Emile’s knee dropped into Michael’s ribs. He felt the wind forced out of his lungs, but before he could respond—before he could push Emile off or take a breath—the cold barrel of the injection pistol pushed into his neck.
Pppsssshhh.
The nightmares began.
THREE
DENVER, COLORADO
THREE DAYS LATER
The place was called Casa Bonita. It was the closest thing the Mile High City had to a true theme restaurant, the kind that pocked the landscape around Disney World like acne. Mexico was done here en una manera grande: lava-rock walls, thatched-roof gazebos, fake palm trees festooned with holiday lights, what appeared to be an entire street lifted out of Puerto Vallarta. The centerpiece was a lagoon into which “cliff divers” plunged, alongside a three-story waterfall, every half hour. Diners sat at tables in aristocratic dining halls and waterside cabanas, in the caves of the Sierra Madres, even in the darkness behind the waterfall. Kids played games in one of several arcade rooms and crept through Black Bart’s Hideaway, a cavern of passageways where lights flashed on to reveal monsters hidden in the walls and where air, accompanied by shrill alarms, shot out at unsuspecting passersby. Parents got caricature portraits made near a wishing well and passed time in the cantina. Somehow, this tour of la Tierra Azteca fit in a single building that, from outside, mimicked an oversized Spanish mission.
Laura Fuller gazed up at the black-painted ceilings, where tiny lights twinkled like stars. “I thought our flight was taking us to Denver, not Mazatlán,” she said, sipping a margarita.
“Great, isn’t it?” John Hutchinson pushed his plate away and leaned back in his chair. He plopped a hand on his belly, groaning. “These all-you-can-eat meals should be illegal.”
“I had three plates of enchiladas,” said Laura’s son, Dillon. He didn’t bother to look up from the sopaipilla he was dousing with honey.
“It was a long flight, and we didn’t get up in time for breakfast,” Laura explained.
Hutch was familiar with the journey.
The day before, Laura and Dillon had taken an eight-passenger commuter out of Fiddler Falls, a speck of a town in northern Saskatchewan. The stomach-tossing, six-hour flight alone was enough to lay seasoned travelers low, but then they had spent the night in Saskatoon and caught a 6:30 AM commercial flight to Denver—another five hours in the air.
Hutch caught the eye of a wandering trinket salesman and waved him over. The man stepped up to the table, bearing lighted spinning butterflies, glowing rabbit ears, and swords that shlinged when waved—apparently pirates and conquistadors used the same bladesmith.
“What’s your fancy?” Hutch asked Dillon.
“I’m too old for that stuff,” the boy said around a mouthful of food. His eyes sparkled at the goodies all the same.
“Ten is not too old for a light saber,” Hutch informed him. “Green or blue?”
“Hutch, really,” Laura said, “you don’t have to.”
“If you’re going to explore the caves, you gotta have a sword.” He pointed at one and handed the man a twenty. He turned the saber over to Dillon.
The boy, all eyes and teeth, accepted it. He swung it around, then held it vertically in front of himself. Its blue glow radiated over his face.
Hutch remembered those eyes, at once vibrant and sad; the mouth that when it smiled made dimpled cheeks and revealed Chiclet teeth and a little tongue that seemed not to know quite what to do with itself. It’d been over a year since he’d seen Dillon. Hutch had bought Laura a satellite phone, the only kind that worked in the wilderness she and her son called home. He’d burned through a few paychecks’ worth of airtime minutes, but it wasn’t the same as being with them.
They’d met a year ago when hell had staked a claim on Fiddler Falls. A young man named Declan Page and a homicidal gang of youthful followers had attempted to take over the town—for not much more reason than because they thought they could. Laura’s husband, Tom, Dillon’s father, had died fighting them.
Hutch and three friends had been camping in the hills above town. They had inadvertently crashed Declan’s party, and through dumb luck, according to Hutch, or through “survival skills and heroism,” according to some news media, they had managed to stop the siege. Hutch had saved the boy’s life. In turn, Dillon had returned Hutch’s life to him, reminding him that despite the nasty divorce he was going through, life was worth living and the children his ex was trying to keep from him were worth fighting for.
