by Jeff Carson
Deputy Hanson had been tasked with guarding Hammes’s room overnight up on the third floor, and also letting Yates and Rachette know when the big man woke up again so they could question him.
“You guys want coffee first?” Hanson asked as they passed the vending machine.
“Nah,” Rachette said, allowing the deputy to escort them through double doors to the main hallway.
They rode the elevator to the third floor and walked down the hall to an open doorway, where Hanson sat down on a plastic chair and began looking at his phone.
Rachette and Yates entered the room, knocking softly on the door. Inside, a doctor and two nurses stood at Rick Hammes’s bedside.
“Hello, detectives” the doctor said. “Just give us one moment, please.”
Rachette recognized the nurse as one of Wolf’s ex’s friends. She seemed to be ignoring them, and good riddance to that, he thought.
Hammes’s eyes were half opened. Tubes snaked from beeping machines into his gown and one side of his abdomen. Liquids dripped into his veins from IVs hooked into one arm, which was handcuffed at the wrist to the hospital bed.
The doctor came over and nodded.
“Hi, doc. I’m Detective Rachette. This is Detective Yates.”
“My name is Doctor Bates.” He looked back at the hulking, tattooed man lying on the bed. “Let me start by saying that Mr. Hammes is not in good shape right now. We’ve removed his spleen. His stomach was perforated by the bullet, and there was significant internal hemorrhaging, along with half a dozen other complications from the gunshot. Talking too loudly or for too long will be hard on him.”
“Ah, we won’t keep him too long,” Rachette said.
“If you could please keep his recovery in mind when you speak to him, I would appreciate it.”
"Yeah, doc, no problem. We've got our silk gloves on. Don't worry about it." Rachette winked at Hammes, who stared back through puffy eyes, a blank expression on his face. His gown was open at the chest, revealing a pentagram and other symbols on his muscle-bound flesh. His arms were covered in more ink than a comic book. The tats even climbed up his neck, stopping just below the chin like some kind of insane turtleneck.
The doctor and nurse left quietly, closing the door with a soft click.
Hammes flicked his eyes to the door, then back to Rachette and Yates. "What the hell do you guys want?" he croaked.
"We just have a few questions for you," Yates said. "And then we'll be on our way and we'll let you get back to healing.”
Hammes picked up a remote control next to him with his free hand, slid his eyes to the television, and pushed the button. Over Rachette's right shoulder, the television came to life, canned laughter blaring. He set the remote down and settled in to watch an episode of “Friends.”
Rachette smiled, then grabbed the remote control and turned it off. He then held it up for a moment before letting it drop to the floor. Bits of plastic skittered across the tile.
"I said we had a few questions for you. Then we’ll be on our merry way.”
A noise, something like a chuckle, came out of Hammes’s mouth. It turned to a squeal in pain. The machine behind him made a loud beep.
The nurse came in. "Everything okay?"
Nobody responded as she looked at the readout on the machine. "Is everything okay in here, I said?"
Rachette shrugged, looked at Yates. Yates shrugged back.
"Is everything okay with you?" she asked the patient.
Hammes nodded. She walked out without another word.
Outside the hospital window, the wind kicked up, and rain streaked sideways across the glass.
“You’re looking good,” Rachette said. “Pretty lucky to be alive, pulling that gun on our deputies like that.”
“I wasn’t going to do nothing.”
“Oh really.” Rachette snorted. “Then next time you might not want to pull a gun on them.”
Hammes stared at the window. "What happened to Mary?"
Rachette frowned. "Mary Dimitri?”
Hammes’s eyes locked on Rachette's. "What happened to her?"
"She's dead.”
Hammes's eyes closed, and he leaned his head back against the pillow.
"You didn't know that?" Yates asked.
"Nobody told me anything. I’ve been asleep. Drugged up.” He kept his eyes closed. “I drove back into town from Vail and saw there was a bunch of cops at her house when I passed by. But I didn’t know what for.”
They sat in silence for a beat.
“Then I saw you guys at my house,” Hammes said. “And then I thought it all had to do with me.”
“But you just said you didn’t know she was dead.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then why did you think anything had to do with you?” Rachette asked. “I’m not following.”
“I don’t know. Chris was dead. She was dating him. I was dating her behind his back. I have a history, shooting at those pissants a few years ago. I thought she was telling you I killed Chris. I thought she was, you know, giving you guys DNA evidence or some shit. Something you could match to Chris’s killing or something. Something she set me up for.”
“You think she set you up for that?” Yates asked. “You think she was involved with Oakley’s death and pointed us to you?”
Hammes shook his head. “I don’t know. I have no clue what’s going on. I came home from working up in Vail, and now I can’t eat solid food for months, and that’s if I heal good.”
Rachette held up his phone. “This is a picture of the woodpile on the side of your house.”
Hammes said nothing while Rachette swiped to the next photo.
“Do you recognize this gun?” Rachette asked, showing the photo of the G21 with the attached suppressor.
“Nope.”
“We found that gun in your woodpile,” Rachette said.
“In the pile?”
“Between the pieces of wood.”
“Well, it’s not mine.”
