Killer Summer (Walt Fleming)

by Ridley Pearson

  “. . . ud . . . uck . . .” Her voice muffled by the tarp. She’d either said “Good luck” or “Get fucked.”

  Kevin headed back to the door that led into the lodge.

  54

  Walt paced the Incident Command Center. His father had come through with the last-known whereabouts and vectors for the jet. The Mountain Home Air Force Base refused to admit they had radar capable of seeing into the mountains, so none of the information that Walt was given was official. And, since it wasn’t official, Walt wasn’t supposed to know that a pair of fighters had been scrambled to find the jet and shoot it down, if necessary, because it had been stolen. Walt reminded his father that he’d delayed reporting the jet as stolen in order to avoid what to him was a predictable response. His father had told him he couldn’t have it both ways, and to meet him in sixty minutes when he landed.

  Evelyn Holmes, a civilian employee of Walt’s who typically ran numbers, approached Walt.

  “Evelyn,” he greeted her. He had no time to discuss budget but didn’t want to seem dismissive. As a civilian, she had no business being in the Incident Command Center, but he wasn’t about to throw her out.

  “Word is, you’re looking for someone to calculate a flight path.”

  “As it’s been explained to me,” he said, not wanting to insult her, “it’s complicated stuff. Speed in the air, speed over ground, rate of descent, the fact that the engines are constantly losing thrust . . .”

  “May I take a look at the data?”

  “Sure. I don’t mean this the way it sounds, but, from what Steven Garman says, it is rocket science.”

  “I was awarded my Phil-D in astrophysics from Imperial College, London.”

  “You have a Ph.D.,” he said.

  “And a master’s in material sciences.”

  She was working for him for just a few dollars more than minimum wage.

  “This valley . . .” he said.

  “My son wanted to compete at the national level in snowboarding. His father and I made some sacrifices.”

  “But you’ve been here—”

  “Six years, yes. He broke his ankle and blew out his knee in his second season. His snowboarding career was over. But we all fell in love with this place. No way we were going back to southern California.”

  He showed her what little information they had on the Learjet.

  “I need to predict possible airports and landing strips,” he said.

  Evelyn gave a cursory look at the data and grunted. “Okay, I’m on it,” she said.

  A deputy knocked and entered the room. He hesitated at the threshold under the glare of everyone’s attention.

  “Well?” Walt called out.

  “EOC has a report of a UFO . . . That’s right, Sheriff, you heard me right . . . Seen south, southeast of Stanley. A yellow light, not running lights, that just hovered there in the sky for about a minute, then sank slowly over the horizon and vanished. EOC thought it might be your jet.”

  “Give what you’ve got to Evelyn,” Walt said.

  “The guy making the call is retired Navy. Made a big point of that. Didn’t want to be taken as a quack. He gave us his location in lat/long.”

  “In order for it to appear not to be moving,” Evelyn said, accepting the note from the deputy, “he would have had to have been directly behind it, looking in its exact line of flight. I can work with that.”

  Walt referenced a map that was projected on one of the overhead screens as Evelyn drew a line north, northwest across Stanley.

  “There’s nothing out here,” he said. “No airports. There aren’t even roads.”

  “Given the jet’s rate of descent, it went down somewhere here,” Evelyn said. She drew a line perpendicular to the first line, like crossing a T. She glanced at the wall clock. “Twenty to twenty-five minutes ago.”

  “Went down?” Walt said.

  55

  Kevin opened the door that led from the garage/storage into the lodge, listened for signs of life, and, hearing none, sneaked inside. Adrenaline-charged and terrified, he hoped to find a phone or a radio. Since the death of his father, he’d manipulated his mother, banked on friends’ pity, bargained for better grades from his teachers, and underperformed for his employers. Only his uncle wouldn’t cut him any slack. And now, of all the people, it was his uncle that he found himself emulating.

