by D. J. Butler
On the other side of the trailer park was St. Matthew’s. The church was built of brick, had been one of Howard County’s first brick buildings, in fact, back before there had been much of a town at all. It was small, but big enough to stretch out in the cross-armed shape the Catholics like to build their churches in. Behind the church was the little building where I assumed Father Rojas lived, along with a shed and a scraggly patch of lawn.
I leaned against a cottonwood, keeping the trunk between myself and the highway. I dug out my phone. Still had a solid charge—that was because all I did was send text messages, which didn’t use a lot of battery.
Where are you? I texted.
Inside.
I was definitely sweating now, and the sun stabbed me in the eyes as I moved up the walk to the front door of the church. A tile mosaic in a recess to the left of the double door showed a balding man with long hair down to his shoulders. He sat writing at a desk, and behind him, with arms spread wide like he was ready for a hug, stood a winged and haloed angel.
I was a little surprised to find the door unlocked, though I suppose if you wanted the church to be a welcoming safe haven, being open most of the time probably made sense. And it wasn’t like St. Matthew’s had a lot to steal—the inside was pretty Spartan, none of the gold and velvet you’d imagine from seeing the Godfather movies. There was a stone basin of water, a table in a corner with some pamphlets on it, wooden benches with kneelers, and an altar.
No sign of Evil.
What gives? I texted. St. Matthew’s, right?
Side chapel. On the right.
If Father Rojas found me, I’d tell him I came to pray. I skirted the benches and came to the little space on the right side. It wasn’t quite its own room, but the right arm of the cross that the building’s floor plan made. I knew this part of the building had its own name, but I couldn’t remember what it was. There was a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary in an alcove in the back wall, with an iron rack in front of her holding lots of stubby votive candles. Only one of them was lit.
I was about to text Evil again when I noticed that the single burning candle sat next to a little rectangle of plastic. A card. I picked it up and saw that it was a driver’s license. Ronald E. Patten, it said.
Evil? I asked.
In response, a picture appeared in the stream of my text conversation. It was a picture of Evil, wearing the same flannel shirt and Marines Never Die t-shirt he’d worn the day before. He sat inside a bathtub; his hands were behind him and he had a strip of cloth tied through his mouth as a gag.
This isn’t funny, Evil, I told him. My hands trembled.
This isn’t Evil. Pay close attention, now. You’re going to do exactly as I say.
My hands shook so bad I couldn’t spell. Pkay, I typed. Okay. Dont hrut him!
That’s what I get for turning off autocorrect.
I’m watching you, came the next message. You try to talk to the cops, or your dad, or anyone else, your pal gets it. Understood?
Understood. Did that mean he wasn’t a cop? Or just that the entire Howard County Sheriff Department wasn’t dirty? I had to assume the latter, or I might run and turn myself into the bad guy, or his accomplice. I tried to force myself to think. Couldn’t I call Dad? Shouldn’t I? But what would Dad do, except call the cops? And if I couldn’t trust them, all I was doing by involving Dad was risking his life.
Go outside.
I obeyed. The day was becoming warm. Kids in the trailer park shouted as they played soccer on a patch of dirt and trucks rumbled in and out of the gas station, leaving a faint diesel stink in the air.
What do you want? I asked.
Follow Reservoir Road up into the hills. Don’t call or text anybody. If anyone offers you a ride, say no thanks. You’re enjoying a nice hike.
I looked up at the beginning of the Ups, yellow in some spots from the dried grass of late autumn, gray in others from exposed rock faces, and elsewhere dark green with evergreen trees. I won’t get recpetino very far up that road, I typed, hands shaking still.
No answer.
I sighed. My heart was pounding and before doing anything else I took several deep breaths to try to slow it down. Then I put the phone in my pocket and started trudging toward the hills. Grass swished at the cuffs of my jeans and the soles of my boots crunched the dry dirt and gravel beneath loud enough to hear. The sudden tangibility, the boring, plain obviousness of the dry high desert terrain of Howard County made the events of the last twelve hours seem unreal.
