I SLOWED TO ten miles an hour, kept going. No one was in sight. The place would have looked deserted but for the black Chevy Silverado parked to one side of the cabin. The place was old and weathered, built of pine logs, windows caked brown with dirt. A sparse pinyon forest surrounded the place on three sides.
Thirty yards from the cabin I stopped where a log had been dragged across the track, turned off the engine.
I waited a moment, unsure what to do, then the cabin door opened and a big guy came out in jeans, boots, a gray Ole Miss sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, ball cap, dark glasses. He stood on a porch under a deep overhang, two steps up from the dusty yard. He had a huge revolver in a two-handed combat grip, aimed at me.
“Get out,” he yelled.
I’d already palmed the transmitter in my left hand. I got the alligator from the passenger seat and climbed out. In Tonopah I’d tied a ribbon in a festive bow around the gator’s neck. The ice pick was a wicked throbbing pain in my back. I tried to ignore it and move naturally.
“Strip,” Kyle said. “Slow and easy, no sudden moves.”
I set the alligator on the hood of the Sequoia, hoping Kyle was far enough away that he couldn’t see what it was, wouldn’t say anything about it.
I took off shoes, socks, pants, underwear, then peeled off the shirt without turning my back to him. I piled all the clothing on the hood of the SUV. I’d never before felt so naked and defenseless. He could put a bullet in me at any time. I might not hear it or feel it. I had the queasy feeling I wouldn’t be alive in another minute. My lights could go out so fast I wouldn’t know I was gone, but this was for Lucy. And Harper. Either of them was worth more than fifty of me.
“Where’s the video?” Kyle called out. The air was still. His voice carried well.
“Got it with me.”
“Then get on over here, Sally.” He kept the gun aimed at my chest.
Sally again? One more reason to hate the shithead, as if I needed it.
I picked up the alligator and headed toward him. I slid the protective cover off the transmitter’s go button.
“What’ve you got there, dude?”
I held up the gator. “Jake had it in the Suburban.”
“Drop it.”
I couldn’t do that. I kept walking, kept him busy with a story. “It’s got a card on it,” I said. “He bought it for a kid named Katie, if you know who that is.” Which he would; it was his niece in Sioux City.
He grunted.
Ten yards from him I said, “I taped the flash drive to the mouth of this thing.” I held it so he could see it through the clear packing tape. “Flash drive has the video on it.”
He held the gun on my chest. When I was four yards away, he said, “Stop right there, hoss. Chuck it up here.”
Perfect.
I tossed it. He caught it left-handed, gun wavering as I took a half step to one side. I punched the transmit button.
I slid the toggle switch over, hit the button again, and there was a loud bang, like a cherry bomb going off. Kyle’s left hand exploded in a spray of blood. Green and pink fluff billowed into the air.
His gun went off. The bullet dug into the dirt inches from my right foot, kicking dirt and gravel into my shin.
I charged him. He was staring at where his left hand used to be. His fingers were mostly intact, but they were dangling from his palm and wrist by bloody tendons. His thumb was lying on the deck at his feet. His forearm was shredded halfway to his elbow, radius and ulna shattered, blood gushing out of torn arteries.
He staggered backward and looked up as I kicked him in the chest, knocked him back against the cabin wall. I grabbed the wrist that held his gun, twisted the Casull out of his grip and yanked him off the porch, into the yard. He landed on his face. His shredded arm dug into the dirt, pumping blood. He rolled onto his back and tried to sit up. I kicked him in the forehead with the heel of my foot. His head slammed back into the dirt. I rapped his head with the barrel of the Casull, trying not to kill him.
He was out.
I couldn’t have asked for more. I’d thought about what I would do if the shaped charge worked, if it fired in the right direction, disabled him but didn’t kill him and I got him down. I wanted him alive, at least for a while.
I stripped off his belt and wrapped it twice around his left bicep, pulled it tight and found a hole in the belt that cut off the blood pumping from his left arm. He’d already lost a pint, maybe two.
He was still unconscious. I jogged to the Sequoia and got a six-foot length of chain and a padlock. I ran back to him and looped the chain twice around his ankles in a tight figure eight, then padlocked the chain in place. I tried to put the padlock key in a pocket, startled to find I was still naked. I was full of adrenaline, so focused on getting him down and making certain he was going to stay down, that I had tunnel vision. Lucy, however, never left my thoughts. I had to get to her, but I had to deal with Kyle first.
I searched his pockets and came up with a cell phone, a deadly sharp CRKT knife, keys for the Silverado, keys for handcuffs, a wallet. I left him on his back in the dirt and took everything into the cabin, including his revolver.
The interior was dim after the bright sun outside. For a moment I was almost blind, then I saw a wooden table, a few chairs, a doorway right of center in the opposite wall.
