Once Quiet (Jack Widow Book 5) Read online

  He looked off in the distance and then back at the barn. This was a nice piece of land, was his estimation.

  Widow looked down at the end of the driveway. He studied the cement part and then looked at the dirt road. He saw clear, sporadic tracks, leading away from the house. At first they meant nothing to him, but then he decided to take a closer look. He walked to the end of the driveway and knelt over the tracks. He reached out and touched the thick, dirt humps that mimicked the tread left by tires—big thick tires, set deep. They must’ve been from a truck or an SUV or a van. No doubt about that.

  Widow looked over the tread marks. He wasn’t a tire expert by any means and he wasn’t an expert in forensic science, but he wasn’t a layman either.

  Another minute went by and then the front door opened and Hogan came out of the house with another man. The other guy was about fifty years old, maybe a few years younger. He was tall, shorter than Widow, but taller than most. He had that weathered look on his face. He had a steely beard with thick, close-cropped black hair. He had no cowboy hat, like the other two guys, but he had the rest of the Western getup, only his clothes were much neater and cleaner.

  Widow looked over at them. The steely bearded guy followed Hogan off the porch and down the steps. They walked toward Widow.

  The steely bearded man said, “You sure you don’t want my help?”

  Hogan said, “Garret, it’s better that you stay here. Stay behind. You guys have a ranch to run. Let the police do this.”

  “But you’re the only cop and you are here.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll find him. I already called the sheriffs.”

  Which was a complete lie. Widow had heard him earlier say that he wouldn’t call the sheriff’s office.

  The man named Garret said, “Well, get out there and find him.”

  Hogan nodded and motioned for Widow to get back in the car.

  They got in, Widow in the back again, and Hogan hit the accelerator and they drove off back around the drive, past the barn and fields. They made their way back to the main street after a long, long silence. Finally, Hogan spoke.

  He said, “Listen, I’m going to have to bring you with me.

  Widow looked at Hogan’s eyes in the rearview mirror and said, “Then you gotta tell me the details.”

  CHAPTER 13

  HOGAN ASKED, “WHY?”

  Widow felt like he had sunk too low into the seat. He reached out and planted a bucket-sized hand on the cage partition, separating the front bench from the back. He gripped it hard and jerked himself up. His back cracked and he corrected his posture. He said, “If I’m going to come along then I might as well help. I want to find the runaway kid just as much as you. So, tell me what’s going on?”

  “How did you know he ran away?”

  Widow smirked and said, “Come on? If he hadn’t then what took you so long?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You went right in and chatted for a minute. If the kid was kidnapped or something, you’d be in a hurry. It’d be a big ordeal. You would’ve called every department around here. The FBI. The sheriffs too. Not sure what that’s about.”

  Hogan took a long breath and said, “You criticizing me?”

  “Not at all. Simply stating the facts. This isn’t the smallest town I’ve ever seen, but so isolated. I can’t remember ever seeing anything like it. They next town I saw was like fifty miles south. I’d be surprised if you’ve had anything more than a misdemeanor in decades.”

  Hogan seemed to take slight offense to that. He drove off of the ranch and then turned back south. He said, “We get plenty out here. Trust me.”

  “Like what?”

  Hogan was quiet for a short moment, like he was considering whether or not to tell Widow. Then he said, “We’ve got the highest crime rate per person in the state.”

  “What does ‘per person’ mean?”

  “It means that we have plenty of crime here. Higher than we should.”

  “And you only got two cops for all of that?”

  “That’s right. Only two.”

  Widow said, “You guys must be pretty busy? How do you manage that?”

  In a way, Hogan kind of half snarled his answer. He said, “Most of our crime isn’t grade A or anything. Not most of it.”

  “What kind of crime do you have here? Parking tickets?”

  “No. Not only parking tickets. We’ve got a lot of poor people here. Our town is well below the poverty line and at the same time, we’ve got the worst economy in the state. Probably.”

  Widow said, “That always goes hand in hand.”

  “How do you know that? You one of them believers in sociology?”

  “You’re not?”

  “We ain’t got need for theories out here.”

  Widow nodded. He got that. Collegial thinking was highly valuable, but not always in a real-world sense. To people out here it may seem nonsense, but theories and strategic learning cause theoretical and strategic thinking, and that was very important.

  Widow asked, “What’s the worst sort of crime you get here?”

  Hogan didn’t answer that, not at first.

  Widow asked, “Murder?”

  “That one’s been a while. But sure, it happens.”

  “How long?”

  “We had a group of Canadians go missing last year.”

  “Missing?”

  “Yeah. They vanished, camping out in the Glacier Country National Park.”

  “Glacier Country?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You guys have glaciers?”

  Hogan looked left, at his side mirror and then right at his other one and then back at Widow in the rearview. He said, “Yeah.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. There’s not as many as there used to be.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I remember when I was a kid my dad would take us all camping out there. I grew up in a different part of Montana. We’d go out into the park and see tons of glaciers. I think I learned in school there were over a hundred.”

