Road Back: A Doc Hill Story Read online

  Copyright Information

  The Road Back

  Copyright © 2013 by Dean Wesley Smith

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover and Layout copyright © 2013 by WMG Publishing

  Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © Nejron/Dreamstime

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  When you are short-stacked in poker,

  and in life, the road back

  to being in contention

  often has a very sudden end.

  ONE

  “DO WE HAVE ANY IDEA where he might be?” I asked Annie over my shoulder.

  She had crouched down behind my chair at the no-limit ring game I had joined a few hours before at the Bellagio. I was almost a thousand up and had been enjoying the game as a warm-up for a series of poker tournaments coming later in the week to the Bellagio.

  I seldom played regular ring games anymore, only tournaments. But at times it felt right to just sit and play for a time. This hot September afternoon was one of those times to relax in the air-conditioned poker room and drink iced tea and win a little money in the process.

  “Not a clue,” she said. “Dad’s got all the information.”

  Annie had her long brown hair pulled back and the white blouse and dark slacks she wore accented her perfect body. She was the best-looking former Las Vegas detective I had ever met, with brown eyes that could stare through to your soul. Actually, she was one of the best-looking women I had ever met, and also one of most deadly poker players in the modern game.

  In the year we had been together, she had taken down a dozen tournaments and won two World Series of Poker bracelets for two different events.

  Now she wanted my help to find some guy her dad thought was missing. Actually, her dad, Detective Bayard Lott, also a former Las Vegas police detective, wanted her help and she was asking if I would help out as well.

  “You want me to deal you in, Doc?” the dealer asked.

  “No, thanks, Al,” I said, pushing back from the table as Annie stood and stepped back. I flipped him a twenty-five dollar chip and he tapped it and nodded thanks before slipping it into his tip slot.

  I turned and nodded to Ben, the brush in charge of the room at the moment who was headed my way from the poker room desk.

  “Cash you out?” he asked.

  I flipped him a twenty-five dollar chip as well and said, “Thanks. Just add it to the account.”

  I had had a running account at the Bellagio for almost ten years now. Made it easier than hauling racks of chips to the cage all the time. And after the two tips, I had five hundred in starting money in my stack and another eight hundred and fifty in winnings.

  My chip vanished into Ben’s pocket and he worked to rack the rest as I turned and headed with Annie out of the poker room and into the noise and bells of customers filling the slots.

  “Dinner?” I asked, realizing I was starting to get hungry as we turned toward the front of the casino.

  “Dad’s meeting us in the Café Bellagio,” she said.

  I laughed, taking her hand. “You were pretty sure I was going to help you, huh?”

  “Not really,” she said, smiling at me as we wound our way through the people toward the restaurant. “I would have gotten the information from Dad and told you later if you were really interested in staying in the game.”

  “It was enough warm-up,” I said. “More than enough, actually.”

  “Lucky for those guys at the table,” she said, laughing. “You warm-up much more and they would have been broke.”

  “That’s the point, isn’t it?” I asked.

  She agreed and then waved at her father sitting at a semi-private four-person table off to one side of the café where it looked out over the pool. The smell of hamburgers and steaks drifted from the direction of the kitchen and my stomach rumbled. I really was hungrier than I had realized.

  I liked her dad a great deal. He looked pretty sharp for his sixty-three years with short-cut white hair, broad shoulders, and only a hint of a gut around his stomach. He had a wicked sense of humor and his laugh could start an entire room laughing with him.

  He and a bunch of his retired detective friends played poker every week in the basement of his house and worked to solve cold cases for the Las Vegas Police Department on the side. They called themselves the Cold Poker Gang. Annie and I helped them when we could.

  But from what Annie said, this didn’t sound like a cold case. More like a missing person problem. And in Vegas, there were always a lot of those.

  For all sorts of reasons.

  TWO

  I WAS INTO MY RIB STEAK and onion rings, Annie was picking at her hamburger, and her dad was about halfway done with his French Dip before Annie finally broached the subject.

  “So who is missing and why are you involved, Dad?”

  “Steve Benson Junior,” he said between bites.

  Both Annie and I glanced at him.

  Finally Annie asked exactly what I was thinking. “The son of Chief of Police Steven Benson?”

  “One and the same,” her dad said. “Chief Benson called me, asked if I would look into it for him.”

  “He thinks his son is in trouble?” I asked.

  Annie’s dad shook his head. “Not that kind of trouble. He’s a good kid, graduate student at UNLV focusing on Nevada history. But his dad this morning went to meet him for breakfast and Steve didn’t show up. Steve’s best friend hasn’t seen him either.”

  “And his dad’s worried?” Annie asked.

  “I would be too,” her father said, smiling at her. “Steve is like you in that he calls when he has to cancel something.”

  “He have a car?” I asked.

  “Red Jeep SUV,” he said. “About a year old. It’s missing as well.”