“Lucy!”
I heard a muffled yell.
In the back room I found her and Harper handcuffed, gagged, tied to the iron frame of a bed on an old mattress that looked as if it had served as a nest to mice for years.
I took the duct tape off Lucy’s and Harper’s mouths.
“Are you okay?” I asked Lucy.
“Yes. Is he dead?”
“Not yet. But he’s hurting.”
“I heard a loud bang and a gunshot, Mort.”
“I’m fine. He missed me. He wasn’t able to aim with both hands.” I was almost sorry I’d said that. Almost.
“If he’s not dead, then leave us here. Make sure he’s not gonna come after us again.”
“I’m sure, Luce. He’s not—”
“I mean really sure, Mort. We’ll be okay for another minute or two.”
“Are you sure you don’t—?”
“Go! Kill him if you have to.”
I went. Lucy was still tough, still a fighter. She had her priorities straight.
Outside, Kyle was conscious and trying to sit up, not doing very well with only one operational arm and his feet chained together.
I kept out of his reach and assessed the situation for a moment. Handcuffs wouldn’t work on him.
He glared at me through his agony, but even SEALs lose gravitas when they lose an arm. He sank back and lay in the dirt. “Fuck,” he groaned. “Shaped charge?”
“Jake put it on the radiator of my truck in Ely. I found it, thought something like that might be useful so I kept it. I would thank him, if he weren’t a vegetable.”
“A vegetable?”
“He waterboarded Lucy,” I said harshly. “She felt like she was dying, so I didn’t try to stop it when his air got cut off long enough to turn him into a turnip for the rest of his miserable life. He’ll be wearing diapers and having his ass wiped for him until he’s gone.”
“Aw, fuck.” His eyes sought mine. “What about me?”
“What about you, Sally?”
His eyes blazed for half a second. Guess he didn’t like being called Sally any more than I did. But the fire didn’t last. He said, “Whatever you do, don’t do to me what you did to Jake. Kill me first.”
“I’ll think about it. Right now, I’ll try to keep you from bleeding to death and make damn sure you can’t cause any more trouble.”
His right arm was still free and unhurt. Other than that, he wasn’t a threat. I cut a length of parachute cord off a fifty-foot skein, tied the middle of the cord around Kyle’s right wrist in a square knot, snugged his wrist tight against his neck and looped the ends of the cord around either side of his neck, tied them off on the far side where he had no hope of reaching the knot with his one good hand.
I stood up and looked down at him. His left hand was splintered bone and hamburger, fingers all but severed and lying in the dirt, still held to his wrist by tendons.
“Stay down,” I said. “Try to get up and I’ll cut off your air. You and brother Jake can share a minimum-wage nurse named Bennie for the next forty years.”
He wasn’t going anywhere and I’d spent too long with him. I wanted to get Lucy and Harper off that filthy mattress and out of the cabin.
I got them out of their cuffs, cut the rope holding them to the bed frame, helped them to their feet. They were in shorts and tank tops, what they were wearing when Kyle grabbed them at the Goldfield Inn.
Lucy dragged me to the front door and onto the porch. She wanted to see Kyle, make sure he wasn’t about to rise up and come after us again. She stopped dead when she saw him with his ankles chained, one hand tied to his neck, the other hand a bloody stump. He wasn’t going anywhere.
She turned and hugged me, broke down into wracking sobs. “He was going to kill you and then us,” she wailed. She choked, couldn’t say anything more. Then Harper got in on the crying and the hug.
Two gorgeous girls, hugging naked me—a private eye tableau that would make Mike Hammer weep. It lasted a full minute, which would’ve been perfect except that they hadn’t showered in almost two days and they had that eau de mattress smell.
But I toughed it out, let them cling.
Somewhere in mid-hug, Lucy jumped away as if I’d turned into a vampire bat. “What’s on your back!”
“What? Oh, jeez, I forgot.”
She spun me around, then let out a cry of horror and shock. I reached back, pulled the ice pick out of its sheath—me. I’d forgotten it. I had been so awash in adrenaline I hadn’t felt it from the time I’d headed toward Kyle while he had that big-ass revolver aimed at my chest.
“Mort! What the hell? That’s an ice pick!”
“I know. He said he’d kill me and both of you if he saw a weapon of any kind. He told me to strip. All the way. I had no place to hide anything except behind me. My hands had to be visible. This was a last resort.”
“You … you stabbed yourself?”
I shrugged. “I couldn’t think of any other way to hide it, cupcake. Like I said, last resort. I’m not going to make it a habit with, you know, kitchen utensils in general.”
Harper stared at me. “Omigod, Mort.”
I shrugged again. “I didn’t have to use it. Sort of too bad, really, when you think about it.”
