The Nightmare Thief (28 page)

“It’s not the first time, but I can’t get either him or his brother. That’s weird.”

“What can you tell me about his plans today? Who’s his client?”

“I don’t know. But it’s a twenty-first-birthday party.”

“Can you find out?”

“Can you find Terry?”

Evan said, “What’s his cell phone number?”

Tang handed over her little notebook, and Evan wrote the number down.

Tang said, “You check out his client. We’ll be back in touch.”

“Please, be quick,” the young woman said.

Evan ended the call and dialed Coates’s number. Tang raced up an on-ramp onto 280 and headed downtown.

Coates’s phone rang.

Tang made her own call. She identified herself and gave her badge number. “I need location services on a cell phone.” Reciting Coates’s number, she said, “Let me know ASAP.”

She changed lanes, not even looking. “If the battery in Coates’s phone is working, we’ll pinpoint its location.”

In Evan’s ear, Coates’s number rang.

 

 

Sabine sat forward in the Volvo and peered at the deputy through the gleam of the headlights. The downpour scattered like BBs from the deputy’s hat and jacket.

“He’s got the brass from Von’s AK-Forty-seven.”

The deputy stared at the cartridge casing for a long second. His head jerked up. He swept the beam of the flashlight across the dirt.

A glinting collection of cartridge casings littered the ground.

“We gotta haul, boss,” Stringer said. “This scene’s gonna get ugly, real fast. That kid’ll call in the cavalry.”

Haugen put his hand on the gearshift. Sabine turned her head. Her gaze was fierce.

The deputy stepped around the clearing, eyes on the cartridge casings. Then he aimed the flashlight at the trees.

Sabine said, “Dane.”

“I see it,” Haugen said.

He couldn’t let the deputy call this in. He put the Volvo in drive and jammed his foot on the gas.

The deputy looked up. He had only a moment to flinch before the Volvo hit him square in the midsection, like a wrecking ball.

The man buckled, his head hit the hood, and he stuck there.

Haugen continued accelerating. Sabine hissed and leaned back against the seat, bracing herself.

Haugen held the wheel and sped across the clearing. At the last second he braked. But still, the heavy SUV was going at noticeable speed when he drove straight into the nearest pine tree.

The brakes kept the airbag from deploying, but still they jerked to a stop.

The deputy made no sound. He hung pinned between the tree and the grille of the Volvo. By the time Haugen put it in reverse, Sabine had jumped out.

He backed up. The deputy slumped off the hood and slid to the ground, out of sight in front of the vehicle. Sabine ran to the spot. Haugen stopped. She bent and came up with the deputy’s service weapon. Swiftly she aimed it at the spot below the hood where the deputy had sprawled.

She fired twice in rapid succession.

Haugen said, “Stringer, put him in the trunk of the patrol car. Then get the other one out of the trees and put him in there too. And clean up the brass.”

Stringer looked at him like,
huh?

“The deputy called in this stop. When the station can’t raise him, they’ll send another deputy to investigate. We have to dispose of the evidence that something happened here.”

He wasn’t worried about the blood. The rain was already washing it away.

Stringer got out. The wind swirled through the Volvo, wet and stinging.

Haugen should have been in the cabin already, tracking market movements and funds transfers. He needed to get up there, quick.

Stringer hunched against the downpour and ran to Sabine’s side. They dragged the deputy’s body toward the patrol car. Halfway there, Sabine stopped. She looked at Haugen, reached into her pocket, and took out her phone.

Correction. A phone.

“It’s Coates’s again,” she called to him.

He shook his head.
Don’t answer.

When they had loaded the bodies, Sabine looked pointedly at the deputy’s car, and at the idling blue Tacoma pickup. Haugen rolled down his window.

“I’ll drive the cruiser. Sabine, you take the Volvo. Stringer, take the pickup.”

“We should dump it,” Stringer said.

“Later. We don’t want to discard a useful vehicle.” Especially since Von and Friedrich had wrecked one already today.

Stringer hopped in the pickup and put it in gear. The lights came on. Haugen got out of the SUV and headed for the cruiser.

Sabine said, “Once the sheriff sends another car to investigate, it will take maybe an hour to get up here. If we’re lucky, it will take longer. If we’re not lucky, they’ll declare their man missing and begin a search.”

