by Russell Fee
“Yes,” said Callahan.
“And do you see where it ends?”
“Yes again,” said Callahan.
“That trail ends on Egan’s property right where that oil rig is being dismantled by Superior Tow and Salvage. Its helicopter is loading the parts onto the barge moored in Pebble Bay. If they had a waiting ATV, they could make it up the trail to the helicopter and be off the island in no time. I think there’ll be three of them, and I think that’s how they intend to do it,” said Amanda.
Callahan straightened up and emitted a low whistle until his breath was gone. “Damn,” he said.
Chapter 72
Surprise and timing. He had those two elements on his side. Callahan was reasonably certain that whoever would come for him did not know he knew his office was bugged. They would not know he had prepared for them. They also had to anticipate his schedule. He was in control of the timing.
Amanda would be hidden on the trail. Dempsey would be waiting at the well rig. If he and Amanda failed to seize them, then it would be up to Dempsey. There would be no communication between the three of them, nothing to nullify the element of surprise, until Callahan was in sight of them and the attackers had made their move.
Callahan pulled the seatbelt across his chest and fastened it. The flash drive was in a padded envelope in the glove compartment. He backed the cruiser out of the station’s driveway and rolled onto the road. He headed west.
Callahan drove through town to its western edge where the road rose in a gentle incline for a mile to a crest where it intersected with Sutter Road. He had an unobstructed view, and not a single car came over the crest toward him or came up the incline behind him. The road remained clear all the way to the intersection. At the intersection, he turned south onto Sutter Road. It lay straight as an arrow for three miles until it formed a tee with Millrace Road at the state forest. There he would turn west again and into the suspected trap.
The geography was as Amanda had described it, flat open fields and farms and barren shoulders edging the road on either side. The day had started to heat up, and the asphalt road began to shimmer ahead of the cruiser. Just inside the shimmer, he could see two cars in his lane. Both were close together and going slower than the speed limit. When he closed the distance between the cruiser and the first car ahead of him, he signaled to pass. As he turned into the oncoming lane, the first car slammed on its brakes and the second car plowed into its rear with an impact so great that the cruiser shook. He saw the airbags explode and the interior of both cars swirl with white dust. Callahan hit the brakes and rumbled to the side of the road. As he jumped from the cruiser, the driver’s-side door of the second car opened and a woman staggered out. She lunged for the rear door and jerked on the handle, struggling to open it. She began to scream. “My baby, my baby. Please, someone help. My baby.” The driver’s door to the first car opened and another woman tumbled out onto the road and tried to push herself to her knees, her head dangling to her chest.
Callahan rushed to the first woman and wrenched the rear door open. He saw the baby in a rear-facing infant car seat covered in a blanket. He ducked into the car, reached over the car seat, unfastened the seat belt, and tore the blanket off the child. Then he froze.
* * *
Amanda hadn’t moved a muscle in over an hour. She had selected a hiding spot that commanded a view of the trail head and that was high enough to see the road. Then she made herself invisible. She had done this dozens of times before in blinds, tower stands, and the open forest. Her brother had taught her to hunt and shoot a rifle. Once she learned, she never missed a kill shot. Some of the happiest times of her life had been hunting with her brother. She thought of him now and how proud of her he would be for choosing to be a deputy sheriff. She missed him terribly. No one could stop him from joining the army, training for the military police, and volunteering for deployment to a war zone. The last time she saw him alive he was in his uniform. He was in his same uniform when they buried him. Her brother’s influence and example had kindled in her a fierce desire to serve in law enforcement.
She was good for several more hours, no problem; but she worried. Callahan should have passed the trail head by now, and she had seen no sign of anyone on the trail. Something went wrong. She had hidden her car off the road a half mile away. If she ran to it, she could be there in minutes, cruising the roads toward town that Callahan would follow to the airport. She waited five more minutes and then stood up out of the brush. Callahan wasn’t coming.
Amanda sprinted to her car and fifteen minutes later stopped on the side of the road opposite the two wrecked automobiles. So that was it. Callahan had come upon the accident and either called an ambulance or taken the injured to the emergency medical facility himself. He had of necessity abandoned their plan. She sighed with relief and silently prayed for anyone who may have been hurt.
* * *
Callahan backed away from the plastic doll in the car seat and felt something blunt and hard bore into his spine. “Get out of the car slowly and start walking to your vehicle. Don’t turn around. You try to be a hero, and I blow a hole in your back, a big one.” The woman had stopped screaming and now her voice sounded low and hard.
“God damn you.” It was a second female voice. “My fucking teeth are broken and maybe my nose.” Callahan heard her spit. “You were supposed to slow down before you hit me, bitch.”
“It’s your own damn fault. You stopped too fast,” said the first woman. “Have you got the computer and phone?”
“Hell yes,” said the second woman and spat again.
Callahan’s head cleared the ceiling of the car, and he stood up, facing over the roof.
“Put your hands on your head,” said the first woman. When Callahan complied, she barked to the second woman, “Get his gun and then get into the cruiser. Hurry.”
* * *
Amanda traveled a short distance down the road when she made a U-turn and headed back to the accident. She’d make a quick inspection of the site and take a few pictures before meeting up with Callahan at the medical facility. Her training demanded it.
