by David Dun
"Janet."
"I did you a good turn. Can you do me one?"
"As long as I don't have to kill anybody," she said, staring at Corey's bloody arms.
"You don't. I still need my videotape."
"That's all you're going to do?" Jack asked.
"Absolutely. We better check the bitch."
Corey was shocked when she opened the interrogation-room door and found the empty chair.
She walked back across the barn to Jack and Janet. ''Jack, did you let her go?''
"Not me."
The German had to take some satisfaction in this turn of events, but he did not smile.
Corey tried to think. They were surrounded by forest. She couldn't be far. But now they couldn't stay here.
''Jack, you and Janet deposit the German in my basement. I've got handcuffs, a place to cuff him. Take him while I chase down the bitch." Then she proceeded to explain in detail what she wanted and how to get into the basement room.
"Why don't you just shoot me now?" the German asked as Corey pushed his head down to stuff him in the back of the van.
"You won't be that lucky."
Before he could say more, she sprayed him full in the face with pepper spray. He lay on his side, emitting muffled groans. She slid his hood over his face, then reached in his pocket, found a wallet and a card.
"What a dumb shit, a wallet with ID. I'll be damned. I thought you looked familiar. You're Hans Groiter, the security guy for the Amada corporation. Shit. Unbelievable.
"Tie his feet tight, Jack, and don't forget to stack some straw bales in front of the cabinet that leads to the room. It's in the cellar, right where I told you. Don't ever take the wire off his neck. Control him with it. And you know whose side you're on?"
"I'm a dead man if we don't deal with this dude," Jack replied.
"I'm real happy you figured that out."
"I want him dead, but I don't want to do it."
"That's my job. And remember those videotapes of your farm and family."
Jack nodded.
"Now let's you and me go back in the barn and make sure all the physical evidence here will incriminate him. This card will come in handy."
A minute later, Corey walked out of the barn, the Colt AR-15 strapped across her back. After popping the Spaniard in the head with the German's fancy Heckler amp; Koch, she left the bloody hulk sitting in the corner and began her search for Maria Fischer's trail.
It took Corey only minutes to find the hole in the barn and the small trail leading away from it. Reaching the fern patch, she saw the disturbed foliage and began following what she hoped was Fischer's escape route. Halfway through the ferns, she heard the helicopter. In minutes the area would be crawling with police. The adrenaline surged through her body and she let herself become the hunter-every scent, every folded leaf, every impression in the ground, held a meaning.
She had to silence Maria Fischer.
Listening to the tap and hum of the big twin turbine-jet helicopter, Dan watched the mountains roll underneath. Sitting next to him was a young officer they called Shane. Curly blond hair framed intense blue eyes that seemed to take in everything. The guy was slender but strong and fit. When they couldn't get Kier Wintripp, a Tilok Indian from the next county who was evidently on his honeymoon in Hawaii, they got Shane.
Next to Shane sat Sergeant Frank Spinoza, a dark-haired man with a reputation for grim determination that often irritated the sheriff but usually resulted in a conviction. Squad cars were to arrive in thirty minutes, but Shane and Frank were authorized to go in if it looked manageable. The highway-patrol copter would go in first. Dan was to remain in Otran's chopper with the pilot until the all clear was given and under no circumstances was the aircraft to enter a live fire zone. The rules were irritating but unavoidable.
Upon arriving, they circled with the highway-patrol chopper. No vehicles were visible at the farm. Staying back about 300 yards, they watched the California Highway Patrol (CHP) copter land.
"We're down and taking no fire," the CHP radioed.
Frank nodded at Otran's pilot.
"We're coming in," the pilot said.
In seconds they were on the ground.
"House or barn first?" Shane asked Frank.
"Let's knock at the house first."
Dan watched them head out, impatient to look around but constrained by his promise to stay. On the front porch they drew their revolvers while the CHP headed toward the back door. No one came to the door. Dan watched them try to open it. Locked. In a couple of minutes the CHP opened the front door. Obviously, they had walked in the back.
