Killer Summer (Walt Fleming)

by Ridley Pearson

  The cowboy came out of the bog at a sprint from behind the three, their attention being on Kevin, reaching them in four or five long strides. John hit the pilot in the ribs and sent him to the ground. A gun discharged, but Kevin couldn’t tell whose. John then scooped Summer off her feet, cradling her in his arms, angling himself in such a way so as to shield her, anticipating the shotgun blast from the copilot. He took the hit, went down on one knee, then somehow managed to stand back up, still holding Summer tight. He continued toward the rocks.

  The copilot tracked him with the shotgun, took aim.

  The revolver’s nickel plating sparkled not five inches from Kevin’s face on the ledge.

  Without thinking, he reached for it, his finger finding the trigger, and, extending his arm, aimed it.

  Red spray erupted from the center of the copilot’s back, directly behind his heart. He didn’t move. Still standing up, he was already dead. Instead of falling, he wilted to the ground like a marionette having its strings slowly released. His knee struck his chin, throwing his head back, and the shotgun discharged. A waft of gray smoke rose into the morning sky.

  The pilot placed his hands on his head and spread his legs, making a dusty angel in the soil. Deathly silence followed, with not a bird or squirrel or even the wind announcing itself. For Kevin, gun still in hand, it was as if the whole world were holding its breath. He hadn’t even realized that he’d pulled the trigger. But there was blood and there was the man, and he most certainly was dead. Kevin was mar veling at the accuracy of his shot when his stomach suddenly erupted and he vomited up bile.

  Recovering, he couldn’t see the cowboy or Summer and didn’t know if they’d made it to the rocks.

  He released the revolver from his hand, its barrel brushing his forearm as it tumbled to the dirt. The barrel was cold, not hot. The gun hadn’t been fired.

  Had the cowboy shot the man?

  Footfalls came running toward him. In that instant, Kevin realized he’d lost track of Matt. Kevin grabbed the revolver, sensing he was a fraction of a second too late already. He rolled on his side and aimed where the rock horizon met the sky, his finger finding the trigger.

  The footfalls slowed. Then a silhouette appeared.

  Kevin closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger.

  There was a pop, followed by loud ringing in his ears. The smell of cordite hung in the air.

  He opened his eyes. The silhouette was gone. Only rock and sky remained. No Matt.

  “Put down the gun, Kevin!”

  Kevin heard the voice of the man he wished were there instead of the man who wished to kill him. He heard his uncle’s voice, not Matt’s. Were his ears playing tricks on him?

  Before leaving this earth, Kevin was determined to summon up the defining moment of his short life: his finding his father’s body. But he couldn’t do it like he usually could. Instead, he only saw peaceful blue sky and pristine white clouds.

  “Kevin!”

  No mistaking it this time: it was his Uncle Walt. There was no way it could be but it was.

  In his mind’s eye, Kevin replayed, videolike, the shots striking the copilot’s chest. His uncle could hit a matchbook at a hundred yards.

  “Kevin, is the gun down? Put the gun down!”

  “Okay,” Kevin muttered, releasing the revolver, “it’s down.” It tumbled off the ledge and landed in the sage.

  Kevin heard something and stole a look at the pilot. The man was now facedown, his hands still over his head. The cowboy, five yards away, his rifle trained on the man, was missing his shirt. His back was bloody.

  Walt’s face appeared cautiously over the edge of the rocks. He reached out a hand and pulled Kevin up.

  Matt lay awkwardly on the ground ten yards away, his eyes blinking, his legs twitching, with two holes in his chest. Kevin had to look away.

  “Good thing you’re a lousy shot,” Walt said.

  “I thought it was—”

  “That arm okay?”

  “It’s felt better,” Kevin said. Then he shouted: “Summer?”

  His uncle smiled.

  “Down here!” came her voice.

  For Kevin, it was all that mattered, it was all he’d wanted to hear. But then purple orbs loomed at the periphery of his vision. He felt faint.

  “Morgan Ranch,” Walt said into his radio.

