Cowboy Undercover (6 page)

Back in the truck, he retraced his route to the store, this time noticing another sign pointing out a place called Freedom Lake. The road was an offshoot of the one he was on, consisting of heavily rutted dirt and ghostly looking trees.

The parking lot at the store was empty but an open sign hung in the door so he went inside. A gangly young man with dark hair cut very short stood behind the counter, flipping through the pages of a catalog. He wore a camouflage long-sleeved shirt.

“Howdy,” Chance said.

The kid nodded once and went back to his catalog. Chance grabbed a can of juice from the refrigerator section and a package of chips off a rack. When he got to the counter, the kid registered his purchases with a disinterested flicker of his eyes, punched in some numbers and gave Chance a total.

“It’s pretty country up here,” Chance said as he counted out the money. “Real peaceful.” He glanced at the catalog, which was open to a page dedicated to shotguns. “I bet you do a lot of hunting up this way.”

“Yeah,” the kid said. He didn’t look much over seventeen, maybe not even that old.

Chance gestured at the catalog. “When I was about your age, my dad got me a BB gun.”

“That’s for little kids,” the boy scoffed.

“I guess. I had fun with it though. Until I killed my first songbird. Didn’t feel too macho over that.”

“Killing animals for sport is wrong,” the boy said. He picked up the catalog and turned to an earmarked page. “This is my next gun. I’ve almost saved enough to buy it.” The item he pointed to was an assault rifle.

“That’s not really a hunting gun,” Chance murmured.

“No siree, but if you have trouble with people, this is the weapon you want.”

“And your parents will let you buy it?”

“It’s just Mom, my brother and me. And sure, she doesn’t care. I’ve been proficient with automatic rifles since I was twelve. In fact, I can shoot a human-size target nine out of ten shots.”

“I’m impressed,” Chance said.

The kid smiled. “It’s no big deal. Everyone in White Cliff over the age of thirteen has to be able to do that. And you have to qualify with a handgun, too. You know, in case.”

Chance opened the bag of chips and offered them to the boy who took a couple with a shy grin and a hasty thanks. “Mom won’t let me eat the junk food we sell in here. If we can’t kill it ourselves or grow it, we barter for it.”

“Sometimes there’s nothing like a bag of salty goodness,” Chance said.

“Yeah. My favorite are pretzels. My aunt bakes them herself, but they’re not the same. My cousin used to have a thing for sunflower seeds. His mom planted whole rows of plants in the garden, but sometimes, I’d smuggle him a bag or two from the store.”

Chance laughed and offered more chips. “Do you have a large family?”

“Not that big. Now it’s just my mom and brother and a bunch of step-cousins and an aunt and a uncle, you know.”

“Sure. You said you needed to be proficient with a weapon just in case. In case of what?”

The boy swallowed his chips and took a few more. “Well, let’s say terrorists knock out our country’s power grid,” he said. “Everything crashes. Everything. Your money in the bank is gone in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon you run out of food and gasoline and everything else. You got no electricity to keep your freezer running. You can’t trust your city’s water. But us here at White Cliff won’t be affected because we’re preppers.”

“Preppers?” Chance said.

“Yeah. That’s just a name for people who prepare for the inevitable trouble ahead. You know, we stockpile food and ammo. We take care of ourselves. Anyway, so all those panicked people start trying to take what we have and they’re so scared, they’re dangerous. We need to be able to protect ourselves.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Chance said but he had to suppress a shiver. The thought of children shooting other children to protect their food was nauseating.

“Or say the government decides to impose undemocratic laws and come after us for no reason? I mean, it could happen. Heck, we just got a new teacher at the school whose uncle was gunned down in Texas a few years back by a government agency.”

“How many people live up there?

“A couple hundred. Maybe more like three now but someday it will have thousands. We have our own stores and schools and just about everything a person needs.”

“Do you know a family by the name of Fallon?”

