In the Ground (David Wolf Book 14)

small shock pulse through his system at the mention of his former fiancée. He had not seen Lauren or her daughter Ella since that afternoon they’d ceremoniously buried Jet, and, symbolically, their prospects of ever getting back together. He often wondered what they both looked like now but hadn’t gone so far as to drive down to Lauren’s art storefront in Aspen to find out. He’d intentionally remained farther north in the Roaring Fork valley, closer to Carbondale, where Jack, Cassidy, and Ryan now lived.
"Anyway,” Cassidy continued in her conspiratorial tone, “I heard from one of my friends there that she met some guy and moved out to San Francisco with him.”
The phone rustled, and then the muffled sounds of conversation filtered through the speakers.
“Hey!” Jack’s voice filled the cruiser.
Wolf blinked, the fog of Cassidy’s news slowly lifting. “Hey, how’s it going?”
“Good. You?”
“Not bad. Just working, you know. How’s life at the station?”
Jack said nothing, and the kitchen noise disappeared in the background.
“You there?” Wolf asked.
“Yeah, sorry. I was just leaving the room. Hey, sorry about that. You know Cassidy when she has a piece of juicy gossip.”
“It’s okay,” Wolf said. “It’s…” why was he still talking? “It’s okay. I said how’s life at the station going?”
“Oh, it’s great. Chief says I’m doing well. Had a car crash the other day I wish I hadn’t seen, but…part of the job, you know?”
Wolf nodded. “Yeah. Definitely part of the job.”
“It’s wet out, so that’s good. How about you? What’s new in Points?”
“A lot, actually. Some mine workers outside of Dredge called in a DB. It’s one of their own.”
“Really. And it’s foul play?”
“Looks like it.” Wolf liked having these professional chats with his son, which were more frequent with Jack’s career change. Jack had majored in geology in college, but once out had decided to serve as a firefighter. Either job choice would have been fine in Wolf’s eyes, but he had to admit he was happy with Jack’s decision.
And he was equally proud of how Jack had gotten the position. Wolf had known the fire chief personally over in Carbondale, but Jack had threatened to disown him if he said anything behind the scenes to help. Wolf had followed orders, and although it had been a long, grueling process to get hired, Jack had landed the job.
“Ryan, come here!” Jack’s phone rustled. “It's Grandpa. You want to talk to him?"
Wolf smiled in anticipation, already hearing “Grumpa! Grumpa!” in the background.
"Okay, here he is." Jack put them on speaker phone.
"Grumpa!”
"Hi there, buddy! How are you doing today?"
He responded with a sentence about kicking something, and running fast? Wolf had no clue.
"Really? That sounds amazing.”
Cassidy’s voice called in the background. "He's says he's learning how to play soccer. He learned how to kick today and he’s really fast.”
"Oh, okay, wow! That's great. So he went straight from walking to playing soccer. That was quick.”
“I love doggies!”
Wolf smiled. “Doggies are great. Maybe your mom and dad—”
“—Maybe not quite right now!” Cassidy yelled.
“Right, sorry,” Wolf said. “So, hey, how about this weekend? You guys still coming over?”
The speaker phone cut off and Jack was back on. "Actually my shift is changing, so it’s not looking good. I’d be dead asleep the whole time. How about next week? I’ll be off then.”
"Yeah, sure," Wolf said, hiding his disappointment.
Ryan was screaming in the background. "Okay, Ryan wants to talk to you again.”
"Put him on."
Another stream of unintelligible syllables came through the speakers, but this time it was because of reception.
“Hello?”
A single blast of noise carrying Cassidy’s voice came through the speakers and the call cut out. He was climbing the southern side of Williams Pass, which was never a good spot for cell reception. After another pop of static he slowed to the side of the road.
"You guys are breaking up,” he said.
Cassidy’s voice came through again. “…I just thought he’d want to know…she moved on…I don’t care, he needs to hear it—”
The phone call ended.
He sat still in his seat, engine idling on the emergency pull-off halfway up the pass. A single vehicle coasted by.
He rolled down the windows and shut off the engine. Silence enveloped the car, save the faint whoosh of the vehicle as it turned out of sight in the sideview mirror.
He thought of Lauren and Ella out in San Francisco, a place he’d never been, living with a man he’d never met. She had moved on. Good for them, he thought. And he meant it.
There was a rustling in the trees off to the right and a deer climbed up the embankment to the edge of the road. The animal tiptoed into his lights and stopped.
Wolf put an elbow out the window.
“Hey,” he said.
The deer turned its head, ears high. Its oil-drop eyes stared. Big ears flapped at swirling bugs.
They sat like that for a while—Wolf staring at the animal, the animal staring at an alien machine—until some synapse fired in its brain. The deer lurched a tentative step, then broke into a trot, and then sprinted across the road, up the steep cut on the other side. Underbrush crashed violently as the deer disappeared into the dark forest above.
Wolf checked the mirrors and leaned to check out the passenger window. When he found nothing out of the ordinary, he looked at himself in the rearview mirror. His eyes were bloodshot. The skin of his face seemed to be of a stranger’s it was so pallid and wrinkled looking.
He fired up the engine, rolled up the windows, and drove.

Chapter 4
The air is hot foam in Wolf’s throat. The grate of insects whining almost drowns out the voice in his earpiece.
“West, clear.”
“South, clear.”
“Wait a second,” Wolf says. “I’m seeing some movement at the edge of the forest.”
Encounters with Sri Lankan elephants are not uncommon in these parts of the country, but it seems strange that one would be testing the edge of the raised meadow so close to an idling CH-47 Chinook helicopter.
The movement is human, Wolf realizes, as a boy