Dangerous Refuge (22 page)
S
haye sat motionless. The unnatural position made her stiff, but since her feet were busy trying to push apart the Velcro closing of her backpack, she didn’t complain. What really irritated her was that her shoes were made for trails, not for finessing sticky cloth apart. After a frustrating amount of time, she managed to hold down the backpack with one foot and scrape the top of the backpack open with the other.
But that was all she could do until Ace got tired of kneeling on metal and let go of her chin.
As the sun descended behind the Sierra Nevadas, the scattered developments that failed to connect Carson City and Refuge gave way to ragged hills rising above the eastern valley. Wind stirred dust across the landscape like a series of small campfires. Behind them, something bigger than a campfire spread like a smudge across the sky.
“Take the next right turn,” Ace said.
Kimberli jumped, startled by the end to silence. “Does that mean it’s okay to talk?”
“Sure,” Ace said. “You’re driving fine now.”
Shaye warily stretched her neck. When his hand didn’t reappear, she decided that he had been as uncomfortable as she had been. She scratched her lower leg, testing how much freedom Ace would give her.
He tossed his hat aside and rubbed his head like it itched.
“I’ll be glad when the first hard frost comes and kills the mosquitoes,” she said. “I got covered in bites out hiking.”
Apparently he didn’t care about the bugs one way or another.
They’d probably die if they drank his blood.
Pretending she was scratching, she slid her hand into the open backpack. She knew right where the emergency locater was. It was just a matter of getting it and turning it on without being killed.
She bit her lip against bubbling laughter, recognizing it as the first signpost on the way to hysteria.
Deep breath.
Yoga breath.
Her fingers reached the locater beacon. The SPOT 2 wasn’t much bigger than a pack of cigarettes or an iPod. She just had to be sure she hit the right button. She really didn’t want to activate the talk function and give away her best hope of getting out of this mess alive.
Her sweaty fingers slid over the face of the device. Her heart stuttered when she almost pressed the wrong button. Finally she found the recessed switch that activated the beacon’s soundless pings.
Kimberli hit a hole in the deteriorating road.
The SPOT 2 squirted from Shaye’s fingers. It seemed like forever before she found it again, but it had only been a few seconds since she first bent over. Adrenaline was screwing up her sense of time. Her finger slid off the switch, returned, and held it down long enough to activate the beacon.
“Are you all right?” Kimberli asked.
“Little nauseated,” Shaye mumbled, stuffing the beacon deep under the front seat, wedging it out of sight. “Light-headed.” She put her head farther between her legs as she felt for the bear spray. It was designed to convince six-hundred-pound bears that the human they were charging wasn’t really worth it. The pepper-based liquid was powerful enough to shoot its spray more than fifteen feet. She’d practiced with a water version, but knew that moving targets were a lot trickier. Especially intelligent human targets.
There, in its loop on the side of the backpack. Smaller than a water bottle but not by much.
“Think I’m coming down with something,” Shaye mumbled. She slid the spray canister free and hid it under her feet. “Haven’t felt good all day.”
“Sit up where I can see you,” Ace said sharply. “Kimberli, watch the road. It gets worse in half a mile.”
With a muffled sound, Shaye sat up. “Can I open the window?”
“A few inches, no more,” he said.
She rolled it down and drew some slow, deep breaths. The air tasted of dust and sage beneath fading sunlight. She had thought she would feel relieved after she had activated the locater, but instead she felt tighter, like a spring being compressed and then compressed ever more until it quivered on the edge of flying apart.
Where are you, Tanner?
Why did I find you only to lose you?
There was no answer but her memory of Lorne’s body and scavengers closing in.
She did some more deep breathing. The cylinder of bear spray felt comforting under her feet. The spray wouldn’t kill Ace, but if she scored a direct hit, it sure would make him lose his focus.
“Now that you’ve had a chance to settle down and think,” Kimberli said to Shaye, “you can see our point, can’t you?”
Is she on crack?
“Kimberli’s right,” Ace said. “No need to let personal baggage get in the way of business.”
Personal baggage? Does he mean Lorne?
Carefully Shaye shrugged. “I’m not sure just what the business is that we’re talking about.”
“Guess,” Ace said.
“Since it all started with Lorne backing out of the Conservancy deal, I’ll guess the business is his land.” Mentally crossing her fingers, she said, “In the right hands, his ranch would make a beautiful—and beautifully profitable—resort.”
