Blind Faith - Sharon Sala Page 0,18
she saw the dark red pattern of the area rug in Charlie’s office and groaned.
“Shit,” she muttered, and scrambled to her feet to get to the phone she’d left on her desk. “I’m here!” she said, and then heard Charlie chuckle.
“Where else would you be?”
“Never mind,” she said. “He’s alive.”
Charlie froze. “What? Where?”
“Inside something...something long and narrow. It’s cold. I heard a trickle of water. I heard what sounded like a moan. The pain...the pain is bad. I don’t know where it is, but I think he’s in a cave. I can’t explain what any of that means. I don’t know if that was a vision from the present or if it was something from the past. You might find him, and he’s not alive anymore...understand?”
“Yes. And thank you,” Charlie said.
Wyrick sighed. “You’re the one who thought of it. Now go do your thing, Charlie Dodge. Figure it out. Find the kid before it’s too late.”
“Jesus, Wyrick! I’m down in this canyon without a freaking clue as to where to go next. Do you see a landmark, or something specific that would tell me where to even start looking?”
She ran back into his office and picked up the cap. Again, the room disappeared and this time she was standing in a small clearing, looking toward a wall of rock and scrub brush.
“Get off the path,” she said. “I think you need to move into the trees toward the cliffs. Whatever you need next is in plain sight, and that’s all I know.”
“Heading that way now,” Charlie said. “If you get anything else, let me know.” He left the trail.
The going was slow now, moving through trees, scrub brush and uneven, rocky ground. His focus was on looking for something that didn’t belong...maybe something man-made...something that Tony Dawson might have dropped. Wyrick said plain sight, and he trusted what she said.
The trail he’d left was about thirty yards behind him now, but he could no longer see it. It would be easy to get lost in here, especially if someone was sick and disoriented.
And then he came upon what looked like a garden of rocks and large boulders. At some time in the past, a part of the mountain had broken off and fallen down here, scattering the rocks about until they looked like they’d come up from the earth like seeds of mountains-to-be.
The canyon wall was on the other side of the rock fall, and as he started making his way through it, he saw something strange near the bottom of the wall and headed toward it. Within seconds, he realized it was a hiker’s boot and started running.
The boot was wedged in a crevice between three large rocks. There was dried blood all over the boot, and on the rocks, as well, and then a whole lot of coyote tracks around the area. The tracks had obliterated any signs that might tell him more.
“Son of a bitch,” Charlie muttered.
He looked up. The trail was right above him. If Tony fell from there, Charlie didn’t think he would’ve survived it. But where was the body? Coyotes could have dragged it away, but it would have been in pieces. There was no way they would have neatly removed the foot that had been in that shoe. At the least, he would be seeing pieces of clothing. None of this was making sense.
But Wyrick said it felt like he was in a cave, and she’d heard him moan. Right now, it didn’t matter how the kid got hurt. He just wanted to find him alive, and Wyrick hadn’t been wrong yet, so he was going to look for caves. Judging from the blood on and around the boot, mobility had to have been compromised. He couldn’t have gone far. He glanced back at the boot one last time, then took a deep breath and started yelling.
“Hello! Hello! Tony! Tony Dawson! Where are you?”
And then he kept yelling as he fanned out from the boot, looking for signs that someone had either walked or crawled away from that bloody boot, looking for anything that could be an opening to a cave.
* * *
Tony was sitting on a pier, looking out across the ocean at the sunset. He felt a pull toward the fading light, as if he was supposed to follow it. But he hesitated, and then all of a sudden, he was no longer alone.
A man had joined him. He looked at Tony and grinned.
“Hi, kid.”
The man looked familiar, but Tony was