Night Eyes (The Detective Temeke Crime Series Book 2) (6 page)

It was four fifty-three when Malin switched off the headlights as they coasted along the latter end of Forest Road. Colonies of aspens bordered the track, pale as Grecian pillars and coated with warty bumps. Her eyes seemed to flick this way and that, looking for a place to park.

“There,” Temeke said, spotting a small clearing about fifteen feet from a house nestled between a gravel driveway and a row of pines. His belly was complaining again and as far as he recalled, a can of refried beans was the last meal he’d had.

3265 was the last house on the right, sitting on ten acres of prime land. The front looked out on an open mesa of boulder and brush, and the back faced a stand of trees. Huge wood framed windows and a pitched roof that slanted down towards a chimney, the house likely sat on twelve acres of private land with a barn about twenty feet away.

Temeke estimated about forty-five hundred square feet and at least a thousand of that included the wraparound deck. Like the other four, it overlooked a small lake. Unlike the other four, there were no lights on inside.

He half expected to see the barrel of a shot gun breaking through the trees, although he would have had a face full of metal to prove it. Nothing moved except a slight bend in a nearby branch to indicate a stiff wind and there was an essence about the place, a feeling of déjà vu.

Malin reversed a few feet up that bumpy track which petered out before a large white boulder. She radioed Hackett, told him they were in position, and then turned to Temeke with a scowl. “Don’t think he’s run off, changed his mind?”

“He’s not going anywhere. Not without the money.”

Temeke wasn’t sure about the money, wasn’t sure about the motive. He waited until four fifty-six, hoping the other cars would soon be in position with a few snipers lying about in the brush. Malin pushed the dog’s nose back into the car as she got out, eyes scanning the skies and ponytail bobbing against a dark sweater. She reached into the back seat for a ballistic vest and a thick woolen scarf. “Air’s thin up here,” she said.

“Probably about eight thousand feet.”

“We could take the dog, you know.”

“Nah. He’d need an oxygen mask.”

“I’m serious. He could find Adam.”

“Not until we’ve had a good look around. Don’t want the bugger running off after a squirrel.”

Temeke shrugged on a ski jacket over his vest, heard Malin mutter something about thunder.

“It’s the chopper,” he said, handing her some latex gloves.

He checked his gun and racked the slide. Keeping to the tree line, they sprinted towards the house, stopping occasionally to listen to the wind. “You take the front,” he said, pointing to where the deck jutted over a steep slope. “I’ll cover the back.”

He ducked beneath a low hanging branch, snow trickling down his wrist, and he was conscious of the silence. Something crunched underfoot and made him stop, made him crouch right there in the darkness and run his hands through the grass. He recognized the feel of it, a scattering of tile and some type of roofing felt, and he looked up at a small casement window that swung on a latch.

He had a flash in his mind of when he was young, when his dad came home from Vietnam. Said he captured a Viet Cong activist near Da Nang Airbase during a search and clear operation. Paid for it with half his arm. It was Kukri knife he said. When he came home there were good times and there were bad. It was the drinking Temeke couldn’t stand, the quarrels, the beatings. That was before his old man tied a rope around the mullion bar of an upper storey window and hanged himself.

Bloody miracle with only one hand
, Temeke thought. He never breathed a word of it at school, never wanted to damage his father’s reputation. If indeed his poor old man had ever been to Vietnam in the first place. War destroyed people. They never came back the same.

He looked up at that roof, sensed the residue of what might have been… where Adam might have been. A warning shot fired in his head, that age-old trickle of dread. What if Adam had been in that upstairs room, crawled out of the window and broke his neck. There’d be a body around here somewhere or a freshly dug grave, which in a few days would smell like a year-old carton of milk.

Creeping on the balls of his feet, he listened to every sound. He was at the back of the house now, half way up the steps to the porch and positioned to cut off the kidnapper’s retreat. A lantern cast an eerie beam on a set of dumbbells on the deck, neatly stacked and ranging from five to twenty-five pounds. It was the two twenty pounders that bothered him, lying at the base of a tree stump someone was using as a seat.

