Brandon blew up. “They’re going to let him die! Jesus, Sherry, he’s our son!”
Sherry gave a bitter little laugh. “Oh, so now he’s our son? I thought the whole world revolved around Team Bachelor.”
Brandon felt like he’d been slapped. His face showed it.
Sherry couldn’t believe she’d just said that. “I’m sorry, Brandon. I didn’t mean that.”
“The hell you didn’t. My God, Sherry, you shut yourself out of his life.”
“Bullshit.” Sherry spat. She was sorry as hell that she’d fired the first shot in this round of battle, but she wasn’t about to let him lay any more of this off on her. “You couldn’t handle my success.”
Good God Almighty, it always came back around to Sherry, didn’t it? “I’m not doing this,” he said. “Not again. Not today.”
“You think I don’t know what poison you fill his head with every day? I just spent a week with him, Brandon. He hates me. My own son hates me. How do you think that makes me feel?”
“I bet it makes you feel like shit,” he said. “And if it doesn’t, it should. And for the record, I don’t fill his head with poison. Actually, you rarely come up in conversation.” He intended those words to hurt, and they found their mark. “What would we talk about? Whether your check came with a note? Hell, you don’t even sign your own checks anymore. We’re just another auto-pay from the bank.”
“You designed the settlement agreement, Brandon, not I.”
“And you jumped at it! That’s how anxious you were to be rid of us.”
“You, Brandon,” Sherry corrected, thrusting a finger toward him. “I was anxious to be rid of you, not Scotty.”
“He hasn’t called himself Scotty in three years.”
His words seemed to break her momentum. He’d already told her that, hadn’t he? Did he have any idea how much it hurt to be shut out from your only child’s life? Didn’t he realize that she was the hero in this family war? She could have dragged the divorce out forever, but what would that have accomplished? It wouldn’t have been right to shuttle Scotty—Scott—from one house to the other. This was Brandon’s favorite kind of argument, though; the kind at which he truly excelled. She’d never known anyone who so quickly claimed the moral high ground for himself and demonized anyone who opposed him.
“Fine,” she said. It just wasn’t the time for this. “You’re right. You’re the best parent in the world, and I’m the worst. Congratulations. All I can say is, this is one bizarre approach to getting people to do you a favor.”
A puff of air escaped Brandon’s lungs when she said this, and in that instant, Sherry didn’t understand what she’d said wrong. “You think I’m asking you for a favor? A favor? What would that be?”
“You want me to put my reputation on the line because you have a feeling. Despite what all the experts say. What would you call it?”
“I call it trying to save a boy’s life,” he said. “Two boys’ lives, actually. If you’re doing anybody a favor, it’s them.” How could two people see the world so differently?
Again, loaded with all his righteous emotion, it sounded so simple. But it wasn’t at all simple. If Sherry called a press conference, sure, people would come, but what would she say? No matter what Brandon thought, she loved her son as much as he did; she was just more of a realist. Did he think for a moment that she wouldn’t want people scouring the countryside looking for Scotty—Scott—if she thought it would do any good? Did he think that the police department and the Civil Air Patrol would just randomly abandon a search effort if there was still a glimmer of hope? Sherry was a psychologist, for God’s sake. A professional. If she pulled together a special news conference to criticize local officials and then rambled on about feelings and intuitions, she’d look like a fool. She’d be a fool to do it.
Brandon helped himself to the chair in front of the panoramic window. “Sherry?”
She broke her concentration to look at him.
“Okay, it’s a favor, then,” he said. “And I’ll concede any point you want, sign any papers you want. I’ll beg, if you want me to.” He fought hard to control the flood of emotion, and Sherry brought her hand to her mouth as she watched him age ten years before her eyes. “We were such a total disaster, you and I,” he went on. “But out of all the misery and the fighting, we produced one miracle.”
His voice caught in his throat and Sherry took a step forward to comfort him. He held her off with a raised hand. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe I am jealous. You have your fame and your career and your things. But that boy is it for me. He’s my entire life.”