Hutch leaned across the table to run his fingers over Dillon’s hair and cheek. “I’m glad you’re here.”
Dillon rolled his eyes. “Finally!” He looked anxiously at his mom. “How long, a week?”
“We head home next weekend,” she said.
Dillon frowned. He gazed at Hutch, and his eyes got a little watery.
Hutch felt the same. A week was too short, but he said, “Hey, we can do a lot in a week. You’ll see. In a week, you’ll be so beat you’ll want to go home just to rest.”
“I do chores at home,” Dillon said.
“He does,” Laura said. “It’s amazing, how much he helps.”
Dillon hung his head. He found the switch on the sword and turned it off.
Laura smiled at Hutch. “We’re tired, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry,” Hutch said, bringing his watch up. “I should have thought about that. You need a nap more than you do a crazy place like this.” He moved a napkin from his lap to the sauce-smeared plate in front of him.
“No,” Dillon said, perking up. “That’s all right. I want to see more.” As if to prove it, he turned the sword’s light on again. “Can I . . . uh . . . ?” His finger pointed this way and that; his eyes roamed elsewhere.
“You sure?” Hutch said. Getting an enthusiastic affirmation, Hutch looked to Laura. She shrugged, as if to say Kids. He tossed Dillon a plastic baggie of tokens. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”
Dillon hefted it in his hand. His smile grew bigger. He stood and looked around, unsure which direction to head first.
“Dillon,” Hutch said, gesturing for the boy to draw closer. He whispered, “Check out the area under the bridge in Black Bart’s. It’s really cool.” He pointed, and Dillon ran off. Hutch called to him: “But don’t get lost. It’s easy to do in this place.” To Laura he said, “This is Logan’s favorite restaurant.”
Logan was Hutch’s twelve-year-old son.
“Once, when he was about seven, he ran off like that and disappeared. We couldn’t find him anywhere. Cops came, started interviewing people, checking the security tapes. Janet was freaking out.”
“You weren’t?” Laura’s eyes had grown big.
Hutch smiled. “In my way. Thing is, I should have known. I’ve been coming here since I was a kid. Finally, I had a revelation.” He laughed and took a swig from a bottle of Dos Equis. “Black Bart’s Hideaway. There’s a plank bridge in there. If you’re mischievous enough, you can slip between the rocks and get under it. Almost no way to see under there, it’s so dark, even with the lights on.”
“He got stuck?” Laura said. She looked over her shoulder the direction Dillon had gone. “Why didn’t he call out?”
“Uh-uh,” Hutch said. “Not Logan. He was hiding.”
“That whole time?”
“That’s Logan.”
“Well, it is called Hideaway.”
“Exactly.” Hutch drained the bottle into his mouth. He reached for the flag attached to a tiny pole on the table. Raising it beckoned a server. Then he stopped and withdrew his hand. He’d promised himself no more than two beers at a single sitting. After returning from Canada, he’d had trouble with that. It was just too blasted easy to keep going.
He said, “Of course, they’d turned the lights on and even flashed a light under the bridge. Whenever they did, Logan would squeeze himself into a corner.”
“Oooh,” Laura said.
“His rump was red for a while, I’ll tell you,” Hutch sai
d. “But worse, as far as he was concerned, we didn’t come back for six months.”
“No more hiding?”
“You gotta hide when you’re here. Only not for three hours.”
“So,” she said, shifting in her chair, sizing him up, “where are they, Logan and Macie? Not your week?”
“It is, actually. Janet will bring them to the house this evening. You know I’ve always wanted the two of you to meet them. I think Dillon and Logan will have a blast together. When you see him, ask to see his grill.”
“His what?”
“His braces. Not really what the rap kids consider grillz, but close enough for a twelve-year-old suburbanite.”
She shook her head. “I’m still trying to get my head around the idea that you’re not the Grizzly Adams guy I met in Canada. Of course, I knew you lived in Denver, but I can’t shake the thought that you belong in the woods, in some cabin you built yourself. Instead of stalking lynx through the wilderness, you write newspaper columns. Now you tell me your son talks like a . . . whaddaya call ’em . . . gangsta?”
