The Nightmare Thief

by Meg Gardiner

“Are you an idiot?”

  Von held on to the gun even though his cartoon hand had to be throbbing like a police light, red and huge. He was going to shoot this son of a bitch.

  “When is Haugen getting here?” Kyle said. “Who’s with him, besides Sabine?”

  “I’ll give you twenty-five percent of my cut,” Von said. “Come on, man.”

  “We’re still at ninety-five. Haugen, Sabine, you, Friedrich—who, sadly, is lying beside the Hummer like a squashed sandwich—that’s not enough people to corral six college students. Who else is with Haugen?”

  “Nobody—come on, man.” Von swung, feeling the centrifugal force, his feet flying out. “Fine, thirty-five percent.”

  “Enough nonsense,” Kyle said.

  He caught Von around the waist and stopped him cold.

  “Know how much pressure it takes to dislocate a human shoulder? To pull the joint clean out of the socket?”

  “What are you—”

  “Less than you’d think.”

  Von kicked and punched with his left hand. But Kyle just took it, wrapped his arms around Von’s shoulders like a movie starlet leaning in for a kiss with the leading man, and lifted his feet from the ground. His smile gleamed in the moonlight, a grimace like a jacko’-lantern’s.

  Inside the Hummer, huddled together to share body heat, Gabe stilled. Lark and Peyton were murmuring, low. Noah was breathing shallowly.

  “Shh,” Gabe said.

  The girls looked up. “What?” Peyton said.

  Gabe heard it. Far away, uncertain, caught by the wind. But he recognized the sound, and his skin tightened.

  “Someone’s screaming,” he said.

  38

  The horse lunged down the slope, gaining speed. Jo submarined forward in the saddle. Autumn slid up its lathered neck.

  “I’m slipping,” Autumn cried.

  They heard the river rushing, louder. The horse picked up his forelegs to avoid a fallen log.

  Jo lost her balance. “Oh no. Jump.”

  The horse kicked his rear legs to avoid the log, and Jo and Autumn peeled off.

  She had hated falling the first time, and hated it even more now. Tuck and roll, she thought.

  Wet pine needles and soft dirt saved her. She crashed into the slope and didn’t bounce, didn’t flip, just slid down the grade with the wind knocked out of her as if she’d been hit with a door.

  She heard Autumn thump along in the dark, nearby. She turned facedown and clawed her fingers into the earth as if they were ice axes, trying to arrest her fall.

  She bumped backward into a tree trunk and jolted to a stop. She heard Autumn thud into something.

  In the dark, Autumn shouted, “Crap.”

  “You all right?”

  After a moment, Autumn clambered to her feet. “You call that horse Faithful?”

  “Not if he gets away.” She pushed herself up onto one knee. “Damn.”

  She was filthy and shaking. And if she’d wanted to slide downhill over and over, she’d do it on a snowboard. She stumbled forward, climbed over the log, and saw the horse ten feet away, head down, drinking from an eddy in the river. Its tail swished lazily.

  Jo limped over and grabbed the reins. Chill needles of rain hit her face. She heard the sound of feet splashing through the river and brought her head up sharply.

  Moonlight split the clouds. On the slab of rock upriver, Gabe was running straight at her. He had a length of metal pipe in his hand, held low, like a katana.

  He saw her and his lips parted. His eyes were bright.

  Jo hobbled toward him. “We have to get everybody out of here. We’ve got trouble.”

  He ran onto the riverbank. “Where’s Autumn?” His voice had a hot note, like an electric coil.

  “Here.” Autumn came out of the trees, her hair blowing around her face.

  Jo grabbed Gabe’s arms. “Dustin’s dead. Kyle killed him.”

  “Holy mother.”

  “He’s armed with a shotgun. We need to roll. Now.”

  He put his arm firmly around her shoulder. The wind was whipping the river. She held the reins and urged Autumn back into the saddle, then hauled herself up. A sharp pain in her hamstring told her she’d strained something, deep, when she’d been thrown. She swung her leg over and settled in. She saw what Gabe had in his hand: not a piece of pipe but a Club steering-wheel lock. Not bad.

  He slapped the horse on the rump. “Go. I’ll cross on foot, where it’s shallow.”

