Seated at the kitchen table, his legs propped up on a straight backed chair matching the one he was seated in, Wood raised the beer from the table beside him. He idly let a half-inch of the cold liquid slide down his throat.
A full minute passed after the creaking of the springs before bare feet could be heard touching the hardwood floor, shuffle steps growing closer before a silhouette stood in the bedroom door.
“Awful lonely in that bed in there,” Maria said, grogginess obvious in her tone.
Wood shrugged, saying nothing as he continued to stare into the darkness. He loved Maria, always had, but he didn’t have time for this right now.
“Whatcha doing out here in the dark?” Maria asked, not picking up on his cues, walking around the table and stopping beside him.
She stood there, neither saying anything, before Wood conceded that the conversation was in fact going to happen. He lowered his feet from the chair and used his heel to push it out a couple of inches.
“Thinking.”
Maria looked at the chair for just an instant before bypassing it and taking another step forward, lowering herself onto his lap, nestling the top of her head beneath his chin.
“What about?” she asked.
The warmth of bed still clung to her skin as she settled against him. It passed through the front of the long sleeve thermal he wore and through the jeans into his thighs. Her long dark hair just inches away smelled like lavender, the combined effect putting his earlier agitation at bay.
She was the only person in the world capable of evoking such a response, a fact they were both very much aware of.
“That call earlier,” Wood said, “from Cuddy.”
“Hmm,” Maria said, her voice seeming to already be retreating back toward slumber. “Remind me, which one is he?”
“One of our biggest suppliers,” Wood said.
“Oh, right,” Maria said. “The scary guy.”
The right corner of Wood’s mouth pulled up just a bit as he tilted his head back to look down at her. “Oh, really?”
Her eyes were already pressed closed as she made no effort to look up at him, a small smile the only reaction to his response. “Well, I just mean, between the hair and the dirty clothes and that God-awful smell...”
Wood couldn’t help but agree. Sam Cuddyer was long past needing a bath and a haircut, his clothes could probably be used as fire starter logs, they were so contaminated with chemicals.
Still, at no point in his life would Wood have ever thought to use the word scary to describe him.
“What did he want?” Maria asked.
The mirth bled from Wood’s features.
“They’ve had a problem.”
“You don’t do problems,” Maria responded, shaking her head just slightly against him.
“Nope.”
“How bad?”
Truth was, Wood didn’t know how bad. From the sound of things, Cuddy’s reliance on his partner had finally caught up with him, Elias the living proof of the mantra to never trust a cook who took too much pleasure from his own product.
If there was anything left of the man or the operation, was anybody’s guess.
For the first hour after getting the call, that was Wood’s chief concern. They had worked long and hard to become the preeminent supplier for the new Bakken oil fields. They now had a firm grip on the operation and a captive audience growing larger by the week. They could not afford to be without product for any length of time, because if they couldn’t supply, there were more than enough vultures around just waiting to move in.
After those concerns, a second, even larger one occurred to him.
It had been some time since he’d been over to inspect the operation Cuddy ran, but it was by no means a small affair. The equipment alone was enough to fill a four car garage. If an explosion had taken place, the likes of which Cuddy seemed to describe, or that Wood envisioned in his mind, it would be noticed.
From miles away.
Right now they had the benefit of the storm dumping snow over everything from Bozeman to the Black Hills, but that wouldn’t last forever. Once it stopped, somebody was bound to investigate a fire ball just a few miles outside of town and would almost certainly smell ethyl ether in the air.
He had no idea who the sheriff was over there, or even if there was one, only that nobody had found it necessary to make any payments as far away as Glasgow.
There was no trace of his organization over there, nothing to connect him to Cuddyer and his crew. Still, if somebody was determined enough to go snooping into things, it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to see the relationship between the two.
It wasn’t as if a lab that large could be exclusively for personal use.
“Bad,” Wood whispered.
A small, barely audible sound passed Maria’s lips, sleep not far away. Once more she pressed her shoulder against him, snuggling tight.
“So what are you going to do about it?”
Chapter Ten
For three hours Sam Cuddyer’s only movement was one short sprint from the truck to the front door of Valley Memorial Hospital and back again. It had been a short run, no more than a minute, but had filled him with enough adrenaline to redline his heart rate even now, long after.
His left knee, long a bane to him, was beginning to ache, and he could feel his tailbone rubbing against the seat beneath him. The bottom half of his jeans, soaked with snow as he tromped through it, were still damp.
Combined with the moisture from Jasper’s and the girl’s clothes, the interior of the cab was beginning to feel like a sauna. Condensation continued to bead on the windows, causing him to have to reach out every so often and wipe it away, thick wet swirls visible on the glass.
“Where we going now, Cuddy?” Jasper whispered, his body pressed tight beside him.
“You know,” Cuddyer replied, leaning forward to see past Jasper to the girl on the opposite end of the seat.
She was tall – taller than Jasper and almost as tall as he was. Her hair was big and windblown, giving her an extra inch or two, providing a natural pillow for her head as it rested against the passenger window. From that angle Cuddyer could see that her face was angular with wide cheekbones.
