"It's possible."
"I got ya covered. It'll miss the morning flight. Shit happens." Pete
sniggered. He zipped the bag shut and handed it to Walt. "Monday morning, I need it back by seven."
Walt thanked him. Right or wrong, he connected the bag to the shooter. The medical contents suggested the preparation for injury. If the man was prepared to doctor himself, he meant business.
And if such a man was so prepared to treat himself, then what exactly did he have planned for Liz Shaler?
SATURDAY
1 A.M.
One
A
t a few minutes before 1 a.m., as the bars were closing, the quiet streets briefly came alive again. Vehicles filled Main Street. The sidewalks were crowded with late night revelers. A young woman bent over and emptied her stomach into the gutter.
This was also the hour that city police and deputy sheriffs set speed traps and watched for erratic driving. Trevalian had a thirty-minute window. By 1:30 a.m. the town would be dead and the cops would respond more quickly to a break-in.
It took him seven minutes to pick the lock on the back door of Suds Tub. He entered to the alarm system's steady beeping—a thirty-second grace period to enter a pass code. He had options open to him if he failed to disarm it in time, but he kept a running count as he located the alarm box.
Five seconds.
Flipped open the panel and keyed in the last four digits of the laundry's phone number. T
en seconds
. . . the warning beep continued.
He crossed the room to the cash register.
Fifteen seconds
. . . Ran his gloved hand around the shelving and came up with a small key that opened the cash register.
Twenty seconds
. . .
Opened the cash register. Removed the empty tray. Cleared away
some receipts. There! On the bottom of the drawer was a handwritten number on a small piece of paper covered in layers of Scotch tape:
4376.
Twenty-five . . . twenty-six . . .
He raced back to the alarm box on the back wall.
Twenty-eight . . . twenty-nine . . .
He quickly keyed in 4376. The beeping stopped. The red flashing LED on the device disappeared. He locked the door from the inside. He carried a Maglite with red tape over the lens, cutting back its brightness. He ran a quick inspection: no motion sensors. He rearmed the alarm, working under the assumption that leaving a commercial building without its alarm engaged might raise suspicions. The box beeped for another thirty seconds and then went silent—the system active.
He had fifty or sixty identical blue bags to search. One of them was Shaler's. He checked the tags and rolled bags out of his way.
Vehicles sped past, out on the street. A group of noisy kids left their shadows on the front window. Trevalian had pulled a balaclava over his head, but he lifted it to get better vision. He worked methodically through the piled sacks.
Ten minutes into it, he located Shaler's. He opened it and, with the Maglite clenched between his teeth, searched the contents. He took out a bra, two pairs of panties, and finally touched the Holy Grail: a Capilene, pull-on, sports top. He sniffed just to make sure: sour. He tucked these items into a pouch on the back of his shirt, pulled the drawstring on the sack, and was in the midst of tying it shut when the back door was kicked in. Simultaneously, the alarm box began its countdown.
Trevalian pulled the balaclava over his face. Police? Two people came through the door. But with them backlit by a streetlamp, he saw they were too small to be adults. They were just kids. He decided to intimidate.
"Who's there?" he shouted, stepping forward.
The kids panicked. One turned, stumbled over a drum of chemicals, rose to his feet, and sprinted to the nearest window, which he promptly dove through. Or tried to. A crash of glass, but he didn't make it all the way. Thrashing and bleeding, he fell back inside the building.
"Eric!" the other kid cried.
Trevalian hurried over to the fallen boy. The kid was in shock, but still tried to move away from Trevalian. He smeared his own blood on the floor with his movement.
Trevalian took the boy's right hand, uncurled his unwilling fingers, and pressed the fingers against the gash on his neck. "Push here as hard as you can."
The alarm sounded. A robotic voice announced, "INTRUDER! INTRUDER! GET OUT OF THE HOUSE NOW!" at a numbing volume.