  “And now?”

  “Now there’s twenty-five left.”

  Widow said, “That’s it?”

  Hogan shrugged and said, “Must be what you city folk call Global Change.”

  “Global Warming.”

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s called Global Warming or Climate Change, not Global Change.”

  Hogan didn’t respond.

  Widow said, “Sorry. I do that sometimes.”

  “Do what?”

  “Correct people. It’s a bad habit.”

  “It’s okay. You’re the city boy. You’d know better than me.”

  “You’re wrong about that, by the way.”

  Hogan sped the car up and Widow heard the wind slipstream outside. The wind whooshed against the windows. Hogan said, “What’s that?”

  “I’m not a city boy. I was born in a rural town in Mississippi.”

  “Really? Mississippi?”

  “Yep.”

  “What’s that like?”

  “It was a long time ago, but not unlike this.”

  Hogan asked, “You from a small town?”

  “Mississippi only has small towns.”

  “What about Jackson? I’ve been there. It was a city.”

  Widow said, “You’ve been there? Yeah, Jackson is a city, but a small one compared to most cities.”

  “Not any smaller than our cities.”

  “Even Great Falls?”

  “Oh yeah, Billings is our biggest city and it only has about a hundred fifty thousand people. Maybe more.”

  “I guess Jackson is about the same. Maybe closer to two hundred thousand.”

  A silence fell between them for a long moment, like the conversation had run out of steam. Widow stared out the window to the west. He studied the panoramic vistas of red and blue skies over the mountains. This was big sky country, something particularly grand about Montana.

  Finally, Widow aske
d, “So what happened to the Canadian hikers?”

  “They’re dead.”

  “How?”

  Hogan was silent for a beat and then he said, “Nah, I’m just yanking your chain. They were scared by a grizzly bear. We found them all hiding out on a ridge.

  Widow stayed quiet.

  Hogan said, “Sorry, I thought it was funny.”

  Widow remained silent.

  “We really do have grizzlies here. They get pretty big. And the winters here are quite brutal, especially up in those mountains.”

  “People can camp up there? During the winter?”

  “Sure.”

  “You got rangers out there?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “So where are we headed?”

  “We’ll take a look at a few spots I know about on the way back to town.”

  “What spots?”

  “Casey is a teenager. If he is serious about running away in the family’s old truck, then he’ll get spotted by one of the other departments. He won’t stop in town and there’s nowhere else to go.”

  “What if he dumps the truck?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “If he’s done this before, he may want to throw you guys off his trail.”

  Hogan thought for a moment and said, “He won’t do that.”

  Widow stayed quiet.

  Hogan said nothing else and drove on, eyes straight ahead.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE YOUNGEST WATCHER and his uncle decided it best to wake up the other two and report what they had seen. The second older watcher decided to call their client on the phone. To do this, he had to leave the other three behind and walk back through thick woods for the better part of a mile. He came to the empty lot where they had parked their truck and fired it up and drove to town.

  On the way, he made sure to drive slowly, so as not to run into Officer Hogan.

  In town, the watcher stopped at a drugstore that was just opening. He stood out front and used the payphone.

  There wasn’t any complicated reason for this. It wasn’t because he was supposed to stay out of the attention of anyone. It wasn’t because they couldn’t have called from the woods. It was because they had only one cell phone between them and it had been cut off a week ago. Therefore, he had no choice but to call the client from a payphone.

  The watcher stood outside the drugstore, looking up and down the street and then checking out the sidewalks, which was a penchant for the dramatic more than anything else. No one was paying attention to him.

  He slipped a quarter into the phone and waited for the dial tone. He dialed the number, having to reenter it once because he had hit the wrong digit. He waited. The phone clicked and whirred and then it rang and rang.

  The client answered and said her name, as she had always done.

  He said, “It’s me.”

  She said, “Where are you calling me from?”

  “Don’t worry. I’m on a payphone.”

  The client didn’t ask about what had happened to his own personal phone. Instead, she said, “So what’s up? I didn’t expect a report from you for another two weeks.”

  “Sorry to bother you. But there’s been some development.”

  “What?” the client asked. She had expected it to be news that Liam Sossaman was awake. She had expected this because she specifically had told them not to call her unless something miraculous had happened. And a man who had been in a coma for ten years waking up was the only miraculous thing that she could think of.

  “The boy ran away.”

  “What boy?”

  “The oldest son. This morning. He took off in the family truck.”

  The client was silent for a moment. The watcher imagined her taking notes. He imagined her smiling, being pleased with his observation.

  She said, “Why are you calling me?”

  “Ma’am, you asked us to contact you if something unusual happened.”

  The client rolled her eyes, but he was right. She had offered them a tremendous amount of money to do a job. And she had said to take particular note of anything unusual, but she had meant miraculously unusual, like Liam Sossaman waking up from his ten-year coma. But she guessed that she should have been more accurate, clearer in her request.

