Dead Dry

by Sarah Andrews

  Hands shaking, I dug through my pockets and found my cell phone and punched it on. The battery was three-quarters gone, but to my immense relief, I got a signal. I punched in 911 and hit SEND.

  It rang twice and clicked to a connection. “State the nature of your emergency,” said a phlegmatic voice.

  My hands were shaking so hard that I had to hold the phone in both hands. I fought to control my voice around chattering teeth. “I’m on a ridge, west of Sedalia somewhere. Someone just ran me off the road. Please send help.”

  “You’ve reached Salt Lake City emergency. State your location relative to a highway.”

  “I’m in Colorado!”

  “Are you on a cell phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your service provider has put you through to the 801 area code 911 line. I can transfer you. What area code and jurisdiction do you wish me to dial?”

  “Three-oh-three, I think. Sedalia, Colorado.”

  “Please hold.” The line clicked over and rang and rang and rang …

  I pulled the phone from my ear to listen again for pursuers. I could hear nothing but the pounding rain and the gurgling of water sluicing down the rocks.

  When I put the phone back to my ear, I heard a recorded voice. It announced, “We are encountering an unusual number of emergency calls at this time. Please hold for the next available operator.”

  A bright flash lit the sky, almost immediately followed by a crack! and deafening BOOM! that rolled around me with a fully physical sense of concussion. The reek of ozone filled the air. I pressed myself tighter into the crevice.

  The connection had gone dead.

  I tried to harness my careening brain for another strategy. I was shaking now from head to foot and not just from the cold that was seeping in from my soaking wet jeans and socks and shirt. I knew that I was going into shock. Still crouching between the rocks, I stared into the illuminated dial of the cell phone, trying to imagine a solution to my predicament. Another bar in the battery-charge indicator had extinguished. The battery was old and weak; by the time it went down another bar, I would have less than a minute left. Unable to remember a single phone number of anyone anywhere, I pushed the button that would bring up previously dialed sequences. The first one was 801 area code, as was the second, and the third, and I realized that they all were. All Utah, not Colorado. I knew that one had to be Michele’s, but I could not remember which it was.

  I punched the lower button and scrolled downward through numbers listed by name. The names of the few people I had bothered to put into the memory flipped by. A for ADAM, B for BETTY, then F for FAYE—I almost punched that one in but remembered that it was her home number. The next name in memory was F for FAYE, CELL. I stopped. She rarely switched on her phone. Should I call that number and risk wasting precious battery time on another recorded message? I pressed the memory scroll button again. F again, this time for FRITZ, CELL.

  Without another thought, I jabbed the SEND button. The line connected, rang, rang again, and then I heard the finest sound ever, the voice of a friend. “This is Fritz,” he said, his voice strong and firm. I could hear road noise. He was driving.

  I was afraid to raise my voice to be heard over the cell phone. So frightened, in fact, that I could not think what to say.

  “Who is this?” he demanded.

  “Fritz!” I called, anguish ripping the sound into pieces.

  “Is this Em? Are you all right?” Alarm filled his voice, but then it deepened into a tone of command. “Em, tell me where you are.”

  “I’m … I n-need you,” I stammered, trembling so hard that I could not control lips.

  “I am coming, Em. I’m on I-25 coming south from Centennial. Tell me where you are!”

  “W-west of Sedalia, on a d-dirt road off the road that goes to … Highway 67.” I tried to remember which side of 67 the road turned off, but the universe seemed to pivot like a carousel. “Send the sh-sheriff to the Johnson Ranch. They’ll know.”

  “Em, are you hurt?”

  “I’m scared, Fritz.”

  “Are you in a car? Where exactly are you?”

  Another flash and immediate BOOM! creased the air. I turned the face of the phone toward me to see if I was still connected, but I could no longer understand what the little symbols were telling me. I put it back to my ear and said desperately, “I’m hiding in some rocks. Find the J-Jeep and send the p-police. I’ll s-see their lights, and I’ll know I can c-come out. P-please hurry.” The shock was deepening, and even the sense of cold seemed remote.