  “So he went somewhere and hasn’t returned yet,” Annie said. “More than likely he’s fine.”

  Her dad nodded. “That’s what the Chief thinks as well, but he’s still worried. Steve’s cell isn’t picking up. I think that’s really why the Chief called me. He doesn’t want this out yet, so he’s just calling in personal favors at the moment.”

  I sat back munching on a crisp onion ring, thinking. My little voice was telling me that something was wrong with this kid. I didn’t know him and I didn’t know his father, but this felt wrong for some reason I couldn’t put my finger on.

  However, when at a poker table, I had learned to trust that little voice when it told me something was wrong with a play another player made. And in life I had also learned to trust that voice. And right now the very same voice was telling me we needed to move on this and fast.

  I finished the onion ring and leaned forward toward Annie’s dad. “Could you call the chief and ask him if Steve is back yet? And if not, could we go look at his apartment?”

  Detective Lott slid the key across the table at me, smiling. “Steve wasn’t back five minutes before you two showed up, and I got this key from the Chief before coming over here.”

  I just shook my head and grinned as Annie patted her father’s arm, smiling. It was no wonder the guy had been such a great detective in his day. He was a half step ahead of everything.

  THREE

  STEVE’S APARTMENT near the university seemed far neater than I would have expected a grad student’s apartment to be. And it was clear with only a quick look that ther
e was nothing at all out of place.

  Nothing.

  The apartment had one bedroom with a living room with only a couch and chair and a large desk in it. A small, clean dining room table with four chairs sat near the open kitchen. There was a bathroom off the bedroom.

  There was no sign at all of any woman’s touch in here. Everything was standard apartment except the large computer on a L-shaped desk on the left side of the living room and large wall of books on the right side, mostly textbooks that at a glance I was glad I never would have to read. My college days were a long ways behind me now.

  However, one full shelf was full of books on various aspects of Nevada history that looked very interesting, from the gold rush towns to railroad history to the founding of Las Vegas.

  All of them in perfect order by author.

  Annie was looking through Steve’s desk. There were a couple of books open on the desk on Nevada place names and another on lost mines of Nevada.

  “Can you access that computer?” I asked Annie. “See what he was researching before he left?”

  “If it’s not password protected,” she said, sitting down in the chair and moving the wireless keyboard closer toward her.

  Her father came out of the bathroom shaking his head. “This kid is the cleanest kid I have ever seen. Nothing out of place, no sign that anyone else but him even visited here. Not even a hair on his comb.”

  “He folds his socks and underwear,” I said. “His bed is made, even though he slept in it recently. And he washed his breakfast dishes before he left, more than likely yesterday morning, since the dishes are completely dry as is the dish towel.”

  Annie brought the computer up and then shook her head. “Protected.”

  “He’s going to have a password book,” I said. “Upper drawer on the left.”

  She opened the drawer and pulled out a small notebook, shaking her head. “How did you know that?”

  “Someone like Steve is completely predictable. Every move, every detail. It’s how his mind works. He has no choice.”

  “Easy pickings on a poker table,” Annie said.

  “He’d never sit down at one,” I said. “He wouldn’t be able to handle the uncertainty that comes naturally with the game.”

  “Obsessive-compulsive?” Annie’s dad asked.

  “Borderline,” Annie said, nodding. “It goes toward hoarding or being neat freaks.”

  “We know which way Steve goes,” I said.

  As Annie worked on the computer and bringing up the history, I went back into the small apartment bedroom. Steve had his shoes lined up perfectly along the bottom of his closet, from dress shoes through tennis shoes to boots. There was an empty spot between a pair of tennis shoes and a heavy pair of boots. That’s where he would put his hiking boots.

  His shirts were lined up hanging in his closet and there was a clear opening where a light casual shirt had clearly hung. More than likely brown from the patterns of the colors.

  I went into the bathroom and opened the medicine chest. There was an empty spot where a tube of suntan lotion would have sat right between a small jar of Vaseline and a tube of blister cream.

  I closed the cabinet and turned went back into the living room with the desk and books. “He’s gone into the desert. More than likely yesterday morning. My guess is he was planning on returning before dark last night and something happened.”

  Annie’s dad looked around at the apartment. “I can see why the Chief was worried, now.”

  “Got it,” Annie said, moving back through the history of what Steve had last looked at on his computer.

  The very last thing was a map of an area of the Nevada desert to the north and west of Las Vegas along Highway 95.

  “Skeleton Mountains,” Annie said, hitting a button to print up the map just as I was sure Steve had done.

  One of the books open on the desk referred to the area as well, and I picked it up as Annie kept going back through the history on the computer.

  Seems the Skeleton Mountains were a group of rocky peaks sticking up out of the desert about ten miles to the west of the highway. The article said that no one knew exactly how it got its name. From what I could tell in the book, the rocky peaks had just always been named that.

