Wild Fire: A Suspense Thriller (A Hawk Tate Novel Book 6)

by Dustin Stevens

  Pulling back onto the road in the wake of the call with Latham, I had pushed the gas hard. Bringing the truck back up to speed, I’d gotten the cruise control set again before calling the phone back to life.

  Gone were my initial reactions in the aftermath of leaving the Snoqualmie Police Department. Also nudged aside was whatever hostility I’d felt after speaking with Pally and Latham, not completely gone, but momentarily shoved out of the way in favor of caution.

  Anger, venom, wrath, were all good things. Things that at some point in the near future I would need in abundance. Guiding principles that would help me whenever I finally encountered Ruiz.

  Until then, though, I needed to keep them in check. I needed to have a clear mind, sorting through what I knew, assessing what was available.

  Namely, the man that had just left West Yellowstone. Who he was, what his connection to Ruiz was.

  How I could use him to get exactly where I needed to be.

  Step one of that had to be getting a positive ID. Latham had said that the man was driving a rental car, which would have required a driver’s license and a credit card. Even if the name he’d given at the sheriff’s department was bunk, there was a chance that he had used authentic items to rent the car.

  And in the more likely event that they too were fake, there was a chance that whatever alias he was working under was in the system. More information that could be searched for, pointing me in the right direction.

  Alternating my attention between the road and the cellphone in my lap, I made my way back to the recent call log. Leapfrogging the top listing in the list, I dropped down a single entry before hitting send.

  Throwing the line to speaker, I turned the volume up as loud as it would go, the ringer drowning out the sound of pavement passing beneath my tires. After a pair of rings, it was snatched up.

  “Hawk.”

  “Pally.”

  “I’m still digging on Ruiz,” he said, his voice a bit detached as he worked. “Your call give you anything?”

  Along the side of the road, a green highway sign passed by announcing distances to various cities stretched out along I-90. Closing in on halfway across the state, Ellensburg was just a few miles up ahead, Spokane a hundred and seventy beyond that.

  From there, it was a quick trip across the panhandle of Idaho before closing back in on West Yellowstone.

  With luck, I should arrive sometime overnight.

  “More shit,” I replied, relaying the story of what had transpired at the medical center. As I shared, I could hear the sound of computer keys fall away, replaced by complete silence.

  When I was done, he said nothing for several moments before finally exhaling slowly.

  “Yeah, that is some shit.”

  Unable to disagree, I felt my eyebrows rise slightly as I bobbed my head. Flicking a glance to the rearview mirror, I could see the vitriol I’d been trying to keep under wraps come a little closer to the surface, my features drawn tight.

  If ever I was going to relay my idea, ask him to begin looking into things, it had to be soon.

  Otherwise, there was a decent chance I might descend into pounding the seatback beside me, no matter how hard I fought to keep myself under control.

  “Maybe not,” I replied. “Or, at least not completely. Remember that time in Rio? When you were able to-“

  “Access the public works and pull traffic camera footage?” Pally asked, jumping ahead.

  “Yes,” I replied. “I was thinking...Latham said that after the guy shot Mendoza and took out the deputy, he jumped in a rental car and took off.

  “I know you don’t know the area well, but from where they were, there’s only one road. Now, he wouldn’t want to go west, because he has to assume there would be a BOLO going out looking for him, and that road would just take him out into the mountains.”

  Seeming to follow along - most likely having a map already pulled up on screen before him - Pally said, “And that would limit his options.”

  Pausing, he considered it for a moment before adding, “But I thought Latham didn’t get his license plate number?”

  “He didn’t,” I said, having considered that too, “but this guy wouldn’t have known that. He’d probably even assume the opposite, meaning he’d want to get back through town as fast as possible. Either find somewhere to ditch the car, or better yet, drop the rental off wherever he got it and disappear back into his own ride.”

  For a moment, there was no sound. Nothing but the familiar thrum of the highway as lights appeared along the south side of the highway, the town of Ellensburg fast approaching.

  Flicking my gaze to the dash, I saw that I still had plenty of gas from filling up in Snoqualmie, the sack of snacks still rolling around on the floor. Combined, they dismissed any thought of stopping, the speedometer staying pinned at eighty-two as I hurtled forward.

  “I’m assuming since you alluded to Rio, there are traffic cameras in West Yellowstone?” Pally eventually asked.

  “There are,” I confirmed. “New ones put in last summer to monitor traffic coming in and out of the park.”

  “Any idea who oversees them?” he asked.

  “Not exactly,” I confessed. “I would guess the Park Service, though there’s a handful of other organizations that could lay a claim to them.

  “West Yellowstone Sheriff, Montana Highway Patrol...”

  “Even the FBI,” he said, citing their primary jurisdiction of the federal lands inside Yellowstone. “You say those are the only cameras?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” he said, not the slightest hint of concern in his voice. “And what am I looking for?”

  “Silver sedan, Idaho plates. Hispanic male, mid-to-late twenties in age. Probably the only man in town wearing a suit and tie.”

