The Goodbye Man

by Jeffery Deaver

  Adam has few friends and the ones the police contacted, as well as a couple of family members, were unaware of anyone or anyplace he would be inclined to flee to.

  His residence, a small apartment on the east side of Tacoma, was searched. There was no evidence of any extremist affiliation.

  Firearm used in the shooting was a Smith & Wesson .38 Police Special, registered to Adam’s father.

  Neither of the suspects’ phones are active.

  Both men have passports. Erick’s is still in his parents’ home.

  A video of a currency exchange showed two men, in sunglasses and wearing hoodies, changing $500 U.S. into Canadian. They matched the general builds of the suspects.

  Shaw scanned these notes, sat back, closed his eyes, digesting what he’d read, drawing conclusions about the incident and the people involved.

  His phone hummed. It was Chad Johnson.

  “Detective?”

  “We’ve got them, Mr. Shaw.”

  Fastest reward job on record. No money. But the good news was that he could now return to his other mission: tracking down his father’s secret.

  Echo Ridge . . .

  “Anybody hurt? Did they resist?”

  A pause. “Oh, we haven’t apprehended them yet. I mean, we’ve located them. They’re in Adam’s pickup. There was a sighting of it headed north on I-5. Then they turned off on surface roads and were still heading north. Making for Canada, of course. We’ve got a taskforce on the apprehension detail. Ten person.”

  The last word stumbled out. Johnson had recently been trained not to use the male gender if possible, Shaw guessed.

  “Should get them in the next hour.”

  “Good.”

  “Sorry about the reward, sir.”

  He didn’t sound too sorry, Shaw thought. Maybe the Ecumenical Council and the high-tech wunderkind Ed Jasper were contributing the bulk but the rest of the cash would have to come out of his budget.

  Shaw thanked him. He sipped a bit more coffee, then sent a text to Mack McKenzie, his D.C.-based private eye, requesting three items of information. Shortly after, she responded, answering all of them with the level of detail that she was known for.

  Shaw read the reply closely and, after scanning a map, fired up the Winnebago’s engine. He pulled out of Harper’s parking lot, surveyed the vehicles nearby—those parked, as well as those in motion—then drove onto the uneven road. He steered east out of Gig Harbor, his GPS directing him to a trailer camp, where he’d park the Winnebago and Uber to a car rental agency to pick up a sedan or SUV. He edged the camper as far over the speed limit as he dared without getting pulled over.

  He couldn’t afford any delays. Time was vital.

  An hour later Shaw was steering his rental Kia along a mountainous route fifty miles east of Tacoma in the beautiful country approaching Mount Rainier National Park. Winding roads, panoramic views, verdant forest, formations of rock shiny and pitted as wet bone.

  He eased out of a climbing switchback and onto a straightaway, a hillside face on his right, and began to accelerate.

  Then a moving shadow caught his attention.

  The boulder was cartwheeling toward the road directly in front of him.

  Seconds to decide.

  Swerve left? Swerve right?

  4.

  June 11, 2 p.m., present time

  This bullet hit its mark . . .

  A golden eagle, troubled by the sharp crack of the pistol rolling through the valley, lifted off and descended away from the human disturbance in stately urgency.

  Colter Shaw glanced down, noting the sizable gunshot hole in the Kia’s right front tire. The car knelt.

  Now free from the vehicle, Shaw pushed through the forsythia and watched the shooter walk across the road, dusting away pollen and burrs from his sleeves and jeans.

  Fully bearded, Dalton Crowe was two inches taller than Shaw’s six feet even. Broad shoulders, ample chest, both encased in a black and red plaid lumberjack shirt. Camo overalls. His belt was well tooled, and well worn, shiny and unevenly dark. The holster for the long-barreled revolver was cowboy style, brown and glossy and chrome studded.

  Each of the men had bestowed scars upon the other, about the same number, the same length, the same depth. The bruises had long fleshed away. The confrontations were not intended to be lethal but simply to derail the other’s success in finding the suspects in reward jobs. In one instance, Crowe wanted to stop Shaw so he could get one hundred percent of the money for an escaped prisoner; Shaw wanted to stop Crowe from gunning down the trapped, unarmed man.

