Jake noticed T.J. faltering and offered encouragement. “Keep your head down,” he whispered. “Try to focus only on your next step. Don’t look up.”
After a half hour they crested the top of the mountain. The trees thinned. Scrub and boulders prevailed. Jake caught his wind as they started down the back side, but going downhill wasn’t any easier than climbing up. The weight of the pack felt like someone pushing him from behind and forced him to plant each step to keep from stumbling into T.J. His knees ached from the pounding. Atkins showed no sign of easing the pace.
Jake did his best to continue to keep track of the time and their direction, but night began to fall, and soon they were hiking in moonlight. The temperature dropped, cold enough that the animals’ breath marked the air. Jake, covered with sweat and hollow with hunger, felt chilled.
T.J. had the unfortunate luck of being directly behind the donkey, which was farting a horrific ammonia smell. After one blast, T.J. turned his head, stumbled on a partially hidden root, and went down. The line came to an abrupt stop.
“Get up,” Atkins said from his saddle.
T.J. didn’t respond. He just knelt there, head down.
“I said, get up.”
T.J. was crying. Jake reached down to help him.
“Leave him alone, Stand-up.”
Jake ignored Atkins and grabbed T.J.’s shoulder. “Come on, T.J., get up.”
Atkins climbed off his horse and shoved Jake out of the way, the weight of his backpack causing him to fall back against the hillside. “I said leave him alone.” He stood over T.J. “I gave you an order. Get up.” He emphasized each word.
T.J. did not move.
For a moment Jake thought Atkins might pull T.J. to his feet, but that would have been too humane. Instead he walked to the horse and grabbed the rifle from the scabbard. Then he squatted on his haunches in front of T.J. “Look at me.”
T.J. did not.
“I said, look at me.” T.J. raised his head, their faces less than an inch apart. “You get up and get moving. You understand?”
“I can’t,” T.J. said, his voice soft, meek.
“You can and you will.”
“I hurt my ankle.” It sounded like the excuse that it was.
Atkins stood and stepped back. “Do you know what we do to a horse that goes lame?”
Jake’s heart hammered in his chest.
“We shoot it, in the head, and leave it for the other animals to rip open and pull its flesh from its bones.”
Jake took a step forward. “T.J., get up—”
Atkins whipped the rifle at him. “Stand-up, you shut your mouth or so help me God I’ll drop you where you stand.”
Jake took a step back. Bee Dee and Henry looked on, eyes wide with fear.
Atkins turned again to T.J. “We have no place to leave you. So I’m going to give you to the count of three to get up and get moving. I won’t reach four. You can’t walk; the other three are going to start digging a hole.”
Jake couldn’t swallow. Even in the dark he could see Henry had gone pale. Bee Dee was looking from T.J. to Atkins, as if about to do something.
“One.” Atkins cocked the rifle. T.J. did not move.
“Two.” Atkins shouldered the rifle and took a step closer, lowering the barrel inches from the top of T.J.’s head.
Jake felt his knees go weak.
Get up. Get up, T.J., God damn you. Get up.
The forest became devoid of all sound. Blood pulsed inside his head, ringing in his ears. Whether or not Atkins paused a split second longer between two and three, Jake would never know, but the moment felt like an hour. He watched Atkins finger the trigger, noticed Bee Dee about to step forward.
T.J. moved.
He slid his second leg beneath him, slowly rising to his feet.
Bee Dee stepped back. Jake exhaled.
Atkins used the barrel to raise T.J.’s chin. “Next time I don’t wait ’til three.” He threw the reins over the horse’s ears and returned the rifle to the scabbard. “Move out.” Bradley set off as Atkins swung back up into his saddle, waiting for the path to clear.
They walked into the encroaching darkness, the forest thickening, the moon filtering through the branches in slats of light. The horses’ metal shoes scraped rock and shale and every so often they heard the occasional hoot of an owl. After another twenty minutes, Jake spotted a light in the distance, too bright to be the moon. The light grew in intensity and size as they approached, a lantern hanging from a tree branch.