  “Is he okay?” Summer cried out in panic.

  “He’s going to be fine,” Walt answered. “Just fine.”

  Kevin felt his uncle’s arms around him. He felt a sense of peace he had not known in a long time. And then the world went dark.

  88

  Using a first-aid kit, Walt cleaned Kevin’s wound and wrapped his arm—the through shot that was no longer bleeding too badly—before boarding Garman’s four-seater. Garman had transferred the cell repeater, which was about the size of a briefcase, to the plane’s small cargo hold, allowing Summer to occupy the front passenger’s seat while Walt sat with Kevin in the back. Walt held Kevin’s upper arm firmly, keeping the compress on the wound. Despite the pain, Kevin didn’t complain.

  The FBI was reportedly on their way in a helicopter to Morgan Creek Ranch to “establish supervision.” A Life Flight chopper out of Boise was coming for Salvo. While Cantell was dead, Salvo was critically wounded and needed medical attention. But who had decided the evacuation of Kevin and Summer took precedence over Salvo.

  Summer, now wearing a headset, listened to radio traffic and communicated with Garman. She checked over her shoulder every few minutes to assure herself that Kevin was still there. She seemed to be in surprisingly good spirits.

  “What on earth possessed you to just . . . stand up like that?” Walt asked Kevin, raising his voice to be heard.

  “I don’t know,” Kevin answered.

  “You could have gotten yourself killed.”

  “I guess.”

  “John said the plan was for you to fire a couple shots, create a distraction.”

  “Did he?”

  “Was that your idea of a distraction?”

  Kevin shrugged, then winced with pain. He wouldn’t be shrugging again anytime soon. “Plans change,” he said.

  “You were lucky it was John. Not many like him.”

  “Do you know him?” Kevin asked, thinking it sounded like he did.

  “I know him professionally. He’s a good guy who got himself in a bad situation maybe eight or nine years ago. Two men dead. In Lemhi County, not my case. Way I heard it, it was self-defense. That’s the way the judge saw it too. Trial was in Hailey, to get a fair jury. John couldn’t seem to get it right after that, even though he was acquitted. He took to drinking, got himself in more trouble. Then there were these men in Challis and Salmon, relatives and drinking buddies of the two who were killed, and they’ll never see it the way the law sees it. It’ll never be safe up there for John. So he just dried up, went to work on Mitchum’s Ranch, and has been a hermit ever since.”

  “Without him—” Kevin started, his throat constricting. He hung his head, not wanting Walt to see.

  Walt tousled the boy’s hair with his free hand, an intimate, fatherly, forgiving gesture that Kevin couldn’t remember anyone doing for years.

  “Listen, he said the same thing about you. Said how you saved his life back there at the river.”

  That gave Kevin another reason to keep his head down. He didn’t want Summer to see him. After a minute, he dragged his left arm across his eyes.

  “Don’t hold that stuff in,” Walt said. “You’ve got to just let it out. We’ll get you and Summer some help, some counseling. It’ll get better, you’ll see.”

  “Grandpa was ticked he couldn’t come with us in the plane.”

  “Grandpa,” Walt said, “has issues.”

  Kevin laughed out loud. Summer somehow heard him through her headset and turned to make connection once more.

  Walt wasn’t about to wander farther into those waters and held his tongue. He noticed that the wound had stopped bleeding.
He eased his grip on Kevin’s arm.

  But Kevin immediately reached up and covered his uncle’s hand with his own, reapplying his own pressure. Then the fingers of his bad arm twitched, and they sought out and joined the fingers of Walt’s free hand.

  The two rode out the rest of the flight hand in hand. Nothing more was said. And just before Garman circled the Hailey field to land, Kevin’s head slid onto Walt’s shoulder and he fell into a deep sleep.

  89

  It was such a Jerry thing to do: organize a family dinner on the same night his grandson was rescued from the backcountry. He was obsessed with the public’s impression of his family. Walt believed Jerry’s neurosis could be traced back to Robert’s death. Jerry had to show everyone that the Flemings were okay, that they could rebound from adversity with the best of them. If Norman Rockwell had been alive, Jerry would have commissioned a family portrait.

