by Jeff Carson
“Sir? You there?”
“Yeah. Which house are you at?”
“Four. I’m the only one here. I can’t leave. Unless you can get someone.”
“And everyone else?”
A clearing of the throat. “Chairman’s at camp two, if that’s what you mean. At least as far as I know.”
“Who’s manning three?”
“I think it’s Pepper.”
Pepper. The biggest screw-up in their entire organization. House two was the closest to Gunnison, but next to the bleeding corpse a few feet away, inept men like Pepper were the biggest detriment to their entire organization.
“What do you want me to do, boss?”
“I want you to stay put. And I want you to continue to keep your mouth shut until this is all over.”
“Hey, you know that.”
“What’s the news on our Rocky Points guy?”
An exhale in his ear. “I hear they’re still looking.”
His palms broke into a sweat. “Still looking? They still haven’t found him?”
“Yeah. I guess he got away or something.”
The image of Pike’s Peak blurred in his vision. “Okay. They’ll find him. Change is underway, my friend.”
Pope thought he heard a swallow on the other end.
He pressed the end-call button.
Like a master chess player, he’d already had his next move planned well in advance, but the maniacal laugh this agent had just let out had got to him.
The agent had called his bluff, clearly unconcerned for his family. How could he have had such certainty up against a man like Pope? What was Pope unaware of?
He pressed his map application, and then typed in Gunnison, Colorado.
The blue line materialized, showing him a drive time of three hours and forty-three minutes. It was 6:20 a.m. With the half-mile walk back to his car, he could be there by 9:45, give or take a quarter-hour, depending on how fast he drove.
Pocketing the phone, he steeled his thoughts and looked at the FBI agent, now lying in a lake of red.
He was going to have to be careful. He was walking a fine line between cut and run and stay the course and become nothing short of God in his world.
He gritted his teeth, just about punching himself in the face for even thinking cut and run.
Today was no different from any other day in his life, looking over his shoulder for feds. As always, he would use caution.
And this Wolf guy escaping the FBI? They would find him. They had plenty of motivation to stay the course there. Despite the setbacks, Pope was progressing.
Feeling better, he walked to the front door.
With one last glance at his watch, he unlocked the latch and stepped out into the brisk fall air.
Chapter 16
Wolf woke to the sound of a wailing woman, which when he jumped awake morphed into the true sound of a long zipper being pulled back on the tent.
“Morning, sunshine. Get enough sleep yesterday? By my count, you’re pushing twenty hours.”
Lying back down, he smacked the back of his head on a rock underneath the tent floor.
He winced and cracked an eye, and then watched Luke’s shapely, mostly bare, rear end exit the tent. Aroused for an instant, his thoughts went to Sarah, and then he was hit with a lightning bolt of guilt.
What was Sarah doing right now? Watching down on him? Sitting here in the tent with him? He suddenly had an image of her, hands on her hips, tapping her foot, wondering what the hell was taking him so long. Why hadn’t he brought her justice yet?
Rubbing a hand through his hair, he pulled off the sleeping bag and poked his head out into the cold morning air. He brushed his bare feet free of debris, pulled on his socks, and put on his shoes.
It was bright on the tops of the trees, but shaded and brisk at ground level.
He stretched his arms overhead, taking in the view of lumber for three-hundred sixty degrees. “Wow, this is a good spot you found here.”
A jet of fog shot out of Luke’s mouth. “It’s as secluded as I could find. I wasn’t looking for picturesque views.”
“No, I’m serious. You can’t see fifty yards in any direction.” He twisted and looked at the truck. “It’s perfect. There’s not even a road in.”
“There’s a two-track over there.” She pointed east into the trees. “It leads to a pay campground. Then there’s a county road that goes south and ends up near Crested Butte. I’ve been on it a few times before.”
Wolf looked at his watch—8:05 a.m. “How far to Gunnison?”
“Shouldn’t take more than an hour, hour and a half.”
“We’re going to have to figure out how to change vehicles.”
Luke ignored him and concentrated on lacing up her shoes. They were a black athletic style, something that went well with a pantsuit and chasing criminals in a full sprint.
“Hey, Luke.”
“What?”
“Did I say thank you yesterday?”
“Yeah, you did.” She gave a final pull on her laces and looked up with a nod. “Let’s tear down camp and haul ass.”
They took down the tent, packed up the sleeping bags, and stowed everything in the spacious back of the interior cab of the truck.
Luke drove them out of the woods, along a loop that passed a group of deserted campsites to a dirt county road, and turned south.
The drive started out bumpy and progressed to smooth: starting in the deep woods on a rarely improved road in mountainous terrain, then dropping down into the East River Valley just south of the Crested Butte Ski Resort mountain and connecting with Colorado State Highway 135 made of dark, newly paved asphalt.
The land was flat as a board on the bottom of the valley, with low sage-covered hills on either side.
Behind them, Crested Butte Ski Resort jutted up, reminding Wolf of a breaching submarine launching up from beneath a calm sea. Every year they held a free skiing competition at the resort, filled with contestants who had somehow slipped through the Darwinian cracks.
