt considered pursuing the ATVs. He then held his breath and approached Kevin, the boy’s condition matching the driver’s.

  A lump in his throat, he dragged his nephew away from the scene. He checked Kevin’s pulse and found it steady. He elevated the boy’s feet, wondering what he was going to tell Myra.

  He called for an ambulance and his ad hoc crime-scene crew, including local news photographer and part-time deputy Fiona Kenshaw.

  Far in the distance, a spiral of dust rose like smoke, marking the path of the two ATVs headed north toward Deer Creek Road. He issued a BOLO—be on the lookout—for the ATVs or for a pickup truck carrying ATVs. But, given the few hundred thousand acres of uninhabited wilderness facing him, he understood the ATVs were likely long gone.

  He turned his attention to the Taurus and the wrecker, quickly spotting the gas canister, the tubing, and, climbing under and shutting it off, wondering what could possibly justify such elaborate planning. An attempted kidnapping? Breath held, he pulled the driver from the vehicle and searched for his wallet.

  Randall Everest Malone carried a corporate AmEx, issued to Branson Risk, LLC. He knew about the private security company, it being one of many repeatedly mentioned by Walt’s father as an employment possibility.

  A search of the Taurus revealed a black attaché case handcuffed to the frame of the passenger’s seat. Larger and thicker than a standard briefcase, it featured a thin slot underneath the handle next to which glowed a red LED.

  Government work? he wondered. Corporate securities? In all likelihood a delivery to one of the many financial moguls living a few miles north in Sun Valley.

  He heard the ambulance sirens approaching. He returned to Kevin’s side. The boy’s eyes were open. He was coming around.

  “What the hell?” Kevin said.

  “I told you to stay in the truck.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to help me right now.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “I was trying to help the guy,” Kevin said, now sitting up and leaning on his elbows, pleading his case. “I couldn’t believe you just abandoned him.”

  “I—” Walt cut himself off. He wasn’t going to explain himself. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Head hurts. My stomach feels weird.” Kevin rose higher, from his elbows to his hands, and looked over at the car and tow truck. “What the hell, Uncle Walt?”

  “I think we interrupted an attempted robbery,” Walt said. “Maybe a kidnapping.”

  “Seriously? Like Ocean’s Eleven?”

  Walt didn’t answer. He hurried to the top of the rise to slow down the ambulance, all the while wondering about the contents of the attaché, how much, if anything, Branson Risk would tell him about it, and when, if ever, he’d apprehend the two who had fled.

  5

  Before disturbing it, Walt photographed the scene—including the wrecker and the Taurus. He then lowered the Taurus, hoping Fiona would arrive before the paramedics left. He wanted a
s much of a record of this as possible, and she was five times the photographer he was.

  Malone was coughing while being attended to.

  “Respiratory occlusion,” the male paramedic said. “We can’t seem to stabilize him. We’re going to move him.”

  Malone’s eyelids fluttered, revealing only the whites of his eyes. Even with his mouth covered by the oxygen mask, he was caught in a downward spiral of suffocation.

  Kevin was now on his feet and next to Walt.

  “Can’t they do something?” Kevin pleaded. Tears sprang from his frightened eyes. “Help him! Someone fucking help him!”

  The paramedics moved the man to a gurney. Puffs of fine brown dirt swirled out from under him like smoke.

  Ashes to ashes, Walt thought.

  When the convulsions began, the two stopped the gurney and tended to him. But death was upon him, in its unforgiving way. A series of violent, guttural gasps were followed by an oppressive silence, and he had passed.

  Kevin went quiet, looking on in horror, longing for a PAUSE button that didn’t exist.

  The paramedics, not giving up, finally got the gurney into the back of the ambulance.

  Kevin sank wordlessly by his uncle’s side.

  “God . . .” Kevin finally choked out.

  “Let’s hope so,” Walt said.

  6

  Cantell heard the insectlike buzzing of the two ATVs approaching the rendezvous. He’d parked the Yukon, engine running, on Deer Creek Road at the intersection with Harp Creek. Their reckless speed, along with the fact that they’d been told to keep a low profile, told Cantell all he needed to know.

  Roger McGuiness and Matt Salvo drove the ATVs straight into a thicket of golden willow along the creek and disappeared. They ran out on foot a moment later, frantic and panicked.

  The two piled hurriedly into the vehicle. McGuiness shouted “Go!” too loudly for the confines of the truck’s interior.

  Salvo climbed into the front passenger’s seat and dragged a sleeve across his face, mopping off the sweat and dirt. “Cops!” he said.