BAD DEEDS: A Dylan Hunter Thriller (Dylan Hunter Thrillers) Read online

  He looked around, made sure nobody was in sight. Then knelt and dragged away the brush he had piled beneath it. He leaned in, groping inside a wide fissure in the base of the rock.

  Found the ice-cold handle of the satchel. Lifted it out—carefully. Set it on the ground.

  He thought of the man and woman and smiled as he unzipped the bag and looked inside.

  The pipe bombs were stacked exactly as he had left them.

  SIX

  Dan Adair led them back inside the site’s mobile headquarters, what he called the “data van.” He spoke to a man at one of the desks, getting a progress update. He spent a few minutes on the phone making dinner arrangements. Then he walked over to Will Whelan, still occupying Adair’s seat at the end of the van and working at a laptop keyboard.

  “Will, since we’re short-handed here tonight, I’ll need for you to stick around till about eight and take those phone reports from Texas when their crews knock off.”

  Whelan spun his chair to face Adair, frowning. “Hey, I had things I wanted to do tonight.”

  The snippy tone surprised Hunter.

  “Look, I’m sorry about that. But I’m heading home now with these folks to continue our conversation. They’ll be staying for dinner.”

  “Well, that’s just great. What about me?”

  Hunter stared at Adair, astonished to see that he looked apologetic rather than angry.

  “There’s plenty here in the fridge. And you’ll get the O.T. rate for the extra hours.”

  “Yeah,” the young man snapped, turning his chair and his back on Adair. “Whatever.”

  “You can have tomorrow off. Okay?” It sounded almost like pleading.

  Whelan didn’t respond. Hunter caught Annie’s glance, eyes wide in disbelief.

  “Anyway, it’ll be steak when you get home, Will. I’ll make sure your mom keeps a hot plate for you.” Adair turned back to them and smiled sheepishly. “Let’s go.”

  They dropped their hard hats and goggles on a shelf and left. After the door closed behind them, Adair led them a distance from the van before speaking.

  “Sorry about that. I should explain—”

  “No need,” Hunter interrupted. “Not our business.”

  “No, really. You’ll probably run into Will again while you’re up here doing research. You see, he’s my stepson.”

  “Ah,” Annie said.

  “Hell, you don’t think I’d let anyone but family talk to me like that.”

  “Dan,” Hunter said, “I didn’t think you were the type to let anybody talk to you like that.”

  Adair didn’t respond or look at them. He kept walking, leading them to the parking area. Hunter already pegged him as unpretentious and practical, so didn’t expect that he’d be driving pricey show-off wheels. Adair confirmed it when he stopped at the door of a cherry Nissan Titan SE pickup. The man knew his trucks; this one was best in its class for off-road work.

  “It’s still early,” Adair said. “I’ll introduce you to the family over drinks and snacks before dinner. I just arranged for a couple of others to join us. You’ll find their stories interesting. Follow me.”

  It was just after four p.m. when Rusty Nash ambled up to the counter of the Whitetail Diner and planted himself on a stool amid three of the regulars. He knew they were regulars because they were chatting up the busty blonde behind the counter like they were old friends. He smiled and nodded at them all, then asked her for coffee. As he sipped quietly from the steaming mug bearing the restaurant’s jumping-deer logo, he listened and sized them up.

  All three customers and the woman behind the counter were fiftyish, like him, though he wouldn’t see that birthday for a few more months. One guy, sitting apart from the other pair, wore a tidy uniform that matched him up with the phone company truck parked outside. The other two, dressed rougher, obviously belonged to the building-contractor pickup beside it. One man was chubby, the other skin-and-bones.

  He had already prepared his line of bullshit on the drive over. He was proud of how good he was at bullshitting people. He also was proud that Zak relied on him for this sort of thing. Zak liked that he didn’t look like the rest of the group. Partly, Zak said, it was because Rusty was a lot older than most of them. And partly because he dressed and talked just like a regular guy. And partly because he was so easy-going. Zak admitted that he himself and most of the others came across as “pretty intense.” His words. “I like the fact that you are so laid-back and friendly, Rusty,” he said. “You have the knack for fitting in anywhere—for blending right into the background, like …” What the hell was that lizard he mentioned?

