Ridley Pearson - Killer Summer

“Sumner?” Walt asked.

“Hanging around, miserable. He cursed you a blue streak when he found out you’d left.”

“Remy?”

“He’s booked and in jail. Since when do we actually lock up a guy like that? Don’t they usually make bail?”

“It’s complicated,” Walt said. “Back to Sumner… His hotel phone…”

“Is forwarded and under surveillance, and his wireless usage is being tracked in real time. We can’t hear conversations, but we know-”

“The caller ID, incoming and outgoing,” Walt said.

Sometimes his own staff treated him like he didn’t understand his own requests.

He considered the delicacy of the Sumner situation.

“Where have you got him?”

“He’s turned the break room into an office.”

“Leave him there. That’s okay.”

“I have Fiona on hold, waiting to speak with you. Do you want to take it?”

Walt said to put her through.

“Hey,” Fiona said.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“I answered your phone,” she said apologetically. “Your office phone. I figured that with you gone and me using your office, if they put through a call it was probably you.”

“And who was it?” Walt asked, bracing to hear she’d communicated with the FBI or another federal agency, digging him into an even deeper hole.

“A guy named Bremer.”

“FAA,” Walt said. He’d dealt with Charles Bremer earlier when trying to make sense of Sumner’s missing jet. “Makes sense. I gave him my direct line.”

“A plane, a Frontier jet, spotted a fire from thirty thousand feet.”

Walt caught his breath. “Wreckage?”

“Just what I asked… Too small and organized. More like a bonfire.”

Kevin? The boy was smart enough to start a signal fire.

“They eyeballed the coordinates… It was definitely in the backcountry. Could have been a rafters’ bonfire on the Middle Fork. But it was big… very big… maybe too big for that.”

“A signal fire,” Walt said, thinking aloud.

“Who do I tell this to? What do I do next? My first reaction was to jump up and tell someone, but then… That was something, like, twenty minutes ago, and I’ve been going crazy since trying to figure out who you’d want me to tell. Do we send up a search plane? Does the FAA do that for us? How does any of this work?”

“You didn’t ask me that,” Walt said.

“Excuse me?”

“The reason I took off without telling anybody… My father knows the SAC who will take this one. The guy’s a wannabe Rambo. We don’t want Kevin caught in the middle of that.”

“Ah, okay. So…?”

“You don’t approve of my dodging a potential disaster,” Walt said, hearing it in her voice.

“When it comes to you and your father? It’s not exactly like there aren’t issues there, Walt, you know?”

“I’m not doing this for my father,” Walt said, “I’m doing it for Kevin.”

“And you know for a fact that this SAC is who your father says he is?”

“No, but-”

Walt saw his father out the window. He was on the truck’s tailgate, checking out a rifle and a handgun. Would his father lie in order to hold off the FBI and give himself a chance at some fieldwork? Would he put Kevin in the middle of his own ambitions?

“Christ,” Walt muttered inadvertently into the phone.

“What do you want me to do?” came her voice.

“It has to be reported. You’d better tell Brad. But if it takes you thirty minutes or more to get down the hall… If you told Brad to call back Bremer and determine the veracity of the report…”

“You want us to stall.”

“We’re still several hours from the ranch” Walt said. “I’d like to hold off the helicopters and jump squads until I know the situation out there.”

“I can understand that.”

“You think it’s a mistake. I can hear it in your voice.”

“I’m new to all this,” she said.

“Don’t give me that.”

“It’s your father,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, still watching him through the glass.

“I’ll do this however you want.”

“Okay, then,” he said, not changing his instructions.

The line went silent. Neither said a thing.

Walt didn’t want to be the one to end the call. He felt like he was fourteen.

“It’s Kevin in trouble, not me,” he said softly.

“Doesn’t exactly feel that way from here.”

“About the other night-”

“What’s interesting,” she cut him off, “is that it’s important to me. You’re important to me.”

“I handled that all wrong,” he said.

“Shut up, Walt, I’m not talking about the other night.”

“But I am. If you were in my position, with Gail and Brandon, the need to protect the girls… It gets so you don’t trust anybody or anything.”

“You can trust me,” she said, he thought rather boldly.

“I’m beginning to figure that out.”

“Yeah? Well speed it up a little, would you?”

“I shouldn’t be smiling with all that’s going down,” he said.

“Give it a rest. It won’t kill you.”

Kill you hung on the line between them. He knew what she was thinking and she knew what he was thinking.

“Okay, then,” he said.

To her credit, she didn’t get maudlin or overly dramatic, which he’d half expected.

“Okay, then,” she said, just before hanging up.

Kevin discovered an attic access hatch at the opposite end of the lodge from the study. Given the change in framing, he believed he was somewhere over the kitchen.

Whoever had entered the lodge only minutes before was still there. He’d heard an occasional footfall as he’d crept from one crossbeam to the next. The overall silence was uncomfortable. He couldn’t help but think that each might be listening for the other.

Now the silence was broken by a tapping sound coming from the study. It continued until provoking a response from the hijacker.

“Whatever you’re doing in there, stop it,” a man shouted. It wasn’t the copilot’s voice; maybe the guy who’d grabbed up Summer. “Any more of that noise and I put a couple rounds through the door.”

So, he had a gun.

Kevin used the noise of the man talking to cover the sound of his own lifting of the hatch. It came up easily, issuing a pale light into the attic. He found himself looking down into a pantry closet, its shelves loaded with cans and dry goods. Just inside the closet’s louvered doors, he spotted a bucket filled with cleaning supplies, and next to it a broom, a mop, and a canister vacuum cleaner. There were boxes of lightbulbs and boxes of tape, extension cords, a stepladder, and a toolbox. On the opposite wall was a soapstone sink and a clothes washer.

Tap, tap, tap.

“LAST WARNING!” shouted Matt.

The cowboy was the one doing the tapping, meaning he’d managed to use the knife to free himself. It was either an intentional distraction, trying to buy Kevin time by keeping the sentry’s attention, or it was an effort at escape.

Kevin had to take advantage of it. He lowered himself down through the hatch, swinging from the opening and catching the toes of his shoes on the lip of the sink. Hands on the walls, he quickly lowered himself.

He eased the louvered doors open just as the sentry shouted again.

“I SAID, BACK OFF!” He cocked his shotgun.

Kevin grabbed a spray cleaner from the bucket. He slipped out into the hallway, crept down it, and looked around the corner and saw the sentry by the smoldering fireplace with his shotgun aimed at the door to the study.

The ensuing seconds stretched out uncomfortably as Kevin was knotted by a dozen what-ifs, tortured by not having a clue what to do. Finally, his mind made up, he backtracked to the pantry and found a bottle of cooking sherry. He snuck back down the hall, took two steps into the room, and launched the bottle at the fireplace.