Eileen fired the gun twice more—Tap! Tap!—and she was out of bullets. A tiny black mark appeared in the man’s forehead and another one pinned itself on his chest. Eileen dropped her Ladysmith to the grass and pulled her Sig Sauer from her shoulder holster. One click of the safety and she was armed again.
The man leaned backward slowly, like a child’s punching bag with a hole in it. The bazooka-like silencer continued to burn. Teddy settled to the grass, no longer looking much like a human being, no longer alive. Eileen stood blinking, suddenly aware of her racing heart, her lack of breathing, the stink of gunfire, and the richer stink of blood. She gasped and her arms started to tremble. Looking around, she saw nothing, no one else. The van still idled at the curb. The back door was open.
“This is the police!” she shouted. “Come out with your hands up!”
There was a response from the van. A tiny, squealing sound, like a rabbit when it is struck by a hawk or a fox. Eileen sidled along the side of her Jeep until she could get to the passenger-side door, keeping the back door of the van and the very dead man in her sight. She fumbled out her cell phone and called for backup.
“Then you decided to look in the van,” Gerri said.
“I did,” Eileen said. “I should have waited, but there was that tiny little sound. Maybe a bullet had ricocheted and I was listening to someone dying. I had to see.”
“Nobody came out of the house? None of the neighbors?”
“A .38 makes a popping sound, not a big boom. The .357 makes a good-sized noise, but Teddy built that stupid half-ass silencer. The windshield made the most noise. Lights started to come on in a few houses, but my backup arrived before anyone came out of their houses. Besides, the whole thing had taken maybe thirty seconds.”
“So you looked in the van,” Gerri said, and took a measured sip of her tea.
Eileen took a sip of her own tea and sighed. The tea was herbal, light and sweet and dainty. A little girl’s drink.
“Yeah, I looked in the van. And there was Jeannie Bernowski, whose face had been on every telephone pole and in every supermarket in town for a week. I knew her instantly and I was just flat out amazed. Do you know how often we get a kid back alive?”
“Not very often,” Gerri said.
“Statistically speaking, never. I remember the whole Heather Dawn Church search. That little girl was snatched from her bedroom during the early evening, and they had helicopters from Fort Carson combing the Black Forest that very night. Finally, a year later, they came across her bones. That’s what everyone expected for poor little Jeannie. If a child isn’t snatched by a parent, their chances are slim and none. And Slim left town,” Eileen added. She grinned a hard and unmirthful little grin.
“And yet there she was,” Gerri said.
Eileen made a diving roll past the back doors of the van, getting a nightmare glimpse of the horror within. The van was running and the interior light was on, which gave color to the blood. There was a little figure huddled against one wall, and some sacking and other materials were puddled on the floor. Nothing large enough to hide a man or woman. Eileen wasn’t going to have to shoot anyone else. She climbed to her feet. The little figure looked vaguely human, but her one flashing glimpse didn’t give many details.
She walked to the doors and looked inside, gun still held at the ready, and there was little Jeannie Bernowski. There was no one else in the van. In the distance, sirens warbled briefly as her backup negotiated some red lights. Jeannie raised her head slowly, sensing someone, but her eyes had no more sense than a gutted doe. She was covered with bruises and worse. There was quite a bit of blood. She was handcuffed to a steel bar welded to the side of the van. On the other side of the van, another steel bar waited.
Eileen looked back toward the black bag. She took two long steps away from the van and bent over the bag. She had time to marvel at the warmth of the breeze, the stars, the beauty of the Colorado night. Then the zipper came open with a long buzzing sound and a choking smell of ether and there, duct tape firmly over mouth and eyes, was six-year-old Alice Gherkin, unconscious.
“So what made you go back to the van?”
“I don’t know,” Eileen said. “But that wasn’t very popular with Captain Harben. I crawled up in that van like my brains had run right out my ass—that’s what Captain Harben told me, anyway—and wrapped the little girl up in my arms.”
“Captain Harben didn’t approve,” Gerri said, and laughed.
