Fall Hunter

by M K Dymock

  He wiped the blood from her face in a futile attempt to make it easier on her family, and knew he couldn’t ignore his instincts anymore.

  Blake had insisted on riding with his wife in the helicopter to the hospital. After Clint was forced to tell Daniel and Keen about Elizabeth, he turned his attention to Grace. The drive to the hospital down the Gorge and over to Summit gave him ample time to come to a decision. He called Charlie from the highway to check into some stuff from the crime scene at the mayor’s house. By the time he reached the hospital, Charlie had texted him an answer.

  The nurse explained Grace’s injuries weren’t life-threatening and he could see her if he really wanted to. Was he sure he really wanted to, she’d asked.

  Clint quietly shut the door behind him as he stared at the form sleeping on the bed. At the sight of her injuries, he questioned his assumption. Who would drive themselves off a cliff?

  He cleared his throat and her eyes opened. “Clint, Blake isn’t here. You can leave.”

  The woman, whom he knew as Grace, had disappeared at her father’s death. “I needed to talk to you about your dad.” He moved closer to the bed. “First of all, I wanted to say how sorry I am about your loss, the town’s loss.” He’d learned the skill of schmoozing from his mentor as well.

  “So true,” she whispered. “What did you want to talk about?”

  The hospital room lay in shadows, which softened the look of her injuries. “I know it appears he killed himself.” She flinched at those words, which changed his course. “But you don’t think so.”

  She clenched her jaw and shook her head. Clint sat on the recliner next to the bed. “Blake seems sure, and he’s a good cop.” She scoffed slightly, but enough for him to see the crack.

  “If not, why would he be so certain?”

  “It’s easier to believe that than the alternative.”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  Grace looked away, perplexed. “I don’t know, but it wasn’t suicide.”

  Clint knew from his own experience that you never tell anyone what to think. Too bad he hadn’t done a very good job of avoiding that in his marriage. “One thing that was odd is there were fingerprints on the gun besides your dad’s.”

  Grace sat up straight. “Whose? As far as I know, that gun never left the desk.”

  “That’s just it. The fingerprints are more smudges than prints.” Clint’s mind flashed back to a class on fingerprints taken from the FBI. “Like what happens when someone is wearing latex gloves,” he said, more to himself than her. Bile rose in his throat as he considered everything he’d been blind to this last week and before that. “Grace, Blake would do anything to take care of you and the kids. Wouldn’t he?”

  She strained to sit up right. “He wouldn’t do that,” she said.

  “You’ve got one shot to take care of Billy and Cecilia. Where is he?”

  “No!” she yelled. “He wouldn’t hurt my father; he wouldn’t do that to me.”

  “All the papers on your father’s desk pointed to him. Would your father have ever given up without a fight?”

  “No,” she whispered. “He didn’t even call his lawyers before he died. But Blake couldn’t—”

  “Come on, Grace. You know your husband better than me.”

  Clint so wanted to be wrong, wanted to believe he knew his friend, his boss. He wanted her to keep protesting.

  “He’s gone after Keenley; I had nothing to do with it, with any of it,” Grace said.

  53

  Gauge slammed the brakes as the bridge swayed beneath them. “What the—”

  “Go back, go back!” Keen screamed.

  Gauge reached for the stick shift as the first shot pinged into the engine, which smoked in response. The second pierced a hole in the windshield, and they ducked down.

  His hand slipped off the gear shift. “Keen,” he whispered. “Run.”

  She reached over to touch his chest and stifled a cry at the wetness she discovered. She yanked him down as another shot split the windshield near the first. She couldn’t outrun a gun. “No,” she whispered, then repeated it louder. “No.”

  She tried to pull Gauge out of the driver’s seat. He tried to move with her but didn’t budge more than a few inches. “Hold tight,” she said.

  Keen couldn’t run, but she wouldn’t fight with nothing more than a stick. Not again. With her body still pressed against the seat, she reached up and pulled down the rifle Gauge always kept in the back window. A .243 hunting rifle he had let her shoot when she explained her mother hadn’t allowed her near guns.

  “Keen!” Blake McKenzie yelled. “I’ve come to offer you a deal.” She cringed at his voice. Despite everything, she still couldn’t quite believe people she’d grown up with could hurt them.

  Gauge didn’t keep the gun loaded and she wrenched the glove compartment open to find the shells. “What deal?” she yelled back as she fumbled with the cartridges. “I don’t think you’re going to let me live.” It took two tries to slide back the bolt.

  “You’re right, but I will let your father live.”

  She hesitated for a second before inserting the first cartridge.

  “You’re not getting off this bridge alive,” Blake called. “You know this. If you do things my way, I won’t kill Daniel.”

