The Nightmare Thief (37 page)

Jo and Gabe edged forward. He shone the flashlight down.

“That’s what Ratner did with their spears,” he said. “Turned them into punji sticks.”

It was the flood runoff pit. At the bottom, four whittled spears pointed straight up. Anybody who walked up to Lark, intending to cut her down, would have plunged into the pit and been impaled.

Now she understood why Gabe needed her here and not standing guard at the mine entrance. It would take two people to get Lark down and Noah out.

“Hang on, we’re going to cut you down,” he said.

Lark nodded, but it was half relief, half terror. She cried something that, even gagged, was clear.
Hurry.

Gabe looked around. “Ratner had to have climbed on something to get the rope knotted up there.”

They found it: an ancient wooden crate. Beneath it was a pickax. Gabe handed Jo his knife. He set the crate next to the wall. Then he jumped across the pit, pulled Lark toward him by her belt, and said, “Cut the rope.”

Jo climbed on the crate. She sliced through the rope. Lark dropped and Gabe yanked her backward toward him. They fell in a heap.

He pulled off the gag. She clutched him, crying. “Thank you. Oh God. Help Noah.”

Jo jumped across the pit and sliced the ropes that bound the boy. He was deeply cold. She took his pulse: slow and regular, but far weaker than before. She tapped him hard on the cheek, twice. His eyes opened. He saw her, nodded, and said, “Yeah.”

She turned to Lark. “Where’s Autumn?”

“Deeper in the mine. He dragged her way back in there. This thing branches off in a bunch of directions. I don’t know where she is.”

“Come on, let’s get you two out of here,” Gabe said.

He grabbed Noah in a fireman’s carry, which must have nearly killed both of them. Jo grabbed the pickax. She and Lark ran out first, checked the hillside, and motioned Gabe to come.

He lugged Noah into the daylight. “Lark, can one person reach Autumn by themselves?”

“Should be able to. She’s fine, as far as I know.”

Jo said, “Go. I’ll get her. I’ll hurry.”

Gabe said, “Give Lark the pickax.”

Jo kept the buck knife. Gabe and Lark struggled uphill and disappeared into the trees.

Jo dashed back to the mine. She ducked low and ran down the tunnel. The mine was cold and dank and ghostly.

“Autumn?” she said.

The only reply was darkness.

 

 

“Thank you, Sheriff Gilbert.”

Tang slammed down the phone, grabbed Evan’s elbow, and pulled her off the plastic desk chair.

“Come on. I need to get out of here for a minute.”

Evan bumbled to her feet and followed her. “What’s happened?”

Tang pushed the button for the elevator, then, fidgeting, headed for the stairs instead. She had a pack of cigarettes in her hand.

“Jo’s truck is no longer parked at the roadside where the deputy found it,” she said. “It’s gone.”

From Tang’s tightly spun anger, Evan knew this did not mean Jo had driven down the canyon to hole up in some cozy motel overnight.

“It’ll be light soon,” Tang said. “And the weather’s clearing. With luck, they’ll get a helicopter airborne searching for them.”

“With luck?”

“Roads are washed out. Other campers are stranded, and drivers got swept off the roads in the flash flood. It’s a mess. The authorities are swamped.”

They jogged down the stairs and hit the ground floor. Tang kept going, straight through the doors and outside into the clinging, twilight damp. She stopped on the sidewalk, cupped her hand, and lit her smoke.

“The deputy’s still missing too, isn’t he?” Evan said.

“No sign of him or his cruiser.”

She snuffed her lighter, jammed it in her pocket, and squinted as she inhaled.

Not going to be a happy ending
. The street was glum and empty. The roadside attractions included bail bondsmen and an auto body shop.

Tang glared at stoplights directing nothing, red and green and lonely, all the way toward the bay. “How do you figure this all fits together?”

“Dane Haugen ambushed Autumn Reiniger’s group on its Edge Adventures weekend.”

“What about the rest?”

“Ruben Kyle Ratner is working for Edge Adventures. And Ratner murdered Phelps Wylie. He carjacked him here in the city, forced him to drive to the Sierras, and then killed him and dumped his body in the mine.”

“And Jo stumbled into it?”

“Yes. And no. Jo was at the wrong place at the wrong time. But it wasn’t random.”