The boy ate the last chip and brushed the salt off his hands. Chance offered him the unopened juice and he took it with a nod of appreciation. “You’re talking about that guy who murdered a Greenville man down in Boise.”

“You know about that?”

“Sure. Police came and asked questions. Everyone knows about him up here but nobody had ever seen him and there’s no trace of him having a family here or in Greenville, either.” He opened the juice and took a long swallow.

A noise at the door made the kid look up and Chance turn round. A woman wearing a long black coat entered. The boy slammed the can down on the counter and whipped the empty bag off to the side. The woman watched him do both, a suspicious frown twisting her lips for a second. “Dennis? What are you doing?”

“Nothing, Mom,” he said.

The woman was tall and stern-looking with very straight graying black hair that fell almost to her waist, dark eyes and an old scar on her forehead.

“Best you go on home now, I’ll close up the store,” she said, sparing Chance a lingering perusal as she strode around the counter. The kid grabbed his jacket from the back of a chair, stuffed the rolled-up catalog into a pocket and hurried out of the store without looking at Chance again.

Chance offered the woman his hand. “Pete Reed,” he said. “You have a nice boy.”

“Maria Eastern,” she replied. “I know he’s nice. Too nice, sometimes. He needs to know when to keep his mouth closed. People take advantage of innocence.” She took off her coat and hung it on a hook. She was almost as tall as his six feet one inch. “What are you, one of those reporters come sniffing around for a story?”

“No,” Chance said. “Do you get a lot of reporters up here?”

“Some. Mostly they treat White Cliff as a novelty.”

“I did drive up to the end of the road when I first got here,” he said. “I wanted to look around but the gate appeared to be locked.”

“It’s late,” she said. “We tend to rise and set with the sun in these parts and we don’t like strangers driving by our homes after dark.”

Or any other time, he bargained.
“I used to know some people who moved up this way. Their last name is Fallon. Do you know them?”

“Are you sure you’re not a reporter?” she asked, her hooded eyes veiled.

“I’m sure.”

“There is no one named Fallon here and never has been.”

He needed to up the ante and give himself a reason to hang around. “It was just a thought. Listen, ma’am, I’m sure you don’t want to hear my story, but I was living on land my grandfather homesteaded and when my daddy died the government took so many taxes we had to sell off half the land just to stay out of the slammer. I told them those were the last taxes they were taking from me and now they’ve taken everything except the cash in the ground. My woman used to talk about relocating to White Cliff, but I always had my family’s land to consider. Now that’s gone and so is she. I’ve got nothing.”

“And what do you want from us?”

“A fresh start. I just want to look around. I dug up the last of the money Grandpa buried under a rock and it’s just enough to buy a place up here. Maybe if Dorrie hears I’ve turned myself around she’ll come back to me.”

Maria stared hard at him with those dark, dark eyes. Her vision seemed to snake through his skin, along his arteries, straight to his lying heart. “I’ll think about what you’ve said,” she finally muttered. “We take turns at White Cliff dealing with interested parties who show up on our doorstep. This week it’s my turn. Come back here about one o’clock tomorrow. But I should tell you that I can often see through lies and self-delusion. I’ve had a lot of practice. So, I suggest you spend your night being honest with yourself and tomorrow being honest with me.”

Her comment surprised him. “I’ll do that,” he said. What would happen if he was honest with her right now? If he asked if Lily had shown up, if he asked about Charlie being here, if he admitted he was scamming Jeremy Block?

And risk a bullet to the brain?

He needed to think about this. He left the store without saying another word and drove slowly back to the last town he’d driven through to find a motel.

Something told him he was in for another sleepless night.

Chapter Six

Okay, she’d done it. She’d found White Cliff, she’d come up with a convincing story to elicit enough sympathy to buy her a few days’ hospitality and even managed to ingratiate herself into the community by volunteering to take over a fifth-grade class for an ailing teacher. All this in a little over thirty hours. Not bad.