  Fritz’s voice filled my ear. “What Jeep, Emmy? What does it look like?”

  “It’s … can’t remember.”

  “Is anybody with you? Do you need an ambulance? Damn it, Em, tell me where you are!”

  Hearing fear twist through Fritz Calder’s voice snapped me back to my senses. “My battery is almost dead. I’ll be okay if you can just get here. Call the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department and—” A sound needled my ear: beep-beep!

  The phone had shut down, its battery dead. I was alone with the rain and the fear of death.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “IT SEEMED LIKE HOURS BEFORE I SAW THE RED flashing lights of the emergency vehicles,” I said.

  “It was twenty minutes, exactly,” Fritz replied softly, as he rubbed my hair with a towel in the warm bedroom of Trevor Reed’s condominium in Denver.

  “Only twenty minutes?” I asked, leaning into the force of his ministrations.

  “Only? Only? It felt like forever to me. I’ve never been so scared in my life. I must have hit a hundred miles an hour in that damned rental car. I didn’t have any trouble finding the sheriff’s deputies,” he said, laughing now. “They found me.”

  “No. It wasn’t really like that.”

  “You’re right, it wasn’t. I had them on the cell phone, and I fell in behind them. Otherwise I could never have found you.” He rubbed a little harder. “And that is not something I wish to contemplate.”

  Satisfied that my hair was as dry as he could get it with the towel, he grabbed a dry one off the stack he had put beside me where I sat at the foot of that gigantic bed. This towel he applied vigorously to my shoulders and back, even though I was wearing one of his big T-shirts and a terrycloth bathrobe Fritz had liberated from Reed’s closet and I had dried myself before putting it on. But I didn’t ask him to stop. It felt too good. The pressure of his touch was reassuring. It kept me focused on where I was and not the place where I had been.

  “Now get up,” he said.

  “Why? I’m liking it here.”

  He stood up. “Come on, up!”

  I did as I was told.

  Suddenly Fritz was running in place. “Come on, run with me!”

  He made it sound like so much fun that I started to move my feet, too, but they felt as heavy and hard as uncooked potatoes.

  “No, run!” he insisted. “You won’t break anything. The ER doctors said there’s not a broken bone in your body, though having seen that Jeep, that’s hard to understand.”

  I started to chuff a little faster.

  He reached his hands out and tickled my ribs. “Run, Emmy! C’mon, there’s a race to be run here!” His grin was infectious.

  My face felt unnatural trying to smile like that, but my heart didn’t want to be left behind, and I jogged all around the room, now waving my arms as Fritz had begun to do.

  “Now over the bed,” he announced, dropping to his hands and knees and scrambling over the covers, messing them up good.

  I followed, wobbly but still game. My arms and legs ached, and the bandages on my hands and knees cut, but I made it without flopping onto my side even once. “Can I ask the purpose of this exercise?”

  “Not yet. Now, I’m going to stand on the other side of the door here and you push with all your might, okay?”

  “If you say so.”

  He stepped out of the room and closed the door to just a crack. “Now, push!”

 
Panic swept through me at having him out of sight. Stepping into the shower had been hard enough—taking my clothes off alone in the bathroom, even worse—but this was somehow unbearable. I lunged at the door, shoving frantically. I pushed and pushed, wondering why Fritz should leave me like this. I cried, “Let me out! Let me out, please!”

  “Push, Emmy!”

  I gave it everything I had. Sweat burst out on my upper lip. It was an out-swing door, and I was on carpeting and Fritz on hardwood. He began to skid, and I crashed through into his arms as he fought to regain his balance.

  “That’s my girl,” he said proudly, gathering me up close. “Now you’ll be okay.”

  My chest was heaving again, just like in the rain and the lightning, but now strong, protective arms surrounded me. My brain swung between the two sensations: shock and fear at what had happened that afternoon and the warmth and security of Fritz’s embrace. I felt jagged energy drain from my body.

