by Bobby Adair
At least she’d dropped off his car.
His ringing cellphone forced him to rearrange his load. He checked the screen to see who was calling. “Shit.” He plugged in his headphones to answer. “Marty?”
“What the hell?” whined Marty. “I’ve been trying to call you all day. Just because you’re back home doesn’t mean—”
“I emailed you last night,” Tommy told him. “I was stuck in Dallas. You know how spotty connectivity is at the airports these days.”
“What? I thought you were direct to Denver.”
“The flight was re-routed.”
“Plane trouble?”
“Air traffic controller strike,” said Tommy. “Or baggage handlers shut down the airport. I don’t know what it was this time.”
“When did you get home?”
“I just stepped off the shuttle.”
“You didn’t hear, then?”
“I’ve been stuck on I-70 for the last four hours. What happened?”
“They impeached Hazelton.”
Tommy laughed because no other reaction seemed appropriate. "Three impeached presidents in three years? What’s it matter anymore?”
“Hazelton is trying to force the Supreme Court to block it and now Congress is talking impeachment proceedings against Chief Justice Reinhold. I tell you, Tommy, this whole country is going down the shitter.”
Tommy knew the sound of Marty’s soapbox when he was setting it up. “Why are you calling?”
Marty huffed. “This stuff affects our lives, Tommy. All of us. You need to pay attention.”
Tommy tossed his bag in the back of his Ford. “Not that I don’t like hearing your voice, Marty, but I’ve been stuck in conference rooms with you and asshole customers for five weeks. I just want to get home and see my wife and daughter.”
“About that.”
Tommy stopped with one leg through the driver side door. “What?”
“Don’t get mad at—”
“We agreed, Marty. The company can lay down whatever rules it wants about my use of social media and I’ll follow them. But those rules do not apply to my daughter.”
“Tommy, I’m not saying this as your boss. I’m telling you as a friend.”
Tommy laid his laptop on the passenger seat and buckled himself in. “You and Emma are on different sides of the political fence and—”
“Stop. Listen to me. I’m telling you, you need to make sure your personal info isn’t out there on the web. Emma needs to be careful about what she posts. I’m hearing things. There’s been violence.”
Tommy started the engine and backed out. He hated the never-ending political circus. He avoided the news as much as possible. But his head wasn’t completely in the sand. He’d heard things, too. Had read them. The question wasn’t which stories were viraling their way through the infosphere, but which ones were true.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Marty, we’ll be fine.”
***
It should have been a ten-minute drive from the transit center parking lot to his house, but some dumbass tourist had managed to roll his car into oncoming traffic. Two died. Five were ambulanced to the hospital, and Tommy idled in the northbound lane for half an hour waiting for the EMTs to finish their necessary duties.
When he made the turn off the two-lane highway, the last of the light was fading from the dirty sky. He navigated the switchbacks through the mountainside golf course community. The higher he went, the more the valley stretched to the south below him. The river wound black and shiny past swampy beaver ponds and low-rent apartments. I-70 cut a garish path directly across the valley. Cars full of Denver’s weekend migrants clogged the westbound lanes all the way up to Vail Pass. On the other side of the highway, Spring Creek’s gridwork of streets twinkled as the night came on. The sparkling constellations of high-dollar ski condos blinked to life up and down the mountain slopes.
Finally pulling onto the dirt pad beside his driveway, Tommy cut the Ford’s engine. He was in his spot, just where Faith had asked him to park. There was plenty of room in the garage for a third and a fourth car, unfortunately, his had developed an oil drip last winter. Faith didn’t want spots on the epoxy-sealed floor inside. Or on the flagstones of the driveway, because they’d been cut by hand in some exotic quarry from some certain color of stone that could only be mined in that one place, and little bits of quartz glistened just so when the sun came up in the morning and—oh, to hell with it all. Tommy never liked to argue with his wife. He parked in the dirt.
Faith had offered to buy Tommy a car that didn’t leak. Something German and expensive. Definitely new. Tommy wouldn’t let her do it. They had a his-money-her-money relationship. They’d agreed on that when they’d married four years back. He’d insisted on it. His debts and liens were his to make good on. And though she could have solved Tommy’s money problems with the stroke of a pen and not noticed the dent in her portfolio, her trust fund was hers to do with whatever people with too much money did.
The house, though, was a compromise. Faith refused to live in the kind of place Tommy could afford, and her parents’ vacation home had gone unused for years with their declining health. Why not put it to use?
But no oil spots in the driveway—one of many Faith-imposed rules.
Tommy punched a button on his remote to open one of the garage doors. He gathered his bags, and crossed those imported flagstones toward a house without a single light turned on.
Nobody home.
Emma was probably out with her friends, because it was Friday and she was in high school, so of course she was. And Faith? Though Tommy didn’t want to admit it, that felt like relief. Things had been so volatile between them these last few months, there was no telling if his homecoming would end in the hot tub with a glass of wine, or if they’d argue all night and he’d sleep in one of the guest rooms.