She looked around the small room of ten-year-olds. One student stood in front of her desk reading aloud from a history book. This particular volume had been published sixty years earlier and there was the taint of revisionist history in the curriculum, but the kids sat calmly at their desks and appeared to listen.

A beautiful new school was under construction next door and the sound of hammers and saws made their way through the windows. Most importantly, Lily had learned that a kindergarten class was held in the adjacent building. Her plan was to dash down there and check it out as soon as her class went to what the school called recess but which she’d learned consisted of laps around the track.

She had one goal: find Charlie. If he was here, it figured he’d be in that kindergarten class, sitting right out in the wide-open. She was hoping the fortress nature of this place might breed complacency. When you are surrounded by like-minded people who all know and support you, to say nothing of two walls between you and the rest of the world, it might be easy to assume you were safe.

She could see why someone would exact revenge against Jeremy—boy, could she. She could even see why they might go so far as to kidnap his son if they felt he’d “kidnapped” theirs by facilitating his death. What fueled the anxiety eating at her gut was that revenge would go too far and Charlie would become part of some insane sacrifice.

Her subtle attempt to find out if someone had recently “acquired” a five-year-old boy had been thoroughly ignored. She was afraid to mention Darke Fallon or Wallace Connor, afraid to push too hard. It was all so frustrating. She had to struggle every minute not to begin pounding on doors or give in to the longing to call the FBI and beg them to find her son.

What would Chance do?
For a second she remembered him as she’d last seen him, asleep and peaceful. In another life, if they’d met first, maybe they could have found a way to build a future. Even if she’d managed to leave Jeremy in such a way that he hadn’t decided killing her was preferable to divorcing her, she might still have found Chance and then she and Charlie could live with him and play with him and work with him...and love him.

She finally realized the whole classroom had fallen silent, including the child who had apparently finished reading. With horror, she felt a tear sting the gash on her cheek as it rolled down her face.

“Sorry about that, kids,” she said. “I was thinking about our country’s...great history. I guess I got emotional. Emma, you read the chapter very well. It’s almost time to go run around the field a couple of times. Be back in twenty minutes.”

The kids got up eagerly and filed out of the classroom. Lily made herself sit there for a moment in case one of them came back for something, and then she got to her feet and walked briskly down the hall toward the door. She crossed a small courtyard and opened another door directly into the kindergarten room. Her hope she could spy on the class without being seen evaporated as more than a dozen kids and two adults turned to face her.

Her gaze swept the children as her heart almost beat out of her chest. Several were blond—none were Charlie.

“May we help you?” one of the women asked. Lily had been told all the teachers were parents who took turns teaching the kids who attended this organized school but many parents chose to homeschool their kids themselves in their own homes. She told herself that Charlie might be with such a family; his not being here didn’t absolutely mean he wasn’t at White Cliff.

“Sorry to barge in,” she said. “I’m new and I was just looking around. I thought this doorway led to the restrooms.”

The other woman spoke up. “They’re in the main building.”

“Thanks,” Lily called and left the classroom. She returned to her own class to finish the teaching day but she did so with a heavy heart. Where was Charlie and what did she do now?

* * *

M
ARIA
TOLD
C
HANCE
she’d decided to give him a personal tour and he could leave his truck parked outside the wall. He wasn’t flattered by her attention—he figured it had more to do with keeping an eye on him than because she liked his company. She drove him around the perimeter first and he was duly impressed by the organization set out in front of him.

As she drove, she delivered a well-rehearsed spiel about the community being the vision of a solitary man. Since his death, his son, Robert Brighton, had assumed leadership. Chance saw signs of building going on everywhere.

Eventually, they ended up walking onto a broad expanse of grass, pausing by a large central water fountain. “Where’s the gunfire coming from?” Chance asked as the sound of bullets flying competed with the splattering of water.

