Dare Me Again: A Christmas Chronicle

by Karin Tabke

  She nodded, put the Jeep in gear, and headed for the bridge. Stevie followed in her Mustang.

  Simon stood watching the taillights of the Jeep disappear down the street. “I’m going to kill that motherfucker,” he said.

  Jack grasped his shoulder. “Leave your emotions out of this, Simon.”

  Simon turned and looked at Jack. Since elementary school, they had been the best of friends. They’d gone through boot camp together and jumped together in the army. They’d fought side by side in that sandpit, Iraq. That sense of fear, of knowing they had targets on their backs was nothing compared to the fear Simon felt at that moment. Life without Kat would be the end of his life. It was impossible to keep his emotions out of the equation.

  “Imagine it was Stevie,” he said.

  And he could tell by the look on his friend’s face that he got it.

  Simon picked up his briefcase and headed for the officer who was giving them a ride to the apartment. As Simon slid into the front seat, he pulled his iPad from his case, turned it on, then checked his text messages.

  “Onfario gave me the hookup to follow Scott.” He pulled up the website, downloaded what needed to be downloaded, then logged in with the information he was given by the very accommodating DDA.

  At first the beacon showed inactive. Just as they were being dropped off, and getting into Kat’s car, the little green light that signaled Scott’s GPS signal flashed his location on a detailed grid. “He’s headed north on the Golden Gate,” Simon said. Then he smiled. “Once he hits the Marin County line, he’s violating his conditions.” Simon practically rubbed his hands in anticipation of putting them on the sick fuck. And he would personally do the honors. Even if he had to chase Scott all night.

  “Maybe he knows we’re on to him and making a run for it.”

  “He’s got a damn GPS device strapped to his ankle. He can’t run for it!” Simon said, shaking his head. “Kat always said his test tube was only half full.”

  “He’s making it real easy, isn’t he?” Jack said.

  “Too easy,” Simon said, looking down at the grid.

  As they drove across the Golden Gate, they were forced to slow halfway across. “Damn it, there must be an accident,” Jack said, and he checked his CHP app for road condition updates. “Yeah, damn it, a fatal. All lanes ahead are closed, both directions.”

  Simon slammed his hands on the steering wheel, then checked Scott’s position. “He’s in Tiburon. I’m going to call it in.”

  His first call was to Onfario. “You watching your boy?” he asked the DDA.

  “We’ve got a set of eyes on him.”

  “Then you know he’s in Tiburon.”

  He sighed. “It’s Christmas Eve, West. I’m home with my family, I’m sure someone in my office is on it.”

  “I’m sure someone is on it, isn’t good enough for me, Onfario. So this is how it’s going to go down: I’m working my way across the Golden Gate. And when I get off, with back up from CHP and Marin SO, I’m going to personally put my hands on Scott and hand him over for violating his conditions. When that happens, I’m going to call you while you’re making merry with your family, and you’re going to personally make it your mission to ensure Scott is rebooked and put in a nice miserable cell to celebrate the holiday. Then, and only then am I going to let you enjoy the rest of Christmas with your family.”

  “Then I’ll be waiting for your call, West.” Onfario hung up.

  Simon checked the grid again. Scott hadn’t moved from his previous position near the marina in Tiburon. What the hell? Was he running or getting a bowl of chowder?

  “He’s not moving,” he said more to himself then to Jack. As they slowly inched across the bridge, Simon put the players in place. CHP along with Marin SO was in the area, and had Scott on their radar. He was in a cab, parked down by the marina.

  As they made it off the bridge, the green beacon began to move.

  Jack was in constant contact with CHP and the sheriff’s office while Simon followed the little green dot north on 101. When it began to accelerate, all units went on alert.

  “He’s running,” Jack said.

  Simon gave the car some gas. “He can run, but he can’t hide.”

  As Kat pulled off Highway 5 into a shopping center in southwest Sacramento, she shivered as she got out of the Jeep. The temps had plummeted and a slow steady rain had made the roads slick. She looked up at the darkening sky. She guessed they were just ahead of the heavy stuff. In this weather it would be another three hours to Truckee.