The rear of the first car had folded like an accordion. The bumper dangled from the chassis, held there by a twisted strand of plastic. The left rear tire was flat, and the wheel broken from the axel. The driver’s air bag had deployed and was spotted with thick smudges of blood-filled dust. Someone had been injured.
The second car’s hood had popped open, the bumper and grill crushed. Oil floated over a large pool of liquid under the engine. Inside, the driver’s air bag had also deployed, but there were no signs of an injury to the driver. The rear passenger door lay open and when Amanda inspected the back seat, her heart sank. A doll sat in a child’s seat. A child must have been a passenger and the door opened to take it from the car. She hoped against hope that the abandoned doll was not a sign the child had been hurt.
As she turned to leave, she noticed a dull glint from an object on the floor. She thought it must be a baby toy of some kind knocked form the child’s hand by the collision. She bent down to pick it up. When she pulled her hand out of the shadow and into full light, she was holding Callahan’s sheriff’s badge.
Chapter 73
The first woman twisted toward Callahan, her back propped against the door, her left leg lying bent on the seat. She pointed the gun at Callahan as he drove.
“Keep your eyes on the road and drive where I tell you,” she said.
He’d gotten a solid glimpse of her when she climbed into the passenger seat: early thirties, thin but taught, muscular. She wore shorts and a loose long-sleeved t-shirt. He suspected she hid tattoos. Her pale blue baseball cap covered all but a few strands of brown hair. He’d stolen another glance at her when she’d opened the glove compartment and tossed the envelope with the flash drive to the second woman in the back seat.
Except for the confusion in the seconds following the wreck, he’d not had an opportunity to observe the second woman. The first w
oman had rotated the rearview mirror so that he couldn’t see into the back seat. He’d heard the second woman speak when she had cursed the first woman. She talked faster and sounded younger, her voice oddly rising and falling with the last words of a sentence. Since entering the cruiser, she had spoken just one word, Done, in a phone call that lasted a fraction of a second. Now she was speaking again.
“Fuck, fuck, FUCK! We don’t have a goddamn cell signal. We’ve lost it. What’s with this fucking island that you can’t get a fucking signal?”
“The cell phone signal is too weak here. Where is it stronger?” The first woman spoke to Callahan.
“If you need a consistent signal, we have to get closer to town. That won’t happen unless we turn around. If we keep going in this direction, it will just get weaker,” he said.
“Turn this car around,” the first woman said to Callahan. “Let me know when the signal is strong enough,” she said to the second woman.
“I’ve downloaded the drive. I just need a minute to send the file. Then we wait until we get confirmation it’s the real deal. After that, we get off this fucking island, and I punch you in the goddamn face for breaking my teeth,” said the second woman.
Callahan turned the cruiser around and drove toward town. He was as determined as the two women to get to a stronger signal.
* * *
Dempsey had purchased the hard hat at the hardware store and the ancient Carhartt work jacket at Goodwill. The clipboard had come from the grocery store’s school supplies section. Like his disguise, his heads-up, in-charge demeanor was fabricated. He felt conspicuously out of place; yet, it all seemed to be working. So far, two workers at the drill site had approached him thinking he was a supervisor. But he didn’t know how much longer he could hang around before someone suspected that he didn’t belong there. He’d been waiting a long time, too long. He was supposed to be the fallback guy. If Callahan’s plan backfired, then he was there to stop anyone from escaping the island by helicopter. The helicopter had not landed to pick anyone up. And no one had come or gone from the rig site. Maybe the plan had worked. But why hadn’t Callahan contacted him? Something had gone wrong. He was sure of it.
He heard the car before he saw it—the piercing growl of an engine under stress and the hollow thuds of a two-ton metallic mass. When he turned toward the din, he saw a car racing down the dirt road to the site, swerving in the ruts and pounding over its pitted surface, heedless of obstacles. It skidded to a stop just feet from the well’s perimeter barricade causing two workers to backpedal away from the chain-link fence. The door flung open, and a woman jumped out, frantically waving her arms above her head.
It took Dempsey a few seconds to comprehend the scene and realize what was happening. The woman was Amanda and she was waving at him.
* * *
“I’ve got a signal. Stop the car,” demanded the second woman. The first woman waved the muzzle of the gun toward the side of the road for Callahan to pull over and stop.
This was the moment Callahan had been waiting for. Once the file was sent, the computer in the second woman’s hands would contain the identity of the receiving computer. With that identity, its location could be determined. And that location would reveal who had been behind the murders and kidnapping. Callahan had to get the computer from the women and get it to Dempsey. His window of opportunity would slam shut when they received the reply that the data were authentic. Then they would kill him, destroy the computer and flash drive, and bolt from the island.
“Come on, come on, come on,” urged the second woman. “Bingo. They got it and its good,” she cheered in the second before she screamed.
* * *
“Callahan never got to the trail. When I backtracked on the road, I passed an accident: two cars, no one at the scene, evidence of an injury, and this on the floor of one of the cars.” She reached into her pocket and tossed Dempsey the badge. “It’s Callahan’s.”