Sherry looked down to give him a moment. She’d never seen him like this. Even in the worst of times, he’d always been a rock—stubborn, passionate, angry as hell, but always solid and strong. The sight of him crumbling took her breath away. His pain, she saw, was physical, and somewhere in her soul, buried under years and years of hatred, something stirred in her that was akin to affection. She sat on the coffee table opposite him.
“He’s out there, Sherry,” he whispered. “He’s alive. And without us on his side, he’s got nobody.”
She nodded, her throat suddenly thick. “Okay.”
24
THROUGH EVERY STEP OF HIS ORDEAL, Scott had planned to sleep all day. When the opportunity finally arrived, though, he could only make it to 1:30 in the afternoon. Isaac had lent him a bedroom on the second floor, just at the top of the stairs. He’d even put on sheets and a luscious down quilt. It should have been good for a week of sleep.
Ultimately, it was the smell of food—bacon again—that lifted him from his cocoon and brought him back to consciousness. He dressed as quickly as his battered body would permit, and headed out for another meal. It simply wasn’t possible for him to eat enough.
Outside his bedroom door, the narrow log-railed balcony offered him a view of most of the first floor, with the living room directly below and to the right, and the rustic eat-in kitchen on the left, the front door directly across.
The kitchen appliances, such as they were, looked as old as the cabin itself. A thin blue flame rose from a front burner. Next to it, safely off the fire, sat a cast-iron skillet with strips of bacon floating in a pond of grease.
Isaac was nowhere to be seen. “Hello?” he called, but there was no response. “Isaac?”
Nothing.
The skin on the back of his neck pulled tight as he remembered the half-million-dollar contract on his host’s life.
“Isaac, are you here?”
Still, no response.
Shit. In the kitchen now, Scott turned a complete circle, looking for…something. Anything. But there were no signs of a struggle, no broken windows, no open doors. He called out one more time, just for the hell of it.
What was he supposed to do now? Should he look outside? Find a place to hide? Maybe he should—
There was a crack in the wall to the right of the stove, running vertically, from the floor nearly to the ceiling. Curious, he moved in for a closer look and saw that it actually was a door, so carefully camouflaged as a wall that he never would have found it if it were closed all the way.
Using two fingers, he pulled the door open a little more. “Isaac?” Clearly, Scott was alone. He stepped inside.
What he saw made him gasp. It was a room he was never supposed to see. It looked like a home office, he supposed, with one major addition—a vault. It looked like something out of a bank, actually, and it, too, was propped open. Inside, Scott counted a dozen different guns, from pistols to rifles to machine guns. If this were a movie, they’d all be stacked vertically, on display, but in here, they just lay on shelves inside the vault, some of their muzzles pointing toward him, and others pointing away.
“Holy shit,” he breathed as he fingered the weapons. What had he stumbled into? Would the government really let an ex-criminal have this much firepower just to protect himself?
On the shelf above the guns, he found what appeared to
be some kind of foam rubber suit, thick and squishy. Except for the light emitted through the open door, the room was dark. “Isaac?” he whispered. “Are you here?”
Scott found the light switch on the wall. The overhead fluorescents confirmed his first impression of a home office. A desk occupied one corner, and next to it stood a heavy-duty locked file cabinet, four drawers high. The desk was clean, not so much as a pencil in sight.
Feeling like a burglar, he carefully opened the center desk drawer, just to see. There in the front, under a couple of papers that didn’t interest him, Scott found a telephone.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he whispered to the room. It looked like an older model cell phone, about as big as his hand, but with an unusually stubby antenna. He’d heard of satellite phones, but this was the first one he’d ever seen up close. More secure than cell phones, and capable of calling from anywhere, they were more than adequate for calling the police.
Scott picked it up and hit the power button. The LCD display showed a full battery but no signal. Not surprising, really, given that he was indoors. To make a call, he’d have to be outside. Later.