  She said, “You’ve done a good job. That is unusual, but what I’m looking for is more unusual. Strangers coming around or if Mr. Sossaman wakes up from his coma. Got it?”

  The watcher said, “Okay. I got it.”

  “Good. But keep taking notes. Write down stuff like that. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  The client clicked off. She gave the Sossamans and the mystery around why the oldest son ran off another thirty seconds of thought and then she refocused on finishing her shower and preparing for her work day.

  CHAPTER 15

  WIDOW SAID, “Hogan, I feel like we’ve been all over the county now. You’ve taken me to a pair of radio towers out in the middle of the woods, the old lumber country, and numerous backwoods roads paved with dirt and nothing else. The kid’s not out there. You’re better off trying the highways. The exit routes. The kid ran away. He’s not hiding out somewhere.”

  Hogan said, “I just thought he’d go off to think. The kids here like to hang out at all these old monuments. They’re always switching it up. Changing the cool, hangout spot. You know, to avoid letting us ever figure out where they are. But these are all the main spots.”

  “Take me back to town. You can head south without me.”

  Hogan was silent and then he said, “Guess you’re right.”

  “Look, I want to help find this kid too, but he ran away. He probably had a plan. You’re not gonna find him by randomly searching all the local teen hangouts.”

  “You’re right.”

  “So why not involve the county sheriffs?”

  Hogan didn’t respond.

  Widow said, “Might as well tell me now. I spent the last two hours with you searching for this kid. We’re not gonna find him out here. It’s time for me to get back to my own life.”

  Hogan said, “The county sheriff’s office is real by-the-book. They’ll report the kid and draw attention to the family.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  Hogan said, “This family has been through enough.”

  And he left it at that. Widow was done talking with him. He was ready to move on. Which meant calling his bank, finding out what the hell happened to the money he had left in his account. But first he’d grab some coffee.

  Hogan stopped himself from saying anything more. Widow guessed it was because Hogan realized that it wasn’t proper for a man in uniform to gossip, but Widow had been around many guys and gals in uniform and it was far from unheard of for uniformed people to gossip.

  Widow simply turned his attention back to the long stretches of beautiful country outside.

  CHAPTER 16

  AN AERIAL VIEW of Eureka, Montana, showed that it was laid out on a grid. The streets shaped out clear square lots around homes and businesses and empty patches of soft, green land. The main part of the town was so small that Widow was reluctant to think of it as downtown or even as the headquarters of the township. Of course, he’d been to some of the smallest towns that America had to offer. Widow liked small towns. He was born in a small town. He grew up in a small town. In fact, he had made the last year of his life sticking to small towns mainly because he had spent sixteen years traveling the world. Most of the places that the Navy sent him were major or moderate cities. International ports had been his mainstays. America’s best-kept gem was the small town, in Widow’s opinion. Not that he had had anything against city life. He liked cities, but Widow’s new life was the drifter life and he was still only just starting out. He was still learning how to do it all on his own, with no backup, no safety net. In Widow’s opinion, it was better to learn to crawl before you tried to run. Small towns had been a great place to learn what to expect as a drifter.

  Hogan let
Widow out at the edge of town. He mentioned something about going south and they parted ways.

  Widow walked down Welling Street. He walked past the post office, which was basically a two-story red house, half wood and half brick. The front was wall-height windows. It kind of looked like it belonged buried in the woods more than serving as an official federal building. On the one hand, the lack of money used to construct a proper federal building said a lot about how Eureka, Montana, ranked on a scale of priorities for the government. On the other hand, this was Big Sky country. Who cared about an ugly old building of a dying government agency anyway?

  Email will be the murderer of the US Postal System someday.

  Widow walked on. He walked to the end of a four-way stop. Cars with local plates stopped and waited and drove on. He passed by an old woman holding hands with another old woman, and not in the friend way, where one might be leading the other around in a causal, chatty way. This was more like lovers. Widow smiled. Widow was a big guy, but he had a big heart and seeing an old couple finding love this late in life was worth smiling about, no matter who it was.

  Widow walked down E. Maple Street, looking for a local diner or eatery, any place to get coffee. He wanted to find another payphone. He needed to call his bank.

  Widow stopped at the corner in front of a passenger train station. He looked left, looked right. Then he realized that train stations have payphones. He had that part covered, but first he wanted coffee. No sense in getting on the phone with his bank and potentially getting angry without having coffee. He searched the cross streets around the station. There was a fast-food joint that he had never heard of, must have been a Montana joint. There was a McDonalds that had some exterior updates, but stopped at a newer-looking sign and parking lot. The building looked like it was one of the original stores in the franchise.

  Widow frowned. McDonalds wasn’t really in the wheelhouse of what he was looking for. He liked to support local businesses. He saw nothing else, until he looked back at the train station. He stepped up onto the cross tracks and saw that on the other end of the station, past several benches, was a café at the corner of the building.

  He walked along the tracks, stepping on the rail bed, rocks crunching under his weight. When Widow neared the station, he stepped over the track and walked toward the corner café.