It still didn’t fit. Not completely.

Behind them the door banged open. Ferd ran out, panting. He was wearing a headset, and his eyes were wide.

“I got it. Ragnarok. I found the next iteration in their mythology,” he said.

Tang looked, for a second, like she wanted to punch him. But then again, she looked in the mood to punch a brick wall.

“What, Ferd?” Evan said.

He danced on his toes. “Ragnarok—like I said, in Norse mythology it means the end of the world and ruin of the gods. Literally it translates as ‘destruction of the powers.’ I know you searched U.S. databases for information about it. I did some parallel processing.”

Tang spun her hand.
Speed it up.

“I do a lot of online gaming, and—”

“
Ferd
. Please,” Tang said.

He stopped, abashed, almost dashed. Mr. Peebles glared from the Baby Björn. Ferd rubbed the monkey’s back, a quick, reassuring motion.

Tang shut her eyes. “What?”

“One of my online friends is in Oslo. I contacted him about Norse mythology. I asked him about mythological themes related to Ragnarok. He came up with a few.”

Evan was skeptical. “I found summaries of Norse myth in online encyclopedias. It’s not necessarily helpful.”

“You don’t understand. He knows this stuff inside out. He checked online for companies with related names.
Norwegian
companies. You said this series of shell companies was international, right? I heard you mention an Interpol flag. Didn’t I?”

Did he have bat ears?

“Yes,” Tang said.

“You’ve been checking American search engines and government databases. My friend checked Norwegian databases for corporations with dot-no Internet addresses. And he speaks Norwegian. He doesn’t have to rely on online translation.”

“And?”

“Asgard.” Ferd squeezed his hands into fists. “Asgard is a kind of Norse god headquarters. And you have to be dead to get in. But it’s also a hollow shell of a company with Norwegian roots, and a dot-no address. I checked its connections with Ragnarok. They’re tenuous, but they’re there.”

“Ferd, I don’t know. It seems awfully convenient that you found this information,” Tang said. The rest was implied:
You’re seeing what you want to see.

But Evan felt an electric buzz. “Yeah, but Haugen seems full of hubris. Maybe he’s the type to go for grand gestures, thinking he’s always going to be a step ahead.”

Ferd was nearly bouncing. “You’ve only heard part of it.” He held out his phone. “Asgard-dot-no doesn’t have offices in San Francisco. But they’ve leased a big rig. And they’ve parked it here.”

Tang peered at his phone. A list of companies and contract information for a tractor-trailer depot were displayed on the screen.

“How on earth …”

“Don’t ask. Please.” He went as red as the stoplights down the street. “All you need to know is that Google doesn’t own the only heavy-duty search algorithms in the Bay Area.”

And they certainly didn’t use password-cracking software to prioritize search results, Evan bet. Not openly.

“Why would Asgard need to rent a tractor-trailer? Why would they store it near Candlestick Park?” Ferd said.

Evan had her car keys out and was running toward the garage.

 

 

The sky was brightening above the bay. The stars had winked out. The dawn was cool and clammy. Ahead of the Mustang, Tang flashed her badge at the gate to the truck depot. The depot foreman, who had been rousted out of bed, unlocked the gate and rolled it open.

Ferd filled the passenger seat of the Mustang. Not physically—emotionally. It was his anxiety that practically turned the air in the car a jangly red. Behind him, perched on the back of the headrest, Mr. Peebles kept watch.

“Think Jo’s in there?” Ferd said.

“We’ll see.”

Tang drove through the gate. Evan goosed the Mustang and rumbled after her.

“You’re really fond of Jo, aren’t you?” Evan said.

“We’re ad-hoc investigative partners.” He crossed his fingers to show her:
like that.
“We have an intuitive connection. I think it’s because Mr. Peebles loves her so.”

Evan glanced at the monkey. It glanced back. She thought it rolled its eyes.

“He’s really sensitive,” Ferd said. “I can tell he likes you. You’re a pet person.”

“I wouldn’t have a pet if you paid me in gold bullion. However, I could see Mr. Peebles being my butler. Does he mix cocktails?”

Ahead, Tang and the depot foreman pulled up behind a parked forty-foot trailer. It was painted white without any markings. Tang got out and gestured Evan and Ferd to stay put.