This is crazy, I thought. Someone’s been killed. A deputy sheriff might have done it, and might have it in for me. And now someone…maybe the same deputy sheriff…or worse, it suddenly occurred to me, maybe somebody else…has kidnapped my boyfriend and is making me hike into the mountains.
Ex-boyfriend, I reminded myself. Not even really ex-boyfriend, just a friend who asked me to be his girlfriend for a while and I was bored enough, or merciful enough, to agree.
Evil. I thought of the image of him tied up on my phone and forced myself not to look.
Is this guy going to kill me? He can’t ask what I know and then decide to trust me. If he’s afraid of me as a witness, all he can really do is get me out of the way.
Why would anybody want to kill me? The question seemed ridiculous in the bright sun, but then I remembered hearing the gunshots and smelling the gunpowder the night before in Dad’s office. Killing me because I was a witness to a murder was no more unlikely than committing that murder in the first place. Especially when the victim was a crazy old computer programmer living in the middle of nowhere.
Why would anybody want to kill Charlie Herbert?
I remembered that he’d had a blow to the head when I saw him at the Fun Lanes the night before. So before he was shot, he’d been in a fight. Or anyway, he’d been beaten up.
For a moment a fantasy flashed into my head that I was being led out into the middle of nowhere so that I could be bought off. Take this cash and don’t reveal the identity of the shooter, a man with an unseen face would say. Since I didn’t actually know who the shooter was, couldn’t I take that money in good conscience? And then Dad would have some resources and could hire a real paralegal and receptionist, and I could go off to school.
Like I had told Evil he should do.
I remembered Evil again, tied up in a shower, and my fantasy seemed small, greedy, and cruel.
I wasn’t going to be offered money. I was going to be killed.
I was sweating fiercely now, even though I’d thrown the front of the poncho up over one shoulder. I hit the beginning of the Ups, stepped gingerly over the thick horizontal bars of a cattle guard, and then dropped into the gravelly ditch at the side of the highway and kept walking.
I looked at the reception bars of the phone as the canyon narrowed around me. They dropped down to a slender single bar, with a second flickering in and out, but they didn’t disappear entirely. I put the phone away and watched the walls of stone instead. Would this be the place? Would a passing car just slow down long enough for the driver to lean out the window and gun me down? There was nowhere to hide, and unless I suddenly metamorphosed into a spider, I wasn’t going to be shooting up these walls anytime soon.
I puffed uncomfortably, but didn’t feel like I could really stop and take a break, not with Evil hostage somewhere. The image of myself shot dead by the side of the highway may have helped encourage me.
Cars passed, and I tried not to look at them. No one stopped, and no one shot me.
At the top of the canyon was a grassy meadow speckled with stands of aspen trees. They rippled in a slight morning breeze as if they were waving at me, but I didn’t feel welcomed or comforted. At the far end of the field, the Ups rose again and another canyon cut into them, leading higher up and further back into the mountains. Another couple of little rises like this one and the road would hit the Millard Fillmore Dam and Reservoir, the big gift of the Roosevelt Administration and the WPA to Howard County. From th
ere the road wound around the Reservoir, launching smaller paved roads up into the mountains every couple of miles. Those mountain tracks mostly just led to ranches, though a few of them went to fishing holes or backpacking trailheads, and one or two, if you followed them doggedly enough, would carry you all the way through the Rocky Mountains.
My phone buzzed. Three bars.
Evil (only it wasn’t Evil, and at the sight of his name a shiver ran down my back): Turn right here. Follow that dirt road.
I looked right and had to squint to find the dirt road he was talking about. It was a track left by four wheelers, maybe, and from the edge of Reservoir Road it cut out at a right angle and ran straight until it disappeared into the trees.
Something bothered me, some connection in the back of my head that wouldn’t quite come up into my conscious mind. I grabbed for it but missed, and then it was gone.
The person using Evil’s phone didn’t have to be a man. It could be a woman. Evil was a pretty strong guy, so whoever had tied him up had probably had the drop on him with a gun, and hadn’t just pounded him into submission. A woman could do that as easily as a man. I looked at the photo again—no obvious bruises or cuts on Evil’s face.
