Killer Summer

by Ridley Pearson

  “A plane, a Frontier jet, spotted a fire from thirty thousand feet.”

  Walt caught his breath. “Wreckage?”

  “Just what I asked… Too small and organized. More like a bonfire.”

  Kevin? The boy was smart enough to start a signal fire.

  “They eyeballed the coordinates… It was definitely in the backcountry. Could have been a rafters’ bonfire on the Middle Fork. But it was big… very big… maybe too big for that.”

  “A signal fire,” Walt said, thinking aloud.

  “Who do I tell this to? What do I do next? My first reaction was to jump up and tell someone, but then… That was something, like, twenty minutes ago, and I’ve been going crazy since trying to figure out who you’d want me to tell. Do we send up a search plane? Does the FAA do that for us? How does any of this work?”

  “You didn’t ask me that,” Walt said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The reason I took off without telling anybody… My father knows the SAC who will take this one. The guy’s a wannabe Rambo. We don’t want Kevin caught in the middle of that.”

  “Ah, okay. So…?”

  “You don’t approve of my dodging a potential disaster,” Walt said, hearing it in her voice.

  “When it comes to you and your father? It’s not exactly like there aren’t issues there, Walt, you know?”

  “I’m not doing this for my father,” Walt said, “I’m doing it for Kevin.”

  “And you know for a fact that this SAC is who your father says he is?”

  “No, but-”

  Walt saw his father out the window. He was on the truck’s tailgate, checking out a rifle and a handgun. Would his father lie in order to hold off the FBI and give himself a chance at some fieldwork? Would he put Kevin in the middle of his own ambitions?

  “Christ,” Walt muttered inadvertently into the phone.

  “What do you want me to do?” came her voice.

  “It has to be reported. You’d better tell Brad. But if it takes you thirty minutes or more to get down the hall… If you told Brad to call back Bremer and determine the veracity of the report…”

  “You want us to stall.”

  “We’re still several hours from the ranch” Walt said. “I’d like to hold off the helicopters and jump squads until I know the situation out there.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “You think it’s a mistake. I can hear it in your voice.”

  “I’m new to all this,” she said.

  “Don’t give me that.”

  “It’s your father,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, still watching him through the glass.

  “I’ll do this however you want.”

  “Okay, then,” he said, not changing his instructions.

  The line went silent. Neither said a thing.

  Walt didn’t want to be the one to end the call. He felt like he was fourteen.

  “It’s Kevin in trouble, not me,” he said softly.

  “Doesn’t exactly feel that way from here.”

  “About the other night-”

  “What’s interesting,” she cut him off, “is that it’s important to me. You’re important to me.”

  “I handled that all wrong,” he said.

  “Shut up, Walt, I’m not talking about the other night.”

  “But I am. If you were in my position, with Gail and Brandon, the need to protect the girls… It gets so you don’t trust anybody or anything.”

  “You can trust me,” she said, he thought rather boldly.

  “I’m beginning to figure that out.”

  “Yeah? Well speed it up a little, would you?”

  “I shouldn’t be smiling with all that’s going down,” he said.

  “Give it a rest. It won’t kill you.”

  Kill you hung on the line between them. He knew what she was thinking and she knew what he was thinking.

  “Okay, then,” he said.

  To her credit, she didn’t get maudlin or overly dramatic, which he’d half expected.

  “Okay, then,” she said, just before hanging up.

  72

  Kevin discovered an attic access hatch at the opposite end of the lodge from the study. Given the change in framing, he believed he was somewhere over the kitchen.

  Whoever had entered the lodge only minutes before was still there. He’d heard an occasional footfall as he’d crept from one crossbeam to the next. The overall silence was uncomfortable. He couldn’t help but think that each might be listening for the other.

  Now the silence was broken by a tapping sound coming from the study. It continued until provoking a response from the hijacker.

  “Whatever you’re doing in there, stop it,” a man shouted. It wasn’t the copilot’s voice; maybe the guy who’d grabbed up Summer. “Any more of that noise and I put a couple rounds through the door.”

