The Goodbye Man
- Автор: Дивер Джеффри
- Серия: Colter Shaw #2
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: G. P. Putnam’s Sons
- ISBN: 978-0-525-53597-3
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Goodbye Man». Краткое содержание книги:
Never go into snake brush without a trekking stick. You can push plants aside ahead of you, and if there’s a strike, the snake will likely go for the stick.
“Heel,” Shaw commanded and together he and Chase turned left and struck out through the dense woods. The rottie hewed close to Shaw’s left thigh as they circumvented the rattler and continued on their mission, the human probing thickets before they trod through them.
That mission was the second of the two he’d been thinking of for the past several weeks, the one he’d put aside to pursue Erick and Adam... and, as it turned out, that little trip to the Osiris Foundation.
He was looking for what his father had hidden here in this mountainous part of the family property years ago.
In some University of California archives, Colter had found a clue that told him that the mysterious message was here, in an area roughly the size of a suburban neighborhood. A daunting search to many, but even if Shaw did not know the exact location, he knew how to find it.
The path now led them to the crest of Echo Ridge — where, years ago, the woman who’d been hunting his father, Braxton, had sent one of her hired guns to follow Ashton and torture him to give up his secret. Ashton had tricked the man and come up behind him. In the ensuing struggle, though, Ashton had slipped and fallen to his death. Teenage Colter had discovered the body — that was the motivation for his mad, and pointless, high-speed rappel down the face of Echo Ridge to the creek bed where his father’s body lay.
Shaw reflected that he’d thought of Adam as the man on the cliff. Now, he realized that he was, as well — and so was Ashton.
Shaw had learned recently that Braxton had dealt harsh justice to her thug; the man was no longer among the living. The woman, apparently, had little tolerance for incompetence.
The hired muscle, Ebbitt Droon, had taken over his job.
Ironically, Braxton and Droon never guessed that Ashton had hidden the secret here. If they had, they would have returned to search and they never did. There was no other access to Echo Ridge except past the cabin and its security system, which Mary Dove had installed just after her husband’s death. Braxton would assume the secret was hidden in San Francisco, where Ashton’s efforts had been focused. To them, Echo Ridge was a conveniently deserted place in which to waylay Shaw’s father and force him to tell what he knew.
The dog now tensed and looked to the left, through a tall line of sycamore, black walnut and gray pine. Brush too: bladderpod, creosote, lupine and snowberry.
A sound? Not a rattle — a crackling of dry leaves. Maybe deer? Bear? Detour was not often an option with the latter, and Shaw’s hand dropped to the Colt. But whatever it was meandered away, as ninety-nine percent of forest inhabitants will do when they hear, see or smell you. The two continued on. He kept his eye on the trail and checked his phone for GPS directions.
Shaw felt the urgent anticipation that comes with closing in on your prey. What had his father found, and why were some people willing to kill — and others die — for it?
At the direction of the electronic navigator, he and Chase now turned away from the cliff and headed into the woods. They climbed onto a limestone shelf. Shaw checked his phone once more. They were on the eastern edge of the hunting ground. His father’s coordinates defined an entire square mile, one filled with dense forest, thickets, brush and brambles, rock formations, streams and ponds.
He surveyed the expanse now.
“Let’s get to it.”
This was not an official dog command but Chase caught the gist, and they started down to the forest floor.
73
Rottweilers fall into the American Kennel Club’s “Working” group, a category of large dogs bred to guard, to pull small wagons and sleds and to perform search and rescue. The latter meant they were skilled trackers.
Shaw dug into his backpack and withdrew a plastic bag. Inside was a piece of what appeared to be wood, but was actually recycled plastic.
One of the survival skills taught by Ashton Shaw to his children was the art of hiding objects that could be found only by your allies. He never would use anything electronic, of course, but stuck with the basics. A popular technique among survivalists is to wrap the object you’ll hide in something that has a distinctive odor detectable only by tracking dogs. If you need it to be hidden for only a few days, the dog will track the hider’s scent. Ashton, however, chose something that off-gassed scent molecules for far longer than that: plastic, specifically recycled plastic, which has a strong and distinctive scent.
There were field scentometers — including the wonderfully named Nose Ranger — that might have detected the smell. But nothing located aromas better than a dog, and when circumstance provided one, he leapt at the opportunity.
Whatever was hidden here, Shaw knew, it would be in or beside something that was still, after all these years, radiating its unique smell. Shaw held it down to Chase’s nose, and he sniffed enthusiastically. Shaw hooked a long lead to the rottie’s collar and gave a true command: “Find.”
The dog didn’t race forward but moved fast in a zigzag from rock to rock, tree to bush. Shaw kept up, hurrying behind, his hand near the grip of the Colt. Detours weren’t possible now, and if it came to a confrontation, a rattler would lose.
The rottie’s nose was up, as he was air tracking. The buried treasure would be stashed in a cave somewhere, Shaw assumed, protected from the elements.
As the minutes turned to hours, Shaw began thinking that maybe this was folly. Was he here on the basis of false information? It was possible that Ashton, in one of his foggier moments, had thought he’d left the package yet in fact he had not.
However, this proved not to be the case.
Chase braked to a stop. He did what all search dogs do upon finding the target. They don’t point, they don’t bark. They sit down.
He was in front of a small cavern. A rock slide had covered most of the opening but there was a six-inch slit toward the top. Shaw gave the rottie a piece of venison jerky and crouched down, firing a beam from his tactical halogen light into the cave. No snakes. Just dust and rocks and — about eight feet past the rubble — what seemed to be a white box, about 9-by-12 inches and an inch thick, made, of course, from recycled materials. The seams were glued with thick adhesive, probably of the industrial-strength waterproof variety.
He started to pull away rocks but there was another mini-slide; he’d need a shovel and pickaxe and some timber to shore the cave entrance properly. He wasn’t going to end his quest for his father’s secret by being buried alive with it for all eternity. He’d return with the proper tools and lumber for shoring. He noted the exact location via landmarks and he and Chase began the hour-plus trek back to the cabin. They took their time on the descent — it was steep and gravelly in parts. Also, you never knew when you might come across a visitor in the middle of the path, coiled and cautious and just not in the mood to slither out of your way.
74
“Your boy did a good job,” Shaw said to the couple sitting on the front porch of his family’s cabin, which nestled in the expansive valley.
He rubbed Chase’s head.
“’Course he did. I trained him.” Teddy gave the dog an ear scratch too.
Velma laughed, nodded toward her husband. “Trained him to lie at your feet while you dish up a big helping of Netflix.” Her voice was low and as smooth as her husband’s was rough.
Teddy scoffed. “It’ll come in useful someday: That dog’ll never twitch a muscle when a superhero lands in front of him with a crash and does that down-on-one-knee thing. Why do they do that?”