Authors: Meg Gardiner

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

The Nightmare Thief (16 page)

BOOK: The Nightmare Thief

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He let go of her.

“Both hands on the wheel, Dane,” she gasped. The look she gave him was filthy.

He put his hands at two and ten. His vision was flashing red. He reached back across the SUV to stroke her cheek, and like a cobra she slapped his hand away.

“I will tell you why we need to phone Von,” he said. “Because he needs to understand the rules of play. They’ve changed.”

Stringer leaned forward. “How?”

“One gunshot, fired into the rocks or the river, will scare these kids back into the Hummer. One gunshot fired into somebody’s head will convince them the risks of escaping are worth it.” He wrung his hands on the wheel. “He needs to save his gunfire for when it counts.”

He looked again at Sabine. “He needs to wait to kill them until I’m on the scene.”

“Unless they try to escape,” Sabine said.

“Unless. Then all bets are off.”

Gabe stood at the center of the semicircle, all eyes on him. “We survived the wreck, but that’s not even half the battle. To evade capture and escape, we need to know who our opposition is.”

Jo said, “How many people were in the group that took you?”

“Five,” Kyle said. “And one was a woman. The two clowns who drove us into this gorge, they wasn’t in charge. Another man was giving them orders.”

Autumn said, “The tall man who drove the speedboat.”

Kyle appeared to think about it. He nodded.

Gabe said, “So we should count on at least four hostiles coming for us, heavily armed and determined to recapture the group.”

Everybody looked at Autumn. Thinking: or recapture her and kill the rest of them.

“The quickest way to get help is to contact the local sheriffs. And we still have to find Jo’s and my cell phones,” Gabe said.

“On it,” Jo said, and headed for the Hummer.

“We can’t just sit here,” Dustin said.

“I’m not suggesting it. Somebody’s got to climb out of here. But we can’t all go.”

“Then what are you saying, man?”

“Noah shouldn’t be moved unless it’s absolutely necessary. Peyton, you’re going to have difficulty hiking severe terrain. Ideally, we’d move to a defensible position and get under cover. But for now we stay here and protect ourselves.”

Peyton looked tired and shaky. “How?”

“Night’s coming. The temperature is going to drop, maybe below freezing. And there’s a storm blowing in.”

“You gotta be shitting me,” Dustin said.

“We can’t build a fire because it would pinpoint our location in the dark. If you brought warm clothes, get them. Put them on, keep them zipped up. Stay dry.”

Jo circled to the wrecked driver’s compartment of the limo, avoiding Friedrich’s crushed body. The door was open, twisted like a bird’s broken wing. She squirmed inside. The interior of the vehicle had deepened into gray shadow.

She rooted around. She heard voices in the passenger compartment. Lark and Autumn had crawled inside.

“You okay, Noah?” Autumn said.

He rocked his hand side to side:
so-so
. “Had better days.”

Lark pressed her lips tightly closed. For a second she looked like she might cry.

Jo said, “You all right back there?”

Lark shook her head. “Hardly.” Then she got hold of herself. “But we will be. Right?”

“That’s the plan.”

Jo crabbed through the wrecked driver’s compartment, flinching away from broken glass and twisted shards of metal. She sifted through trash and debris until, at the bottom of it, she found her cell phone.

“Got it,” she said.

The phone was powered up and didn’t look damaged. She dusted it off.

No signal.
They were too deep in the gorge. She kept looking for Gabe’s cell, but had no luck.

Autumn was looking around the interior of the Hummer. “None of our stuff is here. They took it.”

“What about the luggage compartment?”

A freighted pause. “But …”

Autumn glanced at Jo. Her expression practically begged,
Don’t make me.

“I’ll go with you,” Jo said.

She climbed back through the twisted door into the cooling evening, and trudged with Autumn to the rear of the Hummer. Autumn opened the latch on the luggage compartment. It creaked open about two feet. Autumn moaned and shook her hands, the universal sign for
grossed out.

The army duffel bag was visible. In the crash, the body had been dislodged and slid halfway out. Jo recognized the outfit the corpse was wearing: the tactical black of the hijackers. She didn’t recognize the corpse. His skin was pale white. A gunshot wound pocked his temple.

