Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
GABE
Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, Gabe pulled down the visor with the other and squinted through the glare at the road ahead—or tried to anyway. The sun was high in the sky now and glinting off every shiny fucking thing in existence.
“Dammit, I didn’t bring my fucking sunglasses with me. Every spring, I fork over forty bucks for emergency gas station glasses, but by the next year, they disappear. Poof. Sunglasses manufacturers must make a mint off people living in the Northwest.”
The sunshine was almost unbearably bright, and Gabe concentrated on staying in the right lane.
“Any sunglasses in that glove compartment of yours?” Gabe asked.
Elton opened the compartment’s door. Sure enough, out of the corner of his eye, Gabe spotted a pair of battered mirrored aviators nestled among a stack of maps, paper napkins, and probably every oil change record ever. “I need those.”
Grabbing the sunglasses, Elton handed them over to Gabe, who shook them open and jammed them over his eyes.
The relief was immediate.
“Christ, when will I get used to this shit? Every fucking year, the damn sun tries to kill me.”
After months of short days and thick cloud cover, no Pacific Northwest resident was prepared for the return of sunshine. The glare was legitimately painful. His phone began to chime from where he’d dropped it in the cup holder.
Elton looked at the screen. “Casey’s calling you.”
“Answer it, will you? This brightness is enough to deal with.”
“Casey, it’s Elton, Gabe’s driving. I’ll put you on speaker.”
“What’s up, Case?” Gabe said over the noise of the truck.
He risked a glance at Elton, who had his eyebrows raised questioningly. Gabe shook his head firmly. No, they weren’t going to mention their upcoming chat with Spurring. Casey would only worry or tell Sheriff Eagan, and that was the last thing Gabe wanted.
“I’ve had an interesting morning. Chatted with Kelly Perkins and then Gordon MacDonald. Gordon says he’s had two offers on his property, which is suspicious just on general principle,” Casey told them. “Wasn’t Vale a real estate agent or something?”
“More ‘or something,’ but yeah, he had a legit license,” Gabe said. Didn’t Casey have park work to do today? Gabe wasn’t going to say anything; it wasn’t as if he had legitimate employment. Casey was the wage-earner in their family.
“Who from? I didn’t know he was selling.” Elton sounded annoyed, as if Gordon should’ve told him first. Frankly, Gabe felt the same. He was very protective toward Gordon.
“Oh, he’s not selling,” Casey said. “These were unsolicited. And he has a job interview Friday. Anyway, I should go, was just checking in. I’m about to lose signal.”
And then Casey was gone, just like that.
“Gordo has a job interview? And then he just hangs up?” Gabe opened his mouth to add something snarky about proper goodbyes when Elton yelled, “Watch it!”
Gabe slammed his foot against the brake pedal and by some miracle managed not to slam into the back of a pickup that appeared out of nowhere.
“Mother of hell!”
The Ford fishtailed, and Gabe was pretty sure the tires left rubber on the blacktop, but by pure luck or fast reflexes, they stayed on the road. Gabe pulled off to the side to get his heart rate under control.
“What the fuck? Where did that come from? Wait, was that the waitress’s truck?”
Gabe’s heart was still hammering against his rib cage, and he inhaled a deep breath to get the adrenaline to subside. It wasn’t working fast enough. Thank fuck they hadn’t been driving the Honda. Maybe he needed to trade it in for something less practical and more threatening.
“I think that was the truck from the Geoduck,” Elton said with a calm Gabe wasn’t feeling.
Continuing to take big breaths and then release them, Gabe agreed. “Yep.”
He was positive it was the truck they’d seen the harried young woman get into at the Geoduck lot. One last deep breath and he pulled back onto the road.
“I wonder what she’s doing on Heartstone and why she left the restaurant so fast.”
“We could follow her,” Elton suggested.
“As if she wouldn’t notice a banged-up 1997 Ford F250 on her tail.
Although, with the way she’s driving”—over the speed limit and taking the curves in the road faster than Gabe had—“possibly she wouldn’t.
But we don’t have the time right now. Emmett’s waiting for me.
We can check on her later, maybe tomorrow?
And as a reminder, you are staying in the car. ”
Elton muttered something Gabe couldn’t quite hear but it sounded an awful lot like “We’ll see about that.”
