Си Бокс - Dark Sky

“So,” Marybeth asked her daughter, “what did you find?”

“Not a lot,” Sheridan said. “There have been no more posts from Steve-2. Even though it’s the middle of the night, his followers on ConFab are starting to ask questions and chatter about him. The hashtag #WheresSteve2 is trending and there are a few memes where people pasted pictures of Steve-2’s face on that ‘Where’s Waldo?’ character. Most of the comments are about how he’s done this kind of thing before, kind of jerking his followers around by not posting. There are a few people who think something happened to him, but most of them think he’s just a self-absorbed asshole.”

“Is he?” Marybeth asked.

“Of course. But I checked his timeline and it’s rare for him to be off-line for so long. He usually can’t wait to share his observations and philosophy.”

“Could it be he just can’t get on the Internet?” Marybeth asked.

“I suppose that’s possible, but I doubt it. He was online before. So what happened?”

“I’m afraid whatever it was happened to your dad as well.”

Sheridan sat back and lowered her phone to her lap as Marybeth drove back toward her house. Then she said, “Nate and Liv are at your place, right?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll call Nate. We can get going right now to go up there and see if we can find him on our own.”

“Honey, is that a good idea?”

“Mom, don’t talk to me as if I were a child. Do you have a better idea?”

“No.”

“We can’t afford to wait until Sheriff Dipshit gets his act together.”

“Sheriff Dipshit?”

“Sorry, that’s what I think of him right now.”

“I can’t disagree,” Marybeth said.

“Just make sure in the morning that he knows we’re up there and ahead of him,” Sheridan said. “I don’t want him tracking us instead of finding Dad.”

TWENTY

Raylan Wagy opened his eyes and thought he might be hallucinating from the pain and shock and loss of blood when he saw two rough-looking females gliding through the living room of the old hunting lodge. They seemed to float at first. One had big blue eyes and a headband made of plastic flowers on her blond head, and the other one shut the television off.

Then the second woman, a sturdy brunette with wide hips, large breasts, and knee-high boots, turned and saw him sprawled out on the couch. She screamed. The blonde jumped back as well and joined her friend, and the two strange hippie women stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the fading television screen. They did matching poses when it came to their reaction: they pointed at him with one hand and covered their mouths with the other and screamed in unison through their outstretched fingers.

Wagy winced and grunted as he sat up. His head swooned from the movement and he almost pitched headfirst off the couch. As he came back into consciousness, he realized that yes, he wasn’t hallucinating, and yes, there were two thirty-something women in the house and he had no idea who they were, how they got there, or what they were doing.

“What’s going on?” Axel Soledad asked as he entered the room from the kitchen. He was carrying a grocery sack, which he placed on top of an old stereo cabinet. He wore his usual uniform of all black and his bald head bobbed about in the gloom like an unfocused blob, Wagy thought.

As usual on the days he spent climbing cliffs, Soledad clomped around in heavy lace-up boots, and his tactical pants were dirty with mud and debris. He wore a thick black turtleneck sweater with patches on the elbow. Several loose carabiners clinked from loops on his belt.

“There’s a bloody man on the couch,” the brunette said to Soledad.

Soledad didn’t get excited. He never did. Instead, he removed a twelve-pack of beer from the sack, then a sixer of hard seltzer and a fifth of Jim Beam. He turned after he’d opened a beer and drank more than half of it in a long series of gulps.

Soledad had a presence about him, Wagy thought. Even in this situation, he seemed to radiate both menace and confidence. He had a kind of edgy take-charge charisma that at first glance either repelled people or drew them to him. Hence the two strange women he’d brought back.

“What in the hell happened to you?” he asked Wagy.

“I got attacked by a maniac,” Wagy said. “He stuck a pitchfork into my foot and nearly shot my head off.”

“So that’s why you’ve got that bath towel on your foot?” Soledad asked.

Wagy nodded painfully. His right leg was elevated and propped on the coffee table. He recalled his last action before he collapsed on the couch. He’d lurched into the bathroom on his injured foot and had pawed through the drawers in the bathroom for a clean towel. When he found one, he wrapped it around the wounds on his foot and secured the towel with an Ace bandage. The towel was now wet and hard with blood.

“Fuckin’ right,” Wagy said. “To stop the bleeding.” He noticed that the room was coming into sharper focus now. He knew he must have passed out, but he had no idea how long he’d been sleeping other than it was dark outside.

“What time is it?” Wagy asked.

Soledad didn’t respond. The blond girl struggled to remove the phone wedged into her tight black jeans pocket. When she got it out, she looked at the screen.

“Three-o-five,” she said. Then to Soledad: “Time for a hard seltzer, I’d say.”

Soledad chinned toward the drinks on the cabinet. “‘Ain’t no laws when you’re drinking Claws.’”

Both women laughed at that. Wagy got the impression the phrase had been used quite a number of times between the three of them before they showed up and came in through the back door.

“This is Zenda,” Soledad said, pointing the neck of his beer bottle toward the blond woman. Then the other: “That’s Cyndy. They’re passing through, just like us. They’re on their way to protest the killing of buffalo that wander out of Yellowstone Park into Montana.”

“ Bison ,” Zenda corrected.

“That’s Cyndy with two y ’s,” Cyndy said.

“Like he’s going to have to spell your name in a blog post or something,” Soledad chided. Cyndy didn’t look amused at the sarcasm.

As the two women pulled thin cans from the packaging, Wagy made a face and addressed Soledad. “Where in the hell have you been? I’ve been here bleeding out for hours with no way to get help. You took the car, and it’s not like I can call an Uber out here.”

“Why didn’t you call or text?”

“The maniac crushed my cell phone, and the landline here doesn’t work.”

Soledad shrugged. He was nothing if not cool and uncaring, Wagy thought.

“I thought you’d be happy I brought us some company,” Soledad said. “Zenda and Cyndy like to party. Or so they said.”

“Not with that one,” Cyndy said to Soledad after gesturing toward Wagy on the couch. “He’s a train wreck.”

“I’m hurt bad,” Wagy said, suddenly serious. “I’m in a really bad way. I’m in no shape for a party.” Then, to Soledad: “Where have you been?”

Soledad sat down on the coffee table in front of Wagy and stared at him, then sipped his beer. Wagy couldn’t tell if Soledad was disappointed or angry with him, or simply oblivious to the situation. He was a hard man to read.

One thing Wagy had learned about Soledad was the falconer’s utter disregard toward life and death. The man was totally amoral. Wagy had witnessed Soledad kill living things like pigeons and prairie dogs to feed to his captured raptors. There wasn’t even a flinch. There was no difference between Soledad twisting the cap off a beer bottle or the head off a pigeon. He’d seen Soledad hold a bunny up by the neck and punch it so hard in the face it died instantly. He’d also observed as Soledad “culled” weak or injured falcons by lopping their heads off with a scythe he’d found in the barn.