  Grunting in reply, I could hear Pally go back to working on the keyboard. “And here I thought you might have a challenge for me. Timeframe?”

  “Latham ran inside about an hour and a half ago. The clinic is just outside of town, so he’d have passed through maybe five or ten minutes after that?”

  “Got it,” he said, more keystrokes audible behind him. “When I have something, you’ll have something.”

  The line cut off without another word, Pally going to work, leaving me alone with my thoughts in the darkness.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  “The threat has been contained.”

  With the phone switched to stereo Bluetooth, the sound of the man breathing on the other end was plainly obvious. Drawing in deep and even breaths, it sounded like he was just inches from Tres Salinas’s ears, loud enough that he reached out and lowered the volume on the radio dial.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” Tres replied. “Put a bullet between his eyes myself.”

  Headed north on the sole state highway leaving West Yellowstone, Tres had one hand draped over the wheel. The other sat trembling in his lap, his body coming down from the adrenaline of the fight, fighting to recalibrate.

  Making that even more difficult was the pain in his ribs, every breath feeling like a hot poker being jabbed into his serratus muscles.

  Offering some sort of guttural noise that Tres took to be positive, the man asked, “Any other damage?”

  “Had to slap around some low-level flunky a little bit to get the opening I needed,” Tres replied. “No other deaths or even serious injury.”

  Again came the same noise, as if the man was clearing his throat. “Any word on the target?”

  Rounding a bend in the road, a car approached from the north. Low-slung headlights that were spaced tight together, the vehicle looked like some sort of sports car. Closing fast, it threw halogen light across the rental Tres was in, illuminating the interior, highlighting the spots of blood spattering the front of his dress shirt.

  “None,” Tres replied. “I did a drive-by on his office, but the place was blocked off with police tape. Otherwise, I just went after our gu
y and got out.”

  “Good,” the man said, his voice low. “Where are you now?”

  “Moving north,” Tres said. “Going to swap rides and then head back down.”

  “Good,” the man repeated. “Be sure to check in before arrival.”

  “Will do,” Tres replied. Knowing the last statement was a signal of closure, he cut the line, silence falling in the car. Tossing his cellphone onto the passenger seat, he shifted his body back to sitting upright. Seizing the wheel in both hands, he stared straight out, lifting his shoulders just slightly, stretching as much as his body would allow.

  The events at the medical center weren’t exactly how he would have liked things to go. Under optimal conditions, he would have been given a few minutes alone with the man that was supposed to be his client.

  Time when he could have fired a bullet or used a knife or a garrote or a damn cyanide capsule. Anything that would have allowed him to complete the task and get away cleanly, without raising an alarm.

  Such a thing was never going to present itself, though. For all the faults of the hillbillies that were playing cops, they had at least had the sense never to leave him alone.

  So he’d had to improvise.

  Peeling his right hand away from the wheel, he grabbed at the lapel of his suit coat. Holding it open, he saw the spots of blood dappling his white dress shirt, already dried and hardened, closer to black than red in the semi-darkness of the car.

  Shooting him wouldn’t have been his first choice – not after the man had messed up such an important assignment – but it had gotten the job done. All things considered, that was the best Tres could hope for.

  Lifting his gaze back to the road ahead, he noticed a faint glow begin to rise above the treetops before him. The sign he’d been waiting for since pulling away from the clinic, he felt a tiny bit of the clench in his stomach release.

  Growing ever brighter, it served as a beacon drawing him in, lighting the way to Bozeman, the town he’d been yearning to see for the better part of an hour.

  The answer he’d given on the phone a moment before about being close to swapping rides wasn’t entirely true. Still a few hours east of where his car was parked, there was no way he could risk making it that far and crossing multiple state lines.

  Not with the very real possibility that the sheriff had gotten his license plate, probably had half the state now looking for him.

  What was true was he was about to make a swap of sorts. Once he got to Bozeman, he could find a shopping center. From there, all he needed to do was spot another vehicle with Idaho plates and make a quick trade.

  Between that and peeling away the suit he was in, switching back into the Seahawks gear he’d been wearing the night before, he would become effectively invisible. Just another random sedan out for a drive, passing through on his way back home.

  Nothing to concern himself with before making it back to Spokane, grabbing his own car, and turning due south.

  Never to return.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  For a good hour after hanging up with Pally, I was too wired to even begin coming down. Armed with a combination of adrenaline and anger, confusion and anticipation, there was no way I could get my body to slow.

  Not after all that had happened in the previous twenty-four hours, the truncated timetable seeming almost too much to even believe. To think that just a day earlier I had been sitting at a table with Kaylan enjoying the most decadent fudge brownie monstrosity ever put in a bowl, the two of us laughing at the uptight folks sneaking glances our way, seemed inconceivable.

  Adding to it the way things had escalated, beginning with the explosion on the front steps of my office, including seeing Serra Martin for the first time in years, and now culminating with a second trip across the Pacific Northwest, bordered on the absurd.

  And that was before saying anything of Junior Ruiz or the henchmen he somehow had traipsing across two states.