  So, he had a gun.

  Kevin used the noise of the man talking to cover the sound of his own lifting of the hatch. It came up easily, issuing a pale light into the attic. He found himself looking down into a pantry closet, its shelves loaded with cans and dry goods. Just inside the closet’s louvered doors, he spotted a bucket filled with cleaning supplies, and next to it a broom, a mop, and a canister vacuum cleaner. There were boxes of lightbulbs and boxes of tape, extension cords, a stepladder, and a toolbox. On the opposite wall was a soapstone sink and a clothes washer.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  “LAST WARNING!” shouted Matt.

  The cowboy was the one doing the tapping, meaning he’d managed to use the knife to free himself. It was either an intentional distraction, trying to buy Kevin time by keeping the sentry’s attention, or it was an effort at escape.

  Kevin had to take advantage of it. He lowered himself down through the hatch, swinging from the opening and catching the toes of his shoes on the lip of the sink. Hands on the walls, he quickly lowered himself.

  He eased the louvered doors open just as the sentry shouted again.

  “I SAID, BACK OFF!” He cocked his shotgun.

  Kevin grabbed a spray cleaner from the bucket. He slipped out into the hallway, crept down it, and looked around the corner and saw the sentry by the smoldering fireplace with his shotgun aimed at the door to the study.

  The ensuing seconds stretched out uncomfortably as Kevin was knotted by a dozen what-ifs, tortured by not having a clue what to do. Finally, his mind made up, he backtracked to the pantry and found a bottle of cooking sherry. He snuck back down the hall, took two steps into the room, and launched the bottle at the fireplace.

  “NOW!” Kevin shouted.

  The shotgun misfired.

  Kevin dove back into the hallway, scrambled to his feet, and ran like hell for the garage. He saw a flash of orange light on the walls that signaled the sherry igniting in the fireplace.

  The shotgun fired a second time. He heard wood peppered right behind him. Some of the shot rolled past his feet, tiny balls no bigger than BBs.

  ***

  Salvo narrowly missed being set on fire when the fireplace erupted. He jumped out of the way as flames spit out of the hearth. The rug caught fire at his feet, and he discharged the shotgun wildly in the direction of the kitchen. But then the fire died out as quickly as it had exploded.

  Salvo reacted a split second too late to a noise coming from behind him, and as he turned around he saw the study door open-Impossible!-and a coffee table coming at him at full speed. In an instant he understood that the tapping sound had been the cowboy pulling out the door’s hinge pins.

  Salvo hoisted his shotgun while backing away from the table coming at him. He fell over an ottoman and the shotgun discharged a second time. Dropping it, he then was able to deflect the table to the right and toward the fire, and he rolled that same direction.

  Whoosh!

  A wrought-iron fire poker missed Salvo’s head by inches. He sprang to his feet and grabbed a nearby lamp.

  Another swing of the poker dem
olished the lamp and broke the index and middle fingers of his right hand. He screamed, jumping back out of the way of a third blow. Retreat was his only option.

  He turned. A wet mist struck his face, rendering him blind and in even more pain. Screaming again, he fell to his knees. He wiped his face with his sleeve but it was no use.

  He heard the cocking of the shotgun.

  “You so much as twitch and I’m taking the side of your face off,” said the cowboy in a low rumbled twang.

  “My eyes!” Salvo wailed. “Help me!”

  “What was that stuff?” the cowboy asked.

  “How the hell would I know?” Salvo shouted. “Fuckin’ help me!”

  “Toilet-bowl cleaner,” said a second voice.

  It was the kid. But Salvo couldn’t see him, couldn’t see anything.

  “Hands out,” said the cowboy to Salvo, “flat on the floor.”

  Salvo sagged forward.

  “Get a wet towel,” the cowboy said to Kevin. “There’s some rope in the shop… not the climbing rope. Bring it here-”

  A few minutes later, Salvo was gagged and tied on the study floor. The cowboy tied the last knot and led Kevin into the living room. He extended his hand, and Kevin took it.