They laughed.
“Something like that,” Hutch said. He tried to remember if he’d ever seen her smile in those few weeks he’d spent in Canada while the authorities up there conducted their investigation. Probably she had, if only forcing it for Dillon’s sake, but he couldn’t recall.
Laura said, “How is it, having them back?”
Hutch nodded. He wished he could say, We went camping last week and saw a bear! Or, You should have seen Macie in the school play. Eight-year- olds everywhere gave up their dreams of stardom, what with her talent sucking up all the accolades. But truth was he’d won joint custody, and it hadn’t gone much further than his kids bouncing from Janet’s home to his every week.
He hadn’t done all the things with them he’d thought he would. No bike rides or circuses. No taking Logan to the skate park or fishing with Macie. Going out to the movies or the ice-cream parlor—events he’d imaged as everyday occurrences—had become rare. He sometimes wondered, when his mind paused long enough to consider it, whether getting time with them had been more important to him than spending time with them.
But instead of addressing it aloud, he said, “Both Janet and I come from broken homes. When we got married, we promised ourselves we’d break that cycle. Guess that didn’t work so well.”
A spotlight illuminated a stage beside the waterfall, about halfway up. A cowboy spun a six-shooter and spoke into a microphone: “Well, howdy, folks. I’m sheriff of these parts, and I’m looking for Black Bart. Anybody seen that varmint?”
A chorus of kid voices yelled that the evildoer was right there, sneaking up on the sheriff from behind the waterfall. He was a cowboy bad guy: black hat, bandolier, and Snidely Whiplash mustache.
Laura said, “I thought Black Bart was a pirate.”
Hutch shrugged. “Depends on the context, or what costumes are handy, I guess.” He sat up in his chair and saw Dillon run up to a rope barrier on the other side of the lagoon. Hutch waved, but the boy’s eyes were too full of the show. He said, “I bet he’s never seen anything like this before.”
“I never have,” Laura said. She touched his arm. “Don’t feel that you have to, you know, show us the sights. That’s not why we came.”
“Oh, come on. Skiing. The Rockies. Mile High Stadium, I mean, Invesco Field. My dad still calls it Bears Stadium, and that goes back to ’68. Let’s see, what else . . . ?”
“John Hutchinson,” she said. “You, that’s what we came for. I’m just happy you could make time for us.”
He nodded. “Got a couple columns banked, so readers won’t miss their thrice-weekly dose of the Spirit of Colorado.”
His column, which ran in the Denver Post, profiled Coloradoans who had triumphed over adversity. Everyone had made a big deal over his entering the ranks of these victors by surviving in Canada. In fact, the story had been picked up by the national media.
Before he had realized what was happening, they’d dubbed him a hero. The story of Declan, the scion of the Page fortune, gone bad and the man who’d stopped him had made it to the pages of People magazine and Reader’s Digest. Heck, even 60 Minutes had given the drama a twelve-minute segment. Three publishing houses had contacted him about writing a book, but they wanted a “hero’s tale,” and that didn’t interest him.
He simply couldn’t take credit, when all he had done was live through it, and when so much tragedy had resulted despite his best efforts. Besides, he was flat broke and couldn’t find time for his kids. What kind of hero let his life crumble like that?
“Dillon was hoping the two of you could do a little archery,” Laura said. “He’s become a regular Robin Hood.”
“I hope not the part about—”
The James Bond-like opening of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” emanated from his breast pocket. He pulled out the mobile phone.
“—robbing from the rich to give to the poor,” he finished. The call was coming from a pay phone. “Hello?”
“John Hutchinson?”
He didn’t recognize the voice, strained, rushed.
“Speaking.”
“Don’t say my name.”
“That would be a little difficult, since I don’t know—”
The voice said, “It adds up to a dime or more.”
Nichols. Dr. Dorian Nichols.
