Spy High (14 page)

I hadn’t realized before how isolated
they were. Down at the end of a twisting trail, they were nearly a
quarter-mile away from the rest of the encampment. After living
here most of their lives they probably valued their privacy, but
that would also make them easy marks for an attack. Dammit.

Orion’s and my tents were on the end of
another long branch of gravel, easily identified by the large pond
a hundred yards or so behind us. My forehead crunched into a frown
despite the pressure of my hand.

When I had first arrived I’d been
abjectly grateful for the distance and privacy until Orion’s tent
had been erected a couple of weeks later, but by then I’d been
through the worst of the screaming nightmares. I hadn’t spent much
time in the rest of the encampment, and now I realized all the
other tents were clustered together in a friendly village-type
layout. Only ours were separate. And the gravel on our path shone
brightly compared to the half-overgrown trails that made up the
rest of the commune.

So I had been deliberately segregated.
Gratitude warmed my heart. Stemp had said his parents understood
the difficulties of recovering from traumatic stress, and that was
obviously true. They had gone to considerable effort to make a
private haven for me and offer comfort with no strings
attached.

Guilt returned full-force. Okay, I’d
get my ass to the Spirit Callings from now on and smile while I did
it. It was the least I could do.

I sighed and returned to my scrutiny.
To my right, the big field where we met for the Callings lay a few
hundred yards off the road with an entrance at each end. I still
didn’t understand why we couldn’t just march down the road to get
to it instead of hiking twice as far along the winding forest
trails, but I smothered that thought. Be respectful, dammit.

I spent the next several minutes
memorizing the visible parts of the road and surrounding forest.
Then I stood, stretched for the benefit of any hidden observers,
and stepped into the trees behind the bench.

Scouting quietly through the forest, I
identified several other viewpoints along the escarpment. One
offered a wider view of the renters’ land while another gave me a
better look at the road, but none were as panoramic as the view
from the bench.

Good to know.

I turned my feet toward Skidmark’s
garage at last, my stomach growling its displeasure. A glance at my
watch showed it was nearing eleven o’clock, and a sudden glorious
vision of a cheeseburger and fries flooded my mind.

If I went to town early I could hit the
burger joint for a gut bomb instead of eating the mostly-vegetarian
fare from the commune’s kitchen. Drool nearly overflowed my mouth
at the thought. After months of healthy eating, my grease and salt
levels were critically low.

And if I went right now, I could have a
beer, too. It would be okay because I’d be stone-cold sober by the
time I had to drive back four hours later. My stomach emitted a
whimper of eagerness.

And a milkshake for dessert. I hadn’t
had ice cream in four months…

I abandoned the path to crash directly
through the undergrowth. Sugar, salt, fat, and booze: the four
basic food groups. Ohmigod. Taste-bud orgasm, here I come.

When I panted into Skidmark’s clearing
shedding broken twigs and fern fragments, both vehicles sat in
their usual places. The garage doors were closed and there was no
sign of Skidmark.

Hurrying over to the station wagon, I
tried the door and let out a small hum of satisfaction when it
opened to reveal the keys in the ignition. I slid behind the wheel
and twisted the key.

The starter turned over but the engine
didn’t catch.

Damn.

I popped the hood and strode around
front to study the engine. Hoping for another simple fix, I checked
the ignition wire, but it was secure on the distributor cap.

Fine, whatever. I could take the truck
instead. Once I was in town I could contact Stemp and have him
communicate the change to the courier.

Moments later my confidence evaporated
when the truck’s starter cranked over ineffectually as well.

What the hell? It had been running fine
yesterday. Surely that dipshit Ratboy hadn’t managed to undo all my
good work.

I burrowed under the hood.

Like the car, its ignition wire was
also secure. So Skidmark hadn’t been messing with it this time.

Suspicion oozed into my mind.

Or had he?

Scowling, I traced the distributor wire
to the first spark plug. The boot fell away in my hand, revealing
an empty hole in the block. A hurried inspection revealed that all
the spark plugs were missing, the boots simply resting in their
cavities.

“Skidmark, if I don’t get my
cheeseburger and beer today, you are a fucking dead man,” I
muttered, and stomped over to the car.