Rachette nodded. "Where were you on Monday night?”
"Up in Eagle. The Motel 6 right there. Also downtown Edwards. Ask any of the five other guys I was with from the Edwards Downtown Construction Project. I was out drinking with them. I stayed all night in the motel afterwards." Hammes looked around. “I don’t know where my phone is.”
“We have it. And we talked to the workers up there,” Rachette said. “They corroborated your story.”
“Yeah?” Relief looked to wash over Hammes. Then he twisted his handcuffed arm, pulling the slack in the chain.
“Why did you come home this Tuesday morning?” Rachette asked.
“I took the day off. I had to go back and make sure my dog was doing all right.”
“You haven’t asked about your dog,” Yates said.
Hammes shot him a glare. “The doctors told me he was all right. He’s okay, right? That’s what they said. They said it was a graze to his leg. They said he’d have a limp and—”
“—He’s fine,” Rachette said.
Hammes closed his eyes and leaned back. His chest rose and fell fast. The machine beeped once, but otherwise did nothing out of the ordinary as Hammes continued to relax.
“I was going to pick Dex up and bring him up to Eagle for the rest of the month,” he said. “Work was going well and I was going to stay up there. That’s why I came home that morning.”
“You never told your parole officer about the new job,” Rachette said.
“I was going to, if things went well. But the cops came over and shot me in the stomach.”
“I’m not feeling any sympathy for you, Hammy,” Rachette said. “In fact, I’m holding back from punching you in the stomach right now.”
Yates put his hand on his shoulder. Rachette took a step back.
Hammes shook his head, closing his eyes. “I’m not going back to jail.”
“I’m sorry to say you’re wrong on that count,” Rachette said.
Hammes said nothing, ke
eping his eyes closed. After a few seconds he opened them and said, “Something isn’t right, though.”
“What?” Yates asked.
“I said something isn’t right.”
“What isn’t right?”
“The steak bone.”
“What steak bone?”
“When I came home, Dex had diarrhea.”
“Yeah,” Rachette said. “We noticed.”
“There was a T-bone steak bone that Dex was chewing on. I asked the neighbor across the street if he fed it to him. He said no. I was pissed off, but I believed him. That guy doesn't lie. Not really in his DNA. Especially since I gave him specific instructions not to do that or I would rip his arms off. Dex has a meat protein allergy. It could kill him. Put him into anaphylactic shock.”
"Okay," Rachette said.
"Okay," Hammes repeated. "So, somebody planted that gun in my woodpile.”
“If anyone was trying to get near my house, Dex would have chewed off that person’s nuts. He was outside the whole time I was gone. But you give him a steak? That would keep him occupied.”
Rachette had to admit it made sense, and he’d been thinking along the same lines. That's why the gun was shoved into the woodpile. If it was actually Hammes's gun, why wouldn't it have been inside? Why in the woodpile outside? Or, like he’d said before, why not in a lake or a river? It was too sloppy and stupid.
The machine beeped again, and the nurse returned. “Excuse me,” she said, pushing past Rachette. “I have to get to the machine.”
“No problem,” Rachette said. “We were just leaving anyway.”
Chapter 31
Wolf's cell phone vibrated as he drove into the aspen-tree covered clearing on the near side of the pass leading to Dredge.
The cell service vortex, he had dubbed it in his mind, because passing through this section on the way to Dredge always injected his phone with the service needed to download whatever Wolf had missed in the thirty minutes of dead zone on the outskirts of Rocky Points.
He pulled to the side of the road and saw he had a new text message and voicemail from Rachette.
Give me a call when you can. I left a voicemail.
He clicked the voicemail button and Rachette’s voice blared through the speakers.
“Sir, we were just at the hospital and finally got a chance to talk to Hammes. I wanted to talk to you about something he said. Remember how the dog had the shits when we were there talking to his neighbor?”
Wolf turned down the volume and listened to Rachette’s explanation about Rick Hammes finding that a T-Bone steak had been fed to the dog, flaring up a reaction from a meat protein allergy.
“That gives us probable cause to look into everyone’s financials,” Rachette said. “We find who bought that T-Bone, that’s gotta be our killer.”
Wolf zoned out, thinking of the way the neighbor had been talking about how Hammes had been yelling at him about the steak. Wolf had dismissed his ramblings at the time. He pulled up Cain’s text message again, and the picture on screen.
He studied the numbers and letters on the spreadsheet this time. The letters STK jumped out at him from a spreadsheet cell underneath a column labeled product. A number filled the next cell, the column labeled Price. The column name to the left said Customer, but if there was any name associated with the transaction, it was concealed by the blur of light.
“… so give me a ring when you can and we’ll talk about it.” Rachette finished his voicemail and hung up.
Wolf called Cain again, realizing she still hadn’t called him back. It rang six times, then went to voicemail.
He pressed her voicemail message again. As her voice came out of his speakers, he cranked it up, her voice filling the cab.