"No one home, but two cars in the carport," Frank said over the police radio as they exited the house.
"Ground to Helo," Shane said.
"Helo here," the pilot said.
"Any signs of life?"
"Not yet."
"Stick around. We're going in the barn."
After what seemed like minutes, the radio crackled.
"Come on in," Shane said.
Dan jumped from the copter, his heart in his throat. At the door he slowed.
"Careful," Frank said. "There's no Maria Fischer so far, but it's a murder scene. Don't touch anything. Don't step in anything. You shouldn't even be in here." Frank walked ahead, nodding at the body in the corner.
Dan involuntarily began to retch.
"Somebody castrated him."
"They did more man that. Cut off everything down there. Not to mention his eyes."
"Anyone home?" Frank shouted again. He received no reply.
"Look at that," Frank whispered, nodding at the hangman's noose and the two concrete blocks, bathed in bright light.
''Somebody built themselves a special little room," Shane said, entering what looked like a giant plywood box. It was crude on the outside, but Dan marveled at the finish work within-Sheetrock, carpet, the large two-way mirror. And a single chair. Cuffs on the ground. Blood. A lingering odor-pepper spray.
"They had her in here, I'll bet," Shane said.
Dan went back out and to the other side of the mirror.
The camcorder, mounted and ready to record, sat beside the huge recliner. A single bottle of German beer sat by the chair with no more than two or three swigs gone.
"We'll print it all," said Frank.
Shane nodded, analyzing the scene.
"Maybe they were interrupted," Dan said.
''Why would anybody want to go to this much trouble to interrogate Maria Fischer?" Frank asked.
"I would guess because somebody wanted to know what she knew about a lot of things."
"Like what?"
"Turning trees into gasoline, toxic ponds, stuff like that. And maybe somebody wanted to know if Patty McCafferty was selling favors to the timber industry."
"Can they really turn trees into oil?"
"Price is the issue. It can be done, though. In twenty years it'll be commonplace."
"How do you know about all this?"
"Seems Ms. Fischer and I are a nosy pair." Dan looked at the empty interrogation chair, the bloody cuffs. He bit his lip and offered a wordless prayer that she had escaped.
There must be something, some kind of clue, he thought, walking out of the room and along the perimeter of the barn. Minutes later Dan came to the broken board. He studied the hole. Then he noticed a handprint just outside, in the mud, and seconds later he made out the plaid fibers of a Pendleton shirt on the board's rough edge. Maria liked those shirts. A big fan of wool. She had even bought him one.
"Frank, Shane, come here," Dan called. "She went through here."
Two minutes later, Dan was back in the helicopter, flying under the high overcast, studying the terrain. Frank Spinoza had joined him, the pilot, and the sheriff's deputy while Shane followed the trail on the ground.
Situated on a bench near a ridge top, the house was surrounded by thick, mixed conifer forests, with the exception of two small emerald-green meadow areas nearby. At low altitude th
e forest looked like a textured, rolling mosaic of pointy dark greens-the conifers-and bubblelike, lighter greens-the hardwoods-with occasional flecks of gray and earth-tone reds in areas of thinner growth, where tree trunks were visible. The trail leading from the barn was exceedingly hard to make out, but it was apparent to Dan that if Maria had stayed on the flat bench paralleling the ridge top, she would have remained in the thick forest.
About a mile and a quarter from the house, the bench narrowed and met the headwaters of the Marmon River. Dan willed his eyesight to improve, desperate to see Maria safe, but the forest floor was for the most part obscured from the air; they could fly over a small army and not know it. Occasionally, though, he did catch a glimpse of Shane, moving quickly, jumping over logs, and zigzagging through the trees along the bench like a determined tailback hurtling toward the goal line.
Frank pointed. "More than likely, if she stayed on the bench, she hit that creek and went down it. It's human nature to run downhill when you're in trouble-and water always leads to civilization. Let's concentrate there."