“But we’ll be so far gone and so deep in the gorge, in the dark, that they’ll never find us. Come on.”

Sabine climbed into the Volvo. Haugen put a hand on the door. “Who was calling Coates—Peter Reiniger?”

“No. It wasn’t a four-one-five number. I’ll check to see who it was once we get away from here.”

Haugen got in the deputy’s cruiser. There was a shotgun locked beside the center console. The key for it was hanging on the ring in the ignition. Excellent.

He pulled out and headed up the logging road higher into the mountains. The rain came down in sheets, thrown against the windows by the wind. It drummed so hard he could barely see the taillights of the Volvo twenty meters ahead. They crept toward the gorge at five miles an hour.

The cruiser’s radio squawked. A man said, “D.V.?”

The dispatcher sounded worried.

“D.V., you there? Deputy Gilbert?”

Haugen eyed the radio. Perhaps they didn’t have as much time as he’d hoped.

Then they reached the gorge, and Haugen saw a sight that thrilled and terrified him. The river was battering at the footings of the bridge.

T
he storm continued for hours. Inside the Hummer, everybody huddled together for warmth. Jo pressed herself to Gabe’s side. She had taken off her soaking outer shirt and left on her thin but dry thermal fleece. Nobody spoke. The rain needled into the undercarriage of the Hummer above their heads, driven by the wind.

Gabe kept his eyes on the windows and his buck knife in his hand. He was stiff, and Jo didn’t think it was simply from nerves and pain. Though he kept his arm over her shoulder, he seemed distant. She tried to draw him into whispered conversation, but he muttered brief replies.

About four A.M., chilled and thirsty and aching, Jo popped awake, unaware she’d even fallen asleep.

Gabe was no longer by her side. She pried her eyes open. Something had surprised her into wakefulness.

Noise. It had changed.

The rain had eased and the wind had dropped. She no longer heard the near constant, tumbling crack of thunder. But she heard something else.

Gabe was crouched by the window of the Hummer, scanning the terrain outside. Moonlight fell across his face, white and cold.

He was staring at the river.

The sound, the new, raw sound, was water roaring through the gorge. But that wasn’t what frightened her. What frightened her was the sound of the river lapping at the crushed frame of the Hummer.

Gabe moved. “We gotta go. Now.”

He slid across the cramped interior of the limo. In the white moonlight, Jo saw the scene outside.

The lightning had ended. They could safely evacuate. And the rain had stopped. The clouds had blown away, and their opposition now had a clearer, easier chance to come after them. But that wasn’t what scared her.

She saw the river thrashing through the gorge.

“Everybody up,” Gabe said. “Hurry. It’s an emergency.”

Flash flood.

The Hummer had slid to rest a dozen feet from the riverbank, perhaps a meter above the level of the water. But the torrential mountain downpour had created flood conditions.

They were in a granite-lined gorge, where the water couldn’t soak into the ground. It could only run off. Jo saw it—wild waves, turbulent, dangerous, and rising quickly. The spot upriver she had hiked across earlier, the inch-deep rock slab, was deeply submerged. Muddy torrents lapped at the side of the car.

“Quick,” she said. “Gather up all the supplies. Help us get Noah out.”

Nearby, the horse nickered and stamped its feet. Autumn and Lark crawled out the window of the Hummer. They laid a thick coat across the windowsill. Jo and Gabe knelt on either side of Noah.

“Ready?” Gabe said.

Noah nodded halfheartedly. “Surfin’ USA. Let’s go.”

“On three.”

They slid him across the Hummer, grating against dust and chunks of shattered safety glass, to the window. Jo crawled out. She gestured for Autumn to help. They reached back inside and grabbed Noah’s shoulders.

“This is going to hurt,” Jo said.

“Do it.”

She eyed Gabe. Then she and Autumn pulled. Gabe lifted Noah’s legs. Noah’s face looked vampire pale, but he didn’t cry out. With a hard tug, Jo and Autumn hauled him through the window onto the rocky sand outside.

“Shit,” he muttered.

“We’re going to get you on the horse,” Gabe said. “Then we’re going to walk out of here.”

