Authors: Meg Gardiner

Tags: #Mystery, #Suspense, #Romance, #Thriller

The Nightmare Thief (13 page)

BOOK: The Nightmare Thief

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And they needed to go, right now. Starting with the Edge Adventures douche, Mr. Kyle with-the-toy-gun Ritter. Then the two hikers who had hitched along. Up here, nobody would hear the echo of rifle fire, and nobody would miss those two.

He kept climbing, slowly, inch by inch—which made him all the more furious.

The wind cascaded through the pines. Distantly, running water flowed over rocks. From below him, bouncing off the sides of the gorge, came voices. Shrill, stressed-out rich kid voices. Probably wondering why their Mocha Frappuccinos and platinum credit cards couldn’t get them out of there.

Carefully, Von leaned forward to see what the disposables were doing down at the bottom of the gorge.

He couldn’t see a thing.

The slope of the gorge was too shallow at this point. It kept him from seeing all the way to the bottom. He couldn’t get them.

He sat down again. “Little shits.”

He slung the AK over his shoulder. He needed a better vantage point. He turned and climbed toward the road, crawling yard by yard, up the crumbling slope, with the hot-stove sizzle of rage growing louder in his head.

A minute later, he found his cell phone.

“Stay still and hang tough,” Gabe told Noah. “We’ll be right back to set your leg.”

Noah nodded grimly. He was as pale as a fish belly, with pain spinning in his eyes. Lark hovered near him, outwardly calm but humming like a pipe under pressure.

Jo crawled behind Gabe across the roof-cum-floor of the wrecked Hummer. He slid through the empty window frame as smooth and lithe as an eel. She followed, stiff and bruised, and dropped to the dirt.

The air smelled of gasoline and rubber and wet moss. She crouched for a moment, inhaling the sense of space around her. It was huge. It was freedom.

Carefully, feeling every ding and laceration, she straightened. And she got her first full look at the wreck. Her throat went tight.

The Hummer had slid down the eastern slope of the gorge. Halfway down, it had scraped against a line of boulders. Slowed by its impact with a sluice gate of granite, it had veered into soft soil and plowed down to the riverbank at an oblique angle. That had prevented it from dropping like a bomb off a ledge about eighty feet above them.

The ledge was heavily eroded. It had roots protruding from it, and rocks and crumbling dirt clods. Going over would have killed them all. Instead, the Hummer had come to rest upside down about a dozen feet from the edge of the rock-strewn river.

She walked to the river’s edge over clacking pebbles and mossy rocks. Upstream, the river rushed around boulders. The water sounded like reassurance. But farther out, it looked strangely turbulent.

They’d been lucky. She didn’t want to comprehend how lucky.

She was still shaky, but her pulse was no longer pounding in her ears. She didn’t have the odd sensation of tasting cement dust or smelling oily black smoke. But her mouth was dry, her legs wobbly. She turned.

And saw everybody staring at her.

They were loitering in a semicircle near the vehicle. Not exactly shivering, not crying. But scared and shocked and lost. And looking to her.

“What are we going to do?” Peyton said.

Jo took a long breath. She tried to adopt her bedside manner.
Calm down. You need your shit together.
Peyton was eyeing her like she had on a cape.

“We’re going to figure out how to get help and get out of here,” Jo said.

“How we gonna do that?” said Kyle. “Who are you?”

“I’m a physician,” Jo said.

Dustin pointed at Gabe. “So who’s he?”

Gabe kept his expression low-key. “I’m a pararescueman with the California Air National Guard.”

“Huh? Para-what? Thunderbirds are go?” Dustin spread his hands.
So?
“What’s that mean?”

“Search and rescue. Combat rescue and battlefield surgery.”

“Combat? Where were you when I needed your backup in the Hummer?”

Jo bristled.
Oh no, you did not just say that.

Dustin stepped toward Gabe. “I was trying to save us, and you just let me …”

The rest of the sentence hung in the air: …
let me make an ass of myself and crash the limo.

Dustin wiped grit from his face with the back of his hand. He looked equally ready to spit and cry. “I could have used more help, man. Maybe we’d still be on the road. Maybe
we’d
be at the wheel of the Hummer now, calling Delta Force or whatever brigade you belong to.”

