“Haw. Now get that tire of yours fixed, call Triple A or man the jack yourself.” Crowe looked around, at the boulder, then back to Shaw. “On these roads, in that breadbox of a car … you could come to real grief. Not from me, of course, saving your ass from rattlers. But somebody aiming at you. I’d hate to see that happen.”
The threat delivered, Crowe turned and plodded up the road, then disappeared into the bushes. A moment later his silver SUV drove onto the road, on the other side of the boulder, and turned away from Shaw and the rock. A hand appeared from the driver’s window of the Bronco. The gesture seemed to be a wave but it might have been ruder.
He called 911, reporting the fallen boulder to the state police. The obstacle was in the middle of a straightaway and could be seen fifty yards away from either direction. Still, Colter Shaw was hardwired to save people from disaster, even if it was their own failings that put them in peril. Someone cruising along while texting might deserve the air bag slap; his or her children did not, however.
Shaw spent a few minutes checking the tires and backing out of the razorish weeds. It took some rocking and some tire spinning but eventually the car rolled onto the road again.
Once on the asphalt, he changed the tire and searched the wheel wells. He found the GPS tracker Crowe had hidden. He clicked the off button and stowed the device in his backpack.
Then he turned around and sped back the way he’d come, the exact opposite of the direction that Dalton Crowe was headed. Shaw checked his map and estimated that he should intercept Erick Young and Adam Harper in less than a half hour.
It had taken some effort, and time, but the problem of Dalton Crowe had to be eliminated.
The man’s assessment of his own skill—“I’m the best”—was just plain wrong. Crowe was a functional, not talented, tracker, and he was just plain lousy at surveillance. Shaw knew Crowe had been dogging him from the moment he’d arrived in Gig Harbor. He’d noted the silver SUV as soon as he’d arrived at the Youngs’, parked at the curb several doors away, in front of a house with a foreclosure sale sign in the lawn. Not necessarily suspicious. He merely tucked the observation away.
When he’d left, he’d pulled past the SUV and seen the driver bending toward the glove compartment, as if avoiding being seen. Then the Bronco had pulled away from the curb and followed the Winnebago all the way to Adam’s father’s chandler business on the waterfront.
It was obviously Dalton Crowe, who would have been staking out the Young residence since he’d arrived in the harbor town on the chance that the boy, known to be still in the area, would return.
At that point, Shaw’s mission had doubled: get rid of Crowe, then find Adam and Erick.
Shaw had come up with a plan to do both.
The Public Safety Office believed the young men were headed north from Tacoma, presumably en route to Canada, given the currency exchange intelligence.
Shaw was eighty percent certain, however, that Adam and Erick were not in the red pickup.
Anticipating the suspects’ most logical plan, Shaw had sent the email to Mack. The questions he’d posed were:
1. What neighborhood in Tacoma has the highest gang activity?
2. Where’s the main bus station in or near that neighborhood?
3. Where are cars likely to be taken for chopping in the Seattle-Tacoma area?
The reply had been: the neighborhood of Manitou, a Western Express bus terminal on Evans Street, and any number of places, though there was a concentration of junkyard/chop shops on the south side of Seattle.
Shaw believed that they’d donned costumes and exchanged U.S. dollars for Canadian to trick investigators into thinking their destination was north. That alone wasn’t enough, though. They had to keep the law’s focus on Adam’s truck. Since Erick worked with troubled youths, he was likely familiar with the underworld of Pierce County. He would have known where to leave the pickup—with the keys “hidden” under the front seat or in a wheel well—where it would quickly be perped by some bangers and driven to south Seattle for butchering into parts.
Meanwhile, Adam and Erick had walked a few blocks to the bus station on Evans Street, bought tickets and left town.
After leaving Harper’s seaside company, Shaw had driven the Winnebago to a campground east of Tacoma, and parked it there. He’d Ubered to a nearby car rental agency and gotten the Kia, which he’d then driven into the Manitou neighborhood, with Crowe clumsily tailing all the way.
Shaw had parked in front of the Hermanos Alverez bodega. He had gone inside the store, and for a twenty-dollar bribe and several bags of groceries he didn’t need, bought the right to slip out the back door.
From there, to the bus station, at which the ante increased significantly, and it cost him five hundred dollars to learn the destination of the tickets the two boys had bought—a little town called Hope’s Corner, eighty miles southeast of Tacoma, near Mount Rainier National Park.
This fact was good news. They were both alive.
He’d returned to the car, out the bodega’s front door, dumped the groceries in the trunk. When he pulled into traffic, Crowe’s SUV was not far behind. It had been while the car was parked in front of the store that Crowe had clamped on the tracker.
Then the fun began.
Shaw had driven a circuitous route in the general direction of Hope’s Corner, though he had stopped every fifteen miles or so, buying water or coffee or snacks or yet another unnecessary road map. And always asking the clerks and customers the same question.
“Say, you noticed a yellow Volkswagen bug coming through here? It’s my two buddies. We were going fishing at Wuikinuxv Falls but there’s been a change of plans and I can’t reach ’em. Those boys’re just not picking up their phones.”
The point of this exercise was to misdirect Crowe as to the suspects’ means of transport and their destination. Now, having used the boulder to clear the field for himself, the man was speeding in pursuit of a gaudy, nonexistent car, to a town whose name was hard to pronounce and harder yet to spell … and that lay in the exact opposite direction of Hope’s Corner, where the suspects really were.
Colter Shaw now rolled past the Hope’s Corner welcome to sign and surveyed the burg. The downtown embraced a diner, a mechanic’s garage, a general store and two gas stations, one of which was also a bus way station; it would be there that the suspects disembarked.
The tiny place also featured an overlook from which you got a grand view of Mount Rainier, the tallest peak in the state. It was designated a Decade Volcano, one of the most hazardous in the world. Shaw knew this because he and Tom Pepper had once considered climbing. But while the threat of eruption wasn’t a deterrent, the surfaces were. They were largely ice and snow, and that made for a specialized technique that didn’t interest them much.
Shaw steered the Kia into the pump area of the larger gas station, refueled and examined the damage to the car from his boulder-avoiding plunge. Cosmetic only. Expensive, of course. But Shaw wasn’t concerned; he always bought the loss/damage insurance. When finished at the pump, he drove the car into a shaded spot at the side of the general store. Climbing out, he went to the trunk, opened it and, after looking round and seeing no humans or security cameras, removed his concealed carry weapon—a single-stack Glock 42, the .380 caliber, in a Blackhawk holster. He chambered a round and fitted the holster inside his right waistband, making sure the securing hook snugly held his belt; the fastest draw in the world is pretty useless if the holster comes along for the ride.
Now, to determine where exactly were the suspects.
Shaw