  Crowe ambled across the road and looked at the tire. “Hmm.”

  “You fired in my direction,” Shaw said. His tone was scolding only; he hadn’t felt himself in much danger. He’d known to a certainty that the rock-tipper and shooter was Crowe and not the suspects, Adam Harper or Erick Young.

  For a big man who would look right at home in Hells Angels’ attire, Crowe had an eerily high voice. “Nup, Shaw. None of that. I was saving you from a snake.” He was from Birmingham, Alabama, and came equipped with the accent. “Timber rattler and a damn big one.”

  Shaw glanced down. “Don’t see him.”

  “Aw, I just fired to scare him off. Which I did, as you can see. I like all of God’s creatures, rattlers included. Sorry about your tire.”

  Shaw looked at the boulder, completely blocking the highway.

  Crowe didn’t bother to spin a tale about that.

  “These boys’re mine, Shaw. Adam and Erick. I’m going to find ’em and I’m going to bring ’em in. I got to Gig Harbor ’fore you did. So, dig yourself out and head on home.”

  “How’d you find me?” Shaw asked.

  “I’m the best, that’s how.” Crowe slipped his gun away. Shaw wondered if he ever twirled it on his finger like gunslingers do in the movies. Shaw had once seen somebody shoot himself in the armpit doing that. Human stupidity has no bounds.

  “You heard my piece. That’s all there is to it. I’ve got a yellow Volkswagen to catch up with.”

  Shaw’s brows compressed. “How’d you know they were . . .” His voice faded, as if he’d slipped up, confirming a fact that Crowe hadn’t known for certain.

  “Haw. Now get that tire of yours fixed, call Triple A or man the jack yourself.” Crowe looked around, at the boulder, then back to Shaw. “On these roads, in that breadbox of a car . . . you could come to real grief. Not from me, of course, saving your ass from rattlers. But somebody aiming at you. I’d hate to see that happen.”

  The threat delivered, Crowe turned and plodded up the road, then disappeared into the bushes. A moment later his silver SUV drove onto the road, on the other side of the boulder, and turned away from Shaw and the rock. A hand appeared from the driver’s window of the Bronco. The gesture seemed to be a wave but it might have been ruder.

  He called 911, reporting the fallen boulder to the state police. The obstacle was in the middle of a straightaway and could be seen fifty yards away from either direction. Still, Colter Shaw was hardwired to save people from disaster, even if it was their own failings that put them in peril. Someone cruising along while texting might deserve the air bag slap; his or her children did not, however.

  Shaw spent a few minutes checking the tires and backing out of the razorish weeds. It took some rocking and some tire spinning but eventually the car rolled onto the road again.

  Once on the asphalt, he changed the tire and searched the wheel wells. He found the GPS tracker Crowe had hidden. He clicked the off button and stowed the device in his backpack.

  Then he turned around and sped back the way he’d come, the exact opposite of the direction that Dalton Crowe was headed. Shaw checked his map and estimated that he should intercept Erick Young and Adam Harper in less than a half hour.

  5.

  It had taken
some effort, and time, but the problem of Dalton Crowe had to be eliminated.

  The man’s assessment of his own skill—“I’m the best”—was just plain wrong. Crowe was a functional, not talented, tracker, and he was just plain lousy at surveillance. Shaw knew Crowe had been dogging him from the moment he’d arrived in Gig Harbor. He’d noted the silver SUV as soon as he’d arrived at the Youngs’, parked at the curb several doors away, in front of a house with a FORECLOSURE SALE sign in the lawn. Not necessarily suspicious. He merely tucked the observation away.

  When he’d left, he’d pulled past the SUV and seen the driver bending toward the glove compartment, as if avoiding being seen. Then the Bronco had pulled away from the curb and followed the Winnebago all the way to Adam’s father’s chandler business on the waterfront.