So, why did Isaac lie to him? And what else did he lie about? He turned off the phone and put it back where he’d found it.
Feeling more and more like a felon, he searched the other drawers, too, but found nothing interesting—just more papers he didn’t have time to read, some pencils and a stack of Post-its.
So, who was this Isaac guy, really?
Turning back to explore the gun vault more carefully, a glint from something on the floor caught his attention. It looked like a door pull, flat on the floor, just below a wall-mounted flashlight charger. Scowling, he stooped for a closer look. It wasn’t just a door pull, as it turned out. It was a door pull between two slide bolts. Shifting his eyes to the left, he could just barely make out the flush hinges in the floor.
“It’s a trap door,” Scott told the room.
Every fiber in his being told him that it was time to turn off the lights, put everything back the way he’d found it, and get out of this place, but even as the thoughts flowed through his brain, he knew there wasn’t a chance he’d do it. A trap door, for God’s sake! It was like something out of a movie.
The otherwise dull surface of the floor had been worn shiny over time from the action of the bolts, and Scott noted how easily they slid as he shoved them back. With that done, he wrapped his fist around the pull and lifted. The door was heavier than he’d expected, making him shift to grab the edge with his other hand as he pulled. The door was every bit of three inches thick, and it surprised him when it flopped all the way open, until its face was flush with the floor. Inside the edge of the door panel itself, Scott noted the presence of two more bolts, the actuators for which were on the trap side of the door. Given the stoutness of the receivers on the jamb, someone had thought of this hole in the floor as a refuge—a place to go, maybe, when people are trying to kill you.
A metal-rung ladder led from the edge of the door down into the darkness.
“So, Mrs. O’Toole, did you raise any idiots?” Scott mused aloud as he swung his legs over the side of the opening and placed his feet on the third rung down. “Only Scott, I’m afraid. He just couldn’t leave well enough alone.”
Balancing himself with a hand flat on the floor, he pulled a flashlight from the charger on the wall and pressed the button, nearly blinding himself with the burst of high intensity light. With each rung he descended, he confirmed to himself his own stupidity.
You don’t know who this guy is, you don’t know what pisses him off, and you do know that he’s heavily armed. Are you out of your friggin’ mind?
Yes to all of the above, but he still had to see.
It wasn’t a room after all; it was a tunnel. And a cold one at that. A gentle, constant breeze raised goose pimples on his flesh. The base of the ladder marked the beginning, and as he stood there, shining his light straight ahead, it seemed to stretch forever, the ceiling only slightly higher than he was tall. Fifty yards ahead, the tunnel took a hard turn to the left. Fifty yards. How long could the thing be? And where could it possibly go?
“You’re an idiot,” Scott sang softly as he inched forward, oddly comforted by the company of his own voice. The tunnel was a crudely constructed thing, unpaved and unlit, and pitched steeply downhill. Tree roots extended into the passageway like so many arthritic fingers, twisted and gnarled, but not so far as to impede passage. If this were an Indiana Jones movie, he’d have had to fight massive cobwebs every step of the way, but here, there was none of that. He wondered if the relative cleanliness spoke more to a lack of spiders or to frequent use.
Twisting the lens of the MagLite, Scott expanded the light beam to its widest circle, concentric rings of light that brought life to a hundred new shadows. The silence of the place was absolute, in effect amplifying the tympani tattoo pounding in his ears. The light beam jumped with each beat of his heart.
Sometimes, you just get a feeling that you’re not alone. You can’t quite put your finger on it, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred it turns out to be your imagination, but right now, Scott knew that something was terribly wrong. Was it a sound he’d heard? Something he’d seen?
It’s all in your head, pussy-boy, he told himself. Still, he couldn’t help but think what a perfect lair this would make for a pack of wolves, or maybe a hibernating bear. With that thought, the air grew suddenly colder.