  Things were already getting back to normal.

  Jerry’s bad timing was matched by his choice of bad location. He’d insisted on the Pioneer, all the way up in Ketchum, rather than any one of the good eateries in Hailey. But the Pioneer was Kevin’s favorite. And Kevin wasn’t about to fight it. Not now, anyway.

  Kevin was stitched up at St. Luke’s and moved to a private room, where he slept six hours before being discharged to his mother’s care. Myra had been uncommonly quiet throughout the ordeal. It had taken Walt several hours to realize she’d been praying.

  For his part, Walt spent most of Sunday on the telephone and in meetings. Dog tired, he finally called a joint press conference with the FBI, emphasizing the success resulting from cooperation between his office and their agency. In a strange, almost surreal, twist, the FBI fielded nearly all of the questions. In the end, according to the wording of the official statement, it was a “well-choreographed, jointly operated raid that had resulted in the safe recovery of assets.” By assets, he meant the two teenagers.

  The dinner itself was painful. Forced but enthusiastic conversation through the salad course when Myra, fueled by white wine with ice, made a reference to Bobby that had silenced the table.

  “I am so done with that,” Kevin said.

  Walt didn’t know if it was his nephew or the painkillers talking.

  “Excuse me?” Jerry said.

  “My dad, the family’s inability to get past his death and remember his life. I don’t want to remember that day, I want to remember all the days that came before it. I mean, come on, people.”

  Kevin caught his grandpa’s startled expression and turned his attention to a baked potato the size of a football. But then something happened that Walt definitely attributed to the painkillers: Kevin lifted his head and bravely entered into a staring contest with the senior Fleming.

  “The thing is,” Kevin said, “I was the one that found him . . . suicide or no suicide—”

  At this, Jerry rose several inches in his chair.

  “Oh, yeah, I know all about that,” Kevin said. “But I don’t care how he died, I care how he lived. He was a good dad. Maybe not as smart as Uncle Walt or as brave as you, but that only made him different, not bad.”

  Myra had buried her face in her napkin and her shoulders were shaking. Walt reached over and placed his hand on her back, and she sagged toward him.

  “And I’m sick of no one ever talking about him. You all act like he never existed, and that’s just not going to work for me. He was there with me today.”

  He stabbed at the potato, then set down the fork.

  “I dropped that gun because of him, and I don’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. But I’m not pretending anymore that he never existed.” Kevin looked around at each of them. “So all of you had better get used to it.”

  Definitely, it was the painkillers, because his statement was followed by a devilish grin that he fought to conceal but couldn’t. And then, inexplicably, he began to laugh—a small laugh, at first, a chuckle. But it grew inside him and then spread like a virus around the table until everyone, including Jerry, was laughing. The uncontrolled group laugh drew the attention of the crowded restaurant. They were laughing about a dead man and everybody was watching them, noticing them. It was a laugh that made Jerry proud.

  Before heading back down the valley to the now-open bridge, Kevin asked if they could stop by work for a minute, meaning the Sun Valley Lodge. Walt knew damn well he had no intention of talking to the boss, who wouldn’t be there at eight o’clock on a Sunday night anyway. But Walt dropped Kevin off while he and Myra waited silently in the Cherokee, Myra not knowing what to say and for once not trying to.

  Then her shoulders began shaking again, and she reached into her purse and fished out a tissue, cleaning herself up.

  “Thank you,” she whispered hoarsely.

  “No problem,” Walt said, looking out the windshield at the hotel’s reddish façade, thinking briefly of Hemingway as he always did no matter how many times he visited the lodge. He pushed his anger over Teddy Sumner back, having no idea how or even if the law would ever catch up to him. Cantell was dead, and quite possibly so was the connection between the two. Walt had a couple of interview tapes he needed to decide what to do with.