Hutch stood so quickly, his chair toppled backward. “I thought you were . . .” He started to turn away, remembered where he was, and held an index finger up to Laura. She had stopped his bottle from toppling over when his legs had hit the table. He turned away from her concern.
Hutch said, “The cops . . . everyone is looking for you. Your family . . .”
“They slaughtered them, all of them.” Nichols’s voice broke on slaughtered, rose in pitch.
“They? Who?”
“Don’t use any names!”
“You think what? My line’s bugged? Yours? You’re calling from a pay phone.”
“Yours, absolutely, but they probably have entire area codes covered for me by now. They use a keyword program. It can monitor millions of conversations without anyone having to listen. That’s how they do it now.”
A señorita brushed past, leading a family to a nearby table. Hutch picked up his chair and stepped around it. He faced a lava-rock wall, lowered his voice.
“You keep saying they.”
“You have to ask?”
“The news said—”
“I know, that I killed them. That’s what they made it look like. Would you expect anything different?”
“Where are you? Why are you calling me? You need to go to . . .”
The man jumped into Hutch’s hesitation. “To who? I can’t go to anyone. As soon as I do, they’ll lock me up. Then Page . . .” The man pulled in air, as if trying to take back the word. “Put me in a cell and I won’t come out—they’ll get me for sure. The only chance I have to . . . to expose who did this is to blow it wide open.”
“I don’t understand.” But Hutch was beginning to. “Why don’t you go to the media? I mean, the big guys? They’d—”
“They’d think I went crazy, like they’re already saying. First they’d turn me in, then they’d write a story about how they helped apprehend me.”
Hutch closed his eyes. Nichols was right. Hutch had beaten his own head against enough brick walls this past year to know. The man Nichols was talking about—Brendan Page—had insulated himself so thoroughly, was so adept at using his money and influence, that he was nearly untouchable. And nearly was Hutch’s hope only adding words. If Page had gone after Nichols as ruthlessly as he apparently had done, the doctor must possess exactly what Hutch’s investigation needed.
God help me, Hutch thought. Thinking like this. The man’s family. Still . . .
“What do you have?” Hutch said.
Silence. Finally, Nichols said, “X. não . . . Genjuros.”
“What? Wait . . . spell that.” Hutch patt
ed his pockets for a pen.
Nichols said, “Do your research. I’ll be in touch.”
“Hold on. Where are you? I can—”
A clicking sound came through, as though he could hear the quarters Nichols had used dropping through the phone.
“Hello? Doc—” He stopped himself. Bugged? His phone? He looked at it, as if some evidence of it would show. The screen told him the call had been lost. He slapped it shut and dropped it into his pocket. He turned to the table, picked up his sunglasses.
“We have to go,” he told Laura.
“What is it? Is everything all right?”
Hutch flagged down their server and handed her a credit card. He turned back to Laura. “I’m sorry, it’s just . . . Everything’s okay. That was a guy I’d been trying to reach. He’d always avoided me, like everyone else. Now he’s in trouble and wants to talk. I think he knows something, what I’ve been looking for.”
“About Declan’s father?” she asked.
Hutch had always believed the billionaire military industrialist had something to do with the atrocities his son had committed in Canada. The Canadian and U.S. justice departments had ultimately disagreed. Hutch had been digging for dirt—futilely—since returning to Denver a year ago.
He said, “I think so, yeah.” He waved at Dillon, still watching the show from the far side of the lagoon. “Dillon!”
Black Bart pushed the sheriff off the stage. The lawman plunged twenty feet into the water. Everyone booed. Black Bart laughed maniacally.
“Dillon!”
The boy glanced over. He grinned and waved.
Hutch beckoned him. The server returned with his card and the bill to sign. Hutch scrawled the odd words Nichols had told him on a napkin and shoved it into his pocket. He said, “He wants me to research something. Said he’d get back to me.”
Laura said, “Hey, at least he had the courtesy to call after we ate, huh?”
Dillon ran over. “Can we get more of those roll things?”
“Not this time, honey.” Laura pulled his coat off the back of a chair.
“We’re leaving?”