The last time he’d been there to ski had been with Sarah, all the way back in their senior year of high school.
It had been arctic cold that weekend, and he remembered little of the skiing, but memories of shacking up next to Sarah on the floor of her cousin’s dorm room at Western State College in Gunnison, zipping their cloth sleeping bags together and using each other to keep warm, were as fresh as if they’d happened yesterday.
“We need substantial food.”
He blinked, arriving in the present. “What do you have in mind? These groceries are pretty useless.” He turned and looked at the paper bags on the rear floor that Valerie Patterson had left in haste yesterday. “Flour, yeast, sugar. A bag of tortillas. Some cheese. Waffles. You want another granola bar?”
“No, I don’t.” Luke’s tone was razor sharp. “I need a meal. When you were asleep yesterday I had a candy bar, a granola bar, and some beef jerky I got at the gas station.”
Wolf eyed her. “I hope you paid cash.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m hungry.”
“I think it’s a bad idea to stop at a restaurant. Every law-enforcement agency in the state is probably on the lookout for us now. It’s dumb.”
“You should see the color of your face,” she said. “You need food, too.”
Wolf kept quiet, watching barbed-wire fence posts fly by next to the Gunnison River. “Let’s get into Gunnison and see what we can find. I have twenty bucks. I hope you have more cash.”
They rode in silence for another ten minutes, and Wolf zoned out watching the meandering route of the water. The Gunnison was a destination river for die-hard anglers. This morning they were thick, casting their fly rods amid the rising steam and bugs. If he could come out of this whole thing alive and free, he thought it would be a good idea to go camping and fishing with Jack. That is, if he could come out of this whole thing with a relationship with his son.
They arrived at the outskirts of Gunnison and
Luke slowed as they cruised down Main Street.
“There it is, Trout Creek Moving and Storage. Kind of a little shithole.”
Laid out in rows perpendicular to the street, the aluminum roll doors of the storage facility were visible for only a second and then obscured by a concrete wall, but Wolf saw that the units were low and skinny, made of sagging metal and coated with flaking paint. Mini storage units rather than full sized, and it looked like a strong kick would peel one open.
“There’s a restaurant.” Luke let off the brake. “Up there. We’ll park here, halfway between. Walk both places. What do you think?”
He nodded. The truth was, he was ravenous. He would kill for a chicken fried steak with eggs and hash browns, and he failed to see any law enforcement in every direction.
They parked and walked a block and a half along old western-looking storefronts, to a floor-to-ceiling-windowed restaurant.
Walking inside, the sight and smell of breakfast dishes atop the tables made his mouth gush in anticipation.
The hostess sat them at a booth in the rear underneath a mounted elk head, and they ordered their meals.
As they waited for their food they sucked down water and coffee and surveyed the room.
“No cops,” Wolf said. “No one staring at us.”
“Speak for yourself. Those hung-over college boys over there keep looking at me.”
He sipped his coffee and eyed the group of five college kids. All male. All nodding and whispering behind sly grins. “That’s just because they like the view.”
“Psh.”
A group of tourists came in and sat down.
“I was serious,” Wolf said. “I have twenty bucks, and that’s it.”
“Don’t worry. I have money.”
He leaned back and relaxed. “Tell me about your Assistant Special Agent in Charge, Frye. He a good agent?”
“He’s definitely smart.”
“What do you think he’s doing now?”
“Let’s see.” Luke took a sip of coffee. “I’d say he’s figured out by now I’m involved, so he’d be checking my cell-phone records. He’d see that the last phone call I made was with Margaret Hitchens. So he’d track her down and see that her sister, Valerie, was in town, and then talk to both of them. According to Valerie, she’s a terrible liar, so she’d give the whole thing away immediately. Then they’d have an APB out on our car.”
She froze with her coffee against her lips. “And then the Gunnison police would spot Valerie Patterson’s truck parked along Main Street, and two units with flashing lights would speed by the restaurant that we were sitting in.”
Wolf caught the tail end of a third flashing cop car as it flew past the windows. The blur and revving engines drew gasps from the diners inside the restaurant.
“Geez, something’s going on out there. Hi, my name’s Toby. I’ll be taking care of you two today. Where you guys from?”
Luke peered around the waiter. “Listen, Toby, we need a few minutes.”
“Sure. Let me know if you have any questions. Our special this morning is—”
“Thanks, Toby. We’ll let you know if we have any questions.”
Toby closed his mouth and nodded. “Sure.” He moved to the next booth.
“Let’s go out the back,” Wolf said.
“If there is a back.”
“There is. Behind you, down the hallway to the right, past the kitchen window.”
She shook her head. “Damn it. I’m hungry.”
They got up and both walked toward the back hallway.
Toby intercepted them halfway. “Hey, you guys taking off?”
Wolf smiled. “Gotta go to the bathroom. We’ve been in the car for a while.”
“Me too.” Luke smiled.
“Ah, I see. Straight back down the hall.”
Wolf followed Luke around the corner and almost slammed into her.
She’d stopped, poking her head through the window to the kitchen where three plates of food steamed under the heat lamps.
