Killer Summer

He waited several minutes and tried yet again.

This time, the headphone popped with a male voice breaking through the static.

“It’s summertime. I know you can hear me, cowboy. Summer… time! No more prank calls. Get off this frequency. NOW!”

Summer. Time.

Two silhouettes appeared in the jet’s aft door, one unmistakably female. It appeared the girl had a knife held to her throat.

John sighted the man’s head through the scope and considered the tight shot. The man changed angle, putting the girl between him and the Cessna. John lowered his rifle and put it on the ground.

74

Three to four hours to go,” Brandon said to the other two men, slipping his GPS device back in his pocket. He was riding a chestnut filly with a blond mane, a showcase quarter horse with a gait as smooth as a Cadillac’s. All three riders wore headlamps, a bluish glare illuminating the narrow trail ahead.

“How long can the horses keep up this pace?” Walt said. He was not a regular in the saddle.

“Longer than you can,” Brandon said. “They can trot for hours, they’re fine. But it won’t be too much longer now before we have to walk them, anyway. Terrain’s not getting any better.”

“We’ll ride them ’til they drop,” Jerry asserted.

“No, we’ll walk them,” Walt corrected. “And we’ll hike the last half mile without them so they don’t give us away. They’re our way in. They may be Kevin’s only way out.”

Jerry was turning in his saddle to object but nodded instead. “Yeah, okay.”

The sudden agreement silenced all three.

Brandon consulted the GPS.

“Looks to me like the trail runs out pretty soon,” he said.

“First light,” Jerry a

They’d agreed that their best odds of reaching Mitchum’s Creek Ranch unseen was to cross the Middle Fork before sunrise, before four A.M. Daylight diminished any element of surprise considerably.

Walt thought unlikely they’d meet this worthy goal. They had to hobble the horses, inflate the raft, and make the crossing-all very time-consuming.

“This guy Sumner,” Brandon said, “he made Mastermind, right?”

“He produces movies,” Walt said.

Something sparked at the back of his tired brain. A voice was shouting at him. But whose was it?

“You think if we get his daughter out safe and sound he’ll make it into a movie?”

“Put a sock in it,” Jerry said.

Walt tried to focus on the voice in his head. It wasn’t Fiona’s voice, it wasn’t his own. It definitely was a man’s voice… Something about movies…

“What about Mastermind?” Walt said, trying to stimulate whatever had prompted the mental itch.

“It was so-so,” Brandon said. “Fairly predictable.”

“It was a heist movie,” Walt said.

Flickers of an earlier conversation… The voice belonged to Arthur Remy.

“Absolutely. Horse racing, hitting up the track on the day of the biggest race of the year. The bad guy stole the movie, the Mastermind guy. He was the best thing about it.”

“But he had his fifteen minutes. You’re aware of that, right?”

Walt had it. He reined his horse to an abrupt stop. Brandon reined his horse but Jerry’s kept trotting.

The satellite phone rang as he was reaching for it. His mind was elsewhere as he answered.

“Dad!” Walt called out to Jerry, who still rode on.

“Stay with him!” Walt said to Brandon. “Stop him if you can. We ride together.”

Brandon passed Walt the lead rope to the pack horse as Walt spoke into the phone. The bluish hue of Brandon’s headlamp disappeared into the curtain of tree trunks.

“It’s me,” Steven Garman answered back, his voice just audible above the growl of an engine “I’m at nine thousand feet, directly over the river.”

Walt had heard a small plane not twenty minutes earlier. He’d switched on his phone and had caught a signal briefly. The phone had buzzed repeatedly with incoming messages. The co

“I’ve got the repeater on board and up and ru

“I had reception about twenty minutes ago. Didn’t last long.”

“I’m talking five minutes ago. I’m well north of you. Didn’t last for me either.”

“Kevin?”

“Could be one phone… could be ten. I had the hit only a few seconds. I came around and headed upriver, throttling back to limit engine noise. I’m now a mile west of my earlier route. I’d like to get closer and try again.”

“Only one pass,” Walt said, “as quietly as you can, directly over the ranch. See if the repeater gets a hit. If it lights up, then circle and try to hold the co

“Copy that,” Garman said. “Turning for the ranch now.”

Walt was about to punch in Kevin’s number when he realized that it would take Garman a few minutes to get in position. That gave Walt time to make another call first.

He punched in the numbers and hit SND.

75

Come down from there, boy,” a man’s deep voice called out.

Kevin shuddered, cold and scared and unsure what to do. The cowboy had told him to shoot if he were discovered in his rooftop hiding place, and yet by all appearances, the cowboy had led them to him.

As if reading his thoughts, the cowboy spoke.

“Forget what I said, son. They’ve got Summer. I surrendered my weapon. We need you to come down.”

Kevin’s back to the stone chimney, he replayed the message, focusing on weapon and need you. Was there a subtext to the cowboy’s message? Was Kevin supposed to come down shooting? Was he supposed to hide the shotgun for later? He was shaking so badly he couldn’t keep his hands still.

“We’re not going to hurt you… or anyone.” He recognized the voice as the copilot’s. “We’re only interested in the plane.”

The plane?

“We know you’ve got a shotgun. I’ve got Summer in front of me. Lower the shotgun down to me, and then we’ll get you off of there.

“This is no time for heroics, Kevin,” the voice continued. “No one’s getting hurt unless you start something. You hear me?”

If the copilot had Summer, that left the two others with the cowboy. They likely had his rifle and pistol.

Can I get a shot off, maybe two? Maybe even drop one of them? With Summer as their only bargaining chip, would they dare hurt her?

“Do as he says, boy,” said the cowboy with resignation in his voice. “They don’t mean no harm to us.”

He and Summer had gone through too much to surrender now.

“Kevin, they mean it,” Summer called out.

He felt for the extra shotgun shells, slipping one in each sock. Doing it made him feel like this wasn’t surrendering.

“Okay!” he called back.

The copilot came around the side of the building, his left arm slung over Summer’s shoulder and tightly across her chest. In his right hand was the cowboy’s handgun.

“The shotgun first,” he said.

Kevin wasn’t about to provide them with another weapon. He swung the gun against the chimney like a baseball bat, busting it at the hinge. That left the three men with the over-under shotgun loaded with bird shot, and the cowboy’s rifle and handgun.

“That was u

Kevin climbed down. The small guy took Kevin by the arm, roughed him up as he took away the flashlight and knife.

“Easy,” the copilot chastised.

“I owe this kid,” Matt said.

As Kevin was led away along with the others, he glanced surreptitiously up at the chimney. No one had thought to check up there.

If they had, they would have found his cell phone, tucked onto a high chimney rock, its red NO SIGNAL flashing.