Apparently originality wasn’t his
forte. Its spark plugs were missing, too.

I straightened and bellowed,
“SKIDMARK!”

No reply.

A few more increasingly irritated
shouts brought no answer, and I found myself feeling a moment of
empathy for Ratboy. Maybe he’d needed a cheeseburger, too.

Well, fuck this. Skidmark probably
wasn’t walking around with sixteen spark plugs jingling in his
pockets. If nothing else, it would screw up the gaps and he’d have
to re-gap them all before he reinstalled them. Somehow I couldn’t
see him expending that kind of effort.

The garage door was locked.

“Asshole,” I growled. “It’s a fucking
commune. Public property.”

I examined the lock, but it was a
sturdy deadbolt. The overhead door didn’t budge when I tugged on
it, either.

Whipped into junk-food-deprived
indignation, I stalked around the building, studying it.

The windows were definitely the weak
points. I couldn’t justify breaking one, but…

A wolfish grin stretched my mouth as I
examined the nearest one. Single sliding panes in a simple track
system. Ha.

Carefully levering with the tip of my
survival knife, I lifted the end of the pane out of the lower
track. A moment later I got my fingertips wrapped around it and
lifted it out. The window was only waist height, and I shed my
backpack and climbed through the opening, my grin widening at the
sight of sixteen blackened spark plugs lined up on the workbench
with the ratchet drive and deep socket lying beside them.

You lose, old man.

I hesitated over the plugs for only a
moment. The engines were both big V-8s so their gap specs were
probably pretty similar. If I happened to choose the wrong set the
car might run a little rough, but it would still get me to town and
back with no harm to the engine. I tucked eight spark plugs
carefully into my pocket, stowed the ratchet in another pocket, and
climbed out again, replacing the window pane behind me.

A few minutes of work restored the
plugs to their proper homes, and I gave silent thanks that sheer
habit had made me lay out the wires in order when I’d removed
them.

I paused, the first wire in hand.

Surely Skidmark wouldn’t be devious
enough to mix up the wires when he took out the plugs.

The old bastard wouldn’t.

Would he?

I ground my teeth. Goddammit, if I was
sabotaging an engine, I sure as hell would. With the wrong firing
order the engine likely wouldn’t run at all. Or if my luck was
really bad, it could backfire, break a valve, and crater a piston
and cylinder when the pieces fell in.

Muttering imprecations, I pushed the
boots onto the plugs anyway. Only one way to find out.

When I slid into the driver’s seat, I
drew a deep breath, my fingers hesitating over the ignition. I’d
hate to blow this poor old engine.

Cringing, I turned the key.

The starter caught immediately and the
engine roared to life, idling as smoothly as a decades-old car was
likely to run.

“HA!” I pumped my fist and hopped out
to slam the hood and grab my backpack before returning to my
triumphal throne behind the wheel. A black-smeared rag balled up on
the floor of the passenger side indicated I wasn’t the first person
to undertake last-minute repairs, and I rubbed as much grease off
my hands as possible before dropping the car into gear with a
grin.

“Fuck you, old man!” I yelled out the
open window, and stomped on the gas, flinging gravel across the
clearing before rumbling off in a cloud of malodorous blue
exhaust.

Rattling along the gravel road with the
window down, my hair swirled wildly around my head while I bellowed
an off-key version of Jimmy Buffett’s ‘Cheeseburger In Paradise’
over the roar of the rotted-out muffler.

My grin widened at the thought of
Skidmark returning to the scene of the crime to find his
carefully-sabotaged car gone. Ha. Let the old goat roll that up in
his cigarette paper and smoke it.

Sudden realization halted my singing in
mid-verse.

Shit.

Skidmark was deliberately sabotaging
the vehicles.

Shit, shit, shit! What if he was
working with Orion? What if he had disabled both vehicles so nobody
could go for help when Orion attacked Moonbeam and Karma? What if
something terrible was happening right this minute?

Had I just traded two wonderful human
beings for a cheeseburger?

I slammed on the brakes, steering into
the skid on the treacherous gravel. The car rocked to a stop at the
side of the road in a shower of stones and I stared blindly through
the windshield.