Entering the garage, Tommy saw Emma’s and Faith’s cars sitting inside. That was odd. A little bit.
He walked past the autos and entered the laundry room, where he stopped and emptied the clothes from his suitcase into the washing machine. He left the bag there. No point hauling it into the house, he’d be repacking it from the dryer in forty-eight hours for his flight out on Monday.
By the time Tommy stepped into the kitchen, his travel mood was starting to fall away, and he was wondering if maybe candles, a romantic dinner, and scantily clad Faith might be waiting out on the deck. When things were good between Tommy and her, they were so good.
A quick glance through the sliding glass doors put that budding fantasy to rest.
Tommy called into the house with no response.
One of Emma’s friends could have picked her up. That would explain her car in the garage. But Faith? Would she have gone for a walk? No. She wasn’t the go-for-a-walk type.
Could she have accepted an invitation to dinner at the Casey’s place down at the end of the cul-de-sac? Maybe.
Faith knew he was coming home. She would have texted him at least.
Too tired to cross through the house to the main staircase, Tommy took the maid’s stairs and came out on the second floor near the master bedroom and his home office. He ditched his computer and changed into a t-shirt along with his favorite jeans. He took out his phone as he headed for the main stairs leading down to the front door and noticed the wifi was out. He depended on wifi for a phone signal because the cellular strength inside the house was so weak.
At the top of the stairs, he stopped.
Moonlight was shining into the foyer through an open front door.
“Faith? Emma?”
A pair of Chinese vases that belonged atop a sideboard in the foyer was on the floor, shattered. A dark splatter of something was smeared on the marble tiles.
Tommy bounded down the stairs, shouting for his wife and daughter.
He hit the bottom, crunching porcelain under his shoes, kicking through stray papers on the floor, and coming to a stop. Dropping to his hand
s and knees for a close look in the dim light, he recognized the splatter for what it was. Blood.
Tommy ran upstairs, shouting for Emma, turning on every light he passed. He fumbled with his phone, yet couldn’t get a signal. He burst into his daughter's room and noticed immediately that her iMac—the one with the giant screen that was a fixture on her desk—was missing. He rummaged to find her laptop. It was gone, too.
He shouted Emma’s name again.
He called for Faith as he ran to the desk where she kept her laptop. Faith hadn’t moved it from that spot since the day she took it out of the box. It was also missing.
That’s when Tommy noticed the media closet off the hall. The door was open. Wires were hanging out. The router and cable modem were gone.
Tommy ran through the house, checking every room on the second floor, and then doing the same on the main level. It terrified him that he might find a body. He double-checked the decks and looked inside the guest apartment in the basement.
He was alone in the house.
The only sign of violence was at the front door. All the computers and related equipment were gone.
Corporate espionage? Could one of his company’s competitors have broken in to steal the latest version of their software?
He tried his phone again. Only one bar and even that was a lie.
He realized he’d never checked the porch or front yard. None of that was visible from the driveway.
He made a sprint for the foyer again and burst out through the front door, having the irrational thought that maybe a bear had broken in and… He didn’t want to finish the thought.
There was nothing in the front yard but tall pines, aspens, gray boulders, and lush flower gardens. No mauled bodies, nothing out of place.
He spun to go back into the house and stopped. The numerals seven, zero, and four had been sloppily painted across the door.
Seven-O-Four?
“What?”
Tommy bolted through the house, flung open one of the sliding glass doors leading to the deck, and ran for the rail. Spring Creek and its cellular towers lay down the valley in direct line of sight, and his phone instantly showed him four healthy bars. He dialed 911.
It rang.
Staring down at the town’s lights, he willed the emergency operator to pick up.
Another ring.
Instead of an answer, a boom of thunder blasted up the valley. Only it wasn’t thunder. It was different in a way that didn’t make sense.
A light flashed bright from a short hill on the eastern edge of town. Two more flashes followed, one from near the highway, and one from the far end of town.
His phone stopped ringing, signal lost. The sounds of three more explosions hit him.
“What in the hell is going on?”
Chapter 2
With no landline and no cell signal, Tommy committed to the first alternative that came to mind. He sprinted across the deck, tore through the house, and raced up the steps. He retrieved his car keys and paused for a moment to think whether he needed to bring anything. No. He bounded down the maid’s stairs, ran through the kitchen, the laundry room, and back out through the garage. His Ford chirped in response to his key fob and he was inside in a flash, not panicked, but riding a wave of urgent rage as he imagined all the things that could have happened.
Still, he had enough presence of mind to know he needed to calm down. If not, he’d more likely compound the problem than solve it.
The problem?
Understatement.
His analytical side was taking over, responding to the crisis, trying to logic its way through the unknowns. Trying ever so hard to ignore the emotions tied to the two most important things in his life.
He took a few slow breaths to clear his head.
It didn’t work.
With jittery hands, Tommy started the car and draped his fingers over the steering wheel.
Breathe.
Robbery and kidnapping?
What the hell? Robbery made sense. Well, some. He hadn’t checked the house for missing jewelry. They had no money under the mattresses. No biometric safe full of gold coins. But why steal the routers and cable box?