Jo clamped her jaw tight.
Keep quiet, Beckett. Just shut up
.

Gabe simply took his hands from his jeans pockets and let them hang loose at his sides. “Maybe. Or maybe if you had waited, we wouldn’t have crashed.”

Dustin turned to his friends, shaking his head. “You believe this weekend warrior?”

Kyle tipped back his baseball cap with an index finger. “I know who he is.”

Everybody looked around at him.

“He’s the guy who probably kept you from getting shot,” he said. “He cracked Von’s head against the door frame until the man nearly passed out. Got him to lower his gun hand instead of continuing to fire.”

“What?” Dustin said.

Kyle sauntered toward them. “Von was firing like a frightened schoolmarm.” He nodded at Friedrich’s covered corpse. “Von shot the driver.”

Autumn gaped. “You’re serious?”

“Why do you think the limo went off the road? Dustin was wrestling the guy with the gun, and the guy with the gun started firing, trying to hit all you little sons of bitches. The only things he did hit were your friend Noah and his
compadre
at the wheel.”

Dustin paled.

Kyle nodded at Gabe. “He’s the guy who disabled Von. If he hadn’t, you’d probably all be dead.” He paused, then walked toward Gabe. “I know who you are. You’re the guy who took a bullet for Robert McFarland.”

Everybody went silent, and Peyton actually stepped back, as though she’d been shoved. Autumn’s eyes went as round as saucers. Dustin looked confused.

“You took one for the president. You preserved the constitutional order and saved the commander in chief.” Kyle stopped in front of Gabe. “Partner, that makes you the man.”

The river burbled. In the distance, thunder rolled. Kyle’s gaze was intense and demanding.

“So, you tell me,” he said. “What’s the plan?”

Gabe eyed Kyle slowly and then the rest of them.

“The plan,” he said, “is to survive. And here’s how we need to do it.”

E
van hitched her backpack over her shoulder and trooped out of Starbucks, feeling energized and full of suspicion.

Though the October sun was warm, the shadows were a cool whisper. The sky was deep blue, gold streaked, headed toward evening. People crowded past her on the sidewalk. She stopped at the corner for a red light, wondering about Ragnarok Investments.

It didn’t exist.

It was a phantom. The number on Phelps Wylie’s second cell phone—the number Wylie had repeatedly received calls from in the days before he died—belonged to a business that was a hollow shell.

Ragnarok’s presence in the world was limited to a listing in the California Department of Corporations database. No Web site. No news, not even a press release. No information about the owners or its business. No official phone number. Ragnarok was a front. It was a curt woman answering a cell phone.

Who was she to Wylie? A subterranean business partner? A lover?

The carjacker?

If she could piece together the other partial numbers from Wylie’s damaged phone, perhaps she could find out. She stopped at a holein-the-wall restaurant, grabbed Hunan chicken and a cold Tsingtao, and took them to the tourist motel where she was staying. In her room, the fading sun cast red light across the Formica table. The television weather report predicted storms in the Sierras.

She got out her laptop and the list of partial phone numbers. But before she started cold calling, she phoned Santa Barbara.

Her neighbor and friend, Nikki Vincent, answered on the seventh ring. “Don’t make a pregnant woman run like that.”

“But it’s my favorite game,” Evan said. “How’re things?”

“Jiffy.”

She smiled. Nikki was a tightly sprung African American artist who wore her hair in dreadlocks. Hearing her say
jiffy
was as incongruous as hearing Nancy Reagan sing lead for Metallica.

“Georgie’s fine. I’ll put her on,” Nikki said.

Georgie—Georgia Delaney—was Evan’s eleven-year-old half sister. Evan had recently assumed her guardianship, under difficult circumstances. Georgie was struggling to make sense of life in California with the big sister she had only just met, the new surrogate mom who might or might not continue in that role for—a month? a year? forever?

And now Evan was out of town for a couple of days. She felt a pang.

On the end of the line, the phone rattled. A little girl’s voice came on. “Hiya.”