  It was obviously Dalton Crowe, who would have been staking out the Young residence since he’d arrived in the harbor town on the chance that the boy, known to be still in the area, would return.

  At that point, Shaw’s mission had doubled: get rid of Crowe, then find Adam and Erick.

  Shaw had come up with a plan to do both.

  The Public Safety Office believed the young men were headed north from Tacoma, presumably en route to Canada, given the currency exchange intelligence.

  Shaw was eighty percent certain, however, that Adam and Erick were not in the red pickup.

  Anticipating the suspects’ most logical plan, Shaw had sent the email to Mack. The questions he’d posed were:

  What neighborhood in Tacoma has the highest gang activity?

  Where’s the main bus station in or near that neighborhood?

  Where are cars likely to be taken for chopping in the Seattle-Tacoma area?

  The reply had been: the neighborhood of Manitou, a Western Express bus terminal on Evans Street, and any number of places, though there was a concentration of junkyard/chop shops on the south side of Seattle.

  Shaw believed that they’d donned costumes and exchanged U.S. dollars for Canadian to trick investigators into thinking their destination was north. That alone wasn’t enough, though. They had to keep the law’s focus on Adam’s truck. Since Erick worked with troubled youths, he was likely familiar with the underworld of Pierce County. He would have known where to leave the pickup—with the keys “hidden” under the front seat or in a wheel well—where it would quickly be perped by some bangers and driven to south Seattle for butchering into parts.

  Meanwhile, Adam and Erick had walked a few blocks to the bus station on Evans Street, bought tickets and left town.

  After leaving Harper’s seaside company, Shaw had driven the Winnebago to a campground east of Tacoma, and parked it there. He’d Ubered to a nearby car rental agency and gotten the Kia, which he’d then driven into the Manitou neighborhood, with Crowe clumsily tailing all the way.

  Shaw had parked in front of the Hermanos Alverez bodega. He had gone inside the store, and for a twenty-dollar bribe and several bags of groceries he didn’t need, bought the right to slip out the back door.

  From there, to the bus station, at which the ante increased significantly, and it cost him five hundred dollars to learn the destination of the tickets the two boys had bought—a little town called Hope’s Corner, eighty miles southeast of Tacoma, near Mount Rainier National Park.

  This fact was good news. They were both alive.

  He’d returned to the car, out the bodega’s front door, dumped the groceries in the trunk. When he pulled into traffic, Crowe’s SUV was not far behind. It had been while the car was parked in front of the store that Crowe had clamped on the tracker.

  Then the fun began.

  Shaw had driven a circuitous route in the general direction of Hope’s Corner, though he had stopped every fifteen miles or so, buying water or coffee or snacks or yet another unnecessary road map. And always asking the clerks and customers the same question.

  “Say, you noticed a yellow Volkswagen bug coming through here? It’s my two buddies. We were going fishing at Wuikinuxv Falls but there’s been a change of plans and I can’t reach ’em. Those boys’re just not picking up their phones.”

  The point of this exercise was to misdirect Crowe as to the suspects’ means of transport and their destination. Now, having used the boulder to clear the field for himself, the man was speeding in pursuit of a gaudy, nonexistent car, to a town whose name was hard to pronounce and harder yet to spell . . . and that lay in the exact opposite direction of Hope’s Corner, where the suspects really were.

  Colter Shaw now rolled past the Hope’s Corner WELCOME TO sign and surveyed the burg. The downtown embraced a diner, a mechanic’s garage, a general store and two gas stations, one of which was also a bus way station; it would be there that the suspects disembarked.

  The tiny place also featured an overlook from which you got a grand view of Mount Rainier, the tallest peak in the state. It was designated a Decade Volcano, one of the most hazardous in the world. Shaw knew this because he and Tom Pepper had once considered climbing. But while the threat of eruption wasn’t a deterrent, the surfaces were. They were largely ice and snow, and that made for a specialized technique that didn’t interest them much.

