The Shadowkiller Read Free Page A

toward the six-car structure, clenching the whisky.
    He entered the garage’s side door and flipped on the lights, revealing a vehicle behind each of its six portals. Passing his work truck, a muddy Dodge Ram with a bedliner, he continued on to his baby, a mercury silver 1956 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing coupe swaddled in a car cover. Once his dream car, it would now be his longboat to Valhalla. He took off the cover and pulled up its door—the doors on the Gullwing opened upward—and slid down into the buttery, flame red leather. Ty’s only concession to modernity had been to install a modern sound system. Ty had a technical mind tempered with the soul of an artist and felt this machine was not so much simply a great car as it was the pinnacle of a mid-twentieth-century ideal expressed by a meeting of art and engineering. He felt it would be fitting to take this car with him, as no one else could appreciate it as much as he did.
    As with all Ty’s vehicles, the key was in the ignition. No need for high security, given they were on the edge of the foothills of the Cascade range and much farther from civilization than indicated by the thirty-eight-mile ride into downtown Seattle.
    Ty twisted the key, and the big in-line six’s two hundred and forty horses roared awake. He had considered just sitting there and letting the fumes do the job, but he had another plan. He punched the clicker, and the door in front of the Mercedes rolled up. He sat there and stared into the void beyond his garage. As he put his hand on the gearshift, he paused, and his thoughts went back three summers to when all of his torment began.

3
    I t had been an unseasonably warm summer in Seattle. But on that Fourth of July weekend in central Idaho, up the middle fork of the Salmon River, it was an oven. When thirty-four employees and spouses of NovaSoft Digiware Systems gathered at the junction of Highway 93 and the dirt track leading them into the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area, there was fleeting talk of fire danger. When a few of the more prudent souls suggested they reconsider (Ty noted they were all spouses, not the gung ho NovaSoft troops), the NovaSoft gang voted them down heartily. For they were invincible.
    Everyone who had been with the company much more than five years had long since been anointed as a millionaire, and that included the warehouse guys who wielded rolls of shrink wrap for the UPS shipments. Most of the execs, including Ty and Ronnie, had stock and options worth many tens of millions. The dot-com collapse had hurt many others, and while NovaSoft had taken a slight dip, it had come back strong and lost little since the heady days of the big run-up.
    The caravan moved slowly in the wake of a dust cloud up the one-lane fire road toward a place they were told was heaven on earth. Twenty miles of cloudy grit later, the promise was kept. They rolled their dozen vehicles into a dirt parking area. A few yards below them lay the river, a sparkling strand of aqua pura crowned in sunlit diamonds that hurt the eyes. The surrounding forest was a luxurious blue green and the mountains were nearly virgin, having suffered little at the hand of man. Everyone got out and stood silently in awe of the grandeur and dead quiet of the place.
    Then the party began.
    For two days in paradise the revelers drank and ate and shattered the silence of the woods. Ty and Ronnie had much to celebrate. NovaSoft had just formed an entirely new company called Digiware Microsystems and Ronnie was the number three player. Ty would assume a new role at NovaSoft as head of product development while retaining his position as executive vice president. The moment was so heady, Ronnie had lightheartedly cautioned her extroverted husband about drinking too much. Ty was always the life of the party, and after a stint of hiking or river rafting or even just sitting around enjoying a cold Pilsner Urquell, he would always egg someone on to