She did. She took a step or two, then she just stood there, Wade nodding and training the gun on her.
“Now walk over there.” He swung the gun to indicate the cliff’s edge. She stayed rooted, but her heart quickened its pace in fear. She didn’t know if there was any reason left in him. “Walk over there, or so help me God I’ll shoot you where you stand, Danielle. I will.”
Tears of dread wound their way down her cheeks. She took another step back.
“Walk!” he shouted.
She started to move. She tripped in her sandals over a rough growth of scrub and caught herself. She backed away to a distance of about ten feet from Wade’s car. She was maybe three or four feet from the ledge. A two-thousand-foot drop. She could start to run, but to where? And not in her sandals. She was trapped. She could feel the warm wind whooshing up the cliff face and beating into her. How could he want to kill her now? There was no point. She always thought he loved her.
He still had the gun pointed at her through the open window.
“Wait.”
Dani stood there.
“Watch out for him,” Wade said.
“Who?”
“He still needs lots of help. He gets whatever I have, of course, which ain’t much. He’ll just need somebody.”
It took a second for what he was saying to break through her confusion and fear. “Wade, please, don’t … What are you even thinking?”
“I lied before.” His voice seemed to soften. “What I said about you … We always did have that deal. Being tough with one another. But I was always fond of you, Danielle. I tried to think of you as if you were my own. No matter what I’ve done, I did.”
“I know.” Suddenly the tears were burning in her eyes. And they were no longer of fear. “I did, too.”
“I tried to warn you …”
Suddenly there were sirens in the distance.
“Don’t let my son think ill of me, if you can.”
Dani heard the V8 engine rev.
“Wade, wait!”
He looked ahead, and with a roar the white police SUV lurched forward and hurtled toward the edge.
“Wade, no!” Dani screamed in horror.
It shot off the edge, vaulting into the night sky, and seemed to hold there for an instant, like a hang glider catching the wind, about to soar.
Then it fell, nose forward into the deep abyss of the valley. Into the web of a million flickering lights. The valley Wade practically owned at one time, or at least that was the way it seemed, she thought later. If you could ever really own something like that, a man who never had a dime, only an off-color joke, a hearty laugh, or a slap on the back. Descending silently with a hundred secrets still buried with him.
Yet in his own way he had.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
Three days later, the United Airlines A320 touched down at LaGuardia Airport in New York and pulled up at the end of the runway with Hauck in it.
Three days of being treated for his wounds—two fractured ribs, a contusion on the back of his skull, and a clean through-and-through gunshot wound in the shoulder. And sorting things out with the various law enforcement agencies to come to the conclusion that despite two dead and one wounded at the farm, on top of the six dead in Aspen, he and Chuck Watkins wouldn’t be charged.
In the end, the only charge that seemed even remotely prosecutable, but at the same time moot, was for unlawfully breaking into Robertson’s mailbox, which the DA in Greeley seemed agreeable to ignore, only half jokingly, if Hauck promised never to come back to the state.
Randall J. McKay, from Alpha, was brought up on multiple counts of attempted murder, kidnapping, conspiracy to commit murder in the case of Trey Watkins, blackmail, and witness intimidation. Not to mention federal charges of illegally using military PsyOps tactics in the United States. Alpha Group agreed to discontinue all operations on the Wattenberg field pending a review of their business practices, and before that was even undertaken, several other energy accounts of theirs decided to walk away, and the firm collapsed. Several litigations against their management and board of directors were initiated.
Resurgent Mining and Mineral underwent an internal audit and Wendell Moss, their regional head of Colorado operations, resigned, pending charges against him of blackmail, conspiracy to defraud the justice system, and conspiracy to commit murder. The company expressed its “dismay and disappointment” at the tactics employed in the Wattenberg region, which ran against its “core philosophy to working hand in hand with local communities.” The CEO said it would immediately take steps to ensure “that sufficient levels of water, either from local sources or beyond,” would immediately be made available to the farmers and ranchers of Weld County, “who had been disadvantaged by their policies.” In advance of what was anticipated to be several class action suits, the company pledged up front to invest the sum of $60 million to be put back into the affected localities, for RMM’s role in compounding the hardships of the drought the past two years. At the same time the company insisted it had only worked within the wishes of the local municipalities affected, and that other than the actions of a few misguided managers, it had broken no laws. In Templeton, Police Chief Joseph Riddick tendered his resignation, citing reasons of personal health, pending a criminal review, and an outside lieutenant from Greeley was temporarily put in charge.
Two days after Hauck was taken away from Trixie One on a stretcher, a news release came over the wires that the proposed merger between RMM and Global had been put on hold.
RMM’s stock fell twenty points that day.