Ridley Pearson - Killer Summer

“You can’t put the cart before the horse, son.”

“She comes first.”

“You listen to me. They have no use for us. And we’ve seen their faces. We know their names. We’re expendable to them, and that’ll soon include the girl. Right now, she’s valuable to them, but it won’t last. We want to focus on what they’ll do to her before they kill her.”

“They won’t kill her.”

“Of course they will.”

“Then why didn’t they kill us? Why put us onto the river?”

“We’re going to get one chance here,” John said, not answering Kevin, not wanting to hear him. “You’d better bone up, son. I need you… Summer needs you. You go thinking there’s some other way out of this and you’ll do this half-assed, and that’s unacceptable. Where’d all the John Wayne in you go?”

“Who?”

“Oh, Christ.” John surveyed the route again. “You know anything about human nature?”

“I suppose…”

“We go taking potshots at them, what’s the first thing they’re going to do?”

“Shoot back?”

“What’s the second thing?”

“Seek cover?”

“You said earlier you’re a policeman’s son?”

“My uncle’s the sheriff.”

“You see? It’s rubbed off. Yes, seek cover. And if somebody is throwing shots from up here, then what?”

“Down there, I suppose… in the rocks.”

The cowboy studied the boy’s face.

“Have you figured it out yet… how we’re going to do this?”

“I can’t shoot anybody. I mean, maybe I could, but I don’t know for sure.”

The cowboy’s expression revealed his missing teeth.

“I told you before, it’s not coming down to you.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

“The over-under’s only good at close range, and it’s doubtful these guys are good enough to make the handgun count. Besides, if they go for their guns, they can’t be holding the girl. Intelligence and preparation wins here.”

“You want me to be your scout, is that it? I can do that.”

“No. The intelligence part is this: that shotgun is loaded with bird shot, but they don’t know that. It’ll sting like a mother, could even blind a person, I suppose. But it’s not going to kill anybody, and it’s certainly not going to kill me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kevin said, sizing up the cowboy. “You’re not planning on getting yourself shot.”

“This kind of thing… You can’t plan what’s going to happen.”

Deputy Stratum did not prevent Fiona from entering the interview room as Fiona had expected she would. Positioning herself behind the video camera, Fiona decided to record the second interview as a pretense for being in the room. She wasn’t going to miss this.

Teddy Sumner had aged in the past hour. Bags had formed under his eyes-the man had been crying-and a gray pallor had replaced the tanning-bed bronze. He reminded her of a piece of fruit ripened too long and left on the countertop.

She didn’t want to feel sorry for him, didn’t understand how she could. But his remorse had a contagious quality: it begged to be shared, as if others’ pity might lighten his load.

“The insurance company received a call,” Stratum told him.

“And…?”

“They gave them forty-eight hours to make a wire transfer of eight million dollars to a bank account-”

“In Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.” Sumner nodded. “Well, at least they’re sticking with the plan.”

“Not exactly,” Stratum said. “At least, not the plan you detailed for us. You were right about the GPS coordinates. If the money arrives on time, the coordinates will be sent. But there was mention of ‘a package.’ ” Stratum drew quotation marks in the air. “They said it will be returned when the deposit is confirmed.”

“Summer.” It came out as a moan. “Oh… dear… God…”

“Can you reach him… Cantell?”

“I tried before, remember? He didn’t pick up.”

“We’d like you to try again.”

“I’ll do anything, of course. But I don’t see what good-”

“If he answers the satellite phone, we’ll get a GPS fix,” Stratum explained.

Sumner’s sagging head snapped to attention. His eyes widened with hope.

“Where’s the phone?” he asked.

“It has to be yours,” she said, “in case of caller ID.” She slid his BlackBerry across to him. “We’d like it on speakerphone, please. Take the position that the ransom call has come in and you’ve been told it’s going to be paid.”

Sumner held the BlackBerry in his hand, briefly looking at it as if he’d never seen it before.

“God, what a mess,” he mumbled.

He looked up a number on the device.

“This wasn’t part of the agreement… a call from me. The idea was, no contact.”

“You’re concerned about your daughter, plans have changed. Be strong with him. Remind him you’re holding a card nearly as strong as his. If you turn yourself in to the police, there’ll be no money.”

“But why would I do that? That puts Summer in the middle.”

“She’s already in the middle. If you can negotiate her release ahead of the ransom, maybe they’ll take it. It’s all we’ve got.”

In Fiona’s opinion, Sumner wasn’t up to it.

But he punched in the number and hit the green button.

First came a radio call from his father. He’d located the camouflaged Learjet, ignored Walt, and entered the lodge without backup, and found evidence of a fight, some wet clothes, and no people. A radio had been destroyed, and there were signs that a room and a closet had been sealed up.

“Given that we found only two sets of prints at the zip line,” Jerry said, “they must have split up. That means they went with the river, as far as I can tell, but I’ll scout the woods.”

“You were going to wait for backup, Dad.”

There, he said it.

“Woulda, coulda, shoulda… he’s my grandson.”

Jerry ended the call.

Within minutes, Walt’s phone interrupted his chasing scuffs through the pine straw.

The call was the second from the office in the past fifteen minutes, this time rehashing Sumner’s contact with Cantell, a conversation that had gone poorly but which netted them Cantell’s lat/long coordinates, putting him less than a mile due west and moving in the same direction as Walt, south-southeast. Summer clearly was part of the ransom package. Cantell hadn’t budged from his demands.

Walt marked Cantell’s position on the map, being no pro when it came to the handheld GPS in his backpack, and determined he had a fighting chance of intercepting the hijackers. Cantell’s refusal to negotiate with the girl’s father, his original partner in the Learjet theft, sent up a flare. There would be no negotiating ever.

The position on the map seemed to imply that their destination was Morgan Creek Ranch as Walt had guessed. The Middle Fork ranches were all accessible by plane, and with the ranches being open during the summer, there likely was a plane on the property.

Given the remote location, the plan no doubt was to scout Morgan Creek Ranch and then escape by plane.

He couldn’t rule out the possibility that they might try to cross the river at the next zip line, in which case he was being handed an ideal setup for an ambush. But, then, why hadn’t more of them used the zip Kevin had?

The contradiction confused him. A possible explanation was that Cantell had split up his team and hostages to circumvent capture. Two different teams, each with a hostage, each with a different route out.

Was that it? Or was Kevin being lured to his grave in the woods.