He held his breath, shifting from one foot to the other, back pressed against the wall. There were four wooden chairs facing that breathtaking view and the patio doors behind them were open a crack. A reading lamp inside cast a blush over a black leather chair and there were no sounds, nothing that would suggest a presence. Just the inherent feeling they were too sodding late.

Temeke heard the distant beat of rotors somewhere to the south. It was loud enough to scare an owl. The sky was a gray canopy overhead where dawn would soon shimmer on the horizon in streaks of rusty red. That big old New Mexican sun would beat down on the forest floor in a couple of hours, waking chipmunks and all kinds of chuckling things. 

Malin came around the side of the house, weapon drawn, eyes flicking towards the patio door. Temeke knew it wasn’t like her to waste time so they were both inside before you could count to three. The living room gave off a faint odor of cigarette smoke mingled with alcohol and musty carpets. Temeke felt right at home.

A picture window gazed out at towering trees and above them a gallery ran beneath a timbered ceiling. On the kitchen counter was a fire extinguisher and a pad of college ruled paper. Temeke put a hand against the coffee pot. It was still warm. The remains of a chicken sandwich sat in a nest of aluminum foil and three empty beer cans had been pitched onto the lid of a trash can. There was a book propped up beside the toaster that caught his eye.
Armed & Inglorious
by Bo Kinsella.

Temeke repeated the name in his head. If he wasn’t mistaken, Kinsella was a New York Times bestselling author and a sniper instructor if he remembered correctly. A dangerous book in the wrong hands.

He nodded at Malin and gestured towards the stairs. Edging forward, he hoped his movements weren’t betrayed by a creak or two. There was a bedroom to the right, clean except for an uneaten bowl of soup on the bedside table. The quilt was tousled, pillow dented and Temeke smoothed a hand against the sheet. Cold.

The bathroom was clear except for a few strips of paper on the floor under the toilet. Temeke turned them over in his hand. Bible verse. He couldn’t afford to get his hopes up, couldn’t assume Adam had left them on purpose. Not all of them at the same time.

The urine was fresh, the only solid proof and it was dark orange and concentrated. A cold draft came in through a small casement window and Temeke looked out onto the pitched roof. A patch of underlay peeked out from a crooked tile, suggesting someone might have shinned their way towards the gutter before dropping to the grass below. It would explain the broken tiles underfoot.

Each slow breath told Temeke to be vigilant but his senses said something else. He checked the remaining rooms and found them to be empty. There was not a heartbeat left in that house.

Malin stood on the landing, hand raised to distill his alarm. She signaled all clear and they holstered their guns and headed back downstairs.

“These must have fallen out of his pocket,” Temeke said, handing her the Bible tracts. “Climbed out the bedroom window by the look of it. Must be scared bloody stiff.”

“No sign of the kidnapper. No clothes. Nothing.”

“He won’t miss the drop. All those nice crisp bank notes. No, he’s out there. Somewhere.”

He gazed towards the picture window seeing the shadow of a cloud racing before the moon. The musty smell of rain and the loud rumble of the helicopter overhead. It was five thirty precisely.

“They’re here,” Malin whispered.

“Just when the boy decides to do a sodding runner.”

“You ok?” She frowned, gave him a sideways look.

“I’m pissed at that thing up there making a noise and churning up every bit of dust from here to Santa Fe. I hope he can run. Lord, I hope he can run.”

Temeke heard scuffing on the front deck and snatched a glance at the sliding doors. A large bird exploded from the rail where a feeder hung, wings thudding against the wind. It took off when the trees began to bend in the downdraft of the helicopter.

Temeke headed for the front door and peered outside. Up there in the sky was a big gray belly and skids, and rotors that drowned out his thoughts. A duffel bag thudded to the ground about thirty feet from the cabin door, bouncing twice before rolling to a stop.

He heard an echo, heard the changing pitch of the helicopter engine as it lifted, banking to the left and rotor blades clawing for the sky. It was the acrid oil and smoke that bothered him. He couldn’t see what had caused it, not immediately.