  “Kevin,” he supplied.

  “John,” said the cowboy. “Your friend?”

  “Gone,” Kevin said. He yanked back the tarp in the shed only to find her missing.

  “I know the season, son.”

  “Her name is Summer. We were on the plane together. It’s complicated.”

  “Gone where?”

  “Dunno. Just gone. It’s her jet… her father’s. She was supposed to wait here for me.”

  “Mistake number one: don’t ever expect a woman to do what you think she’s going to do. Mistake number two: don’t ever tell her what to do because that’s a surefire way of making sure she doesn’t.”

  “You’re making jokes? She’s out there… They could have her.”

  “If they had her, then who lit that fire? Ever shot a rifle, son?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Follow me.”

  Five minutes later, Kevin and John were armed with the shotgun and the rifle, respectively. John got them flashlights, two-way radios, and a large handgun for the small of his back.

  “Pulling the door like that… You could have gotten yourself killed,” Kevin said.

  They had gone out a back window of the lodge and up the rocks, a route John knew from repairing the roof. They had a bird’s-eye view of the dying fire and the flickering orange woods beyond. They tucked in behind a stone chimney that Kevin immediately recognized as an elevated, well-fortified, defensible position, something that obviously hadn’t just occurred to John on the spur of the moment.

  “You ever play poker, son?” John asked.

  “No, sir, not so it counts.”

  “When they showed up, they were unarmed. If there was any time to produce a weapon, it was then, and they didn’t. So by the time that one was in the living room and I heard him cock the shotgun, I figured it had to be my twelve-gauge pump. And I knew something he didn’t: because we’d had some guests up to the ranch not two weeks ago with three kids under nine, none of them three rifles was loaded. I’d emptied ’em all myself. We keep the ammo in the study, so I had it in there with me. They had the big guns, leaving the two pellet pushers: the over-under twenty and the twelve-gauge pump. Both were loaded with bird shot. Did that myself. We had a murder of crows waking up guests at five in the morning with their damn squawking. Flying garbage men, is what they are. Been using the bird shot to discourage them… Not that I’d shoot a crow, because that’s illegal.”

  “But bird shot-”

  “Would sting a bit but wasn’t going to kill me.”

  “But if it didn’t turn out to be your shotgun?”

  “But it was. That’s where gambling comes in, son. Chance is nothing but a balance of risk to reward.”

  In the silence that followed, they both heard voices filtering faintly through the trees.

  “That’s coming from down below,” John whispered.

  “The jet.”

  “They wouldn’t be shouting at each other, not unless they’re short a few cells.”

  “Summer.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m going-”

  But John had him by the arm. His grip was like a vise.

  “Number one: this is my ranch, in a manner of speaking. So let’s get straight right off the bat that I’m calling the shots. Number two: I served my country, served it well, so experience is on our side. I promise you, the only war these guys have seen is in movies. Number three: they got my sat phone and busted up my radio.”

  “They busted up more than that,” Kevin said. “They took most of a wing off that little Cessna down there.”

  Hearing that, John seemed all the more mad.

  “They’re guarding the jet, which is smart,” he said. “But I’ll bet good money that they haven’t thought much about the Cessna’s radios. Mind you, they will before long, but so far they haven’t had the luxury of time, something we owe your girlfriend a debt of gratitude for.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” Kevin blurted it out, his patience running thin. “Do you always have to talk so much?”

  The cowboy surprised him with a grin. “I go long stretches out here all by my lonesome, kid.”

  “How ’bout we do something like find Summer.”