  Anyway, it turned out that he didn’t have to use his line of bullshit on these people at all, because they made it easy for him. They were already talking about what happened yesterday when he sat down.

  “I had to check with my insurance agent,” the blonde was saying to Skin-and-Bones, “to see if the policy would cover me if they tried to sue me for the injuries.”

  “How could they sue you, Sherry?” Phone Guy cut in. “They started the trouble.”

  “You never know these days. Laws ain’t what they used to be. And the injury lawyers, they’re all sharks. Still, I’m just glad Brad and Annie were here to kick the crap out of them. No telling what that gang would’ve done to us or to my place if they got in here.”

  His opening. “Sounds like you had some excitement here.” He grinned.

  The woman, Sherry, turned to him and chuckled. “Did we ever! You know ’bout that environmental gang, WildJustice?”

  “Not sure. They local? I’m just visiting a cousin up here for a few days.”

  Sherry then unloaded her description and opinion of his group, in language so salty he was surprised to hear it coming out of a woman’s mouth in public. The three guys roared, so he had to force himself to laugh, too.

  “Well anyway,” she continued, “they come here yesterday chasing three poor scared clerks from a fracking office down the road.” Sherry then delivered her version of what happened. Which further pissed him off. He wanted to throw his coffee in her face, but he held it together and made sure to look amazed and say “No shit!” and “You’re kidding!” at all the right places. When she ran out of steam, Chubby said, “Boy, I wish I was here to see all that go down.”

  “Me too,” Rusty chimed in, keeping the grin plastered in place. “Man, I’d a loved to see them punks get their sorry asses whipped. And you say it was just one guy and a girl?”

  “Unbelievable, huh?” Sherry laughed and wiped her hands on her apron. “Brad, he’s tall and tough-looking; I think he fought in Iraq. You can see how he could take care of himself. Annie, on the other hand, she’s just a little thing. But boy, can she ever fight!”

  “So you know them. They locals, then?”

  Sherry shook her head. “From New Jersey. But they’ve been staying here on vacation this month.”

  “Yeah? My cousin, he told me all the rentals around here was shut down for the winter.”

  “They don’t rent. Brad has his own cabin out past Endeavor. You know where that is?”

  “I think I been through there. Out on 666, right?”

  “Just past there. Up East Hickory Road.”

  This is too easy. “I didn’t know there was any cabins up there. Just woods.”

  “Well, that’s what you think when you look around from the road. But if you drive up past the little bridge over Hickory Creek …” She then described exactly where the driveway was.

  Rusty grinned again. This time he didn’t have to force it. “Well, I sure am glad there’s still some people who stand up to the creeps trashing this country. I’d love to shake their hands while I’m here visiting. They come in here a lot?”

  Sherry said, “Yeah, but you probably won’t run into them anymore. They’ll be heading home tomorrow or Friday.”

  Not good. “That’s too bad.” He took a last swallow from the mug, then dumped a couple of bucks on the counter. “Well
, my cousin oughta be home from work by now, so I better push off.” He rose, stretched casually, nodded his goodbyes.

  He kept the grin till he reached the door.

  Dan Adair’s house on Higgins Hill Road commanded a bluff overlooking the Allegheny River. Like its owner, the dwelling was a combination of rural unpretentiousness and modern attitude. Its natural-wood exterior seemed of a piece with the surrounding trees, but rose in angular, contemporary lines. The western side of the home ended in a sharp triangular outcropping, a glassed-in porch that jutted over the embankment. It afforded a panoramic view of the river valley.

  Hunter stood beside Adair at the window of that porch, sipping a superb Lagavulin single malt. Across the river, the setting sun rim-lit the deep green rolling waves of mountains. Standing here, where the panes of glass intersected, he felt as if he were at the prow of a ship. Adair, his lean legs planted apart, blue eyes trained on the horizon, looked like its captain.

