Submerged Read Free Page B

forehead rested on
her hair.
    In the light of the lobby, in the middle of
the day, darkness descended, engulfing them. Perry didn’t know what
had happened to his father, but his mother’s words and the look on
the male nurse’s face told him that it was bad.
    Something wrapped around Perry shoulders,
drawing him and his mother in. Something strong. Something thick.
Jack had encircled his friends with his arms. Soft words were
spoken. It didn’t take long for Perry to recognize a whispered
prayer.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter2
     
     
    Carl Subick bit back
a curse as his Ford Escape SUV hit yet another pothole in
the unnamed narrow dirt road that led to the east of the San
Antonio Mountains. He had already been on the road for longer than
he wanted and knew that the next few miles would be worse than what
he had already experienced. The road, little more than a path, had
never seen asphalt and never would. Almost no one came up here.
    He hit another dip. The Sam Browne belt he
wore dug into his back, and his holstered gun chewed at his side.
Subick had wanted to be a police officer all his life. It was a
dream born when he was six, and it had persisted through high
school and junior college. Now, after three years with the Nye
County Sheriff’s Department and driving through hills that once
held silver for miners to harvest, he was ready to trade it in.
Endless days or nights in a patrol car, chasing calls that were an
hour’s drive away or more, had tarnished the luster of the job. Yet
somehow his love for police work always won out.
    That love had its work cut out for it today.
Once again Carl had drawn the short straw. Actually, no straws had
been drawn. He was chosen for this assignment because he knew the
back roads better than anyone at the Tonopah substation. He should.
He had grown up wandering most of the hills and valleys.
    After he earned an associate degree in
criminal justice, he had been certain some police department would
gobble him up. He’d applied everywhere in Nevada and California but
was passed over time and again. His short stature and thin frame
made him look too fragile for major police departments to take him
seriously. There were others who were bigger, had more experience,
or had bachelor’s degrees. The irony of it was that he possessed a
bigger heart, a stiffer spine, and greater determination than most
of the others who were awarded the slot he felt should have been
his.
    It took four years of applying, testing, and
interviewing before he was hired on at the Nye County Sheriff’s
Department—the same county he had grown up in, as the son of an
alcoholic father who was seldom home and a mother who had never
wanted children. “You’re an accident boy,” his mother had told him
time and time again. “You’re just one big oops.” Then she would
laugh.
    Since he had no comfort at home, he sought it
in the desert mountains, following paths that few knew existed,
roads laid down by silver miners a hundred years earlier. Now he
was back in the same county, living near the same town, and driving
up one of those long forgotten paths.
    He was here for a purpose, he reminded
himself. A man had gone missing, and a distraught wife had been
calling several times a day to make sure that the authorities had
been out searching. Carl had been on such expeditions before. Every
once in a while a hiker or some nature lover would wander off the
path and become lost. Most of the time people disappeared because
they wanted to disappear. Whatever the case, it had fallen to him
to drive to the place where the missing man told his wife he would
be fishing. He was three days late. He had told her that he would
spend a day driving to the lake, two days fishing, and then return.
But she had been out of town with the kids and just discovered that
he had not come home when she returned two days after he was due.
Four days was a long time to be lost in these mountains.
    “You missed one.”
    Carl