Chapter 2
Wolf led officer Tom Rachette down the slope towards the staging area. The trail was smoothed from the bouts of torrential rain of late. He went fast, following the original line of signs he saw on the way up with Connell, now obscured by the foot falls of four officers. Rachette followed silently for a good hundred yards, then went down in a loud thump and sliding noise.
“Ah!” Rachette bounced up from his butt and looked at the ground.
Wolf turned and gave Rachette an appraising look.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said brushing himself off. “So you think there were two others with the Wheatman kid when he fell?”
“Yep,” Wolf turned back down the hill. “There’s fresh tracks, after the rain from two days ago, and nothing else but a few deer from what I saw. Two teenage boys, one teenage girl. Wheatman drops off the cliff, and now we have left one boy, one teenage girl,” he said. “And in a frantic hurry. Here.” He pointed, stopping suddenly at a steep slope of loose dirt.
There were two sets of footprints, obviously pointed downwards, heels digging in hard. One set of prints a boyish set of boots, one a smaller thin shoe model. They were stumbling and stopping, helping each other after falls.
Rachette bent down. “Could be a couple of boys, just a smaller boy.”
“Could be. But we both know who these three are. It was Mulroy’s girl, the Wheatman kid, and the Fitzgerald kid. They’ve been inseparable all summer.”
Rachette sighed. “Yeah, you’re right.”
Another rumble of thunder shook the air, still many miles away. Wolf looked at the sky behind the peaks. It was pitch dark save the continuous flickering of lightning from within. There was a torrid downpour being unleashed. If the storm expanded over the peaks in the next hour it was going to be tough going for the boys. Wolf looked to the task ahead of him and Tom and envied them.
Chapter 3
Wolf climbed into the Explorer with a grunt, his body stiff, muscles stuffed with lactic acid. Living on a ranch in the mountains, at nine thousand plus feet, one tended to build up a strength and stamina seldom seen by most frequenters of exercise gyms. Tack on that he was an avid outdoorsman, and Wolf normally wouldn’t have felt the slightest bit of fatigue after climbing up and down a relatively short section of mountain. But this morning his adrenaline injected muscles had been tested to the point of failure numerous times within the span of a minute. Ten years ago, his Special Forces hardened body would have been accustomed to it. But this was ten years later, and he was downright sore.
“Jesus. I can’t believe you did that to Connell! I wish I would have seen it.” Rachette stared at him with revered awe. “Was that about next week or something?”
“Can you get me some coffee from that thermos at your feet?” Wolf held out his screw-lid cup.
Rachette stared at Wolf for a second and shook his head, picking up the thermos. “Dammit.” He patted a dark splotch of coffee on his pants.
“What the heck’s wrong with you today?”
“Psssshhh!”
Wolf chuckled inwardly. He was thirty five, ten years on the force, up for consideration to be appointed to Sheriff of the Rocky Points Police Department, but he’d found the one person on the force he really connected with to be this second-year twenty-three-year-old.
For too many years he’d come to disturbing realizations of the shortfalls of many of the department officers. Some didn’t step up when the going got tough. Some showed borderline psychotic behavior when given a badge and gun. Most of them were good men, he admitted. But would he entrust his life in their hands? Not with a few of them, and sure as hell not with Derek Connell.
Rachette was different. In one and a half years on the force, he’d shown Wolf, without a doubt, that he was one to be counted on above anyone else in the RPPF. He had the attitude, strength, coolness under pressure, reliability, confidence, intelligence, and the drive.
Thinking about all this, watching him wipe coffee off his crotch, he smiled as he turned his attention back to the winding dusty road to town.
The road turned back to the west and dropped in elevation through the dense forest for a couple miles. Gleaming-copper-trimmed, massive houses poked out of the trees on both sides of the road. They were well spread apart, leaving vast swaths of dense forest in between them. At least Wolf was grateful for that.
Wolf’s ears popped as he wound down further still, and finally out onto the dirt straightaway that slung out onto the vast valley floor. Barbed wire lined the road on either side, and cattle grazed in the bright green fields smattered with wild flowers. They reached the “T” junction of the main highway that ran north-south. They took a left towards town.
Rocky Points was a ski resort town first and foremost, but hadn’t always been. In 1883, some hard-nosed easterners came to Denver and kept walking uphill, past Black Hawk miners, past Central City miners, over the Continental Divide, and tried their luck. There they dug, sluiced, panned, found some gold, and set roots. They dubbed their new town Rocky Points. A fitting name referring to the Rocky Pointed 12,000-foot peak to the west of town that would later become the western most peak of the ski resort.
And it was a rough beginning, according to the history books in town. There was a good amount of gold to be found at the start, but as word got out, and more and more men walked over the divide into town, things got dangerous. Fighting, murder, and lawlessness ruled for a few years. That was, until a band of four men joined forces to bring law and order to the town. One of those men was Wolf’s great-great-great grandfather, or so the story went.
Wolf pulled into The Mackery gas station on the northern outskirts and got out to fill up. Ruth Beal, the owner, came out yelling at the top of her lungs, “Did you find the bastards?”
“Hi Ruth. What are you talking about?”
“The hippies who stole the gas!”
Wolf looked at her with a blank expression. “Uhhhh, I don’t know what you are talking about. I haven’t gotten a call about it yet.”
“What? I called it in just now! A couple hippies just drove off without paying for fifty bucks worth of gas! Probably too high to remember to pay. Dang hippies…”
“Ruth, did you get the license plate number?”
“No, I just went in back when they pulled up, came back out and they were gone.”
Rachette opened the door and leaned out with a concerned expression. “What kind of car was it?”
“A gol-darn hippie-mobile! One of those, gol-darn, mini-vans.”
“You mean a bus? Like a Volkswagon bus-type-van?” Wolf asked.
“Yeah, I guess. If that’s what they call em.”
The gas tank clicked to a stop. Wolf pulled the hose out and double-took a sign hanging from the tank. “Ruth, what’s this sign all about?”
All three stood frozen. Rachette got back in the car and shut the door.
“Pre-pay? Isn’t it impossible to fill up unless you turn on the tank after someone gives you money or they put in a credit card?” He pulled out his credit card receipt and waved it before putting it in his pocket.
Ruth stood with her mouth open, eye brows in a worried crease. “Huh. Oh mercy! What the hell am I thinking? I don’t know what happened then!” She burst into a sparsely toothed cackle ending with a ten second coughing fit.
“So, there weren’t any hippies who stole your gas?” Wolf opened the driver’s side door.