The second kid screamed, "ERIC!" and took off out the back door. Trevalian went after him. His buddy needed to keep that pressure up. If the boy should pass out . . . But the kid panicked and ran hard toward the street. His attention remained on Trevalian a beat too long. He ran headlong into an eight-foot-tall wooden grizzly bear. He might as well have been hit by a truck. He went down hard and lay still on the sidewalk.
The boy was out cold, bleeding from his ear and nose. It looked as if he'd shattered the bone around his right eye socket. He was breathing.
A siren grew louder.
Trevalian blended into shadow and disappeared. He was well on his way back to the rental before the first cruiser arrived.
Two
M
ost people, when under the harsh tube lighting of the Sheriff 's Office, looked somewhat green and sickly. But not Fiona.
She had an intriguing look about her, fan lines at the edges of her eyes, giving her wisdom and her small but pouty mouth something of a distraction.
Walt studied her as she arranged the contents of the lost-and-found carry-on discovered at the airport. She spread them out and began photographing them while maintaining a conversation with him.
"It must strike you as odd," she said, "some guy carrying around all this stuff."
"Atypical is how I'd classify it," he said.
"Yeah, that's
exactly
how I'd put it as well."
He'd shut the door to the room and locked it because he didn't want anyone from his office seeing the bag or its contents. For now, the bag was all his.
"Tell me about your father. He's here for the conference, right?" She ran off a series of shots.
"The usual sordid history," he said.
"Sordid's a strong word."
"And accurate in this case."
"Fathers and sons. Mothers and daughters. As old as the Bible," she said.
"There was . . . an event," he said. "A long time ago." He felt on the verge of sharing something he had shared with no one.
She remained focused on the photography. "An event. That does sound ominous." She took a few more shots. "Are you going to tell me about it?"
"No."
"That hardly seems fair."
"He put me through something. He went from god to demon in an afternoon."
"That doesn't sound pretty."
"It wasn't pretty." He added, "And the funny thing is: I'll bet he doesn't even remember it. Strange how that happens—a kid's world crumbles and the adult doesn't even take notice."
"Change is good. Look at what a strong leader you've become as an adult."
"Me?" Walt didn't think of himself as a strong leader. He felt like a failed husband and father. "If it had been adolescence, it might have made more sense. I was nine at the time. I still worshipped at his feet at that point."
"And you're not going to tell me?"
"It's not you . . . I've never told anyone," he said. "I don't know if—"
His cell phone rang, and he answered it. He caught himself holding his breath as a nurse explained the situation to him. He hung up.
"It's my nephew," he muttered. "He's in the emergency room. I gotta go."
"Is he all right?"
Walt couldn't get a word out. He'd lost his brother, his marriage. He couldn't lose Kevin, too.
He climbed into the Cherokee and sped off, his light rack flashing. She'd started him thinking about the past, and he found himself stuck there.
* * *
His father had been drinking; Walt had no trouble remembering that day. The furtive promise had been father to son, filling Walt with great expectancy. He'd labeled it "a secret mission," which further played to Walt's imagination, causing his pulse to race. He would not, for any reason, allow his mother to find out.
He was given the task of retrieving the neighbor's cat, a noisy vandal whose crimes included digging up his mother's rosebushes and crying loudly at all hours of the night. Chippers, as the cat was known, had become the stuff of legend in their house, the subject of many dinner conversations.
"Chippers?" Walt had said—an attempt to clarify his mission.
"He's critical to the assignment," his father said. "Get Chippers into the cage in the back of the car and wait for me."
The lure of the adventure had been intensified for Walt by his father's brandishing a handgun: a six-shot revolver, with a barrel as long as a ruler. They'd been down in the basement together at the time. It was a gray gun wrapped in a damp cloth with the sweet smell of gun oil. His father had loaded and unloaded it, inspecting it with a careful eye.
"What's that for?" Walt asked excitedly.
"Target practice."
"Do I get to shoot?"
"If you're a good boy. If you get Chippers into that car like I said."
"But why Chippers?" Walt asked.
"He's a hunter, isn't he?"