  Coats hung on pegs to the left, boots were lined up neatly next to a rough-planked bench. The coats were all big, the boots all the same size: large. Kevin worked his way down the hallway, past the kitchen, and into a living room. It was furnished with couches, overstuffed chairs, and a dining table and chairs. In the oversized fireplace, the remnants of a summer night’s fire glowed.

  The room was unintentionally shabby chic. The furniture didn’t match; there were wrought-iron lamps with cowhide lampshades, a deer-antler chandelier over the table. There were no bright colors or flowers. The tone was more hunting lodge than family getaway.

  While the cowboy appeared to live alone, this notion was contradicted by a better view of the kitchen, with its eight-burner range and twin refrigerators.

  He was the caretaker, was more like it.

  Searching for a phone and not finding one, Kevin didn’t panic. Summer had told him about the radio and portable GPS in her father’s emergency bag on the jet. If Kevin struck out here, with the right distraction he might be able to return there.

  Just when he was about to give up, he spotted a radio atop of a walnut cabinet. Its face was dark, and a handheld microphone on a spiraled black cord was hanging from it that reminded him of the CB radio in his uncle’s Cherokee.

  Kevin heard deep voices rumbling through the wall, and he looked out the window to the top of the stairs, where the cowboy was talking to the copilot from the jet. The two men turned toward the lodge.

  He now rushed to the radio, switched it on, grabbed the microphone, and hit the TALK button.

  “Mayday! Mayday!” he whispered. “I’m at some lodge . . . on the Middle Fork, I think. Our plane went down . . . a jet. There are guys after me . . . the guys who took the jet.”

  He heard the cowboy’s boots and the pilot’s shoes clomping up the steps of the lodge.

  Replacing the microphone, ducking down, and making for the nearest door, he looked back to see he’d left the radio on. At that moment, the front doorknob was turning. Only then did he spot the open gun case to the far right of the door. It held at least five rifles.

  He hurried through the door and found himself in the study, with its two-person couch, beat-up recliner, and flat-screen television mounted on the wall. There was a cowhide under the harvest-table desk, and on the walls a pair of snowshoes, a brass clock, and some old black-and-white photographs. The fireplace was constructed of river rock, with a wide hearth for sitting close to the flames, and nearby was a closet with sliding doors. The room smelled sweetly of pine sap and pipe smoke, and it felt like it would be a cozy place to spend a long snowed-in day.

  Kevin had his ear to the study’s door while searching for a way out—the door and a casement window immediately behind him.

  “. . . basically, a ten-acre island in the middle of God’s country,” a man’s heavily accented voice was saying on the other side of the door. It was the cowboy. “The river is down there by the strip, with gorges at either end. Amazed you made it in. We extended that runway a year ago, but the boss’s pilot took three weeks of simulation before daring to try it.”

  “What do you mean ‘an island’?” asked the other man, the copilot.

  “This cabin’s on Shady Mountain. It’s four thousand feet. Between it and the river . . . It’s the isolation of this place, the privacy, that the boss finds so pleasing. Original cabin was built eighty years ago from logs cleared from the land. Major redo when the boss got it ten years ago. You can fly in, float in, but you don’t get hikers knocking on your door like at some of these ranches . . . Can I get you something?”

  “I’m okay, than
ks . . . So, you take care of it by yourself ?”

  “That I do.”

  “Must get a little lonely.”

  “Not that I’ve noticed—”

  “Come back. Didn’t copy,” a nasally thin voice broke in.

  “Ah! The radio,” said the pilot.

  “Huh?” the cowboy said.

  “Didn’t copy your call,” the radio voice clarified.

  “I didn’t call.” The cowboy raised his voice for the radio.

  “Is this John?” said the radio.

  “It is. Ernie?”

  “Get yourself off the channel, would you, John?” said Ernie. “You’re clogging the airwaves. Someone was calling on this frequency.”

  “Keep your britches on,” John said.

  There were a couple pops, then Ernie’s voice was no more.

  “Not sure who we should contact first,” said John. “I’ve got a satellite phone. I’m thinking you might want to call your boss before I go getting the Custer County sheriff all in a froth.”

