Fall Hunter

by M K Dymock

  “I see it,” the pilot said in a calm intonation. “Let me get closer.”

  It was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. Below in the blur of trees and rocks, a yellow flash waved in the wind.

  The helicopter dropped closer, along with Blake’s stomach. The flash became a person. The radio crackled as the pilot made contact with the SAR team. “Be advised, we have sight of life.”

  43

  Sunday Night

  Keen woke up several times before she managed to open her eyes. Each attempt was too strenuous to succeed, and she drifted back into blissful unconsciousness.

  Somewhere in the darkness music played, a guitar strummed. A hundred thoughts flooded her exhausted mind in a second, but only one came through with any clarity. Run.

  She ripped off the blankets covering her and tried to sit up, but she’d been bound by her right arm. She tore at the bindings and nearly screamed at the pain as the bindings ripped out of her skin, but she smothered the scream in the back of her throat. As her feet touched floor, arms wrapped around her and she tried to bite at them and kick.

  “Keen,” a voice yelled, “look at me!” Her eyes focused on the man who held her arms pinned against her side.

  “Dad?” Tears shimmered on his coarse beard. How did he find her? Next to him, her mother’s face looked on, so scared.

  “You’re okay; you’re in the hospital.” The rest of the room came into focus. An IV pole tipped on her bed and a few drops of blood ran down the back of her hand. Her dad sat next to her on the bed and wrapped Keen in her arms. “It’s okay,” he repeated.

  “No, no. It’s not,” she whispered. As much as she wanted to believe her parents’ platitudes, even her addled mind knew it was not all right. “He’ll find me.”

  Elizabeth took Keen’s hands, careful to avoid the puncture from the needle. “Who hurt you?”

  “I don’t know.” Memories of the week ran through her mind, like scrolling through her Instagram feed without stopping at any image. “I can’t think. Why can’t I think?” The adrenaline from fear drained out of her and keeping her eyes open was such a burden.

  “The EMTs gave you a sedative in the ambulance.” Daniel propped Keen up against him.

  “He won’t stop looking. He’ll kill me.”

  Elizabeth’s hands tightened over hers. “Who?”

  The sheriff pushed open the door. “The nurses said she’s awake.”

  Keen lifted her head, which took more effort than climbing the ridge did. A great distance stood between her brain and her lips. “Not him.”

  She gave no resistance as her dad laid her back on the hospital bed. “She’s not ready to talk yet.” A nurse came in and adjusted the IV. A shot of something put her out again.

  When Keen woke up the second time, the first thing she saw was her mother asleep on a reclining chair within two feet of her. She glanced to her other side to discover her father, also asleep on a couch. The panic receded at the sight. Silent tears tricked down her cheek as the realization she truly survived came over her. Despite everything, she lived.

  Her mom opened her eyes and smiled. Without a word, she moved closer and nestled her head against Keen’s. Her callused hands wiped the tears away.

  Keen spent a ridiculous amount of time her first full day in the hospital eating. Not that she ate that much; doctors started her off slowly. And she took a lot of breaks between bites as her body fought the food. The nurses would try to remove her food after about an hour, but had given up separating Keen from the tray.

  The yoga pants her mom brought her fell each time she tottered to the bathroom. The face in the mirror looked a little familiar, albeit older with dark circles and gaunt cheeks.

  As she ate small bites of the red Jell-O and swished it through her teeth, a knock sounded on the door. “Come in,” she said after a quick swallow.

  Blake McKenzie peeked around the door. “You decent?”

  “Nope, but you can come in anyhow.” She pushed away her food on its roller table, but not before grabbing the plastic-wrapped cookie still on it.

  He came through the door with Clint behind him. Blake perched on the edge of a recliner her mom had slept on the night before, and Clint set out a folding chair. “You all right to talk? We could wait for your folks.” She sent her parents down to the cafeteria to give them something to do other than hover.