“Could be an ambush,” Elton pointed out after a moment of broody silence.
Gabe had been thinking that too, but he wasn’t going to admit it.
But ambush was the main reason he didn’t want Elton to come along aside from the fact that he was supposed to arrive alone.
Why would someone want to ambush him? Gabe was going out on a limb and assuming that Spurring had been working with, or for, Wilson and was now quietly freaking out over the murder of his boss.
Additionally, he could have been double-dipping, working for Wilson and whoever had wielded that golf club.
But why call him? Spurring and Gabe weren’t even acquaintances.
“Could be, but I don’t see how you joining me would make it not an ambush.”
“Backup.” Elton leaned forward and was digging around under the passenger seat.
Gabe chose to ignore that comment. “Maybe Spurring killed Wilson? It’s possible, but if he had, why not just run? Why call me? It wasn’t as if I had interacted with him aside from those two lovely interviews at the Sheriff’s Office.” Memories of the stinky-sock smell continued to haunt him.
“I don’t know. Spurring just doesn’t have that bludgeon-someone-with-a-golf-club edge to him.”
He wasn’t a good guy. Ex-Deputy Spurring hadn’t been directly implicated in Eli Rizzi’s dirty dealings, but the man had been in Rizzi’s orbit for years. Which was why he’d been forced into early retirement.
“And Heartstone isn’t the Wild West, or Chicago back in the thirties,” Gabe added for good measure.
“No, it isn’t, but Knute’s right. We’ve had our own gangsters out here, still do. Equally deadly, and they know how to hide bodies where they can’t be found.”
“Wilson’s body wasn’t hidden, but maybe it was a message to someone? And they used me to deliver it,” Gabe said. “If it was a message, who was it aimed at?”
They were just about to pass Elton’s driveway.
“I can still drop you off.” Gabe knew the old man would argue. Did he feel bad for asking again? Nope.
“No,” Elton said huffily, sitting up again.
Whatever Elton had been feeling around for, he’d found it and tucked it into the side of his old-man overalls, then checked his phone. “Knute also says to be careful.”
“I’m starting to think you and Knute are closer than you’ve let on, you sneaky dog.”
A grumbled humph reached his ears, and out of the corner of his eye, Gabe watched Elton jab at his phone’s screen. “Goddammit, autocorrect.”
“Seriously though, what’s the worst that can happen, Elton? I’ll trip on the stairs? We’re meeting at a public park, for fuck’s sake.”
“I’m not even going to try and cover all the trouble you can get into, Gabriel.”
“Oooh, Gabriel. I’m in real trouble now.”
Chuckling, Gabe navigated the Ford through the decorative gates of Fort Hood, where several signs with directional arrows on them that pointed everywhere but up announced visitors had entered the park.
An extremely long road stretched out in front of them.
It had been built by the military before Fort Hood had been decommissioned and was one of the straightest roads Gabe had ever seen.
When Gabe had mentioned this to Casey not long ago, he’d been informed that it was not straight.
There was a slight curve. Gabe had laughed until he couldn’t breathe.
“Turn there.” Elton pointed left.
Aside from the commander stations and remaining underground tunnels—and legendary hidden ones—there were also bunkers, latrines, and anti-aircraft batteries.
“Oh, you mean where the sign is right there?” Gabe teased as he turned onto Hood Road.
There were twenty or so spaces to park near the largest bunker, and only three were taken. Gabe didn’t recognize the other cars. Not that he knew what Emmett Spurring drove, but if he had to guess, he was going with the ugly white PT Cruiser. A car people loved or hated.
Parking a few spots away, Gabe turned off the truck’s engine and climbed out of the cab, checking his texts—nothing new—while he waited at the back of the vehicle for Elton. Because the man refused to stay put.
“Where’s he supposed to be?” Elton asked.
“Here near the front, I’d guess. He didn’t say.”
The concrete bunker was two levels above ground and shaped like a T, with the middle facing the road and two arms at the back. Currently, there was no graffiti, but Casey and Greta had spent a recent afternoon cleaning spray-painted Frodo Lives and My Precious off one of the exterior walls.
Gabe looked carefully around. There was no one in sight, and no drivers waited in the other cars.