He reached the end of the first section of the tunnel, and pivoted the light beam to examine the sharp turn to the left. This leg was longer than the first, probably twice as long, but if he wasn’t mistaken, the darkness seemed lighter down there. Sure enough, when he thumbed off the flashlight, he clearly saw a tiny pinprick of daylight. If it were possible, this section seemed even steeper than the first.
“What the hell does he do in here?” he asked no one.
Scott moved forward, the treacherous angle cramping his battered leg muscles. One degree steeper, and a flight of steps would have been mandatory. The tangle of roots made it three times more difficult.
Maybe a third of the way down this second corridor, a noise to his left made him jump, and as he whirled with his light, something slammed down hard on his wrist, smashing the MagLite to the ground. Scott didn’t even have time to react before something hard and fast plowed itself into his gut, driving the air from his lungs and sending his diaphragm into a violent spasm. His mind registered only pain as he fell backward against the tunnel wall and then in a heap on the floor.
Gasping for air that wouldn’t come, Scott tried to roll himself into a protective ball, but his attacker wouldn’t let him. He imagined a giant fist grabbing a handful of his hair as his head snapped back hard, and a brilliant white light dug like a stiletto into his eyes.
A voice from behind the light hissed, “Say one word and I’ll blow your head off.”
THE PRESIDENT’S DECISION to go shopping in downtown Eagle Feather created a nightmare for Barry Whitestone. What was supposed to have been a quick fire-hall speech to dedicate a new ladder truck bought in part with federal funds had turned into a four-hour affair that snarled everything.
Main Street and its feeders were closed to both vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Anyone who had pressing business elsewhere was just plain out of luck. Even air traffic was directed away from the main approach to the airport while POTUS popped in and out of the trendy boutiques. The newspapers and television networks would show smiling merchants shaking hands with the leader of the free world, but word had already reached Barry from all directions that those same merchants were losing revenue by the bushel basket. Five minutes of presidential publicity didn’t pay anybody’s mortgage.
For his part, Barry was exploiting his rank. Never one to shy away from grunt work, this kind of traffic detail had always driven him over the edge, and now that he had the eagles on his collar, he didn’t have to do it anymore. Instead, he drove his Humvee from checkpoint to checkpoin
t, making sure that his troops were managing okay. After all, this was only the beginning. The president’s main event wasn’t scheduled until tomorrow. Given the predictions for postcard weather, those crowds were likely to be huge, and Barry didn’t want his people to burn through their bullshit tolerance too early.
Parking his truck with two wheels on the sidewalk, Barry climbed out of the Humvee at the intersection of Aspen and Ponderosa streets and walked to the sawhorse currently manned by Jesse Tingle.
“Next time, I’m voting for the guy whose favorite pastime is golf,” Jesse said as his boss approached.
Barry smiled. “Aren’t you supposed to be partnered with James?”
Jesse gestured with his head toward the department Explorer parked a little ways down Ponderosa. “You mean Supersleuth? He’s sitting in the car down there solving the world’s great mysteries.”
Barry cocked his head, gave a confused look.
“Maurice Hertzberger,” Jesse clarified. “Actually, he asked me if I minded being alone here for a while and I told him to go ahead. Off and on, he’s been on the phone for an hour.”
Barry set his hands on his hips and sighed. Sooner or later, shit like this happened with every hungry young buck who joined the department. Early on, the lure of the resort environment was intoxicating; but as time went on and reality sank in, they came to realize that small town policing is a daily grind of boredom. Barry didn’t mind James taking such a strong lead on the Hertzberger investigation—he admired the commitment—but it wasn’t right to jam your partner with a brain-numbing assignment while you sat in a warm car doing real police work.
James lowered the truck’s window as he saw Barry approaching. “I got a call from an FBI buddy of mine,” he said.
“Hey, James, this isn’t where you’re supposed to be right now.”
Deputy Alexander gave a brusque, disinterested nod. “Yeah, I know. Listen to this—”
“James, Jesse is standing out here all by himself. That’s not how this works.”
Scott Free Page 21
