Ray poked his head up from time to time. Lights on in the kitchen, but heavy shades drawn. No telling who was up. The kitchen was Cheryl’s territory, now. Taylor helped a little, but seemed out of her element, better when she was told what to do. He laid back and missed Cheryl beside him. He cursed Jason. He had lost Kim. He could be alone in the barn without giving up a thing.
Beating wings. Ray woke to barn swallows rustling in the eaves. They came inside, sometimes, the downside of the open loft door. He scanned the yard then rolled his bag and brought it down with him. No point leaving evidence of his failure to comply. He crossed the yard, pistol on hip, rifle in hand, feeling fully vulnerable in the open.
The house doors were locked. Jason and his security—no keys other than his. Ray walked the periphery, got one glance inside through a tiny gap in the living room shades. No movement there. He stopped at Cheryl’s window, saw nothing, and tapped lightly. No need to wake the whole house. He waited, tapped again, then lost patience and moved to the back door. He pounded solidly.
Cheryl let him in. Barefoot, jeans and a tee shirt, her lustrous hair uncombed. No hug. She just let him pass. Ray feared the separation had cost him—that Cheryl felt secure in the house and no longer needed him. That was what their relationship had been all about: security and survival. He wondered what would happen when his week ended.
Jason sat at the kitchen table with hot coffee and pancakes. Cheryl went back to the stove and worked the spatula. Ray sat opposite Jason.
“All quiet.”
“Trouble again in Knoxville last night.” Jason sipped his coffee. “Mob looted a dozen places on Kingston Pike before the law got down on them. Killed thirty. Rounded up a bunch more. Not sure what they’ll do with them.”
“Better to be out in the country,” Ray said.
“Unless thirty of them descend on you.”
Cheryl dropped a plate of pancakes in front of Ray. “You handled it last time.”
“Some teams are easier to whomp on than others,” Jason said.
Chapter 32
Karla hung up the phone. Thirty seconds with Jessie. Another struggle with the phone company. She was alive and okay in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. And Jessie had called from a different phone, this one unregistered.
Karla studied a map—a very long day to Pigeon Forge. Jessie had said she was in a house. That was good, but where and for how long? Had they stopped moving, reached their destination? Karla thought maybe. They couldn’t go much farther east before crossing into the borderlands. From what she had seen on TV, no sensible person would take a child there.
The new phone was a twist. She wanted to hug Jessie for managing to find one and for the cleverness and nerve to make the call. She thought next of Alyssa Otteon. How did she fit in? Had she abandoned her life in Kansas City to traipse around the country with Roger and Jessie? It seemed an unnatural thing for her to do. Unless, she was simply helping an unfortunate father with his child.
Whatever benefit there had been in waiting was gone. Karla made the call.
“Hi, Alyssa. This is Karla Becker.”
“Yes?” No trace of recognition.
“I’m trying to locate my daughter, Jessie. She’s traveling with her father, Roger. I think you know them.”
“Roger Becker? No. I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”
Karla considered how far she could go with what she knew. It mattered a lot where Alyssa Otteon actually was.
“I’ve traced them to Joplin, Missouri. I’ve been told you spoke with them there ten days ago. Do you remember a father and daughter?” Karla left out the information on a possible Aunt Ellen.
Alyssa was slow to answer. “I spoke with several men at a campground near Joplin. There were a large number of people present. I honestly don’t remember any of them with a daughter.”
“Do you mind if I ask what you were doing at a campground in Joplin?”
“I don’t really think it’s any of your business.”
“Sorry. It isn’t. What I didn’t tell you is that Roger and I are no longer married, and that he is a non-custodial parent.”
“He kidnapped your daughter. That’s what you’re saying.”
“Yes. It is. Are you back in Shawnee, Alyssa?”
“Where did you get my name?”
Karla threw everything she had at the woman. “From your phone. My daughter used it to call me from Joplin.”
