Three Women Disappear

by James Patterson

  I hadn’t realized how insane my plan was until I was fully exposed on the rock face. I’m sure I looked like the biggest target this wacko had ever seen. Yet there I was, heading up the cliff as fast as I could, in the strategic path of a question mark.

  He started running up behind me. He really did. Straight upward, the cheat. And I began to believe this entire ploy might just work.

  If he would enter the slide zone, I’d gain about five minutes on him. The rocks would tangle him up. He might sprain an ankle. At the very least, he’d slide all the way back down and be bewildered. I’d be free to make a mad dash. I might even manage to separate him from his gun.

  Crack—another shot. Missed, but splattered the dust directly near my hand.

  I could see him fiddle with the gun. Because it was broken?—no, to reload it. He was coming up a lot faster than I anticipated. I was just nearing the top and he was already nearing the end of the loose shale, a patch of hillside about the size of a grocery store aisle. He’d already traversed most of it fast, surprisingly without incident. What was motivating this idiot?

  The footing beneath him was holding up agonizingly well, and I’d stopped to watch all this, letting him gain on me, assuming I’d have already achieved the desired landslide by now. No such luck.

  I’m not sure what I did to give him road rage but now he’d taken it off the road. Was life so bad in the Wild West that people chased after fellow motorists on foot?

  “I’m just a mother!” I yelled at him.

  He was nearly across the band of “helpful” geology. I was nearly at the end of my safety zone. The rest of my climb was going to put me in a long corridor of easiest targeting. Crack, he fired another shot at me.

  And then his foot plunged.

  Downward. Deep. I didn’t see it at first but I heard it. I’d ducked down after the last bullet whizzed by my head (note, Miranda, the best time to duck is before the deadly projectile arrives, not after), but I heard something like miniature thunder down below me. I heard, yes, a rockslide. It was like thunder, or a bowling alley.

  I looked, and not only was he sliding down the slope, as I’d hoped, but the entire diagonal section of rocks cascaded with him. He was riding a magic carpet of sharp, jagged stones. The avalanche knocked him off his feet—the point a guardian angel should step in—and, dumbfounded, I watched him plummet all the way down to the hard ground of the ravine. Didn’t see that coming.

  The only sign of the disturbance was an elongated cloud of dust rising below. But he was down there. In bad shape. He had to have fallen a hundred feet.

  I strained to see through the dust and detected a crumpled heap of errantly strewn limbs, lying motionless. His leg was rotated awkwardly outward, probably broken.

  Okay, what now? The only route down was to march back past him. But what if he was faking it? What if he was waiting until I got close to shoot me, up close and personal?

  I picked up the sharpest piece of shale I could find. It felt heavy enough to do damage, but light enough to throw. Maybe I could spin it at him like a Frisbee.

  I started scooting down the hillside, trying and failing to be quiet. He hadn’t yet looked up or moved. Spinning a rock like a Frisbee is ridiculous. What is wrong with you, Miranda? I could see him more clearly as I got closer. He was sprawled, facedown. It felt very likely that I would tumble forward to plummet as he had, and land right on top of him, dead.

  I held my rock-weapon up, like a quarterback ready to throw.

  “You almost killed my daughter!” I shouted.

  I wanted to just throw my projectile at him, but I had some more choice words. “My daughter…she’s four! And you were shooting at me! Why?!”

  He really was quite still. I knew I should walk away, continue on to get help for Aaron—every moment counted. But I felt drawn to see him up close—to know what we were dealing with.

  “Hey!” I said. “Hey, I’m right here with a sharp rock! You don’t have to pretend to be out! You don’t have to fake it.”

  I started to wonder if he was still breathing. I moved between him and his rifle, lying in the dirt about ten feet away. I kept my shale-football-Frisbee-rock-spear held high above me and felt the clichés bubbling to my mouth.

  “One false move, buster, and you’re going down in flames!”

  Flames? I knelt by his side. I needed to flip him over. Buster?