“Captain Harben did not approve,” Eileen said. “He chewed me out good, he did. Disturbing a crime scene. Destroying evidence. Et cetera.”
“But she was talking when the ambulance got there, that’s what the report said.”
“She’s a tough girl,” Eileen said. “He’d done a lot to her, but he hadn’t killed her. Inside, or outside.”
“Now you’re a hero. But you got that way by killing someone.”
“Teddy Shaw,” Eileen grimaced. “I know. So fix me, Gerri.”
“I have no magic wand, Eileen.” Gerri smiled, glancing at her watch. “And our session is over for today.”
“I have to come back?” Eileen asked in dismay. “I thought this was just—you know.”
“What, for show?” Gerri asked. “No way, lady. You’re mine for at least two months. Maybe more. Once a week, my tea, your choice of flavors.”
The sun was setting over Pikes Peak when Eileen walked outside. Gerri’s office was in an old Victorian house, surrounded by gorgeous elm trees and lilac bushes and stuffed full of psychologists and social workers. Eileen paused and took a deep breath, smelling the warm earth and the flowers that grew in lovely hundred-year-old beds. A woman hurried up the walk past her, her head down and dark sunglasses failing to cover the fading remains of a spectacular beating. Eileen stood for a few moments more, her hands in her pockets, listening to the door open and close and the distant sound of voices. Next week, same place, same tea. And eventually, if Eileen wasn’t careful, Gerri was going to figure out the places where she had lied.
2
The Great Sand Dunes, San Luis Valley, Colorado
Five days later, at dawn, Marcia Fowler found the body of the dead girl. At first she didn’t know what she was looking at. She walked across the sand dunes, squinting in the near darkness of early morning, her mind flipping through a series of mental images and discarding each one as they did not fit. What was that dark object? A rock? No, it was too familiar-looking to be a rock. Someone’s discarded coat, blown across the sand during the night? No, it was too large. A cougar crouched down and waiting for her?
Marcia stopped walking, the last of her breath wisping away in a vapor from her open mouth. She was in the Great Sand Dunes in southwestern Colorado. There were cougars in this part of the state.
This could be a cougar. It didn’t move. Marcia didn’t move. She’d dropped into a steady hiking pace a half-hour ago, wanting to reach the top of the first range of sand dunes before the glorious early fall sunrise. Now she stood, panting a little, wondering what to do. There was a campground full of people less than two miles away, most of them still asleep. It was cold in late August in this part of Colorado.
There was no steam of breath from the object. Shouldn’t a cougar breathe? The light was becoming clearer by the second as the sun rushed to its rise above the range of mountains to the east. The mountains to the west suddenly flared with light from the rising sun. The snow at the peaks turned an impossible rose color, delicate and lovely. This was called the alpenglow and should have thrilled Marcia to the bone. She could see the dawnlight from the corner of her eye as the racing light swept down the mountainside across the valley. The prairie to the west lit up with amber grasses. The line of light swept out to the sand and took the grayish sand to gold.
Marcia’s knees were trembling with fear and tension, in a face-off with the unknown thing. It was hard to stand still. She was traveling to the Great Sand Dunes to hear the famous Taos Hum, because she’d read that the hum could be
heard best of all in the huge expanse of Colorado’s version of the Sahara. The dunes were made of fine ground quartz with a great deal of iron, a material that some said was a source of spiritual power.
Marcia believed in spiritual power. She was a retired teacher of high school biology. She’d been married once, but the marriage didn’t last. She had no children. She was only fifty-five, having taken early retirement, and she spent her free time exploring the paranormal.
This was the third trip she’d taken in the glorious freedom of retirement. There weren’t enough years left for her to visit all the places she wanted to visit. This place was one she’d read about for years. She stood frozen in a waiting game with whatever-it-was, trying not to think that this trip might be her last. The light was almost bright enough to see now.
Then the morning sun reached her discovery and illuminated it brilliantly. The light was not kind to the body, for a body it was.
