Cutting Edge (2002)

by Clancy, Tom - Power Plays 06

  Kuhl had thoroughly scouted the terrain en route to the San Antonio de Padua Mission, concentrating on its prominent rock formations, and was convinced the jutting outcrops would afford the precise geological features he required.

  He had searched about for a while before the hollow presented itself to him. At the base of a sandstone rise effaced by weather and the roots of the scrub oak studding its surface, a portion of the hillside had worn away beneath an overhanging ledge to create a moderately deep cave that seemed well suited to his purposes. Here, he believed, was an excellent fallback shelter.

  Kuhl had stooped low as he entered the ragged hole of its mouth to investigate, beamed his electric torch into the dark space beyond, and within seconds known his initial impression was correct. The entrance would require covering, but there was an abundance of raw material around him, and he had all the necessary tools in his backpack.

  Kuhl found that the long hours he’d spent carving scale miniatures from featureless pieces of wood had yielded a surplus of patience for his work, even a kind of gratification in it, that he would not have known before. Time slipped from his notice as he cut limbs from the trees and underbrush, cleaning the leaves and twigs from the oak branches to form base poles of the proper height, leaving the pine boughs more or less intact, shagged with needles for a rainproof thatch screen. When Kuhl had finished, he sorted the poles and thatching into separate bundles, tied them together with lengths of rope, and brought them into the cave, where they would remain hidden until such occasion as they might be of use.

  Returning to his Explorer, Kuhl had checked his watch for the first time since he’d pulled into the thicket. It was just after six o’clock in the evening. The hours had truly gone winging by.

  He had been back on the road, headed for his rented cabin, before the last of the sunlight was drained from the sky.

  Now midnight had come and gone, and Kuhl could hear the engines of the false power company vehicles awakening as Ciras and Anton started them up and swung away into the darkness. At the door of the cabin, Lido greeted him, licking and sniffing his hand. Kuhl paused to scratch the dog under its muzzle, then strode forward through the foyer. He padded close behind him, treading softly for a creature of its immense size.

  Kuhl’s bond with the Schutzhunds had been immediate and was strongest with the alpha.

  He entered the living room, Lido at his heels. Four men sat waiting there in silence. On the carpeted floor, the two other shepherds peered up at him with their gleaming, attentive black eyes.

  Kuhl looked around at his men.

  “Let’s have one of you put up some coffee,” he said. “I want to review tomorrow’s action in detail before we rest.”

  Startled awake by the sound of his own prolonged adenoidal snore, Rob Howell lifted his chin off his pillow and realized the baseball game he’d been watching on TV had been replaced by an infomercial.

  Rob glanced at his alarm clock in the flickering glow of the set. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. Wonderful, he thought. The Seattle Mariners and Oakland A’s in a match that might very well decide which team won the hotly contested AL West playoff slot, and he’d slipped into dreamland with the score tied at the bottom of the seventh. If that wasn’t evidence of a man suffering from acute overwork, Rob didn’t know what was.

  He groped blearily around on his nightstand for the remote, couldn’t locate it, felt for it on the bed, and found it wedged between himself and the vague shape under the quilt that was Cynthia snuggled into a sleeping ball.

  “Later for you, Mr. Crap-o-matic Veggie Master,” he muttered to the tube, ready to thumb off the power. Then he reconsidered. There was always ESPN to give him the game highlights.

  Rob raised the clicker to change channels, landed on the station just as it cut away from a repeat of some NASCAR tournament to a plug for Sports Illustrated magazine. Sure, why not, what gave him the right to catch a break? He snorted, thinking he could still look forward to the news crawl at the bottom of the screen when the race footage came back on.

  Meanwhile, though, his bladder was sending him an urgent newsflash of its own.

  He slipped from under the blanket, tiptoed around the humongous doggie cushion where Rachel and Monica slept back-to-back—Ross and Joey preferred his wife’s side of the bed, while Phoebe had taken a shining to a spot near the head of the baby’s crib—and went out into the hall.

