Ultimate Thriller Box Set (60 page)

The skis scrape across the pavement, and I bring the snowmobile to a halt on the other side of the road. Alighting, I unfasten the two suitcases filled with clothes and the contents of Orson’s drawer. I sit down on the shoulder. The highway has been plowed — the only snow on the road is windblown powder. All is still. My left arm throbs, but luckily, Percy was wrong. The bullet tore through — I extracted the mushroom of lead from the back of my shoulder this morning.

The sun is gone. Ancient images of stars and planets commence filling the night sky.

The moon crawls above the Winds at my back, and I cast a lunar shadow across the road. The empty, pruinose highway stretches on, north and south, as far as I can see.

I’m so cold. I stand and stamp my feet on the road. Instead of sitting back down on the shoulder, I walk out into a thigh-deep drift and make a snow angel. Lying flat on my back, a wall of white enclosing me, all I can see now is the cosmos, and all I can feel is the steady infusion of cold.

My thoughts become electric.

I think of Orson’s poem. Defiant. Courageous perhaps.

If we’d never stepped into your tunnel, we’d still be in this desert.

Mom…

Walter…

I will not be returning to North Carolina.

As the cold strengthens, the madness seems to ebb, and my mind clears.

Peace overruns me.

I’m nearly asleep when the distant mumble of a car engine reaches me. For a moment, I consider whether I should lie here and die. I’ve stopped shivering, and false warmth flows through me.

I struggle to sit up. Headlights appear, heading northbound out of Rock Springs. I rise, brush the snow from my clothes, and trudge stiffly into the road. A transfer truck, I predict, and standing on the dotted line, I wave my arms when the beam strikes me.

Much to my surprise, the bumper of a long white suburban stops ten feet from my waist.

The driver’s window lowers at my approach, and a man several years my junior smiles until he sees the bruises that blacken my face. Elbows on the console, his pretty wife looks warily at me, the side of her face lit blue by the lucent dashboard clock. Three children sleep in the backseat, spread across one another in a tangle of small sibling appendages.

“Are you all right?” the husband asks.

“I don’t know. I just…I need a ride to the next town. Wherever you’re going. Please.” The man glances at his wife. Her lips purse.

“Where’s your car?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Well, how’d you get here?”

“Will you please take me to the next town? You’re the only car that’s passed all night.”

The man turns once more to his wife, their eyes consulting.

“Look, we’re going to visit family in Montana,” he says. “But Pinedale is about fifty miles up the road. We’ll take you that far. You can hop in through the back.”

“Thank you. I’ll grab my things.”

“Richard,” his wife mutters.

I lift my suitcases from the snow and walk to the back of the suburban. Opening the cargo doors, I stow my luggage on the floor and climb inside.

“Please keep it down back there,” the wife whispers. “We want them to sleep through the night.” She motions to her children as though she were displaying jewels.

The rear bench seat has been removed, so I find a place on the floor amid the family’s luggage: a red cooler, canvas bags, suitcases, a laundry basket filled with toys. With my suitcases at my feet, I curl up against the cooler and draw my knees into my chest. We begin to move, and I stare out the back window, watching the linear moonlit strip of highway spooling out beneath the tires with increasing speed.

We climb subtly for a half hour. Then we’re cruising along a plateau, and I’m looking back across the desolate flatland, scanning for two black specks in the sea of snow.

In the front seat, the woman whispers to her husband, “You’re a sweet man, Rich.” She strokes the back of his neck.

The vents channel warmth into my face, and the speakers emit a solacing oceanic ambience: sparse piano, waves and seagulls, the calming voice of a man reading Scripture.

And as Orson, Luther, and the Maddings harden on the cabin porch, in the massive desertic silence, I bask in the breathing of the children.