  She barely remembered the rough ride on the helicopter, him trying to ask questions as the EMT started fluids. “We can talk now.” Keen hadn’t decided how much of the week she would reveal to her parents.

  “How you covered so much country in your condition, I’ll never know,” Clint said.

  Last night, she’d woken drenched in her own sweat, probably brought on by being tangled in her blankets. “I had some strong motivation, and a week to do it.” Blake put out a tape recorder, and she talked him through the week. The only way to get through it was to picture everything from far away, like it happened to a character in a movie.

  She listed every memory as if doing so would take it out of her mind and into his: waking up in the trunk, spraying her attacker with bear spray. That she spoke of with pride. “I hurt him. I know I did.”

  For the most part he listened with few interruptions. She described the many attempts her assailant had made to draw her out, from the rancher dropping hay out of a truck with a little crane to the tent. “Seemed like every time I got anywhere, he was already there.”

  “What made you so sure the rancher you saw was the man who took you? You didn’t see his or the kidnapper’s face,” Blake asked.

  “The music.” She flinched at the memory of the songs.

  “Lots of people play the Beatles. I think I’ve got a few of their songs on my phone.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I’m sorry. I do believe you; it’s just my job to question.” Blake leaned closer and she unconsciously moved away.

  “Keen,” Clint interjected for the first time. “Tell me more about that truck.”

  Blake held up a hand. “I’ve talked to a few ranchers who run cattle on the BLM land out there to see if anyone saw something. One old guy said he dropped off a couple of bales last week, although he couldn’t say for sure whether it was Tuesday or Wednesday.”

  Keen pulled her knees into her chest. Had she walked away from help? She pictured the man spreading out the hay. It had seemed deliberate and slow at the time, like he wanted to stretch it out as long as possible. Was he just an old man taking his time?

  She shook her head. “What about the tent?”

  “We found a few four-wheeler tracks in and out of the area. Could’ve been campers.” Blake patted her shoulder. “Whoever took you is long gone. It wouldn’t make sense for him to stick around. My guess is that it was some out-of-towner who saw you out biking by yourself and took the opportunity.”

  She examined her fingernails and all the scratches on her one hand from digging in the dirt just to have a place to sleep and pee. The one she cut open on the rock was hidden by bandages covering an infection. “What if he comes back?”

  Blake stood and settled himself on the bed where her legs had been. “Look at me. You are safe. We’ll never stop looking, but he has no reason to come back. We’ll tell the press you have no description of him.”

  She looked up into his intent blue eyes and believed him—or wanted to believe him.

  “But if you remember anything or something else comes to mind, you call me. You have my cell number?”

  “Yeah, in my phone.” When she babysat his and Grace’s kids, they always made sure she had the number in case of an emergency.

  “You’re lucky; you’re home.”

  She ducked her head but kept silent. She didn’t feel lucky; she felt hunted.

  44

  Despite hypothermia, a gash on her head, a cracked tailbone, and more cuts and scrapes than a five-year-old learning to ride a bike, the hospital pronounced Keen in remarkably good shape, considering,
and released her after a few days.

  While she felt far from in good shape, she didn’t argue. She wanted nothing more than to be home in her own bed, sleeping on clean sheets with no beeping sounds or PA announcements waking her every ten minutes.

  Keen walked in the front door of her home escorted by Daniel and Blake, who flanked her on each side, to the smell of baking cookies. Elizabeth had come home earlier to get everything ready. And bless her heart, going by the smell of cookies from the kitchen, her mother had broken out the gluten.

  She stood in the doorway of her home, feeling out of place. She counted the changes as her mother ushered her to the couch, where a blanket and plate of cookies awaited her. The living room floor hadn’t been vacuumed and chunks of dirt had been ground into the carpet; usually nobody was allowed to wear shoes on the carpet. Furniture had been shifted and the drapes were pulled tight, where they usually ushered in the sun.

  All were changes she could name, but none were what bothered her.

