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

by Dustin Stevens

  Tiny pinpricks lit up my face and forehead, the cold nipping at the moisture covering my skin.

  Leaning over the side of the truck bed, I popped open the toolbox running the width of it. Cold to the touch, the hinges let out a small moan as I shoved it upward, reaching into the bottom for a roll of duct tape.

  Snapping it up, I jogged around the rear of the bed. Starting with Tres’s wrists, I bound the entirety of his hands and lower arms behind him into one solid silver cocoon, ensuring there was no way he could get them free. With his shoulder so severely disjointed, I doubted he’d even be able to lift them, the man’s upper body rendered basically useless.

  Once that was done, I moved to his feet and did the same, beginning with his ankles before encapsulating the shoes he wore. When that was done, I made a few passes around his knees, clamping them together as well.

  The last thing to be mummified was the lower half of his face, working around the mangled remains of his nose from my kick a moment earlier. Without needing to break the tape into strips, I wound it around his head a half-dozen times before tearing it off.

  Whenever it was time to revive the prick, there would be no small amount of hair and skin to come with it.

  A fact I have no shame in admitting made me smile.

  Vaguely aware of the clock, I unspooled nearly the entire roll, waiting until I was sure he was rendered immobile before tossing the remainder of the tape into the truck bed.

  From there, I hefted the man off the ground, hoisting him to a shoulder like a bag of mulch and dumping him in as well.

  To say it was a gentle landing would be a misstatement, his forehead bouncing off the spray-on liner, a new gash opening above his left eye.

  A worthy addition to the busted nose, uneven stripes of blood moved across his face as his body settled into position, balanced on his mangled shoulder.

  As good a place as any.

  Snatching up the man’s duffel bag from the ground, I jogged back around the truck and slid in behind the steering wheel. Chucking the bag into the passenger foot well, I checked the clock on the dash, less than three minutes having passed since moving the truck.

  Jerking the gear shift down into reverse, I backed away and headed for the exit, waiting until I was on the main drive leading away from the airport before sliding the phone back onto my thigh. Moving from pure muscle memory, I used my thumb and forefinger to navigate through the call log, finding what I needed and hitting send.

  A moment later, Pally’s voice piped in, the first ring not even complete before he answered.

  “Well, that looked fun.”

  Under the extreme mix of thoughts and feelings running through me, it took a moment for me to place what he meant. Once I did, a half-smile appeared, my head shaking an inch or two to either side.

  “You saw?”

  “Watched the whole damn thing.”

  I should have suspected as much. He’d been the one to tell me where Salinas’s car was parked. Cleary, he’d had a real time feed of everything.

  To have expected him not to tune in would be nothing short of selfish.

  “The video?” I asked.

  “What video?” he replied, an unspoken assurance that he and Salinas and I were the only three that knew about what had just taken place. Already the camera feeds had been scrubbed clean, a five-minute loop of inactivity filling any gap.

  Glancing to the rearview mirror, I could see that the man’s body had rolled over flat on his back. With his hands pinned behind him, the uneven surface caused him to shift a few inches to either side, his eyes still pinched shut.

  Just staring at him, knowing I was in the same space, had just shared the same air, as the man that killed my friend caused acrimony to rise within me. White hot and acrid, it rivaled what I’d felt standing in Russia almost two years before, staring at the man who had killed my wife and daughter.

  “For a second there, I thought you were going to kill him,” Pally said, the words pulling my attention back to the call.

  “Would you have blamed me?”

  For a moment, there was no response. Nothing but silence, punctuated by a slow sigh.

  “No,” he eventually confessed. “Though that would have made things a lot more difficult moving forward.”

  Setting my jaw, I bobbed my head slightly, again flicking my gaze to the rearview mirror.

  This man deserved absolutely no quarter from me. What he did, the greater scheme he was willingly participating in, made him culpable for anything that came his way.

  And still yet might soon be arriving.

  But to merely succumb to those urges, to lash out in pure rage, would do no good. It wouldn’t bring us any closer to Junior Ruiz, wouldn’t help answer how he’d gotten out or why he’d decided to come for us when he did.

  It wouldn’t have given peace of mind to Serra or Kaylan.

  All it would have managed to do was feed my own desire for vengeance.

  “Which is why I didn’t,” I muttered. “Though I still can’t make any promises moving forward.”

  “Nor should you,” Pally replied. “There’s a lot we don’t know yet. No way of foreseeing how this all plays out.”

  Pally wasn’t being as forthcoming as I was, but in his own way, he was letting me know he was of the same mind.

  This son of a bitch had killed our friend.

  That would not pass lightly.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  A small turnout along the side of the road, the spot was one I’d been to a few times in the past. Still a couple of hours from making it back to West Yellowstone, it abutted the Beaverhead National Forest. The last place I knew to have reliable cell coverage before the road officially moved into the back country.

  Pulling the truck to the side of the road, I killed the lights and the ignition. Grabbing up my cellphone, I slid from the interior of the truck, stepping out into the night.