  He recalled what he’d read about the man in a magazine profile. Born and raised near Cincinnati, Adair studied petroleum engineering at the University of Texas in Austin. He then took a job in oil-and-gas exploration with a nearby start-up company. Adair had a knack for figuring out inventive solutions to difficult drilling problems and was promoted fast. But his dream wasn’t to work for somebody else. With savings from almost every paycheck, he scooped up company stock during its growth years. Eventually, he cashed out and used the proceeds as seed money to hire a first-rate geologist and open his own exploration and drilling outfit.

  Adair borrowed heavily to lease mineral rights on promising land. But like most wildcatters, he struggled during the oil glut of the Eighties. Prices collapsed, wells tapped out, companies closed, and many petroleum engineers left the industry. Scrounging for cash, he sometimes contracted out his engineering and drilling services to larger companies. But with a young wife and baby daughter to support, he barely managed to meet the mortgage on their cramped, 900-square-foot ranch house.

  Hunter watched Adair savor a slow sip of the Scotch. Traces of the battles he had endured were etched in the lines around his eyes and mouth.

  In desperation, Adair tried out ideas that he read and heard about. He drilled one of his wells at a slant and hit a “payback” reservoir in a bed of naturally fractured limestone. That strike got his creditors off his back. And when he experimented with new horizontal drilling techniques on other wells, their impressive output attracted new investors.

  Adair became a pioneer at combining horizontal drilling with fracking. This proved so lucrative that, had he been able to focus fully on emerging opportunities, he might now be a billionaire. But his momentum stalled for several years while he cared for his wife, who finally succumbed to ovarian cancer. The brutal loss also left him the single parent of a little girl. With his responsibilities and attention divided, Adair lost ground while his competitors forged ahead.

  Now this man found himself in a new battle, this time with foes of a different kind. He hadn’t yet spoken of it, but Adair Energy’s future—and much more—rested on the precarious foothold that he had established here in the Allegheny National Forest.

  From inside the kitchen behind them, Hunter could hear Annie and Adair’s second wife, Nan, laughing and chatting like old friends. In the darkening valley below them, scattered lights appeared in the homes along the river. Its surface had become a flaming ribbon, reflecting clouds ignited by the now-hidden sun.

  “I can see why you love it here,” Hunter said quietly.

  Adair held his gaze on the unfolding spectacle. “Did I say that?”

  “Your eyes betray you.”

  The man chuckled and faced him. “Well, it’s true. I’ve always loved being out in nature. The wilder, the better.”

  “Your environmentalist enemies would be surprised to hear you say that.”

  He took another sip. “That’s what I don’t get. You know, Dylan, until lately—since they’ve been trying to shut me down—I called myself an environmentalist. Hell, I even used to donate to environmental groups. Drillers like me, we love the environment. We do our damnedest to take care of it. Look”—he gestured with his glass at the world beyond the window—“and tell me why I’d want to ruin all that. I hate pollution as much as anybody.”

  “But your critics say you’re, quote, ‘vandalizing natural vistas.’ That you’re ‘plundering the world’s precious resources.’”

  “Which is total bullshit. We don’t ruin the natural landscape. As I told you, we restore it when we’re finished. And we don’t waste resources. Why would we? We can’t afford to. We even purify and reuse our waste water. We use nature responsibly.”

  “I know, Dan,” Hunter said. “But to them, that’s the problem.”

  Adair frowned. “That we use nature responsibly?”

  “That you use nature at all.”

  Adair was about to respond when they heard the sound of the doorbell.

  Dawn Ferine stood atop the hill overlooking Queen Creek, where the path down to the camp joined the access road. Her gaze was fixed on the dazzling, shifting color patterns in the sunset sky above the Forest.