THE END

About Blake Crouch

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DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN

By J. CARSON BLACK

J. Carson Black’s
Amazon Author Central
page

About the Author

Table of Contents

To the memory of my father:

A stray breeze on a hot day

The sun gentle on my face

1

VAIL, ARIZONA

Francis X. Entwistle showed up in Laura Cardinal’s bedroom at three in the morning, looking world-weary.

“Don’t get up, Lorie. Just wanted to give you a heads-up. A bad one’s coming.”

Frank’s complexion was pale and there were shadows under his eyes. In life, his face had been dull red from the high blood pressure that had killed him. A bottle of Tanqueray gin sat on the window table and the tumbler in Frank’s hand was about a quarter full. Laura didn’t own any tumblers and she didn’t drink gin.

Laura wasn’t entirely surprised that her old mentor was sitting in the straight-backed Mexican chair in her bedroom four months after his wife had buried him. Maybe because she knew she was dreaming. Or maybe because he was her last link to her parents, and she didn’t want him to be gone for good. Frank Entwistle leaned forward, the nightlight from the bathroom illuminating the scroll of white hair above his side part. “You’re gonna have to pay attention and keep on paying attention.”

He stopped to scratch the tip of his nose. Laura Cardinal realized the absurdity of the situation: Sitting in her bed at three in the morning, watching a dead homicide cop scratching his nose.

“I’m talking about the kind of thing, you aren’t careful, could come back around and bite you in the ass. The key word here is vigilance.”

She wanted him to clarify what he meant by that, but he was starting to fade.

He held his glass up in a salute. “Watch your back, kiddo.”

When she caught the case the next day, there was no doubt in Laura’s mind that it was the one Frank Entwistle had alluded to.

It was the weekend, and she was at her little house on the guest ranch where she lived rent-free. The owner, a friend from high school, liked the idea of having a criminal investigator from the Arizona Department of Public Safety living on his property.

The dream about Frank Entwistle remained with her, vivid and unsettling. It didn’t feel like a dream. When she got up this morning, she sleepwalked into the bathroom. In the dim glow of the nightlight, she saw a ring on the table left by a sweating glass. Instantly she was wide awake, her heart rate going through the roof, until she realized the real culprit was Tom Lightfoot. Tom never remembered to use a coaster.

It was Tom who had been on her mind all morning, Tom who had preoccupied her since he left two days ago on a packing trip to New Mexico.

This was because of the note stuck to the refrigerator: “Maybe we should live together - T”

Not “Love, T,” she noticed. The word “love” scared her anyway, so she wouldn’t hold that against him. What she did hold against him was the fact that he had blindsided her, leaving that note on her refrigerator and then creeping out of town. She couldn’t reach him in the back country. She couldn’t say they’d only been together two and a half months, that his house was just over the hill, that just because he spent every night with her anyway, he shouldn’t think he could move in. Living together was a whole different proposition from sleeping together. The last man she had lived with had been her husband, and that had not turned out well.

What bothered Laura most, though, was the part of her that leaped at the thought.

Restless, she went outside to water, the day already hot enough she had to run the hose awhile to avoid scalding the plants. Her mobile rang and she retreated into the shade with the phone.

It was Jerry Grimes, her sergeant. “You busy?”

“What’s up?” Knowing that whatever plans she had for a quiet weekend were about to be blown out of the water.

“Bisbee PD has asked for an assist on a homicide.”

As she listened, Laura forgot about Tom’s note. Frank Entwistle had warned her it would be bad, and it was. A fourteen-year-old girl had been found dead in a small town south of here.

“Mike’s talked to the chief down there, and we all agree,” Jerry said. “You’re the lead investigator on this. So don’t take any shit.”

He always said that, although Laura had never taken any shit yet. She knew the pep talk was just his way of showing support for her, a woman doing a man’s job. But being called in to assist on investigations in other jurisdictions—mostly small towns—Laura knew that petty politics were far more obstructive to an investigation than any effect her gender might have.

“Victor will meet you there as soon as he can. You know where the ADOT yard is this side of the tunnel?” Jerry said. “They’ll have someone from Bisbee PD there to escort you in.”