  I steeled myself. He might lunge at me. He might turn out to be someone I knew. He might be someone whose identity made sense and somehow proved to me that Aaron wasn’t a good husband. Every part of my brain started whirling. I pushed at his shoulder and stomach and managed to flip him over.

  It was horrible. His face was torn open.

  “Are you okay?” I asked in a nice, maternal tone of voice. “Can you breathe?”

  This man was certainly no friend of mine. But faced with a dying human, I couldn’t just walk away. I had to do something.

  There are so many times I’ve told myself I need to take CPR. So many times Aaron and I decided that to be good parents, we had to be experts in resuscitation. Who knew when we might need to revive Sierra? Or each other? Or our dog? I had read the steps—but here I was, feeling helpless. I knew there was pressing, and counting.…

  “Hey, man, wake up!”

  In the heat of the moment, I was panicking. I was increasing my anxiety by the minute. I killed this man. I put my hands on his chest. To press.

  Step one. Ask, “Hey, are you okay?”

  Step two. Check for breathing and pulse. Not breathing. But he had a pulse, though it was weak.

  Step three. Chest compressions. I vaguely remembered some trick with the song “Another One Bites the Dust,” which sets the cadence for the chest compressions. Ironic, given the circumstances. Did he even need chest compressions? I killed him. It was my plan to trip him down the mountain.

  Step four. Call for help.

  If I yelled out for help, out here approximately one billion miles from the nearest anything, no one would come. But if I were to call.…

  That’s when the obvious dawned on me. I didn’t have a phone, but he did. He must. More important than his gun, I could take his phone.

  Save him first, Miranda.

  I would revive him, then find the phone, call 911, and request an ambulance for him and helicopter for my husband. The new plan. I leaned over to start the compressions.

  But before I could even touch his chest, he coughed.

  He was awake.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “Hey, you’re up! You’re okay? Are you? Can you breathe?”

  No words came out, just a terrible sound.

  “My name is Miranda. You just fell down a mountain.”

  He coughed and up came blood. Lots of blood. It was in his lungs. Whatever the problem was, he had ruptured something vital, deep within him. He burbled up a crimson stream that trickled down his chin and cheeks.

  “Tellth…” he said to me.

  “What?”

  “Tell…” he said. He stopped. Then he continued. “Them.”

  “Them? Who? Okay, I will. Tell what?”

  It took a moment, but he finally answered. “My team…to save me.”

  “What team?”

  Team? Did he say team?

  “Was there someone else in the car with you?” I asked. “Did you ram me off the road?”

  I needed to give this man time to respond.

  “Why did your team ram me off the road?”

  He was dying. Now. Here.

  “T-tray…” he said weakly. Was this his dying breath? He looked over at me.

  “No,” I said. I would not let him quit. “No way. Stay awake, buddy. Please.”

  “Kiss,” he said.

  “Don’t give up, man!” How had I gone from a road trip with my family to watching a man I didn’t know die?

  “Tray,” he gasped, then started again. “Tray…Kiss…Kilt…” and then a big exhale…

  And he was gone.

 
; Chapter 9

  He died. Right there in front of me. I watched a human being leave this world. At thirty years of age, I was lucky—this was the first time I’d ever seen someone go.

  I stood up, feeling heavy and sick to my stomach. My head was swirling. My face was sweating cold droplets down my brow. Before I knew what was happening, I gave way to my nausea, sending my upper body folding forward with hands braced against my thighs. I did this to him. I sent him up the loose shale. I ended a man’s life. No matter what kind of idiotic warfare he had waged on me, I’m not in the business of ending lives. And I’d just ended one.

  “Damn it, Mandy.”

  I took a few breaths, got my bearings, and knelt by him again.

  I began a prayer. A silent one, not words but more feelings. Putting aside the guilt that threatened to overwhelm me, I prayed for him to be forgiven, to see a better place than whatever chaotic evil had led him to a life of chasing innocent women through the desert with a rifle.

  Or was he chasing Aaron?

  “Tray. Kiss. Kilt,” I said to myself. What in God’s name could that mean?