“Let’s find out what Spurring has to say for himself.”
“You go ahead. I’ll follow and wait by the stairs.”
Disused concrete stairs led to the top floor of the bunker, and the roof was covered with moss and grasses.
At the top was an expansive view of the Salish Sea, and no trees grew over it.
A month or so ago, Casey had dragged Gabe out of bed in the middle of the night to see if they could spot the northern lights, saying that clear skies in April made it too rare to miss.
They had spotted them, and it had been worth it.
“Sounds like a plan. I doubt I’ll be too long. Spurring is skittish.”
Elton nodded his agreement, and Gabe ducked inside the concrete building.
Almost immediately, he shivered, startled by the abrupt temperature drop.
He estimated it was about ten or twenty degrees cooler inside versus outside.
Moving toward the back of the structure, Gabe peered into the gloom, looking for signs of the disgraced officer.
“Spurring,” he called out.
The echo didn’t help, but Gabe thought he heard a “Here” and headed toward it.
The building, of course, had nothing left from its military days except the layout and the skeletons of anti-aircraft gun mounts. His footsteps seemed loud, the sound of them bouncing off the walls of the main corridor.
“Spurring,” he said again, albeit a bit quieter. The echo freaked him out.
He heard something, a groan or a grunt, maybe just the wind. He hoped so, but the hair on the back of his neck rose and goose bumps formed underneath his jacket, telling him something different.
“Fuck,” he whispered.
Slowing his pace to a crawl, Gabe pressed back against the wall and continued to move forward while also trying to make himself small.
Very small. Possibly invisible. Ahead on the right was a darker rectangle, indicating another corridor.
He seemed to remember that it led crosswise through the building.
He made it to the next corridor without being shot or otherwise ambushed and then hesitated. The hairs on his neck were telling him to run away now. The goose bumps told him he was an idiot to still be standing there. And his heart rate was outrageous.
He inched forward. “Spurring?”
This time he definitely heard a moan in response. A sound he did not fucking like.
Poking his head around the corner, Gabe squinted into the dark.
“Spurring?”
“Here,” a man’s voice, laced with pain, said weakly. “They got me.”
Disregarding possible danger to himself, Gabe darted down the corridor. He hadn’t gone more than fifty feet when he found Emmett Spurring. Spurring lay in an area with a bit more light due to an open grate overhead. He was on his back, his hands clamped over his midsection.
Gabe knelt beside him. “What happened? Who did this to you? Shit, just a sec.”
Hopping up, he ran back to the first hallway. “Elton, call 9-1-1! Spurring’s hurt. Shot, I think. It’s bad,” he yelled.
Gabe waited until he heard a muffled “On it” from Elton, then rushed back to Spurring’s side. The ex-deputy’s eyes were closed. Gabe shook his shoulder.
“Fuck, Spurring, you gotta keep your eyes open. Stay with me. Tell me what happened. Why did Wilson call me? What were you two involved in?”
Not knowing if it would help or not, Gabe tore his jacket off and tossed it to the ground. Then he took off the t-shirt he’d put on that morning, wadded it up, and pressed it against the slowly growing dark stain on Spurring’s chest.
Spurring was moving his head side to side.
“No, what? I know it was your phone that was used, that’s how I have your number.”
“Wilson,” Spurring managed. “Peter.” His eyes fluttered shut again.
“Yeah, Wilson. Come on, open ’em back up.
Peter? Like my Peter?” Gabe couldn’t fathom how Peter Vale might have been involved, and he’d been dead since last fall anyway.
Although since Peter had grown up in the area, maybe his death hadn’t been revenge on his father.
Maybe it had been something else entirely.
Spurring slowly shook his head. “No… not… Peter.”
“Tell me who. Keep fucking talking. Stay with me. Peter, not Peter?” Gabe shook him again.
“Tried to get out… should’ve known.”
“Who tried to get out? You? Wilson? Both of you? Of fucking what? No, no, hang on, keep your eyes open, that’s it. Ambulance is almost here.”
That was a blatant lie, but almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth, Gabe heard faint sirens that grew louder as the emergency response vehicle drew closer.
This time when Spurring’s eyes shut, Gabe couldn’t get him to open them again.