Silence from the other end. Karla waited. “Yes. I didn’t make the connection. It was a woman with her daughter, not a man. Ten years old. Thin with a shy smile. She hid under a picnic table, hardly knew she was there.”
“There was a woman looking after her, not a man?”
“Ellen. She was in real estate. Had been. Her friend, too.”
“Roger.”
“Might be. Don’t remember his name. At the campground, we were cooking out, sharing. Forty people mingling around the fire pits and tables. It was hard to know who were old friends and who had met there.”
“What do you remember about Ellen?”
A pause. “Thirty. Professional. You know, well spoken, sincere. Knew her stuff, though it no longer mattered.”
“So you spoke with her for a while?”
“She was friendly, put people at ease, a natural for sales.”
“And Jessie, the little girl? Did she look healthy, taken care of?”
“She was clean, for a campground. Her hair brushed. She played under the table. Stayed near her . . . Ellen. Didn’t mix. Didn’t go far.”
“How did she get your phone?”
“I didn’t know she had. It was in my purse, on the bench beside me, I suppose or maybe on the table. I may have taken it out at some point. Pictures, you know.”
“Did she say anything about where they were going?”
“East. I remember that. Kentucky, Tennessee, maybe.”
“No cities mentioned?”
“No. Talked like travel was routine. Not an exciting destination or something special waiting.”
“The man obviously wasn’t talking with you or watching Jessie. What was he doing?”
“He sat with us a few minutes then wandered off. I saw him several times nearby. I guess he was socializing, checking out the other RVs. That’s what guys usually do.”
“Check out the other RVs?”
“They like to show off the fancy stuff. There were a couple forty-two footers, super luxe, you know the kind.”
Karla didn’t. “What were they driving?”
“I never saw Ellen’s. The man, I remember, he got into one of those mid-size units. Look like a converted short bed truck.”
“So they were in an RV.”
“That’s what you get in campgrounds—RVs and trailers. His was an RV.”
“Is there anything you can tell me about the vehicle that would help me find it?”
“I think it was a Fleetwood. Class C, like I said. Couldn’t tell you the model.”
“You’ve been a ton of help, Alyssa. Thank you so much.”
After she disconnected, Karla checked campgrounds in eastern Tennessee. She found one hundred thirty, sixteen in Pigeon Forge alone. Camper’s paradise, she thought.
* * *
The desire to leave at first light was overwhelming. But a drive to Pigeon Forge and finding Jessie when she arrived was not that simple. The ride was a full fifteen hours each way. Several hours for each campground. Six days, if Jessie was still in Pigeon Forge and at the last campground Karla searched. A week more if she had to spread her search even twenty-five miles.
If she was lucky, a campground manager would recognize Jessie or Roger. Otherwise, she would go door to door. Not foolproof. Not subtle. She could knock on Ellen’s door, talk to her, and not know it. Or warned, they could run.
Karla had to face the other reality. When she found Jessie, Roger did not intend to hand her back. That meant brute force. Retrieve Jessie at gunpoint. Coul
d she shoot Roger, if it came to it? She worried what would happen to Jessie if she did.
One more logistical problem. She needed a place to stay. She didn’t like hotels, alone. She would be spending her time in campgrounds. May as well stay in one. There were networking possibilities, and as Alyssa described the campgrounds, there could be safety in numbers.
She had a plan. She relaxed and checked the news.
Revenue was not coming in. Governments at all levels were furloughing employees each week. Only the police and military were kept at full force. “New” money had been printed by the federal government. It was not much better than from a copier, and, in its first weeks in circulation, it had not been generally accepted.
Unemployment in the private sector had passed fifty percent. Only medical, farming, and food processing kept it from being higher.
* * *
In the morning, Karla drove to Cedar Rapids and found what she wanted at a closed truck shop on Blair’s Ferry. A dozen calls and she found the man who owned it. He was happy to come out and sell her a cap for her truck bed. A good price, too, installed. There were no other buyers.