  It was a chill night—well, morning—and after concluding his urgent visit to the bathroom, Rob peeked into the nursery to make sure that Laurie was covered. She was, indeed, nicely tucked in and curled into a ball like a diminutive version of her mother.

  Rob blew her a kiss through the half-open door, saw Phoebe’s head pop up at him from her favorite nesting place on the rug, blew her one for good measure, and was starting back toward his bedroom when he decided to check on one more thing. He would be leaving for his fill-in shift at the Fairwinds before daybreak and wanted to be certain that he’d put his briefcase of ledgers and files on the little chair Cynthia had stood beside the front door for that single, solitary purpose, hoping to avoid another absentminded misadventure wherein he drove off to work without it.

  Sure enough, it was there. Waiting conspicuously for him to snatch it up on his way out to the car.

  Rob yawned and turned into his bedroom, having forgotten about a ledger he’d been looking at earlier and set down on the kitchen phone stand before hurrying to watch the ball game’s first pitch. Then he climbed back under the blankets with his wife, eager to catch the score—and a few more hours of sleep—beside the familiar warmth of her body.

  They would be the last hours Rob and Cynthia Howell spent together in life.

  NINE

  CALIFORNIA

  TIRED, TIRED. AND WHY NOT? IT WAS FIVE A.M.

  Hitting the SNOOZE control on her alarm clock, Julia Gordian stirred for work on Sunday thinking she could use about four more hours’ sleep, which would just about equal the number she’d actually gotten. Not that she felt she had any right to complain. There could be some good, not-so-good, and downright bad reasons for a person to stay awake into the early morning, and though it had been all too long since she’d enjoyed what was undeniably the best of them—plenty of opportunities for that had come Julia’s way since her divorce, some of them sorely tempting, but she hadn’t quite mustered the will to jump back aboard the dating merry-go-round—a baseball game like the beauty she’d watched on television last night made her bleariness seem a fair price to pay.

  Julia scooched up under the blankets, fluffed her pillows, settled against them, and drowsed a bit, giving herself a chance to ease into the day. Her mind drifted, touched on this and that like a helium balloon in a light, variable breeze. She wondered if Dad’s flight had landed in Gabon yet. Ought to be there by now. Or almost there; he’d left San Jose at three or four the day before. Africa, God. A long, long way for him to go to make a business announcement. He hadn’t sounded thrilled about it over the phone Friday night. A necessary spectacle, he’d called it. Then the subject changed. The two of them going on to lament that they’d never made up their postponed lunch date. Things had gotten in the way. Dad’s hasty preparations for his trip. Her commitment to the rescue center. Nobody to blame, just the problem with tight schedules . . . so why had they both sounded so guilty? They’d promised to see each other after he returned, and then Dad had transferred the receiver to Mom’s hand.

  Julia had talked to her for a half hour or so, and then gone out to the grocery to buy some microwave popcorn and other snacks for the game.

  She felt her eyelids grow heavy now and lowered them, visualizing its wild final inning. Funny, she thought. Until Craig came along she’d cared nothing for pro sports. Baseball in particular. A bunch of guys packing their cheeks with sunflower seeds, tobacco, and bubble gum as they stood around tugging at their jockstraps. Then she’d watched some games with him during the ’98 season and gotten interested. The following year hooke
d her. Funny, really funny, how her appreciation for what went on around the diamond had outlasted her marriage. But it was something positive to carry away from it. And she believed a plus was a plus, worth taking wherever you could.

  Last night’s game had been one of those simple, fun charges to Julia’s battery that helped make it a little easier to be philosophical . . . especially since her favorite team had snatched the win by a hair. Scoreless going into the ninth, Seattle’s pitcher throwing a no-hitter. Then a lazy single at the top of the inning, followed by a crushing line drive that led to a one-run ribbie. That had seemed to be the whole ball game right there, but a two-out solo homer by the M’s at the bottom of ninth tied it. Then three more shutout extra innings by both teams. Finally, the bottom of the thirteenth, bases loaded, the winning run bunted in on a one-out, two-strike count.

  Julia smiled dozily to herself. Poor Rob. He would be driving to the Fairwinds right now with the bill of his yellow-and-green baseball cap pulled down low over his face to hide his dejection . . .