“How’s your day going, sugar?”

“We played football after school, and now Nikki’s cooking paella.”

By football
,
Georgie meant soccer. Her English accent was strong. They talked for a few minutes, and Georgie said, “See you Sunday?”

“That’s the plan. Be good, little sug’. I love you.”

Evan ended the call, holding the phone in the quiet of the motel room. The pang lingered.
I’m doing this job for you,
she thought.
For both of us. To prove to the world that I’m still here, that I care, that I’m on the side of right.

And to prove that Phelps Wylie mattered. His death should not be left unexplained or picked over by gossips. He deserved an accounting.

She laid out the list of partial phone numbers from Wylie’s call register and set out to systematically phone every possible combination of numbers that could complete them. It took her ninety minutes to work through the list and cross off numbers that were out of service or obviously had no connection to Wylie.

The last number she dialed rang endlessly before a robotic machine answered.
“The person you are trying to reach”
—there was a pause, and a different voice came on—“Ruby Ratner”—back to the robot
—“is not available. Please leave a message for”
—“Ruby Ratner”—
“after the tone.”

Evan left a message asking Ratner to phone her back.

Ruby Ratner.

It was an androgynous voice. A high tenor or a low alto. Asked to bet whether it was male or female, Evan would have hedged.

Could it have been the woman who answered the phone for Ragnarok? Could it have been the carjacker?

Searching online for
Ruby Ratner
brought up nine results, most from the U.S. Census, offering to search for the prevalence of the name. But one result was a public-records search from a site that listed half a dozen Ruby Ratners in the western United States. Two in the Bay Area. One in San Francisco.

And the phone number in Wylie’s call register was a San Francisco number. She checked the phone book. Ratner’s street address was listed.

The public-records site promised juicy details—credit histories and records of criminal convictions—if she paid a premium subscription. Which she could, just by entering her credit card number.

The blinking cursor, enticing her to fork out, wasn’t exactly a growl. But it was a whisper, suggesting that something rough and toothy might lie behind the pay wall.

She wasn’t about to chuck $59.99 into that hole. However, one of her rules, honored occasionally, was
Don’t stumble blind into thickets where you hear things growling.

She didn’t have many favors she could call in. Not at the moment, not with the law enforcement community. This called for finesse. Charm. Distraction. She phoned a contact at the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department, Detective Lilia Rodriguez.

Rodriguez was off duty, so she left a message. “I’m writing an investigative piece on Phelps Wylie, and I’ve unearthed a lead. Lily, it’s big. It’ll mean gold stars to the detective who brings it home.” She left the name Ruby Ratner and asked Lily to phone her back.

She grabbed her things.

Ruby Ratner’s house was a dreary yellow box in a dispirited neighborhood near an elevated section of I-280. The yard was paved with concrete and decorated with plastic windmills, bright as a box of crayons, stuck by the dozen in a chain-link fence. When Evan pushed open the creaking gate, a dog inside the house cut loose with yippy barking.

She was halfway up the weed-bearded walk when the door cracked open. A barking orb of noise appeared, parked between the sturdy legs of a woman with a gray perm. The woman’s face was framed by the darkness behind her.

“You the party planner?” she said.

Her mouth was pinched, like she was sucking on a pebble. Her cat’s-eye glasses may have been fashionable when Harper Lee sat down to write
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Maybe. In trailer parks that got the older editions of the Sears catalogue.

Evan smiled. “Ruby Ratner?”

“You a process server?”

“No, ma’am.” Not today.

The little dog bared its teeth and barked like it was about to have a seizure. The woman nudged it aside with her ankle. It bounced back as if magnetized and lunged for the crack in the doorway. The woman squinted at Evan.

“Mrs. Ratner? About the party?” Evan said.

The woman appeared to think about things for a moment. The dog began to hump her ankle.

She shook it off. “Pepito, go get your squeaky toy.”

The dog turned and ticked away. The woman scowled at Evan for a moment longer. Without a word she stepped back and opened the door.

“He’s not here, but we can talk about the party,” she said.

She invited Evan in. To the OK Corral.

BOOK: The Nightmare Thief

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