“I knew you’d understand,” Kimberli said, relieved and eager at the same time. “The whole thing is bigger than one old man and a run-down ranch nobody wants, including the one who supposedly inherits it. These small-town, small-time ranchers just don’t get the big picture.”
“Lorne sure didn’t,” Shaye said. That, at least, was the truth.
“He was just letting this incredible opportunity go to waste by being so stub—”
Abruptly Kimberli stopped talking long enough to make the right turn, miss second gear, and have to slow enough to start all over again in first. As if to make up for the mistake, she gunned the engine and jerked through the gears.
“Take it easy,” Ace said. “This piece of crap is more than thirty years old. We’ve got a ways to go yet.”
Not to mention getting back from wherever you’re going,
Shaye thought bitterly.
But I don’t need to worry about that little thing, do I?
“Anyway,” Kimberli said with determined brightness, “we can put Lorne’s land to work for everyone now. I just wish he’d had his heart attack after he initialed the contract and signed the letter of intent.”
“Inconvenient of him,” Shaye said neutrally.
“Exactly. See, Ace? I told you she’d understand. There’s no need for all the rough talk. Shaye is our friend.”
Kimberli half turned to glance at him in the backseat. The movement made the rhinestones on her silk shirt swirl like a mass of tiny suns shooting out her large, unlikely breasts.
“Lorne was at the end of the road,” Ace said, his voice bored. “He just didn’t know how close it was. Nobody ever does. There’s no point in wailing over an old man’s death. Emotion is a waste of energy anyway. The Conservancy traffics in nostalgia, but it’s one thing to believe and another to use beliefs.”
Kimberli blinked and turned her attention fully back to the road. “That sounds so . . . cold.”
“Give me cold over stupid every time,” he said. “Just up past those fences and over the cattle grate, turn left.”
“I don’t see a road,” Kimberli complained. Her expression said she wasn’t happy at the turn of the conversation.
“It’s not much, but it’s there. Follow my directions and you won’t even have to use low range.”
Kimberli gripped the wheel tighter. “It will be dark soon. You know I don’t like night driving.”
“You think I like banging my butt in the cargo space?”
She pouted.
How stupid are you, Kimberli?
Shaye thought.
Do you really believe that Lorne died of a heart attack and that this is all just talky-talk business? A little seamy, a lot cold, but still, just business?
“Stupid people live in the past,” Ace said as if he had been reading Shaye’s mind. “Smart ones live in the present and plan for the future.”
Kimberli nodded.
“Like a high-end resort on low-rent land,” Shaye said.
“Among other things,” he said. “The present always becomes the future. The intelligent choice is to understand that and not get tangled in emotions and the past.”
“There’s always a cost,” she said, easing forward again as though to scratch her leg.
Her fingertips brushed the backpack. She flipped the top closed but didn’t fasten it.
“Sure,” he said with a smile. “Take notes, Kimberli. Your blue-jeaned protégée is about to name her price.”
Shaye started to deny it, then realized how dumb that would be.
“Sure,” she said, echoing his tone. “I want a job.”
He laughed. “I was right all along. You were just stirring things up to see if there was a better payday in it for you. Self-interest is at the heart of every idealist.”
“I’ve never met an idealist, so I wouldn’t know,” she said.
She doubted Ace had, either.
T
anner drove into the Mountain View Motel’s parking lot the same way he had driven since the gas station—too fast. The first thing he saw was a champagne Lexus parked opposite number twenty-three. He pulled in next to it.
The Nevada license plate on the Lexus showed a rearing horse. The plate itself said
SAVE IT
. The plate holder said
NEVADA RANCH CONSERVANCY
.
A chill settled deeper into Tanner’s gut. Despite everything, he still had hoped he was wrong, that Shaye was just asleep, safe, a cell phone with a dead battery on the night table beside her.
Now he knew that for the fool’s dream it was. This was one too many in the string of coincidences clouding Lorne’s death.
Okay, so Kimberli isn’t just into conning rich men. She has a sideline in kidnapping. Or did she somehow talk Shaye into taking a drive? And where did Kimberli meet Rua? Did she pay him with sex? Can she even hold a handgun well enough to hit him at close range? Is she cold enough for murder one?
Tanner didn’t particularly like Kimberli, and he knew that if pushed hard enough, anyone could kill, but he was having a hard time seeing her as having the brainpower or the sheer stones to pull off swindling Lorne, hiring out a murder, and then killing the murderer herself.
The important thing is to find Shaye and keep her safe. With me.
