She’d already written an apology note for Pink for what she was planning. Stepping into the pantry, she pulled down the jar Mrs. Pink kept emergency cash in. There was a little over five hundred dollars inside, and Heather took it all, replacing it with the note and putting it carefully back on the shelf. She’d stuffed the cash into her jeans and turned to leave the pantry when she heard the stairs creak.
Someone was coming.
Sucking in a breath, Heather quietly pulled the pantry door closed and stepped as far back inside as she could, hoping that whoever was awake, it wasn’t because they were hungry, and they wouldn’t look inside the pantry.
“Gravy, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Heather heard Pink’s voice, a whisper. He was talking to his partner, Graves, a man he always called Gravy. He’d probably come downstairs so as not to wake Mrs. Pink.
Footsteps told her that Pink was in the small kitchen, pacing from one end to the other.
“No, no, I get that. I’m being an old woman, but I can’t help it. I—”
The whisper stopped and so did the pacing.
“Hey, something’s up. The alarm panel just went dead. I saw the light wink out. No, it’s not the power—fridge is still on. I gotta go, man. Send me help.”
–––
The rain fell harder, and Royal pulled on gloves. His pulse increased, and he worked to calm the shudder in his hands. He was ready for this, he told himself. Failure was not an option.
Suddenly Devo was next to him, looking and smelling like a wet dog. “Child’s play,” he whispered. “Ice, baby, ice.”
He went to work on the back door and had it open in a matter of seconds. Once Royal stepped inside, he knew the next few minutes would change his life forever.
Devo moved in first, two steps ahead of Royal. And that was when it all went wrong.
“Boom! Boom!” The report of a gun sounded like a cannon, and Devo went down. Somehow, someway, the man had been waiting for them.
All instinct and reflex, Royal crouched and stepped to his right, firing back in the direction of the sound. He emptied his gun and heard a muffled “Oomph,” then a thud.
Breath coming fast and ears ringing from the gunfire, Royal stepped forward, Get the girl singing in his mind. A big man was down on the floor, moaning. Royal knew it was the police officer who lived here, the man hiding the girl.
Shoving his own small, empty .38 into his waistband, Royal ripped the man’s shiny revolver from his grasp and shot him again. The moaning stopped. He then pivoted toward the room off the kitchen, where they’d been told the girl would be.
Operating on pure adrenaline, internal clock telling him time was ticking away, Royal pushed open the door and clicked on the light. The room was empty. Eyes sweeping the area, he stepped forward and threw open the closet door. Nothing but clothes.
He heard the floor creak. Did someone call out? The girl must be upstairs. Swirling back out of the room, Royal jogged for the stairs. Ears ringing from the gunfire, he thought he heard someone, but he didn’t hesitate. When he saw a woman, the cop’s wife, Royal fired without hesitation, feeling in a groove now. The woman went down, and he leaped over her. Upstairs, he found the couple’s daughter hiding under the bed and he shot her.
But the girl he’d come for, the one he wanted, was nowhere.
–––
Heather heard Sergeant Pink move again, but he didn’t go back upstairs. She hunkered down, more fearful now. What was happening?
She struggled to stay still, to not fidget, and then she heard the back door open.
A floorboard protested.
Boom! Boom! Two shots blasted her eardrums, and Heather jumped, nearly wetting her pants and smacking into a shelf, knocking a container of cereal onto the floor. Even as she stiffened, gripping her backpack in front of her with both hands, Heather thought of poor Mrs. Pink having to clean up the mess.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. More shots, and Heather heard a thud, then groaning. Was it Sergeant Pink?
She held her breath as footsteps sounded in the kitchen. Another gunshot, and the groaning stopped.
The footsteps crossed in front of the pantry, toward Heather’s room. The door was thrown open.
They were here for her.
It took all her strength to stay still. Very faintly, she heard Mrs. Pink call out, “Isaac?”
She wanted to scream a warning, something, anything, to save the woman who’d been only kind to her.
The footsteps passed in front of the pantry again, moving to the stairs. More gunshots.