So my…enemy, for lack of a better word, my tormentor, my foe, could be a man or a woman. Or both. Or, heck, an artificial intelligence, a sapient pumpkin, or a flesh-eating unicorn. I had nothing to go on—
Stop! I told myself, reeling my brain in. Anything was possible, but only some things were likely. I had seen two men—and they had both been men, I was pretty sure of it—at Dad’s office the night before. Most likely one of those men, or maybe both of them together, had Evil prisoner.
I flinched as I entered the trees, half-expecting someone to jump out and grab me. No one did, and I followed the track up around a shoulder of the hill, eventually breaking out of the forest again. Over a crested hump of earth to my right I could see Howard, and the Flats. Out in the distance, more ridges of rock and earth snaggled up out of the high desert plain, hiding the Columbia River that I knew was somewhere out there.
The road turned left, away from the view, and suddenly I realized what had been niggling at my mind. Aaron Wilding. I had never been, but Dad had, and everyone knew that Wilding’s ranch was the first right turn after the Dam. Everyone knew because the hunters always complained about it. I knew because Evil and Dad were both hunters.
And then I hit the fence.
The Ups are full of ranchers, and the Flats are farm country, so I was no stranger to fences. This was a serious one. Its poles were metal and its wires were barbed and taut, and right in front of me were three signs stacked one on top of the other. The signs read PRIVATE PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING, HUNTING NOT ALLOWED, and THIS PROPERTY PROTECTED BY SMITH & WESSON.
But the signs hung on a gate.
I stared.
I shouldn’t be shocked, I told myself. The dead man had been Wilding’s employee. I had no idea why he had been trying to talk to me, or why he might have been in Dad’s office, but the fact that whoever had killed him now wanted me to come back to Wilding’s ranch...
Well, I couldn’t explain it. But somehow, it fit together.
Maybe the killer wanted something of Charlie Herbert’s, and thought I had it.
Maybe the killer wanted information Charlie had had, and figured he’d talked to me before he died.
But why lead me back here?
I screwed up my mind and struggled with the problem. There was something here, and the killer thought I knew how to find it? Thought Charlie had told me where something was, or given me a map?
I don’t know how long I’d been standing there, but I was snapped out of my train of thought by the buzzing of my phone.
Get moving.
I looked around. The ridge rose above me into another stand of trees, and below me dropped off until it fell down to Howard and the Flats. I saw no one. I even scanned the sky with one hand over my eyes, and saw nothing but a single hawk circling out over the valley. Where was the man hiding?
Buzz. Get moving NOW.
Who are you? I typed. My legs hurt and I didn’t want to go any farther. I felt spooked by the fact that this guy seemed to be able to see me but I couldn’t see him. And I was worried that if I walked into the next stand of trees I might get shot. Tell me what you want. Maybe we can work together.
The last one in particular was a bit ridiculous, but I felt trapped.
The next buzz dropped another picture into my stream of texts.
Evil. Sitting in the same bathtub. Only this time whoever was taking the picture was also pointing a gun at Evil’s forehead.
My heart boomed like a cannon, but I forced myself to focus. I couldn’t identify the pistol for sure, but I saw that it was a black semi-automatic, not a revolver. I saw that the hand belonged to a man. And I saw a look of angry defiance in Evil’s eyes.
Angry defiance mixed with a little fear.
Here’s how we’re going to work together. Go to the damn house, knock on the door, and repeat the message I tell you. Anything else, and I shoot Mr. Patten. Or should I just go ahead and shoot him now?
I pushed the gate open and stumbled through.
I’m going.
No answer.
I was braced for it, but no one jumped me in the trees. Beyond them was a vale, a shallow bowl of earth with a building in the center. The building was semi-circular. Its curve faced south and showed ceiling-high windows with floors of poured concrete behind them. I could see through the windows that the entire thing was built with an envelope of space all around, like a house inside a house. The dead air in between the two parts of the house would act as insulation, I knew. This was a total hippie house, energy-conscious and environmentally impeccable. Rich hippie house, not the only one in Howard County, but a nice one. House like that, I would have guessed it had its own well and geothermal power even if Dad hadn’t already told me it did.