The bag drove him outside and a shot from the woods. The helicopter seemed to buck like a horse with a throaty roar as bullets pinged off the tail boom and sparks lit up the sky. It was the one that ripped through fuel tank that brought it down, flames and shrapnel streaking through the trees. Like a great beast that had lost the battle to live, it lurched to one side, rotors pinned into the earth and squealing out a death rattle.

Instinct made Temeke reach for the fire extinguisher before running towards the wreckage. He was almost twenty feet away when he saw the flash, heard the explosion and his legs buckled at the tremor. The rain was coming down hard now, droplets patting the top of his bald head and trickling down his back. It was hot, too damned hot.

The helicopter lay in the brush on the opposite side of the track. Smoke trailed upwards into the sky and then the flames dimed to a ghostly amber.

It took him a few seconds to breathe again, heat searing his cheeks. He could hear Malin behind him, shouting for him to stay down. He covered his face, lungs burning from the smoke, could barely see the blackened co-pilot through the shattered glass on the flight deck still belted to his seat. There was another officer on the ground tangled in a burning clump of box elder.

“Danny,” he murmured. It was Danny Michael wasn’t it? Blond hair, stocky build, worked up at Twin Hawks regional airport. He’d met him over a month ago when they airlifted serial killer, Ole Eriksen from the Tolby Ranch. Now he was motionless, face melting like a wax doll.

The tingling came first and then the pressure in his chest. Temeke tasted the acrid bile in the back of his throat before he vomited. He hardly felt Malin’s strong arms pulling him back into the trees away from the smoke, shouting things he couldn’t hear.

He perched on the front bumper of the car trying to catch his breath and staring at a tangled frame of tail and struts. The debris had settled in a quarter-mile strip and sporadic fires flickered across the plain. He coughed again, tongue swollen and neck crawling with ash.

“Thank you,” Temeke said between coughs. He couldn’t stand. Couldn’t feel his legs either. “Call Hackett, love. We’re going after him.”

“I can’t get near them,” Malin moaned, fumbling for her radio.

Temeke heard her relay the terrible code for
officers down
…
all patrols respond
. He could hear her sobbing through one hand, the other pressing the radio to her chest. And then he remembered the drop.

“The bag,” he wheezed. “Get the sodding bag!”

Hand over mouth, she shuffled forward a step or two.

“Anything?” Temeke said. It was the words he was dreading, the words he knew she would say.

“It’s gone.”

Something big fell out of the sky, and the explosion when it came brought Adam to his knees. He lay in a clump of wet leaves against the slope at the back of the house, watching a spire of gray smoke as it climbed above the trees. Then a whump of flames, sparks spitting onto the dead brown earth.

It was then he remembered the shot. A loud echo somewhere to the left of him where the wood glowed an angry red and something broke through the smoke on the crest of the hill. A face so pale against a tree, it was as if the man it belonged to had already died once and come back to life. His hands were wrapped around the polished stock of a rifle that glinted red in a flash of firelight. He cowered over that gun like he was coughing, or loading it, or something. And then he looked up at the flames and scuttled off sideways like a crab into the darkness.

It wasn’t Ramsey. Too old for that.

Even though Adam’s senses were jumbled, his gut reaction told him to stay down and watch, tried to steel himself to remember what was at stake. From where he was lying, he could see the back of the house. There should have been fire fighters swarming towards it and police cars drifting in along that chalk white track. Nothing. Except the sound of a bellow. A war cry.

Adam stayed where he was, rain peppering his back, cheek pressed against wet leaves. He couldn’t think, couldn’t move. It seemed like minutes before he crawled to the ridge of that slope and that was because he was cold. Peering over the summit, he squinted at a ball of fire in the scrubland several yards from the house, rotors poking out of the wreckage and the terrible smell of gas.

A flicker of movement to the left and a man powered through boulder and brush like a wild animal, limbs pumping with exceptional grace. He stooped and hooked something large over his shoulder before sprinting back the way he had come.

Ramsey.

Despite the risk Adam took in keeping his head up, he knew he was safe in the darkness, clothes melding with the gray-green leaves. Even Ramsey stood like a frozen figurine about ten yards to his left, studying the fire through lifeless eyes.