  “You already killed my mother.” Talking was better than him shooting.

  “No, I didn’t. Believe it or not, I liked Elizabeth. That was an unfortunate accident that wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t come out of the wilderness alive.”

  She jammed in another cartridge. “So this is my fault?”

  “No, Keen.” Sadness filled his voice. “This is my fault, but unfortunately you have to pay the price. I will protect my family, but I promise you, I will spare your father if you cooperate.”

  The third cartridge fell to the floor. “What do you want from me?”

  “Come out of the truck so we can talk.” His voice came closer.

  “I can hear you fine and if you come any closer, I’ll jump. Make things a lot harder for you.” The truck idled within inches of the edge of the bridge.

  The footsteps stopped. “I want you to jump.”

  Whatever answer she expected, that wasn’t it. She reached into the box, but it was empty and the third cartridge had disappeared into the darkness. Two chances at life.

  “You’re going to commit suicide after leaving a text message on your dad’s phone telling him how sorry you are about your mom.”

  She considered the option, not the suicide but the jump. She knew the river better than anyone and had swum a lot of it. If it was only swimming, she would chance it, but the drop to the Gorge was a hundred feet to a few feet of water rushing over boulders. “What about Gauge?”

  “Going by the lack of sound from him, I’d venture a guess he’s dead or close to it. Unlike you, when he disappears, no one will look.”

  Gauge’s shallow breaths filled the space between him. “I would look,” she whispered in case he was aware enough to comprehend.

  She knew when she looked out the windshield she’d be blinded by the lights still penetrating the top of the cab. Going by Blake’s voice, he was off to the right and beyond the exposure of the headlights. The old truck’s doors opened with a heave and a creak; there would be no sneaking out.

  “What about my body?” She slipped over Gauge with an apology as he groaned. Pain meant still alive, and she swallowed her guilt. As she pulled the rifle after her, his blood smeared across her arms. “I don’t want my dad looking for me, never knowing.”

  Blake didn’t respond for a moment, and she clenched the door handle. “I’m not going to lie to you. It’ll be tough to search for you in the river, but we’ll do everything we can.”

  Keen wondered if he told the same lie to her parents.

  She pulled the door handle. The second he’d hear the door creak, he would come after her. With one hand on the rifle, she shoved the door open with her body. As sho
ts pinged over her head, she ran to the railing of the bridge. With less than a prayer, she leapt over.

  54

  Blake shone the light across the smoking truck hood to the railing where a second ago Keen had stood outlined in the rising moon.

  Struck dumb was an understatement. He’d anticipated she’d get out of the truck and plead, fight, or run—something. Definitely didn’t expect her to obey his request without a warning. He kept his pistol out as he crept across the bridge, cutting through the headlights of the truck.

  “Keen!” he yelled. The rushing water below would drown out any splash. Through the windshield, Gauge slumped behind the steering wheel. Blake wished she hadn’t brought the boy along—another life sacrificed that didn’t need to be.

  He scanned the gaps between the suspension cables with his flashlight, but the light ended at the edge, everything beyond shrouded in the night. “It really didn’t need to come to this,” he whispered to himself.

  The explosion of sound forced his hands over his ears even as his leg gave out underneath him. He fell to the pavement and rolled away from the edge to under the old truck. His gun was still out but the flashlight dropped on the pavement, pointing to his Tahoe.

  It felt as if his heart beat in his calf muscle as it pumped blood out his leg. He pointed the pistol into the darkness at nothing. How many bullets did she have? The broken pavement pressed into his chest as he tried to flatten out as much as possible.

  He forced his mind to think of Cece and Billy and how they waited for their parents at home. Their anguish cleared his thoughts. She couldn’t get to him without him seeing her, and when he did, he would shoot her down. Investigation be damned.

  He never saw the rifle fold over the edge of the bridge between the bars of the railing.

  “Hey!” Keen yelled, and he fired once and squeezed again—but the next shot wasn’t his. The bullet sped through his head, wiping out any trace of his family.

  55

  No phone service, like always. Keen pulled Blake’s Tahoe close to Gauge’s and dragged him into the passenger side. “What’s hap–” he mumbled as she shoved him in.

  She considered calling out on the radio but didn’t much like the idea of who might answer, considering she shot the county sheriff. Anyhow, it would take them far too long to get Gauge to a hospital.

  It took three tries but she found the switch that turned on the sirens as she sped down the canyon away from Lost Gorge.

  Kids who grow up in a small town find ways to entertain themselves. Theirs was to stand on the thin pipe that ran the length of the bridge, hanging a few feet below the asphalt. Everyone raised in the Gorge knew this. Those who could walk the length of the pipe across the river had forever bragging rights, but Keen had never made it beyond a few inches, trembling in terror before crawling back over the railing.