  “You’re right about that,” said the pilot.

  “I’ve got to call it in, but I sure as shit can wait ten minutes if that’ll keep you your job.”

  “It might.”

  “I’ll chase down that sat phone for you.”

  “Sounds good.”

  The cowboy’s boots sounded as he crossed the room, then stopped abruptly.

  “You must have made a shout-out to ATC once you caught fire,” the cowboy said.

  The pilot stuttered with his answer. “Ah . . . of course we did.”

  “Well, hell, there’s no putting it off, then. They’ll be organizing searches. We had something similar last year—a Beechcraft Bonanza gone missing. Radio’s probably the way to go. Call off the dogs, you know . . . not fair to them.”

  “I know what you’re saying, but I’d sure appreciate contacting my boss first. That phone would be a big help.”

  “Timing won’t make any difference,” the cowboy said, his voice suddenly cautious and reserved. “How many souls did you say were on board?”

  “I didn’t say,” said the other man. “But it was three of us: me, my pilot, and one crew.”

  A loud knock caused Kevin to jump.

  “Yeah?” the cowboy hollered. “Come in.”

  The door opened, then banged shut.

  “Whoa!” said the cowboy. “You took quite a hit.”

  “That’ll teach you to tighten that seat belt,” the copilot said, “won’t it, Bobby?”

  Bobby . . .

  Kevin knew the newcomer. He’d hammered him with the wrong end of the fire extinguisher.

  Kevin hoped the cowboy’s change in tone meant he’d reasoned through the radio being found switched on. The discovery had to be weighing on him, had to have prompted the question about the number of passengers.

  One thing became clear to Kevin: the cowboy wasn’t part of the team. He and the copilot were strangers to each other, each testing the other. Distrustful of each other, it was beginning to feel like.

  “Let’s do hold off on the radio,” the copilot said, a little too insistently, “until I can reach my boss and let him know what’s going on. He’s a low-profile kind of guy. He’s not going to want a lot of attention over this.”

  “Who’d you say the owner of the jet was?”

  “I didn’t say. He keeps a pretty low profile,” the copilot repeated. The tone between him and the cowboy had turned chilly.

  Kevin, glancing again at the window, then the closet, was riveted by what he was hearing. He knew he should run, but his eavesdropping had him glued to the spot.

  “A plane that fancy and all,” the cowboy said, “surprised it don’t have its own sat phone. Most do, right?”

  “You know what?” said the copilot, his voice less antagonistic. “Of course it does. I didn’t even check before coming up here, the power being down after we fried that panel. I didn’t think anything was working. Let me go check.”

  “Not a problem,” the cowboy said, also sounding less tense, “you can use mine. Now, about keeping a low profile around here? Not possible, I’m afraid. It’s big news when a bear rips into the trash. But a private plane—a jet, no less—hell, if this is handled wrong you’ll have Boise news choppers getting aerial shots by sunup. And let me tell you something: my boss wouldn’t appreciate that. So I’m thinking, maybe we’re of a like mind here. First we’ll call your boss, then mine. We’ve got to call off the search somehow, but let me set on that for a minute. We best go about this with kid gloves. Let me get me that satellite phone. I just remembered, it’s not upstairs.”

  The clomp-clomp of boots was now coming Kevin’s direction as he frantically glanced around the study on his way to the closet. He spotted a small green light on the bookshelf. It was the satellite phone. It had been there all along, just five feet away.

  He was late getting to the closet, his hand on the sliding door as the cowboy entered the room.

  They locked eyes.

  Kevin’s eyes must have looked fearful. The cowboy’s eyes widened at first, then softened.

  “Won’t be but a minute,” the cowboy called out to the others. He then shut the door.

  The moment the door closed, the copilot’s footfalls hurried toward the study. He wasn’t having any doors shut on him.

  The cowboy stabbed at the air, directing Kevin to hide in the closet.