Fifteen minutes later, Laura turned her 4Runner onto Interstate 10 going east, dread pressing into her throat.

Fourteen years old.

2

Once on the road, Laura punched in the Jerry Grime’s number to get some background. Now she’d have time to absorb what he had to say.

“A girl named Jessica Parris was abducted yesterday from the street near her house. They
think
that’s where it happened; there weren’t any witnesses.”

“What time yesterday?”

“After school. She didn’t come home for dinner. Place is kind of out in the sticks. According to Bisbee PD, she lives—lived—at the end of West Boulevard.” Jerry paused. He reminded her of an old-time union boss, tough and gruff. This case, though, would get to him; he had three daughters of his own.

Jerry said, “A girl fitting the Parris girl’s description was found this morning in City Park. You know where that is?”

“On Brewery Gulch.”

“That’s right. Tourists went to see the bandshell and got a big surprise.”

She thought of how the tourists must have felt, that sudden drop in the pit of the stomach. “She was in the bandshell?”

“Propped up against the back wall. Kind of like a doll on a bed, the woman said. The witness’s name is Slaughter.” He paused to let the irony sink in. “Doris Ann Slaughter. Said the girl was dressed up in some way, I don’t know, like a doll dress." He paused again—this was hard for him. “Victor’s coming from Marana. Should be a half hour behind you.”

Laura signed off and pushed the 4runner up to eighty, mesmerized by her own thoughts as the freeway unraveled before her. She hoped the storm would hold off until she got a look at the crime scene. The day was sunny, but the sky to the south and east was an ominous leaden blue.

The monsoon season had started July 4. They’d had a thunderstorm every day this week—uprooted trees, downed power lines, roofs torn off, the north-south streets of Tucson turned into flooded canals. A whole city held hostage by rain-swollen streets, many of them uncrossable. Ask a man who has been plucked by a helicopter from the roof of his pickup in a Tucson intersection just how quickly nature can trump progress.

This morning, the heat hadn’t yet built up sufficiently to produce the cumulonimbus clouds necessary for a thunderstorm, but Laura could feel the electricity in the air. She stopped at a fast food place in Benson for a breakfast sandwich—fuel—then drove south into the gathering gloom that seemed to press down on the mountains like a weight.

She felt both dread and anticipation. Needing to get there, see it for herself, but knowing that when she did, the image would haunt her for the rest of her life. The sight of the dead girl would be imprinted on her eyeball as if it were caught in the flash from a camera.

It would have plenty of company.

Laura reached the ADOT yard, where the Arizona Department of Transportation kept road machinery, at a little after ten a.m. A Bisbee PD Crown Vic was parked just outside the Mule Pass Tunnel. The officer, female and twenty-something, leaned against the Crown Vic’s door. When she saw Laura’s unmarked 4runner pull in behind her, she walked up to the window. “I have to advise you that you are not allowed to park here.” Her face was peeling from a severe sunburn.

Laura showed her badge and told the officer—her nameplate said Duffy—that she would follow her. They drove through the tunnel and down into town and parked in a lot populated by law enforcement vehicles from four different agencies. Everybody and his brother was here.

Officer Duffy was out of her car in an instant. She strode across the lot without looking back, headed toward the staging area set up outside the mining museum across the street. Laura was used to this kind of rudeness. A state agency, the Arizona Department of Public Safety could only assist small town police departments if the chief requested it. The chief usually asked for help either because his force was too small or they weren’t equipped to do the job. Laura encountered resentment every time she set foot in one of these small towns.

Sometimes she thought her job description should read Professional Pariah.

She opened up the back of her vehicle and took out her camera bag, wishing she hadn’t worn dark clothes that absorbed the heat. The sky above was an unrelenting blue; no sign of the storm clouds she’s seen on the way down. The mountains above the town were so high, they probably hid them from view. Laura entered the park and introduced herself to the cluster of men in the roped-off area.