The Survivors Club (27 page)

Any luck, it would come back to Wade Poole.

Jaimie drove out on Harshaw Road, which led south toward the Mexican border. It was a graded road early on but then started to wind and get narrower. She was looking for a sign for the ghost town of Mowry. On her right, she passed the graveyard of another ghost town, Harshaw, for which the road was named. A lot of colorful fake flowers, whitewashed stones and crosses, and piled rocks to keep the coyotes away, although the people buried there were from the early part of the twentieth century and long past edibility.

She tried to occupy her mind with stuff like that, but her heart was beating hard and all she could think of was what that thing—Helium Man—said he’d do to Adele.

The road started going up higher, and the trees became thicker—mostly oak.

She was driving into a tight curve when suddenly a white truck pulled out right in front of her. She slammed on the brakes and wrestled with the wheel of her big Dodge Ram, skidding across the narrow road down into the ravine on the other side.

The truck came to rest upright. She took stock: banged up a little but her seat belt saved her. And whoever that asshole was who clipped her—

Someone yanked open the truck door. Somebody coming to rescue her? She was okay, she needed to tell them that, but suddenly her belt was unlatched, a big man leaning over her, crushing her against the airbag that had whopped her in the chest and, she realized, broken her wrist, and he pulled her out by the shoulder and shoved her up against the side of the truck. “Police!” he yelled, and grabbed her arm and wrenched it around behind her back—agony. The next thing she knew, her hands were cuffed behind her back.

She screamed.

The man kicked her legs apart and patted her down, then grabbed her by the arm and pulled her up the embankment and over to his own truck, shoved her inside. “You move, and you’re going to jail,” he yelled, his red face right in hers. “Got it?”

She nodded mutely. She couldn’t think of anything except for the excruciating pain in her wrist. And that she wet her pants.

He drove her truck back out on the road, parked and locked it. Then he came back and got his truck and took off with a slew of dirt, up a two-lane track into the woods.

Jaimie was confused. This guy was dressed like her friends in the ranching community. He drove with one hand on the wheel, slewing along the road, and one hand holding a gun trained on her. She had no doubt he would use it. But another part of her insisted that he was a cop. He treated her as a cop would. With authority.

Cops wouldn’t kill unarmed citizens—and that was what she would hold on to.

Her own revolver sat in a zippered bag inside her truck.

Her wrist was screaming. She realized she was screaming too when he took his gun butt and smacked her mouth. “Shut up. Do it now. You are in deep enough trouble already.”

They headed up a steep four-wheel-drive road, little more than a trail, up into the hills.

They came to a camping spot screened by trees. In the truck, he duct taped her mouth and tied a rope around her neck. He jerked at the rope and told her to follow him. She scrambled to keep up, terrified of being literally hanged—her air cut off. She saw the remains of an adobe building among the trees, roofless, just two walls meeting in a corner, the adobe bricks slumping like a melting candy barn. There was a stake there, driven deep into the ground, and a chain. He replaced the rope with a choke chain and hooked it to the chain. She could only sit in one way, because she was snubbed up pretty close to the stake—about two and a half to three feet.

I’m going to die.

She was sure of that. She also knew he would rape her first, and probably torture her.

He was no cop.

How had she been so stupid? He had her ten thousand dollars and he had her. She could feel the chain links cold and hard against her neck. Could feel her airway close, suffocating her. Realized that wasn’t really happening, but she felt it anyway. Panic exploded upward. Her gorge rose. Tears spilled down her cheeks.

The man sat down across from her, cross-legged. His broad face all smiles.

“Please don’t kill me!” she said through the duct tape. “I’ll do anything you want—anything. Just…don’t kill me.”

He reached over and tugged on the chain. The choke chain pinched her throat.

Suddenly, she had to throw up. She could choke to death.

He ripped the duct tape off just before she vomited.

He watched her like she was some bug crawling along the ground. Fascinated.

“Sorry,” he said. “I had to establish the ground rules. You need to speak only when spoken to. Okay?”

She nodded.

He pulled a blade of grass out of the ground and stuck it between his teeth. It was hard to believe this was happening. He had such merry blue eyes. Hard to believe, looking at him, that he wasn’t a nice man. Maybe he would just have sex with her, take the money, and let her live.

It was like a tender shoot of a plant inside her, reaching for the sun. Just a slim hope.

“Okay, here are the ground rules,” he said at last. “You are my hostage. If you cooperate, you will go back to your family. Got that?”

She nodded. She nodded as hard as she could.

“Okay, where’s your phone?”

She nodded to the back pocket of her jeans.

He got up and came to her, bent and slid out her phone. “We’re gonna need this for later. The cash is in your truck, I take it?”

She nodded furiously, tried again to speak through the duct tape. Tried to please him. There was hope. She was a hostage. That was okay. Hostages were kept alive.

“Okay, I’ll be right back. Don’t you move. If you do, you might just end up hanging yourself and you’ll be no use to me and none to yourself, neither.”

He ran down the hill. She could hear him beating his way through the tree branches and bushes.

She waited. A fly zoomed around and lighted on her nose. She swatted at it with her manacled hands, but it kept coming back. She was in a twisted position, one shoulder high, her head stretched in the direction of the stake. She tried to get her legs under her so she could release the tension in her shoulders, neck, back, and hip. It was easiest just to lie down on her side.