He reached under the front seat and hauled out his pistol in its belt holder. He kept the weapon in hand and clipped the holster to the back of his jeans. Nevada didn’t require a license to carry a weapon in plain sight, so he wasn’t worried about pulling his shirt out to cover the gun.
The air smelled vaguely of woodsmoke. Tanner didn’t hear any sirens, so he ignored it. Keeping his pistol along his right leg, he climbed the stairs. The tag requesting maid service dangled in the fitful wind. Left-handed, he fished the key card out of his jeans pocket, unlocked and threw open the door to number twenty-three.
No sound.
No shots.
No body.
The room’s stale air felt clammy after the dry, late-afternoon air outside. He breathed in cautiously but thoroughly. No scent of blood and human waste.
Thank God.
Tanner went through the two rooms with the speed and care of the cop he was.
Empty.
His pulse beat heavily as he put his pistol in its holster. Shaye wasn’t dead or hurt inside the room, but that didn’t make her being safe and alive anywhere else a certainty.
At least I don’t have to worry about leaving prints,
he thought as he began to search the room,
because I don’t have any gloves on me.
Just one more thing I didn’t think I’d need in Refuge.
He didn’t know what he expected to find in the room, but anything was better than what he had now. There wasn’t enough sunlight left for a decent search, so he turned on every light in the place. The energy-efficient bulbs were slow, dim, and made everything a ghastly shade of greenish yellow.
The bedspread was a tangled mess, sheets whipped around it like sails that had come unmoored in wind. It could have looked like that for a perfectly innocent reason. He and Shaye had all but attacked each other in their rush to get skin to skin, need to need, heat to heat. The memory was both beautiful and bleak.
She should be here.
If only I hadn’t left her . . .
Don’t go there,
he told himself.
Think like a cop, not a lover, because a lover won’t do Shaye a damn bit of good right now.
Since none of her clothes were tossed around the way they had been when he left, she must have gotten dressed before she disappeared. Even her jacket was gone. The furniture hadn’t been moved. There were stains on the carpet, but none of them was fresh.
He opened drawers and found the courtesy pen and notepad undisturbed. He picked up the notepad, tilting and turning to catch the light, making sure that there wasn’t an impression left by any note she might have tried to write.
The paper was unmarked. All the other drawers were empty. So was the closet. The bed was solid to the floor. Nothing was caught in the blackout curtains on any of the windows.
No water was drying on the shower glass or splashed on the floor. Two of the washrags and towels were rumpled. He had used one set for a fast cleanup. Presumably Shaye had used the other. A wad of toilet paper in the trash can—
Wait.
I didn’t leave that. Did Shaye?
When he prodded the toilet paper, he felt something solid beneath. He grabbed a strip of tissue to protect his fingers and preserve any possible evidence. If this was the kind of crime scene he was afraid it was, technicians would be trying to lift latent prints from every surface, even the unlikely ones like toilet paper.
Gently he teased apart the wad of tissue until Shaye’s cell phone lay in plain view. The phone was off. The SIM card was gone.
A combination of rage and fear flashed through Tanner, vaporizing the ice in his gut in the instant before he clamped down on his self-control. Shaye damn well deserved better than some hothead tearing around the landscape punching everything in sight.
He forced himself to breathe calmly, but his mind still clawed like a caged animal.
Nevada is a big, empty state. Lots of places to hide bodies.
Too many.
I could search for the rest of my life and—
Vaguely he realized his hand hurt. He glanced down, saw his left fist beating methodically on the cheap wood cabinet like it was a punching bag. Slowly he forced his fingers to unclench.
Use your head,
he told himself savagely.
You can beat the hell out of something later.
The sound of a maid’s cart bumping along the cement walkway a story below focused Tanner. He strode out of the room, flipped the card to
DO NOT DISTURB
, and trotted down the stairs. He saw a young woman in jeans and a western shirt hauling trash from a room to the garbage section of her cart. She had the look of a pretty young mother with two jobs and not enough sleep. She probably had a gig as a cocktail waitress in the evening.
“Room twenty-three,” he said, smiling and giving her plenty of physical space. Young maids were rightly nervous of being caught alone in a room by a strange man.
“Hi,” she said, smiling. “I saw the service card out, and I’ll be up as soon as I finish here. Should only be a minute.”
“No problem,” he said easily. “My woman was supposed to wait for me, but the room is empty. You notice anyone heading into or out of our room?”