It was true. Chippers delivered a dead mouse or mole to their back door every so often.
With a beer pinched between his father's legs, they were off. The Ford Pinto rattled a lot and smelled of exhaust. They drove with the windows down. Chippers moaned in the back.
"What's the mission?" Walt asked, now that they were alone and driving into the mountains.
"A good soldier learns to never question his senior officer. And he learns to
keep his mouth shut ev
en after the mission is over. Are we clear, soldier?"
"Yes, sir."
"That's good, because this mission is top secret, and I'd hate to see you lose rank and be prevented from taking future missions."
"No, sir. Won't happen."
"What's a soldier's first duty?"
"To God and Country," the boy answered.
"Damn straight. You're a good kid, you know that?"
"To follow orders and never question authority." Walt repeated anything he could remember his father saying about army service.
"Now you're talking!"
"To boldly go where no man has gone before," Walt said.
His father laughed, sipped the beer, and returned the can to his crotch. "I borrowed that one, son, but that's the spirit. You bet it is." He looked at Walt with a smile: His father never smiled. He put his eyes back on the road. "You remember a lot of the shi—things . . . I tell you."
"I try to remember them all," Walt said proudly.
"You're a good kid. Have I told you that?"
"Yes, sir, you have. About one minute ago, actually."
His father chuckled some more. "Just so long as we got it straight between us that this mission is top secret. Even your brother's not to hear of it. Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir!" The idea of Walt knowing something Bobby did not was nearly too much for him to contain. He jittered and jumped around in the front seat—having graduated backseat to front on his ninth birthday. Asked to fetch a second beer from the cooler, he did so, a task that required unfastening his seat belt while the
car was moving.
He'd never done that before either. This was a day of firsts. It was only while fetching the beer that he noticed an oil-stained towel lying along the backseat. He thought about asking but decided not to.
They drove up the narrow, curving, dangerously steep and precipitous one-lane track to the top of Trail Creek summit. The road was a composition of packed dirt and scree, with no guardrails and drops of a thousand feet or more. Rock walls on the hillside leached water that streamed across the track, cutting muddy ruts into the road bed. His father handled the car poorly. It jumped and skidded as the tires caught in the ruts. More than once, Walt felt they were going over the edge. He rode white-knuckled, his eyes straight ahead, never questioning his superior officer, not even when his father lost control of the car while juggling the beer.
"Fucking thing is a nuisance," his father muttered under his beer breath.
Walt wondered if this was a comment on road conditions or something else. He nearly spoke up, but his father's mood was sliding, as it often did. He was muttering and talking to himself, and looking up the mountain instead of at the road. For the rest of the ride, Walt kept one hand on the door handle, ready to jump.
Shortly after they crested the summit, the dirt road widened out, crossing an open, flat expanse of gray green prairie, wax weed, sage, and tumblebush. To the east loomed the jagged peaks of the Pioneers, and the barren faces of the White Clouds. They turned right onto a dirt track following signs to Devil's Bedstead. The name stuck in Walt's mind. He would be haunted by it for the rest of his life.
A third beer was gone as they arrived at the trailhead Unnamed Lake. Devil's Bedstead, an oppressive gray granite monster wearing a skirt of boulders, rose from the lake, blotting out the sky. Even in late July it wore a cap of ice and snow.
The car rolled to a noisy stop on the gravel, and his father lumbered out from behind the wheel, grabbing for the door to retain his balance. It was cooler here despite a powerful sun. Walt tugged on a sweatshirt he'd thrown into the backseat.
"Get the cage," his father ordered while pissing only feet from the car. His father zipped up his pants and came around the car, shielding his eyes to survey up the mountain. Then he looked back down the road from where they'd come. He wore the revolver on his belt in a leather holster that carried an insignia. From the backseat he withdrew the stained towel that he now unwrapped to reveal a twelve-gauge, over-under, double-barreled shotgun. Sunlight flickered dimly off its polished barrels, as his old man tucked the gun beneath his left armpit.