The Devil's Anvil (37 page)

I hadn’t yet learned the details of what had gone on, but now I knew from whom the scream had come that led me to Billie. She’d fought back against her captors even without the knowledge that I was coming for her. Her proactivity had allowed her to get hold of a gun and shoot Daniel Jaeger. I should have offered her kudos, but instead I said, ‘We were all lucky to get out alive, and relatively uninjured. We can all pat each other on the back once this is over with.’

Over the top of Billie’s head I caught another glance from Rink. This time there was definite confusion in it. I didn’t offer an explanation, just nodded softly at him. Rink knew enough not to push, and we fell back to silence.

A few minutes later we arrived at the motel and Noah parked the car out of sight of the highway. If anyone at the logistics depot had spotted our getaway car it wouldn’t matter, because I believed that everyone there would have been hightailing it in the opposite direction to that of the responding police officers. Any that were mopped up and interrogated would plead ignorance of what had gone down, because to admit otherwise would be to implicate them in the kidnapping and torturing of a citizen. I felt confident that the car hadn’t been in view of any working CCTV cameras, so we’d be safe enough from discovery for now.

Adam was first out of the car. He still had a sidearm down alongside his thigh and I spoke gruffly. ‘Put that thing away, will you? Try to be a bit less conspicuous if you can.’

Adam was suitably abashed and quickly stuck the gun inside his coat.

‘Hey, go easy on the kid, brother,’ Rink said. ‘If it weren’t for these guys we’d still be running up the five-o-seven with half the cops in Tacoma after us.’

Rink was right. Noah and Adam could have left us behind, but they’d chosen to come and rescue us instead. I owed them more than my surliness. It had nothing to do with them, but something worried me and was weighing heavily on my mind. I waved the young man an apology, but he had the grace to shrug it off. ‘You were right, Joe. It was stupid of me to wave a gun around like that where anyone could see.’

As it was there was nobody in sight. We were in darkness at the back of the parking lot, and most people staying in the motel had retired for the night. Our arrival hadn’t caused any of the bedroom curtains to twitch. We headed inside the room we’d used earlier. Without asking him, Adam offered to go and fetch ice for Billie’s hand from a machine he’d earlier visited in the lobby. When he returned it was also with an armful of Coca-Cola drinks, and some chocolate bars from a vending machine. We all needed the sugar rush and carbs.

‘What are we going to do about the guns?’ Noah wondered, once we’d settled in the sitting area.

‘We need to hang on to them for now,’ Rink replied. Like I did, Rink understood that things had not yet come to a head. Without adding anything more, he went to Billie who was sitting on the edge of the bed. Out of us all – and considering my mind was on other things – he was the appropriate person to administer field dressings and such to Billie’s hands. Billie offered up her malformed right hand, but she didn’t look at Rink; she eyed me steadily, with great interest. I found her scrutiny oddly unnerving and looked away. I asked to borrow Noah’s cell phone.

‘I’ve got to make a couple of private calls,’ I announced.

Once out of the room, I walked away from the motel across the lot to the darkness alongside the parked car.

I must call Brandon Cooper, I thought.

After that, Harvey Lucas.

First I wanted to clear up the lies, and follow that by learning the truth.

41

We didn’t bring Billie home to her farm. She stayed in Hill End with Noah and Adam watching over her, while Rink drove the two of us to Baker’s Hole. It was a solemn drive. After I’d made the calls last night, I’d got Rink alone and told him what I’d learned, and also what I suspected. I hoped to God I was wrong, but the clenching in my guts was too intense to ignore.

Arriving at the farm, I went inside the house through the front door Adam had booted open, and upstairs to Billie’s bedroom. I then joined Rink on the stoop and we walked out by the lake. As I stood on the shore, Rink silent alongside me, I held up the painting I’d taken down off Billie’s bedroom wall. Then taking our bearings from the scene in the painting we visually marked the spot of interest on the opposite shore.

‘X marks the spot, huh?’ Rink said, but with no enthusiasm.

‘C’mon, let’s get going before Cooper arrives.’ I put the painting down on the shore – a clue for the ATF agent to follow. I didn’t need the painting as I’d memorised it in detail and could probably draw it again myself, not with Billie’s artistic flair but a good copy.

We each shouldered garden spades and set off, following the curve of the lakeshore around its eastern end. It took us twenty minutes to find the general location we’d noted from the other side of the lake, and I lined us up on the natural landmarks I’d taken note of. ‘It should be here somewhere,’ I said.

Rink is an expert tracker. He sees things that would go unnoticed by your regular man, and what would appear a natural feature of the landscape would stand out to him like an explosion of colour. ‘There’s irregularity in the undergrowth over there,’ he said, indicating a low hummock of turf just beyond the pebble-strewn shore. I trusted his instincts and we moved together for the area he pointed out. It wasn’t the hummock itself, but the depression in the ground in front. The grass and weed that had found purchase in the depression were darker, younger than the growth all around. Some of the rocks embedded in the earth were also darker in colour than those in the vicinity. Those rocks had once lain the other side up, and hadn’t yet had time to fade the way their neighbours had. The earth had been disturbed there. It had been dug out, and then shovelled back into place. Over the years it had settled, sinking marginally lower than the ground nearby.

‘You sure we should do this, brother?’

‘It’s the only way we’re going to know for certain what’s down there,’ I said.

‘Maybe it’s best we never find out. It’s not too late to walk away.’

Unfortunately, it was too late.

In my mind’s eye I pictured the crimson stroke of colour in Billie’s painting. The vibrant red depicted Nicola, her deceased daughter. In that painting – and others of Billie’s if I’d had the time to study them – the dead girl pointed at the ground, at this very spot in the wilderness. Those paintings Billie had committed to canvas were both her way of paying homage to her daughter, and clues to the treasure everyone had been seeking in vain. Following the direction of Nicola’s pointing finger, I settled the spade in the earth, stepped on it with one foot and pushed.