“So they got him,” he said.
“I called the medical facility. No one was admitted who needed medical attention, and the EMTs weren’t dispatched to any accident.
“Do you know where they might have taken him?”
Amanda shook her head. She drove toward town away from the drill site. If the abductors were on their way to the helicopter, she and Dempsey would meet them. The road wasn’t safe above 30 mph, and she was doing 70 when the tractor pulled onto the road in front of them. She slammed on the brakes and jerked the wheel to the left. The car fishtailed and then skidded broadside on the gravel before spinning to a stop across both lanes of traffic just in front of the tractor, missing it by feet.
The tractor had stopped, and the driver climbed down from the seat. Amanda pushed open the car door. Dempsey was already out of the vehicle. That’s when they heard the siren.
Chapter 74
Callahan sat with his arms at his side and his head tilted back against the headrest watching the first woman out of the corner of his eye. She was still turned sideways, her back leaning against the door, her left leg bent and propped against the backrest of the front seat. She held the gun easily in her right hand close to her chest, her elbow tucked at her side. The muzzle pointed at Callahan’s heart, and neither it nor the woman’s eyes had shifted away from Callahan for even a second. Callahan hadn’t moved or spoken since he stopped the cruiser. His breathing had settled into a steady rhythm as he waited, his hand inches from the siren button on the center console. The sound he waited for was maybe moments away and when it came, he would take his chance. He fought against his body’s urge to tense. He struggled to keep his muscles relaxed and his breathing even.
Then it happened.
There was a clap when the second woman slapped shut the computer. In that instant, Callahan jammed the button, and the siren blasted. Both women jumped, startled. And Callahan spun, grabbed the second woman’s hair with his right hand and slammed her face against the top of the seat. With his left hand, he seized the first woman’s gun and twisted it a full 360 degrees. The woman’s wrist cracked, and her forefinger snapped in half as the gun fired into the console. Still griping the second woman’s hair, he wrenched a fistful from her scalp and threw himself across the front seat, smashing his forehead into the first woman’s face, breaking her nose. Both women’s screams hovered above the wail of the siren. Jerking the gun from the first woman’s hand, Callahan swung it at the second woman just as she lifted her gun above the backrest.
The windshield shattered, and the first woman’s head exploded, hurling bone fragments into the face and neck of the second woman whose screams ceased as she teetered sideways and slumped onto the rear seat.
Dempsey stood at the hood of the cruiser, aiming his gun through the windshield. Amanda, gun drawn, opened the passenger-side door, and the first woman’s body careened backwards and tumbled to the ground.
The siren moaned into silence and Dempsey lowered his gun. “Holy shit,” he said. “Talk about mayhem.”
Chapter 75
Amanda had erected makeshift traffic barriers blocking any oncoming traffic from passing the cruiser. So far, she had directed only a few cars to turn around and head away from the scene. But that was enough for Callahan.
“It’s only going to be minutes before this goes viral on social media and less than an hour before it appears online in the Ledger. Gallagher probably is already on his way over here. Whoever hired these two is going to find out what happened to them very soon,” said Callahan. Already, he could hear the ambulance sirens.
Dempsey was holding the computer. “It’s going to take at least 24 hours to get this analyzed,” he said.
“Then we’re going to lose them. That’s more time than they need to erase their digital footprints,” said Callahan.
“What about the phone? Did she use it?” Amanda was standing at the open door of the cruiser and pointing to the dead woman slumped across the back seat. The woman wore tight jeans and the conspicuous bulge in her rear pocket conformed to t
he contours of a cell phone.
“She did,” said Callahan. He leaned into the back of the cruiser and removed the phone from the second woman’s pocket. He pushed himself back out, and while Dempsey and Amanda looked over his shoulder, he searched it for the most recent numbers dialed. There was only one. “Can you trace this call and find the phone?” Callahan asked Dempsey.
“If the other phone still exists and is on, I can. All I need to do is give the Detroit office that number. I’m sure both phones are burners and are meant to be destroyed. But if another call was supposed to be made, then they may be waiting for it and we’re in luck.” Dempsey snapped his phone out of its case on his belt and began dialing.
* * *
The return call from Detroit came within minutes, but the wait seemed like an hour to the three of them. Dempsey answered his phone when it vibrated before the first ring tone, listened for a moment, and then frantically gestured with his right hand for something to write with. Amanda handed Dempsey her pen, and then took her notepad from her shirt pocket and held it open in front of him. He scribbled something on the page, grabbed the pad, and then ended the call.
“The phone is near the island, sort of. I wrote down the coordinates. But according to the office, its geolocation put it out in the lake and then it disappeared,” said Dempsey. He shook his head. “Something must be wrong.”
“There’s nothing wrong,” said Amanda. “They’re on a boat. Show me those coordinates.”
* * *
Amanda pushed the Vigilant into a headwind that raised a chop on the lake, and the boat began to slap the waves and throw up a spray when she increased its speed. Callahan and Dempsey huddled behind the wheelhouse to keep dry and held tight to whatever they could while the boat bucked over the chop. The wind turned cool and bit through their clothing as the bay disappeared behind them and they shot into open water.