“Sir, it's Deputy Cain. I’m at Lonnie’s Market in Dredge, and I think I just figured something out. Please give me a call—”
Again her words cut off, but what came out of the speakers at full volume sounded much different this time. He suddenly realized there had been no digital distortion after all. With sickening clarity he heard a thump, accompanied by a sharp yelp of pain, followed by a long drawl of unintelligible noise. It was the sound of a body shutting down, completely taken over by unconscious reflexes.
He shook his head, wondering if he was hearing things with an overactive imagination.
She wasn’t answering her phone. He listened again, but he was already convinced. He had already pressed the gas pedal to the floor.
Chapter 32
Piper’s head slammed hard against something and her eyes fluttered open. Her nose whistled with a spastic sucking in of air, then crackled with mucus as she exhaled.
She tried to open her mouth to take a breath and found it stuck shut. She tried to bring her hand up to her mouth to unblock whatever was there, then realized her arms were bound behind her.
She lay still, then tried it all again. Thoughts moved sluggishly in a head pounding with pain.
What is this?
There was a deep, guttural rumbling coming from somewhere. Her body vibrated with the noise.
So cold.
Popping sounds overlaid the rumble. She blinked, trying to focus, but something was right in front of her face. She adjusted her focus and realized it was a blue plastic sheet. Raindrops were pelting it, rivulets running down on the other side as wind fluttered it against her face.
When she twisted her hands, she felt a pliable plastic cord that terminated in a knob with three prongs, and she realized it was an electrical extension cord wrapped around her wrists.
Whatever she was lying on bucked and jumped, lifting and slamming her down. She straightened, hitting the back of her head on a metal retaining wall of some sort. Her fingers groped down, feeling a cold, wet, dirt-covered metal floor.
So cold. Her chin bobbed up and down as she shivered.
Her head hurt so much.
A memory of leaving the supermarket wriggled its way through the pain. She’d seen a man. A man who had attacked her.
Her legs were free, but she couldn’t feel a thing. She tried moving her right leg and heard the scrape of metal. She moved her foot, then her other leg and foot. All she felt was cold.
She shivered some more, and heard the high-pitched squeal as she slid forward, hitting her head again. And then it dawned on her she was in the back of a pickup truck, covered by a tarp.
The engine cut off. The sound of a door shutting. Footsteps crunching. Then just the popping of the rain.
She opened her eyes wide, waiting, then jumped as the blue covering lifted off her. Icy drops hit her face, landing inside her ear. A man's visage filled her vision and their eyes met. She recognized him and tried to speak, remembering too late she had the duct tape over her mouth.
His eyes were wild, nothing like they’d been the first time she’d seen the man a couple days ago, reminding her of a cat’s on the hunt. He put a finger to his lips. "You be quiet, all right?"
She tried to speak again.
"I said, shut up."
She glared at him and screamed behind the duct tape.
He flinched backward, turning his head.
Again she screamed. The sound was futile to her own ears but it built in intensity as the panic within her redlined.
“Shut up!” he hissed.
Her throat felt like she was gargling razorblades as every effort to yell was jammed back into her by the tape, but the man was growing distraught at her increasing volume, however pathetic it was.
Something in his eyes changed and he ducked away and out of her field of vision.
What about dad?
The thought stopped her. She sucked in breaths through her nose, thinking of her father.
She wanted to check her watch, but her arms were bound behind her back. She already knew that. Her sluggish brain worked in fits and starts. She thrashed against her restraints. This was stupid, she thought. Stacy was with Dad, and that’s the least of my worries.
Footsteps sounded again,
this time down by her feet. The tailgate clicked, squealed, and dropped open. The truck sagged down as someone stepped on the tailgate.
She let out the loudest scream yet.
"I said, shut up.” The world flashed as there was another tremendous blow to her head, and she fell back into the darkness.
Chapter 33
Wolf kept one eye on his cell phone, the other on the road in front of him as he descended into the Dredge Valley. He had been driving out of the cell vortex when he’d last spoken with Patterson. His call had been cut off by three beeps early in his rant for help. Despite the disconnection he continued to drive, certain Patterson had heard his request for backup. But as
he drove on, doubt had crept in and set up camp inside him.
His phone still read No Service. Damn it. He should have turned around when the call had gone out, but something told him every second counted right now.
There! The No Service indicator disappeared, replaced by a single bar of reception. His phone began vibrating as missed call notifications and messages rolled in. Ignoring them, he poked Patterson's number.
"There you are," she said through the speakers. “You cut out.”
"Are you on your way?”
"Yes. I have people heading up,” she said. “We’re all heading up. I tried to get a chopper up there, but they’re saying the radar indicates it’s impossible.”
Wolf’s windshield wipers slapped back and forth at the highest setting but it was still not enough at the speed Wolf was going. Still, he kept his foot on the gas.
“The radar’s not lying,” he said.
“What’s happened to her? You said somebody attacked her. Who?”
“I don’t know that yet.” He told her about the text message that he'd gotten from Cain, and the voice message. "She was onto something, though. Something about a financial transaction at a place called Lonnie's Market.”
“Where?”
“Dredge? I don’t know.”
Wolf passed a sign reading Dredge—2 miles. He wanted to jam the accelerator all the way down, but the road veered to the left and the windshield already looked like he was inside a carwash.