Wild Fire: A Suspense Thriller (A Hawk Tate Novel Book 6)

by Dustin Stevens

  I took his cutting things off there to mean that he hadn’t turned anything up yet, which wasn’t terribly surprising. Together, we had worked hundreds of cases, most involving multiple players. Layers and layers of people spread across many countries, all with associates and family members that would love nothing more than to garner our home addresses.

  A ton of scattershot information to try and sort through.

  “While you do that, I’m going to go back over to the sheriff’s office and see what they’ve gotten out of the guy that showed up here,” I said. “I doubt he’s said a word, but I guarantee they’ve at least ran his prints by now.”

  We both knew that unless the man was in the system for something, they would be worthless, but it was a start. Someplace to go, something to do while I cleared my head a bit, trying to make sense of everything happening.

  “See if you can get a picture, too,” Pally said. “Text it over to me, I’ll put it through the databases.”

  Again, I nodded. “Will do, though fair warning, I mashed the hell out of his nose last night. No promises on what it’ll look like.”

  Grunting softly, Pally asked, “You break it? Lots of blood?”

  I had hit that man so hard, there was still a dull throb in my forehead. Already, I could feel a small lump protruding beneath the curtain of hair hanging to my eyebrows.

  I could remember the bridge of his nose shattering, ground to splinters against my skull.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.”

  Any other time, I might have chuckled, or at least cracked a smile. I knew the sentiment Pally was getting at, wanting to feel like we at least got in one solid shot for the good guys.

  As it was, I just wished I had hit him harder. That Kaylan hadn’t been there, so I could have really gone to work on him.

  “Have you talked to Serra?” I asked.

  “Not yet. I called, but haven’t gotten through.”

  That made sense, the home probably rife with police, all wondering what the hell had happened in their sleepy mountain town.

  “When you do, can you tell her I’m on my way?” I asked.

  I just needed to check on Kaylan first, make arrangements to ensure she would be okay. Then I had to stop by the sheriff’s, get what I could from them.

  After that, it was time to head west.

  Chapter Twenty

  A town the size of West Yellowstone would never be able to sustain a hospital. With just fifteen hundred full-time residents, there would barely be enough people around to staff the place, let alone take advantage of its services.

  Even during the peak of tourist season, when the town size swelled to almost double, many of them prone to profound acts of stupidity, it just wouldn’t have been a good investment. For the community, or for the state that would inevitably have to bail them out.

  Care for the area instead started with the clinic on the western edge of town. More than capable of handling most small injuries, I’d even been there a few times myself for things that had happened while out with clients.

  Almost all of them, again, springing from some act of foolishness.

  Anything larger - such as a door exploding in Kaylan’s face - was sent straight to the hospital in Big Sky. Fifty miles north, it was a straight shot up US-191.

  Fifty miles of faint morning light just starting to break through the cloud cover above. Fifty miles of dense pine forest and barren highway.

  Almost an hour to sit in silence, berating myself for everything I had done wrong the night before.

  In the face of an active shooter, my reptile brain had completely taken over. Logic and reason had been pushed to the side, overwhelmed by self-preservation. The most powerful of all evoked responses, it had driven my every action from the moment the man had opened fire as I was scrambling onto the porch until my forehead connected with his nose, rendering him neutralized.

  There was no way around that. The body was programmed to react the way it did for a reason.

  Kaylan and I were both alive because of it.

  In the moments afterward, though, I should have been smarter. I should have realized that just because Kaylan was hurt, she wasn’t the only friend at risk.

  Nor was she the only one I had the responsibility of taking care of.

  A quick call to Pally, telling him to sound the alarm. A simple text, not even needing to type out a single word, a basic 911 sufficient to alert them to be watchful.

  Anything more than what I had done. So worried about Kaylan, about calling for help, I had been blind.

  No better than the foolhardy tourists I was always swapping stories about with the other guides.

  Based on what Pally was telling me, there was no way to know when Martin had been put down. Trying to determine an exact time of death would be close to impossible, making it difficult to ever know if a message from me might have saved them.

  But it damned sure wouldn’t have hurt.

  Reaching for the middle console of the truck, I grabbed up my cellphone. Sliding it onto my thigh, I draped my left hand atop the wheel, alternating glances between the device and the road ahead.

  More concerned with any wildlife that might dart out than encountering my first vehicle in over fifteen minutes, I thumbed through the phone. Bypassing the recent call log, knowing the person I needed to speak to wouldn’t show up there, I instead went straight to the address book.

  Finding the listing I wanted, I raised my gaze, checking the clock on the dash. Halfway past six, my finger lingered above the screen, considering whether it was too early yet to call, before hitting send.

  Hours before, I had had the chance to reach out to my friends and hadn’t. Someone had died as a result.

  Not again, even if it did cost another friend a little bit of sleep.

  Besides, something told me she wouldn’t mind.

  The shrill ringtone echoed over the line, filling the cab of the truck, overpowering the sound of the road passing beneath my tires. Sounding off twice in order, it was snatched up in the middle of the third ring.