Paralyzed by fear, Heather stood frozen, but the fear evaporated as a sense of self-preservation and fight or flight kicked in. She knew she had to move or be slaughtered. She opened the pantry door and darted out, stumbling when she saw the still form of Isaac Pink on his kitchen floor. Horror brought tears in a rush, and she bit her tongue to keep from screaming. But street-smart pragmatism told her there was nothing she could do for him or his wife.
She cursed Porter Cross and hurried toward the back door. There was another body there. Devo. He belonged to Cross. At least Sergeant Pink got one.
Trembling, she stepped over him and out the back door into the driving rain, taking her one brief chance to flee and save her life by never looking back.
–––
Cursing, certain his two minutes were up, Royal did what life on the streets had taught him to do well: he thought on his feet. He bounded back down the stairs two at a time and returned to the kitchen, where he checked Devo, who was twitching. Putting his newly acquired handgun in the waistband at the small of his back, Royal grabbed Devo and swung the thin man up over his shoulder. Devo made no sound, not then and not when Royal dumped him into the trunk, where the girl should have gone, and slammed it shut.
He slid behind the wheel and forced himself to drive slowly out of the alley. The rain was pounding, a Southern California gutter buster of a storm, and even with the pummeling of the water, he thought he heard sirens. Winding out of the San Pedro neighborhood, Royal found his way to the Gerald Desmond Bridge and back into Long Beach. He drove to Sixth Street, where he could park under an overpass, out of sight of traffic, got out of the car, and threw up.
When his stomach was completely empty, he stepped out from under the overpass and let the rain pound him until he was soaked through. Only then was his head clear enough to consider what he must do next. They’d failed where the girl was concerned, and Royal was not about to add to it by getting arrested. He checked on Devo again. The cokehead was dead, already cold to the touch.
Considering the car, which was stolen, and poor dead Devo, Royal had an idea. He knew how to get up on the bike path that ran along the flood control channel. With this rain, the channel would be rushing, engorged with runoff, if not now, soon.
Hopping back in the car, Royal drove up onto the bike path. He cautiously turned the car wheels down the steep concrete bank, toward the rushing water, which was halfway up the bank, left the car in drive, and leaped out, hitting the wet pavement so hard his teeth jarred. The vehicle rolled forward and down into the dark, debris-clogged water. In the darkness, the car disappeared quickly.
Royal didn’t know where it would end up, but he knew the water and the elements would erase any evidence tying him to the car. As an afterthought, he tossed his little .38 into the water after the car. He examined the gun he’d taken from the cop. Shiny, it was a larger revolver with hard rubber grips, and it felt like it was made for his hand. I’ll keep this, he thought. Scratch off the serial number . . . it will be a good piece.
He then hurried away, back down to the access road and into downtown Long Beach. Royal was so wet he didn’t even feel the rain anymore, which was showing no signs of letting up. He found a phone and called Boss Cross, the man he’d failed.
The boss listened as Royal told him everything that had happened, without embellishment or excuse.
“Sit tight. I’ll send a car.”
The car, a limo,
came a while later, with a bag of dry clothes waiting for him in the back. The rain had finally lessened, and the sun was trying to brighten the sky. Tired and cold now, and wondering about his fate, Royal changed as the driver took him to a gated residence in Rancho Palos Verdes.
Hair still wet on his collar, Royal was led into the TV room, where Cross, his right-hand man Digger, and his business associate Cyrus, sat watching an early morning news broadcast. Royal didn’t know Cyrus very well, but he admired what he did know. Cyrus was younger than Cross, and he had style. He was a big spender and liked a lot of the same stuff Cross did. Digger was a tough guy, a Vietnam vet and a martial arts expert, one of the scariest guys he’d ever met. Digger had taught Royal a few moves and promised to work with him more if Royal proved himself.
“You did good, kid.” Cross held out a beer, Royal’s favorite, and Cyrus beamed, nodding in agreement. Digger’s expression, as usual, was unreadable.
Floored and a little speechless, Royal took the beer. “But we didn’t get the girl and Devo is dead.”
