Ransom X

  *****

  Wagner felt a large hand clamp onto her shoulder. Her body tensed as a mountain of human flesh pushed her up against her midsection. She caught the faint scent of spearmint, and a voice pressed into her inner ear.

  “You need to get out of here.” Burly shifted his weight pointing his gut diagonally so it didn’t rest on this little toothpick of a woman. His frame, if he lost his balance, would have spread her like peanut butter up against the wall. Burly didn’t want to have to clean the wall. “Trouble is on the way.”

  Wagner slid to the floor. Burly reached out a hand to her shoulder, “Are you OK?”

  Wagner only needed two fingers, and with a snap of leverage, she turned her shoulders into a hand crank, spinning the pressure into the slow separation the bones in his wrist. In a blink of an eye, she had turned and was kneeling before Burly. Burly’s eyes flooded with pain, and tears began to pool in the corners. Wagner was controlling the floodgates. She pressed her thumb further into the joint, her nail pinching the connective tissue.

  Burly somehow maintained an even tone. “Jesus, little lady, I’m trying to help you - “

  She cut him off, “Let’s start talking about what I want to talk about. Where did she go?” Wagner couldn’t let go of Darci’s trail. The concern of the bartender, even the sincerity of his warning, didn’t throw up any alarms.

  Burly heaved a minty sigh, and he decided that it was far less painful to give the agent what she wanted, rather than argue with her.

  He pointed two fingers on his free hand toward a rusty sign, gleaming in the half moon. “Trailhead to the compound starts right there.”

  “I’ll take the road.”

  “The back trail is faster, even at night. The road winds all the way out to Park Canyon Bridge.” His husky voice began to quiver. Wagner released her grip.

  She paused, considering her options. The fact that the bartender didn’t want her to go back into the bar area was clear. He hadn’t moved a step and his message was protective. “Protective of what? Of her?” Wagner’s thoughts rang so loud in her head that she was sure that he could hear her. The presence of something or someone hung in the air. It was Blade. Burly knew when his customers were scared. Years of running a bar had tuned his radar carefully to the moment before blood was going to be shed. Blade was on his way; knives were out.

  None of the information that hung in the air filtered into Wagner – it seemed like she’d have to make a decision without all of the facts. If, for example, she had any idea that Brent and Legacy stood only yards away, it might have changed her reasoning. She might have pushed past the mountain of a man who filled the hallway and ordered a final round for the men in the corner. Instead, she decided if there was any chance of getting to Darci before she came into contact with Blade, it was worth the gamble. One last confirmation -“Darci started coming in here about six moths ago?”

  He nodded, “She smiled and winked every time she picked up drinks for them, she made little toothpick decorations with the fruit – she’s a kid. She’ll end up going to jail with them, and she doesn’t deserve that.”

  “Do you know what they’re up to?”

  “Drugs? Theft – the regular.”

  Wagner did her best in the dim light to judge the bartender’s eyes. She made a snap decision and pulled out a pen, then plucked a detached scotch label from the utility shelf. “It’s a satellite phone number, call it and tell the man on the other end these exact words.” She wrote a single sentence.

  Burly looked passive, indecisive, it was probably the trait that had made so many women walk out on him. He needed something – what was it?

  Wagner perched up on her tiptoes hauled back and slapped the large man full force across a chubby cheek. “There’s more where that came from, don’t disappoint me.” She flashed a smile. A rumble began in Burly’s tummy, erupting past his stinging cheek and finally coming out of his nose and mouth simultaneously. Burly had a therapeutic break through in that hallway; he’d always hesitated when someone walked out on him - in his own world. Bang! The back door crashed against the frame. He finally got out the words. Wagner had already left, and he spoke under his breath, as the message wasn’t for her. “Leaving me is the biggest mistake you’ll ever make, don’t walk out that door.”

  Trailblazer Wagner was five minutes up the trail when she began to hear noises ahead of her. Twenty yards up the trail a shadow crossed the moon, it might have been a coyote, or a bear, or a tiger. Wagner’s identifications betrayed her east coast city upbringing. She had less understanding of alpine predators than grasses that she crushed under foot. It didn’t slow her down a bit. Her instinct that anything truly dangerous wouldn’t announce its presence kept her plunging forward toward the noise ahead at breakneck speed.

  She knew that trusting Burly was a huge leap; however, it was one she took at a full run. It all came down to his breath. Not the odor, that was putrid. The sound of breathing told Wagner a lot about a person. The sounds that a person calculated were not half as interesting as the ones they didn’t control at all. They couldn’t conceal the nature of the breath that they had been drawing into themselves since birth. Very few people can control their breath with the same precision as his words. Legacy could. It was number 321 on a list of reasons to dislike Legacy, pages and pages were filled and she was even printing the mental list double sided nowadays to save space. Still she wouldn’t mind hearing his voice to calm her racing pulse, or at least in order to redirect her anger.

  It sounded crazy but she’d thought she’d heard his voice outside the bar, just as she’d left. It was over the racing of an engine – another reason she was sure it was paranoia, because she’d also thought that the engine sounded exactly like her own car. So, in her mind, Legacy was outside the bar, yelling, stealing her car. Wagner knew why she’d created it. What was it about the tall dark father figure head case that put her at ease during crises and pissed her off at all other times?

  Her legs raced over old halved out logs compacted so far into the earth that the fact that were once stairs was almost completely lost to the feet which alternately skidded off or sunk into sections of the wood – at the top, the sound of breathing became louder. Wagner was almost on top of her when she topped the stairs, and what she saw made her pause.

  A pool of light filtered pale green by the pine needles. There was a compound of buildings. The down slope after the top of the stairs had hidden the cluster of outbuildings from sight, but now she could see their location winking from behind the trees.

  There was the movement again. Two different sources now, and one of them was getting louder. It was approaching. She and Darci were not the only ones out walking the silver tipped edge of the moon.