Burglars weren’t necessarily the smartest lot.
Kidnapping?
Adjustable rate mortgage payments had ballooned on the back of third-world-level inflation numbers. Two million families had lost their homes in the past twelve months. The real estate market was getting murdered, and unemployment was running in the high double-digits. The lynch-bait Congress, as usual, was so preoccupied with their scorched-earth political game they couldn’t find the time to adjust Social Security checks to keep up with the rapidly rising prices. That left half the country’s seniors starving themselves down to skeletons in line at the local food banks, filling up tent cities in the municipal parks, and dropping dead on the sidewalks when the last pennies from their government checks didn’t stretch far enough to cover their prescriptions.
Kidnapping had never been a successful venture in the US, yet times being what they were, who could say what desperate people would do?
Faith had an enviable portfolio and a huge inheritance not too many years down the road. It wasn’t common knowledge, but anybody in the low-rent apartments down behind the Walmart could look up at the big houses built into the sides of the mountains and brainstorm a scheme to redistribute some mac-’n-cheese money from the fat bank accounts up there into the bellies of their hungry children.
The longer Tommy sat in the driveway letting his imagination rocket his anger into the stratosphere, the more he realized that pushing himself to move was better than ruminating.
He needed information, and he needed the police. That thought alone irked him. He’d kept his nose clean for two decades, but as a young man, he and the men in blue didn’t maintain a friendly relationship.
He threw the car into drive, pulled a tight U-turn on those rare flagstones, and was racing at a dangerous speed by the time he hit the end of the driveway.
Barely three seconds after rolling his tires into the street, Tommy braked to make a sharp right into the next-door neighbor’s driveway. Because of the terrain and distance between the houses, driving was faster than walking. Tommy followed the curve of the drive down the slope. He passed the branch that led to the garage and stopped in front of the house. He jumped out of his truck and ran for the door.
Summer Corrigan, the owner, had divorced well. The house was a modern beauty inspired—apparently—by the architect’s tabletop aquarium. Every wall was floor-to-ceiling glass, leaving the occupants to depend on the size of the lot and the surrounding trees for privacy. From the front door, Tommy noticed a blue glow from a room over the garage. That meant Summer was up there contorting her body through her evening yoga session.
Tommy rang the bell and pounded on the ornate iron door, thinking how ironic it was to have a formidable gate on a house with glass walls.
He pushed the button again, just as Summer’s voice enveloped him. “What’s wrong?”
Tommy looked at the camera mounted above. “Summer, do you have a landline?”
“A telephone? Why?”
“Faith and Emma.” Tommy didn’t know what to say for sure. “The door was open when I got home. They’re missing. There was blood.”
***
Nobody answered at 911 the first time he’d tried. Nor the second.
With the handset held to his ear, Tommy listened to the third ring of his third try as his eyes followed the cord down to the phone’s desktop unit. Another cord fed to a jack mounted in the floor. Rarities from a recent past, things left in the wake of a world racing to a new tomorrow.
A future now full of fright.
It rang again.
The desk on which the phone sat was an eight-foot slab of thick glass the color of a Coke bottle, laid across a brutish hunk of mining machinery the purpose of which Tommy couldn’t guess. Antiques converted into functional art. Expensive, and way out of his bu
dget, like the house and everything else inside it.
Another ring.
Emma’s number had been the first he’d tried. It had gone straight to voicemail. Nevertheless, he’d attempted again. Of course, he had. It was the same story with Faith’s phone.
Another frustrating ring.
Standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling glass wall with a view all the way down the valley, Summer said, “I was upstairs, halfway through my routine, when it happened.”
Tiny blue and red lights flashed by the dozen down in Spring Creek. More were mixed with the traffic on the highway. The sound of sirens rolled up the valley and bounced against Summer’s expensive glass walls.
Tommy’s patience with ringing found its end. He cursed, hung up, and dialed 911 for the fourth time since Summer had led him to the desk. Tommy noticed his fingers were shaking again.
“Terrorists here?” Summer sounded distant as she stared through the window. “It’s surreal.”
“It’s just ringing.” Tommy couldn’t help but notice Summer’s yoga pants were translucent—painted on, as they say—leaving no detail to the imagination. He suddenly felt like he was peeking through her bedroom window. He turned to look over the office’s walls instead. He’d never been in the room before. Indeed, he’d seen little more than Summer’s kitchen, living room, and deck. Summer was Faith’s friend, not his. “Is this where you work?”
Summer giggled with no enthusiasm. “My husband’s office before the divorce. I rarely come in here. Still no answer?”
Tommy shook his head.
“I’ll try my phone.” Summer hurried off. “I left it upstairs.”
“Cellular’s out,” Tommy told her as it occurred to him that she had a home network. Had to have one. Everybody did. “What’s your wifi password?”
She called it out as she ran up the stairs.
Tommy gave up on the landline and keyed the numerals and characters into his cellphone. With access granted, he dialed 911 again. It rang.