  I unpressed my palms and stood back up.

  I had to be careful. This man mentioned others. The rest of his “team,” so I could assume that there were other fine gentlemen in the car that ran us off the road. If he was now in my canyon, shooting at me, what were these “others” doing?

  I drew a little map in the dirt with a stick. The river. The highway. The cliff we tumbled over. The spot where our van was sprawled out like a turtle on its back. The waterfall. The crags. The cave containing my husband and child.

  As far as I could tell, this guy, this corpse next to me, got lucky finding me out here on the south end of the canyon. Unless he had tracked me in a more sophisticated way than I was aware of, he wasn’t expecting me to be right here. The safer place to look—where I was betting his team was right now—was the area very close to the highway where we were run off.

  So my new goal was to get to the main highway we were headed toward. A big eight-lane behemoth of glory.

  Tray. Kiss. Kilt. I picked up Mr. SUV Driver’s rifle. It was scratched but didn’t look broken. I tried to cock it, but the gun didn’t cooperate.

  Then I remembered—the phone!

  I quickly turned back to him. I’d completely forgotten. I dug for his phone in his pocket, found it, and tried to turn it on. It was locked, as expected, but I should at least be able to dial 911, which I did…but got nothing. We were so far away from any signal, even a priority call wouldn’t get through.

  I put it in my pocket, to try again later.

  Tray. Kiss. Kilt.

  I stood up and erased my map in the dirt with my shoe.

  Kiss. Maybe I’d been onto something before, and Aaron really had kissed this guy’s wife. That made sense. No. No, it didn’t.

  Why would Mr. SUV Driver bring all his friends? His driving maneuver seemed too premeditated for a crime of passion.

  Who exactly was this “Jed” we were visiting? He supposedly had a ranch and lovely horses, fine, but why suddenly visit a guy we barely knew? Why had I agreed to this visit I knew nothing about?

  Maybe he kissed some girl at work? But no, I didn’t think there were many single mingling types at Drake Oil.

  I noticed my shadow on the ground. There was my silhouette, unchanged but for the gun in my hand. I was that woman. The gun woman.

  My shadow seemed to belong to a different person.

  Armed with a gun, a phone, and a new sense of purpose, I hiked over to the crest of the ridge. Tray Kiss. Maybe it’s actually Drake Is. I was replaying the audio in my head, not just the words. I was scrutinizing the nuances. Tray Kiss. Drake Is. The dead SUV driver was saying Drake Is Something.

  “Drake is…” I said to myself, imitating his voice.

  The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t imagine any other possibility.

  What I was hoping to achieve was a good view of the back canyon. This was about a two-mile corridor. If Mr. SUV Driver had hiked through here, maybe his teammates were nearby. Fine. As bad as it sounded, I preferred this possibility to its catastrophic alternative: enemies might be heading toward my family, toward my injured husband and my tiny daughter. If they were willing to shoot at me—I mean, no questions asked, just shoot at me—what would they do to my daughter?

  No way, not letting that happen. I needed to survey the terrain as fast as possible and plot a countermeasure. I sped up to a run, now among the top crags.

  Drake. Is. Kilt. This was about my husband. This was about something he did. Said. I was replaying every aspect of Mr. SUV Driver’s voice in my head. Drake. Is. Kilt. Exhale. And I was now starting to hear the end of his speech a little differently. There was more of a word tucked in there. Drake. Is. Kilt. Something.

  I was on the crest now, viewing the expanse of the valley. I could see the arroyo where Mr. SUV Driver first greeted me with his bullets.

  Drake is guilty.

  I finally heard it for what it was. Guilty. Drake, the oil company, is guilty.

  But I couldn’t let the mental gyrations distract me from the puzzle in front of me. If there were other men out there, and Mr. SUV Driver came from the top of the far crest…they probably split up right before the crest. There—tracing his trail upward with my eyes I could see the other path, the one they might have followed. It led back to the crags. And that meant that they were already on their way back toward Aaron and Sierra.

