“He said no FBI.”
“Of course he said no FBI. Everybody who ever kidnaps anybody says no FBI. But the only way we get Robbie back is to narrow the search grid and find a way to negotiate with Hayduke. This information,” she held her phone up, “would help Nielsen and Taylor do just that.”
“He’s not going to be there. He’s too smart. He’s been planning this.” Silas pulled out the papers he’d taken from under the sink.
“What’s that?”
“They were in the room. Robbie must have hidden them before Hayduke grabbed him. It’s the research that he was doing today. These are postings from a blog set up by some guys who created something called the Hayduke Trail. It’s a rugged back-country hiking route that circles the Southwest following locations from The Monkey Wrench Gang.” Silas riffled through the pages. “Josh Charleston has been posting on it for the last couple of months. He’s been hiking all over the various sections of the trail here in the Escalante and down into Canyonlands, asking questions about distances and road access. Look, Robbie highlighted this section where Josh asks Can I get from Hite into the Maze district on the old Jeep trail that Hayduke took in The Monkey Wrench Gang?”
“Silas, this doesn’t mean he was planning this.”
“I think it does. Look here; Robbie found this posting: Time to play a game of Hayduke Lives. Charleston—Hayduke—posted that two weeks ago! That was just after we found where Penelope was murdered. I think he knew that you guys would eventually draw the line back to him. There was nothing he could do at that time to steer us away from the evidence. He was the one who firebombed my store, and he stole Penelope’s journal later that night to try and erase the evidence that he had planted it for me to find in the first place. He’d already been planning an escape route at that point, and when I didn’t die in the store fire, he kicked it into high gear.”
“Why not just run? He could have slipped across the border into Mexico and been long gone.”
“I don’t know. He’s crazy? He believes he is Hayduke?”
“If you’re right, if he has been planning this out, what happens next? He’s given you a destination. He’s using The Monkey Wrench Gang as some sort of guidebook to draw you in. What’s next?”
Silas pressed his fingers to his forehead. He turned and leaned over the seat and grabbed the worn copy of the novel he had given Robbie to read. He handed Katie the paperback. “If I’m correct, he’s going to head toward Canyonlands. He might try and follow the old Jeep trails above Cataract Canyon. I don’t even know if they are passable. But maybe he’s got something else planned. In Hayduke Lives the character blows up a power plant. Josh could be planning anything. The only way I’m going to find out is to go to the White River Bridge.”
“Taylor can—”
“No he can’t! Not now. He can’t do anything to get my son back that I can’t do alone. Hayduke sees the FBI coming, he’s going to kill Robbie just like he killed those others and the game will be over. Hayduke lives. Get it?”
Rain sat silently next to Silas for a long time. “Alright, here’s the deal. I’m coming with you. We go to the White River Bridge and find out what Hayduke wants. Then you and I call Taylor and tell him what’s going on. Deal?”
“What if I say no?”
“Then I arrest you.”
“Then I guess we have a deal.”
“And we take my truck. This old jalopy isn’t going to get us far.”
43
THEY DROVE IN SILENCE FOR the first hour, passing through Boulder and taking the Burr Trail over the Circle Cliffs and into Capital Reef National Park. Silas sat behind the wheel of her Toyota Tundra while Katie sat speed-reading The Monkey Wrench Gang in the passenger seat. Silas had given her his copy from the portable Abbey library he had in the hotel room. The sun rose as they were approaching Highway 276 south of the Henry Mountains. The first light of morning reflected off the previous evening’s rain-soaked desert. If Silas hadn’t been in a race to save his oldest son from a killer, he might have even found the dawn beautiful.
“What do you think we’re going to find when we get there?” Katie asked as they turned onto Highway 95. She was reading the final chapters of the book.
“I don’t know. It depends on what Josh thinks the end game will be.”
They crossed the bridge over the Dirty Devil River and then the Colorado itself.