We only had to dig a few feet until we came across a galvanised steel barrel. I’d seen others like it in the shed on Billie’s farm, next to her parked Jetta. We scraped away the soil, but left the barrel on its side, the lid untouched. By that time the crunch of approaching footsteps had alerted us to Agent Cooper’s arrival and we stepped out of the hole and leaned on our spades. Cooper had come as I asked – alone – but I didn’t doubt his ATF pals were waiting nearby. He held a pistol down by his thigh.

‘Good of you to join us,’ I said.

Cooper stopped fifteen feet away, his shoes sinking into gravel with a soft hiss. He didn’t lift the pistol, but neither did he put it away.

‘I’m surprised you’d doubted me,’ he said.

When I’d phoned him the night before, he’d given a lame-arsed excuse about trying to round up a team of ATF agents to come to our assistance but had been too late to be of any help. By the time they’d arrived at the logistics depot it was a no-go area of cops and Feds and he’d backed off. When he’d enquired about Billie’s welfare I told him she was safely in my care, and would stay that way without his help. He’d offered to come get her anyway, and to place her in protective custody. It was bullshit; he wasn’t the least bit interested in Billie, only in what she could tell him. Still playing his game, he’d asked what I’d learned from her, and that was when I’d told him where and when to meet me, and I’d show him.

‘I fully expected you to come.’ I tapped the barrel with my spade and it rang dully. ‘I promised I’d show you what I’d found. It’s right here, Cooper.’

He couldn’t keep the greed out of his face. He licked his lips, glancing from me to Rink and back again. Then he took a slow look at the surrounding hills, without ever fully losing sight of us. ‘How the hell did you find it all the way out here? Billie must have finally told you the truth, right?’

‘I’ve never been the best detective in the world, but even I was able to figure out the clues,’ I said. ‘And for the record, Billie wasn’t lying. Only you were lying, Cooper.’

After I’d called Cooper I’d rung Harvey and had him check a few facts for me. Apparently Brandon Cooper was no longer an active ATF agent and hadn’t been for months. He was simply another interested party in the hunt for Richard Womack, or more pertinently those missing millions of dollars. I should have checked his story earlier, and saved myself a whole heap of trouble. But there you go.

‘You know, I should’ve known you were lying the first time we met and you told me that a facial recognition program had got a hit on Richard. If it had he wouldn’t have progressed through border control without being detained. You knew that was bull, but to be fair it was reasonable enough for me to believe you at the time. You mentioned there was a mole in the ATF; that was true. But the mole was yours, he was feeding you intel, getting you the equipment you needed to put me in place, make your fantasy story ring true. You hoped that by having me stick close to Billie she’d finally relent and tell me where the money was, eh?’

Cooper’s lips made a thin line. He had no need to lie any further, or to add the details of his fiendish plan like the bad guy in the final act of a mystery movie. All he need to do was allow that I was right and that would have suited me fine. But he felt that he must unburden himself, maybe to make room for all the cash he hoped to carry away from here. ‘The ATF burned me, Hunter. After all my years of loyal service to them they kicked me loose, without as much as a kiss my ass. Well they got rid of me, but they couldn’t take back what I knew up here.’ He tapped his head with the barrel of his pistol. ‘I knew about the Womack cold case and about the missing money. And, yeah, I wanted a piece of it.’

‘So you dropped Procrylon the tip-off, and set me up as Billie’s guardian, hoping to set us against each other, make everyone desperate and draw out the truth from Billie?’

He shrugged. ‘Something like that.’

‘You piece of crap,’ Rink called him.

‘Shut your pie hole,’ Cooper said. ‘This has nothing to do with you.’

Beside me I felt Rink coil like a spring. I shook my head gently at him and leaned on my spade handle again, eyeing Cooper. ‘So was it you who told Procrylon about the beacons your ATF mole put in those bulletproof vests?’

‘I had to give them a fighting chance, didn’t I? If you’d driven Billie away they’d have had no hope of finding her again. I had to make sure that she was a prize that both of you would go after. If it’s any consolation I never expected you to get shot, Hunter. I had faith in your abilities, and believed you’d get Billie safely out of the way, where she’d then feel indebted to you and tell you the truth about the money.’ He looked down at the steel barrel I’d unearthed and smiled, but it was at his own ingenuity rather than mine. ‘When you called me with the news that Billie had been taken, I admit I was a bit worried. Shit, for a second or two I even thought you were going to go along with my plan to call in the FBI. If you had, well, I guess everything would have gone to hell. But my suspicion played out; knowing your way of working, you’d want your chance to go after her yourself. I allowed you to talk me out of it and go along with your idea to rescue her. Luckily, everything worked out for the best, eh? My idea seems to have worked, even if it took a little longer than I anticipated.’

‘Do you realise how many people died because of your greed?’ I asked.

Cooper laughed at the inanity of my question. ‘So a bunch of mercenaries and thugs died? Do I look as if I give a fuck?’

‘Good people could have been hurt.’

‘Good people
always
get hurt,’ he said. ‘You should know that.’

Sadly he was correct. But it didn’t make it right.

He waved his gun in our general direction. ‘Stand the barrel upright. I think it’s time I got a look at all that lovely cash, don’t you?’

I looked at Rink and he nodded. We left our spades buried in the loose soil, and each grabbed a hold of the barrel rim. It was heavy, and took effort to tug from the earth’s embrace. We jostled it to an upright position, then stepped aside. But Cooper shook his head.