The Wildings had probably had their house featured in New Earth Monthly.
In the driveway next to the house were parked Mrs. Wilding’s canary yellow H3 and an unremarkable white sedan. The H3 at least was a strange fit with the house, a gas guzzler and chewer-up of the atmosphere and not the usual first choice of hippie software gurus, I imagined. Not that I actually knew any.
I walked toward the front door and my phone buzzed.
Ready for the message? Word for word.
Ready, I texted back.
The next text message came all in capital letters. MY BOSS HAS WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR. IT WILL COST YOU $50K.
I stared at the screen. This was crazy. I couldn’t ask Mrs. Wilding for fifty thousand dollars.
My boss? I typed.
Get the cash or not, either way, you retrace your steps. Got it?
I was at the door, which was totally glass. Yes.
I pressed the doorbell.
There was no immediate answer and I shivered, even though the day was shaping up to be a warm one and the bowl of earth the house sat in shielded me from any breeze. I realized as I stood waiting for the door to be answered that when I’d seen Marilyn Wilding’s canary yellow H3 before, it had also been with a white sedan. Or at least, parked near a sedan.
It had only been the day before, but it seemed years earlier. I focused on remembering. Mrs. Wilding had parked her H3 and come into the Fun Lanes door; a Greek-looking guy in a turtleneck and sunglasses had parked a white sedan and gone into the door to McCrae’s. He’d drunk a bottle or two and left, I hadn’t seen him again.
Probably coincidence. There were a lot of white sedans on the road. Still, I wished I’d noticed the make and model of the Greek guy’s sedan.
I punched the doorbell again and as I did I also pressed my ear against the glass to be sure a bell actually rang. The opening chords of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”—the famous ones, duh duh duh, duh duh DUH duh, and before you ask, I know them because that’s the kind of thing Dad listens to—rang inside the house.
>
I almost laughed.
I saw Marilyn coming because of the house-within-a-house design. She came through a big open kitchen space wrapping herself in a kimono. I smiled and stepped back from the door a respectful distance. This was a client, after all.
She opened the door and frowned. Her hair was tousled and makeup smeared—she looked as if she’d gotten ready for the day and then had a pillow fight. “Did your father send you with the will?” she asked. “That was fast.”
Dad had been here. That was good. He was easily distracted, but if he was out shaking a leg this morning without me reminding him, he was off to a good start. Only he hadn’t brought Mrs. Wilding her husband’s will.
“No. I mean…didn’t he have it with him?”
Marilyn Wilding squinted at me through smudged mascara. “What do you mean?”
The question knocked me off balance a little. “Uh…Mr. Wilding’s will. I guess Dad didn’t have it.”
She pursed her lips into a pouty you-are-a-strange-child-and-I-don’t-know-what-to-make-of-you look. I get that sometimes.
“Then what are you doing here?” she asked.
Oh. Right. I looked down at the phone. I felt a cold hard ball in the pit of my stomach; this was not going to go over well. “My boss has what you’re looking for. It will cost you fifty thousand dollars.”
Marilyn Wilding should have looked confused, and she did, alright. But she also looked like I’d punched her in the gut. “What did you say?” she hissed, all the air rushing out of her around her words. “Your father has…what does your father have?”
Oh no. “Not my father,” I said. “Not my father. Someone else.” I looked at the phone again. “My boss has what you’re looking for. It will cost you fifty thousand dollars.”
“Am I supposed to give you fifty thousand dollars?” Her expression changed as she spoke. Now she looked at me like I was a cockroach, or a coiled snake. I hoped she didn’t have a taser in her kimono pocket. “Is this some kind of shakedown?”
“Or not.” I waved my phone, as if that would explain anything. “I have to deliver the message. I’m sorry. I have to deliver it. I—” I was about to spill the beans completely, babble about Evil and Charlie Herbert and everything I knew, just to get out of this situation, but she cut me off by turning away.
