Killer Summer (Walt Fleming)

by Ridley Pearson

  The shattered Airphone’s LED changed from green to blinking red. They’d snapped off the antennas, rendering the satellite phone and no doubt the plane’s other instruments useless.

  The door lever pushed against her. She kept her shoulder against it. It was the last place she wanted to be.

  More banging around outside. With each sound she flinched.

  He was out there on the wing.

  There was more sound: metal on metal.

  Something was going on out there. She focused. It was coming from the rear of the plane. From . . .

  The emergency exit.

  The same hatch through which she and Kevin had fled the plane.

  Again, the front door’s lever attempted to move. Again, she braced against it.

  But her attention remained on the rear of the plane, where obviously someone was opening the door from the outside.

  She spotted the handheld GPS and radio she had dropped on the carpet. She stretched out and kicked the GPS beneath the first seat. She then hooked the radio with the toe of her sandal, noticing for the first time how scratched up her foot was.

  Keeping her shoulder to the door handle, she saw things get light at the back of the plane.

  Paralyzed with fear, she left the radio on the carpet a few feet from her.

  The plane’s captain stepped into the aisle. He aimed a small but blinding light at her.

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” he said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  The flare gun.

  Her father kept a flare gun for emergencies somewhere on the plane; she’d heard him mention it to William before. The closet briefcase? Had she been so eager to find the radio that she’d missed the gun?

  “Step away from the door and keep your hands where I can see them,” the pilot said.

  “Or else what?” she called out. “I thought you weren’t going to hurt me.”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass.”

  She kept her shoulder against the handle.

  “Too late,” she said.

  If she could get past the pilot, if she could get her hands on that case in the closet, maybe, just maybe . . .

  “I’ll hurt you, if necessary. I saw what you did to . . . to my associate. Now, keep your hands where I can see them and step away from the door.”

  Her knees wobbled, her arms and legs shook, tears threatened once again. She hated herself for it.

  “Do not test me,” the man said, his voice ominous and chilling.

  Summer stepped away from the door.

  71

  Willie Godfrey, a third-generation trust funder who could trace his lineage back to William Brewster, sported a mane of white hair even though only forty-odd years old. Tall and movie-star handsome, he had a larger-than-life persona that was even bigger than his oversized, overaccessorized pickup truck.

  “I can shave a good hour off your route,” he said loudly, drawing Brandon to his side. The two men studied a map under the glare of a mercury light mounted on an outbuilding.

  Walt watched things play out between the two through a kitchen window. Cell-phone and radio coverage having died passing Galena Summit ninety minutes earlier and wanting to preserve every watt of the satellite phone’s battery, he was taking advantage of the Godfreys’ landline.

  He was brought up to speed on events in the valley: the bridge was open to traffic again; no further attempt had been made on the wine, or the armory, or half a dozen other potential targets. Things were returning to normal. His biggest concern, he was told, was the barrage of phone calls from the FBI and Homeland Security, and a growing anger because of Walt’s silence.

  “Sumner?” Walt asked.

  “Hanging around, miserable. He cursed you a blue streak when he found out you’d left.”

  “Remy?”

  “He’s booked and in jail. Since when do we actually lock up a guy like that? Don’t they usually make bail?”

  “It’s complicated,” Walt said. “Back to Sumner . . . His hotel phone . . .”

  “Is forwarded and under surveillance, and his wireless usage is being tracked in real time. We can’t hear conversations, but we know—”

  “The caller ID, incoming and outgoing,” Walt said.

  Sometimes his own staff treated him like he didn’t understand his own requests.

  He considered the delicacy of the Sumner situation.

  “Where have you got him?”

  “He’s turned the break room into an office.”

  “Leave him there. That’s okay.”

  “I have Fiona on hold, waiting to speak with you. Do you want to take it?”

  Walt said to put her through.

  “Hey,” Fiona said.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “I answered your phone,” she said apologetically. “Your office phone. I figured that with you gone and me using your office, if they put through a call it was probably you.”

  “And who was it?” Walt asked, bracing to hear she’d communicated with the FBI or another federal agency, digging him into an even deeper hole.

  “A guy named Bremer.”

  “FAA,” Walt said. He’d dealt with Charles Bremer earlier when trying to make sense of Sumner’s missing jet. “Makes sense. I gave him my direct line.”

  “A plane, a Frontier jet, spotted a fire from thirty thousand feet.”

  Walt caught his breath. “Wreckage?”

  “Just what I asked . . . Too small and organized. More like a bonfire.”

  Kevin? The boy was smart enough to start a signal fire.

  “They eyeballed the coordinates . . . It was definitely in the backcountry. Could have been a rafters’ bonfire on the Middle Fork. But it was big . . . very big . . . maybe too big for that.”

  “A signal fire,” Walt said, thinking aloud.

  “Who do I tell this to? What do I do next? My first reaction was to jump up and tell someone, but then . . . That was something, like, twenty minutes ago, and I’ve been going crazy since trying to figure out who you’d want me to tell. Do we send up a search plane? Does the FAA do that for us? How does any of this work?”