  “Damn, where did this weather come from?” Stevie asked, shivering along with Kat as they hurried into the grocery store.

  “I don’t know, but I hope it holds for Simon.”

  Kat made quick work of her shopping, making sure she got enough to feed four adults in case Jack and Stevie decided to stay. As they loaded up the Jeep, the wind picked up, and icy rain needled her face. “Snow’s coming,” Kat said over the hood to Stevie.

  “Then let’s gas up and get out of here before it gets ahead of us,” Stevie answered.

  Before she turned back on the road, Kat texted Simon that they were on their way.

  He called a few minutes later. “Hey, Princess, drive carefully. It’s already snowing as far south as Auburn. You’re going to get more the further north you go.”

  “Did you find him?” she asked not worried about a little snow.

  “We’re following him. He’s violated the conditions of his release by leaving the city. We’re trying to get to him, but it’s raining hard, it’s Christmas Eve, and the highway is a mess. But we’ll get him tonight.”

  Kat let out a long sigh of relief. “I can’t tell you how much comfort that gives me.”

  “You and me both.”

  “But you have plenty of backup, right? I need you to be careful, Simon.”

  “Always. I love you, baby. Drive carefully and call me when you get up there.”

  “I will, love you, too.”

  When she hit Highway 80, the rain had turned to ice and Kat lost sight of Stevie behind her. She tried calling, but her calls kept timing out. She vacillated on whether to pull over and wait for her to catch up or to keep going forward. The weather made the decisions for her. It was too dangerous to stop. She prayed Stevie had chains, because after another hour she had slowed to a crawl on 80 as the snow began to accumulate. She couldn’t call out her position because she had no cell service.

  By the time Kat got to Blue Canyon, chains were required. Thankfully, the Jeep had auto four-wheel drive and Simon had just put on new all-terrains so she wasn’t required to have chains. But she worried about Stevie. It wasn’t like she couldn’t buy chains—there were roadside stands that sold and installed them. But driving the Mustang in this mess was hazardous, even with chains.

  Kat’s car was stopped and inspected. By the time she was ten miles away from her exit, she was in a long slow caravan of cars and trucks moving at a snail’s pace as the snow pummeled the Sierras.

  The travel advisory was calling for several feet by morning and advising travelers to avoid 80 north of Blue Canyon. She had no cell signal, but she had gas, food, and warmth. Just as she made her exit into Truckee, CHP closed 80 all the way up to Reno.

  Her heart sank.

  The way things were looking, there was no way Simon would make it up for Christmas. And she prayed Stevie had had the good sense to turn around.

  Simon and Jack came up on the cab Scott was in on 101 just outside of Santa Rosa. For officer and civilian safety, they wouldn’t take Scott out on the highway. Instead they followed at a safe distance, until the cab exited several miles north.

  Once the cab had safely exited the highway, CHP moved in, maneuvering the cab off the road into a strip mall parking lot.

  With the vehicle stopped and surrounded, they did a felony car sto
p. After the driver had exited the vehicle, hands up and walking backward toward them, he was instructed to lie face down on the asphalt with his hands locked behind his head and his ankles crossed.

  Once the driver was secured, Simon called for the passenger in the right backseat to exit. When there was no movement and no response, Simon’s heart slammed hard against his ribcage.

  “What is the condition of the passenger?” Simon demanded of the driver.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong!” the driver screamed.

  “What is the condition of the passenger?” Simon asked again, losing what little patience he had left.

  “There is no passenger! A man paid me to drive around with a fake Santa in the backseat!”

  “Fuck!” Simon cursed as he cautiously approached the left back door of the cab. As the driver said, there was no living, breathing passenger, only a life-sized fake Santa with Scott’s monitoring bracelet taped to his black plastic boot.

  The blood drained from Simon’s face. He knew exactly where Scott was.

  Quickly he called Kat, but it went directly to voice mail.