  She carried the plate, now cleaned of cookies—would she ever not be hungry—to the kitchen. Her mother scrubbed dishes in the sink with a passion. As Keen reached past her to grab a washcloth, Elizabeth leapt back, knocking the plate out of Keen’s hand. Both women retreated as porcelain shards sprayed across the wood floor.

  Elizabeth stood there, shaking, as Keen pulled the broom out of the pantry. “Sweetie, I’ll get it,” Elizabeth said.

  “It’s fine. I’m tired of sitting around anyhow.” Elizabeth bustled around Keen in a nervous energy that unnerved her. “Mom, I’m home.”

  “I know.” She went back to pushing the dishes around the sink. “I told your dad to get an alarm system put in, but I guess there’s no company for about fifty miles who can do it. They’ll be here in a few days.”

  Keen now knew what had changed; home no longer felt safe. Someone had kidnapped her, left her in the hills to die, and hunted her to make sure of it.

  For the first time, she longed to leave for college to get some distance between her and who would come. Keen retreated to her room for some space, which was ironic, considering all the space she’d had the last week. More changes awaited in her room, as most of her stuff had been tossed around. She didn’t get too far in putting it in order as her laptop called her attention.

  It sat on her desk, fully charged. She’d left it in its bag, but her mom mentioned using it to track her phone. There were several emails: some from professors questioning her absence, a few friends wanting to know if she was okay, and one from Jacob. Let’s meet up.

  How many days since she’d longed for him, dreamt he’d be the one who would rescue her? He hadn’t called once since her rescue, and she deleted the old email. Gauge had sent a tentative text the day before on the new phone her parents bought before she left the hospital. She’d smiled at the two-word message: You good? Her response: Yeah. With almost as few words, they made plans to go fishing in a few days.

  Gauge and Keen’s friendship existed outside the realm of anyone’s understanding, even their own. Her friends spent summer vacation anywhere but the small town they grew up in and only returned for a quick visit. Gauge’s acquaintances drunk themselves into a stupor every evening.

  She met him after he fixed her car. But the friendship grew when he came into the store a few months before for a new pole, and she told him about a fishing hole she’d overheard another customer bragging about. She didn’t have anywhere else to go after work, and he didn’t know if he could find it. Still, neither was sure how they ended up in his truck together and, out of awkwardness, didn’t speak for the first hour. Without really discussing it, neither told their families. That would mean explaining something they couldn’t.

  The last few months they’d gone hiking a few times, even shooting once where he showed her how to use his rifle. It was easy being with him, peaceful.

  It took Keen about a half hour to get through the emails awaiting her. All of them except one, which seemed to have disappeared. The one sent to herself to remind her of something she wished she could forget.

  She’d sent the file on Saturday, but no emails showed that date. She attempted to curl up on her bed to take a nap, but her body, empty of drugs, refused any more sleep. There was nothing she could do, she told herself; the file was gone.

  She sat up and pulled the laptop back out. Before shutting the computer down Sunday, she’d backed her files up to an external drive before packing it away for school. She’d opened the email once to look at the file. Once she saw the numbers she didn’t want to see, she’d closed the file and tried hard not to think about it. If she’d downloaded the file, it would’ve been saved to the drive. If she had viewed it in an email, it was lost with the email.

  It only took a few minutes to rip open one of the packed boxes and pull out the small black drive. She didn’t breathe as she plugged it into the laptop and opened it up. Didn’t know if she wanted to find it to delete it or to keep it.

  The file, which questioned everything she knew about her parents, was buried in her downloads folder.

  She felt stuck on that ridge again, no going up or down without something bad happening. She clicked on the file—maybe she hadn’t seen what she’d thought. She entered the password, the same one she saw the mayor enter in his own computer as she stood behind him a few months ago when she’d interned. Wasn’t her fault she could never forget a number.

