Page 100 of In Cold Blood

“You know, Jack, at one time you weren’t an asshole. You were a good kid. That daddy of yours won’t bail you out forever. Then what will you do? Consider this your wake-up call. Get new friends. Clean yourself up. Gloria deserves better!”

He could hear Jack cursing as he walked away.

Noah got back into the Bronco. Ethan waved at his uncle as he drove out of the lot. “What was all that about?” Ethan asked.

“Ah, you know Uncle Jack, he was just excited to see me.”

25

After dropping the kids off, Noah phoned Callie to update her on what Jack had told him. He was in the middle of leaving a voice message when his phone died.

“Oh, c’mon.” He attached it to the cable in his car. With all that had occurred the night before, and by the time he rolled into bed amid thoughts of an early morning search, he’d forgotten to plug it into the wall.

He’d considered driving the twenty minutes back to High Peaks but as he hadn’t heard from Callie while he was out that morning, he assumed she was either booking Cyrus or wading through his apartment in search of evidence.

Noah was close to Bloomingdale.

He figured if Cyrus hadn’t been caught and he’d gone north, he could get eyes on him. Once he arrived he would call Callie again. At least that way, Cyrus couldn’t slide out from under their noses.

“Just you and me, pal,” Noah said to Axel as he drove north. He glanced at him in the mirror. “You liked Ethan, didn’t you?”

Axel whined a little.

“Yeah, I miss him too.”

Ethan was much like Luke, outgoing, all smiles, and personable. At least that’s how he remembered him.

What Alicia and Lena had said about Luke just didn’t add up unless, of course, Luke had gotten hooked on drugs. It wasn’t unheard of for officers in drug units to be tempted by the allure of cash and narcotics. A little off the top just to take the edge off. Beer usually did the trick but who was to say his brother hadn’t dipped into powder?

Noah didn’t want to think that was the case. Luke had always struck him as a straight shooter who went by the book, much like his father. A churchgoer who excelled in keeping his life clean and free from secrets.

“Secrets are what get people in trouble,” he remembered him saying on the phone.

Noah pushed the past from his mind and focused on recalling the directions Jack had given him. Saranac to Bloomingdale was less than ten minutes. It was a tiny hamlet in Adirondack County. With less than 1,200 people, it paled in comparison to its big sister cities. Route 3 skirted around the western edge of McKenzie Mountain Wilderness. There were few homes along the way. It was nothing more than a road that stretched into the horizon, cutting through woodland and marshland.

Noah’s thoughts drifted back to his final days in High Peaks.

He’d gone camping with Ray and Luke. It was meant to be a last hurrah before he headed off to boot camp and became another one of Uncle Sam’s molds cut from the same military cloth as those before him. But he knew the trip was more than that. Their father had arranged it in a last-ditch effort to see if his brothers couldn’t talk sense into him.

“You sure this is what you want?” Luke had asked.

“It is.”

“Despite what dad says, I was sure hoping you would stick around. You know, we’d be part of the same Sheriff’s Office.”

“How much did he pay you?”

“Who?”

“Dad.”

“A hundred bucks.”

“And you took it?”

“Beer’s not cheap,” he said before laughing hard. Ray clinked his can against Luke’s.

“You two. I’m going to miss yah.”