Stop panicking. Think.

I had covered nearly half of the twelve
miles to town. It would take ten or fifteen minutes to get back to
the commune. I had last seen Moonbeam around nine-thirty. I threw a
worried scowl at my watch. Two and a half hours ago.

I swallowed hard, fear clutching my
throat. What if Orion and Ratboy had been talking about attacking
Moonbeam and Karma? Ratboy had said ‘soon’…

Shut up. Think.

Okay, if they were making their move
today, there was no reason to believe I’d get back there in time to
stop them. And as Stemp had pointed out, they likely weren’t
planning simple murders. That meant they’d probably capture
Moonbeam and Karma and hold them somewhere. Even with a trained
team, eighty acres of dense forest would take a long time to
search. Alone, with no thermal imaging or night-vision goggles, I
didn’t have a chance in hell of finding them before it was too
late.

But the courier drop was still four
hours away.

Four hours for Orion to do his
worst…

The memory of torture-ravaged bodies
rose and choked me. Fingers clenched on the wheel, I stared
straight ahead and forced my shallow panting to slow.

Stay calm. Maybe Skidmark was just
being a pain as usual. Maybe today wasn’t the day for Orion to
attack. Maybe Orion wasn’t even planning to attack. Maybe he had
some good reason for carrying those hand restraints…

Bullshit.

I abandoned that train of thought and
tried again.

Rushing back to the commune only to
find everybody fine was a waste of gasoline and nervous energy. And
without the surveillance equipment, I was practically useless. I
had to go to town no matter what.

I drew a deep shaky breath and peeled
my fingers loose from the steering wheel. Okay. Simple solution.
Call the commune and ask for Moonbeam or Karma. If they answered,
there was nothing to worry about. And I wasn’t technically on the
commune anymore, so nobody could object to me using a cell
phone.

Heart hammering, I dug into my backpack
and fumbled a phone out with cold stiff fingers.

And if nobody could find them, well,
I’d just have a heart attack right here on the spot.

The sound of ringing on the other end
of the line froze my fingers around the phone, its plastic case
protesting my grip with a faint creak. When an unidentifiable male
voice answered, it took two tries for me to force a voice from my
constricted throat.

“May I speak to Moonbeam or Karma,
please?”

“Hang on, I’ll see if I can find them.”
A clunk signalled that the receiver was dangling from its cord in
its low-tech version of ‘on hold’ while he went to search.

Long minutes ticked by. The thud-swish
of my heartbeat in my ears accelerated, and I began to wonder about
the state of my blood pressure.

Well, if something had happened to
Moonbeam or Karma, it wouldn’t matter. Stemp wouldn’t let me live
long enough to have a stroke.

“Hello?” Moonbeam’s voice on the other
end of the line released a small sob of relief from my throat.

“H-Hi…” I had to stop and swallow.
“It’s Ayd… Um, Storm.”

Her voice went sharp with concern.
“What’s wrong? Where are you?”

I drew a breath and managed a normal
tone. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m in town but I realized I’d forgotten to
ask if you needed me to pick up anything while I’m here.”

“Oh.” I thought I heard a breath of
relief on the line before she spoke again. “Thank you, dear, but
no. We got the mail yesterday, and we had a load of groceries last
week. We really need very little. Have a nice time, and we’ll see
you later.”

“Okay. Thanks.” I hung up and toppled
sideways onto the seat, panting and clutching my chest.

Jeez, I had to stop doing that. Getting
myself all worked up over nothing. Dr. Rawling would call it
catastrophic thinking.

I hauled myself upright again,
trembling. But Dr. Rawling had never rushed into a butcher shop to
find the man he loved hanging from a meat hook.

I shook my head and gave my cheeks a
couple of not-too-vigorous slaps. So much wrong with that
thought.

In the first place, it was inaccurate
syntax or gender or something. I was pretty sure Dr. Rawling was
heterosexual.

In the second place, I had no reason to
believe Orion would torture Moonbeam and Karma. Hell, I didn’t even
know if he posed any kind of threat to them. Maybe those hand
restraints were for somebody else entirely. Like me, for
instance.