by T. K. Chapin
"Well, yeah, I'm alive. Sorry to disappoint you." My eyes were red and swollen. I could feel them. I had cried all the way over to see her. The detective was my last hope for saving Emily. “I don’t know what to do anymore, Maria.”
“Maybe it’s time to stop, Ron.”
I nodded.
Reaching out, she touched my shoulder. "Give me the thumb drive. I know someone who can—"
“No.” Stepping back, I shook my head as I felt a strong urge to not hand it over. “I'll take care of it. I'm not going to risk your getting killed too. Emily needs her mom."
The phone rang inside the shop, pulling Maria’s attention. She looked back at me. "Sometimes, life is weird and doesn't make sense, Ron. Maybe it's time you just let this all go. Forcing your own will over and over again can never end well."
"It's our daughter, Maria. I won't ever give up. No matter what."
“Suit yourself.” She went inside her shop and answered the phone. A guy with headphones on over his ears bumped into my shoulder as he walked by on the sidewalk. Turning, I looked at him and saw his headphones, and I recalled the guy from the coffee shop who knew Charles’s codename online, Felix. There wasn't much of a chance of finding the kid again, but I had to try. It was all I had now.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
FOR THE NEXT TWO MORNINGS, I went into the Rocket Bakery where I had briefly met the hacker kid named Mikey. Each day I went in, I’d order cup after cup of coffee and sit at a table, waiting and hoping for him to show.
The kid never showed.
Finally, on Sunday, I decided to skip the coffee shop and head to church. I needed God more than I needed coffee or the thumb drive cracked.
Making myself comfortable in my usual seat, I couldn’t help but think about Teresa as I looked around. I thought about how everything had gone down the other day outside the Steer Inn, and I felt bad. Glancing over my shoulder, I didn’t see her anywhere that morning, even though I wanted to.
“How’s it going, Ron?” Fred’s familiar voice pulled my attention to the seat in front of me.
Shaking his hand, I smiled and said, “Oh, you know. I can’t complain.”
“Jimmy told me about your run-in with some kind of dark clothing masked ninja in the church parking lot? Did you lose in poker to the wrong guy again?” He let out a hearty but innocent laugh.
“That five of a kind tends to get people upset,” I joked.
Soon enough, the music began playing up front, and Fred hurried over to Marjorie to sit down with her. As we all stood and sang, I again looked around for Teresa. I had thought she’d still come to church if she was really done with them. Was I really the reason she came? Not God? The thought sickened me.
Sitting down, the Pastor made his way up to the front to start the sermon and I heard a sanctuary door close in back. Glancing over my shoulder quickly, I spotted Teresa slipping in. Twenty minutes late, but still, she was in church. I breathed a sigh of relief, and a smile even grazed my lips knowing she did, in fact, show.
After the sermon let out, Teresa approached me on my way out of the sanctuary. We stopped over by the information desk to talk.
Her eyes looked swollen as if she had been crying for a long time, and it broke my heart to see her that way. She looked at the people passing by behind me and then met my eyes.
“Ron . . .”
“Yeah?”
She bit her lip and then said, “I can’t do this. Never mind.” Turning, she hurried away, vanishing into the crowd of people as they exited the church. I wasn’t sure what was going on with Teresa, but I knew she was struggling with something deep. That was easy to tell.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
THE NEXT DAY, I WENT back to the Rocket Bakery to pursue Mikey once more. Before I went in, I prayed to God that this would be the day. Walking inside the coffee shop for what felt like the umpteenth time, I looked around, surveying the faces. Praying as I walked, I asked for God's help in finding him. There's only a few days left, Lord. Please help me. Please. I went up to the counter and ordered a tall black coffee. I'd wait there in that coffee shop all day again, just like I had been doing for days. I needed to know what was on that thumb drive. If there were secrets like I guessed there were, I could use them to get my daughter out of the community and back to me.