28
Maria moved quickly despite the pain in her hands and the watering of her eyes, able through years of conditioning to maintain a steady jog except in the most obstructed areas. By her reckoning, she was now more than a mile from the barn. Moving through some dense brush, she suddenly imagined that she could hear a low-flying helicopter. She stopped, looked up, but could see nothing through the dense canopy of leaves. Could be the police, she thought-or it could be the bad guys. She plunged on through the forest, head down, moving like an animal, making herself small by shrugging her shoulders inward, squeezing along narrow pathways in the underbrush.
After traveling for about forty-five minutes, she began following a small stream downhill, but the stream's course was choked with fallen trees. Growing up through the crisscrossed logs were huckleberry, salmonberry, thimbleberry, young alders, and a host of other greenery, all of it forming an almost impassable wall. It was tough-going: a bruising, scraping, and soon bloody experience. She was forced to move up the sidehill, higher up the ravine above the creek bottom.
She had been running for maybe twenty minutes when she came to the first marijuana patch. Black plastic pipe traversed the hillside, sometimes partly buried and sometimes above ground, feeding the young marijuana plants in their large clay pots. The pots had been placed next to large trees, effectively concealed from prying eyes in police helicopters.
Knowing she was in danger from growers determined to keep their gardens a secret, Maria moved quickly downstream, where the country opened up. The trees and undergrowth thinned, allowing her to move easily-not hunched over all the time-but also making her more vulnerable to detection. Natural meadows formed great green ribbons down the hillside. Interspersed with the meadows were patches of forest comprised of leafy hardwoods and arrow-shaped conifers. Maria moved along the meadow edges now, trying to stay hidden without delving into the denser forest. Deep blue-gray gullies were water-carved, appearing like giant tears flowing down the flanks of the mountain, often choked with brush, sometimes vertical sided and not easily crossable. She suspected she was on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) property, designated a wilderness area despite the pot-growing squatters.
About thirty more minutes downstream, she turned and looked up at the terrain she'd just descended. What she saw sent a wave of fear through her. Far up on the sidehill, near the ridgeline above the creek, a lone figure moved quickly down the mountain. While the figure was not directly on her trail, he or she was moving in the same general direction and was no more than half a mile behind.
Maria's heart began to pound. If she could see the pursuer, then the pursuer might well have seen her. She considered her options. She could try to hide by losing herself in the brush, or she could run. Hiding might mean an overnight stay under a clump of trees, in nothing but a wool shirt. Capture by the kidnappers would be unlikely, even if they had radios and several hunters, but the chilly night could be brutal. Running in the dark was not a much more enticing option. What if she hurt herself on the trail? Run or hide?
Until dark, at least, she had to keep moving.
Turning downstream toward civilization would be the likely choice for Maria, but Corey knew that lower on the slopes she would find pot gardens, probably guarded by unpredictable men with tangled hair and beards, men living in hovels, who could or would do nothing else for a living, who lived outside the law. Such men didn't mind long stretches without much company under hard, primitive conditions. Each year they suffered the elements, thieves among their own kind, government raids, the threat of imprisonment, and the risk of great bodily harm or death at the hands of whoever happened to oppose them-and there were many who had reason to oppose them.
She considered how she might turn that situation to her advantage.
The second marijuana plantation was much larger than the first. Plants were everywhere, by almost every big tree. Some trees had several pots. And the plants were big. Already some were four feet high. Maria realized she was looking at millions of dollars in marijuana. What wouldn't they do to protect it? She had to get away from this place, across the creek and to the far side of the canyon, where there was no southern exposure-without the sun there would be no gardens. But as she tried to find a place to descend the precipitous mountainside to get to the creek, she was suddenly shaken by the coarse, boisterous blaring of an air horn. Adrenaline shot into her system as she looked around. Then at her feet she saw a trip wire. Damn. She was in the open near a steep embankment. She could hear someone coming. Galvanized into action, she went feetfirst down an almost vertical bank.