  “Hawk,” Mia Diaz answered. The first time I had heard her voice in more than a year, she sounded slightly out of breath.

  But definitely not like she had just woken up.

  “Diaz,” I replied. “Sorry to call so early.”

  A year and a half earlier, Diaz and I had first met as part of a case that had pulled me out of retirement. Dragged back into the fold by a woman that had hired me as a guide and then tried to leave me for dead in the park, it had been a whirlwind week.

  One that had seen me and Diaz work together to bring down a major new player in the drug trade coming over the border and allowed me to track down the people that had murdered my wife and daughter years before.

  As the acting director of the Southwest field office, she had gone out of her way to help me. Even though it had turned out to her benefit, she hadn’t known it at the time, doing me a solid based on nothing more than reputation and common history.

  Six months later, I’d been able to repay the favor, acting as a protection detail for a vital witness to a desert human trafficking and drug mule ring.

  In the time since, we had spoken little, though that wasn’t for any particular reason beyond we were both busy people.

  It happens.

  “Don’t be,” she replied. “You know this job doesn’t really afford sleep. I was in the shower, about to head in.”

  I did know exactly what she was referring to. During my time, Don Hutchinson – Hutch – was the area overseer. Seeming to age in dog years, I more than once commented that I wasn’t sure why he even bothered with the expense of renting an apartment.

  It wasn’t like he was ever there.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  Under different circumstances, I would imagine the question to be the sort of thing that one friend might ask another. A basic greeting, a way to say hello, inquire as to what was new in the other’s life.

  Now, I took
it for what I imagined was much closer to her intent.

  Why the hell I was calling her at what was five-thirty in the morning along the west coast.

  “Last night, a man broke into my office,” I said. Every word I kept free of inflection, wanting her to hear the account more than any underlying animosity I had about it.

  Of which there was plenty, both at the man and myself.

  “Rigged the front door to explode, waited inside with a nine-millimeter to finish the job.”

  Whatever movement there might have been on the other end of the line ceased.

  “You okay?”

  Grunting softly, I replied, “My partner Kaylan happened to open the door before me. The blast dropped her on her head, cracked her skull, burned the hell out of her.

  “Gave me enough time to get to cover, eventually neutralize the threat.”

  Remaining silent a moment, processing what I’d said, Diaz eventually asked, “Neutralized? As in...?”

  “No,” I said, getting her insinuation. “He is alive, currently in possession of the West Yellowstone sheriff. I’m on my way there now, see if they have an ID.

  “Pally also wants me to snap a picture of him so he can start running facial rec.”

  During our first go-round together, I had introduced Diaz and Pally via video conference. A couple times since, I heard she had even hired him as a private consultant.

  Again, Diaz remained quiet a moment. She seemed to piece together what I had just said, adding it to the fact that I was calling at such an unseemly hour.

  “And you think it was related to this place somehow?”

  Pulling in a deep breath, I again felt my core draw in tight. Tiny pangs shot through my system, scads of thoughts and feelings too numerous to be singled out.

  Self-loathing. Frustration. Anger. Confusion.

  Grief.

  “Seven hundred miles west of here, Shawn Martin was killed behind his home at the same exact time.” Pausing, letting the bile that rose along the back of my throat from merely saying the words settle, I added, “He was the lead on our FAST crew the whole time I was there.”

  This time, I heard the slightest exhalation. “Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah,” I muttered, bobbing my head in agreement.

  Most people would have moved immediately from there into apologies. They would have offered condolences, asked if there was anything they could do.

  But most of those people hadn’t made a career doing the sorts of things we had.

  “Pally looking into it?” she asked instead.

  “Digging as we speak,” I said. “As soon as I get anything from the sheriff, I’m going to send it his way. Hopefully it can aid in the hunt.”

  On the opposite end of the line, I could hear movement begin anew. Bare feet sliding over hardwood floor. Drawers being opened and closed.

  A woman moving with purpose.

  “After that, I’m going to head over to Washington,” I said. “Talk to my friend’s widow, maybe poke around a bit, see if anything else shakes loose.”

  “Okay,” Diaz replied, her voice a bit terser than even a moment before. “You get anything, shoot it my way too. Like I said, I’m heading into the office now.

  “I haven’t heard about anything new going down, but I’ll make it top priority.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Sheriff Sam Latham was as much a West Yellowstone fixture as the Conoco station in the center of town or the enormous gateway into the park along the eastern edge. First elected twenty-five years prior, he’d been the recipient of running unopposed in the wake of the sitting sheriff keeling straight back at his desk from a heart attack.

  Considering that the next in order would have to use the same desk in the same office, no one else had wanted the job.

  After that, nobody had thought to challenge the kid that had slid into the vacancy, watching him grow from a cocky twenty-something into the man now in his early-fifties standing beside me.

  Coming in at five-ten and weighing right at one-hundred-and-seventy pounds, he had sandy brown hair finger combed to the side and a matching mustache.

