FOR A MOMENT I stood there. Kyle could see me; see everything I did. Eerie feeling. But he didn’t have eyes on all of Nevada, so it was time to get going, try to figure out what I could do about tomorrow.
I got in the Sequoia, backed out and headed north to Tonopah. Kyle thought he would get two million dollars, presumably from Sylvia Haas with whom he’d been having an affair. So much for love. In order to get the money, he had to come up with a video that I didn’t have, so Harper, Lucy, and I weren’t going to get out of this alive unless I came up with a plan. Even if I had the video and played it his way, I doubted that he would let us live. In fact, I was certain he wouldn’t.
Driving to Tonopah, I considered my options, which were limited in the extreme. I had to strip naked as soon as I got out of the SUV at the cabin. I gave that some thought. A Casull .454 was a cannon, bigger than my “Dirty Harry” .44 Magnum. Kyle had placed cameras in a few locations on the way up to the cabin. The police or the FBI were not going to be any part of this nightmare. This would be all on me.
Shit.
I should’ve stuck it out with the IRS.
I hauled ass, reached Tonopah at 5:20. By the time I got there, I had an idea. Not a great idea, not even a good idea, but something, a glimmer, a shadow of an idea. The chances of it working were somewhere between terrible and zero.
But not quite zero, so I geared up.
My first stop was at a variety store that sold a little of everything, like a Dollar Store. I looked around in a toy section and bought a stuffed alligator, green and pink, two feet long, big toothy smile, perfect cuddly toy for a kid three or four years old. And needles, thread, an icepick, a pack of pink file cards, red ribbon, a black marker, a flash drive, a small bottle of isopropyl alcohol.
At a hardware store I purchased copper wire, solder, a soldering gun, a tube of super glue, a roll of clear packing tape, needle-nose pliers, wire strippers, black electrical tape, several lengths of chain, a four-pack of padlocks that used the same key, nylon rope. I didn’t know what I would need so I bought out the store.
I rented a room at the Mizpah Hotel using the David Peterson credit card and ID.
I got the key for the room but didn’t go up. No time. I filled the SUV’s tank at an Exxon station, downed a Red Bull, bought a pre-packaged sandwich and bottled water, then headed for Ely on Highway 6, the same road I was on when I’d come across Harper five days ago.
Five days? It felt more like a month.
I called Ma on a burner when I was eight miles out of Tonopah. I had to keep her out of this. I told her I’d found Lucy and we were fine but tired, that we’d be back in Reno sometime tomorrow, if we didn’t decide to hit Vegas and get a suite, visit with Harper for a day or two. If I’d told her what was really going on, she would’ve had a coronary. She would’ve tried to save us somehow. I lost the signal twelve miles out of Tonopah, which was just as well.
I hustled, hit the straight sections at a hundred ten miles an hour, took the curves as fast as I could. At least the road was dry this time.
The internet gave the distance from Tonopah to Ely as 168 miles, a three-hour, seven-minute drive. I got to Ely in two hours forty-one minutes at 9:02, daylight starting to go. I filled the tank, picked up two sandwiches, another Red Bull, a bottle of NoDoz, and headed north to Wells.
I reached Wells at 10:40, stopped at mile marker 3 on the way in. I filled the tank at the Flying J station in Wells, then raced back to Ely, then on to Tonopah, worried sick about Lucy and Harper. I didn’t want to think about what they might be going through.
The night was full of stars. I distracted myself with the thought that in a billion years the night would still be full of stars, but they wouldn’t look the same. Stars slowly drift around. Polaris would be somewhere else. Orion would no longer look like Orion. We are specks of transient dust in an extremely slow whirlwind of cosmic debris, but we are important. Lucy is worth more than all the visible stars in the sky. Much more. I would trade every last one of them to save her.
I went over what I had to do, kept looking for ways to better my odds but didn’t come up with much.
I arrived in Tonopah at 4:25 a.m., and hiked up to my room in the Mizpah Hotel. I went to work with the needle-nose pliers, wire, soldering gun, electrical tape, a knife, needle and thread. And I wrote a gift card and tied it to the stuffed alligator with red ribbon. When I got done, I could only hope it would work. I was betting our lives on it.
