From a Dead Sleep (43 page)
The chief quickly passed up a slow-moving, rust-red pickup only to get stuck behind a beige Dodge moving at an even slower pace while a caravan of vehicles approached from the oncoming lane. He swore in frustration and longed for the police cruiser and its siren. For now, the horn would have to do, and he laid on it hard. When the Dodge began veering onto the shoulder to let him pass, Lumbergh accelerated and flew around a blind curve that had quickly presented itself. He was driving at a speed he knew was reckless while edging across two yellow lines. When a range of thick spruce gave way to the horrifying sight of an oncoming car that blared its own horn in panic, he yelled and cranked his steering wheel far to the right. His Jeep skidded across the shoulder and onto an uneven, downward slope. The decline was masked with tall grass and unattended weeds. His foot cranked down on the brake pedal, and every mundane object inside the car that wasn’t bolted down flew forward and onto the floorboard. The vehicle came to an abrupt dead stop that left his damp, clenched fingers cemented to the steering wheel and his heart bemoaning his poor decision.
With enlarged eyes, he swallowed some bile and uttered aloud the phrase, “To serve and protect.” It was a reminder of the key responsibilities of his job—responsibilities that seemed at that moment to warrant reciting.
A stream of sweat ran down his brow as he rolled down his window to fire out an overchewed wad of gum that he released from his clamped jaw. He took a few short breaths and let his pulse normalize. As he did, the image of the white car he’d nearly collided with hovered in his glazed vision like a single, subliminal frame from an art film. Below its tinted windshield and gleaming, silver grill hung a frame of blue mountains under an orange sky. A Nevada state license plate.
By geographical standards, Nevada and Colorado were only separated by a single state, but Utah was a large state and close to six hundred miles, and numerous mountain ranges separated the region from the Nevada state line. Aside from that, Colorado Road 1007 was an obscure route. It marked the rural, sparsely populated boundary between Lakeland and Winston, and was normally only used by local commuters and a few ranchers. While the appearance of a Nevada plate was by no means a foreign sight within Colorado, it was highly unusual and perhaps unheard of for one to turn up there in the backwoods, far away from the action of the downtown area in northern Lakeland.
A long, white car would have never been mistaken for a dark sedan, even by a teenage busboy who didn’t know his automobile makes. Still, Kyle Kimble, Moretti The Big Shot, and even the disappearance of Chad Grimes—the shop owner from Lakeland— appeared to have ties to Nevada. Though the significance felt thin, Lumbergh’s refined law enforcement instincts weren’t quite prepared to treat the unusual finding as an absolute coincidence.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a fresh stick of gum that he unwrapped in what would have appeared to a casual observer as one quick motion. He flung it into his mouth and checked for oncoming traffic before flipping a U-turn across the road and setting off in the direction of the white Cadillac.
The man who’d made it as far as Meyers Bridge was not alone before he ended his life. That was the conclusion that Oldhorse made after spending the better part of the morning tracking his trail up the long and lofty ravine. The markings of a single man had been joined by those of at least three others who looked to have been in pursuit of him. A pack of wolves chasing a deer.
Oldhorse was now on private land, but he cared little. He was engrossed in tracing the split nerve back to its root.
As two aggressive squirrels spiraled their way up a tall pine’s trunk high above the rocky terrace that loomed above him, Oldhorse imagined that the prey had either fallen or been thrown off of the jagged ledge above. The impact of his body had left an obvious trail of disruption with its rapid decent, all the way down the steep wall. He’d survived the fall though, only to get into an altercation with one of his pursuers along the shore.
Oldhorse scaled his way up the gorge at a pace that would have rivaled expert climbers, effortlessly digging his fingers and the toes of his moccasins into every delicate wedge and crevice. When he reached the top and examined the surface of the plateau, he found not only tracks but a family of .30-30 rifle shells. Their nestling together along the ground attested that their owner had fired shots down toward the river from his perched position.
All four sets of tracks congregated at that point, having emerged from the thick forest that lay to the east.
Oldhorse dipped one of his coarse and weathered hands into a pouch on the side of his pack and retrieved a dark strip of elk jerky that he’d dried himself. He gnawed on it with the back of his teeth before tearing a chunk off, devouring its taste and letting it slide down his throat.
His tapered eyes pierced through the maze of tall stalks of chipped bark and their thick crowns of intertwined branches. A deep breath filtered out through his nose before he entered into a corridor of the forest that seemed darker than it had any right to be.
“W
hat is that?” Lisa asked.
“What’s what?”
“That welt, or whatever it is on the back of your head. You keep touching it. Did you hurt yourself back at the house?”
Sean rolled his eyes and shook his head. “It’s nothing. It’s been there forever.”
“Forever?” she said with a mark of confusion in her tone and inquisitiveness in her eyes. It didn’t take long for her to recognize that he’d rather not continue with the topic, so she was surprised after a few seconds when he did.
“I don’t mean
forever
, forever. I wasn’t born with it. It just . . . Well, I don’t know how long it’s been there. My head just started itching one day and it’s never really stopped.” His eyes lowered to the circular gauges along the dashboard of his car.
“That doesn’t sound healthy,” she said with her eyes blinking in thought. “You should probably get that looked at.”
“Yeah, probably.” His forehead formed ripples and his eyes angled toward her. “Do you always ask this many questions?”
She let her gaze drift back to the road in front of them and she shrugged her shoulders a bit. “No. Not really. Maybe if I did, I would have figured out who my husband really was.”
He said nothing.
Peering above some trees on the side of the road ahead was a large, sky-blue metal canopy with multicolored stripes jetting diagonally down its wide edge. Beside it, the tall price sign of a gas station came into view.