If he was into black girls, even light-skinned ones like her, he might have found her pretty. As it were, his attention skipped right past her features to the brown and purple bruise along her right cheek, a small scrape revealing just a hint of blood.
He hadn’t planned on hitting her, even less on using the butt of the gun to do it, but her yelling and struggling was something they could ill afford, standing out in the parking lot of the hospital. It had taken everything he and Jasper had just to drag her a few feet, her legs splayed out, burrowing into the snow, her backside anchoring her to the ground. Even the sight of the weapon had not had the intended effect, only causing her to scream with everything she had instead of frightening her into complicity as he had hoped.
Luckily for him, he had resisted the urge to just pull the trigger, instead wielding it as a club, her body going limp beneath its impact, bringing a thin smile to his face.
“She sure was strong, wasn’t she?” Jasper asked, following Cuddyer’s gaze and glancing over at her as well.
For a moment Cuddyer considered agreeing before turning to face forward again.
Still unconscious, her wrists and ankles both bound in wide swaths of duct tape, she appeared anything but.
“I’ve fought stronger,” he whispered.
“Yeah,” Jasper conceded, “but women?”
Again, Cuddyer fell silent, considering the statement. For as daft as Jasper could be, and often was, this time he wasn’t necessarily wrong. The girl had clearly been in a scrap or two before, maybe even had some sort of training. Given her shape and skin tone, he wouldn’t be surprised if she was an athlete of some sort, perhaps one of those crazy UFC types he saw on television.
She’d also obviously been around a gun before. Nobody seein
g one for the first time would ever think to fight harder or yell louder, most falling into submission at the mere sight of it.
Every minute since loading her inside and driving away, Cuddyer had spent with both hands squeezing the steering wheel, his gaze alternating between the rearview mirror and the path ahead. The combination of the tension inside the truck and trying to stay on the road had his nerves pulled taut, every sense heightened, adrenaline causing his pulse to surge. Sweat coated his face beneath his beard, causing his skin to itch.
“How’s Elias?” Cuddyer asked.
For a moment there was no response, Jasper simply sitting quietly and staring out the windshield. Renewed anger passed through Cuddyer as he glanced to his side, waiting for any sign of movement.
“Jasper, check Elias.”
At the mention of his name, Jasper turned away from him, pressing his back flat against Cuddyer’s shoulder. He looped a hand back, just as he had every half hour since leaving the house, returning with the same report he did each time.
“He’s breathing, but it’s still fast and shallow,” he said. A low huff escaped his lips as he moved back to face forward, settling himself against the seat.
“How much further?” he asked. “I didn’t think we’d be driving so long, and I had all that water before we left.”
He had first met Jasper Maxx when they were just kids, he, the older boy down the street and Jasper, the younger one who never took a hint to leave him alone. The combination of time and relative isolation had eventually caused his stance to soften a bit, finding out many times over that there was always some use for a kid with unflinching loyalty.
Only on the occasional odd moment such as this did having him around ever present a problem, not because he had to fear him mentioning what they had done to the doctor, but because his friend’s diminished intellectual capacity meant he had to be extra careful with every step he took.
“We’ve only gone 10 miles,” Cuddyer said, painfully aware of how little progress they had made. Between the depth of snow and the lack of visibility, they had been forced to go no more than a few miles an hour, the diesel engine moaning as it powered through the growing mounds of powder.
“Oh,” Jasper said, settling himself back against the seat and folding his arms across his chest. “And where are we going again?”
Cuddyer hadn’t told him the first time, though it shouldn’t have been hard to figure out. There was only one place that was even a possibility at a time such as this, something they had put in place months before in case this very thing ever occurred.
The fact that Jasper didn’t know, hadn’t already pieced things together, only served as a reminder to Cuddyer of what he was working with. The younger man could recite random comments Cuddyer had made years before, but asking him to use the smallest amount of deductive reasoning was simply not possible.
“Fallback,” Cuddyer said, offering no further explanation, hoping it would be enough to end the conversation. They only had a little bit further to go, and there would be a massive amount of work to do when they arrived. He needed the next few minutes to think, to plan things out in his mind.
“Oh,” Jasper whispered, raising his head as if he understood completely. “Fallback.”
It was obvious from his tone that he had no idea what that meant, but Cuddyer made no effort to enlighten him.
He would find out soon enough.
Chapter Eleven
“Shit.”
The wind pulled the word away from my mouth the moment I said it, carrying it away into the Montana night. Along with it went a healthy spattering of snowflakes, wet and thick, clinging to everything they touched.
There was no earthly reason for me to be standing outside the front door of the Valley County Sheriff’s Department. That is, aside from the moral implications, the notion that a woman was out there in this godforsaken blizzard, had been taken against her will by someone with intentions I didn’t want to guess at.