  She always experienced her most intense sense of spirituality at the beginning and end of day—with the sun’s first kiss upon the sky in the morning, and with its parting kiss upon Gaea’s lips in the evening. Each day she stopped whatever she was doing at these two sacred moments. She paused to remind herself of the timeless enormity of the Cycles of Life, of the grand Ecosystem in which she and everyone and everything were just insignificant parts. This was her form of prayer: a daily ritual in which she always felt this overwhelming surge of belonging, experiencing her oneness with the Cosmos. Her prayer, at sunset and at dawn …

  Dawn.

  She recalled the day that she chose that name, not long after she met him. She shed the ugly, meaningless name of her birth—Judith Hernstein. It annoyed her that she even remembered it. How she hated the crude, harsh commonness of the name that her parents had hung upon the shy, lost child that she had been. But she was no longer adrift, and no longer that person, not anymore—not since she met her soul mate.

  She shuddered, partly from the icy breeze, partly from the ecstasy of the moment, partly from her memory of the time when she held his hand and chose her new Self: one name to remind her of the start of day, the other to remind her of the beauty of Life, untouched and wild and free:

  Dawn Ferine.

  Her vision began to blur with tears. She knew she had to share this with him.

  “Zak …”

  She turned away from the luminous sky to look for him.

  He stood about twenty feet away, his back to her, staring up the road into the distance. The mysterious black bag was on the ground at his feet.

  “Zak …”

  He raised his hand to his face to look at his watch, then said something under his breath; she could hear only the name “Rusty.”

  She glanced back at the sun for an instant; its colors already were slightly muted.

  “Zak!”

  He spun and looked at her. “What?” he snapped.

  It rattled her. She tried to hold onto the feeling.

  “Zak … please come here for a moment. Share the sunset with me.”

  He stared at her blankly.

  She felt the familiar pang of anxiety rising once again. She walked toward him, but he had already turned his back and was looking up the road again.

  “What in hell could be keeping him?” he muttered. She reached out a gloved hand to touch his arm—then hesitated and drew it back. Fearful to intrude on his thoughts.

  “Zak. I just …”

  He turned to her. “What? What’s the problem?”

  “It’s just so … spiritual. I want us to share it.”

  “Share what?” His voice cold and impatient.

  “The sunset.”

  He glanced up at the sky for a few seconds. Nodded.

  “That is very pretty.” He smiled at her,
his lips twisted from the swelling on his face. “It’s lovely, honey. Thanks for pointing it out.”

  She didn’t know why she suddenly felt so hollow. Why she felt that touch of fear again.

  He turned to look once again up the road. “I hope he didn’t get a flat.”

  She licked her lips; her tongue ran over the sore puffy part that had split. “It’s what you said, Zak. Earlier today.”

  “What did I say? What are you talking about?”

  “That … that when you look at Nature, you stand humbled, with a sense of awe.”

  “Oh that … I wondered what you meant.” He reached out his gloved hand to wipe away the tear on her cheek. She felt the coarse cloth crawl across her skin. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. But you can see I’m preoccupied. It’s really hard to enjoy nature when humans are screwing it up.”

  “Well, can’t we stop once in a while, for a few minutes—and just appreciate it?”

  His features tightened; so did his voice. “I suppose it’s a matter of priorities.” Then his expression softened. He shook his head slowly and squeezed her shoulder. “Sometimes, I wonder if you are tough enough for this war.”

  A flash of light caught their attention. Headlights emerged from the west, around a bend in the tree-lined road.

  “Finally!” Zak leaned over her and kissed her cheek. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Meanwhile, you go get yourself warm. And have something to eat, okay? You haven’t been eating enough.”

  She nodded, saying nothing.

  Rusty stopped his battered pickup where they stood. Zak hefted the satchel over and got in on the passenger side. Slammed the door. She stood aside as Rusty turned around in the intersection of the road and the path, grinding through the worn gears. Zak gave her a little smile, and a little wave.

  Then she watched the truck accelerate away, back in the direction from which it had come. Watched until its tail lights vanished in the dark tangle of trees.

  She walked slowly back down the path that led into the campsite.