“Devo sacrificed himself for the rest of us,” Cross said. “But I’m impressed by the way you handled yourself, how you improvised. You didn’t panic. Well done.”
Royal swallowed, in awe now. “Th-th-thanks.”
He was offered a seat on the couch and he took it, chugging the beer. As he watched the news reports on TV, he understood. The cops had no idea where the girl was. She’d been a witness in hiding, and now the cop and his family hiding her were dead and she was nowhere to be found. The cops were clearly ready to blame the girl.
Cross laughed, and he and Cyrus clinked glasses. “We’ll find her eventually. But there’ll be no trial, that’s for sure. You certainly have proved that you have a cool head in stressful situations. You’ve earned yourself a nickname—given any thought to one?”
Royal considered the question for a brief moment. “Yeah, I have. You can call me Ice.”
1
PRESENT DAY
Today should have been the day of her baptism. But instead of being dunked in the cool water of the church’s baptismal, Police Chief Tess O’Rourke coughed, eyes squinted and burning because of the hot smoke swirling everywhere. She wore a nose and mouth mask, but it barely helped. A lightning strike fire was raging. Half of Rogue’s Hollow was under a mandatory evacuation order.
She hopped back in her patrol vehicle as the Coopers, the second-to-last holdout family on this rural road she was evacuating, grabbed their kids and a dog, climbed into their truck, and reluctantly left their property. The husband, Garrett Cooper, wanted to stay and defend the home, and he’d slowed Tess down considerably, eating into her margin of safety.
“The house is a hundred years old—we can’t just leave it!”
“Garrett, the house can be replaced, possessions can be replaced—your life can’t be.” Tess tried to reason with him and got nowhere. It was Janie refusing to leave without him that finally worked to change his mind. Tess witnessed a tense fight between the pair that ended when Cooper recognized that his wife wasn’t going anywhere without him. And fighting to save a hundred-year-old structure on two wooded and brush-choked acres, with the wind driving the flames this way, was foolhardy to say the least. Finally common sense won out. The only way he’d save his brand-new pickup was to drive it out with his family in it.
Even now, in spite of helicopter and plane water drops, Tess could see the flames swirling and consuming on a seemingly unstoppable march. They were off to her left now, roughly behind Arthur Goding’s place, and the wind was driving them along the ridge of hills that bracketed the boundaries of Rogue’s Hollow. Arthur had left his home without argument, taking his dog and loading his livestock into a large trailer.
“Have to trust this all to the Lord,” he’d said.
The property next to Arthur’s, a onetime pot farm, was vacant, so no worries there. Nearly everyone else, including Bart Dover, who owned the property at the end of the road, had already evacuated as well. Dover’s farm was at the western boundary of Rogue’s Hollow. He hadn’t wanted to wait or to take a chance, so he left with his family at the first sign of trouble. Tess wished everyone had been so easy. There was one last resident Tess had not been able to contact—at the end of Juniper, a gravel road that cut south, between here and the Dover place. Fighting with Garrett Cooper had put Tess on the razor’s edge of danger; the safe time cushion the fire captain had given her was expiring.
“Edward-1.” The radio crackled with her call sign.
Tess yanked off the mask to answer. “Edward-1, copy.”
“Fire is advising that you hurry. The wind has shifted, and they can’t guarantee you won’t be cut off.”
“I’ve got one more home. Five, ten minutes, max.”
“10-4, will advise.”
Tess wiped sweat from her brow as she pressed the accelerator, able to breathe again inside her air-conditioned SUV. She followed the Coopers’ truck down the long, bumpy driveway. They turned right to head to town and safety, while she turned left.
The last property on Juniper was the largest at 105 acres, and it backed up to a hillside that could erupt into flames any minute. Tess was barely acquainted with the person who lived there. A bona fide recluse, Livie Harp was sometimes the lead topic on all channels of the Rogue telegraph, the thread of gossip that wound itself everywhere through the Upper Rogue valley.
