Killer Summer Read Free Page B

day.”
    Kevin stuffed his rod into the back, and climbed in front, still in his waders.
    Walt whistled for Beatrice, who raced to the vehicle, throwing dirt in her wake. She jumped into Kevin’s lap, pressing up against him.
    “That’s her spot,” Walt said.
    “You think?”

    T he road ran nearly perfectly straight, due west. Walt worked the Cherokee up to seventy miles per hour, the wrecker now nowhere in sight.
    “We can’t catch a tow truck? You want me to drive?”
    “I’m dying of laughter over here. How ’bout you use your eyes instead of your wit?”
    Kevin kept his attention on Walt.
    “Did you happen to see those pronghorns back at Democrat?”
    Walt glanced at his nephew.
    “They were moving along real good,” Kevin said. “They were up and going before we came along.”
    “What would a wrecker be doing up Democrat Gulch?” Walt asked. “That makes no sense.”
    “Chop shop, maybe? Tow it out there and cut it up?”
    “A Taurus? Nah . . .”
    But a moment later, Walt slowed and threw the Cherokee in a U-turn. He drove off the road and navigated through the scrub.
    “We should have seen lots of dust if they went out there,” he said, “that’s a dirt road.”
    “Not if they stopped somewhere,” Kevin said.
    The ride turned loud and shaky as the Cherokee’s four-wheel drive bit into the dirt road rising up Democrat Gulch. When Walt took the first rise a little hotly, the fishing rod slapped the window frame, and Kevin’s sunglasses flew off his face.
    Walt sensed trouble. The pieces of the puzzle just didn’t fit together: the wrecker coming out Croy Canyon, the person behind the wheel of the Taurus, the wrecker heading up Democrat Gulch.
    Kevin was right: it felt more like auto theft than anything else. But a Taurus? The economy really was tough.
    “You’re going to stay here in the Jeep,” Walt announced, his plan already forming.
    “You keep driving like this, there won’t be a Jeep,” Kevin said, gripping the panic bar.
    Walt slowed it down some for the next hill, not for Kevin’s sake but because the clear Idaho air was faintly clouded by a shimmer of dust. As the Cherokee crested the hill, Walt cut the wheel sharply, skidding to a stop a few feet short of the back of the Taurus.
    The road narrowed here, and though the wrecker and Taurus were pulled to the side of the road they still blocked it.
    Walt spotted two men, one working the wrecker’s hoist to lower the Taurus, the other on foot already fleeing, heading for an aspen grove. Seeing the Cherokee and its rooftop light rack, the other took off.
    The man behind the wheel of the Taurus was either dead or unconscious.
    Walt calmly reported the situation to dispatch, then dropped the mic on the seat.
    “Stay!” he called to Beatrice. “You too,” he added for Kevin’s sake. Then he threw open the Cherokee’s door and hit the ground in his stocking feet.
    He ducked when he mistook a sputter of an engine starting for small weapons fire. Two camo-painted ATVs raced out from the aspen grove and headed away from him. Walt snapped a mental picture, trying to grab any identifying characteristics he could. But the two men had their backs to him, and the ATVs were commonplace.
    He hurried back to the Cherokee, climbing behind the wheel before realizing Kevin’s door was ajar. The boy was curled in the dirt in front of the Taurus’s open door.
    Beatrice was pacing nearby, refusing to go closer.
    She smells something, Walt thought.
    For a fraction of a second—only a fraction—Walt considered pursuing the ATVs. He then held his breath and approached Kevin, the boy’s condition matching the driver’s.
    A lump in his throat, he dragged his nephew away from the scene. He checked Kevin’s pulse and found it steady . He elevated the boy’s feet, wondering what he was going to tell Myra.
    He called for an ambulance and his ad hoc crime-scene crew, including local news photographer and part-time deputy Fiona Kenshaw.
    Far in the