  And they weren’t that big, with the largest being not more than six or seven hundred feet off the desert. Compared to the mountains I spent the summer in every year in central Idaho, guiding rafts on the River of No Return, these Skeleton Mountains were nothing more than large piles of rocks.

  “He was researching some old patented mining claims in those mountains,” Annie said, again hitting the print button. “All of them are long dormant and never produced anything of real value.”

  “So we know where he went,” Annie’s father said, nodding.

  “Get a search team set up from the Chief,” I said to him as Annie printed a second copy of the map of the small group of mountains.

  “Where are you going?” Annie’s dad asked, as he pulled out his phone.

  “Fleet’s in town and he loves testing out his new helicopter,” I said, and Annie laughed. “He’ll get us up there and we’ll see what we can see from the air, see if we can spot his car before you and the Chief get there.”

  I was on the phone to my best friend and business partner, Fleet, and Annie’s father was talking with the Chief of Police as we headed out into the hot early evening air and Annie pulled the door to the apartment closed behind us.

  FOUR

  FLEET LIVED IN BOISE with his family. Annie and I had a house there as well, but unlike Fleet, we were seldom in Boise. Fleet had a wonderful wife and two kids there, but at the moment they were all here, letting the kids have one last vacation before school started up again.

  Fleet had decided that our company needed a helicopter to go along with our own private jet. It seemed that over the years, his investments of my poker winnings had made us, as he said, stupidly rich. We gave millions away to charity every year and spent what we wanted and somehow just managed to get richer.

  Fleet was that good with business and investments.

  My father’s death a year ago had just added more millions than I wanted to think about into the picture.

  When Fleet bought the jet helicopter for the company, he had decided he wanted to fly it, much to his wife’s horror. And in the last year he had become a very good pilot.

  On the phone I told him what was going on and he almost beat us to the airport, even though we had a shorter distance to go. Any excuse to take out the helicopter was a great idea as far as he was concerned.

  Within forty minutes after leaving Steve’s apartment, we were airborne and headed for the Skeleton Mountains, the loud drone of the chopper a constant noise around us.

  “So what do you think we’re going to find?” Fleet asked through the communications links we all wore.

  Annie was in the co-pilot chair because she had taken a few lessons with the chopper last year. I was behind them, strapped in tight. I wasn’t afraid of flying, but I had to admit having my friend from childhood doing the flying didn’t instill great confidence, even though he had a lot of hours in the air already.

  “Besides rocks and snakes?” Annie asked.

  She moved slightly so I could see the wink she gave me.

  I smiled. Fleet was deathly afraid of snakes. Any kind and size of snake, actually. And everyone knew it.

  “Not funny,” he said.

  “If we have to land, you can stay in the chopper,” I said. “There will be snakes.”

  Fleet shook his head. “You two sure know how to kill a good flight.”

  Less than fifteen minutes after leaving the Las Vegas airport, the mountains sort of rose from the rolling desert floor in front of us. They were sure nothing to look at. Mostly rocks and scattered open areas covered in scrub brush. I hadn’t been kidding Fleet. Those rocks would be infested with snakes, since it was clear the area got little or no attention by humans at all.

 
“Come in from Highway 95,” I said to Fleet. “See if you can spot a road into those mountains.”

  Fleet nodded and slowed until Annie pointed ahead.

  A bare excuse of a dirt road left the highway and wound toward the mountains.

  Fleet banked over it and followed the road, moving slowly as we all studied the area.

  There was no place to hide below us at all. Just open desert and scrub.

  Up ahead the road started to wind up a small canyon and then seemed to break out into an open flat area before going back into another canyon and deeper into the piles of rocks laughingly called mountains.

  Nothing but huge rocks and scrub brush.

  “On the right,” Annie said, pointing.

  It took me a moment, but finally I saw what she was pointing at. A glint of the sun reflected off some metal. At closer look I could see hints of a red car hidden beside a rock and covered with scrub brush. Someone had spent a lot of time in the task of hiding the car and had the car off the road so it couldn’t be seen by anyone driving in.

  “Someone really wanted that hidden,” Fleet said, shaking his head.

  My stomach was twisting like my rib steak was suddenly not agreeing with me.

  “Same speed,” I said to Fleet. “Just keep going straight and off into the desert on the other side of the mountains.”

  “Like we’re on Fleet’s tour of the desert,” he said and did as he was told.

  Annie had her cell phone to her ear as all of us watched the ground below. To the right of our flight path I could see a trail going up to what looked to be an old mine entrance. There was no sign of anyone there, but that meant nothing.

  Then, near where the dirt road came out the other side of another rock canyon and started across the desert, I spotted an old pickup truck parked under a rock outcropping. It was brown and clearly dusty and blended in perfectly with the rocks.

  “Truck on the right,” I said as we went past and out into the desert just as if we were a sightseeing chopper doing nothing unusual.