  Kevin came out of the lodge a few minutes later. Despite having his arm in a sling, he seemed to be walking taller. He had a confident, almost smug expression on his face as he climbed into the back.

  “Everything okay?” Walt said.

  “We’re good,” Kevin said.

  “We’re good,” said Myra, unable to control her tears.

  “Mom, get over it,” said Kevin. “She’s just a friend.”

  Myra’s shoulders continued to shake but now with laughter. She was laughing into her tissue and looking over at Walt, her teary eyes filled with utter amazement.

  90

  —hwz it ging?

  sme. u? WYCM?

  Kevin responded to the “Will you call me?” by immediately dialing her number.

  “Hey,” she said. She sounded so close all of a sudden.

  “Hey,” he said. “How’s the tennis?”

  “Haven’t played.”

  “You should.”

  “You sound like my father.”

  “How is he?”

  “The same. In big trouble. I may have to live with my aunt, or something. It sucks.” A silence crossed the line. She filled it. “No big deal.”

  “I . . . I think about you all the time.”

  “Yeah. Me too,” she said. “My shrink says that’s part of it.”

  “Mine says I’m supposed to move on. Right . . . Not going to happen.”

  “We’re coming up there.”

  “Here?”

  “Yeah. Some kind of hearing or something.”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever fly again,” he said. “That’s what I dream about: those flames.”

  “My dad, he cried like a baby,” she said. “Apologizing. As if that’s going to change it. Said how he screwed it all up. I said: Duh!”

  “My uncle says people do weird stuff when they’re cornered.”

  “Don’t go defending him,” she said.

  “You’ve got to forgive him,” Kevin said.

  “No way.”

  “Way,” he said. “So he goes to jail, so what? Maybe you could live up here or something. Maybe it all works out.”

  “Yeah, like that’s going to happen.”

  “It might,” Kevin said.

  Silence.

  “So, will I see you when you’re up here?” he asked.

  “If you’re looking for me,” she said.

  He tried to follow the shrink’s advice and just say what came to his mind, but it wasn’t as easy as she made out, and he heard himself whisper, “The thing is . . . I think about you all the time. I feel like—”

  “Shut up,” she said. “I love you too. BFF.”

  Best friends forever.

  Kevin swallowed, trying to regain his voice. “No . . . not for me. It’s more than that, more than BF
F.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she confessed.

  He felt good all of a sudden. Incredibly good. “I’m going to see you when you’re up here.”

  “Duh!”

  He thought he heard her crying. Only a few seconds later, mumbling some excuse about needing to be somewhere, she hung up.

  Kevin held the phone in his hand, staring at it. He remembered calling his uncle from the back of the jet as it took off. He remembered leaving the phone by the chimney of the lodge and his uncle telling him how it had helped track him to the ranch. He considered calling the cowboy and thanking him for everything he’d done. He’d been invited to spend time at the lodge and to fish or white-water raft, and he thought maybe that would be a fun thing to do with his uncle. But he wasn’t going to fly in. If they ever went back there, they would have to hike it.

  91

  What’s to become of her?” Fiona asked. The view from Walt’s back porch included a dozen hummingbirds battling for control of the feeder. Shadows from the aspen trees slanted across grass that needed mowing. It was almost nine P.M. He’d made them a dinner of microwave lasagna, peas, and coleslaw from the deli. He was sipping Mexican beer. She preferred red wine.

  “A white-collar guy like Sumner, he’ll win multiple extensions. He’ll push the trial back at least a year, maybe two. Days before the court date, he’ll cop a plea and get eighteen months in minimum, where he can get home visitations and play volleyball. She’ll be in college by then, immune from a lot of it.”

  “I feel bad for her.”

  “Yeah.” He worked on the beer and watched the hummingbirds duel with their long bills, their wings going a million miles an hour. He felt like that more often than not: insanely busy but just hovering in the same place. “We caught the woman. Reno, at the tables. We have the phone records connecting her to Cantell, and our visual of her here. She’ll do time along with the others.”

  “But months, not years. That’s what you said, right?”