Bear Bait (9781101611548) (17 page)

The deputy put one hand on Ernest’s forearm, and used the other to push the screen door open wider. “If it’s all right with you, Mr. Craig, I think I’d better come in.”

THE
gate barred the road to Marmot Lake. Good, Sam thought, this was a false alarm and Raider wasn’t really in danger. But when she reached for the lock, she found that the chain had merely been draped over the posts to make it look as though it were still secure. Her stomach cramped with anxiety. Something hinky, indeed. She drove through, leaving the gate open behind her.

She tried to raise Joe Choi on the radio. “Three-four-seven, this is three-two-five. Come in, three-four-seven.” No response. Next she tried the dispatcher. To her dismay, Peter Hoyle responded. “What’s going on out there, Westin? Over.”

“Where’s Joe?” Sam asked.

“Choi is on lunch break. Where are you? Over.”

“I’m on my way to check out suspicious activity at Marmot Lake. Someone broke the gate lock again. Over.”

“That’s a job for law enforcement. I’ll dispatch Tyburn to that location ASAP. Turn that vehicle around now, Westin, and go back to the duties you were hired to do. Over.”

Sam knew that unless Norm Tyburn was by some miraculous coincidence in this sector, he wouldn’t be here for forty-five minutes at the earliest. By that time, anything could happen: Raider could be dead, the forest could be on fire again, some wackos could be torturing another girl.

“Westin? Acknowledge. Over.”

She swung the truck into the gravel parking lot, switched off the engine, and intermittently thumbed the Talk button on her radio. “Didn’t get that, HQ, you’re breaking up. I’m at the lake now. I’ll report my findings. Three-two-five, clear.” She switched off the radio and slid it back into her belt holster before getting out of the pickup.

She’d parked close to a late-model black pickup, gleaming with stripes and chrome. Jacked up on extra-large tires and adorned with two spotlights mounted above the cab in addition to its four headlights, the vehicle leered down at her like a monstrous black widow about to pounce on an insect. It looked exactly like the sort of vehicle a bear poacher would drive. Or a would-be gold miner. Or an arsonist. Kidnapper. Meth cook. Or maybe just a local backwoodsman; heaven knew she’d seen enough of these in Forks. Whoever it belonged to was, at the very least, trespassing, and deserved to be grilled about that.

She noted its license number on her notepad. After scrutinizing the area to make sure the owner wasn’t lurking nearby, she made an undignified climb onto the running board. A quick inspection of the interior revealed little. Two men’s windbreakers lay across the seat. A pack of cigarettes on the dashboard. A rifle rack barred the back window. Empty. She prayed that it had been that way when the truck entered the parking lot.

Using the side mirror as a handle, Sam lowered herself to the ground. The loose gravel crunched under her boots. The noise seemed loud in the deserted parking lot. She chewed her thumbnail for a moment. Should she wait for Tyburn? Who knew how long that would take? Go in search of the pickup’s passengers? As Hoyle had reminded her, law enforcement was not her job. Still, she was the only ranger here, even if she was only a temporary one.

Pop. Pop. Tightly controlled explosions that, in an urban environment, might have come from a nail gun or a backfiring muffler. But here in the hills, it could only be gunfire. From the far side of the lake. Damn it!

She jogged across the lot and started down the trail. Please let this be paintball, she prayed. Please don’t let me find two illegal hunters and a dead bear at the end of this path.

THE
deputy listened to Ernest’s story about his missing daughter, then borrowed the phone and called his office. He
told someone to seal the Nova and call a forensics team. Ernest wasn’t sure what that meant, but it didn’t sound good.

“I don’t know,” he heard the deputy say into the receiver. The man’s eyes connected with Ernest’s for a second, then he turned away and said in a low voice, “It might be related to that other…incident. Yeah. Get them on it ASAP, see if there are any, uh, similarities.”

After he hung up, the deputy asked if Allyson had ever been fingerprinted.

Ernest shook his head. “No, she’s never been in trouble. She is a good girl.”
Please, let Allie still be alive and well; let him still be right to say
is
and not
was.

“These days people take fingerprints for all sorts of reasons. Some jobs require them. Some parents get their kids fingerprinted just in case they get lost.”

Was the deputy accusing him of being a bad father? Fingerprinting a kid—what was the world coming to? He shook his head again. “No prints.”