  “There now,” he said, stroking my hair. “There now.”

  I laid my head against his chest and put both arms around him in a tight embrace. “Why?” I asked. “Now tell me why.”

  “To release the trauma,” he said. “Remember? The nervous system stores the fear and energy you need for escape until you release it by working your muscles. You know that. You’ve read the books.”

  “I’ve read the books,” I told the fabric of his shirt.

  He kissed the top of my head, then squeezed me tighter and swung me gently side to side.

  About then I realized that we were hugging each other with both arms.

  I liked it.

  I quelled the fear that rushed in behind that realization and closed my eyes.

  Another wave of remembrance rolled across my brain. Lightning. Rain. The demon charging at me on the road.

  “Open your eyes,” Fritz whispered into my hair. “You’re tensing up again. Open your eyes. What color is the wall?”

  “Red. It’s brick.”

  “That’s my girl. Now tell me your favorite flavor of ice cream.”

  “Peppermint. No, green tea.”

  “Excellent. Green tea is magic. Okay, you can think about the trauma again for ten seconds. Ready?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Okay, wait for it to hit you.”

  “It’s hitting me.”

  “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five—”

  “That’s enough!”

  “Green tea ice cream!”

  “Yum.” I remembered now. Levine’s book spoke of the vortex formed by the memory of trauma—the capacity of the horror to drag me under to relive the event—but also of the counter-vortex I could create that would balance and heal it. The game was to dip a toe into horror and then ground back in the present, give my brain something pleasant to fire on so it could spin things back the other way. Thus decoupled from the event, the latent energy bound up in the will to escape would be released to flow like a river between smooth banks. My mind bobbed sweetly on the currents, telling me, What luck to know someone as smart as Fritz!

  “How are you now?” he asked.

  “Better. Exhausted.”

  “I probably shouldn’t push you so hard. The ER docs said to let you rest. But I can’t stand—”

  I was willing to lean against him all night if he wanted me to, but just then my cell phone rang.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Ignore it,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  It stopped ringing, and twenty seconds later, Fritz’s phone went off.

  “Did you give Michele your number or something?” I mumbled.

  “She would have broken my arm if I tried to resist.”

  I inhaled and let out a long, tired breath. “I suppose she won’t go away until we answer it then.”

  Fritz’s phone stopped its ruckus and ten seconds later, mine started up again. Fritz waltzed me over to where it lay on the recharger on the black stone counter, and I switched it on. “Hello, Michele,” I told it.

  “Are you alive?”

  “No, I speak to you from beyond the grave. I was just getting into it with the worms.”

  “Nice image. Are you ready to talk?”

  “If I have to.”

  “You’d prefer that whoever did that to you walks?”

  “No. Go ahead then.”

  “What did the vehicle look like?”

  “I already told the Highway Patrol. It was high and wide. I assume it to be a truck. Beyond that—” The image of that mass of metal hurtling toward me filled my mind again, and I tensed. Fritz returned the pressure, supporting my urge to fight with every ounce of my strength. The wave of fear washed over me and passed, leaving me once again rocked and slightly nauseous.

  “What color was it?”

  “Color?” My mind brought the image to life again, but saw nothing. No tint. Only the gray fury of slashing rain. “I don’t see any.”

  “Call it white?”

  “Could have been.”

  “But not black or red or green.”

  “No.”

  “A newer truck? Or older?”

  “I … older. It had square corners. You know, like they don’t make anymore.”

  “Describe the driver.”

  “I can’t. I’ve already tried. I couldn’t see the face because of the hat, and that was some drab ball cap, a dime a dozen.”

  “The driver’s hands, then. Could you see them?”

  “Yes—yes, they were white. Or white person hands. Tan, or whatever that color is. You know what I mean.”

  “Slender fingers? Thick?”

  “Thick. So I’d say male. But it could have been deerskin gloves, for all that.”

  “Gnarly?”

  “You mean like Johnson’s hands? I’m sorry, the image isn’t giving me that kind of detail.”