“I was outside taking a smoke by the Dumpster a little while ago. Saw two blondes and a guy almost your size, wearing fishing gear and a floppy hat to cover up what looked like a bald head. One of the blondes looked like a rodeo queen, all big hair and makeup and glitter on her tight shirt. The other blonde was the real kind, but she could have used some of her friend’s makeup. Real pale, you know?”
Kimberli and Ace.
Tanner’s jaw tightened but he nodded amiably. “I know them. They’re hard to say no to.”
“Your girlfriend didn’t look real eager.”
“Any sign she was really unwilling? Last I heard, she was mad at them.”
The maid shrugged. “She was on her own feet, not real happy but not fighting. Probably getting over her mad.”
“You see which car they took?”
“Old orange Bronco. I didn’t see where they went, because my break was over and I had to get back to work. Boss was driving into the parking lot.”
He pulled out his wallet and gave her a ten. He knew what life working two jobs was like. “Thanks. And don’t bother with room twenty-three. We’re staying the night. She must have left the sign wrong-side out.”
The ten disappeared into the woman’s front pocket. “A lot of people do. Boss is too cheap to have separate signs. You sure about the room? I don’t mind.”
“I’m sure.”
The woman stretched her back, stuffed an armload of sheets and towels in her cart, closed the door to the room she had just made up, and pushed the cart back the way it had come.
Tanner watched her without seeing her, caught by the memory of Rua dead on his back in his bedroom, lit by the unearthly glow of the aquarium.
Except it was Shaye’s face, Shaye’s body.
He grabbed his cell phone, found August’s number in the memory, and called the deputy on his private phone.
“What’s new?” the deputy asked. “Someone else drew second shift, so I’m off in thirty.”
“Kimberli’s car is in the motel parking lot. The maid saw two blondes—one flashy, one natural—and a probably bald-headed man get in an old orange Bronco. Shaye’s cell phone was buried in the bathroom wastebasket. The SIM card is gone. Shaye promised she would be here when I got back from the wild-goose chase Ace sent me on to Reno. I’m assuming a hostage situation.”
“Shit. Desmond, too? You’re certain?”
“As much as I can be without having seen it myself. That enough to get the sheriff off his dead ass?”
“Doubt it. He can come up with more objections than you have answers or time. Desmond is a big supporter. Besides, the sheriff is on his way to El Dorado County.”
The sound of computer keys clicking came over the phone as August talked.
“But,” the deputy said, “I outrank Mercer. I just upgraded the BOLO to a potential felony in progress. Then I’ll—damn, the other phone is ringing. Hang on. I’m not off the clock yet.”
Tanner headed for Lorne’s truck and waited. He was getting in behind the wheel when August came back on the line.
“SAR county coordinator got a call from a monitoring service. Seems that an emergency beacon used by one of our SAR people has been activated and is broadcasting.”
“Search and rescue?”
“Yes. The ID matches the beacon we issued to Shaye when she volunteered for SAR duty. It’s moving, so they can’t get a real fix on it. Can’t raise her cell phone, either, but after what you told me I won’t try anymore. Her beacon’s radio is on standby, so they can’t get through to her. Besides, everybody but the three-legged dog is—”
“How close is the beacon?” Tanner cut in, starting the truck.
“South and east of Refuge. Our nearest four-wheel patrol car is at least an hour away, more if they keep going toward tribal lands. Some of the dirt tracks out there need high clearance.”
“What about a helicopter?”
“Look to the west and what do you see?” the deputy asked.
“Mountains and some clouds.”
“One of those clouds is a lot of smoke in east El Dorado County, burning over the line to Refuge County. People have been cut off and burned out. Everything that can fly is already gone. SAR is scrambling to check on hikers.”
Tanner had seen too many brushfires in Los Angeles County not to know what an uncontrolled fire meant, especially with population in danger.
“Give me directions to the beacon’s location,” he said.
August did, then listened as Tanner repeated everything back to him verbatim.
“And do me a favor,” Tanner added. “If any speed teams are still working, keep them off my ass.”
“What are you driving?”
He described Lorne’s truck right down to the license plate.
“Okay. You’ve just been deputized to pursue the BOLO. Leave your phone on. I’ll tell you if the locater changes direction.”
“I owe you,” Tanner said, meaning it.
“Stuff it. Shaye is worth getting fired over. She’s one of the good people. Find her. I’m taking a radio and following as soon as Mercer arrives and I can swap my patrol car for my own truck.”
Tanner left the motel parking lot so fast he made marks on the old asphalt.