Finishing my second cup of coffee, I headed to the rest room down the hallway in the back of the shop. As I came out of the restroom, I saw him—Mikey. He was sitting at a table with headphones on and lost in his own little world. Elated to finally see the kid, I walked right up to this table and stood there, lingering until he noticed and removed his headphones.
"Do I know you?" he asked, raising an eyebrow as he looked at me. "You look kind of familiar."
"You were in the coffee shop a while back and noticed my friend." I glanced around and then leaned in. “Felix.”
He jumped up and darted for the door, his backpack on his shoulder and his laptop under his other arm. Chasing after him, I followed him down a long stretch of sidewalk as I yelled for him. "Mikey! Stop! Mikey!"
He didn't stop. Instead, he picked up his pace. I was about out of breath when he pulled a garbage can off from a driveway and it fell into my path, but when he did that, he accidentally tripped along with the can and fell too. Stopping, I grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him upright.
"Don't kill me, dude! I'm too young to die!"
Catching my breath, I shook my head. "I don't want to hurt you. I want to talk."
Mikey calmed down and we started to walk.
"What happened to Felix?" he finally asked. “I saw him dead on the news.”
Pulling out the thumb drive, we both stopped. Holding it up, I said, "He knew something and died because of it. It's all on this drive. I need you to unlock it for me."
“They figured out who Felix was and killed him? I don’t have a death wish, man.” He was about to take off again when I grabbed his shoulder, digging my fingers into his flesh tightly. “Ahh!” he shouted. “Come on, dude!”
“Please, Mikey. My daughter’s life, along with a whole lot of other women’s, depends on it, and you’re my last hope. Please.”
His eyes softened, and I released my grip as I saw the gravity of the situation sink into his eyes. He turned to me and looked at my hand with the thumb drive. I gave it over to him.
He looked at me for a second, then the drive as he brought it closer to his face. "This isn't an easy drive to crack."
"You can't do it?"
He smiled. "Oh, I can do it. It'll take my desktop at my house though."
Turning back toward the coffee shop, I said, "Let’s take my truck."
CHAPTER SEVENTY
WE WENT BACK AND GOT my truck, then headed over to his house. On the way, the silence was awkward as it permeated the air between us in the cab. We were complete strangers to each other, and that’s about how we were acting. Glancing over at him a few times, I finally found something to talk about—the city of Moab hat he was wearing.
"You do off-road?"
"What?" he asked sharply, shaking his head.
"Your hat. It's from Moab, that place in Utah for off-roading, right?"
He raised his eyebrows as it clicked in his head. "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um . . . I don't off-road, but my dad, oh, man. He went every summer down there with a few of his friends from work back years ago when he worked at the old steel company."
Thinking of my own father and my experiences with him, I knew Mikey probably felt a lot like I did when my father would go on those fishing trips with his friends and only rarely take me. Prodding, since the GPS on Mikey's phone said we still had another ten miles to go to reach his house in the Spokane Valley, I asked, "How's that make you feel that he goes without you?"
He furrowed his eyebrows at me as he shot me a quick look. "What are you? Some kind of shrink?"
Directing my sights forward, I dropped it. I had obviously hit a nerve. “Sorry, man.”
Arriving at the hous
e not long after the brief exchange in the truck, I understood a little bit more about Mikey and that reaction he had. His mother was gone at work, his father gone too. His dad wasn’t at work, though, and he wasn’t in Moab either. He was somewhere else, about six feet under. I saw his dad’s obituary newspaper clipping hanging on the wall in the hallway as we traveled up the stairs to Mikey's room. The poor kid was without a father, and at such a young age. We had more in common than I first knew.
Going into his room, the kid barked off some rules to me like I was some toddler allowed to enter his bedroom. "Don't touch anything, and just sit right there on the edge of the bed. Oh, and give me the thumb drive."
I handed it to him and took my seat.