  By the time I had made it two-thirds of the way across Washington, much of that initial angst had started to bleed away. Not because I reached any form of resolution in my mind, but because simple physiology began to take control.

  I hadn’t slept in well over thirty hours. In the time since, my body had been yo-yoing through caffeine and adrenaline bursts, needing precious rest soon if I was going to be any good to anybody.

  Doing the best I could given the situation, I had slid down a couple inches behind the steering wheel. Shaving a mile or two off the cruise control setting, I’d put myself into a low energy state, letting the flat and straight nature of the road and muscle memory push me on through the night.

  A state I remained in, gleaning any bit of rest I could, allowing the hum of wheels on the blacktop to become white noise, until the sound of my phone shattered the relative still of the truck cab. Snapping me from my trance with the first shrill bark, I blinked three times in succession. Raising a hand, I rubbed at my eyes, sliding myself back upright.

  Without bothering to look over at the phone, knowing it had to be one of three people, I jabbed out a single finger, accepting the incoming call.

  “Tate.”

  “Pally. Where are you?”

  Blinking twice more, I took just a moment to let the voice register. Giving a quick shake of my head, I expelled any lingering grogginess, alternating my gaze between the glowing faceplate and the highway before me.

  “An hour from the Idaho border.”

  “On which side?”

  A crease appeared between my brows as I considered the question a moment before recognition of what he was saying, of the last conversation we’d had, landed.

  “Washington. Why?” For as much as the last hour had managed to push aside whatever chemical elixir my body was operating under, in just seven words Pally was able to draw it back to the fore. My body temperature rose, my pulse picking up just slightly. “What did you find?”

  “Like Rio all over again,” Pally replied.

  The sting we had carried out in Brazil had gone well beyond merely being a success, coming in as a veritable coup. A joint operation with the local field office, we’d managed to seize more than a thousand kilos of product and two million dollars cash.

  And more importantly, we’d pulled a couple of known cartel leaders that were funneling proceeds to known terrorists off the board.

  Saying whatever he had found was like that was no small praise, words I knew he would not offer lightly.

  Again, I sat up higher, lifting my bottom from the seat. Running a hand over my face, I could feel bits of moisture underlying my beard and the hair draped across my forehead.

  “Hit me.”

  “Okay,” Pally began, his voice taking on the detached tone he always employed when relaying information, “the cameras in West Yellowstone are run by the Park Service. They are saved to a depository in the cloud and kept for a period of one week before being wiped clean.”

  Neither of the pieces of information he gave me came as a surprise. The intersection was well within city limits, meaning the highway patrol wouldn’t care. Same for the sheriff’s office, which always had at least one patrol car roaming the streets.

  The cameras would be meant to monitor anybody entering the park, footage archived for the same period as the standard pass people were granted upon entry.

  “And you were able to find our guy?” I asked.

  “Way, way better than that,” he said. Hitting a couple of keystrokes, I heard the sound of a rolling desk chair sliding across a hard surface.

  “Tres Salinas,” Pally said.

  Pulling up there, he gave me a moment to pass it through my mental repository, the name bringing up absolutely nothing.

  “Real or alias?” I asked.

  “We’ll get to his alias in a minute,” Pally replied. “For now, we’ll focus on this, his real name. Got it from pulling his image from the traffic cam footage and running it through facial recognition.”

  The move was one I hadn’t thought o
f before, not knowing what the resolution on those cameras might have been, though I had to admit it was a good call. A man could have all the fake identification he wanted, but changing his face on the fly would be much more difficult.

  “In the system?” I asked.

  “DMV,” Pally replied. “United States citizen, born in Chula Vista, California in 1993.”

  Running the math, I landed on him being twenty-five or twenty-six, depending on the month he was born. Much like Luis Mendoza.

  “Any known affiliation? Anything?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Pally replied. “Outside of the driver’s license, has surprisingly little footprint on American soil. Never attended high school here, not so much as a credit card in his name.”

  On the opposite side of the highway, a trio of semi-trucks moved by in a miniature convoy. One after another, the glare of their lights infiltrated the cab of my truck, bright enough that they lingered with every blink even long after they were gone.

  What Pally was describing wasn’t terribly surprising. We’d seen it a number of times before, especially with people that might somehow be affiliated with the drug trade.

  “Passport baby,” I muttered, referencing the term that was given to people that entered the United States for the purpose of giving birth, imbuing their child with citizenship rights. From there, they likely took them back over the border, keeping all other activities quiet moving forward, ensuring that both had an easier timing moving between the two countries.

  “Definitely looks like it,” Pally agreed. “Which brings me to the alias. At one o’clock this afternoon, the car he’s driving was rented from the Avis counter at the Spokane International Airport.”

  My lips parted just slightly as I took in the information, adding the mash of disparate facts already floating through my mind.

  “Spokane,” I whispered, having seen the name flash by on a dozen or so different road signs as I cut a path east across the state.

  “Exactly,” Pally said, “which is why I asked where you were. Once I had a time of rental, it wasn’t too hard to take a peek at the cameras on their short-term parking lot.