“Do you know her blood type?”

Oh God, no.
“Was there blood in her car?”

The deputy avoided meeting his eyes. “It’s just a formality, sir.”

“Type O, I think. Same as mine.”

The man wrote it down.

“What other incident?” Ernest asked.

“Pardon?” The deputy looked up.

“I heard you say that this might be related to ‘that other incident.’ What’d you mean by that?”

The deputy’s gaze flicked to the tabletop, to the notepad, and finally came to rest on the pen in his hands. He was a young man, clearly uncertain about what to do. “There’s probably no relationship, but…”

“Just spit it out, man.” He could take it, Ernest thought. Christ, he had to take it, didn’t he?

The deputy’s brown eyes were cool, analytic. His gaze was locked on Ernest’s face as he said, “This morning, under the fishing dock, we found a woman’s hand.”

JACK
Winner crouched behind a blackened tree and pulled the pistol in close to his chest. After checking the path ahead, he dashed to the cover of the next tree, making no more noise than a chipmunk scampering across the dry ground. Shit, he was good at this.

Leaning against his new cover, Jack chanced a quick look through the branches. King, in camouflage pants and olive T-shirt like his, was in motion, running to the next large tree. King’s back was toward him, his eyes fixed on some spot in the distance. Ha! He had him now. King had no idea that Jack was behind him. The man needed to learn to be more careful. Allie had been better, more aware of her surroundings. He’d never been able to sneak up on her like this. She’d even managed to surprise him twice.

He swallowed. Thinking about her made his throat hurt. Best not to dwell on the past. Just look at the news: soldiers were dying all the time in routine exercises, when carrying supplies, in transit to and from the real action. And they were soldiers, he and Philip and Roddie and Allie. She deserved a medal of honor and rifle salutes.

The pain ambushed him in the gut again. It was hard to believe there was not a shred left of Allie, but he’d found nothing; he couldn’t even tell where she’d fallen. But as King had pointed out, there were bears around Marmot Lake. And bears were scavengers. From now on, he’d shoot every single one he saw.

Allie had been part of the
real
army, the Americans who knew how to think for themselves, not those poor dupes giving it up in Afghanistan and Iraq, all to make Walmart and Exxon and DuPont even more filthy rich. He could understand bin Laden wanting to take down those monuments to money in New York. Too bad the idiot wasn’t better at targeting just the CEOs. He didn’t need to kill the janitors and secretaries, too.

He wasn’t going to make that mistake. He had discipline. Philip and Roddie always badmouthed the blacks and Jews and Indians and Mexicans, but as far as Jack could see, a lot of those folks were victims even more than your average workingman. He was in charge, and he was going to nail only the ones who deserved it, at the right time, at the right place. The feds wouldn’t know what hit them. They’d just realize that suddenly
they
were the endangered species, and they’d better start listening to the real people for a change.

Four members seemed a little pathetic for a branch, but hey, it wasn’t like he lived in a big city and could muster up dozens of people. Damn Roddie, or Rocky, or whatever his cousin Rodney called himself these days. The kid came to the meetings, but always had some excuse to get out of the exercises. It was always just him and Allie and Philip out here. And now his group was even more of a twig than a branch: today there were only two.

He ran past the burn line into the green area, aiming for the next clump of trees. He silently lowered himself to the ground. Positioning himself on his elbows under the cover of low-hanging pine bows, he aimed the paintball gun in King’s direction. The sights were lined up squarely in the middle of his friend’s back and he was about to squeeze the trigger when he noticed King had thrust the barrel of his paintball pistol through the web belt at his waist. Clasped in King’s left hand was a nine-millimeter semiautomatic. It was aimed at a woman making her way through the woods toward them.

*    *    *

THE
bait was gone, but the trap hadn’t been sprung. How the hell had the damn bear done that? Why hadn’t the stupid beast climbed into the cage like he was supposed to? Garrett Ford knelt and inspected the side of the cage. He reached through the bars, touched the sticky spot where he had hung the cake of honey-soaked pemmican. Three long scratches were etched into the plywood backboard. Just like that, that’s how the damn bear had done it, just reached in and snagged the bait. As Ford pulled out his arm, he noticed a rust-red stain on his sleeve. He rubbed it. Blood. There were spots on the floor of the cage, too. The varmint had probably torn its paw on the bait hook. The drops were drying around the edges, still slightly damp in the middle. Less than an hour old. He’d only missed that bear by minutes.