He let up on the gas pedal while keeping a steady eye on the car they’d been following. Lisa sat up in her seat and turned to him.
“You’re stopping?” she asked with some zest.
“Yeah.”
“Thank you,” she said, with her lips hinting at a grin. She placed her hand on his large shoulder to demonstrate to him her appreciation. “You’re doing the right thing.”
He grunted and shook his head in disappointment before whipping the car sharply into the parking lot. “Don’t thank me. I only stopped because we’re out of gas.”
She leaned forward and peered between the spokes of the steering wheel. Under the dashboard, the needle drooped well below the letter “E” and the low-gas indicator was brightly lit.
“It’s been on for the last five miles,” he said when he quickly pulled up to the nearest pump and jammed on the brakes. “Which means we probably only have another two. We’ve got to make this fast!”
He cranked the gearshift into park and turned off the ignition. The door flew open with a loud creak and he was out in no time, fumbling for the hooked gas nozzle on the side of the pump.
Lisa watched the Volvo glide farther and farther away, and part of her wanted it to keep going so that the she and the man she’d come to know throughout the day would be cut loose from their foolhardy pursuit.
“Oh, you got to be kidding me!” Sean snarled from outside the car. “Prepay?”
He lowered his head through the open driver’s side window and asked her in an almost timid manner if she had a credit card.
With a dispirited sigh, she answered, “Back at the cottage.”
“Dammit!” he moaned before snapping straight and pounding a fist on top of the roof of his car.
“Sean, we need to let this go,” she said, mostly to his torso that she could see through the window. “We’ll go inside, call the police, and tell them which direction he’s headed in. They’ll take over from here.”
She watched him briskly pace back and forth beside the car with his hand rubbing the nagging spot along the back of his head.
She came to a conclusion. “Sean, this is the end of the road for me either way. I’m staying here. Please stay with me.”
Sean was riddled with frustration as he paced. He noticed a teenage girl working the register inside. She was taking a moment from servicing a line of customers to glare at him from behind a dirty window, most likely wondering what in the hell he was doing. The heady odor of gasoline surrounded him and taunted him with its candor. The Volvo was shrinking off into the distance.
“Let’s just make the call,” he heard Lisa say.
He sent her a glare through the car window.
“Please?” she said.
Despite the overwhelming frustration he felt, he couldn’t escape the tenderness in her eyes. Her gaze was sincere and captivating, and for the first time in many years, he felt as if someone other than those obligated by a family tree was concerned about his well-being. The gleam in her bright blue eyes was like the promise of something new. Something different. He had a spur of the moment, consequential decision to make—the kind he typically made off of pure impulse. This time, he found himself more carefully deliberating possible outcomes.
Part of him wanted to adhere to her judgment, but Sean tasted defeat in his mouth and its sourness spoiled the moment. He thought about his uncle and the ultimate sacrifice he had made to stop the same people that were about to vanish from his view.
“Get on out and make the call,” he snapped. “I’ve got two miles of gas left in this baby and I’m gonna use it to take down that son of a bitch.”
She buckled forward in the seat like her strings had been cut, lowering her head and closing her eyes. She felt his returning weight depress the seat of the car. Without extending as much as a glance in his direction, she spun on the vinyl and pulled up on the door handle just as the engine cranked and blazed in fury.
She lifted herself up from the security of the Nova and stood in the dirt parking lot with her shoulders at half-mast. One of her fists was clenched and depicted her dissatisfaction. Raising her head to meet the horizon of the road that Sean would soon disappear down, she perused the abstracted Volvo that was little more than a beige blip at the center of an open sliver of space between green and yellowish clumps of distant trees. Her mind led her to believe that it would dematerialize in mere seconds, but to her wonder, she saw two red lights illuminate at the back of the car. Soon after, the left one began to blink and moments later, the blip changed directions.
Her attention shot to Sean. “He pulled off the highway!”
T
ony Fabrizio’s spinning head nearly collapsed to his steering wheel in a heap of its own sweat and relief once the blue, older model Chevy vanished from sight in his rearview mirror.
“Thank you God,” he whispered twice while recoiling from the salted sting of the open gash along the back of his head.
His trembling hand tossed a lit cigarette that had been burned to the filter outside his open window. He retrieved his cellphone from the center console and brought the undersized gadget back to his ear.
“It was a false alarm, yo,” he sputtered into the phone. “It pulled off the road. Whoever it was, they weren’t following me.”
He could smell the rank odor of his own armpits rising up from the dampness at the base of his sleeves. The blue, oversized uniform he’d stripped from the guard clung to his chest and was no longer light in shade.
“Are you sure?” a cold, dark voice on the other end berated.
“Yeah, man. I just . . . I just gotta chill out.”
“No. You’ve
just gotta
finish cleaning up your mess and get back here.”
“I know, man . . . I know,” Tony said with a gulp in his throat. “Do you have a location for me yet?”
“It won’t be at the house. We don’t know what all Kimble sent his wife in that envelope. If he put this address in there, the cops could show up at any minute. We’re packed up. Once Moretti gets back, he and I will be leaving.”
Nodding his head, Tony replied, “Should I just call you once I land?”
“No. I’ll call you. And, kid, don’t waste any more of my time. You’re on your own until you get back.”
The call went dead.
Tony pressed a button on the face of the cell and let it fall to the passenger seat where it flopped upside down on the tight upholstery.
He took some limited comfort from the tone of the man’s voice on the other end of the line. As ghoulish as it was, it was the most composed he’d heard it in days. A far cry from the rage that poured from the man’s lungs after he’d lost his footing along the top of that ravine back at the river and dropped his rifle over the ledge. If it wasn’t for that misstep, they would have all caught their prey Friday night—whether it was Kimble or Greco that was running from them.