  She felt a cold, wet nose prod her hand and slitted open her eyes. Jack and Jill stood at the bedside, fixated on her. Jack was blowing air out his nostrils, a plaintive murring snuffle, as though he wanted to dispel any chance of her settling into a deeper doze until the clock bleeped again.

  “Uh-uh,” she said in a groggy voice. “Get out of town.”

  Jack paused in his noisemaking, but they continued to stare.

  “Can’t you guys bring me something to eat for a change?”

  Jack’s ears whirligigged, his head cocked in seeming perplexity. Meanwhile Jill did an antsy little tap dance with her forepaws and rested her snout on the edge of the bed. Then both began to whine in an annoying, sour duet.

  “Miserable, rotten creatures.” Julia sighed, gave each of them an affectionate bop on the nose with a fingertip. “Better feed you two before the neighbors hear that God-awful routine and accuse me of animal abuse.”

  She shuffled out of bed toward the kitchen, put up her coffee as the dogs inhaled their food, and then went into her little exercise room. This was her off day from running, and it could not have fallen on a better one. To judge by the chill of her house and leaden sky outside her window, it was going to be another drab gray morning; classic northern California rainy season weather.

  Julia did fifteen minutes of stretches at the freestanding ballet bar she’d owned since high school, another fifteen of light weight lifts. Then she showered, downed a breakfast of coffee and banana yogurt, and walked the beasts. By seven o’clock she was in her Honda 4×4 and headed out toward Pescadero.

  Julia’s drive to the rescue center took under an hour, good time. But traffic was thin at that time of morning, especially headed westbound into the country. Approaching the electric company station across the blacktop, she noticed some road cones arranged around its painted land divider, and then spotted a couple of PG&E vehicles outside the green metal shed—a hatchback in front with its flashers blinking, and a large van pulled halfway behind the shed on its concrete apron. Several workmen stood nearby in hard hats, coveralls, and orange safety vests. One was balanced high on a roadside utility pole, and another two were out in the blacktop by the cones.

  This was, Julia realized, the first time she’d actually seen anyone at the station, which she’d assumed was either a storehouse or routing center of some kind.

  She tapped her brakes and was waved forward by a worker with a SLOW sign in his hand. He glanced into her window as she rolled past, offered her a smile, and she returned it, suddenly remembering the guy who’d stopped by the center last weekend. Barry Hume . . . or maybe the name was Hughes. Yeah, that was it. Barry Hughes. He’d mentioned he was a utility man with PG&E and had noticed the center whenever he was in the area. Julia crunched her forehead. Had he ever called Rob for an appointment? She hadn’t checked, although he’d really seemed to take a shine to Viv.

  A little curious whether he might be among the crew at the station, Julia looked back into her rearview, but didn’t see him outside. Of course he could be in the shed or the van, she thought . . . not that it was of particular importance either way.

  As Julia reached the wooden sign for the rescue center, it occurred to her that it might be important to find out about any trouble with the local power lines. The clouds had become more threatening after she’d left home, and she had even run into some patchy sprinkles farther east. A heavy fall downpour looked like a sure thing this morning, and since whatever work was being done on the lines probably would have to be suspended once it started, it wouldn’t have hurt her to ask the workers what was going on.

  Julia considered pulling over, then scratched the notion. She had already hit her right turn signal and started up the drive, and saw no point bothering them right now.

  Besides, if the lights at the shop didn’t come on when she flicked the switch, she supposed it would be all the answer she needed.

  In the false PG&E van’s front passenger seat, Siegfried Kuhl waited for the Passport to swing in between the low tree limbs partially overgrowing the bottom of the drive. Then he glanced at his wristwatch.

  It was four minutes to eight.

  He counted down to himself, heard a few droplets of rain patter against the windshield in the silence.

  At precisely eight o’clock he turned to Ciras. Seated behind the steering wheel, he made no more sound than the three Shutzhunds in the rear of the van.