“That’s the turn-off for Hite,” said Silas. “The White Canyon Bridge is just up ahead.” He started to slow the truck. They drove onto the bridge, the only vehicle in sight. Below them, the stagnant waters of the White River were hemmed between the sandstone walls of its canyon.
Silas stopped the truck in the middle of the bridge and got out. Katie did too.
The morning was cool and still. The light on the canyon walls glowed with a rosy countenance. Katie scanned the surrounding landscape.
Silas paced up and down the driving lane. “In the book the Gang tries to burn through the bridge’s super-structure with thermite. They placed a barrel of it at one end of the bridge and lit it on fire and watched it burn down through the asphalt, but nothing happened. It made a big hole in the road but the bridge’s girders remained intact. It was a turning point, because shortly afterwards the San Juan Search and Rescue Team got after them and the chase was on.”
“How did the Search and Rescue Team find them? I didn’t get that when I read the book just now.”
“Bishop Love, the head of the Team, had a real hate on for Hayduke. Hayduke had given him the slip a week before and humiliated him so the Bishop was out to get him. Right before they did the bridge job Hayduke took out a few bulldozers over by Hite. Drove them over the cliff. Big explosion.”
“Not the actions of someone trying to be inconspicuous.”
“Inconspicuous isn’t a word a character like Hayduke understands.”
Katie leaned on the railing and looked down into the canyon. “So it was hubris that did in Hayduke and his friends.”
“I think so. How is that going to help me get my son back?”
“It’s something to keep in mind. You’ve spent a lot more time around Josh Charleston than I have, but it seems to me hubris is something this young man has in abundance. Whether he comes by it naturally, or maybe he’s adopted it as part of his persona, he seems to display it with startling regularity.”
“So Josh said we’d find something here that would lead us to Robbie. Do you see anything?”
Silas removed a pair of binoculars from his pack and scanned the length of the bridge. It was a simple, inelegant structure with supports anchored into the canyon walls at either end and a plain flat deck that spanned the gorge below. He walked to the end closest to the Hite marina where the Monkey Wrench Gang had done their work.
Katie followed him, scanning the surrounding bluffs for signs of trouble.
As he neared the end of the bridge something caught Silas’s eye and he picked up his pace, breaking into a run for a few strides. Katie hurried after him. Silas stopped twenty feet from the end of the bridge. On the edge of the bridge, secured to the railing, was a metal ammo can.
“Silas, don’t touch that.”
“It’s got to be from him.”
“I’m sure it is, but you don’t know what it is. It could be an explosive.”
“He’s not going to blow me up, not yet at least. The game is just beginning.”
“And you’re going to play along?”
“What choice do I have?”
“You can let me call Taylor and put his people on this. It’s what they do; they’re good at this.”
“This is my son’s life we’re talking about. Do you think that Josh won’t kill him at the first sight of trouble? Then he just disappears into the Canyons, forever.”
“Even Hayduke couldn’t disappear, not forever.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t particularly care what happens to Hayduke—to Josh—but I do care what happens to Robbie. You can stand back if you thin
k it’s a bomb. I’m going to open it.” He waited and when Rain made no move to step back he knelt down on the ground and snapped open the box.
44
THE STURDY METAL CAN SNAPPED open. No bomb detonated. Silas breathed out and Katie seemed to relax for a moment. Inside was a folded sheet of paper.
Silas opened the note and read, “Because the Maze is a dead end, Doc. The end of the road. The big jump-off. Nobody ever goes to the Maze.”
“I just read that!” exclaimed Katie.
“Yeah, it’s from The Monkey Wrench Gang. Jesus, I’m starting to hate that book all over again.”
“You think he’s taken Robbie into the Maze?”
“I think it’s obvious what he’s doing. He’s following the path that the Gang took during the final chase in the book. Hayduke is leading us into the Maze.”
“To what end? Hayduke dies at the end of the book.”
“Didn’t you read the epilogue?”
“I ran out of time.”