Peyton continued to huddle in the far corner of the Hummer. Over the roar of the river, she said, “Don’t make me. They’re out there.”

“And they’re coming. We have to leave.” Jo gestured to the river. “Look.”

“Where can we even go?” Peyton said.

Jo turned, hopeless, to the river. Even in the time it had taken them to get out of the Hummer, the water had become more turbulent. There was no chance they could possibly cross it now, no chance at all to climb out of the gorge and somehow make their way back to the dead rancher’s burned-out home, where a driveway led toward a way out. They were trapped on this riverbank. The gorge, already lined with stone and pines, was becoming a sluice gate of waves and debris and whitewater. Past them flowed branches and mud. The river was nothing but hard force, grinding wave action, the certainty of drowning.

And it was rising faster. It now slurped against the ruined headlights of the limo.

“Higher ground,” Jo said. “Quick.”

A thought rattled around her exhausted head, about the geography of the gorge, the direction of the logging road above them, and this portion of the national forest, but she couldn’t fit it all together. Not right then, with the roar of the river growing ever louder.

But she had a gut feeling, a snap of certainty, that oriented her.

“Upriver,” she said. “We need to go up the gorge and gain height.”

Lark shook her head. “Farther into the forest? No—that’s the way they were taking us. We need to get back to civilization, and it’s downriver.”

“Downriver is the direction the bad guys are coming
from
. We want to get farther away from them. Trust me.” The nebulous thought was pulling at her, but still wouldn’t come into focus. “Come on.”

Legs trembling with fatigue, fingers stinging with cold, she untied the horse. Autumn and Lark linked arms to form a human armchair.

Gabe turned to Noah. “Can you do this, man?”

“Let’s go,” Noah said.

“Whatever you do, don’t scream.”

Jo and Gabe lifted Noah onto the girls’ linked arms. The young women groaned and stood up. Wobbling, they carried Noah to Faithful’s side. Noah wheezed through his teeth, trying to keep from shouting in pain. In the dark, with only the moonlight flaring through the clouds, his face was ghostly.

Gabe put Noah’s good leg in the stirrup. Jo boosted him up. Groaning, Noah straightened and nearly fell across the saddle. Jo swung his broken leg across. He gripped the saddle horn, about to pass out.

He settled in the saddle. “Got it.”

He hadn’t, he was close to fainting, but he was holding on.

Gabe looked at Autumn and Lark. “One of you get on behind him and hang on.”

Lark said, “I’ve never been on a horse.”

Autumn put a hand on Lark’s arm. A restraining hand. “You ride. I’ll lead Faithful.”

Lark didn’t resist. She mounted awkwardly and settled behind the saddle on the horse’s rump. Autumn held the reins.

“Where are we going?”

Jo felt all eyes on her in the thin white moonlight. “We’re going upriver until we can find a safe spot to climb the hill to the logging road. We’ll get out of the gorge, cross the road into the forest, and work our way back down from there.”

Gabe had stuffed their emergency supplies into Kyle’s black sports bag and slung it across his shoulders like a backpack, gingerly, protecting his sliced-up ribs. He held on to his buck knife and the steering-wheel club. Each of the others took up one of the carved spears. They started up the sandy bank, following the sound of rushing water.

Jo leaned into Autumn’s ear. “How bad is Lark’s eyesight?”

“Bad. She has juvenile macular degeneration.”

Jo’s chest squeezed. That was awful news. “Does she have any central vision?”

“Fuzzy. And her night vision is crap.” Autumn looked out from under her Marine Corps utility cap. Quietly she added, “Don’t mention it. She doesn’t want any help. And definitely not any sympathy.”

Jo nodded. “You’re a good friend.”

Autumn looked at her weirdly. She seemed baffled.

“You okay?” Jo said.

“It’s … you think so?”

Gabe scanned the river and hillside. Without a word, he waved them upriver. Slipping across wet rocks and muddy ground, they began to climb.

 

 

The log scraped and scoured the roadbed, slowly, grating against the wet gravel. Headlights off, brake lights shining, the Toyota pickup dug in and struggled to clear the fallen pine from the logging road. The ropes tied to the pickup’s trailer hitch stretched and groaned.