On the way home, she filled the gas tank and spare jugs. She stopped and told a neighbor she would be gone for a few days. He wasn’t actually close enough to see her house. She just thought someone should know she hadn’t abandoned the place.
She backed the truck into the garage and loaded it: foam pad, sleeping bag, canned food, AR-15, Glock, pump shotgun. She split two thousand dollars between her purse and pockets. She locked the truck and went inside.
Chapter 33
“How’s life up in the big house?” Ray asked.
He and Cheryl were headed to the farmers markets in Townsend and Maryville. He knew why it was the two of them. They, Cheryl, were expected to pay for whatever was found. And her to prepare it. If Jason and Dickie had money, and he guessed they did, they were holding it to the end. Ray didn’t like the deal he was getting, though he wasn’t quite ready to strike out on his own. But if he kept throwing in money every time they shopped, it wouldn’t be long before he was too broke to travel. Gas still cost money.
“You get used to it,” Cheryl replied.
Ray wasn’t sure what that meant. “The barn, too, I suppose.”
“You were the one that said you liked it there.”
“I meant with you.”
“Did you hear Dickie’s sick? He won’t be able to relieve you for a few more days.”
“No. Jason hasn’t passed that on yet. Is he really?”
Cheryl shrugged. “They’re your friends.”
Ray parked the truck and they walked to the Townsend market. They moved between the few vendors present and picked up strawberries, broccoli, beans, and a few left over potatoes. It was still a month before the first corn or tomatoes.
It went more or less the same at Maryville, except they found a man selling corn meal and bought twenty pounds. On the way out, Cheryl smiled and waved to a girl in a pink dress standing on the running board of an RV parked at the curb.
“You have pretty hair,” the girl said.
“You do, too,” Cheryl responded. “Would you like a strawberry?”
The girl said she would and Cheryl gave her one. As the girl popped it into her mouth, a man stepped around the back of the vehicle.
“She gave me a strawberry,” the girl said.
“Did you thank her?” The man was now beside the girl.
“Noooo.”
“Well, do you think you should?”
“Okay. Thank you.”
Cheryl told her she was welcome and stepped away.
* * *
Despite what Cheryl said, Dickie was well enough to go hunting the next morning, and they left in the Gator at dawn. They saw no sign in the small valley they’d been hunting and ranged farther west, picking their way without a trail.
Ray parked on a ridge, as he preferred, and they hiked along it, stopping occasionally for Dickie to scan below with binoculars. Dickie stopped and pointed. Ray stared at the tree tops and at the thin wisp of smoke that broke through, a half mile off. Ray started slowly back the way they’d come.
“I’m going to have a look,” Dickie whispered, and moved silently down the slope angling toward the smoke. Ray would have preferred to let them be, but paralleled his partner, sticking to the high ground.
From behind a rock, Ray watched Dickie drop to his knees and raise the binoculars. He scanned left to right, then up the slope. In a crouch he moved behind a tree, then advanced ten feet. A rifle shot broke the silence. Dickie spun and fell.
Ray dropped behind a long fallen log. He heard Dickie thrashing to his left, drowning out all else. The shooter was close from the sound of the report—a couple hundred feet. Ray worked around the log and froze.
A kid in hunting camos with a lever action rifle had his eye on Dickie and crept slowly toward him. The kid raised a hand to two men carrying unscoped rifles moving up the hill to his right. One man spotted Ray and screamed a warning just before Ray dropped the kid with a shot to the head.
The men dove for cover and Ray circled right in pursuit. He spotted one man gripping a tree and put a bullet through his arm. Ray fired twice into the rhododendron where the other man had vanished, then cut toward Dickie, scooping up the dead kid’s weapons.
A rifle shot and another. Ray dropped into a small depression. Bullets clipped the earth above his head. Ray popped up, fired at where he’d last seen the men, and scrambled on. He covered the fifty feet to Dickie in seconds and slid in next to him, behind an ancient elm tree.