Marcia’s terror changed instantly to horror. A young woman lay before her, sprawled on her side. Her nude body was ivory and pale like a statue, as though every ounce of blood had been drained from her. Her eyes were open and filled with sand. There were no footprints around her. She was laid on a sloping curve with tiny ripples of sand spread all around her. The ripples, formed by wind and dry days into a crunchy plaster, were undisturbed around her body.
She was laid out like an offering to the gods, but not to the God that Marcia worshipped. Her shoulder and arm looked odd. Marcia realized she was seeing places where the girl’s skin had been cut away. She turned away, the image burning in her eyes, and started to run toward the entrance to the dunes. Suddenly a hum filled the air, a low moaning tone that invaded every inch of her body. It was the Taos Hum, at last, and it wasn’t exciting at all. It was more horrible than she could have imagined.
She staggered, flailed, lurched in the sand. The ground seemed to be heaving under her feet. The ground was heaving under her feet. Marcia fell to her knees as the dunes quivered and rolled in enormous waves. She curled up on her side, her arms around her head. Tons of sand around her shifted and writhed, threatening to bury her like an ocean wave of sand. The moaning tone made her dental fillings ache fiercely and vibrated in her head until she thought she would go mad. The rolling started to slow, then abruptly stopped. Marcia heard a high, piercing shriek that went on and on. A while later she realized the sound was coming from her, and she stopped it.
“Earthquake,” she said to herself. Her voice came out in a husky whisper, cracked and broken.
She struggled to her feet. The sand hadn’t buried her. Her ankle didn’t want to work properly and her daypack hung sloppily from one shoulder. She straightened her hair, brushed off her shorts, and adjusted her backpack. She looked back at the body of the girl and it was still there. She took a brief drink from her water bottle. She tried out her voice.
“Colorado has earthquakes,” she said. “They’re very rare, though.” That was better. The shaking was a normal event, though rare, just a perfectly explainable natural phenomenon. Just an earthquake. What the hum meant, she wasn’t sure. No time for that now.
She didn’t have to look at the dead girl again. It was no trick of the light. There was a dead body on the Great Sand Dunes, and Marcia had to get the word to the park rangers before anyone else came along. Earthquake or not, the poor girl needed to be taken care of. Marcia let her years of teaching stiffen her like a good brace. She straightened her shoulders and started limping toward the campgrounds as fast as she could.
Westside, Colorado Springs, Colorado
Eileen Reed directed traffic.
There was nothing else to be done. The ambulance had to get through and the traffic lights were out. Eileen stood in the intersection and waved her arms. She was in a pair of sweatpants and a white T-shirt. Her shoulder holster was clearly visible, which was perhaps why she was commanding respect from the alarmed Colorado Springs drivers.
The traffic streamed through the intersection. The ambulance went through slowly with lights flashing. The ambulance drivers gave Eileen a wave. Their faces were still pale, but there were clear signs of recovery. They grinned at Detective Reed in her workout clothes, directing traffic like a rookie cop.
Eileen grinned back. A few more minutes and the traffic would sort itself into a four-way stop, orderly streams of cars first going one way and then the other. Colorado Springs lost power quite often when the famous summer thunderstorms came barreling down Pikes Peak. The cars wouldn’t be in a snarl if people weren’t so completely poleaxed by this weird earthquake. Eileen could hear the car radios, most tuned to the KALT radio station. An enterprising disc jockey at KALT had called a disc jockey in California, who was now dispensing earthquake advice over the Colorado airwaves with a casual and calming nonchalance.
With a final wave, Eileen left the intersection and ran for her apartment, two blocks from the stoplight. During the earthquake, Eileen had ended up on the lawn with the other residents, wearing bra and panties and a towel that shrank to washcloth size as soon as the earthquake was over. She would have faced a lot worse than the very real threat of a gas explosion to find some clothes. She’d heard the wailing of the siren from her bedroom as she started to get dressed. She abandoned her attempt to put on work clothes and pulled on the first things that came to hand. The ambulance had to get through, and the intersection by her house was a snarl of confused drivers—she had to help.