  Jo clucked and nudged the horse with her heels, and they splashed into the water. The wet air around her felt saturated with cold. She felt the riverbed slope and kept the horse at a slow, steady pace, rocking from side to side as it carefully progressed forward. Big, even steps, haunches rolling. The sound of the water grew louder.

  “Pick your feet up, Autumn. Keep them dry,” she said.

  Autumn scrunched her knees up against Faithful’s neck.

  “When we get back to the Hummer, tell Peyton and Lark that they need to gather up all their survival supplies. And look for something we can use to carry Noah to a safer location. A coat, a sheet of plastic, anything.”

  Maybe they could construct a travois. “Otherwise, we have to get him on the horse.”

  The water swirled around the horse’s belly. Jo lifted her feet from the stirrups. The horse’s hooves clacked against stones on the bottom. She gingered it forward, and the bottom sloped upward and they came out on the rocky bank.

  Jo jumped down. Her entire body ached, sore and cold.

  Autumn’s voice sounded like fractured ice. “He’s the Bad Cowboy, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  Gabe splashed across the granite pan upstream and caught up with them. His dark hair was plastered with rain. His mouth was a sharp line against his skin.

  He pointed to a fallen log with broken branches protruding. “Tie the horse up. Half hitch.”

  “I won’t let the horse wander off untethered,” Jo said.

  He was walking away. He stopped. “You’re cold. You’re wet. You’re . . .” He paused, as if biting off the words. “I don’t know what you might forget.”

  She drew up, stung. “What did I do?”

  He shook his head, raised a hand, and headed for the limo. “Forget it. We need to move.”

  A gust of wind swirled rain into her eyes. Perplexed, sensing his anger, she swallowed her questions and tied the horse’s reins to the log. Then she ran after Gabe.

  Or tried to. Her hamstring, her entire right side all the way up her back, grabbed like cold iron. She hissed, limped to the car, and slithered through the window after Gabe. Her back pinged, as if a needle had been jammed in it.

  The interior of the Hummer was dark but dry. It was beginning to smell of sweat and nerves. Jo heard hard crying, muffled. Autumn was curled next to Lark, shaking.

  Peyton, huddled in a corner, hands hugging her knees, was nothing but a silhouette, edged by moonlight. Blond hair and round, glimmering eyes.

  “I don’t want to go out there,” she said.

  Autumn looked up. “We have to.”

  “Don’t make me,” Peyton said.

  Gabe crawled to Noah’s side, examined the dressing on his gunshot wound, and checked his broken leg.

  “Jo? Explain the situation,” Gabe said.

  There was a measure of command in his voice. It surprised her. Not because he was ever hesitant—he could be maddeningly reticent, but never tentative. It was because it sounded like he was giving her an order.

  She battened down her emotions and kept it curt. “Dustin and a local man have been shot to death.”

  Autumn’s shoulders heaved. She buried her face in Lark’s shoulder to stifle her sobs.

  “Kyle killed them both. He’s armed with a shotgun,” Jo said.

  Peyton shrank. “Kyle? That makes no sense.”

  Autumn looked up, fierce. “He’s the Bad Cowboy. He shot them and stole a shotgun and a truck, and he’s coming back to get us.”
>
  “How do you know? Wouldn’t he try to get out of here?”

  It was a good question.

  Jo postponed thinking about it. “He chased me in a pickup truck. When he crashed, he got out. We have to presume he’s on his way.”

  “No, we don’t.” Peyton looked out the window. “Any fool would get back to the highway and get out of here.”

  “Peyton, he’s not any fool. And we don’t have the luxury of time to debate this. He knows where we are. He killed Dustin and an innocent bystander. If he did that simply to steal the rancher’s truck, he wouldn’t have chased me. We need to leave.”

  Lark cleared her throat. “You said it’s dangerous to leave your location after a wilderness accident.”

  “Unless staying put becomes more dangerous. Which it now is.”

  Gabe said gravely, “We need to evacuate. Kyle’s out there and he’s not playing games. I heard somebody screaming.”

  The silence in the car felt heavy. Outside, the rain nailed the Hummer, angled on the wind.

  Jo’s skin felt, all at once, fuzzy. Charged. The air had a strange energy.

  Everybody else felt it too. They looked around, perplexed. Then Jo saw Peyton’s dry blond hair lift from her shoulders and rise, like a dandelion.