  Well past midnight, the world was completely silent. Enough cloud cover existed to block any stars or the moon from getting through. Any other ambient light there might have been was swallowed by the towering lodgepole pine trees lining either side of the road.

  Aside from the ticking of the cooling engine block, there was not a sound. The sole smells were of pine needles and ice crystals.

  Everything clean and pure, very much my element.

  Exactly as I would have spent the day if not for the unexpected visitor that had arrived the night before.

  Circling around the side of the truck, I rested both forearms along the top edge of the bed. Gripping my phone in hand, I pressed a single button on the side, using the glow of the screen to check on Salinas.

  Despite more than an hour passing since I’d dumped him into the bed of the truck, his eyes were still closed. Having rolled over onto his opposite shoulder, his entire body quivered with the cold, the down coat he wore enough to keep him alive, but little more.

  Not that I cared, my interests in his state purely for the purposes of information gathering at the moment.

  If frostbite took every appendage he had in the process, so be it.

  Pulling the phone back, I took a step away from the side of the truck. Using my thumb, I called the phone log back up on the screen. Scrolling down through, I bypassed a handful of conversations with Pally and Latham before finding what I wanted.

  Three rings later Diaz was on the line, answering just as she had eighteen hours before, regardless of the late hour.

  “Hawk.”

  “Diaz,” I replied. Taking a few steps, I kept my back to the truck, my boots crunching against the gravel beneath my feet. “I need to ask you something, and I need it to be as far off the record as humanly possible.”

  “Hold on,” she replied, her voice even. No other reaction of any kind came with the words, any surprise she might have felt completely hidden.

  The even cadence of hard-soled shoes against a floor could be heard, ending with a door closing.

  “You’re still at w
ork.”

  “I am,” she replied, letting out a sigh as she fell back into her seat. For the first time all day, I heard the slightest hint of exhaustion creep into her tone. “Pally’s been keeping me appraised of what he’s found. I’ve been doing what I can from here, looking into all this with Ruiz.”

  Feeling my brows rise just slightly, I asked, “Any luck?”

  “Not really. Just a lot of closed doors. Layers and layers of red tape.”

  At some point in the near future, I would want to know exactly what she meant. I’d sit down across from her and we could share notes, bringing each other completely up to speed on things.

  But that point wasn’t right now.

  “On your end?” she asked, seeming to think the same thing.

  Twisting over a shoulder, I peered toward the truck sitting silent and the man I knew to be tied up in the back, no part of him visible as he lay in a twisted heap.

  “I found Tres Salinas.”

  Taking a moment, presumably to place the name and what I was referencing, she said, “Salinas being the man who killed Shawn Martin.”

  “Yes. And who killed the guy that came after me and beat the hell out of a local deputy.”

  The last words betrayed a bit of the angst I was feeling, Diaz doing a much better job of keeping her emotions in check than I was.

  “And by found,” she asked, seeming to seize on that very thing, “you mean...?”

  This time, it was my turn to pause. To consider what she was asking and her post as a ranking official in a government agency. Someone that could take what I was about to share and put me away for a very long time with it, service record be damned.

  The first words I’d said to her was asking if we could speak far removed from the record. I had to believe that her rising and closing the door, continuing to speak to me thereafter, was a tacit acknowledgement of as much.

  Or that, at the very least, our friendship would be enough otherwise.

  “I mean, I intercepted him trying to dump his rental car and pick up his original ride at the airport in Spokane,” I said. “And that he is currently encased in duct tape in the back of my truck, and we are about to go out into the woods for a little chat.”

  “And when you’re done?”

  Again, there was no hint of shock or surprise, no attempt to talk me out of anything.

  Answering her question exactly would be impossible. Not until after I got done with Salinas would I know my next steps, whatever he disclosed doing a great deal in determining how things proceeded.

  Something told me, though, that wasn’t exactly what she was getting at.

  Just like I doubted she cared that before I left the area again I needed to check on Kaylan and find a few hours of rest.

  “That’s why I’m calling you.”

  Chapter Fifty

  Much like the front seat of the Chrysler, and the sofa in the living room, the bed in Esmera’s guest room was much too soft for Junior Ruiz. After eight years of sleeping on a twin-size mattress that was little more than two inches of carpet padding, the pillow top mattress had too much give. Each time he began to drift off, his eyelids fluttering shut, it would begin to feel like he was being swallowed up.

  Falling into an abyss, the overstuffed mattress coming up around him, threatening to pull him down.

  After the first time he’d woken with a start, he’d shrugged it off. He had assumed it was just one of many small things he was going to need to get used to, forcing a laugh at his elevated pulse and the beads of sweat along his forehead.

  Nothing a quick trip to the bathroom and a few gulps of cool water couldn’t fix.

  The second time it occurred, he’d recognized things for what they were. Grabbing a pair of the infinite throw pillows lining the headboard, he pulled the comforter to the floor, sprawling out on the area rug at the foot of the bed.

  Fifteen minutes later he’d been asleep, not moving again until a faint buzzing managed to penetrate his senses an unknown number of hours later. Cracking open his eyes to see something besides the top bunk above him for the first time in ages, it took several moments for his bearings to reset.