He returned, sounding like an elk stomping through the brush. Smiling.

So weird—the way he smiled. The way he acted. And yet she realized he would kill her without a second thought.

“I counted it. You did good. It looks like I can trust you.”

She nodded, hard.

He sat down again, cross-legged in the dirt, and leaned toward her, like he was a friend about to tell her a story by the campfire. “Here’s the deal. I want a lot more money than ten thousand dollars, and I think you can get it for me.”

She could barely fathom what he was saying. He wanted
more
money?

“See, I know what you, Brayden, and Michael have been doing. I know all about your little game.” He tipped his hat up on his head. “That should be worth a lot more than ten thousand dollars. I figure—don’t want to be greedy—that the information I have at my disposal, which I could give to the police, with
evidence to back it up
, is worth a cool million or two, at the very least. Just how much is your family’s net worth?”

The realization came on her all at once, like a cascade, hitting her hard. He knew about their game? He wanted a couple million dollars? She couldn’t seem to process this.

He looked at her—she swore it was in a kindly way—like he felt sorry for her. “I know, it’s a lot to take in. How could anybody know? But it’s true. I know all about your little game. But hey. We all get our jollies in our own way, and who am I to judge? Thing is, though, I see an opening, I take it. What’s good for you folks would be good for me.”

He shifted again, his Roper boots stirring up the dust. He sat back, legs crossed at the feet, braced by his arms. Lazy and smiling and terrifying all at once.

It felt like a dream.

“By the way, the name’s Wade.” He smiled. “Now let’s figure out how we’re going to do this.”

CHAPTER 47

AFIS showed no match for the partial fingerprint on the strip of duct tape that had remained stuck to the tree. It was possible that the duct tape was left by someone else hiding a weapon in the tree, as it seemed to be the best hiding place around there. As Peter Deuteronomy had pointed out, caching weapons in various hiding spots along the border had become a frequent occurrence. Either way, Tess couldn’t get Wade Poole on prints. Worse, she had no idea where to begin looking for him. He seemed to have disappeared. So far they had been unable to find an address for Poole in Glendale, California, where he was supposed to have lived. He did not register a vehicle at the DMV. He was not on the tax rolls. He had no phone number.

He had ceased to exist.

But they were on his trail. Danny, working from his computer at home, came across a likely conference earlier in the year, the annual Western Association of Homicide Detectives Conference, held in January. Tess had gone once, herself—there were plenty of good seminars, especially on the latest advances in law enforcement.

“He was retired,” Danny said, “but that doesn’t mean anything. A lot of those old guys go to this conference—gotta keep their hand in.”

Once a homicide cop, always a homicide cop
, Tess thought.

“He probably just got together with his old pals and played a lot of golf,” Danny added.

It took them all of twenty minutes to get the information from Hanley’s records. He had gone to Palm Springs in January.

“So what he said about having too much to drink was true,” Tess said. “Bert said if he drank more than one he was a falling-down drunk.”

“I can see it. They’re hanging out together in the bar, he’s having such a good time with his old buddy and former son-in-law he drinks a little too much and spills the beans. He might not have even remembered it. But
Wade
sure did.”

“So they decided to team up and prove that the family was killing people,” Tess said. “Only Hanley wants to build a case, and Wade wants something else.”

“Money.”

“Probably.”

“He’s a mean son of a bitch,” Danny said. “It wouldn’t surprise me that he’d kill Hanley and try to pin it on the Alacrán. Thirty rounds to make it look like overkill.”

“George trusted Peter Deuteronomy to keep his USB disk. He was afraid of what Wade Poole might do.”

“Or do to
him
. You thinking what I’m thinking,
guera
?”

Tess was. Wade Poole’s next target was the family. If you put yourself in his position, what would he do next?

Extortion
.

They discussed the possibility that Wade Poole might go after the DeKovens. How would they react to extortion? What kind of pressure would it put on them? And how could Tess and Danny use it to further their own goals?

“This might be the crack in the dam,” Tess said.

“Yeah, it could be.”

Tess got the feeling Danny was fading. She knew he was beginning to realize that everything had changed now, and would be changed for a long time, and sleep would be one of those catch-as-catch-can deals.

“You sound like the walking dead,” Tess said.

“But I’m the happy walking dead.”

“Maybe you should get some sleep.”

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead. What were you saying?”

“What do you think Poole’s next move is gonna be?”

“Depends. If he’s a hard-ass, he’d start killing people. In the family.”

Tess said, “To encourage the others to negotiate, or just because he could?”

“Both, I guess. Maybe he’d kill one of them to scare them.”

“Chad,” Tess said.

“He’d be the obvious choice. He could show that he had a long arm. That he could get them anytime.”

“What about Hanley? I think he killed him because he had everything he needed and he knew Hanley wasn’t going to go along with what he was planning.”

“Sounds about right.” Danny sounded like he was drifting off to sleep. “Tell you what, that family better be scared, if they know what he did to Hanley.”

“You think they know how he was killed?” Tess said. “Because if they don’t, maybe someone should tell them.”