  The Excel document contained sheets of figures, all labeled with different businesses. “Dawsons” was the fourth one. In her accounting class when they learned about cash flows, she’d admired her parents’ ability to stay in business with so little cash flowing in. Now she knew they had a lot more cash than they’d let on.

  In the room next to hers, her parents shuffled around, getting ready for bed. She would question them tomorrow—or maybe never. Keen lay in her bed, knowing without the drugs of the hospital she would never sleep. They sent her home with a bottle filled with Percocet, but she wanted her mind clear.

  Branches scraped against the window; the eaves creaked. She felt more exposed than sleeping in a hole. At least then he hadn’t known where to find her. He wouldn’t know where to look here, either. She ripped the blankets off her bed and pulled all the shoes out of her closet. Once buried in a nest of pillows and blankets with the closet door shut, she tried, and mostly failed, to sleep.

  45

  Blake stopped on his way home from the Dawsons’ to see Cliff. It took a lot of threats of prison to convince the auditor to give him what he wanted. Once Blake had what he needed, he drove on to his in-laws.

  His in-laws lived a half mile up the road from Cliff’s castle. Other than the stone bridge crossing over a gully, the property and house appeared modest from the road. A normal-sized rambler, half stone and half logs, awaited any curious visitor. The back, however, was a different view. The house dropped three stories to a small heated pool and hot tub beside a privately accessed ski run that adjoined all the properties, or at least the ones on the good side of the road.

  Blake walked in the modest front door without knocking, a thing he’d never done before.

  Other than William, the house was empty. His mother-in-law was with Grace and the maids always finished by now. They didn’t keep on any full-time staff as William didn’t trust people that much.

  Blake passed a small sitting room with a fireplace adorned with photos, only one of which contained Blake, and that was the requisite family photo. The rest were of William, flanked by his wife, and Grace, and their children. Nature photos adorned the rest of the wall. Everything in this room celebrated family and town. This is the place where William would greet constituents and reporters, including two today, from what Grace had said.

  Blake took the elevator down to the second lower floor, where most of the real living was done. A palatial-sized living room with a movie screen, a fully stocked bar, and a kitchen stood ready to entertain. Off to the side was a playroom his kids loved more than their own rooms.
A room Blake hardly went into stood behind two closed oak doors—William’s office.

  The mayor pushed open the doors at the sound of the elevator. “What are you doing here?”

  “We need to talk.”

  “I have an appointment coming.”

  Blake walked past him into the office, where he sat down at William’s desk in William’s seat. Behind him the Rockies filled the window, already showing patches of red that would soon be replaced with white.

  William’s eyes filled with rage, but his voice was even. “Something I can help you with, son?” Sarcasm filled the last word, as it usually did in private.

  Blake tossed a binder full of printouts of the contents of Keen’s computer. “Cliff is quite thorough with his records.” William took in a deep breath to rein in his temper, but Blake, just once, wanted the man to lose it. “I ran some checks on Cliff,” he continued. “You know the feds called his last company a mini Enron. He sold enough stock before it collapsed to buy up this whole mountain. Dirty as Madoff and yet the feds couldn’t get any charges to stick. That’s the man you trusted the town’s fortune with, and your own.”

  William shut the door behind him. “If this is true, I am as shocked as you are.”

  Blake leaned back, placing his feet on the desk. It took a little rubbing, but he broke off some mud onto the mahogany. “What shouldn’t shock you is that a man who would finance your own weed empire wouldn’t screw you over in the end. All that paperwork–” Blake nudged the file with his heel. “Points everything to you.”

  It took seconds for William to rip open the file and glance at it. “There’s nothing here but numbers.”

  “Just because you can’t read numbers doesn’t mean the feds can’t.” William had objected to Blake’s white-trash upbringing when Grace first brought him home. Despite his degrees, nice clothes, and planned-out future, he was still the son of a grocery store checker with missing teeth from meth and a high school dropout. He’d spent thousands in college ridding himself of that past and stench. A life he would never let his own children repeat.