My eyes surveyed the room. Stark white walls, and only one thing hung on all four walls. It was right above his bed. It was a mirror, and underneath it, a sign read The only one who cares. It was heart-wrenching, and my insides tensed. Directing my attention to the computer desk where Mikey was sitting and typing, I watched as his fingers flew across the keyboard and lines of code or words or something flew up the screen.
"This is strange." The three words carried a worrisome tone as they spilled from the kid's lips.
"What is it?" I asked, standing up and peering over his shoulder.
"The drive. It's at a level 2 of the government's FIPS 140-2 security standard."
Shrugging, I looked at him with a confused expression. "What does that mean?"
"Well, hopefully, the encryption keys are stored locally. Otherwise . . ." He sighed and then leaned over and toward the thumb drive as it stuck out from the port. "If it has a cryptochip module to house it . . . it'll be nearly impossible for me to hack."
The computer beeped and we both looked.
He smiled and looked over his shoulder up at me.
"What?" I asked, perplexed.
"That's the encryption keys we need. We're in business." His fingers soon found the keyboard again, and he was off to the races, unpacking the thumb drive's contents. As he continued to work on the thumb drive, I sat back down on the bed and breathed a sigh of relief.
"If you want, I can keep working on this and you can come back in a bit."
My eyes fixed on the back of his head. He probably wants me to leave, I thought to myself. "You'll be okay?"
"Yeah.” He leaned over and pulled a lock box out from beside his desk. Pulling it onto his lap, he pressed his fingers against a keypad, and it popped open revealing a 9MM handgun.
“Wow. How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Ah.”
He shut the box and set it back to its place beside his desk. “People tell me all the time I look a lot younger. Give me about an hour with this drive and I’ll have it done."
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
BEING THAT I WAS IN the Valley, I decided to burn some time by taking a trip to my father's grave. Not much time had passed since I had been out to see him, but I wanted to at least stop in and say ‘hello.’ Tell him about the progress. On my drive over to the cemetery, I thought of Teresa. Those tears yesterday were real. I could feel their sadness when I saw them rolling down her soft cheeks. Thinking back to the time we went miniature golfing, my chest tightened. She had always been so sweet to me, came across as so genuine. But she’s a Sandrosa. The thought set my heart into confusion. I tried to forget about it and just focus on Emily.
Walking up to my father's grave, I stood for a moment, and then the sound of a gun clicked behind me, followed by it pressing into my back.
"The thumb drive. Where is it?" A man’s voice that sounded familiar said from behind me. I glanced over my shoulder to see, and it was the masked man. I looked forward again and smiled.
"I don't have it."
I went to turn fully, but the man bopped me in the side of the head with the bottom of his pistol, knocking me unconscious.
Waking sometime later, I was in my truck and blood was running down the side of my head and out from my ear. The truck was moving quickly, down a dotted tree hillside. My head pounded with a headache as I tried to focus my eyes, then I saw it up ahead—a cliff.
My heart jumped into my ears. I jingled the handle, but it was stuck. I couldn’t get out.
Gaining more strength, I managed to get up on my seat and crouch at the window. Looking out the open window, I saw only blurred trees in my vision, and then I looked to see how far the cliff was down the path—only feet away now.
Leaping with all my strength, I jumped out the window just as the trees thinned out. Landing, I tumbled into a patch of dirt and rocks. The truck kept going. Then, it soared over the cliff, soundless as the wheels hit the air.
Scrambling as my entire body trembled and ached all over, I hurried to the edge of the cliff and looked down. The truck caught itself between a couple of trees, not quite making it to the bottom of the mountain. Turning around, I lifted my voice in praise to God to be alive. "Thank you, Lord, for saving me again."
I noticed the towering trees not far from me up the hill. They were familiar. Coming up to one, I rested my palm on it as I peered up through the branches. I knew where I was. I was in the Idaho Mountains, the same ones my parents would take me gathering huckleberries every summer. Peering up through the woods where the truck had come down, I saw the road, a gravel one up top. I had been on it a hundred different times in my life. I began climbing up the hill and to my freedom.