“Just got to grit our teeth and grab any gear that’s back there,” Jo said.

She knew that what she was asking Autumn to do was tough. But they had not one single second to wallow in self-pity. They had to get on with it. Tough was what they had to be. Some of them were going to have to climb out of the gorge past Von—while it was still light, and he might target them through his gunsight. They had to. Traveling in the dark was a recipe for death.

Whimpering, Autumn reached into the luggage compartment and pulled out a black sports bag. She stumbled back from the Hummer, shuddering. Dropping the bag, she unzipped it and began rustling through it.

“What … ,” she said, her voice shaky. “What is … ?”

Her chest heaved. “What is this doing here?” She straightened. She looked ready to bite somebody. “Who did this?”

“Did what?” Jo said.

Autumn pulled a cowboy hat and a lasso from the bag. “The Bad Cowboy. This is his stuff. What is it doing here?”

F
or the tenth time, Evan tried calling Jo. And for the tenth time she heard,
The number you are calling is out of range.

She paced across the motel room. She had sent Jo texts and a photo from Ruby Ratner’s flyer. She had received no reply. She should have.

Save yourself the work—hire a cowboy!

Ruben Ratner was a handyman and jack-of-all-trades. The flyer offered his services to haul trash to the dump, set up parties, and teach horseback-riding lessons at knockdown prices. But he had no business license and, from what Evan could determine, no record of ever teaching buckaroos to ride the range. That, she thought, was his mother’s pipe dream, a gleam in her prairie-clouded eye.

She looked at the other flyer: Mrs. Ratner, dressed in singing-cowgirl garb, with an Indian Chief hand puppet. Evan didn’t know whether she had been hired to perform at a single party. The term
buyer beware
had never seemed so pertinent.

It was getting dark. Jo shouldn’t still be out of range.

Maybe it meant nothing. Maybe Jo was sitting by a roaring fireplace in Yosemite, phone turned off, making out with her boyfriend.

Except that Jo had said she would check in. Evan pulled up the text messages Jo had sent from the abandoned gold mine.
Must take cell to Tuolumne sheriffs in Sonora.

She phoned the Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Office.

“Afraid I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” the desk officer said.

“Could I speak to the senior officer on duty?”

“That’s me, and I’ve been here since eight A.M., ma’am. Believe me, if anybody showed up with evidence that Phelps Wylie was murdered, I would remember it. And if I didn’t, there would be a record in our log and a cell phone in our evidence locker. There’s nothing.”

“Dr. Beckett—”

“I’ve spoken to Dr. Beckett before. She hasn’t been here.”

Evan hung up, worried. She tried Jo one more time. No luck.

Grabbing the flyer, she drove to the coffeehouse near Fisherman’s Wharf. The sun was going down. She hoped the place would still be open.

As she jogged toward the door she saw chairs stacked upside down on tables, and a man mopping the floor. Damn. She rapped on the door.

The man called, “We’re closed.”

She cupped her hands against the glass. “I’m looking for one of your baristas—Tina. It’s important.”

The man leaned on his mop. He looked tired and in no mood to help. Then he turned toward a back hallway.

“Tina,” he said.

A moment later, the young woman who looked so much like Jo came out wiping her hands on her black Java Jones apron. When she unlocked the door, her face was perplexed.

“I need to get in touch with Jo. It’s urgent,” Evan said.

“Do you need her phone number?”

“I’ve been calling her for hours.”

Concern sparked in Tina’s eyes. Then it cooled. “She’s at the Lodge in Yosemite.”

“Excellent.”

But even so, Evan began to feel more anxious. If Jo was at the lodge, she presumably had access to a landline. She got the number from directory assistance and phoned.

The receptionist said, “Ms. Beckett hasn’t checked in.”

“She hasn’t?” Evan said.

Tina’s eyes turned wide and shiny. “Maybe they registered under Gabe’s name. Quintana.”

“Try Quintana,” Evan said.

“No reservation under that name,” said the receptionist.

“Thanks.” Evan hung up. “She’s not there.”

Tina stood worriedly for a moment. “Let’s go to her house. Maybe she left some information there.”

Autumn held up the cowboy hat and lariat as though they were venomous snakes. “What the hell is this?”