  More or less the embodiment of the average American male.

  Pulled in in the middle of the night by the deputy that had first responded to my call, he was dressed in jeans and flannel. A cup of coffee in one hand, the thumb of his opposite was hooked into the rear of his jeans. Body shifted toward me, just a couple of feet separating us, his gaze was aimed at the pane of one-way glass running the length of the room beside us.

  At the man that I had first encountered in the front of my office the night before.

  Without the black ski mask and under the harsh glare of the fluorescent bulbs above, the man was a stark contrast to the one I’d first encountered. Gone was the cocksure arrogance or the sense of control he had originally displayed. Missing was any hint of defiance.

  In their place was a clear withdrawal. A defeatist attitude that hinted that he didn’t care where he was or what happened next.

  That he already knew his fate, regardless.

  Seated on the far side of the lone metal table in the middle of the room, both wrists were cuffed to the bar rising from the center of it. Gaze focused on the bare tabletop before him, he sat with his shoulders rolled inward, a classic defense posture.

  Free of his original ski mask, he had dark hair cropped short, tan skin peeking through.

  With the benefits of time and light, his nose looked even worse than I remembered, a twisted mash of bone and cartilage. Blood was still smeared across his cheeks and upper lip, ending in an upturned arc across the middle of his face where the ski mask had been.

  As macabre a grin as I had ever seen, like something the Joker might have worn in an old Batman comic.

  “He said anything?” I asked, glancing from the glass to Latham.

  “Not a word,” the sheriff replied. “Rules say we have to offer medical treatment in clear instances of injury, water after so many hours.

  “Most of the time, the tough guys at least pull it together to curse at us or tell us to go away. This one hasn’t said a damn thing.”

  My own experiences with the sheriff were fairly limited, in an official capacity. Once before, my office had been broken into, that too part of the same incident that introduced me to Diaz. His crew had handled it capably, and I’d never heard any local chatter complaining about him or his office.

  Besides, it wasn’t like the town was in Compton or Southeast D.C.

  Personally, I knew him to be an affable guy, someone that had made an effort to integrate into the community. Deacon at church, PTA, wave-when-people-drive-by sort.

  Basically, someone that would have no reason to lie to me right now.

  “Anything on an ID?” I asked.

  Pulling his mouth back into a tight line, Latham shook his head. “We ran his prints, but nothing came up in the system.”

  Shifting his gaze from the glass to me, he glanced back over a shoulder, ensuring we were still alone. “And not to sound like a racist here, but based on appearances...”

  The first part of his statement I let go as the sort of thing people in Montana said, even if they didn’t recognize the irony in it.

  The latter, I couldn’t help but agree with, especially knowing all that I did.

  The man was clearly Hispanic. Considering that the bulk of the work Martin and I did together was in South and Central America, it wasn’t a stretch to believe that whoever was sent north after us hailed from one of those countries.

  Making the odds of getting a hit low, just as Pally and I had all but said earlier.

  “How about my office?” I asked.

  “Deputy Ferry is there now, keeping it secure,” Latham said. “We put in a call to Bozeman right after it happened last night requesting a crime scene crew, but they said they couldn’t get here until morning.

  “You know how that goes.”

  That too, I was familiar with. It was extremely unlikely that an
ything had happened the night before to warrant them needing to be kept in town. The more logical response was that they had heard about the incident, determined that nobody had died, and decided it could wait until morning.

  When the day shift came on, and it was much warmer outside.

  “I don’t suppose you recognize him now, under the light?” Latham asked.

  After the first time my office was broken into, I had made a point of sharing my background with Latham. A professional courtesy, if nothing else, in the event that anybody else ever showed up in town.

  Over the time since, it hadn’t been an issue, the conversation never mentioned again.

  Not that there had been reason to.

  Taking a moment, as much to prove I was seriously considering the question as anything, I stared in at the man. I tried to see past the garbled nose and the smears of blood, focusing on the face beneath.

  “No,” I replied. “Definitely never seen him around here.”

  A non-committal sound slid from Latham’s throat. “But before, maybe?”

  “Maybe, but he looks young. Like he wouldn’t have been much more than a late teenager back when I was still involved.”

  Not that that would necessarily mean anything. There was virtually zero chance whatever slight our team had committed was perpetuated on this guy directly. He was nothing more than a pawn, sent up to do someone else’s bidding.

  That’s just how things were done.

  “I checked in with my contacts on the drive back down this morning. They said they haven’t heard of anything new going down, but asked that I take a picture and send it over. You mind?”

  Lifting a hand, Latham motioned to the glass before us. Adding nothing more, he waited as I slid my cellphone from my back pocket and pressed it tight to the glass. Zooming in, I snapped off a trio of shots before pulling it back.

  Head down, I worked my way through the various programs on my phone, attaching the images to emails addressed to both Pally and Diaz.

  When I was done, I returned the phone to my rear pocket. “Thanks.”