  “You didn’t ask me that,” Walt said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The reason I took off without telling anybody . . . My father knows the SAC who will take this one. The guy’s a wannabe Rambo. We don’t want Kevin caught in the middle of that.”

  “Ah, okay. So . . . ?”

  “You don’t approve of my dodging a potential disaster,” Walt said, hearing it in her voice.

  “When it comes to you and your father? It’s not exactly like there aren’t issues there, Walt, you know?”

  “I’m not doing this for my father,” Walt said, “I’m doing it for Kevin.”

  “And you know for a fact that this SAC is who your father says he is?”

  “No, but—”

  Walt saw his father out the window. He was on the truck’s tailgate, checking out a rifle and a handgun. Would his father lie in order to hold off the FBI and give himself a chance at some fieldwork? Would he put Kevin in the middle of his own ambitions?

  “Christ,” Walt muttered inadvertently into the phone.

  “What do you want me to do?” came her voice.

  “It has to be reported. You’d better tell Brad. But if it takes you thirty minutes or more to get down the hall . . . If you told Brad to call back Bremer and determine the veracity of the report . . .”

  “You want us to stall.”

  “We’re still several hours from the ranch” Walt said. “I’d like to hold off the helicopters and jump squads until I know the situation out there.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “You think it’s a mistake. I can hear it in your voice.”

  “I’m new to all this,” she said.

  “Don’t give me that.”

  “It’s your father,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, still watching him through the glass.

  “I’ll
do this however you want.”

  “Okay, then,” he said, not changing his instructions.

  The line went silent. Neither said a thing.

  Walt didn’t want to be the one to end the call. He felt like he was fourteen.

  “It’s Kevin in trouble, not me,” he said softly.

  “Doesn’t exactly feel that way from here.”

  “About the other night—”

  “What’s interesting,” she cut him off, “is that it’s important to me. You’re important to me.”

  “I handled that all wrong,” he said.

  “Shut up, Walt, I’m not talking about the other night.”

  “But I am. If you were in my position, with Gail and Brandon, the need to protect the girls . . . It gets so you don’t trust anybody or anything.”

  “You can trust me,” she said, he thought rather boldly.

  “I’m beginning to figure that out.”

  “Yeah? Well speed it up a little, would you?”

  “I shouldn’t be smiling with all that’s going down,” he said.

  “Give it a rest. It won’t kill you.”

  Kill you hung on the line between them. He knew what she was thinking and she knew what he was thinking.

  “Okay, then,” he said.

  To her credit, she didn’t get maudlin or overly dramatic, which he’d half expected.

  “Okay, then,” she said, just before hanging up.

  72

  Kevin discovered an attic access hatch at the opposite end of the lodge from the study. Given the change in framing, he believed he was somewhere over the kitchen.

  Whoever had entered the lodge only minutes before was still there. He’d heard an occasional footfall as he’d crept from one crossbeam to the next. The overall silence was uncomfortable. He couldn’t help but think that each might be listening for the other.

  Now the silence was broken by a tapping sound coming from the study. It continued until provoking a response from the hijacker.

  “Whatever you’re doing in there, stop it,” a man shouted. It wasn’t the copilot’s voice; maybe the guy who’d grabbed up Summer. “Any more of that noise and I put a couple rounds through the door.”

  So, he had a gun.

  Kevin used the noise of the man talking to cover the sound of his own lifting of the hatch. It came up easily, issuing a pale light into the attic. He found himself looking down into a pantry closet, its shelves loaded with cans and dry goods. Just inside the closet’s louvered doors, he spotted a bucket filled with cleaning supplies, and next to it a broom, a mop, and a canister vacuum cleaner. There were boxes of lightbulbs and boxes of tape, extension cords, a stepladder, and a toolbox. On the opposite wall was a soapstone sink and a clothes washer.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  “LAST WARNING!” shouted Matt.

  The cowboy was the one doing the tapping, meaning he’d managed to use the knife to free himself. It was either an intentional distraction, trying to buy Kevin time by keeping the sentry’s attention, or it was an effort at escape.

  Kevin had to take advantage of it. He lowered himself down through the hatch, swinging from the opening and catching the toes of his shoes on the lip of the sink. Hands on the walls, he quickly lowered himself.

  He eased the louvered doors open just as the sentry shouted again.

  “I SAID, BACK OFF!” He cocked his shotgun.

  Kevin grabbed a spray cleaner from the bucket. He slipped out into the hallway, crept down it, and looked around the corner and saw the sentry by the smoldering fireplace with his shotgun aimed at the door to the study.

  The ensuing seconds stretched out uncomfortably as Kevin was knotted by a dozen what-ifs, tortured by not having a clue what to do. Finally, his mind made up, he backtracked to the pantry and found a bottle of cooking sherry. He snuck back down the hall, took two steps into the room, and launched the bottle at the fireplace.

  “NOW!” Kevin shouted.

  The shotgun misfired.

  Kevin dove back into the hallway, scrambled to his feet, and ran like hell for the garage. He saw a flash of orange light on the walls that signaled the sherry igniting in the fireplace.