  As she pulled into the hospital in Summit, a couple of nurses ran out the side door at the flashing lights. “He’s been shot,” she said. They pulled Gauge out onto a gurney and rushed him inside. Only now with the building lights could she see the redness that soaked his shirt.

  “You okay?” One nurse hesitated.

  “I’m okay.” She pulled her shirt away from her body, but the moisture stuck it to her. “Not mine.”

  The nurses called the police as required by law. The sheriff of Summit detained her but allowed her to call home first. Not knowing what to think of her story, he called Clint. Her dad showed up first. He ran to her and hugged her, and she wanted nothing so much as to disappear into his embrace and be a child again.

  She pulled away. “Dad, what did you do?”

  He procrastinated by asking questions about her, but she refused to answer. She asked first, after all.

  The story came out to her, and later to law enforcement. William Ackerman had the connections to know legalized marijuana was coming, if a few years out. When the laws changed in other states, companies who had the financing and structure in place first quickly capitalized on the opportunity and made millions. What if they were in place before? Farms already under cultivation, transportation worked out, and the structure ready. Lost Gorge, with its remoteness and cooler summer temperatures, was ideal. Blake could keep the law ignorant, Daniel would tend to the several cultivations throughout the mountains, and the money could be laundered through the store. Everybody would finally make some long-deserved cash.

  “Your mom,” Daniel said, “she was opposed from the get-go. Wanted us to sell and start over, but I wouldn’t let go.” His jaw clenched. “The McKenzies watched you grow up, sat at our table playing cards. How could they …?”

  No one had an answer to that question.

  Clint showed up in time to keep her from being arrested. He called the DEA himself, though it would probably cost him his job.

  He served a warrant on Croft’s truck, determined to find a trace of Keen. He did better than that and found fingerprints and hair from Grace. She left trace DNA all over the driver’s side. When he showed up at the large house on Skyline with an arrest warrant, no one answered. He found her underwater in her massive claw-foot tub. Toxicology tests came back positive for Lortab and Ambien. Her mother took the kids and left town; nobody bothered to ask where.

  When it came to Sol and Daisy, Clint no longer trusted the word of a friend and launched a complete investigation. A credit card purchase at a gas station led to a video of Daisy filling her tank, wearing the same clothes she’d been found in. Sol had been across the state that day, guiding a fishing trip. Clint ruled her fall an accident.

  Sol blamed himself even more than Clint. He had stumbled onto one of the fields but figured it was none of his business how other people made a buck and ignored it. Never suspected who was behind it.

  When they released Keen, her dad drove her to the funeral home, where she sat by her mother’s body. The tears came, followed by pain so wrenching she longed to be fighting for her life in the barren wilderness rather than feel it. More than the pain, though, she felt a peacefulness knowing her mom would’ve traded her life for Keen’s.

  56

  Keen took a page out of her parents’ book. She ran away from home. She found a job at a ski resort with more employees than Lost Gorge had people. It was a place where everyone was from somewhere else and would disappear again at the spring thaw. An easy place to start anew.

  Her senior year could wait until she had a better idea of what she wanted to do. Gauge healed, but with an arm that couldn’t be raised above his shoulder. The hospital in Summit was the farthest he’d been away from home. He got a CDL and drove trucks around the West to make up for it and to get away from his family and their reputation. Every month or so, he’d pull into town and they’d meet up. They still didn’t say much, but they didn’t have to. It took more than a few visits for him to hold her hand, but she didn’t mind. Wanting to be loved without needing it so desperately was a good place to be.

  Her dad was given immunity to testify against Cliff. He sold the store at a loss and disappeared into the wilderness, supposedly as a guide but mostly to be gone. He surfaced occasionally to take a few ski runs with her, where they finally talked, mostly about Elizabeth.

  Keen took her mother’s ashes and spread them throughout the West, sometimes on a hike or on a river. The last of it she took to the highest peak overlooking Lost Gorge, a place Keen had first been to at three months old when her mother hauled her up in a carrier. Her dad told her about how Elizabeth had lifted the small infant and held her to face the grand view. “Look, Keen: all this is your home.”

  Her parents raised her to see the world as an adventure—and she would take it.

  “Fall Hunter” the second book in the Lost Gorge Mystery Collection is now available on Amazon. Click here to start reading.

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  About the Author

  M.K. Dymock is an analyst by day, a writer by night, and a ski instructor by weekend. Most of her stories involve the outdoors since that’s where she finds adventure and inspiration. Follow her adventures at weekendwomanwarrior.com or on Twitter @WeekendWomanWar.