The Nightmare Thief (18 page)

Real guns. They were aimed at Autumn’s head.

And she didn’t even know it. She thought it was a party. The party he had planned for her. The party he had sent her to.

The party that Edge Adventures had phoned in to the SFPD.

The twisted robot voice warbled from the phone. “Pretty girl. So oblivious.”

“What have you done? Who is this? Where’s Coates?”

The phone pinged again. A new photo arrived. Reiniger opened it and his vision grayed at the edges.

It was a photo of Terry Coates. The Edge Adventures owner was lying on the floor of—what—a tractor-trailer? His hands were bound and he was gagged. And he was covered in blood.

Reiniger tried to focus. “Is this a hoax?”

Ping.
New photo.

It was Cody Grier, splayed on the dirt.

Reiniger gripped the phone and tried to convince himself this was a prank, a trick, a massive ruse designed to swindle him. He couldn’t manage it. He dry heaved.

The voice returned. “Threats, I’ve learned, are insufficient. Action is required. Isn’t it?”

“Don’t hurt her.”

“I’m glad you understand.”

The voice, deep and ghostly, so mechanical, seemed to mock him. Seemed to be
enjoying
this. Reiniger felt nausea and a disintegrative rage, a sense that his center wasn’t holding. He was in a limousine driving down the Long Island Expressway toward Manhattan, his suit pressed, his Rolex gleaming in the streetlights. And death was whispering at him through the phone.

“Give her back to me. I’ll do whatever you want. Just don’t hurt her.”

 

 

Haugen tightened his hands into fists. Reiniger was breaking. It was a breathtaking sensation. His heart, dry and knotted, beat faster.

“Step one—acceptance. I’m proud of you, Peter.”

Sabine frowned at him.
Don’t toy with Reiniger,
the look said. He ignored her. This was the culmination of years of planning. It was a moment to be savored. Sabine could fret about the problems up the road. He deserved this moment.

“Now. Step two. You won’t call the cops, or your kidnap insurers and their security Neanderthals, because if you do, the rest of Autumn’s companions will die.”

“You can’t kill them.”

“Do not interrupt me. Autumn’s companions will die
first.
”

He paused to let the statement sink in. “I don’t believe that you have a moment’s concern for Autumn’s friends. You wouldn’t care if Lark Sobieski or Noah Holloway died in a private rescue attempt, as long as Autumn came home.”

He slowed his speech. Modulate, he told himself. No vocal inflections, no clues. Just the plain facts.

Sabine tapped her watch.
Cut it short.
He couldn’t risk the chance that Reiniger had, despite his orders, alerted his corporate security team to find Coates’s phone. He needed to get off the line. And then to toy with Reiniger some more.

“But if I spot the FBI’s hostage rescue team preparing to deploy or even some steroid-juiced bodyguard getting ready to storm in and rescue your daughter, I will execute the rest of Autumn’s companions one by one. She’ll watch. And I’ll tell her it’s your fault.”

Reiniger didn’t respond.

“And if Autumn comes home after being liberated, it won’t be for long. My operatives will find her. They’ll kill her. And they’ll do it while
you
watch.”

He let Reiniger think about it.

“Still considering?” Haugen said. “I don’t think you want the SEC to start digging around in your business doings, either.”

“Bastard.”

“What do you want?” Reiniger said.

“I’ll phone back in half an hour.” He allowed himself the smallest of smiles. “When I do, be sure you have a pen.”

J
o walked to the back end of the wrecked Hummer, where Autumn and Peyton were piling up survival supplies.

Two lighters. Half a dozen plastic water bottles. A case of Budweiser.

It was a start.

The wind gusted up the gorge, rushing through the darkened pines and shirring the dark steel surface of the river. Peyton sat down on a rock. Hunched over, in pain, she looked bedraggled and small. It made her look younger, emphasized her nerves and fright.

“When it gets dark, predators’ll come out,” she said. “Maybe cougars.”