  Unacceptable. I needed them to go anywhere but into my nest.

  Panic set in, flooding me with nervous, hand-wringing energy. But I already knew what I had to do.

  There was no more time to waste.

  I raised the rifle upward. I committed myself to a plan that would spur this cat-and-mouse game to its inevitable conclusion. I held it with both hands. Straight upward. Like I’ve seen on TV.

  I fired, once. Bam. The recoil nearly knocked me to the ground, and the sound was startling, tearing into the soft silence.

  You hear that, gentlemen? Bring it.

  Chapter 10

  Drake Oil is a fine, fine oil institution. A group of nice people who just want to help America and kittens.

  That’s what the ads would have you believe.

  And that’s what the press would have you believe. The articles. The billboards. The way the cute logo was cutely designed. And, most of all, the way the quiet legal disagreements were quietly settled. Thanks to my husband.

  This I knew. He is, after all, one of their lawyers.

  I was running as fast as I could. Sure, I was trying to get them to follow me; but I couldn’t let them actually get me. I was going as fast as I could for as long as I could.

  Without wind, this was the quietest space you can imagine. It was so still you could actually hear the silence. This was helpful. I should be able to hear anyone coming from behind me. When I stopped, every so often, I could listen.

  There was nothing.

  “Keep moving,” I whispered to myself.

  My mind raced. Jesus, did my husband piss off somebody who settled a suit with Drake Oil? Who then needed vengeance on my family?

  I continued this way, running as fast as my burning legs would allow, for what seemed like an hour. There were no footstep sounds behind me yet, but plodding along like the opposite of a ninja, I suddenly, faintly, heard someone yell something in the distance.

  I stopped, trying to muffle my own panting. I needed to examine the silence, searching the air for the distinct sound of what I thought was a man’s shout.

  Heart slamming against my breastbone, even my pulse became deafening.

  I scanned the horizon behind me, the outline of the red columns of rock, searching for traces of a human shape. Probably one aiming a gun at me.

  What in the world did Aaron do to get people to coordinate an attack against him? Did he stumble into something dangerous? The silence and stillness held no answers.

  I got moving again. My le
gs were cramping, the stopping and starting becoming harder for my body to execute.

  Aaron hadn’t said anything to me, but I imagined that his daily access to the entire legal landscape of Drake must have given him a glimpse of something insidious. He would’ve kept it secret from me, for fear that my unstoppable lungs would have bellowed it to anyone who’d listen. I couldn’t blame him. He was right.

  I worked my way back up to a full sprint, capitalizing on the downhill grade, ignoring the cramps and the strains. I was nearing a huge area of boulders nestled near the river, coming around a blind corner, top speed, when the following disaster happened faster than I could process:

  1. I heard a pop.

  2. I crashed into an obstacle I didn’t think would be there and bounced off.

  3. I realized it was a man.

  4. He and I locked eyes in a moment of mutual shock.

  5. We agreed not to be friends.

  Chapter 11

  He was a mercenary. In what felt like one millisecond after our collision, he decked me across the jaw, hard. I recoiled backward. If Mr. SUV Driver was a dangerous man, this second guy was a nuclear war.

  You could see it in his eyes: this wasn’t a person, this was a professional killer. He was dressed for attacking things—soldier pants, Kevlar vest, handgun, hiking boots.

  I was on my back. I’d never been hit before. Not even my older sister, Valentina, would punch me. We were slappers and that ended at age nine.

  I had surprised him, but well-trained instinct enabled him to regain the upper hand. I would’ve assumed, prior to this moment of my life, that it would hurt to get hit; but it actually was too shocking. I hadn’t read the “So You’re About to Be Punched in the Jaw” orientation brochure, but it might explain that with the hit, your grasp on reality vaporizes. You get stupider.

  So there I was, on the dirt, catching up with my current reality. He was slowly approaching me but I was too cloudy to even scoot myself backward. I just stayed there. Done.

  And then my enemy noticed something, at the same moment that I did.