C Box - Below Zero

“Are you coming in with me?” Stenko asked.

Robert said, “Are you kidding? This isn’t my problem you’re trying to solve.”

Stenko sighed, “Of course not.”

“Think of what you’re doing as a gift to me and the younger generation,” Robert said. “After a lifetime of committing environmental crimes, you’re sacrificing yourself for us. For me. It would make me happy, Dad. It’s the one thing you can do for me to make up for everything else. You can go out a martyr for Mother Earth.”

Stenko’s eyes flooded with tears. They were tears from the pure physical pain that laced his guts, but also because of April and her innocence and how she was gone. But most of all the tears were because of Robert and what he’d turned into.

“Are you really this broken?” Stenko asked. Oh, how it hurt to talk.

Robert glanced over. His eyes were cold. “What are you babbling about, old man?”

“You’re not very sentimental, are you?”

“I learned from the best about selfishness, Dad.”

Robert looked up at the rearview mirror and made a face. “There’s that damned single headlight behind us again. What’s up with that?”

Rapid City

Sheridan rolled over and yawned and remembered she was in a hospital and why she was there. She sat up and rubbed her eyes, then looked over at Lucy, who was still sleeping, and her mother, who’d finally dozed off.

There had been a sound that had jarred her awake. She looked down the hall, assuming it was a nurse or staffer who’d passed by, but she couldn’t see anyone. She stood and looked out the window at the night and the still parking lot below.

Then she heard it again: the rapping of knuckles on glass.

She turned and saw him, a cop in a khaki uniform on the landing of the emergency exit that went to the stairs. He gestured at her and pointed at the handle of the door. She thought he looked vaguely familiar, and when she opened the door she recognized him from earlier that day. He’d been one of the deputies who’d arrived at the scene of April/Janie Doe’s crash.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, stepping into the hallway. His hat was clamped under his arm and he carried a plastic grocery sack. “They shut the elevator down to visitors at night, I just found out. Anyway, the sheriff sent me over here to talk to Agent Portenson and Agent Coon, but I don’t see them anywhere.”

“They’re gone,” Sheridan’s mom said from her chair. “Is there anything we can do?”

The deputy shrugged. “Is Joe Pickett here?”

“He’s with them,” her mom said.

The deputy’s face fell. He clearly didn’t know what he should do next. He said, “We found some personal items in the wreckage of that car. The sheriff bagged them up and asked me to deliver them to the FBI, thinking they might help somehow. Now I’m not sure who to give them to.”

“What kind of personal items?” her mom asked cautiously.

The agent flushed. “Just some feminine things, you know. Underwear, tampons, that kind of thing.” When he said the words, he looked away from Sheridan. “Plus, a pocketbook thing. Do either of you know a girl named Vicki?”

Sheridan felt the skin of her scalp pull back. “No,” she said, “but I think I know where she is.”

Her mom asked, “What’s her full name?”

“Damn, I forgot. Let me look it up,” the deputy said, digging into the plastic bag and pulling out a small leather purse with a metal clasp. He opened the clasp and drew out a small stack of papers, photos, and cards. “This here is a library card from Chicago, Illinois. It says it belongs to Vicki Burgess.”

Her mom covered her open mouth with her hand.

Even though it seemed like alarm bells were going off inside her head, Sheridan said to the deputy, “Can we look at what else is in the purse?”

Thinking: Who is Vicki Burgess?

How did she get my name and number?

The deputy straightened the stack of papers to put them back into the purse when he said, “Oh, there’s a photo. Two girls in it. I bet one of them is this Vicki Burgess…”

Rangeland

Nate leaned forward on the handlebars of the dirt bike and opened it up. Joe bent with him. The electric steel-mesh gate Stenko and Robert had just passed through was closing. Joe squinted over Nate’s shoulder as the bike sped up, trying to gauge whether they could really get through the opening in time. He didn’t think so.

He hollered, “Stop-we won’t make it!” then barely had time to duck his head into Nate’s back as they shot through the gap, the edges of the gate and steel receiver frame less than an inch each from the widest part of the handlebars.

Incredulous, Joe looked over his shoulder to see the gate lock shut behind them. He hadn’t imagined what had just happened after all.

“How did you do that?” Joe asked Nate, but it sounded more like an accusation than a question.

“Don’t know,” Nate yelled back. “I just opened up all the way and closed my eyes.”

“You closed your eyes?”

The taillights they’d been following were less than 200 yards ahead of them now. The vehicle had slowed and was swinging into a parking lot outside the front vestibule door of the power plant.

“Here,” Nate said, handing back his.454 to Joe. “You might need this to start blasting as we go. I think Robert might have seen us, and you know how he is.”

“Remember,” Joe said. “We need Stenko alive.”

And it was if someone had flipped on a switch for the sun. Joe, Nate, and the bike were bathed in brilliant white light. They hadn’t heard the helicopter coming because of the whine of the dirt bike engine.

“Not us, you idiots!” Joe yelled, looking back into the blinding lights and pointing ahead of them with the muzzle of Nate’s.454. “Put the light on Stenko and Robert! They’re up ahead of us!”

And thinking what a bad idea it was to be waving a handgun in the air at an FBI chopper that had already gunned down a man just that morning who did the same exact thing…

ROBERT SAID, “Shit. They’re all over us.”

Although the spotlight had yet to find them in the parking lot, it was bright enough behind them to illuminate the few rows of cars and trucks that belonged to the midnight shift. Instead of parking the car, Robert killed his lights and roared forward across a small lawn toward the front doors.

He said to Stenko, “That helicopter is going to find us any second, Dad, and I see flashing lights out on the road coming from town! Get out, get out, get out… get inside.”

But Stenko wouldn’t move. He slumped against the passenger window, his cheek pressed to the glass. His eyes were wide open, but without expression. Robert saw the open empty morphine bottles on the floor of the car, said, “Stupid old man,” and shoved Stenko in the arm hard, trying to wake him. Stenko’s head lolled back, his mouth open, a string of saliva like a slug trail connecting his upper and lower lips. The front doors of the vestibule were right outside his window now, and Robert braked.

“Ten steps, Dad,” Robert pleaded, his voice cracking. “ Get out. Ten steps and you’re in.”

But Stenko refused to move, and he disappointed Robert once again.

Robert cursed and ripped the lanyard out of his father’s fist. He’d do it himself. Get inside, take the elevator to the top, and open the hatch to the hanging boilers. But he wouldn’t jump in. Opening the hatch would do enough damage. Robert had his life and his mission still ahead of him. What good would it do anyone to become a martyr for the cause? He wasn’t like his old man, after all.

He threw open the door and bounded up the front steps, rejoicing that the spotlight on the helicopter hadn’t found him yet. As he approached the vestibule, he looked over his shoulder and saw the beam flashing over the cars in the parking lot like the vengeful eye of a Cyclops.