Jo had wilderness experience, thanks to years of rock climbing and backpacking trips in the Sierras and Cascades. Though it was nowhere close to Gabe’s training, she knew the basics. She knew that things could go wrong at the snap of a finger and that nothing should be taken for granted. Life and death were only fragile, irrevocable breaths apart.

And she knew that there were real, and tough, psychological aspects to survival in a wilderness emergency. Gabe knew it too: He’d been trained to recognize it in himself and his men and women. But he was busy taking care of perimeter defense. Jo kept an eye on the roiling emotions around her. Pain. Thirst. Cold. Fatigue. Isolation. Fear.

Hopelessness.

“Cougars are highly unlikely to attack a group of people,” she said. “They—”

“Scorpions. Snakes. They crawl into empty shoes and sleeping bags.
Don’t
say it’s unlikely—when I was little I almost got poisoned by a rattler on a family camping trip.”

“We’re going to stick together and keep our eyes open. We’ll protect each other,” she said.

Gabe came up behind her. “Worrying about everything?”

“Of course. And, yes, I have read the U.S. Air Force survival manual.”

Autumn said, “Anything we
don’t
have to worry about?”

“Shark attack,” Jo said. “We lucked out there.”

Peyton pulled on a lock of her blond hair and wound it compulsively around her finger. The movement hurt her fractured clavicle, and she grimaced. “I can’t believe this is happening to us.”

“You were expecting an extreme reality experience, right?” Jo said.

Autumn glanced at Jo and actually laughed. “And now we’re getting it.”

“Yes. Though you should ask for your money back.”

“But you weren’t expecting any of this,” Autumn said.

“No.” Jo nodded toward the limo. “Bundle up and get inside the Hummer.”

Peyton just sat on the rock. Her eyes were glossy. “We’re going to die.”

“No. We’re going to get out of here if it’s the last thing I do,” Jo said.

“Like you guys are the X-Men? Give me a break.”

“Hey, Peyton?” Autumn said. “Shut the hell up and get in the Hummer.”

Peyton didn’t cringe, but she frowned, intensely.
Good
, Jo thought. Get her mad. That was better than caving in.

“I’m the queen of the weekend,” Autumn said. “Your ruler and your bad boss. So move your pretty pink ass.”

Peyton stood and headed for the limo, picking at her charm bracelet. Jo looked at Autumn and thought she seemed taller than she’d first imagined.

When Peyton neared the Hummer she turned her head to avoid looking at Friedrich’s corpse. Jo girded herself. They had an unpleasant task to take care of.

“We should move the bodies,” she said.

Gabe nodded. Autumn and Lark looked nauseated. But the idea of huddling in the Hummer, surrounded by brutalized corpses, was too gruesome to contemplate.

The four of them dragged Friedrich, and then the man in the luggage compartment, away from the vehicle—far enough that getting back inside the Hummer no longer felt disgusting or ghoulish.

“Thanks,” Jo said.

The girls didn’t reply. They clattered across rocks and sand to the river, crouched down, and scrubbed their hands, arms, faces, furiously. Jo and Gabe were right behind them. The cold bite of the water felt more than cleansing. It felt emotionally necessary.

Jo dried her hands on her jeans and checked the time. It had been twenty minutes since Dustin and Kyle struck out across the river.

“Time to cross the river and try to get a signal on my phone. Don’t know how much elevation I’ll need. Wish me luck.”

Gabe looked unhappy. “Be careful.”

She found a spot upriver where the water streamed over the granite like glass, only an inch deep. She crossed to the western bank and darted into thick brush. The last embers of daylight painted highlights and shadows on the steep slopes of the gorge. She scanned it, looking for movement, for color, for flashes of metal. If Von was out there, he was concealed.

She glanced back across the river. Gabe waved.

Beneath the trees, she climbed in shadow up the hillside.
Keep going.
As long as she kept moving she could suppress her fears.