That gossipy thread told Tess that Harp had bought the property in cash, several years ago, before Tess came to Oregon. Everyone labeled Harp a “prepper” because she’d spent months having the property renovated and “fortified,” as Tess’s friend Casey Reno liked to say. The Harp property was as off the grid as possible with solar panels, well water, a septic system, a greenhouse for vegetables, and no listed phone. Tess had heard that Harp even butchered her own meat.
Tess learned from Pastor Oliver Macpherson that Harp seemed to be trying to come out of her shell.
“Twice now she’s come to church. She comes late, sits in the back, and leaves early, but at least she’s putting her toe in the water.”
Tess had worked in the Hollow for over a year and had seen the woman only a couple of times, in her car, an old-style Land Rover that almost looked armor-plated, driving back to her place.
In southern Oregon, a lot of large properties tended to look like they were built—and stuck—in the nineteenth century. But Harp’s place was all twenty-first century. One of the improvements she added to her property was strong metal fencing and an equally heavy security gate. Tess had heard that she had an intercom system and cameras everywhere, and that when she transacted business online and deliveries came, they didn’t get past the gate. She’d provided a chute for packages to be pushed through, so they were safe on the other side of the gate. Livie herself would come and get the package only after the delivery person had left.
Tess wasn’t certain how much the gossip she heard could be trusted, but as she pulled up to the gate now, it was obvious that the security here was formidable. Mindful of the cameras on either side of the fence, she punched the intercom.
The minute or so before there was a response seemed like an hour. Tess was about to punch it again.
“Can I help you?”
“This is Chief O’Rourke. Ms. Harp, there is an out-of-control forest fire heading your way. I’m ordering a mandatory evacuation.”
“I have no intention of leaving.”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me. There’s a raging fire—”
“I heard you. I’m not deaf or stupid. I’m also not leaving my home, my property.”
“Fire personnel will not be able to respond to your residence in the event you need help.”
“I’ll be fine. I’m not asking for help. I can take care of myself. I have defensible space.”
The intercom clicked off. Tess had only a second of openmouthed shock before her phone rang. It was Oliver. He hadn’t wanted her to go, telling her that she’d already completed her duty when it c
ame to warning people and facilitating evacuation. A recent fast-moving fire in northern California had amped up his angst; people there lost their lives when the fires moved toward them so fast they had no chance to get away. Putting herself directly in harm’s way was not in her job description.
“Tess, you need to get back here now!” The emotion in his voice touched her deep inside, making her wish she could hold his face in both hands and assure him that she was fine.
Tess heard debris smack her car, and she felt it move as a strong wind gust slammed into it. She’d been in a car pelted with sand during a sandstorm in the Arizona desert years ago, and that was what this felt like.
“I’m heading back now,” she said and then realized the phone was dead, the connection dropped. She plopped the phone on the seat next to her, frowning because she knew Oliver was justifiably worried. Briefly, she considered a radio call to the incident command center so someone could let him know that she was okay.
Tess looked in her rearview mirror and saw a tornado of flames. She was certain the house she’d just left was lost. The flames were angry, clawing at the sky, and the smoke dark and ominous. She jammed her car into reverse as a large explosion rent the air, deafening even to her with her windows rolled up. The Coopers’ propane tank must have exploded. As if shot from a flamethrower, fire squirted across the road. Tess was cut off.
She reached out and punched the intercom again. There was no choice but to hunker down with the recluse.
But would the woman open the gate?
Tess waited for a response even as her rearview mirror showed a wall of smoke and flames coming closer.
2
Oliver Macpherson stared at his phone as his connection to Tess dropped. Cell phone reception was spotty at times in Rogue’s Hollow as it was, but with two fires raging, and one close to the nearest cell tower, fire personnel had told him that coverage might be affected.
Is Tess okay?
The fire incident commander had warned her not to go, since the fire was moving fast and was too unpredictable. Oliver asked her not to go. She was the police chief; surely she could let the fire department see to evacuations. But Tess was Tess, fearless and a little reckless at times. He couldn’t deny that those same qualities that attracted him to her also frustrated and terrified him at times.
Cold Aim Page 2