They were out of the Mustang before Tang finished glowering.

Tang shone her flashlight on the trailer. The double doors on the back were locked. She walked up to it.

“Blood,” she said. “Come on, get this open.”

The foreman used a crowbar and bolt cutters. When the lock snapped, he swung the doors open.

Evan ran forward, heedless of contaminating the scene or documenting it for her article. Inside the trailer, squinting under the beam of Tang’s flashlight, were four men in Edge Adventures shirts. They were tied together with their feet shackled to a ring on the floor in the center of the trailer.

Evan boosted Tang up and hauled herself into the trailer after her. They rushed to a man who lay, barely conscious, near the doors. He had graying hair and brown skin. His clothes were dark with dried blood. Tang pulled off the gag and rolled him onto his back.

“Thank God,” he croaked.

“Terry Coates?” Tang said.

“Yeah. Never thought you’d come. God bless the SFPD for ignoring everything I phoned in.”

T
he paramedics prepared to load Terry Coates into the ambulance for transport to San Francisco General Hospital. He was strapped to a stretcher and had an IV line running. A gunshot had shattered his femur. Tang was trying to get as much information from him as she could before the ambulance drove away.

“Does the name Dane Haugen mean anything to you?” she said.

Though he was already lying down, Coates seemed to slump. “The Reiniger Capital weekend.”

“You know him?” Tang said.

“Yeah. He’s infamous.”

Evan inched toward the stretcher. “Why?”

Coates had liquid eyes, brimming with pain. “He freaked out during a scenario. Found a snake in his car and had a panic attack. Afterward, Peter Reiniger fired him.”

“Because of a snake?” Tang said.

“He’s phobic. He went berserk. I mean
berserk.
I should have known better—that was the last time I agreed to use snakes in a scenario.” His voice was dry. “So Haugen did this?”

“Very possibly.”

“Then it’s about more than money.”

The EMTs loaded him in the ambulance. Tang and Evan exchanged a look.

Evan got her phone out and typed a message to Jo. She didn’t know if it mattered, whether she was writing to the air.

Tang said, “Really?”

“You gotta have faith.”

Or at the very least, you had to act as though you did—and you had to try, without evidence, proof, or promise of an answer, to get through. Perhaps, if you went through the motions with enough conviction, you could make it real. Wasn’t that what hope meant?

 

 

Haugen and Sabine waited for the tattooed and tatty Ruben Kyle Ratner on a clear patch of hillside where sunlight flowed over the lip of the mountains. The light was cold but clarifying. At the edge of the clearing, a chunk of the mountain had washed away in the night’s flood. The rock and dirt dropped twenty feet, a raw wound in the earth. It seemed, to Haugen, a fitting symbol of the nature of change. It was violent, and painful.

True transformation was agony. That’s what Peter Reiniger hadn’t yet grasped. That’s why he thought Edge Adventures was a hero factory. But in fact Edge offered merely puerile diversion. Its moments of illumination were fake. Whereas this moment, here on the mountain—life and death, wealth beyond imagining—this was real. All or nothing. Reiniger didn’t understand that. Nor did Terry Coates, the lackey who did Reiniger’s bidding and forced people to confront their worst fears.

Face your demons.
That was simply code for getting Peter Reiniger’s employees to piss their pants.

Edge was fake. But by taking Autumn, Haugen had made things real. And her father was soon going to understand the true meaning of
all or nothing.

Ratner stepped from the trees, leading a bay horse. His bandy stride was cocksure. He wore a sleeveless wife-beater shirt, shamelessly displaying the snake tattoos that coiled around his arms. Cheap prison tats, the mark of mediocrity. For years Ratner had been the go-to guy for Haugen’s intimidation needs. But now Haugen saw him clearly: lying, unpredictable, uncontrollable. If only he had fired the loser before he killed Phelps Wylie.

Haugen and Sabine walked to the center of the clearing.

“Two against one,” Ratner said. “It’s fair I get fifty percent. I done all the work, rounding up your chicks after they escaped the coop.”

Haugen remained composed. “Proof of life. Now.”

Ratner showed Haugen a cell phone photo of him with Autumn. In the dark, someplace close. Then he tossed a hunk of Autumn’s long brown curls, tied with a rubber band, on the dirt.