Ridley Pearson - Killer Summer

“Screw that, it’s too risky. We should just lock them up here.”

“Good plan, Matt. Just let them dehydrate and die. Or maybe we should give them the run of the kitchen. The cowboy is our number one threat. He knows this place, the woods. He knows what our options are. We need him gone. But, last I checked, we’re not in the business of killing people.”

“Tell that to the wine currier,” Salvo protested.

“All the more reason to get out of here. Think about it, Matt: who turned on the gas valve?”

That silenced Salvo.

“The girl?” McGuiness said, usually the silent one. Cantell noted this change.

“We tell the insurance company they have to pay up. We tell them that without payment in full, the jet will blow with the girl in it.”

“No way!” McGuiness shouted.

“Hang on, relax. She’s with us the whole time, not on the jet. But we need to give them an incentive to speed things up because we don’t know how long we’ve got.”

“But if the two somehow manage to make that call…” Salvo protested.

“We have the girl,” Cantell repeated. “Let them find the jet.”

That silenced Salvo and McGuiness both.

“Once we’ve rendezvoused with Lorraine at a new location we’re free and clear. We leave the girl behind. No harm, no foul.”

“But the beauty of the original plan,” McGuiness said, “was that we weren’t going to call the company until we were long gone. If they didn’t pay up, then we wouldn’t give them the coordinates and there’d be no way for them to find the plane. We could then go back four months later and fly the thing out of there, sell it in South America. That was our backup. All of that’s gone now. We’re not exactly in the Nevada desert, and no one’s flying that jet anywhere, probably ever. So if we’re going to play the girl card, why not start there?”

“I’m open for suggestions,” Cantell said, throwing his arms out.

He searched the faces of the other two. Salvo appeared to be brooding. McGuiness reeked of impatience.

McGuiness said, “What if we can’t find the girl?”

“We’ll find her. If necessary, we use the boy in her place.”

“We don’t take hostages,” McGuiness said. “We don’t kill people.”

“We broke one of those rules already,” Cantell said. He looked directly at Salvo. He wanted the man motivated. “It’s a work in progress.”

“We could put all three of them in the raft,” McGuiness suggested.

“We could,” Cantell said. “But I’m voting to bring her along as insurance, and, given her age and looks, how do you think Matt’s going to vote?”

Salvo grinned. “Give her to me for an hour and I promise you she’ll do whatever we ask.”

“You disgust me,” McGuiness said.

“Like I should care,” Salvo fired back.

Cantell stepped in. “Girls!” He could ill afford such dissension. “We’ll make a lot of noise like we’re going off to look for her, then one of us stays here while the other two keep an eye on the jet. Temperature’s dropping fast out there,” he added. “She’s not ready for that. She won’t last an hour.”

I’m not going back in the garage, Summer told herself repeatedly. But a little voice at the back of her brain told her otherwise. The woodpile would need fuel of some kind to light it, and she remembered seeing a beat-up cooking grill and a lighter wand on her way out. A row of jerrycans next to the ATVs suggested gasoline or diesel fuel. So while she had no problem connecting the dots, she just couldn’t muster the courage to go back in there and get the wand and fuel.

And, if she could, then what? What if all three men responded to the fire? Did she head for the jet and try to phone out or did she head for the lodge and look for Kevin? What if only two men responded? Or only one? What if they just let it burn?

She stood there, shivering. More than anything, she just wanted all this to go away. She’d dragged Kevin into this, taking his keys and forcing him to follow. What a jerk she’d been. And now she’d gotten him kidnapped, or worse. A big part of her just wanted to take off, to convince herself that it was in everyone’s best interest for her to save herself and somehow get word to her father.

Her father! How she had betrayed him, abused his trust. Having argued her own case so many times that she actually had come to believe it, now she saw the absurdity of her logic, the product of her mistakes. She now could see it all through her father’s eyes, could feel his anger. He wouldn’t know where she was, probably didn’t even know the jet had been stolen, and by the time he figured it out any concern he had would fester into rage. He didn’t lose his temper often-she should have been more grateful for that-but when he did she’d be on the receiving end. Dread now joined the cold, and she felt like all the life had drained out of her.

Balanced atop the file boxes, the knife wedged between the boards and prying, Kevin at first thought his efforts looked promising as the boards began pulling loose. But then an unwilling nail cried out, sending a chill through him that was like biting down on an ice cube. He moved the tip of the knife closer to the nail and tried again and again it squealed. If he kept this up, the sound would bring them running.

Discouraged, he pounded his fist on the closet door.

“Let me out of here!” he shouted.

It was a futile, childish outburst, but the longer he remained inside the dark closet, the greater his growing sense of panic. He was no lover of confined spaces, and the closet felt ever smaller by the minute.

His father-or had it been his Uncle Walt?-once told him that “everything happens for a reason.” He dismissed the platitude at the time the same way he dismissed anything an adult said. But now things were different. With the words reverberating in his head, he tried to clear his thought. He had a spark of realization. Now he understood.

Everything happens for a reason… even childish outbursts.

He stuck the knife between the boards again and kicked the closet door.

“LET ME OUT OF HERE!” he hollered even louder, yanking the knife down, the nail crying out and the board coming free, the sound covered by his petulant plea.

“PLEASE!” he screamed, grabbing the board and pulling down, his cry timed perfectly.

The board came loose in his hands.

Painfully aware that the Avicorps jet carrying his father was scheduled to touch down in fifteen minutes, Walt leaned over the Incident Command Center’s first row of tables and found Steven Garman’s cologne a little too much.

The pilot was stocky, with an Irishman’s florid cheeks and the kind of handsome that found its way onto the labels of soup cans. He had spent the last several minutes proposing to fly the portable transmitter on the same vector as Sumner’s jet. The plan included some sophisticated flying that would allow the wireless carrier to locate the phone, if Walt could win their cooperation. That seemed unlikely to Walt, but he wasn’t going to squash Garman’s optimism.

Walt moved another foot or two away. The cologne had to have a name like Brute Force or Demon’s Mist.

“I can tell you where I’d have aimed for,” Garman said.

“Please.”

“Some big guns have been buying up ranches along the Middle Fork. There are, what, maybe half a dozen grandfathered deeded properties up there, right in the middle of national forest? Those money guys love to have what no one else can have. They also love to break the rules. Any one of them could have made improvements to their strips-I mean, they’re not supposed to mess with the landscape but no one’s going to know whether they have or haven’t, right? And let me tell you something: if you’ve got one engine flamed out and another not producing power, you’re not going to be real picky about where you put it down.” He stood, moved over to Walt’s electronic map, and drew on a pad with a special pen, circling a shaded-out area. “Given the route you’ve predicted, that’s my bet: Mitchum’s Ranch.”