She climbed a hundred meters and crouched behind a gray boulder. The sky was indigo with the last brush of daylight. But thunderheads were stacking ever nearer, and dusk had drawn a gray veil over the gorge. She pulled out her phone, cupped her hand over the display to hide its light, and pushed a button. The display popped on, hot blue in the twilight.
Searching.
The wind buffeted the side of her head.

How had she and Gabe ended up here, on this mountainside, in such straits?

Life was riddled with accidents. Chance was a fearsome force in the cosmos. She believed in free will and relished her own patch of accountability, her ability to grab the throttle and adjust course, even in a quantum universe. However, this accident didn’t feel entirely random. This felt like a collision of loaded dice on a craps table. But she couldn’t see who had thrown them.

One bar on the phone. She had a signal.
“Yes
.
”

She held the phone gingerly, as though it were a tiny bird’s egg with a fragile shell. She didn’t want to adjust the angle of the antenna and lose the little symbols on the display. She dialed 9-1-1.

“Dammit.”

She had to get a stronger signal. Tucking the phone in her back pocket, she scurried up the slope, around worn rocks and the rough bark of tree trunks. Pinecones crunched beneath her hiking boots. The thin, cold air caught her as she climbed.

Halfway up the slope she ducked behind another boulder. She crouched with her back against the stone. It was cold, rough, solid. Birdsong had died and all she could hear was the water rushing in the river below.

She took out her phone. Heard it
ping
.

She had a message.

 

 

Gabe stood on the riverbank, scanning the far side of the gorge. He could no longer see Jo.

Autumn, spear in hand, walked over. “Something wrong?”

“Can you spot Jo?”

Autumn walked upstream. After a minute, she pointed. “Behind that rock.”

Gabe relaxed, but not by much.

Autumn peered up the hill. “Should I keep her company? Buddy up?”

He turned to her in surprise. “Good idea. As long as you stick together.”

Autumn found the inch-deep granite pan and splashed into the river.

 

 

She had a message. No—messages. That meant she had a signal. Delicately she tried, again, to call 9-1-1.

The signal had vanished. She moved the phone around. Nothing. She leaned her head back against the rock.

If there was any chance of getting a stable signal, it would be at the crest of the gorge. She would have to keep climbing.

She opened the messages. The first was from Kyle Ritter:

She wrote back:

She tried to send, failed, and left it in the queue.

The next message was from Evan Delaney.

Evan.

Jo hadn’t checked in with her after forty-eight hours. Maybe, please—maybe Evan was pissed off and trying to reach her.

Her heart pounded. A lead. They had a lead in the murder of Phelps Wylie. But that didn’t matter to her at the moment. She tried to redial Evan’s number.

She stood and kept climbing. Was her phone damaged after all—could it receive calls, but not make them? It pinged again with one more message from Evan. She ducked low and stared at the display. And stopped.

She tried to calm herself, told herself she was seeing things in the dusk, that the shock of the day’s events was causing her to misunderstand.

She began to run up the slope. She wasn’t mistaken. This was too much of a coincidence, and she didn’t believe in coincidence. Just nasty, colliding chance.

Past rocks and trees she ran. Her lungs burned. The wind kicked against her, and the first drops of rain pattered through the pines and hit her face. Two hundred yards above her, the hillside peaked.

The message Evan had sent her was a photo. Taken from Evan’s own phone, it was an image of Ruby Ratner. It had been taken from some kind of cheesy flyer.

Sucking air, she reached the crest of the hill. She aimed west, in the direction Dustin had gone, at a run.

Evan had sent her the photo of a man in a cowboy hat. He had a white circle around the blue iris of his left eye. It looked like a white snake. He was grinning like the Reaper.

It was the Bad Cowboy. It was Kyle Ritter.

D
ustin trudged behind Kyle, hands stuffed into the pockets of his sweatshirt. The wind had turned cold. His entire body felt bruised from the crash, and his hangover was pounding.