"You can stay here," Lucas said. "I doubt you could even stand up without help, not right now. Just stay put, Sam. Rest for a while, at least until the bleeding stops. Wait for us to bring the bastard back."
"Dead or alive?" she murmured.
"Whichever way he wants it." He said to Wyatt, "Get everybody ready. We go in in force, and we go in prepared. Everybody wears a vest."
Caitlin said to Wyatt, "I can help with the phones or whatever while you're all gone. I mean, I know the place won't be deserted, but if I can help?"
"You can," Wyatt told her.
When they had gone, Jaylene said, "I'll go call the boss, Luke."
He nodded, and to Samantha's inquiring look said, "Standard procedure if we're about to go into a probable dangerous situation."
"Ah." She looked after his partner for a moment, then checked the handkerchief before once again pressing it to her nose. "Dammit."
"The price you pay for being reckless," he told her.
She decided not to bother arguing. "Just be careful, okay?"
"We will." He went as far as the doorway, then hesitated and looked back at her. "You are all right?"
"I will be. Go do your job."
Samantha waited there for some time, listening to the bustle in the building as the deputies and agents got ready to go out. Eventually, the building quieted, and her nose stopped bleeding. And it was only a bit longer before she tried sitting up.
On the third attempt she managed it, and about ten minutes later made it to the conference room. A desk shoved up against the wall held the room's only phone, and Samantha sat down there to use it.
Maybe Luke was right about being reckless, she thought, fighting the dizziness and nausea. It had never been this bad before, and between that and her pounding head, she was seriously considering returning to the couch in the lounge and napping for a day or three.
Because her part in this, she thought, was over. She was almost positive that she had been able to change the outcome she had originally seen.
In the vision that had brought her to Golden, Andrew Gilbert had not come close to being caught, and he had certainly not been the one to die.
She got through to Quentin on the first attempt, which was rarely possible calling a cell phone in this mountainous area. "Did you hear from Bishop?" she asked immediately.
"Yeah, just now," he replied. "So our killer is a ghost out of Luke's past, huh?" He sounded just a bit distracted.
"Looks like. Where are you guys?"
"Fairgrounds."
"Why?"
"Just a hunch."
"You don't have hunches, Quentin."
"Whoever said that is a rotten liar."
"Quentin."
He sighed. "Okay, okay. I knew something would be going on here, that's all."
She waited a beat, then asked, "What's going on?"
"Well, it's a funny thing," he said thoughtfully. "The place is practically deserted-but all the rides are going."
CHAPTER 17
What do you mean?" Samantha demanded.
"Just what I said. The Ferris wheel, bumper cars- everything but the pony rides. All running. Sort of spooky, actually, in broad daylight and without any music or people."
"Where's Leo?"
"Can't find him."
"What?"
"Don't panic. Couple of the maintenance guys said he went into town this morning. They're currently trying to get the rides stopped."
"They all have switches; what's the problem?"
"Switches are jammed."
Samantha's uneasiness increased. "I don't like this, Quentin."
"No, me either. Spider sense is tingling like mad."
"You think maybe this Gilbert guy knows the cops are on the way? That maybe he's waiting for them?"
"You saw them take him down in a vision, right?"
"Yeah, but-"
"Look, this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with that, you know." When she remained silent, he sighed and said, "Okay, so I don't believe in coincidences either. Assuming they can be reached out there, Bishop will warn the cops to watch their backs. And their fronts. You stay put, Sam. Galen is staying here, and I'm heading over to get you."
"I'm in a police station."
"Yeah, a practically deserted one. Sit tight, and I'll be there in fifteen minutes."
Samantha cradled the receiver and frowned down at the phone, absently rubbing her temples. She kept remembering her vision, and the dying words of Andrew Gilbert that she hadn't been able to hear.
She had an uneasy notion that something would be different if she had heard those words.
Trying to think about that made her head pound even more violently and the sick dizziness increase, however, so she quickly gave it up and began to make her way very cautiously back to the lounge.
Jeez, the place really was deserted, she realized, hearing only an occasional ringing phone and muted voices from the bull pen at the front of the building.
Samantha hesitated in the doorway of the lounge for a moment, trying once again to grasp the source of her uneasiness, then gave it up and went to lie down on the couch.
The property Wyatt had sold Andrew Gilbert was remote, but it was nowhere near as troublesome to reach as the places they had been investigating the last couple of weeks. In fact, a decent dirt road led from the highway practically to the front door of the small, old farmhouse.
Not that the cops took that route all the way. Instead, they stopped all their vehicles more than a mile and a half from the house and approached on foot, spreading out to cautiously surround the house and barn.
It was a chilly day, and smoke rising from the house's chimney indicated someone was home.
Wyatt, crouched near Lucas as they sheltered behind a granite outcropping and peered down at the house and barn about fifty yards away, said quietly, "That old house has no heat except for the fireplace, not unless he had something more modern installed."
Lucas nodded, but said, "I want to stay put for a few minutes and watch. Glen"-he looked over his shoulder to see the young deputy nearby-"can you work your way around and find out if that barn has a back entrance? And see if it looks like an ATV's been moving in and out recently?"
"You've got it."
"Is your boss's warning bothering you?" Wyatt asked.
All the radios had been silenced, but they had thankfully discovered that their cells worked at least intermittently up here, and Lucas had taken the call from Bishop about half an hour before.
"I take any warning seriously," Lucas replied, not adding that what bothered him most was Bishop's brief confession that at least two other agents had been working in the background for the past couple of weeks. Not that Lucas objected to their presence- though he wasn't the first SCU agent to wish his boss wasn't quite so secretive about some things.
What made him uneasy was the nagging certainty that other things also had been going on all around him without his awareness. Maybe too many things.
He had never been able to develop the enhanced senses that other SCU members called their "spider sense," because, according to Bishop, his concentration shut out rather than focused on external stimuli. And for the first time, Lucas began to seriously question whether Samantha was right in pushing him to tap into his own emotions in order to use his abilities more effectively.
To reach outside himself, let his guards down-no matter how vulnerable and out-of-control it made him feel.
"Look," Wyatt breathed suddenly.
Down below, a man emerged from the old house and started across the half acre or so to the barn. Halfway there, he stopped and pulled a ringing cell phone off its clip on his belt.
Lucas frowned and murmured, "Why do I get the feeling this is not good?"
Binoculars pressed to his eyes, Wyatt said, "He looks pleased. Now he's… upset, looks like."
Even without binoculars, Lucas could see Andrew Gilbert looking around warily, and he hoped silently that all the deputies were well hidden and quiet.
"Somebody's warning him," Lucas realized.
"Who?" Wyatt demanded.