Every muscle in my body cried out in exhaustion and dried blood itched in one of my ears. The heat of the day was weighing heavily on my body, and my tongue felt as dry as sandpaper. Wiping my face of sweat, I felt dirt clumping and smearing in with the sweat and blood on my face. I wanted to stop, to quit, but I had to keep going, if not for my own life, then for Emily’s.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
AFTER GETTING TO THE ROAD up top, I lay down in the cool shade of a tree by the side of the gravel road. As I regained my energy, I lifted another praise to the Lord for sparing me, at least for a little while longer.
"Thank you, Lord. I don't have a clue what to do right now. I don't know how this is all going to turn out, but I hope you spare the life of my daughter regardless of what happens to me," I said aloud. I began to weep as I thought more about her and then to the thoughts of her growing up, when she lost her first tooth all the way until she graduated from college. It was but a blink, but the blink twisted my heart in a vice grip as I thought about it all coming to an end if I didn't get out of these mountains and back to Spokane, back to Mikey.
"I'm powerless, Lord. Please help."
The sound of a vehicle coming up in the distance struck fear in me as I worried my killer had come back to finish me off. Lifting my eyes, I saw a baby blue pickup truck come into view. It backfired, startling me.
Then I saw the driver.
I smiled as salvation came rolling the rest of the way down the gravel road and right to me. Jumping up from the patch of shade, my energy ignored all the pain and exhaustion present in my body. Hope had arrived in beat-up pickup truck.
The man behind the wheel slowed to a stop and motioned me with a hand.
Crossing the road over to him, he looked as confused as I felt inside.
"What you doing out here in these woods, boy?"
"Someone abducted me and tried to kill me."
His eyes narrowed on me for a moment, inspecting me over one time, then a second time. "Happens to the best of us. C'mon then, get in and I'll give you a ride. God kept you alive for some reason. I'm on my way to Chattaroy, just north of Spokane. Where you going?"
"I know Chattaroy. You can just drop me off wherever in Spokane, though, if it's not too much of a burden."
"Where is it you need to go?" He seemed eager to help as I came around the truck and climbed in on the passenger side.
"I need to go to the Valley, actually."
He smiled. "To the Valley it is."
As we continued down the road and off the mountain, I found the nerve to ask him so
mething that had me curious for the previous five miles. "What's the gun in back for?"
"To shoot things, of course. You dumb, boy?"
I laughed and shook my head. "No, Sir. I’m not. I was just wondering if you hunted or something."
He looked at me twice and then said, "Yeah. What's it to you? You're not one of those PETA folks, are ya?"
"No, not at all." I shook my head, still smiling and in good spirits.
"Good. I reckon I would've kicked you outta my truck if you were."
I smiled. Turning my eyes out the window, we passed by a fruit stand on the side of the freeway and my stomach growled. I hadn't eaten much since all of this started, and I was feeling a bit famished at the moment.
"Open there that glove box," the man said, eyes pointed right at it.
I opened it to find a package of wafers and a bottle of water. "Oh. Thank you. How'd you know?"
"Your stomach ain't quiet." Under his breath, the driver said, “I reckon this boy is dumb.”
As we continued, I felt myself moved with compassion for the man. Here I was in the middle of the Idaho Mountains, covered in blood and dirt, and he did me right by giving me a lift to Spokane. Thinking about my prayers to God, I thanked the Lord for delivering me as I requested. He had provided for me when I needed Him.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
WAVING TO THE KIND FARMER from Chattaroy, I walked up the driveway at Mikey's house five hours after I had left. Giving the door a knock a few times, I took a deep breath and stepped back, waiting for him to answer.
The door opened.
"What happened to you, old man?" Mikey asked, laughing as he opened the door.
"Someone tried to kill me, of course." I proceeded to go into detail about what had happened as we went up to his room.
"Did you call the cops?"
"No. I can't do that, otherwise whoever was trying to kill me would know I was alive now, and I'd be in danger."