By then I had a girl on either side of me, each with an arm around my waist. They appeared to remember Kyle at the same time. Lucy stared at me. “How did you do that? I mean, his hand, or arm, or whatever that is, it’s all blood and … torn up.”
“I don’t mean to be a prude,” I said, “but before we get into that since it’ll take a while, how about I put on some clothes?”
“You don’t have to be a prude,” Harper said. She gave Lucy a little grin. “He doesn’t, does he?”
Lucy smiled at me. “Don’t think so. It’s warm out here and you could use a bit of sun, Mort. Vitamin D?”
“Ha ha,” I said. “You two are a riot. Stay here, watch this guy. Make sure he doesn’t jump up and run.” Kyle glared at me. He wanted to say something but held it in. I walked over to the Sequoia. It wasn’t easy to affect a jaunty amble with two broads staring at my naked ass. Prude that I am, I got dressed, happy to be back in clothes.
I came back with my cell phone, then went into the cabin and unloaded Kyle’s wallet. I found driver’s licenses and credit cards for Kyle Anza and a George Crowley. The Crowley ID had Kyle’s picture on it. Outside, I crouched in front of him and said, “How’s the arm, chief?”
His mouth tightened, but he remained silent.
“Hurts a little, huh?” I said. “I’m not surprised. Pain is nature’s way of telling you something isn’t right. I’ve got a first aid kit in the car. I might get you some aspirin, but not yet.
“So here’s how it’s gonna work. I’m going to video you telling the three of us who hired you to kidnap those high school girls and why, who killed the attorney general and that lawyer, Eystad. You’re going to tell us who decided what and why. I’ll send the video to a few law enforcement agencies and let them fight over who will claim the credit for breaking the case wide open. You’re also going to tell the world how you kidnapped Lucy and Harper and why you took them up here, handcuffed them and tied them to that bed, what you intended to do with them and to me after you got your hands on the video. You are going to ensure that if you survive, you will spend the rest of your pathetic life in prison.”
His look turned defiant. “And if I don’t? What? I don’t get aspirin?”
I smiled. Probably not a very nice smile. “You will end up drooling in diapers like Jake. I’m not in the mood to screw around with you. You’ll do it or fifteen minutes from now you won’t know your own name.”
He sagged, which wasn’t easy on his back. It was more like he closed his eyes and deflated.
“Whatever,” he breathed. “What the fuck ever, man.”
Lucy cleaned my ice pick wounds and applied liberal gobs of Polysporin to the punctures before covering them with gauze and tape. Kyle got seven aspirins, probably less medical care than he would’ve received if he’d crawled into an emergency room with a shredded forearm, thumb gone, fingers hanging on by gory threads. I wasn’t sure about the aspirin. I think I heard somewhere that it inhibits clotting, which didn’t seem optimal in his condition, not that I’m an expert in things like that. But he chucked them down and swallowed them dry, so I guess his arm was bothering him. Therefore, c’est la vie about a possible clotting problem.
I propped him against a porch post and untied his one good hand, thinking it would look too much like coercion on video if he had a hand awkwardly bound to his neck. He was still strong, no telling what he could do with one hand, so all of us kept out of reach. I got his confession on my cell phone. Lucy got a backup video on Kyle’s phone. Harper acted as a witness.
It took twenty minutes to get most of it down. I didn’t know how it might be received by a district attorney who would have to hand down an indictment, and the video would probably still be he said, she said, but I didn’t think Lieutenant Governor Sylvia Haas would find Kyle’s story amusing. This was the kind of lever that would move her universe. Now that the Anzas were out of play, I wanted to get the power-hungry bitch who’d hired them.
It was time to get out of there, time to decide what to do with Kyle. I went through his stuff in the Silverado: food, bottled water, clothes, rope, wire, flex cuffs, chain, padlocks, Taser, knives. He’d brought along a tomahawk, same model as Jake’s. A shovel—to bury bodies? A two-gallon can of gasoline—for cremations? Butane lighters, a G20 Glock, a .30-06 rifle, enough ammunition for both the handgun and rifle to fight a war.
Lucy and Harper grabbed bottles of water and lunged at the food, power bars of various kinds.
“He didn’t feed us or give us anything to drink,” Lucy said. “He said there was no point, so we knew he was going to kill us. And you.” She looked weepy as she said it. “You still haven’t said how you did that to his hand and arm.”
“Judo,” I replied.
She hit my arm. “Jerk.” Then she kissed me.
“Tell you later,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.” I looked at Kyle and hefted the Glock. “Always wanted one of these. Okay if I borrow it?”
Other than giving me a savage yet wary look, he didn’t respond.
