C. Box - The Highway

Cody felt his scalp crawl. He said, “Come again?”

“Look, I better get going. But tell me your e-mail address before I go. I’ll fire you an e-mail with some links in it you might want to check out.”

“What do the links go to?” Cody asked.

“You’ll see,” Legerski said and hung up.

* * *

“Oh my God,” Ted Sullivan said when Cody told him. “Oh my God!”

“Don’t panic, Ted,” Cody said. “We don’t know enough yet for you to get hysterical.”

Ted Sullivan had light auburn hair so thin his freckled scalp undergirded it and hazel eyes that darted from one thing to another and seemed to focus up and to the left of the person he was speaking to. The one word Cody had heard over and over from others talking about Sullivan when they’d first met in Yellowstone was “weak.” Gracie hadn’t said as much, but she did concede her father was “not strong.” Cody had learned that Sullivan was a software engineer of some note within his own particular circles, something about cloud technology, and he’d been divorced for seven or eight years from Danielle and Gracie’s mother. He’d moved around the country with different firms and was now in Omaha. Cody was aware Ted Sullivan probably made ten times as much money as he did, but that didn’t impress him. Little about Ted Sullivan impressed him. But as a father himself, he almost felt for the guy. No one wanted to be on the other end of this particular phone call.

“Marcia is going to kill me,” Ted said morosely.

“She should,” Cody said. “You deserve it. Justin told me that Danielle called you and how you went along with it. We just found out about the scheme tonight.”

“She’ll take me back to court,” Ted said. “She’ll get my visitation rights taken away.”

“Enough about you , ass-hat,” Cody barked. “When was the last time you heard from them ? Have you gotten a call or a text in the last four hours?”

“No.”

“Did you try to call them?”

“Well…”

“So you didn’t, okay. As I thought, you’re no help right now, but you need to know the situation.” Cody said. He noticed both Jenny and Justin were peeking in the room at him, probably because his voice had gotten so loud. He waved at them to go away. Neither moved. Jenny frowned back at him.

“That’s just not true,” Ted said. “I know for a fact that both Gracie and Danielle have GPS-embedded phones because I bought them for them. All we have to do is trace their whereabouts through cell-mapping software. They also have a Garmin I sent them. We can contact the company and-”

“Ted,” Cody said impatiently, “GPS doesn’t work if they’re out of cell range. This is Montana. And don’t you think that if their phones were working we wouldn’t be in the situation we are now?”

“Oh.”

“Okay,” Cody said to Ted while nodding at Jenny that he’d received the message from her to cool down, “You need to take off your geek hat and let their mother know. And when you do, find out if they’ve been in touch with her and when it was and exactly what they said. Give her my number if she wants to talk with me directly.”

Sullivan moaned. “You have no idea how she can be.”

“Yeah, Ted. You’re the only man with an ex-wife, so I wouldn’t know how that is,” Cody said, glancing at Jenny who looked back steaming. “You need to call her, Ted. Tell her what’s going on.”

There was a beat of silence. “Can you…”

“No,” Cody said. “I don’t even know her name or number.”

“I could give it to you.”

“ Call your goddamned ex-wife, Ted! ” Cody shouted. “Man up and call her.”

“Okay.” His voice was a whisper. Then, “I’ll be on the first plane to Helena in the morning.”

“Don’t come, Ted,” Cody said. “I’ve seen you in action. Stay the hell in Omaha by the phone. I’ll keep you posted on anything we find out.”

“But they’re my daughters,” Ted said. “They’re all I’ve got.”

Cody started to yell again but caught himself. He thought of what he’d do in similar circumstances, and he couldn’t blame Sullivan for wanting to be there.

He said, “I can’t stop you but if you come here you’re on your own if you do. I don’t want you around me trying to help. I’ve seen your version of help before. It results in a clusterfuck and dead bodies.”

There was a long silence. Jenny had covered her face with her hands and was shaking her head from side to side. Cody thought maybe he’d overdone it.

Then Ted said, “Call me the second you find out something.”

“I’ll do that,” Cody said, and closed his phone.

“Great bedside manner,” Jenny said. “I can see why you used to be the star of the sheriff’s department.”

“Best they’ve got,” Cody said. Thinking, And the best they’ve ever seen. At least that used to be the case when he had nothing to lose. He corrected himself: “Best they had.”

* * *

At that moment his e-mail chimed again. Cody looked up to see that the message had been sent from TROOPERRICK@gmail.com.

The subject line read: THE CHURCH OF GLORY AND TRANSCENDENCE.

He mouthed, “Oh, shit. ”

Then, to Jenny and Cassie: “I’m going to gear up and drive down there. I want to talk to this trooper before too much more time passes.”

They argued about him driving, and Jenny agreed that Cassie should drive Cody’s pickup. He nixed it.

“We’ve had this discussion,” Cody said, forwarding the e-mail to Cassie’s e-mail address. “She’s going to man the command center here.” To Cassie, he said, “I just forwarded you something. Read it over and give me a call on the road. Let me know what it says and what you think.”

She nodded.

To Jenny, he said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, I hope.”

As he passed them in the doorway, he said to Justin, “Call me the second you hear from them if they text or call you. I wouldn’t mind coming back and getting some sleep. I’ve got a hell of a headache.”

* * *

Cody unlocked the door to the room in his basement where he stored his gear and flipped the light on. The heavy-duty steel shelving was packed with equipment. There were shotguns, hunting rifles, revolvers, semiautomatic pistols, a collection of brass knuckles, fixed-blade tactical knives, night vision goggles, sets of body armor-even a Kevlar helmet.

He selected an AR-15 rifle and a Benelli M1014 12-gauge combat shotgun and propped them in the corner to take along.

Cody packed a gear bag with two.45 ACP 1911 Colts with extra magazines, night vision goggles, body armor, 223 rounds for the AR-15 and 12-gauge buck for the shotgun, binoculars, rope, handcuffs and flex-ties, a pair of radios, and several cell phones. While he was bent over buckling a holster with a 9MM Model 26 “Baby” Glock to his ankle, the door was pushed open.

He looked up to find Jenny standing there with her arms crossed over her breasts. She didn’t have a key to the room and simply referred to it as his “man cave.” Her eyes swept the contents.

Most of the items still had evidence tags attached from the Law Enforcement Center to which, unbeknownst to the sheriff or the supervisor, he had a key.

“Cody…”

“I never take anything that might be used in court,” he said. “Only stuff that’s leftover before it gets sold or destroyed.”

“That’s not why I came down here.”

“I know,” he said. “You don’t have to say it.”

“I’ll wait until you get back,” she said. “Right now you need to help your son and find those girls.”

“Thank you.”

“But, Cody.…”

He nodded, and said, “I thought you were going to wait.”