“Hayduke lives. That’s the whole point. That’s the game he’s playing. He’s cornered. We know he killed Penelope. So he’s making a run for it, using Robbie as both bait and cover.”
“Why not just run?”
“You ask that as if we were dealing with a sane person. Why kill Penny? Why kill Darcy and Kiel and likely Tabby Dingwall too?”
“This note—do you know where this takes place in the book?” Katie was scanning the landscape once again.
“I sure do. Just back up the road we came down. There’s an old Jeep trail that leads along the plateau above the Colorado River for thirty miles and ends up in an area called the Fins. Then the Maze.”
“In the book, doesn’t Hayduke get in a gunfight with a whole bunch of law enforcement types?”
“Yeah, so?”
“If Josh is trying to recreate the end of the book for himself, then maybe that’s what he wants.”
“To get in a gunfight? Look, that turned out alright for the character Hayduke in the book. That book was set in the 1970s and Edward Abbey didn’t really have a good grasp of what a tactical team would be using as weapons. He had guys firing shotguns out of helicopters.”
“I see what you mean. Taylor’s Critical Incident Response Group would be geared up. MP5 sub-machine guns, CAR-15s, HK33s and M40 sniper rifles.”
“Hayduke is a vet. He’s got to know that.”
“Standard procedure is for the nearest SWAT team to be scrambled whenever the FBI is lead on a situation like this. From here, that would be Salt Lake. But the resident office in Monticello has tactical capability as well. My bet is that a team is already in place, on standby. A gunfight with these guys is going to be a very one-sided affair.”
“He’s trying to control the situation,” Silas said as they half-ran back to Katie’s truck. He held the note up. “He’s leading us to him. He wants to act out the end of the game. He can’t control a gunfight with the guys you’re describing. That’s why he’s said no FBI. He knows it won’t be a bunch of weekend warriors and small-town sheriff’s deputies he’s dealing with.”
“Our FBI team can be discreet.”
“How? The place he’s leading us—likely to Lizard Rock—it’s out in the middle of nowhere. You have to drive in, on a Jeep trail, and it’s going to be pretty obvious if a couple of big GMC Yukons pull up. He’ll be watching. What I’m starting to realize is that he’s always been watching. He’s been watching me all along.”
Katie got into the vehicle and turned it around in the middle of the bridge. “Where am I going?” She turned on the dashboard-mounted GPS unit. She hit a few buttons, programming the unit, and the device started to send and receive data.
“Back the way we came. On our right.”
“What did you mean, he’s always been watching?”
“When I started to have my dreams, where Penny was leading me places, to bodies, that’s when he showed up. I must have tripped some wire he had set. Maybe he was watching the newspapers for my name and after the body in Sleepy Hollow, my name was in the paper a lot. That’s when he showed up. I remember the day. I was up in the La Sals and there he was. He made it seem so … coincidental, us just running into each other. There, that’s it, on the right.”
Katie slowed the vehicle and turned into the dirt track.
“Just stop a minute. Let’s look around.”
Katie stopped the vehicle. The dirt road was wet, the red clay and sand slick. Silas stepped out of the truck. Katie took the binoculars and scanned the cliffs and buttes that surrounded them. The morning sun was higher now, the shadows still draped like dark cloth over the red rock.
“You see anything?” Silas asked as he searched the area around the road.
“Nope. You?”
“Nope. Wait …”
Silas set off into the rocks.
“What do you see?” Katie was rushing to keep up.
“Another goddamned ammo box.”
“Where? Oh, I see it.”
Perched on top of a boulder, twenty yards from the road, the ammo can was painted bright orange. Silas approached it and looked around. He could hear a few birds calling from a patch of cliff rose, and somewhere above a broad-winged bird of prey circled. Otherwise the desert seemed empty. He popped the ammo can open. There was another note.
Thirty-five miles to Lizard Rock was all it said.
“Son of a bitch. He is leading us to the Maze.”