  Static electricity.

  “Lightning,” Gabe said.

  “Everybody down,” Jo cried.

  She balled up and heard the rest do likewise. With a huge crack, the interior of the Hummer flashed blue-white. She heard wood splinter as if it had been hit with a cannonball. She turned her head. Ten feet from the Hummer a pine had been struck. It had exploded and stood smoking in the rain.

  The downpour increased. The rain came down so hard that it drummed on the Hummer like ball bearings. The view outside turned indistinct. The noise was unbelievable. More lightning sliced the air.

  Jo looked at Gabe. They weren’t going anywhere.

  39

  On the logging road in the Stanislaus National Forest, Deputy D. V. Gilbert slowed for a curve. The weather had turned vicious. Outside his Tuolumne County sheriff’s cruiser, rain nailed the road so hard it bounced and buzzed through the headlights. The lodgepole pines that crowded the shoulders of the road were barely visible through the downpour. The cruiser handled solidly in weather, but his windshield wipers were useless.

  His radio squawked. The desk officer from the station checked in and asked for an update. Gilbert had been on the road forty minutes, since taking the phone call from the San Francisco PD.

  An SFPD consultant and a PJ from the 129th Rescue Wing were missing after investigating the death of that lawyer from the city. They’d been out of communication for—he checked his watch—eight hours now. Not outrageous, certainly not for a PJ. But in this storm, it was troubling.

  Gilbert took the radio transmitter from its cradle below the dash. “I’m at mile ninety-two,” he said, noting the marker as he drove past. “No traffic for the past fifteen miles. Nobody’s out. It’s raining like the end of the world.”

  “Inform when you reach the turnout,” the dispatcher said.

  “Roger that.” Gilbert smiled. Of course he would radio. The worrywart dispatcher knew he would.

  He set the radio back in its cradle and focused on the deluge outside. Gilbert’s first name was Ron, but nobody called him that, not even his mother. They called him D.V. because his deep, rattling voice reminded them of Darth Vader.

  In his rearview mirror, far down the mountain behind him, he thought he saw headlights. Just a blur of white, flashing bright against the rain-smeared rear window. If so, it was the only other vehicle within twenty miles.

  Then he came around the curve and realized he was wrong. He saw the clearing and the dark blue Toyota Tacoma pickup.

  He pulled off the asphalt, stopped, and hit his spotlight.

  Uh-oh.

  He knew that wasn’t a deputy-like thought, but it was always what sprang to mind, never more than now.

  He double-checked the Tacoma’s tags. They matched those of the missing doctor’s truck. He picked up the radio transmitter.

  “I’m at the clearing. The Tacoma’s parked here.”

  “Copy that,” the dispatcher said. “Any sign of the two persons the SFPD is looking for?”

  “Negative. And there’s a situation.”

  The truck was blowing exhaust from its tailpipe. Its lights were off. The driver’s door was open. Nobody was in sight.

  “The truck’s parked here. Running. I can’t see anybody inside.” He stared at the pickup, the exhaust swirling around its back tires like a billowing white skirt. “I’m going to investigate.”

  He got his Maglite. He unsnapped his holster. He looked at the shotgun locked upright beside the cruiser’s center console, but had no visible cause to break it out. Just a bright, buzzy feeling that this scene held the leftovers of chaos.

  Zipping his winter jacket to the top, cinching his hat down on his forehead, he climbed out. The rain hit him like an icy shower.

  He approached the truck cautiously. Though his headlights starkly illuminated it, he held the Maglite at his shoulder and ran the beam over the truck’s tires, its door, its interior. He lowered the beam and swept it across the ground.

  The downpour was pummeling the dirt in the clearing. Rivulets of water were already turning into streams and running toward the road. Still, he could see multiple tire tracks in the turnout and lots of footprints. They wouldn’t last.

  Maybe that meant nothing. Maybe they belonged to hikers who had passed through over the last week. But he doubted it.

  He approached the Tacoma’s open driver’s door. Shining the flashlight into the truck’s interior, he held his breath. It was a bad habit, one his football coach and the sheriff had been trying to make him aware of. He exhaled.

  Nobody inside. But a backpack was on the passenger seat.