  “Then we’ll say not, for the moment.”

  Fritz still held me, swaying gently from foot to foot. I said, “The steering wheel was dark.”

  “That’s something, I guess.” She exhaled her breath with frustration. “Tell me again how the vehicle came up behind you and hit you.”

  I repeated the sequence: the horn, the bumps, the quick cut into my right rear quarter, the awful spinning sensation before everything inside the Jeep turned to complete chaos as it rolled.

  Fritz said, “That’s an attack sequence used by professionals.”

  “He’s right,” said Michele. “They teach that trick to us cops, too.”

  “Explain,” I said.

  Fritz said, “The bumping was probably designed to get you moving faster, but the cut into the right rear wheel, that’s textbook technique for getting a car to spin off the road. Part of why it’s used is it usually doesn’t leave a dent on the attacking car.”

  I tipped my head back to look at Fritz, “Are there a few things about your military career you haven’t told me?”

  He gazed into my eyes. “When they have us fly forty-million-dollar jets over hostile territory where men are shooting rocket launchers at anything with wings, they teach us what to do to avoid getting hit. And what to do if we get unlucky.”

  “They want you to bring it back in one piece.”

  “And it cost about a half million dollars to train me. I was worth something to them, too,” he said huffily.

  “And I thought it was your rakish charm,” I said, giving him a dreamier smile than I had quite intended.

  Fritz’s eyes went wide. Ever so slightly he loosened his hug, and the gentle swaying stopped.

  Michele said, “Em? you still there?”

  I leveled my head so that I was eyeing his shirt front again and readdressed myself to the telephone. “Fritz is right, Michele, I don’t think that maneuver was accidental in its efficiency. You should add that to your wish list for your background search of the suspects.”

  “What would that be? Guerrilla training?”

  I said, “Military service. Special ops? I don’t know, get creativ
e. Where do you learn to be an assassin? You start out as a bodyguard and get cranky? Maybe he’s law enforcement gone bad.”

  “So you do think this is a male of the species.”

  “God damn it, Michele, ask your questions as questions, okay? I appreciate your fancy training, but—”

  “Sorry. It’s become a reflex.”

  “And yes, I think it was a man, because the hands were not small and because I’ve never met a woman that kind of mean. Why, can you see Gilda doing that?”

  “No, I can’t. I think she’s an opportunist but not that type and not that clever mechanically.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Michele said, “Gilda is a leach. Leaches don’t kill their hosts, it’s not in their best interests. And it takes a certain capacity for cunning and mechanical ingenuity to put a scenario like that together. That’s a little beyond your basic buy-it-with-sex, housebreaking, neo-Nature-Girl trollop. Whoever set this up was able to figure out the diagram of rain plus road plus Em Hansen in Jeep. And where in hell is Gilda?”

  “Maybe she’s dead, too. They killed Afton, so how about Gilda, and now let’s go after another geologist, but it wasn’t me he was after. I’ve told you that. I’ve told the state patrol that. I was in Julia’s car, marked MCWAIN; I was wearing her jacket, marked MCWAIN; her hard hat, MCWAIN, MCWAIN, MCWAIN. She’s the trustee of that estate until her kids turn twenty-one, am I right? I mean, read the tea leaves, Michele! Afton’s gone, Gilda’s hiding, and now someone’s trying for Julia. It’s not healthy owning land up there. Has someone checked on Julia? Maybe whoever did this finally saw that I wasn’t Julia, and that’s why they didn’t follow me up that hill and finish me off!”

  Michele said, “You’ve got to hope it wasn’t you they wanted. But you told me Upton looked scared at the sight of you, not Julia.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I’m letting the local law enforcement think it was you they were after, if you don’t mind.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re law enforcement, and we have a thing about people trying to kill cops. It gets them more interested in the case, know what I mean?”

  “I’m not law enforcement, I’m a geologist.”

  “You’d prefer we didn’t count you as one of us? Oh great, then we’ll just leave you out there to bleed to death next time.”