“You called it right. Listen, Silas—”
“No goddamned FBI, Katie.”
“I’m FBI, Silas.”
Silas looked at her. “You’re … different.”
“You think that’s going to matter to him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. I need you. And you were invited. He as much as said so in his text message.”
“And I’m here. But we’ve got to get help. We’re walking straight into a trap. We know where he’s going and we know what he’s going to do. We have the advantage.”
“We don’t have shit! What we have are notes written by a lunatic quoting from a book. I think they might mean he wants us to go to Lizard Rock, but who knows? I don’t know for sure. Josh is insane. He could change the story. He could do anything. One wrong move and my son gets killed. So no FBI!” Silas still had Katie’s phone. He looked at the screen. There was no service, and no messages waiting. He put it on the ground and, with his boot, stomped on it. “That settles it.”
Katie’s face remained calm. “Silas, I can turn this truck around right now—”
“And what? Leave me here? Leave Rob at the mercy of that madman?”
“I can drive into Hite, phone Taylor, and have him put a Hostage Rescue Team in play.”
“You’d be killing my son.”
“What do you think is going to happen when we get to this Lizard Rock? You think Josh is just going to hand out party hats and say that the game is over? No, he’s going to kill Rob and then he’s going to kill you and me.”
“You won’t let that happen. I won’t let that happen.”
“So what’s your plan? You going to outflank him? With what? What are you going to use to get the jump on him?”
“You’re armed.”
“Sure. I’ve got my sidearm. I haven’t shot it outside the range in ten years. And what do you have?”
“Charm and good looks?”
“You looked in the mirror lately, Silas? Seriously, what have you got?”
They were standing face to face in the middle of the road. Silas had sweat forming along his prickly hairline. His eyes were red and his face, though sunburnt, seemed splotchy and pale. “I know the country. I know the book. I know what should happen. If he’s going to play it out just like in the book I think we can flank him, or whatever you call it.”
Rain smiled and shook her head. “Bones. All I wanted to do was look at bones. But no, I have to go and fall … I have to go and take a shine to you. A scruffy professor out wandering around the desert looking for his w
ife. Alright, genius, what’s your plan?”
“This is four-wheel drive, right?”
GUNSIGHT BUTTE, TEAPOT Rock, the Red Cove, the Golden Stairs: the land unfolded before them. Katie drove over the double-track road, Silas scanning the horizon. From time to time they stopped to inspect the road; sure enough there were signs that at least one vehicle had traveled this way since the end of the storm.
“Could these be from Josh’s Jeep?” Silas asked.
Rain shrugged. “Could be. I don’t know this stuff. Nielsen knows his tire tracks.”
“We better keep moving. We’re ten miles from Lizard Rock.”
“I don’t know how you’re holding out, Silas, but this girl has got to pee.” Silas nodded and stepped out of the vehicle. She waited until he was gone and then disappeared behind a boulder and came back a minute later.
“You got anything to eat in your truck?” asked Silas.
“I got a box of granola bars.”
“Sold.”
“It’s going to cost you.”
“What?”
“A new phone.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Not as sorry as you’re going to be when you find out what they cost.”
They drove on. The sun reached high noon. In the middle of October it still cast long shadows over the naked stone. The Flint Trail, the main road to the edge of the Maze, was used more regularly. “There’s likely to be other people in the Maze right now. It’s not like when Abbey wrote about the place,” said Silas. “In October other folks head in there to use the Jeep trails and hike and explore. It’s too hot in July and August, but September and October are perfect.”
“I hope Josh doesn’t get antsy if he runs into some tourist from Ohio.”
“That’s Lizard Rock, there on the horizon. Stop here.”
Katie pulled up next to a large boulder on the side of the road.
“I’m guessing we’re going to find another message at Lizard Rock. From there, I think he’s going to lead us out to Standing Rock and then on foot to Horse Canyon.”
“And then what?”
The Same River Twice Page 17