I crashed—after setting the alarm on my cell phone for 8:45 and calling the front desk, requesting a wake-up call for the same time. I had to be at the junction of 95 and 265 at ten. I couldn’t afford to oversleep. I gave myself an hour and fifteen minutes to get there.
The call woke me at 8:44. I felt drugged, eyes grainy. The thought of Lucy in the hands of that maniac snapped my eyes open, catapulted me out of bed.
I took a cold shower to wake up further, dressed, went out to the Sequoia, drove it to a gas station and filled up, grabbed something to eat, bought two more Red Bulls and half a dozen bottles of water, a handful of Cliff bars.
Before leaving, I put my .44 Magnum in the back of the SUV where I could reach it by opening the tailgate. I tried to think about what might happen at the cabin. If Kyle intended to change the game and kill me on the spot I could try to duck and weave, get behind the SUV, open the back and trade bullets with him.
I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. If it did, the girls would most likely be dead already.
But he wanted the video. He couldn’t do anything to me until he knew I had it. That was my only hope.
I left town at 9:20, gave myself forty minutes to travel thirty-five miles. After thirty miles I slowed to fifty, kept an eye out for the turn. The ice pick was on the passenger seat beside me. The thought about what I was going to do with it made my armpits damp.
Before leaving Tonopah, I’d synchronized the time on my cell phone with the car’s clock. I lost cell coverage a few miles before I reached 265. The car’s clock showed 9:59 as I slowed for the turn. It read 10:00 as I pulled off 95. I reset the trip odometer to 0.0 then headed south to Silver Peak, taking the SUV up to sixty on a flat, empty paved road through the desert. The temperature on the dash registered 82 degrees.
When the odometer read 14, I started to watch for a dirt track off to the right. It appeared at 15.1 miles. Close enough. I turned and headed west into flat desert devoid of life, rolling hills a short way ahead, low mountains beyond that tinted bluish-green by low scrubby trees.
Four miles in, I came to a fork in the road, took the left fork, and kept going. Kyle might’ve placed a camera at that fork, so I went six more miles before I stopped and got out of the car.
This was the part I’d been dreading, but it was for Lucy so I turned off my brain and just did it. I removed my shirt, dipped the spike of the ice pick in alcohol, reached around behind my back with my left hand, pinched a roll of skin six inches below my right shoulder blade, took a deep breath, and, with my right hand, quickly shoved the ice pick to the left and slightly down through the fold of skin and out the other side.
I let out a yelp. Shit, that hurt! Tears came to my eyes. I blinked them away, felt blood on my fingers.
I took a deep breath, located where the ice pick had come out, then felt down and over about three inches, got hold of another fold of skin, and shoved the pick through that. Which also hurt like a son of a bitch.
I closed my eyes, felt rage at Kyle, happy at what had happened to Jake. The rage helped. Fuck these guys.
The pick was now in a human sheath, hidden behind my back. Kyle had told me I would have to remove all my clothes. When I did, I would be able to reach the handle of the ice pick with my right hand, pull it quickly, use it if he gave me any opportunity at all.
Putting my shirt back on was an exercise in pain. I’d planned for this, worn a shirt that buttoned up the front. The ice pick throbbed like a bad tooth. It hurt to move. I got back in the SUV gingerly and leaned forward to drive, keeping pressure off that sonofabitchin’ pick.
I checked the transmitter Jake had taken off his belt at the Monroe Street house. He’d indicated it would fire the shaped charge on my truck’s radiator. It had a small toggle switch on top, and a red button beneath a sliding safety cap. The shaped charge also had a switch on it. I’d turned it off to save the battery when I left the charge in the weeds south of Wells. I hoped it would work when I turned it back on, that the explosive would be waiting for a signal. I had no way to test it. I could only hope.
The track wound around the hills, over washboard ruts and axle-breaking trenches, through canyons, gaining elevation. Sagebrush gave way to pinyon pines, juniper, and an occasional bristlecone pine. I passed a handmade sign nailed to a tree that read 7,000 feet. I kept bumping and thudding up the rocky trail.
Finally, the slope became less steep and I sensed that I was getting close. My heartbeat picked up, making me a little light-headed.
I took deep breaths, drank half a Red Bull, kept going. Then, around a bend I saw the cabin four hundred yards ahead, a low structure of dark wood in the sunlight.
I threw the switch on the shaped charge.