“Hello? Hello!”
“What are you doing?” He swallowed at the sight of the glistening breakfast burrito with cheese oozing over its sides.
“Hi, there. Can I please get a to-go container?” Luke said through the window.
There was a muffled response in accented English.
“A to-go container?”
An arm handed her a Styrofoam clamshell box.
“Thank you so much,” she said with a winning smile.
Without an instant of hesitation, she set the to-go box down on the aluminum shelf, grabbed the plate and tilted it.
“Ah, shit.” She clenched her teeth and clanked the plate back down. “Hot.”
Two arms came from the other side to the rescue, grabbing the plate with two rags.
She caught the green chili dollops first, then the heavy tortilla wrap slapped into the box and she flashed her smile again, this time bashful and flirty. “Thank you so much.”
“De nada.”
“You have any silverware?”
The arms handed her a silver fork and knife.
Toby spotted them from the dining room and approached.
“Are you sure? Thank you.” She winked, took the box and walked after Wolf. “All right, let’s go.”
“I can’t take you anywhere,” he said, stepping fast to the rear door.
“You’ll be thanking me in ten minutes when we’re loosening our belts.”
Wolf pushed on the bar of the rear door and they were into the bright parking lot.
“Hey!” Toby said as Luke slammed the door shut.
Chapter 17
Patterson rolled her eyes and gripped the phone tighter. “Just tell me, Doc. Come on. It’s me.”
Dr. Lorber exhaled long into Patterson’s earpiece. “I’m sorry, Heather. I’ve been sworn to secrecy by the … hold on one moment … federal agents”—a door squeaked and closed in the background—“and I’ve assured them that … I … will … not … okay, they’re not here but I don’t have much time. They’ll come back any second. The time of death on Gail Olson’s body is no longer than seventy-two hours.”
Patterson stood frozen to her spot on the shoulder of the highway, watching as two deputies peeked inside the windows of an old woman’s Buick sedan down the road. “Seventy-two hours?”
“Yes. And I’ve heard a bigger, juicier piece of information.”
“Spit it out, Doc.”
“Gail Olson’s mother is missing from her home in Las Vegas as well. Has been for, wait for it, seventy-two hours.”
Patterson instinctively turned to the forested slopes of Williams Pass to hide her exasperation. “Could she just be on vacation?”
“I heard it looks like abduction. Forced entry, broken furniture. If I was placing bets there, I’d bet on her being dead, too.”
Patterson never knew how to respond to the macabre statements that flew from Lorber’s mouth so freely. She turned and looked over at the roadblock. Lancaster was on his own phone call, studying her intently. “What do they think? Wolf got on a plane and flew to Vegas and offed her?”
“And I’m thinking that … if you could get me a sandwich, you know the one. No mayonnaise, and no pickles. And for God’s sake, don’t be late this time.”
The line went dead.
Patterson looked at her phone screen, pocketed it, and walked to Lancaster.
The big man kept his dead eyes glued to her and then ended his own call as she drew close.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“They want you at the station,” he said, turning away and walking toward the SUV.
She followed in silence.
Taking in the new-car smell, she took a deep breath and relaxed in the passenger seat.
“Who were you talking to?” he asked, climbing behind the wheel.
“It was my mom. Always needing the latest 4-1-1 with my life.”
Lancaster stared out the windshield with no response and fired u
p the engine.
As they cruised down the valley into town, things were as silent as ever. Spending time with this guy was like wearing sound-isolating headphones.
As she often did, she looked over at Lancaster and wondered why the hell she had been paired with the man. It was as if she were being observed, which was probably the truth.
“You know, Wolf didn’t do this.”
Lancaster moved a few centimeters up and down as the car bounced.
“And I had nothing to do with this. And neither did Rachette. Or Baine, or Wilson, or Yates. Or anyone else from our department.”
Still no response.
“Is that why MacLean has us paired up together? So you can all report back to him or something?”
Lancaster swallowed and glanced in the rearview mirror.
“Thanks. Nice talk.”
When they pulled into the county-building parking lot, she got out and walked fast, not caring whether she left Lancaster in the dust. Stepping through the rear entrance, she let the glass doors shut behind her without looking back.
Only when she’d turned around to climb up the second flight of stairs did she see that Lancaster was following silently, only a few steps behind.
Freak!
She reached the third floor and walked down the hall. Reaching MacLean’s glass cube of an office, she stopped dead in her tracks.
Lancaster walked past her and she lashed up and caught his tricep in a vise-like grip.
“What’s my mother doing in MacLean’s office?”
Lancaster looked down at her hand and shrugged.
She kept her hand clamped. “Thanks for the heads-up, partner.”
He blinked. “I thought you said you were talking to her on the phone.”
She let go and walked to MacLean’s office door, which was propped open.
To her surprise, Lancaster veered away from her and walked toward the squad room.
“Deputy Patterson, please come inside.” Agent Frye said from inside.
She walked straight to the cloth-upholstered chair in which her mother slumped.
“What are you doing here, Mom? Are you all right? What’s going on?”
Her mother looked up with red eyes.