  Kevin got in the closet but didn’t shut the door in time. He let it go rather than chance making any noise shutting it. Just then, the pilot, not the copilot, charged into the room behind the cowboy. He hit the cowboy on the head with a lamp, dropping him with the single blow. He was about to deliver a second blow, quite possibly fatal, when the copilot stopped him.

  “No!” said the copilot. “That’s enough!”

  “He’s a big son of a bitch,” said the wiry guy. “Let me give him another.”

  “He knows this place . . . he’s our way out of here. Tie him up.”

  The wiry guy, “Bobby,” raced over to the phone and grabbed it. “Got it!”

  Kevin, behind the closet door, peered through a crack.

  A second light came on in the room.

  “We’re out of here, right?” Bobby asked. “Same plan?”

  “Get real,” barked the copilot. “The airstrip and the river are the only ways in and out of here. The jet’s not going anywhere, Matt. We smashed up his Cessna, something he doesn’t even know about yet. Maybe we could float the river . . . Or maybe we could contact Lorraine and just sit tight.”

  Lorraine, Kevin noted. Matt, not Bobby. He now had two of their names.

  “What about the girl?” Matt said. “She’s worth something to someone.”

  “Trust me, I’m aware of that. The ranch is an island, is how he described it. Those kids aren’t . . .” His voice trailed off.

  With his narrow view of the room, Kevin couldn’t see anyone. But he hadn’t heard them leave the room. The silence stretched out.

  “I don’t have time to play games,” said the copilot.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” said Matt.

  “Shut up, Matt.”

  When he spoke again, he was immediately on the other side of the closet door.

  “There are two ways to play this,” the copilot said through the door. “You come out of the closet with your hands where we can see them or you stay in there and it plays out worse for you.”

  Kevin held his breath. The copilot was talking to him. But how—?

  Then he spotted his own wet shoe print on the floor outside the closet, the toe pointing in. His black Reeboks were soaking wet from the dew.

  “Okay, have it your way,” the copilot said. He then slid the closet door shut.

  Kevin was overcome by the darkness of the space.

  “Find a broom handle,” the copilot said to Matt, “and hammer and nails.”

  “Jesus!” said Matt, as he took off out of the room.

  “What are you, kid, a
size nine? Too big for her. And you’re in there alone, which means she’s alone too. Or hurt. Or whatever. If you want to help her, you start talking.”

  Kevin heard Matt’s footfalls returning to the room. Then he heard wood crack. The sliding door nearest him wobbled as the broken broom handle was jammed in place. Then there was more wobbling as the copilot tested the doors.

  “Bad decision, kid,” the copilot said through the door. “Find the girl,” he then said to Matt. “She’s probably close by.”

  “Roger is not going—”

  “No names!” the copilot shouted.

  “Search the house first. Radio our friend at the plane. Tell him the girl’s alone. We’re going to be fine.”

  Kevin finally exhaled. His head was spinning. Roger. Three names.

  “But get me those nails or some screws or something first,” the copilot said.

  The storage room!

  Speaking to the closet door, he added, “You had your chance, kid.”

  56

  Summer squeezed her legs together, her swollen bladder making it impossible to think. Kevin, who’d said he would hurry, hadn’t returned. How long was she supposed to wait? Only moments earlier, she’d heard noises and voices coming from inside. Scary noises, angry voices.

  Despite her sense of security beneath the tarp, she had to get out of the garage, both to relieve herself and to escape the claustrophobic panic spreading through her. But she was no fan of the great outdoors; the closest she had gotten to wilderness was Orange County, a wasteland without a decent shopping mall in sight. The idea of fleeing alone into the woods at night made her have to pee all the more badly.

  She slipped from beneath the tarp, ducked behind a combination ATV-trailer, and kept still. In the colorful, eerie light of power tools recharging, she searched the pegboard above her. There, she found a chisel with a razor-sharp blade about the width of her little finger. She leaped to her feet, slipped it in her pant pocket, and instantly cut a hole first in the pocket and then nicked her thigh. Noticing the leather sheaths on other chisels, she stuffed hers into one and put it in her other pocket. She then pressed her pants against the wound—only a scratch.