“Thanks,” I said. “Got two of ’em now. I’ll also borrow your truck, unless you have some objection.”
Still no response, other than a homicidal stare. Then he said, “There’s a hand axe in the truck. I need it.”
“Not happenin’, chief.”
“I’ll give it back. I need it, dude, half a minute, that’s all. With these chains on my feet, I ain’t coming after you. Keep a gun on me if you’re all a-scared.”
I shrugged. I had to see what he was up to. Might be a suicide in the offing, which would solve a problem.
“By hand axe, do you mean the tomahawk?” I asked.
His smile was part grimace. “You got that from Jake, didn’t you? That it’s called a tomahawk.”
“Yup. Turns out he didn’t care for the way it was used on him. Nor did your idiot nephew Joe.”
I got the weapon, set it on the porch where he could reach it with his good hand. Lucy and Harper stood ten feet away. Lucy had my .44 aimed at Kyle’s chest. I pointed the Glock at his head, put light pressure on the trigger.
He picked up the tomahawk, flopped his ruined arm on the wooden porch, and chopped the tendons holding his ruined fingers to his shattered wrist. It took four hits to get them all. He tossed the tomahawk at my feet, picked up his fingers and flung them at the two girls. They landed in the dirt, bounced and tumbled, came to rest curled as if trying to get a grip on something.
“Oh, ugh,” Lucy said, stepping to one side.
“Yours if you want ’em,” Kyle said. His grin was that of a demonic jack-o’-lantern. “I’m done with ’em.”
Lucy and Harper backed away.
I put the tomahawk back in his truck, got in, backed the Silverado in a half circle and left it aimed downhill.
“Think you can drive this thing?” I asked Harper. “It’s a hell of a rough trail out of here.”
“Three tires and I’d sit on your lap while you drove. But it has all four so I’ll manage.” A glint of humor was in her eyes. Good for her. She wasn’t as tough as Lucy, but she wasn’t just another pretty face, either.
“Okey-doke then,” I said. “Let’s saddle up.”
She gave Kyle one last look then climbed up into his pickup. Lucy got in the passenger side of the Sequoia.
Kyle called out to me, “You’re not gonna leave me here with my feet chained like this, are you?”
I strode over to him. “What I want to do is put a bullet in your head, drag you into the trees and leave you for whatever might have a use for your carcass.”
He blinked, then said, “But?”
“But that’s too good for you. And I’m not sure it’s up to me to decide something like that, so I’m not going to do anything with you. Or to you.” I glanced at his ruined arm. “Anything more, that is.”
Hope flared in his eyes. “Nothing?”
“I’ll release your ankles, that’s all. Which is more than I should do, but I’m a nice guy.”
“You’re going to leave me up here, twenty miles from anywhere. That’s nice?”
“I’m going to leave you in God’s hands. Whatever He wants to do with you is entirely up to Him, not me.”
“God.” He chuckled darkly. “There is no God, man. If there was, I couldn’t have done the things I did.”
“Huh. Same thing the Schutzstaffel said in Germany in 1941 when they were running the chambers. Bet they’re sorry about that now. I imagine you will be too.”
I removed the padlock holding the chain around his ankles, but left the chain in place. He could unwind it in a matter of seconds. I left the belt tight around his left bicep. Gangrene would set in soon if it hadn’t already. If the belt were removed, he might bleed out quickly. He had several ways to die. Medically speaking, he was in a bad way—not that I felt it was my fault. He’d made his bed; therefore, he could lie in it and good luck.
I set two bottles of water on the porch nearby. “You’re a resourceful guy. I’m sure you’ll figure out how to open a bottle one-handed.”
“Fuck you, dude.” He sounded weary. I tend to have that effect on people. It’s a knack.
Speaking of weary, he was having that effect on me. I smiled and said, “Years ago one of my uncles had the lead of a horse wrapped around a finger when the horse reared up. The rope snapped off the end of the finger on his left hand. Uncle Charlie was a nice enough guy, but a hell of an independent cuss. He wouldn’t let his wife tie his shoes. He did it one-handed, got surprisingly adept at it too, until he got the use of his left hand again.”
“Shit, dude. What’s the point?”
I reached down and untied his right bootlace. “If my uncle could do it, so can you. It’ll give you something to do before you start walking—if you decide to do that. Or you can let the laces flap around. If so, try not to trip and fall on that bad arm. That’d hurt.”
He glared at me. “Asshole. You could at least leave me a little food.”
“I’ll leave you with as much as you gave the girls last night and this morning. I would leave you that much water too, but let’s give God a chance.”
I headed toward the Sequoia, then turned and looked back. “If I see you again, I’ll have to kill you—unless it’s in a courtroom. Otherwise, God or the state will take care of you from here on out. Have a nice day.”