  For him to feel the shag loops of the rug beneath his fingertips, the softness of the comforter sprawled across him.

  To see the first stripes of morning sun penetrating the blinds covering the window, the closest thing to an actual sunrise he’d witnessed in years.

  Blinking twice, he exhaled slowly. Raising both hands to his face, he rubbed vigorously at his cheeks, feeling the skin move beneath his palms, before finally focusing on the sound.

  Faint and persistent, it continued for thirty seconds before pausing. Gone for just a couple of short beats, another round started immediately thereafter, Ruiz finally raising his head from the pillow beneath him.

  Swinging his gaze around the room, he took in his new surroundings, everything looking different in the light of morning, before landing on the phone resting on the nightstand by the bed.

  “Alright,” he muttered. Peeling back the comforter, he rolled forward onto a knee, snatching the phone off the distressed wooden top before dropping back down into position on the floor.

  Not quite ready for the day to begin, he rubbed the thumb and forefinger of his left hand over his eyes, his right raising the phone to his cheek.

  There was no need to check the screen. As far as he knew, there were only two people alive that even had the number.

  And there was no way in hell Ramon Reyes was calling a minute earlier than he had to.

  “Yeah?”

  “El Jefe,” Burris replied, his voice little more than a whisper. “It’s me.”

  Every word uttered thus far was pointless, Ruiz knowing his own name and who was on the other end of the phone. One of many things he’d learned to ignore in the four years since Burris had been assigned to his top bunk.

  A small price in the name of unflinching loyalty.

  “You good?” Ruiz replied.

  “Yeah,” Burris answered. “They haven’t filled your spot yet. It’s a little lonely, but I don’t have to worry about anything.”

  If the measures Ruiz had put into place, the protections he had secured before stepping out, were honored, there would never be any cause for concern.

  Burris’s reward for such loyalty.

  “Good,” Ruiz said. “Any word yet?”

  Prisoners at USP Lompoc were not technically permitted to have cellphones, but that didn’t keep them from being able to secure them easily enough. Smuggled in in a variety of ways – from visiting family members to guards looking to make a little extra cash – Burris was almost always in supply.

  But that didn’t mean he was always at liberty to speak, the inmates that most often got caught being those that were foolish enough to flaunt them.

  The last time the two had spoken was almost twelve hours earlier. The majority of the time since was considered lights out, meaning Burris would have been alone in his cell, but if patrols were extra heavy or something had gone down, he might not have had a moment to check in.

  To say nothing of the people he was trying to contact being slow to respond or having delays on their end, as was the case the last time they talked, no official word having yet been given.

  “Martin is gone,” Burris said. No lead-in, no voice inflection whatsoever. A simple transaction, as easy as if he were delivering the weather.

  Dropping his hand away from his face, Ruiz blinked rapidly, small spots appearing behind his eyelids.

  Shawn Martin had been the man in charge the night he was arrested. He’d been the one barking orders and brandishing his weapon, fully enjoying his place in front of the crowded outdoor area.

  The one that had made a point of taking Ruiz to the ground and cuffing him in full display of everybody present.

  And one of several that had turned down the offer Ruiz had made.

  “Who did it?” Ruiz asked.

  “Tres.”

  Not a response
Ruiz was expecting, he felt his eyes bulge slightly. “Tres?”

  “That’s what he said,” Burris replied.

  The last time Ruiz had seen Tres, he was but a child, still in his teen years. To have been entrusted with such a task now meant things had progressed rapidly in his time away.

  Or the circle of people that could be counted on had shrunk to be much smaller than Ruiz realized.

  “The others?”

  “One was out of the country. Soldier working in a swamp somewhere, completely unreachable.”

  As fast as the partial smile had risen at the mention of Martin being put down, Ruiz’s felt his mouth droop. One of the men being out of the country meant he wasn’t a threat, but it also made for a task that would have to be dealt with later.

  “Which one?”

  “They didn’t tell me his name,” Burris said. He didn’t add that he’d been coached never to ask or to write anything down, his role simply as a conduit, a way of making sure there was never a clear line to be drawn between Ruiz and his contact.

  “And the other?”

  “Got away,” Burris said. “They sent a new guy after him, but he wasn’t able to finish it.”

  The frown on Ruiz’s face deepened, this time moving into a full scowl. Glaring up at the window above him, he saw the sun outside growing stronger, a series of shadows beginning to form across the ceiling, the temperature in the room rising in kind.

  Errors like this could not be abided. Not only because a target had been made aware of their presence and still managed to get away, but because it was sloppy.

  It sent a poor message at a time when every move was critical.

  “New guy?”

  “Yeah,” Burris replied. “Tres went over after he finished his job, made sure he didn’t talk.”

  Ruiz didn’t press further about what exactly that entailed, his own instructions on the matter having been very clear from the beginning.

  Eliminate the target, leave no loose ends.

  A fact that made the inclusion of Tres at all quite curious.