“What’s wrong?” Jo said.

Dustin walked over and tossed clothes out of the black sports bag. Onto the rocks he threw a gaudy Western-style shirt with red roses stitched across the front. Then a pair of crocodile-skin cowboy boots, dyed sky blue. And a pair of chaps.

“This is wack,” he said.

Autumn spun in a circle. “It’s not funny.”

The others approached. Kyle peered into the luggage compartment at the body. The man’s face was bluish white. Peyton caught sight of it and flinched.

Autumn shook the cowboy hat in her fist. “This stuff belongs to the Bad Cowboy. It’s a sick joke.”

“The Bad Cowboy?” Gabe said.

“Red Rattler. The asshole … I hate him. Everybody knows that.”

Dustin nodded. Peyton said, “We do.”

Autumn looked pale and fierce in the dusk, her long brown curls swirling in the gusty wind. “Who did this?”

Kyle turned from the luggage compartment. “Edge Adventures did it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Those clothes, they’re a costume. Edge Adventures supplied them. To me.”

“Why?”

“I was supposed to play the role during the weekend. You were supposed to get to confront this character, this Bad Cowboy”—air quotes—“and defeat him.”

“Are you serious?” she said.

“Terry Coates, he told me it was a customized element of your reality scenario. You pay to play, so you get whatever toys mean the most to you.”

Autumn gaped at Ritter and at the cowboy hat in her hands and the lariat. She dropped them like they stank. “How did Edge know about the Bad Cowboy?”

Dustin said, “Autumn …”

Her face flushed. “Why would he? Why would my dad tell Edge?”

Peyton rolled her eyes. “Because it’s supposed to be a game. A stupid game, Autumn. Not a phobia. Look at you.”

Autumn began to blink, rapidly. “This is sick.”

Jo said, “Can somebody explain?”

Peyton said, “When Autumn was little she went to a party where this Red Rattler guy was parking cars. He screamed at her when she got too close. He spooked her. He just blew her fuses.”

Autumn shook her head, fiercely. “That’s not it. Not at all.”

She grabbed the Western shirt and chaps, picked up the sports bag, and marched toward the river. “This crap can float downstream.”

Jo ran after her. “Don’t. We need the clothing. It’s going to drop toward freezing in a couple of hours.” She grabbed the bag. “Don’t.”

For a moment Autumn held on, like a toddler clinging to a toy. Then she relented and tossed the bag and clothes to the ground. She clawed her hands into her hair and lowered her voice.

“It’s not funny—it’s
sick
. He’s not a cartoon character. He’s a freak.” She gestured ferociously to her eyes. “He had this white circle around the blue of one eye. Bright white. He said it was a snake eye. He said it would be
watching
me. It would know if I told anybody about him, and had the power to
hurt
me.”

She stood with her feet planted, challenging Jo to doubt her. When Jo didn’t, she stalked off, kicking the bag as she went, and gave Kyle a dirty stare.

He raised his hands. “Hey, missy, not my fault.” He shook his head and turned to Dustin. “What was that about?”

“You tell me,” Dustin said. “What did Edge Adventures want you to do?”

“They said the birthday girl had a particular dislike for an ex–rodeo rider she met as a kid. Halfway through the weekend, I was supposed to slip away, put on those clothes, and then burst in on her. See how she reacted.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Dustin said.

“Not my script. Edge cooked it up based on information Autumn’s father gave them. If it’s wack, it’s her daddy’s idea.”

Dustin shook his head. “Man. Her dad’s a piece of work.”

“What does her dad have to do with it?” Jo said.

“She complained to her dad about this guy. The guy gave her nightmares. But her dad pokes fun at it. Autumn hates that.”

Jo turned to Kyle. “And Edge simply asked you to take on the role?”

“I’m the new hire. The rest of the outfit, they all have assigned roles, because of their background and training.”

“What’s your background and training?” Gabe said.

“Needing a job, man. Willing to work hard.”

“You’re not this Red Rattler?”

“I never even been on a horse,” Kyle said. “And now can we stop fussing over Missy Reiniger’s hurt feelings, and get this rescue organized?”

BOOK: The Nightmare Thief