“Cassie Dewell.”
“This is Rachel Mitchell. I’m sorry to call so late but my dad insisted I call you right now this second.” She sounded exasperated. “I’ll put him on.”
“Cassie,” Bull said in a shout so loud Cassie had to move the phone away from her ear, “I blame you for screwing up my enjoyment of Tucker Carlson tonight. All I could think about was that peckerwood Frank Pergram.”
“Yes, what about him?”
“There’s a section southeast in the mountains where he told me he used to get firewood. It’s harder than hell to get to and who knows what the road is like these days. The park border cuts right through it but it ain’t like there’s a marker or a fence of any kind.”
“Can I drive there?” she asked.
“What kind of vehicle do you have?”
“A Ford Escape.”
He scoffed. “You’ll need more clearance than that just to get close to the trailhead.
“It’s probably been twenty-five years since I’ve even been there. I could draw you a map but unless you’ve been there before you’d probably get lost.”
“Could you take me there?” she asked.
Bull began to shout something but he was interrupted as the phone was pried away. Cassie could hear him say, “What the hell…”
“Cassie,” Rachel said, “my father is in no condition to guide you in the backcountry anymore. I just can’t let him do it.”
“If he could just take me up there and point—”
“That’s not his style, believe me,” Rachel said. “He doesn’t do anything except with both feet. So I’m very sorry to say that the best we can do is sit down with a map and have him circle where you need to go.”
She said it with finality.
“I got some maps today,” Cassie said. “I could bring them by in the morning.”
“Perfect,” Rachel said.
In the background, she could hear Bull saying, Give me back that phone.
“Tomorrow,” Cassie said.
*
FIVE MINUTES LATER she got another call. Same number.
“Rachel?”
“Naw. Bull,” he whispered. “Rachel’s in the other room. She doesn’t know I’m calling. You know, she’s a good girl but she thinks she’s my goddamn nanny. So I waited until she was gone before calling you back.”
Cassie raised her eyebrows.
“So you worked with Cody Hoyt?” he asked.
“Yes. He was my mentor. He was tough to get along with at times but I wish he was still here.”
“Yeah, I know what you’re saying. I wanted to hug him and kill him at the same time when I took him into the park that time. But mainly kill him.”
Cassie huffed a laugh.
“Can you ride a horse?”
“It’s been a long time.”
“Do you have outdoor gear? You know, like a sleeping bag and a rain slicker?”
“No, but I can buy some. Bull, you’re not planning to actually go with—”
He cut her off without a response. “Come by the house at ten-thirty after my goddamn nanny has gone to work. We’ll take my truck and I’ll show you where that peckerwood Frank Pergram used to poach.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
Location Unknown
KYLE’S EYES SHOT OPEN AND he nearly cried out when he received a sharp vibrating pulse on the skin of his throat. He threw off his covers and sat up in bed.
“About time you were getting up,” Ron said from his chair at the table. “You’re burning daylight, son.”
Although Ron usually walked around with the three transmitters hanging on lanyards around his neck, on that particular morning they were lined up one by one on the table. As always, he wore his semiautomatic pistol in a shoulder holster.
Kyle wanted to tell Ron he hadn’t slept since he’d had that horrible dream again about what happened to Raheem.
BOOM.
Instead, though, Kyle reached up and slipped his fingers beneath the vinyl collar and rubbed his neck where the two electric prongs were in contact with his skin.
“Just testing,” Ron said. The day before he’d placed colored dots on the collars and transmitters that corresponded with each other. Amanda got blue, Tiffany red, Kyle green.
“I’m making sure I got all the colors right,” Ron said. “Otherwise, I might hit the wrong one at the wrong time. We wouldn’t want that, would we? Besides, it’s time you got up.”
Kyle scrambled out of bed and then turned and made it up. Ron was a stickler about neat beds.
*
THE DAYS THEY’D BEEN at the cabin had started to flesh out into a kind of haunting routine.
It had been difficult for Kyle at first, as it had been for Amanda and Tiffany. Ron somehow expected them to know what he was thinking and act accordingly. When they made a mistake, like sleeping too late or going out of order to the outhouse fifty yards away from the cabin, he would “correct” them, as he called it, with a vibrating pulse on their collars. If they made the same mistake twice or the original transgression was deemed severe, Ron administered an electric pulse.
When they did their twice-a-day outhouse visit, Ron would stand by the window with a transmitter in his hand. He’d watch them go to the outhouse and come back to the cabin. Amanda went first, then Kyle, then Tiffany. As one returned he’d nod at the next in line, grasp the correct transmitter, and watch them the whole way. Color-coding the sets made less guesswork for Ron, Kyle assumed.
When Tiffany spent too much time in the outhouse—in Ron’s opinion—he sent a pulse her direction and she screamed inside. Ron had snorted with laughter. It was the first time Kyle had ever seen him laugh.
The next time she spent too long in there Ron bypassed the vibration feature and sent a mild shock that startled Tiffany so badly she fell out of the door with her panties still around her ankles. That had made Ron laugh out loud. He obviously enjoyed humiliating her most of all.
Kyle always did his business in the outhouse as quickly as he could. The structure was small and old and cold wind blew in through the gaps in the planking. He’d never used an outside toilet before and he didn’t like it at all. He hated the plop sound his excrement made a second after he’d expelled it into the dark cavern below.
*
KYLE HAD BEEN “corrected” a half-dozen times and each time it happened he froze and closed his eyes.
Once, he’d been clearing away the lunch dishes when the pulse nearly made him drop the plates on the floor. He looked up to see Ron beholding him with distant eyes and a grim expression on his mouth. Kyle didn’t know what he’d done to deserve the pulse.
“Clear my dishes first,” Ron had said as if Kyle should have known that.
It made Kyle angry when Ron came up with a new rule he’d never used before. When he glared up at Ron he was hit with a mild electric shock that startled him.