  He called Stevie’s cell phone and got her voice mail.

  He called Jack over. “Fucker followed Kat from her apartment to me, then followed her to the cabin!” He called Kat again, praying to God she answered. When it went straight to voice mail yet again, he left a very precise message for her. “Baby, when you get this, if you aren’t in the Jeep, get in it and go back down to Donner Pass. Go into the grocery store where there are people, and call nine-one-one. Make sure Stevie goes with you. Scott slipped away. I think he followed you. Please, do what I say and call me as soon as you get this so I know you’re okay. I love you. I give you my word by all that is holy, he won’t hurt you.”

  As Simon hung up his cell phone rang. “Stevie!” he said. “Tell me she’s all right.”

  “Simon, we got separated on eighty. They closed it north of Blue Canyon. I think she got through, but I didn’t. I’m at the Sac CHP Garrison; I’m trying to get up there with one of their road crews.”

  Holy fuck. Kat was in the Sierras alone in a freak blizzard with a crazed psychopath.

  It was difficult navigating the mounting snow along the dark mountain roads. The power was out, the streetlights of no use. The cabin was located at the top of a narrow winding road. Finally, according to the GPS, her destination was a thousand feet ahead on the left. As she approached, she let out a small cry as the headlights hit the steep snow-covered driveway that lead to an equally snow-covered A-frame. There was no way she was going to get the Jeep up that drive.

  She glanced down at her cell again. No signal. She looked over her shoulder, debating whether to try and make it back down the mountain to civilization and a landline or suck it up and make a break for the cabin on foot. Under these conditions, Simon would not be getting to her any time soon. She was alone with no cell service on a snow-covered mountainside without any neighbors that she could see. Since the streetlights were out, assuming she even made it inside, she probably wouldn’t have power in the cabin, only the bags of food she’d brought with her for sustenance for Lord knew how long.

  Sliding her hands down to her belly, she said, “Well, kiddo? Flight or fight?” She glanced up at the lovely cabin and the scary snow. “Yeah, my thoughts exactly.”

  It was a no-brainer. Civilization won.

  She put the Jeep into reverse and the wheels dug into the snow, jerking the vehicle backward, but unable to breach the snowpack. Her heart pounded in her ears. Then the wheels began to spin.

  “No, no, Jeep. Please get some traction and get me out of here,” she pleaded.

  Switching tactics, Kat tried quickly shifting from first gear to reverse in order to rock the Jeep back and forth, hoping the inertia would give it enough push or pull that she could get out of the rut she’d created for herself. All the while, the snow continued to fall so heavily all she could see was white.

  After a half hour of trying to get out of the rut, she heard the Jeep starting to make a grinding noise and the acrid odor of hot metal on metal told her the Jeep wasn’t going anywhere. Knowing when she was beaten, she threw in the towel.

  “Okay, Mother Nature, you won that round.” Kat grabbed the envelope with the instructions and key and shoved it down her sweater, then grabbed her coat and shrugged it on, then her overnight bag and one of the two bags of groceries. She’d have to hoof it. And the Uggs she was wearing weren’t the snow-covered-steep-driveway-traction kind.

  When she stepped out of the Jeep, and sank knee-deep into a snowdrift, she realized it didn’t matter if she had on treaded snow boots or not. The drifts were too deep for it to matter. The only way she was going to get to that cabin was one slow step at a time.

  Cautiously, slowly, arduously, with the headlights to guide her, she trudged up the driveway with only a few slips. It was a good thing she wasn’t too far along in her pregnancy, she was a runner and a gym rat, because she was seriously sweaty and out of breath as she made it up the last few steps to the wide front porch. Dropping everything to the porch, she leaned against a support pole and collected herself.

  The snow was coming down so hard and so fast her footprints were already filling up. Digging for the key in the envelope, she prayed it worked. Otherwise, she and the baby were going to become human popsicles.

  Thankfully, the door opened. Letting out a huge sigh of relief, Kat grabbed her bags from the porch and walked inside. In the dim light, she saw a spacious great room with a large stone fireplace on the far wall. Fishing for a light switch, she found it on the right side of the door, and of course when she flipped it, the lights didn’t work.