Bradley stopped and dismounted. Only then did Jake see another person standing in the dark, backlit by the lantern’s glow. He carried a gun, but it was not a rifle. A magazine protruded out the bottom, the kind of gun carried by soldiers. He appeared young, perhaps in his early twenties, with the start of a wispy beard. He said something in Spanish, and a second man materialized from the dark. He looked older but not by much. His white tank-top T-shirt was stained and dirty and his camouflage pants sagged, revealing the blue ink of a tattoo across his stomach. He clenched a cigarette between his teeth as he took the reins and led the horses and donkey farther up the trail.
“Move,” Atkins said to the four of them.
They followed the animals into a small garbage-strewn camp. A camouflage plastic tarp, its four corners tied with rope to the trunks of trees, hung shoulder high above the ground to create a lean-to. Plastic bags and tin cans littered the ground, along with empty jugs of what looked like juice, propane tanks. Nearby, logs had been set on end, a small camp stove on one, a few pots and pans on another. Clothing hung from ropes strung between trees.
“Welcome to Shangri-la, boys,” Atkins said.
K
NOCK
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TIFF
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ANCH
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OLD
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ALIFORNIA
The smell of coffee only partially masked the lingering odor of charred wood left after the fire. Eileen Harper filled two of the three mugs. Molia put a hand over the third. “I’ll pass on anything else hot tonight,” he said. His coughing had lessened but now, when it came, it came in bursts. The paramedics had wanted to take him to the hospital. Molia refused.
Bennett suggested Sloane and Molia move to the main house, but Sloane declined.
“You’ve been generous enough. Nobody’s coming back tonight.” The real question was, what did Bennett and Eileen want to do? The stakes had been raised, and by a considerable amount. Sloane didn’t want to put either of them in further danger. “This might be a good time to take a couple days of vacation,” he suggested.
Bennett looked to Harper, some unspoken message between them; Sloane thought for sure he and Molia would be packing. “It’s like Sherriff Barnes said. This is my home, too. Our home,” Bennett said. “We don’t like thinking that what you’re suggesting is taking place right under our noses, but I’m not leaving my home.”
Sloane looked to Harper. “Tommy’s still in that place,” she said. A few minutes later she and Bennett left Sloane and Molia alone.
“I guess we’re on the right track,” Sloane said.
“That might be the understatement of the week, given that someone just tried to roast my nuts,” Molia said, anger seeping into his voice.
“But Barnes is right.” Sloane said. “What we have are threads, and I’m not exactly sure where the hell to go from here.”
“I am,” Molia said. “The second floor of the fucking Sutter Building.”
In the commotion and aftermath of the fire Sloane had forgotten that just before walking out the door Molia had left him a riddle about how they might get into the second floor. He’d said it was a word you couldn’t yell in a crowded movie theater. Every constitutional law professor posed the same question to his first-year law students as a means to explore the degree of free speech accorded by the First Amendment.
What about yelling “fire” in a crowded theater? Is that protected speech?
“Fire,” Sloane said. “What you can’t yell in a crowded theater.”
Molia smiled. “I would have picked a different riddle if I’d have known it was going to prove prophetic.” He fought back another coughing fit and sipped water. “Here’s the question. The security guards don’t have a key to access the second floor. So in the event of a fire, how does the fire department gain access?”
“I don’t know,” Sloane said. “I suppose they’d break it down.”
Molia shook his head. “Then they’d have property damage, and the county would get the bill. And you can’t expect the fire department to stand around waiting for a building owner to show up with the key while the building, and possibly others around it, burn.”
“So what then?” Sloane asked.
“Every building has to have what’s called a Knox-Box on the outside. It’s a county ordinance in Virginia, and I noticed that Bennett
has one on the post by the front gate. If he’s not home and the fire department needs access to his property or to get back into the hills to fight a fire, the box has a key to the gate.”
“And there’s a Knox-Box on the side of the Sutter Building?” Sloane asked.
“You can see it on the videotape I shot. And I’m betting that inside is a key not only to that front door, but also to the second floor.”
“Okay, but even if we get the Knox-Box open tell me how we get to the second floor with the security guards sitting at their desk every minute of every day? I don’t think they’re going to believe you and I are the cleaning service.”
“They won’t believe you and I are anything. I’m going to do this on my own.” This time the coughing became violent. Molia bent in pain.
