Killer Summer

“I handled that all wrong,” he said.

“Shut up, Walt, I’m not talking about the other night.”

“But I am. If you were in my position, with Gail and Brandon, the need to protect the girls… It gets so you don’t trust anybody or anything.”

“You can trust me,” she said, he thought rather boldly.

“I’m begi

“Yeah? Well speed it up a little, would you?”

“I shouldn’t be smiling with all that’s going down,” he said.

“Give it a rest. It won’t kill you.”

Kill you hung on the line between them. He knew what she was thinking and she knew what he was thinking.

“Okay, then,” he said.

To her credit, she didn’t get maudlin or overly dramatic, which he’d half expected.

“Okay, then,” she said, just before hanging up.

72

Kevin discovered an attic access hatch at the opposite end of the lodge from the study. Given the change in framing, he believed he was somewhere over the kitchen.

Whoever had entered the lodge only minutes before was still there. He’d heard an occasional footfall as he’d crept from one crossbeam to the next. The overall silence was uncomfortable. He couldn’t help but think that each might be listening for the other.

Now the silence was broken by a tapping sound coming from the study. It continued until provoking a response from the hijacker.

“Whatever you’re doing in there, stop it,” a man shouted. It wasn’t the copilot’s voice; maybe the guy who’d grabbed up Summer. “Any more of that noise and I put a couple rounds through the door.”

So, he had a gun.

Kevin used the noise of the man talking to cover the sound of his own lifting of the hatch. It came up easily, issuing a pale light into the attic. He found himself looking down into a pantry closet, its shelves loaded with cans and dry goods. Just inside the closet’s louvered doors, he spotted a bucket filled with cleaning supplies, and next to it a broom, a mop, and a canister vacuum cleaner. There were boxes of lightbulbs and boxes of tape, extension cords, a stepladder, and a toolbox. On the opposite wall was a soapstone sink and a clothes washer.

Tap, tap, tap.

“LAST WARNING!” shouted Matt.

The cowboy was the one doing the tapping, meaning he’d managed to use the knife to free himself. It was either an intentional distraction, trying to buy Kevin time by keeping the sentry’s attention, or it was an effort at escape.

Kevin had to take advantage of it. He lowered himself down through the hatch, swinging from the opening and catching the toes of his shoes on the lip of the sink. Hands on the walls, he quickly lowered himself.

He eased the louvered doors open just as the sentry shouted again.

“I SAID, BACK OFF!” He cocked his shotgun.

Kevin grabbed a spray cleaner from the bucket. He slipped out into the hallway, crept down it, and looked around the corner and saw the sentry by the smoldering fireplace with his shotgun aimed at the door to the study.

The ensuing seconds stretched out uncomfortably as Kevin was knotted by a dozen what-ifs, tortured by not having a clue what to do. Finally, his mind made up, he backtracked to the pantry and found a bottle of cooking sherry. He snuck back down the hall, took two steps into the room, and launched the bottle at the fireplace.

“NOW!” Kevin shouted.

The shotgun misfired.

Kevin dove back into the hallway, scrambled to his feet, and ran like hell for the garage. He saw a flash of orange light on the walls that signaled the sherry igniting in the fireplace.

The shotgun fired a second time. He heard wood peppered right behind him. Some of the shot rolled past his feet, tiny balls no bigger than BBs.

Salvo narrowly missed being set on fire when the fireplace erupted. He jumped out of the way as flames spit out of the hearth. The rug caught fire at his feet, and he discharged the shotgun wildly in the direction of the kitchen. But then the fire died out as quickly as it had exploded.

Salvo reacted a split second too late to a noise coming from behind him, and as he turned around he saw the study door open-Impossible!-and a coffee table coming at him at full speed. In an instant he understood that the tapping sound had been the cowboy pulling out the door’s hinge pins.

Salvo hoisted his shotgun while backing away from the table coming at him. He fell over an ottoman and the shotgun discharged a second time. Dropping it, he then was able to deflect the table to the right and toward the fire, and he rolled that same direction.

Whoosh!

A wrought-iron fire poker missed Salvo’s head by inches. He sprang to his feet and grabbed a nearby lamp.

Another swing of the poker demolished the lamp and broke the index and middle fingers of his right hand. He screamed, jumping back out of the way of a third blow. Retreat was his only option.

He turned. A wet mist struck his face, rendering him blind and in even more pain. Screaming again, he fell to his knees. He wiped his face with his sleeve but it was no use.

He heard the cocking of the shotgun.

“You so much as twitch and I’m taking the side of your face off,” said the cowboy in a low rumbled twang.

“My eyes!” Salvo wailed. “Help me!”

“What was that stuff?” the cowboy asked.

“How the hell would I know?” Salvo shouted. “Fuckin’ help me!”

“Toilet-bowl cleaner,” said a second voice.

It was the kid. But Salvo couldn’t see him, couldn’t see anything.

“Hands out,” said the cowboy to Salvo, “flat on the floor.”

Salvo sagged forward.

“Get a wet towel,” the cowboy said to Kevin. “There’s some rope in the shop… not the climbing rope. Bring it here-”

A few minutes later, Salvo was gagged and tied on the study floor. The cowboy tied the last knot and led Kevin into the living room. He extended his hand, and Kevin took it.

“Kevin,” he supplied.

“John,” said the cowboy. “Your friend?”

“Gone,” Kevin said. He yanked back the tarp in the shed only to find her missing.

“I know the season, son.”

“Her name is Summer. We were on the plane together. It’s complicated.”

“Gone where?”

“Du

“Mistake number one: don’t ever expect a woman to do what you think she’s going to do. Mistake number two: don’t ever tell her what to do because that’s a surefire way of making sure she doesn’t.”

“You’re making jokes? She’s out there… They could have her.”

“If they had her, then who lit that fire? Ever shot a rifle, son?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Follow me.”

Five minutes later, Kevin and John were armed with the shotgun and the rifle, respectively. John got them flashlights, two-way radios, and a large handgun for the small of his back.

“Pulling the door like that… You could have gotten yourself killed,” Kevin said.

They had gone out a back window of the lodge and up the rocks, a route John knew from repairing the roof. They had a bird’s-eye view of the dying fire and the flickering orange woods beyond. They tucked in behind a stone chimney that Kevin immediately recognized as an elevated, well-fortified, defensible position, something that obviously hadn’t just occurred to John on the spur of the moment.

“You ever play poker, son?” John asked.

“No, sir, not so it counts.”

“When they showed up, they were unarmed. If there was any time to produce a weapon, it was then, and they didn’t. So by the time that one was in the living room and I heard him cock the shotgun, I figured it had to be my twelve-gauge pump. And I knew something he didn’t: because we’d had some guests up to the ranch not two weeks ago with three kids under nine, none of them three rifles was loaded. I’d emptied ’em all myself. We keep the ammo in the study, so I had it in there with me. They had the big guns, leaving the two pellet pushers: the over-under twenty and the twelve-gauge pump. Both were loaded with bird shot. Did that myself. We had a murder of crows waking up guests at five in the morning with their damn squawking. Flying garbage men, is what they are. Been using the bird shot to discourage them… Not that I’d shoot a crow, because that’s illegal.”