Mike Martinson sat on the tailgate of his truck, a disappointed scowl on his face. “No bear?”

“Obviously,” growled Ford. Teenagers.

“Should I break it down and put it back in the truck, or are we going to leave it here?”

The brush behind him rustled. Maybe the bear was still close by? There was a chance that this trip wouldn’t be wasted, after all. He darted to the truck, lifted the rifle from the rack behind the seat. “Stay here,” he told the boy in a low voice.

Using the barrel of the rifle to push aside a cedar branch, Ford ducked into the dappled shadows of the forest. He paused a moment, waiting for his eyes to adjust. There, a faint crackle. He crept toward the noise, holding his breath. He might not be so fast anymore, but his hearing was good and he was still an expert tracker.

He followed the sound of scurrying feet through the shadowy woods, pausing behind a tree when the sound stopped. For a moment, all he heard was the drumming of a woodpecker on a hollow tree. Then there was a snorting
sound. He peered through the brush. About a hundred yards away, a man, dressed in camouflage pants and T-shirt, leaned against a thick fir. His left hand clutched a sleek black pistol. Looked like a semiautomatic of some kind.

Muscles clenched between Ford’s shoulder blades. The guy had damn well better not be aiming at his bear. Ford quickly sidestepped around the barrier of the tree. Farther through the woods, there was a flicker of movement. He recognized the gray-green of a park ranger’s uniform, caught a glimpse of a long silver-blond braid.

Summer Westin. Just the sort to be snooping around—the type that never could mind her own business. Her jaw was clenched, her expression anxious, oblivious to the fact that the thug was close by and had a pistol leveled at her chest. Camouflage Man tensed and sighted down the barrel of the nine millimeter. Damnation! Ford released the safety and raised his rifle.

THE
hair on the back of Sam’s neck prickled under her uniform collar. Something or someone was ahead of her in the woods. Stepping into the shade of a tree, she searched the forest for movement, for the bulky shape of a black bear, for two-legged vermin bearing rifles or paintball pistols. A loud drumming reverberated somewhere above her.
Not now, you stupid woodpecker!
She strained to hear the whisper of footsteps beyond the staccato beats.

A rifle shot cracked ahead of her. She ducked, clung to the Douglas fir. Another bang, this one higher pitched, followed a fraction of a second later. The bullet smashed into the tree above her, showering her with bark and fir needles. A grain of bark caught under her right eyelid.
Holy shit!
Someone was shooting
at
her.

“Ranger!” she shouted. “Stop shooting! I’m a park ranger!” She rubbed frantically at her burning eye.

Another shot cracked through the woods. She dropped
to her knees behind the tree trunk. Muffled footsteps thudded dully on the needle-carpeted forest floor. Sounded like at least two people. The racket moved away from her position. She wasn’t about to give chase. They knew exactly where she was, and she hadn’t even glimpsed them. She couldn’t even see out of one eye. She straightened and brushed her sleeve across her face, wiping more grit onto her cheeks, but dislodging the splinter from her eye.

Tears coursed down her face as she blinked rapidly to clear her vision. About eighteen inches above where her cheek hugged the trunk, a half-inch scar had been plowed through the bark. Her chest tightened. This was not a paintball game.

The intruders were probably retreating to the black pickup, moving down the trail on the other side of the lake. She started to jog back the way she’d come. With luck, she might make it back to the parking lot before they did. With more luck, Norm Tyburn might show up at the same time.

Her heavy hiking boots felt like concrete bricks on her feet. Tears streamed from her right eye, blurring the scenery on that side. She detached the radio from her belt as she jogged, clicked the Talk button, and panted, “Three-one-one, this is three-two-five, Westin here. Shots fired at Marmot Lake. Fired at me. Over.”

The toe of her boot whacked against a tree root. She nearly fell, caught herself at the last second. The radio crackled, “Three-two-five, three-one-one. Tyburn’s on his way.” Sam slowed, shoved the radio back onto her belt, forced herself back to a jog. She wanted to at least get a glimpse of the intruders, even though it might be a blurry glimpse. She rubbed at her burning eye, trying to stem the torrent of tears.