  The shotgun fired a second time. He heard wood peppered right behind him. Some of the shot rolled past his feet, tiny balls no bigger than BBs.

  Salvo narrowly missed being set on fire when the fireplace erupted. He jumped out of the way as flames spit out of the hearth. The rug caught fire at his feet, and he discharged the shotgun wildly in the direction of the kitchen. But then the fire died out as quickly as it had exploded.

  Salvo reacted a split second too late to a noise coming from behind him, and as he turned around he saw the study door open—Impossible!—and a coffee table coming at him at full speed. In an instant he understood that the tapping sound had been the cowboy pulling out the door’s hinge pins.

  Salvo hoisted his shotgun while backing away from the table coming at him. He fell over an ottoman and the shotgun discharged a second time. Dropping it, he then was able to deflect the table to the right and toward the fire, and he rolled that same direction.

  Whoosh!

  A wrought-iron fire poker missed Salvo’s head by inches. He sprang to his feet and grabbed a nearby lamp.

  Another swing of the poker demolished the lamp and broke the index and middle fingers of his right hand. He screamed, jumping back out of the way of a third blow. Retreat was his only option.

  He turned. A wet mist struck his face, rendering him blind and in even more pain. Screaming again, he fell to his knees. He wiped his face with his sleeve but it was no use.

  He heard the cocking of the shotgun.

  “You so much as twitch and I’m taking the side of your face off,” said the cowboy in a low rumbled twang.

  “My eyes!” Salvo wailed. “Help me!”

  “What was that stuff ?” the cowboy asked.

  “How the hell would I know?” Salvo shouted. “Fuckin’ help me!”

  “Toilet-bowl cleaner,” said a second voice.

  It was the kid. But Salvo couldn’t see him, couldn’t see anything.

  “Hands out,” said the cowboy to Salvo, “flat on the floor.”

  Salvo sagged forward.

  “Get a wet towel,” the cowboy said to Kevin. “There’s some rope in the shop . . . not the climbing rope. Bring it here—”

  A few minutes later, Salvo was gagged and tied on the study floor. The cowboy tied the last knot and led Kevin into the living room. He extended his hand, and Kevin took it.

  “Kevin,” he supplied.

  “John,” said the cowboy. “Your friend?”

  “Gone,” Kevin said. He yanked back the tarp in the shed only to find her missing.

  “I know the season, son.”

  “Her name is Summer. We were on the plane together. It’s complicated.”

  “Gone where?”

  “Dunno. Just gone. It’s her jet . . . her father’s. She was supposed to wait here for me.”

  “Mistake number one: don’t ever expect a woman to do what you think she’s going to do. Mistake number two: don’t ever tell her what to do because that’s a surefire way of making sure she doesn’t.”

  “You’re making jokes? She’s out there . . . They could have her.”

  “If they had her, then who lit that fire? Ever shot a rifle, son?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Follow me.”

  Five minutes later, Kevin and John were armed with the shotgun and the rifle, respectively. John got them flashlights, two-way radios, and a large handgun for the small of his back.

  “Pulling the door like that . . . You could have gotten yourself killed,” Kevin said.

  They had gone out a back window of the lodge and up the rocks, a route John knew from repairing the roof. They had a bird’s-eye view of the dying fire and the flickering orange woods beyond. They tucked in behind a stone chimney that Kevin immediately recognized as an elevated, well-fortified, defensible position, so
mething that obviously hadn’t just occurred to John on the spur of the moment.

  “You ever play poker, son?” John asked.

  “No, sir, not so it counts.”

  “When they showed up, they were unarmed. If there was any time to produce a weapon, it was then, and they didn’t. So by the time that one was in the living room and I heard him cock the shotgun, I figured it had to be my twelve-gauge pump. And I knew something he didn’t: because we’d had some guests up to the ranch not two weeks ago with three kids under nine, none of them three rifles was loaded. I’d emptied ’em all myself. We keep the ammo in the study, so I had it in there with me. They had the big guns, leaving the two pellet pushers: the over-under twenty and the twelve-gauge pump. Both were loaded with bird shot. Did that myself. We had a murder of crows waking up guests at five in the morning with their damn squawking. Flying garbage men, is what they are. Been using the bird shot to discourage them . . . Not that I’d shoot a crow, because that’s illegal.”

  “But bird shot—”

  “Would sting a bit but wasn’t going to kill me.”

  “But if it didn’t turn out to be your shotgun?”

  “But it was. That’s where gambling comes in, son. Chance is nothing but a balance of risk to reward.”

  In the silence that followed, they both heard voices filtering faintly through the trees.

  “That’s coming from down below,” John whispered.

  “The jet.”

  “They wouldn’t be shouting at each other, not unless they’re short a few cells.”

  “Summer.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m going—”

  But John had him by the arm. His grip was like a vise.

  “Number one: this is my ranch, in a manner of speaking. So let’s get straight right off the bat that I’m calling the shots. Number two: I served my country, served it well, so experience is on our side. I promise you, the only war these guys have seen is in movies. Number three: they got my sat phone and busted up my radio.”