Adam stretched out his legs, muscles trembling. If only trees didn’t shed twigs and other noisy things he could have crept through the patio doors to the back of the house without being heard. He felt tired, unusually sleepy, as if all the energy had seeped from his body.
You’re just hungry that’s all. Should have eaten that bowl of soup. It wasn’t poisoned. It wasn’t drugged. It was good. Solid. Food.

He thought he heard something then. Voices. Perhaps it was just the rain. He lifted himself a little higher, knees pressed into the ground. Measuring the distance between him and Ramsey, he reckoned he could make a run for it without being shot, reckoned he would be swallowed up in that smoky light. Just as he lifted one knee, he saw the sudden tilt of Ramsey’s head. 

He was hunkered down over there, elbows resting on his knees and mouth slightly open as if he was tasting the smoke. The eerie sound of flames crackled over the wind and a burning branch crashed onto the forest floor. He turned at the sound, seeming to weigh it up in his mind before slipping back into the shadows.

Adam drew a deep breath. This was his chance. There was no sense in waiting. Not now that Ramsey was nowhere to be seen. Energized by hope, he took a running step, twigs snapping underfoot. He would have shouted loudly if it hadn’t been for the foul taste of a rolled up bandana in his open mouth and the tight cinching behind his head. He didn’t have to turn around. He knew who it was.

“Don’t move!” Ramsey squeezed that gag for all it was worth and, gripping Adam by the shoulders, he swiveled him around. It was a raised finger that told Adam to be quiet, the other was clamped around his wrists.

Ramsey’s hair was tied in short ponytail and his face was streaked with mud, eyes glaring in the rusty glow of the fire. The hump of a backpack peeked over one shoulder and a small axe hung from a shockcord.

“Someone out there,” he said, looking over at the wreckage. “Sooner have the contraband on board that chopper than save the dumbass flying it. If you shout, he’ll kill us.”

Adam looked down at a gallon jug tied to the backpack bouncing against Ramsey’s thigh. He could hear the slop of water in it and he swallowed.

“Moonshine,” Ramsey said with a grin. “Want some?”

Adam shook his head, eyes falling to the ground. There was a duffel bag nestled against Ramsey’s foot with a Police patch embroidered on the side.

“Things we might need,” Ramsey said as if he could read his mind. “There’s an old man in these woods. Tortures boys. It’s a slow death.”

For a long moment Adam stared into those narrow eyes and he began to feel queasy. Like the queasy he felt when he saw Ramsey for the first time. He felt the hand loosen at his wrists, saw it hover over the pistol in Ramsey’s belt.

“He tied a kid up to a tree a few years ago. Cut him real deep. Left him for the wolves. Want to see what he did to him?”

Adam shook his head. He already imagined a skeleton in the woods with tattered clothing hanging off its bones and eye sockets picked clean by birds. He wanted to shout, to scream, anything to raise an alarm. He was muzzled like a dog and all he could do was struggle against strong arms, kicking and punching thin air until he was exhausted. The bandana pinched his lips and his jaw felt sore from all that clenching.

Ramsey began to cuss. Told him to stop whimpering. Took off that backpack and the coat he was wearing and wrenched Adam’s hands through one sleeve and then the other. He pulled the zipper up to Adam’s throat. It was warm in that coat even though it was two sizes too big.

“Be quiet. You can breathe can’t you?” Ramsey looked dead serious when he said it. Looked like he was afraid of something. “You don’t understand. If he finds you, he’ll kill you. Probably eat you and all.”

Adam took a deep breath and made his mind up to stay quiet. The forest began to seem smaller, trees bending in and out, and he tried to fend off a wave of nausea at the fetid stench of fumes and something sweet. If it wasn’t for the cold, he knew he would have vomited.

Ramsey hauled the backpack on again over a thick sweater and picked up the gym bag. “Let’s go.”

Adam felt strong fingers around his arm, gripping, dragging, steering through the trees. He heard Ramsey’s voice, thick and grating and warm against his ear.

“Don’t look back.”