An excerpt from Awful Intent, a Frank Shaw action thriller by John D. Brown.
1
Runner
FRANK WAS SITTING in the shade and scent of a pine atop a knoll in the desert wilderness of Southern Utah when the man crested the hill on the far side of the dry creek bed. The man was medium height, medium build; he had dark hair, brown skin, and a little goatee. He was probably in his late twenties, early thirties. He glanced back, fearful and wide-eyed, then rushed down through the sparse pinyon pines and junipers on the steep, sunbaked slope.
The man had no smart phone for tunes, no fanny pack, no water. No jogging shoes or shorts. He wore no sunglasses. These were all things you’d want if you were out on a jaunt, enjoying the desert wilds. Instead, he was in long pants and a red-checkered, short-sleeved shirt that was ripped up one side. He was taking desperate strides. He glanced back again, up at the crest of the hill.
Frank’s binoculars rested on top of his pack. A few feet beyond that lay a large collared lizard that had either taken Frank for a rock or assumed it was safe to come join the man party. The lizard was a fabulous specimen with a foot-long turquoise body, a black and white collar, and a sand-colored head.
Frank grabbed his binoculars and glassed the man. He had scrapes and blood on his arm. Scrapes and blood on his face. At least, it looked like blood.
The main predators down in this area were mountain lions. Could have been a lion that had slashed him up. Or maybe the man and a few others had been back in the canyons of the White Cliffs which towered to the north and east of Frank. Maybe they’d had an accident. Maybe someone had fallen from some height. Except the man wasn’t wearing climbing gear either. So maybe there’d been some other kind of accident.
Frank gathered himself to stand and call out when the woman topped the rise. She was medium height, slender, with dark hair pulled into one long braid down her back and brown skin. She too was in her late twenties or early thirties. She was in a short-sleeved shirt, long pants, and sturdy shoes.
Unlike the man, she did not glance back. She marked the man’s path and took off after him. Frank glassed her. She had a face like an angry storm. A face hell-bent on violence.
Something a few hundred feet above the knoll flashed in the sun. Frank looked up. It took him a moment, but then he spotted, of all things, a four-rotor drone, and he realized he’d heard its soft whine earlier, but the breeze through the pine needles had masked it. He squinted and saw a black thing mounted on the bottom, which was probably some type of camera. Frank looked back at the two individuals running down the slope.
The woman ran on a line that would take her a bit to the side of the man, like she was expecting him to turn upstream, and her course would allow her to intercept him at the bottom of the hill.
Then a white pickup rounded the corner of the hill a few hundred yards downstream of the man and woman. It was driving on a scratch of dirt road that sometimes merged with the streambed and sometimes ran to the side. There were two men in the cab, and Frank realized the woman wasn’t trying to cut the running man off—she was trying to herd him, drive him like a deer into those two.
The man didn’t see the pickup. He couldn’t down in the snaky dry river bed because a bend stood between him and the truck. He probably couldn’t hear the truck either over his own labored breath. And he wouldn’t see them. Fear didn’t bring you nuance. Fear brought you only the facts in front of your face. And sometimes not even that.
The woman and man reached the dry, sandy streambed at about the same time, she about ten yards upstream.
The man looked at her, then ran the other way, downstream, toward the white pickup.
He ran ten, twenty, thirty yards, and then he must have finally heard the pickup over his labored breath, heard it coming up the draw, because he stopped, then tried to turn back up the hill. But the woman was there. She was fast and strong and caught up to him before he was three strides up the slope. She launched herself onto his back like a cougar. But instead of biting down on his neck, she took him in a vicious one-armed choke.
Her weight pulled the man up and back. 120 or 130 extra pounds clinging to one’s back tended to do that. The man lost his balance and fell.
She fell with him, but didn’t let go. Her arm was like iron around his neck, strangling him.
The man struggled to rise, but the woman yanked him down. He tried to pull her arm away, failed, then punched his fist up, past his ear, and into her face.
Her head rocked back.
He struck again, and a third time. Three solid blows that dazed her and loosened her grip.
The man struggled free, but before he could take two steps, the woman rolled up and sprang at him again, entangling his legs and causing him to stumble to the ground.
Then the pickup came flying around the bend, a cloud of desert dust billowing up behind it. The truck roared up to the spot of the scuffle. The driver slammed on the brakes, and the truck came to a skidding halt. The doors to the cab flew open, and the two men jumped out. The passenger, a skinny whip of a man, grabbed a shovel from the pickup bed.
The running man kicked free of the woman and began to scramble away. He got to his feet, but he wasn’t fast enough. The passenger flew at him. The shovel’s steel flashed in the sun. Then the passenger struck the running man in the head from behind with the flat of the blade.
The running man stumbled into some loose rock and went down with a heavy crash.
Then the two men from the truck fell on him, punching, then restraining him, but the blow had knocked him unconscious. Or something worse.
Frank’s skin prickled. His heartbeat picked up a notch. He was now on full alert.
The driver, a big guy with a caterpillar brow, hefted the running man over his shoulders, then carried him to the bed of the pickup. In the bed of the truck, the woman laid out a tarp that was silver on one side, blue on the other. The big guy thumped the running man into the middle of it. Then the three of them wrapped him in the tarp and fastened it with bungees.
The running man wasn’t moving.
The woman and shovel man got in the cab on the passenger’s side. The driver slipped his muscular body and caterpillar brow behind the wheel on the other. Then they turned the truck around and gunned it back down the dry draw. When they got to the mouth of the streambed, they headed south.
Frank blew out a tense breath and collected his thoughts. He knew there were a number of troubled-youth rehabilitation programs that operated in the area. But he was pretty sure none of them employed the shovel technique as a means of correction. And the running man hadn’t been exactly a youth.
The spectacular cliffs and canyons in this area would make it a dandy place for an executive team building weekend. But it wasn’t the weekend. And, again, Frank didn’t know of any bonding exercises that included being knocked in the head with tempered steel.
Predator, accident, and wilderness program went off the list. That didn’t leave too many options. None of them were good. And he didn’t think that mob would be all that happy to find out there’d been a witness to their desert crime.
The whine above became louder, and Frank remembered the drone. He slowly looked up. The drone, still high above the knoll, had moved closer to Frank’s position. It was almost directly above him now, hovering, the camera pointing straight down.