  He circled the truck. He saw tire tracks from another vehicle, a long parallel sliding curve, like a double smile. Or like a vehicle that had peeled out of the gravelly dirt clearing at high speed and slid the back tires around.

  He swept the beam across the dirt on the far side of the pickup and toward the looming trees and hillside. Through the stinging rain his breath frosted the night air.

  Down the highway, once again, he caught the diamond shine of headlights coming up the road. Then he heard an engine.

  In this weather, it wasn’t campers. At this time of year, it wasn’t gamblers headed to Reno—the road over the summit was already closed for the season. This time of night, it was likely to be one of the few ranchers who lived back here. Might even mean they had started out earlier in the day, driven down to Modesto or Sonora for supplies and dinner, and were headed home. Might mean they had passed this spot already today. And if they had, they might have seen something meaningful.

  He walked to the edge of the asphalt.

  The headlights swung around the curve and lit the trees in a white arc. The engine sounded smooth and solid. And big. Gilbert stood at the edge of the road, waved the Maglite, and flagged them down.

  A black Volvo SUV, glittering in the rain, pulled into the clearing behind his cruiser.

  40

  Haugen braked the Volvo SUV cleanly to a halt. In his headlights, the young sheriff’s deputy leaned into his patrol car, grabbed his radio, spoke briefly, then shielded his eyes and tramped toward him through the downpour.

  Sabine had not tensed so much as coiled herself. “What does he want?”

  “Information, I presume. That pickup truck possibly belongs to the hikers who entangled themselves in our operation today.”

  From the backseat, Stringer said, “I bet you anything you’re right. Why else would it still be running?”

  He shouldn’t have said that. And Haugen thought, not for the first time, that preventing Stringer from blurting information at the wrong moment was a tricky task. The man was brave and bold, but stupid.

  He looked in the mirror at Stringer. “Keep
your mouth shut. You’re Sabine’s brother. We’re on our way to a weekend at a cabin in the Sierras. I’ll do the talking.”

  Amy Tang pulled her car—a girl-racer Honda Civic with low-profile tires and chrome rims, obviously her personal vehicle—to the curb in front of Ma Ratner’s house. For a moment, Tang looked like she didn’t want to leave the vehicle unguarded. She turned off the stereo. Beyoncé went silent.

  She and Evan stared at the house—the chain-link fence with the ratty plastic windmills; the cracked sidewalk, and listing concrete steps up to the front door; the dingy porch light.

  “You can stay here,” she said.

  “To keep Mrs. Ratner’s dog from pissing on your shiny hubcaps? I think not,” Evan said.

  They got out into a cutting wind. This was weather, and a neighborhood, that San Francisco hid when designing its tourist brochures.

  The windmills sputtered at them. The gate cringed open. Through half-drawn drapes, Evan saw the reflected blue light of the television. Tang rang the doorbell and barking erupted inside.

  “Pavlov’s rat,” Evan said.

  Tang had her badge wallet in her hand. It was the first thing Mrs. Ratner saw when she opened the door.

  Her eyes, behind the cat’s-eye glasses, were the color of cloudy marbles, and as cold. “And here I was hoping you was something less toxic, like sewer gas.”

  The dog, Pepito, bounced and yipped behind her. It was wearing a teensy bandanna and a Western-style vest with a little sheriff’s hat and star. Mrs. Ratner’s gingham presence filled the doorway. She frowned at Evan.

  “Where’s your badge, Starsky?”

  “I’m a citizen. But Lt. Tang is cop enough for both of us.”

  Tang put away her badge. “We’d like to speak to your son, Ruben.”

  “He ain’t here.”

  Pepito continued to bounce around Ma Ratner’s feet. Higher, and more agitated.

  “Can you tell us where he is?” Tang said.

  “Nope.”

  “May we come in?”

  “When horses piss champagne.”

  From the living room came an eerie sound, otherworldly singing. Wavery, high-pitched. It was cowboy yodeling, an old Slim Whitman record. The sound made Evan’s skin contract. Pepito barked, yip yip yip, and pogoed on clicky little dog toes, straight up into the netherworld inside the parachute folds of Ma Ratner’s dress. The barking stopped and the dog dropped to the floor. Cringing, it trotted down the hall, tail between its legs. Ma Ratner continued to glare at Evan.