“There’s a target range to the east of us,” Maria said. “When the clouds are low like they are today, the noise seems louder than usual, but you get used to it. It’s the sound of freedom, after all.”

“That’s a good way to put it,” he said. He gestured at a series of grassy mounds and then a row of what appeared to be bunkers against a hill, five of them in all. “What’s all of that?”

“The mounds are a memorial for fallen patriots. The bunkers are used for storage now. Food, ammo, weapons, water, things like that. Originally they were intended as living quarters for new settlers. It was a time of high tension with Russia and they were intended to substitute as bomb shelters should the need arise. The big white house across the way there belongs to Richard Brighton. He lives with my sister and their—his—kids. My boys and I live in an extension near the back. It’s a beautiful place.” She checked her watch and added, “We better keep moving. My boys are out of school by now.” As she led the way back to her car, she posed a question.

“What are your plans? Are you thinking of starting a small a business, for example? We could use a good mechanic.”

“Not me,” Chance said with a laugh. “I’m not the business type.”

“Okay, well, then, for example, would you prefer a quiet neighborhood filled with children or a bigger parcel of land on which to raise crops or animals?”

“Children,” he said quickly, determined to walk through any door she opened no matter how hard he had to squeeze through.

“Do you have any?” she asked.

“Not yet, but a man can dream. All I need to do is find my Dorrie.”

“Then I’ll drive you through one of the neighborhoods first.”

“How many are there in all?”

“Three. They’re all very pleasant.”

It crossed his mind that he should ask a financial question or two. “How does the money part work?”

She smiled. “That’s a discussion to be had with Mr. Brighton. Perhaps we can arrange a meeting for tomorrow.

“Mind if I ask why your store is outside the walls?”

“Not at all. It’s a temporary location while I construct a new store one street over. See, my sister moved here years ago when she met and got involved with Robert Brighton. I used to visit her. I liked how uncomplicated things seemed. When my husband died a few years ago, I was left with two boys to raise. I thought what better place to do it than White Cliff.” She drove under a small arch and added, “This is the first neighborhood.”

The houses all looked relatively modest to Chance while the land around them was utilized to the last degree. Dried cornstalks and pumpkins were about all that were left of the seasonal harvest, though some trees still held scattered apples and pears. Cords of firewood had been stacked against most of the fences. There were several windmills in evidence, used no doubt for power, and almost everyone had solar panels on their rooftops and propane tanks in their yards.

Several adults working outdoors and kids playing on the street added a comfortable ambience to the environment, but Chance’s heart almost stopped beating when he spied a small blond boy sitting on a curb by himself. A second glance revealed it wasn’t Charlie. He’d only just begun to recover from that disappointment when he glanced up to see a woman walking on the sidewalk in front of them. By the way she moved her head, it was obvious she was searching for someone or something.

“Stop!” Chance yelled and Maria instinctively applied the brakes. “It’s a miracle,” he said as he opened the door and ran after the woman. He hadn’t seen her face but that shapeless gray sweater and the way she moved made it clear to him that he’d found Lily. His pounding footsteps must have alarmed her because when she turned, her eyes were huge.

“Chance! What are you doing—”

She didn’t get a chance to finish because Chance grabbed her around the waist and hoisted her off the ground. He twirled her around, put her back down and bent his head to kiss her. It had been intended as a show of his enthusiasm to assure Maria he was an up-and-up guy, but the instant his lips touched Lily’s, all bets were off. All the anxiety, anger, worry and pure raw emotion he’d been trying to tame for days raged inside his body as he claimed her.

She resisted for a half a heartbeat and then surrendered. She hadn’t kissed him like this since the night out by the river. All the stories he’d told himself that one woman’s kiss was much like another shot up in flames as he lost himself in the soft, moist oasis of her mouth. He blocked out everything but the sensation of having her to himself for what couldn’t have been more than a couple of seconds but seemed to last forever.