  “Confirm that the work on the line has been done,” Kuhl said, and tilted his chin toward the utility pole on the opposite roadside, its cables running straight over the treetops to their target.

  Ciras reached for his dashboard handset and radioed up. After a moment he gave Kuhl a nod.

  Kuhl looked satisfied.

  “We proceed,” he said.

  Rob Howell glanced at his dash clock and groaned in total disgust. A quarter after eight, damn!

  He’d done it again, only worse.

  His Camaro’s speedometer needle quivering over the eighty mph mark, Rob shot home from San Gregario Beach along California 84, bearing south-southwest through fog and drizzle, trying to gobble some highway miles without getting nailed by the staties. Under the best driving conditions he would have to lighten up on the gas pedal around La Honda, where the road really started to loop-de-loop, then slow his pace to a virtual crawl as he turned onto the even twistier local routes . . . and he had a hunch the weather would soon become a problem. Slated over with rain clouds, the sky looked about ready to spill its waterlogged guts and compound the hazardously poor visibility with a slick, wet blacktop.

  Rob frowned, his face sullen under the bill of his Oakland A’s baseball cap. There was no question he’d started out the day on tenuous ground, not from the moment he’d read yesterday’s indecent game score on ESPN and abandoned any chance of falling back asleep. But he didn’t have any idea how he could have forgotten the weekly payroll ledger. How he could’ve been so careless. And what was more bothersome was that he wasn’t sure where it might be.

  When he’d finished preparing the ledger on his home computer late the previous afternoon, Rob had copied his entries to a recordable CD, made a paper backup, then slipped both into an accordion folder, which had in turn gone into his briefcase on its chair by the door. That had been about four o’clock, four-thirty. Then, a short while before game time, say six o’clock, he’d pulled the folder just to give the printout a quick eyeball, and compare it with his updated employee list to be certain there hadn’t been any omissions . . . and that was where his recollection developed a few critical gaps.

  Rob had been trying to mentally retrace his steps ever since he reached the Fairview at seven-thirty this morning, sat down at his desk to transfer the entries onto the hotel’s computer, and been dismayed to realize it was missing from his briefcase. He could remember browsing through it on the living room couch, where he had intended to settle in for the A’s-Mariner’s playoff seed duel. But then Cynthia turned in earl
y—she had been fighting off a head cold for the past week—and he’d decided to keep her company and watch the game on their bedroom TV set. At some point in between, Rob needed to give the baby a feeding and had gone to warm up her formula under the hot-water tap. He distinctly recalled that he’d meant to bring the folder with him, re-deposit it inside his briefcase on his way to the kitchen sink . . . but might he have inadvertently carried the folder into the kitchen with him?

  Could be, he guessed. Either that, or he’d set it down on the coffee table before getting up. What he did remember—or believed he remembered—was that it hadn’t been in his hand when he’d entered the nursery with Laurie’s bottle, eliminating at least one room as a strong possibility.

  Rob produced a long sigh. The drizzle had gotten heavier, and in fact was now closer to a light but steady rain, smudging the road ahead between occasional sweeps of his windshield wipers. He switched them from INTERMITTENT to SLOW and eased off the accelerator before pulling his cellular phone from its visor clip to try his wife again. These days he could barely walk and chew gum at the same time; was he kidding himself trying to simultaneously drive and play detective? But he needed either the CD/R or printout to input his payroll data into the hotel’s computer, and it had to be done by tonight. The staff’s paychecks were cut by an outside payroll service, and unless Rob electronically transmitted the information so its processors had it waiting in their system first thing Monday morning, nobody at the hotel would get squared away on time next week . . . and he would be the person to blame.

  Ah, what I’d give for a home Internet connection, he thought. It hardly seemed an excesive wish. With cash being as tight as it had been since the baby came along, however, anything besides bare bones necessities was out of the question at the Howell abode, and probably would be for a while yet.

  Rob was positive he’d feel a whole lot better knowing the folder’s whereabouts, but he’d left the hotel in such an agitated rush that he hadn’t even thought to call Cynth first. And although he’d been trying to reach her on his cell since eight o’clock or so, she hadn’t picked up yet.