Within seconds she heard voices.
"Well, la-di-da." She whipped around and saw a sandy-haired man with a sly grin coming at her, a knife in his right hand and a military-style rifle in his left. The gun was pointed at her midriff.
"Take it easy now or I'm gonna put a bullet in you."
He wore a stained, heavy wool, half-unbuttoned shirt that revealed soiled long underwear beneath. There were small shells hanging around his neck, five earrings going up his ear, and a little patch of hair on his chin, with several days' growth on the rest of his face. Three feet away from her, he stopped. The muzzle of the rifle was in her belly.
He spoke into a radio.
"I think it was just another deer."
"I'm telling you I saw a woman coming down that hill."
"I'll keep looking."
He grinned at her again.
"I don't want to bother the rest of them just yet. Best I'd get is sloppy seconds."
Her insides turned sick. "You want sex?"
"Aren't you a mind reader?"
"Show me your hard-on," she said.
He laughed. "You gotta be shittin' me."
"I like to fuck as well as the next girl, but I wanna see what I got to work with."
He looked around for a moment.
"You first."
"Oh, come on, inspire me." She stepped close, sliding past the gun barrel, walking right up to the knife.
"You try anything and I'll twist this knife right in your gut."
He stank of stale sweat and had breath like rotten bananas. She had to concentrate in order not to retch. Forcing a smile, she ran her fingers over the front of his jeans, deliberately hurrying before he became erect.
She reached for the top button with her right hand. With her left she touched the stubble on his face. Apparently wanting to feel her breasts and use both hands, he turned the knife flat against her. It was a mistake. She put everything she had into her knee to the testicles and two thumbs into the eyes.
He fell to the ground, thrashing. Sharp thumbnails had gone deep; he was clawing at his eyes. She jumped away and ran. Only after getting twenty feet down the hill did she think about the gun. She cursed herself. Spinning around, she plowed back up through the brush only to see a second armed man coming toward the first.
Leaping back downhill, she barely maintained he
r balance as she ran full out.
"I'll shoot!" somebody said to her side as shots rang out. She disappeared over a six-foot drop-off. Even with all the noise of cascading rock, she could hear them coming after her.
"She's right down here," one of them shouted. As she bounded down the hill, she saw a tiny clearing and a ramshackle cabin about the size of a two-car garage, made of unpainted plywood. It had a big black stovepipe running up the side. Darting around the structure, she looked wildly for a place to hide. Knowing that she was running to a creek bottom in unfamiliar territory, she realized they would no doubt get close enough to shoot when she tried going up the opposite hill.
Slamming through the door, her hands shaking, she looked for a gun. Junk was piled everywhere. There were boxes and sacks of supplies stacked two or three deep all along the wall with three bunk beds and a table in the middle. Against one wall by the door, there was an old wood cook-stove. No gun. A knife on the table. She grabbed it and crawled behind some sacks of fertilizer. These people lived like animals. Desperately she clamped her sides, trying to calm her breathing, trying to make a plan.
"Hell, it's hard to find her in this brush," came a voice from outside.
"We'll find her. You run downstream on the trail and then come back up the draw."
"Wait. What if she went in the cabin?"
"Shit. You take off, I'll look."
She tried to make her hands stop shaking, to get control.
It seemed her whole convulsing body would give her away. The door creaked on its hinges.
"Come out, come out, wherever you are."
He started at the far end, looking behind some boxes. Scrunching down as tight as she could, she tried to make herself invisible.
She had no illusions. Getting caught would be a death sentence-after they were finished raping her. It made her desperate. Believing she had nothing to lose, she decided to lunge with the knife. He was five feet away and almost to the stacks of fertilizer. Trying to look around the six-foot stacks without exposing himself, he moved with slow deliberation. Any second he would see her.
His hand draped over a sack about three feet in front of her and above her. Frightened out of her mind, she lunged, skewering the hand with the knife, running it through and pinning it to the sack.