But just as before, she broke the connection abruptly, breathlessly, though this time she didn’t run away. Instead she looked up at him and slowly raised her hand to gently touch his cheek with her cold fingers. He felt the unexpected tender caress shoot through his body. “What are you doing here?” she whispered.

“What do you think I’m doing here?” He wrapped his hand around hers, trying to warm her. He finally remembered Maria and looked up as she pulled her car forward.

“Quick,” he added. “There’s not much time. You’re my wife, my name is Pete Reed and you’re Dorrie.”

Maria exited her car and approached with a stately walk and a disapproving glance at Chance. “Lily, you know this man?”

“Yes,” she said. “Pete is my husband.”

“Lily? Is that what you’re calling yourself?” Chance asked, staring into Lily’s eyes, one of them still black and blue. He could almost see the imprint of Block’s knuckles. “That was your mother’s name,” he added.

Lily touched Maria’s arm. “I kind of thought Pete might show up. It’s fine that he’s here.”

“You said
your husband
hit you,” Maria said, her gaze searching Lily’s battered face before glancing again at Chance. “I don’t like to pry, but she was in bad shape when she got here and we offered a temporary sanctuary.”

“Now wait a second,” he said, putting up his hands and backing away a step. “Dorrie knows I never hit her.”

Lily smiled at him and then looked at Maria. “He didn’t hit me,” she mumbled.

“But you said your husband—”

“I said it wrong. What I meant was that after I left Pete, I went to my ex-husband’s house to ask for money. He did this to me, not Pete.”

Maria didn’t look convinced. She’d been haughty the night before, friendly that day and now she looked suspicious. “Is there actually a warrant out for your arrest?”

“Yes. I didn’t lie about that or Uncle Hank, either. I’m not ashamed of those things. May Pete stay in the apartment with me?”

“If that’s your choice.” Maria seemed to think for a second before speaking again. “The teacher you’re subbing for needs help until the end of the week. That’s three days. When she’s ready to return, it would be best if you and Pete leave. If you’ve decided our community and way of life appeals to you, then submit an application. Mr. Brighton will review it and respond within ninety days. That’s how it’s done.” She turned to Chance and added, “You can bring your truck inside the wall. Do you two want a ride back to Lily’s, I mean Dorrie’s apartment?”

“No, we’ll walk,” Lily said.

“Thanks for everything, Maria,” Chance added.

“I better get back to work,” was all she said.

They watched her drive away. A few children had gathered round them and Lily made it clear there could be no frank discussions in front of them. “Let’s walk to the gate and get your truck,” she said.

So holding hands like a reunited couple might, they walked the mile back to the gate so Chance could get his things out of the truck. Eventually, the kids petered out and they were alone. “Finally, we can talk,” Lily said.

He put his arm around her shoulder to make sure they were close enough to speak in whispers as there were other people coming and going, most on foot as they were. “What were you doing walking around that neighborhood?” he asked. “And what did Maria mean when she said the teacher you’re subbing for? And who’s Uncle Hank?”

“I was searching the neighborhood for Charlie. As far as the teaching thing goes, I lucked into that. My class is full of ten-year-olds, but I managed to sneak down to the kindergarten room this morning. Charlie wasn’t there. I don’t even know if he’s here.”

“He’s here,” Chance said.

She turned her head and looked up at him. “He is? How do you know that for sure?”

“Because your husband sent me to get him back.”

Her expression turned horrified. “You went to see Jeremy?”

“Yeah. Not right away. I had to get over being mad at you first.”

She bit her lip. It was on the tip of his tongue to chastise her, but he held off.

“Jeremy actually said Charlie was here?”

“He seemed pretty damn sure. He told me Maria Eastern would know but warned me not to ask her outright.”

“Maria? Well, she does seem enmeshed in things.”

“She said today that she’s here in White Cliff because her sister has a relationship with Robert Brighton.”

“Really? What have you learned about Charlie from her?”