  Shaw steered the Kia into the pump area of the larger gas station, refueled and examined the damage to the car from his boulder-avoiding plunge. Cosmetic only. Expensive, of course. But Shaw wasn’t concerned; he always bought the loss/damage insurance. When finished at the pump, he drove the car into a shaded spot at the side of the general store. Climbing out, he went to the trunk, opened it and, after looking round and seeing no humans or security cameras, removed his concealed carry weapon—a single-stack Glock 42, the .380 caliber, in a Blackhawk holster. He chambered a round and fitted the holster inside his right waistband, making sure the securing hook snugly held his belt; the fastest draw in the world is pretty useless if the holster comes along for the ride.

  Now, to determine where exactly were the suspects.

  Shaw considered the timing. The bus was scheduled to arrive thirty minutes ago. Had they hiked out from Hope’s Corner? Had they met some friends near here?

  Neither Adam nor Erick appeared to be neo-Nazi but what if they were operating undercover? After all, the defamatory and racist graffiti had persisted in Pierce County for more than a year, and no one had been caught. Now that they’d been identified and were in the open maybe they’d come here. Washington State had an unfortunate history of hate groups and white supremacist organizations, Shaw knew from several reward-seeking jobs on the West Coast. There were nearly two dozen active extremist groups in the state, including two KKK chapters.

  From the overlook, Shaw gazed at the massive expanse that could easily hide a militia compound.

  Or had the boys simply panicked after the shooting and fled as far as their money would take them, or to the home of a friend who’d shelter them—a friend that no one back home knew about?

  So, Shaw told himself, assess.

  The odds that they had arrived, disembarked and hiked out into the wilderness? Fifteen percent. This territory would require some serious gear and a level of fitness and knowledge of the outdoors that the young men didn’t seem to have.

  The likelihood that they were planning to meet somebody to drive them elsewhere? Forty percent.

  Hitching down one of the crossroads that went east and west out of Hope’s Corner? Possible, though a challenge; there was little traffic on either road. He gave it twenty percent.

  Sheltering with a friend? Fifteen percent.

  There was another option as well. Were they still here, in Hope’s Corner?

  Shaw had donned his brown sport jacket. To make sure his concealed stayed concealed, though, he took the added step of untucking his shirt. His pistol permit was valid in the state but he didn’t need the attention that would ensue if someone spotted the grip of his weapon.

  H
e began a stroll through the town, eyes scanning for the two.

  They weren’t in either gas station.

  The general store was next. He stepped onto the low, saggy wooden porch and pushed inside, hand low, near the gun. No Erick, no Adam.

  He entered the restroom, which he had to use anyway; they weren’t there.

  The establishment was a combination store and restaurant, where a half-dozen diners sat at a chipped linoleum counter. He snagged a can of Fix-a-Flat, being spare-less now, and perched on a stool to order a turkey sandwich and a large coffee to go. When the order was up he took the bag and the can to the register. He handed the check to the middle-aged man in a beige polyester shirt embroidered with a pattern of chains.

  Shaw set down a hundred dollar bill.

  The man grimaced. “Sorry, mister, I can’t change that.”

  “I don’t want change.”

  Eyes cautious now.

  “The son of a friend of mine’s run off. I’m helping find him. He was with another guy. Think he might’ve come in on that bus from Tacoma.”

  One of the reasons Shaw shaved before a job, polished his shoes and dressed in a sport coat and pressed shirt was to give the impression of legitimacy. The sort who really would help a friend find a boy. He shot the man another stage smile.

  “Here’s his picture.” He displayed a photo of Erick. The boy was in his football uniform.

  Shaw wondered if the clerk watched the news from Tacoma and had heard of the shooting at the church. Apparently not. He asked only, “What’s he play?”

  “He’s a receiver,” Shaw vamped. “Can catch a pass one handed.”

  “No.”

  “He can.”

  “Why’d he run off?”

  Shaw shrugged. “Being a kid.”

  The bill vanished into the man’s pocket. “Yeah, they were here, thirty minutes ago. Bought some food and water. Bought a disposable phone too. And a prepaid card for the minutes.”