  “Argh!” She shivered and felt utterly alone. There was no way Stevie was going to join her, nor was Simon. Kat was alone. And she felt more than a little afraid, but grateful Simon was taking care of Evan. There was that one small consolation.

  Pushing the bags farther inside the cabin, Kat used the meager light from the high beams of the Jeep to look for something, anything, to light. Then she remembered Simon’s reminder about the emergency roadside kit in the Jeep. She trudged back down the steep snowy driveway and hauled the kit out from the back of the car.

  “Yes!” she cried as she pulled out a flashlight and fired it up. She grabbed the kit, the other bag of groceries, turned off the headlights, and locked up the Jeep. As she was heading back up the driveway, she could have sworn she caught the flash of headlights down the road, through the thick copse of evergreens. Was there another house up here? She waited for another flash, hoping there was a neighbor with a phone she could make a call from, but was disappointed when there wasn’t one. Maybe she had imagined it.

  Once she was inside the cabin, she locked the front door. Using the flashlight, she found an oil lamp sitting on top of the hewn wood mantel. Breathing heavily from the exertion and feeling more than a little nervous being alone in a remote cabin in a blizzard, she watched as her frozen breath curled around her head. It was as freezing inside as it was outside.

  There was a decent stack of firewood piled in a neat pyramid to the left of the fire screen, but that wouldn’t keep her warm for long. Still, it was enough to get her started. She placed a few logs onto the grate in the fireplace, positioning them carefully, then took some tinder from the open copper box next to the logs and tucked it in. After checking to make sure the flue was open, she used the long-nosed lighter, got the tinder lit quickly, and before she knew it, Kat had a nice robust fire going. She stuck her hands out toward the warmth, feeling pretty happy with her survival skills.

  Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all. Maybe the snow would stop soon and before the snowplows got busy Simon the Invincible would be here. She had food, water, and fire. Once she had the cabin in order, she’d change out of her wet clothes and put the groceries away and make herself at home.

  First she needed mor
e firewood. There had to be more somewhere. She turned, pausing a moment to truly take in the room now that she wasn’t freezing or quite so freaked. It was open, rustic, and very nicely appointed. The eerie shadows of big leather furniture dominated the room, and above the mantel a big bear head snarled at her. Hanging from the wall to the left of the fireplace was an ax, along with a nice looking compound hunting bow and quivers full of arrows slung from a thick wooden wall peg beside them.

  It had been a long time since she’d handled a bow, but she bet if she had to, while she might not be able to hit a bull’s eye at one hundred yards, just like she had in high school, she’d get pretty damn close. Along the side wall was a collection of some of the biggest, baddest knives she had ever seen. As she looked more closely, she saw that they weren’t merely for ornamentation but showed signs of regular use. Same with the bow. Though worn, it was in immaculate shape. Whoever owned the place liked to hunt. Along with the bear head, there was a nine-point buck head, and a nasty looking wild boar head mounted on the opposite wall. She wondered if the heads on the wall were the trophies of an expert bowman? It certainly seemed like a more equitable match. Anyone could aim and shoot a gun and kill something, but it took skill and finesse to hunt down a bear with a bow and hit the mark with an arrow. She wondered how Simon had found this place. It was total testosterone. Perfectly suited for someone like her husband.

  As the fire crackled and popped, Kat looked up the wide stairway to what looked like a loft. Indulging her curiosity, she walked up the steps, stopping at the top. A huge bed took up most of the floor space along with another fireplace, juxtaposed above the one in the great room, tying the chimneys together. She shivered, not from the cold, but in anticipation of wrapping herself around Simon in that big bed with a fire blazing in the hearth.

  But if that was going to happen, she needed firewood! Still using the flashlight, she hurried downstairs and walked toward the back of the great room to the open kitchen. There was a door to the right of the fridge. It led to a covered porch with what looked like a wood pile covered with a tarp.