The odds are she’s a very nice lady. People with the God complex that afflicted many physicians rarely settled in places like Glasgow. Instead, hospitals like the one on the edge of town were where you found doctors who genuinely just wanted to help people and would work for schoolteacher wages.
I didn’t know a single thing about Yvonne Endicott. What her motivations were, or what had caused her to be practicing in this place. She might have been a local who came back, the proverbial prodigal daughter returning. She may have agreed to work in a backwoods area for relief on her student loans.
She might have just needed a job.
As much as I’d tried to tell myself that these things mattered, none of them really did. It wasn’t an issue of how old she was or what she looked like or where she went to school.
At the end of the day, she was a person who needed help.
Years before, I had made my young daughter a promise that I would always do what I could to help people in need. A month before, I had blown my cabin to bits and nearly lost my life making good on that promise.
Before that I had spent the better part of a decade as a member of the best unit the DEA had, running through some of the worst places on earth to ensure that bad men and their products didn’t end up infecting American cities.
And as many times as I told myself this wasn’t my fight, that I didn’t know Rake Ferris or Yvonne Endicott or anybody else in Glasgow, there was no way I could walk away without at least trying to help.
No matter how much I wanted to.
A small bell hung from the ceiling, the top of the glass-paneled door slapping against it as I pushed inside, the ringing announcing my presence. I stomped my feet twice on the thick black rug beside the door, the bell sounding a second time as the door swung closed on a plume of snow crystals following me in.
The room was stifling after fighting my way through the snow and wind on my way over. Sweat was already beading up on my forehead and starting to run down my back beneath the heavy clothes.
I stood, surveying what looked to be an average small-town Sheriff’s Department, my apprehension rising again as I heard the sound of boots against tile, culminating with Ferris appearing at the far end of the hall. He gave no reaction to seeing me there beyond raising a hand and motioning for me to follow him back into the room he had appeared from.
“Come on back, we’re just getting started.”
Once more I stomped my feet to knock any excess snow from my legs and shoes and pulled off the heavy coat and gloves before following him, the rubber treads of my hiking boots squeaking against the tile. I kept my gaze locked straight ahead, following the scent of coffee to the end of the hall.
I entered what appeared to be a makeshift conference room, a round folding table in the center and an odd assortment of chairs around it. On the far wall was a dry erase board, beside it a television perched on a metal cart. A black and white image was frozen across the screen, no doubt the footage taken from the hospital security camera.
To my left was a reclaimed end table with a coffee pot and stacks of Styrofoam cups, a microwave sat on an old refrigerator humming away in the corner.
A far cry from the facilities I had worked out of with the DEA, though nowhere near the worst I had encountered.
Ferris stood at the table, his tan Sheriff’s shirt tucked tight into his jeans. The same tense look he wore when arriving at my room was still in place, his thumbs hooked into the front of his pants.
“Thanks for coming,” he said, nodding slightly for emphasis. He gestured to his right and said, “This is Deputy Mavis Azbell.”
I followed his lead and nodded to a woman with auburn hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her pale skin and light blue eyes both gave the impression she’d been asleep not long before. Much of her body was covered in a puffy down jacket as she leaned forward over the table, a mug of coffee between her hands.
“And that’s Coop Baker,” Ferris added, motioning to the man on the opposite side.
Like Azbell, hi
s skin was pale, almost translucent, a harsh contrast to the weathered outdoorsman look of Ferris. Not much larger than his counterpart, he was older and completely bald.
“Guys, this is Jeremiah Tate,” Ferris said. “Formerly of the navy and the DEA, he’s agreed to give us a hand here.”
“Good to meet you both,” I managed, already sensing that the decision to ask me in was one that either nobody else knew about, or they did and openly disapproved.
Not that it really mattered, one way or another.
Each continued to study me, certainly superimposing the stories they’d heard onto the man who stood in front of them, before Azbell nodded slightly.
“You too.”
Baker said nothing, merely turning his attention back to Ferris.
“I just showed them the footage from the scene,” Ferris said, motioning over his shoulder to the television. “We can cue it up again so you can take a look in a few minutes.”
It was clear from the statement and that no offer had been made for me to take a seat that right now Ferris was running interference, getting through what he had to as fast as possible and divvying up tasks so as to avoid any internal conflict.
At least, that’s how I read it, because it’s exactly how I would have handled things as well.
I nodded in agreement, folding my arms over my chest, letting him know I was good where I stood.
“Okay,” Ferris said, “you both just saw the tape, which is all we know at this point. My preliminary interview at the hospital was only to establish that a kidnapping had taken place and to obtain a copy of the security footage.
“As soon as we’re done here, Mr. Tate and I will be heading back to Valley Memorial to interview everybody present at the time of the abduction, see what we can find out.”
At the mention of my name Azbell cast a glance in my direction, Baker remaining rigid beside her, making it a point not to acknowledge my presence.
Already, I could tell working with him was going to be a problem, making a mental note to never put myself in a position where I had to rely him to watch my back.
Fire and Ice: A Thriller (A Hawk Tate Novel Book 3) Page 4