“How many?” Dickie grimaced as sporadic fire continued.
“Enough.”
Ray checked Dickie’s wound. The bullet had struck near his shoulder and Dickie had already fashioned a bandage from his shirt. “We gotta move, man, or you’re gonna die here.”
A bullet thudded into the tree screening them. Another hit the ground at Dickie’s feet.
“We’re not gonna make it with them chasing us,” Dickie said
“Head for the Gator. I’ll cover the retreat.”
Ray inched higher for a look beyond the tree. A bullet whizzed past his ear.
“When I open up, move.” He handed Dickie the kid’s rifle. “Use it for balance if you have to.”
Ray slipped low around the tree, spotted a man, and ducked back. Another shot, different direction. They were closing in.
“Go.” Ray tapped Dickie then heaved right, fired prone at the man he saw then charged to the next tree. He fired twice and ran from there as several men fired from below, the trees making more difficult a clean shot on a moving target. He sprawled behind a small mound and scanned with the rifle scope.
A hundred yards out, a man slipped between trees, stalking Dickie. Ray’s bullet caught the man’s hip. Ray swung right and gut-shot another man. Dickie labored up the hill. A bullet smacked the mound spraying dirt in Ray’s face. He rolled right, but couldn’t locate the shooter. A second shot, equally close. He had the man, now—lying in dense bushes at one hundred fifty yards. Ray fired twice and pulled back.
Ray found shelter behind a slab of rock. He fired at any movement as he tried to figure how many men were left below him. He’d counted seven and hit at least four. He figured there were more, but he had the advantage, now—the high ground, a two hundred yard field of vision, and a scoped rifle. One of the opposition had one, too. He hoped that was all.
Ray dropped the first man to step from a tree. He fired twice more where he thought men hid. The return fire slowed. Ray looked for Dickie, but he’d moved beyond sight. A man reached the tree where Dickie had been shot and hunkered behind it. Ray shifted, caught a view of the man’s boot, and hit it. He watched and waited. He fired at a tree to let them know he was still there.
Ten minutes passed. He fired at the boot man, then crawled from the rock, put the ridge between him and his pursuers and ran. He stopped twice and look
ed back. He hoped he had scared caution into them, but he didn’t count on it to last forever.
Ray caught Dickie a hundred feet from their vehicle, ran past him, and started it. He swung to Dickie and let him fall into the seat as a bullet slapped the right fender. Ray jerked the vehicle left and opened the throttle.
He cut between trees and over a ridge. The opposition could not possibly keep up on foot, but Ray didn’t want them to even think of following. They crossed the park road at four and a half miles, joined the trail at seven, and entered the yard at eleven. A tracker could cover that distance in a few hours. Ray hoped to hell they didn’t have one.
* * *
“Can you get the slugs out,” Jason asked.
Ray eyed Dickie’s wounds. A second bullet had caught him in the thigh as they made their escape. “Man needs a hospital.”
Jason shook his head. “We ain’t got time if you’ve led those yahoos straight to us.”
“They have their own problems about now. I wouldn’t be expecting them soon.”
“I’ll give Doc Hollinger a call, then. You’ll have to go fetch him.”
Jason gave Ray directions to a farm three miles east of Townsend on the Gatlinburg road. His unsecured property said he relied purely on luck to keep out intruders. Ray parked at the front walk and waited. He was loath to approach any house at present.
Hollinger stepped out. He was tall and graying, no fat on him. He wore jeans and boots and carried a backpack. Ray explained the situation, in case Jason hadn’t been straight and the doctor needed additional equipment. Hollinger said he understood and climbed into the truck.
“How’d it happen?” the doctor asked as Ray pulled onto the highway.
“We were out for a ride. A group of men opened up on us.”
Hollinger looked concerned. “Where was this?”
“In the park. Probably fifteen miles from town.”
“How many, you think?”
“A dozen. No more.”
The doctor nodded. “You heard about the doings to the south?”
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