By the time she returned to her apartment, the building manager had turned off the main valve, educated by the cheery California disc jockey about the dangers of broken gas lines. Just to be sure, the manager had turned off the electric power as well. Eileen finished dressing quickly in her eerily quiet apartment. With no running refrigerator, fans, or clocks, her apartment seemed to be holding its breath.
Betty, her cat, was stiff and outraged and silent underneath the bed. The earthquake was completely Eileen Reed’s fault, and Betty wasn’t going to forgive her any time soon. She was an adopted alley cat, ferociously independent, a bright and improbable orange, and would not be coaxed out from under the bed when she was in a huff. Eileen didn’t even try. She left her an open can of cat food and a small handful of cat treats, a sort of cat bouquet, as an apology.
Her cell phone began ringing as she reached her car.
“What took you so long?” she said into the receiver.
“Uh, er, Detective Reed?” a voice said. “This is Cathy at dispatch.”
“I’m on my way in, Cathy,” Eileen said, starting the car.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Cathy said, and broke the connection. She sounded frayed. It was going to be a busy day at the police department. Eileen figured she wouldn’t be doing much detective work that day. Today would be a day spent in the trenches, keeping citizens happy and looters unhappy.
She started to speed dial Joe’s number, just to check on him. Joe was a solid type. If he wasn’t beyond help, he wasn’t going to do anything stupid.
Eileen saw the first broken storefront window and the small crowd in front and turned off her phone in mid-ring. She pulled over to the curb with a warning yelp of the tires and slammed the car door, hard. The crowd dissolved as she strode up to the storefront, trying to look about seven feet tall. It was going to be a long day, she sighed to herself. A long day.
Scenic Viewing Site, San Luis Valley, Colorado
The sight of Blanca Peak nearly took Alan Baxter’s breath away. He’d never been to the San Luis Valley before. The peak sat at the end of the Sangre de Cristo Mountain range like an enormous post at the end of a fence. The top was a pure and blinding white in the early morning sun. He couldn’t believe any amount of summer could reach the top of that peak and melt the snow. Across the valley he could see the San Juan Mountains, another tall range of mountains with snow-capped peaks. The San Luis Valley lay in between, a peaceful patchwork of farmland and grazing cattle. In the distance, up the valley, he could see the tan pelt of the Great Sand Dunes. What a beautiful
place.
Alan had pulled off at the viewing site and gotten out to stretch his legs. He stopped every two hours, because if he didn’t, he had a tendency to stiffen up. He’d been driving since early morning and the cold air was delicious. There was no one else at the viewing site, which was perched on the edge of an enormous drop-off and gave a gorgeous view of Blanca Peak and the San Luis Valley. The bathroom had an out-of-order sign, so Alan leisurely watered some wildflowers off the side of the guardrail and zipped up. He stretched and sighed and grinned. With luck, he’d be on the Rio Grande in the afternoon, seeing what kind of bugs the fish were taking today. He’d never fished the Rio Grande. He’d meant to get down here for years, but there always seemed to be somewhere else to go. The summer fishing in Yellowstone and Montana were too good to pass up. Then there was the Frying Pan, or the Gunnison. Alan just never made it down to southern Colorado.
Then Sam Williams ended up at his table at the bar in West Yellowstone, Montana, earlier that winter. They’d been warming up after a day of bone-chilling fishing, and Sam had joined their table because he knew Alan’s friend Dietrich. Dee introduced Sam to Alan, and the conversation turned, as it always did, back to fishing.
Sam owned a small cattle ranch down in the San Luis Valley, it turned out, and he talked up his Rio Grande like it was the best fishing since the legendary Millionaire’s Hole on the Henry’s Fork. The wild trout intrigued Alan. Sam Williams, from a ranching family that went four generations back, loved company. Like many ranchers, both he and his wife liked visitors. His wife Beth, particularly. They’d love to have Alan down for a month or so. Hell, all summer if he’d like.
Earthquake Games Page 2