  “You gotta learn to strike a balance between your pecker and your brain, boy. Number one: we don’t know they’ve got the girl. Number two: I know this ranch well. Come daylight, I’m going to find her. At the moment, we got one of ’em tied up and two of ’em on the loose. They took two of the rifles, but they’re not loaded. They heard that shotgun go off, you can count on that. They know their boy up here has got problems. I’ve got a loaded thirty-aught with a night scope and you’ve got a twelve-gauge pump with seven shells holding twelve thirty caliber balls each and another seven in your pockets. That’s enough round ball to stop a bear in its tracks. Those boys are outgunned and on unfamiliar ground, and I imagine the silence is killing them. At some point, they’ve got to come to us, they’ve got to find out what happened. That’s just human curiosity. The best weapon we’ve got right now is patience. We put our curiosity on hold. So do exactly as I say, and it’ll all work out. Start improvising and you put me, the girl, and yourself at risk. Got that?”

  “We can’t just sit here.”

  “Not exactly. But nobody’s ever going to find you up here. You’ve got a rock cliff behind you and a rock chimney in front of you and fourteen shells to stop anyone from trying to pay you a visit.”

  “What do you mean by ‘find me’? You going somewhere?”

  “You catch on real quick.”

  “No way!” Kevin said. “I got you out of there. You need me.”

  “Exactly. In case something goes wrong, you’re my backup. I’m going down to the Cessna and make a call out before they figure out that the radios still work.”

  “And I’m supposed to just sit here?”

  He set the volume control on both radios, slipped Kevin’s radio into the neck of his T-shirt, and explained how to keep from announcing themselves to the others. They’d use two different signals: one to talk, the other to announce that Kevin had spotted either of the men headed for the lodge.

  “There’s no way they’re going to find you up here,” John said. “But if they should, you’re going to have to shoot them, and you’re going to find out that it’s just about impossible to pull that trigger. So what I want you to do is aim low, for their feet. The gun will kick when you shoot, and likely you’ll hit them closer to the knees. But you won’t kill them, you understand me? You will not kill them. Don’t think that way… Don’t think at all. Just hold the gun tight to your shoulder, aim at their feet, and squeeze.”

  “I’m a wicked shot,” Kevin boasted. “My uncle, he’s like the best there is, and he
taught me.”

  “There’s a big difference between a rifle and a shotgun, son.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  John asked Kevin to repeat the instructions for the radio, which he did flawlessly.

  “I could give you a pep talk,” the cowboy said, “but the fact is, we’re looking up the wrong end of the horse here. As long as we don’t do anything stupid, maybe we’ll get through this. You want to do right by this girl, then do as I’ve told you.”

  “I got it,” Kevin said testily.

  John gave him a look in the dim yellow from the slowly dwindling fire. Kevin nodded. John laid his hand on Kevin’s shoulder, then worked his way down the rocks. A moment later, he disappeared.

  73

  John Cumberland had his pride. Three men had taken over the ranch where he was caretaker, wrecked his Cessna, lied to him, smashed his skull, tied him up, threatened the lives of others. His own life had been defined by a failed war, a failed marriage, a brush with the law, then the successful stewardship of the ranch. Now he had failed in that as well.

  A man’s handshake means more than his signature and his word more than that. John had offered these people a helping hand and look how they had answered.

  He would put an end to it. Had the boy and girl not been in the picture, he would have gone on a shooting spree. Instead, he would approach things in a slightly more civil manner.

  He silently worked his way down the wooded slope, his body pumping with adrenaline, breaking a keen sweat despite the chill in the air. He followed a familiar game trail that switched back repeatedly until reaching the airstrip. He moved slowly and carefully among the trees as he approached two hulking shapes-his Cessna and the Learjet.

  There were lights on inside the Lear, the aft door open. He couldn’t see the other side, but light on the ground suggested that the main door was open as well.

  Drawing closer, John saw two shapes in a window. He wondered if one was the girl. If he could account for her and confirm she was safe, he would be free to deal with the others as he saw fit.

  He considered a surprise attack. He could catch them unawares, wound them, and greatly improve his odds. But if they had the girl, his advantage was compromised. Smarter to make the radio call first to get help on the way. Timing the call was important. Given the narrowness of the valley, the Cessna’s radio would likely reach only planes flying directly overhead. Plus, it was late, approaching eleven P.M. No small aircraft would be flying now. His only chance was a commercial flight, and few flew over at this hour.