“The only thing you’re doing is taking a trip to the hospital.”
“Not a chance,” he said. “They upped the ante. We need to counter.”
“Then whatever your plan is, I’ll do it.”
“You can’t; if you get caught we strike out twice. Who retries the case?”
“I don’t intend on getting caught.”
“You going to guarantee that?”
“We’re both tired, okay? And I’m just as pissed as you. But that’s all the more reason to think this through. Whatever your plan, you can’t do it in your condition. If I get caught, then Lisa Lynch retries the case. But before I sign off on this, maybe you better tell me what you have in mind.”
“First, get Alex on the computer. I need to ask her a few questions. Is she as good at this computer stuff as she appears to be?”
“Better.”
Molia nodded. “Then all we need to find out is just how well Eileen can sew.”
NINETEEN
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LDORADO
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OREST
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IERRA
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OUNTAINS
B
lue-gray moonlight trickled through the canopy in uneven streaks. The guards moved the only lantern from the hanging branch to beneath the camouflage tarp, and the hissing propane reminded Jake of Big Baby’s pronounced lisp, which made him shudder at the man-child’s pledge to be waiting for them back at Fresh Start.
After they had unpacked the contents of their backpacks and the mule packs, Atkins had instructed them to load the garbage into their packs. He tied everything onto the mule and he and Bradley packed it out. Jake knew it was only a short reprieve, but the thought of not having to worry about Atkins, even if only for a few hours, actually brightened his mood.
After feeding them beans out of a tin can, the guards spent the rest of the night trying to scare them, talking in broken English about bears being able to smell a human from miles away.
“You fuck around,” the younger of the two said, revealing stained teeth, “and we put the chocolate bar in your pants and tie you to a tree.”
The second man, who Jake considered the “cook,” because he had attended to the beans, sat on a plastic bucket drinking tequila from a small bottle and scraping the blade of a machete over a stone. When it came time to bed down the guard took their shoes and had them lay shoulder to shoulder on their backs. He snapped a leg iron on their right legs and ran a heavy chain through rings
welded onto the shackles. The chain moved and clinked like a metal snake across the ground. No one would be making a run for it in the night. The guard wrapped the excess around a tree trunk, snapping a padlock through two links. The temperature continued to drop, and Jake spent a fitful night on a piece of plastic over hard ground with only a thin green blanket for warmth. When he finally dozed off it felt like he’d been asleep minutes when the guard kicked his socked feet, unlocked the padlock, and pulled the chain through the irons.
“Get up,” he said.
Jake’s body protested. His back ached, and he had a kink in his neck that ran down his right shoulder. The others, T.J., Bee Dee, and Henry, moaned and yawned in similar discomfort. None looked to have slept much. The cook sat on his upturned plastic bucket, stirring the contents of a steaming pot over a camp stove’s blue flame. He’d lined up four metal mugs on a tree stump, the handles of spoons sticking out.
The guard tossed them their boots to sort through. Jake slipped his on and checked out their surroundings. The camp looked worse in daylight, even with the garbage gone. The tarp strung over their heads hung catawampus beneath a canopy of branches and scrub. Logs of varying lengths lying end-to-end formed a crude perimeter, and Jake deduced from the dripping sap along the bark that the logs had been recently cut.
The guard motioned for them to sit on the tree stumps. They watched with revulsion as the cook, a cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth, spooned a gray, lumpy substance into the four cups, scraping the remnants into the cup in front of Bee Dee.
“Eat,” he said, turning to wash out the pot with water from a plastic jug.
When Jake lifted the spoon the porridge clung to it.
“Eat.” This time the order came from the guard, squatted on his haunches at the edge of the camp, automatic weapon slung over his shoulder, also smoking a cigarette.
Jake brought the spoon to his mouth and stuck out his tongue. The porridge had little taste; the texture like paste, with a gritty
consistency. Jake doubted they had any brown sugar to sweeten it, but he also knew there wouldn’t be a second choice or a second helping, and that it was important he eat as much as he could to continue to regain his strength. He took a spoonful and forced it down, then turned to T.J., who sat on the stump next to him looking miserable.