The Nightmare Thief

“Got any more gloves?” he said.

She handed him a pair. He got his key chain—a carabiner on which hung a Swiss Army knife. From the knife he slid a straight pin. He used it to eject the SIM card from the dead phone. He swapped the SIM into his phone and turned it on. The phone lit up.

“Yes,” Jo said.

The SIM was damaged. Only portions of the display showed up— if it had been a piece of paper, sections would have looked washed out from water damage. The entire display was weak and faded.

“It won’t be stable,” Gabe said.

Quickly she scrolled through the controls. She found the damaged SIM’s phone number.

“Write this down.” She rattled it off and Gabe scrawled it on his wrist. “The cops can get started with that.”

With increasing excitement, she checked the call register. The damaged SIM displayed only partial phone numbers. And there was no identifying information on any of the callers. But the numbers were all in the Bay Area. That strongly suggested to her that it was Wylie’s phone.

The screen flickered. “I’m going to lose it.”

She got her own phone. As quickly as she could, she sent it data from the damaged unit. Then she looked again at outgoing calls. A series of three-digit phone numbers had been called in rapid sequence. 6-2-2. 9-4-4. 8-2-1.

She felt chilly. “I think somebody was trying to dial nine-one-one.”

“Trying repeatedly to dial nine-one-one, and missing?”

The wind gusted around them. Gabe’s expression sobered.

“Yeah,” she said.

Somebody would miss if he was trying to dial 9-1-1 without looking at the display. If he was dialing for help surreptitiously— because the phone was in his pocket or behind his back. If he was in deep trouble.

The display faded briefly to white. It came back dimmer than before.

She needed to find everything she could before the SIM died. The sheriffs probably had tech experts who could revive it, but she couldn’t take the chance. Hurriedly she scrolled through the phone’s apps and found a dictation function.

She tapped Play.

She heard sounds. Noises. Scratching, muffled—the sound of the phone’s microphone recording from inside in somebody’s pocket.

She heard a man’s voice. “Where are we going?”

She glanced at Gabe. His eyes were dark.

The man’s voice again: “Just tell me that much. How far should I plan to drive? Do I need to stop for gas?”

Jo closed her eyes. Her heart was beating hard. “It’s him. It’s Wylie.”

On the phone, a long pause. “Well?”

Finally, more distant, another voice answered. “Drive.”

“Please, I just want—”

“Shut up.”

The second voice was swaddled in ambient sound.

“Man or woman?” Jo said.

Gabe shook his head. “Can’t tell.”

They listened for another minute. They could hear Wylie breathing heavily.

“He’s scared,” Jo said.

Engine noise. Wylie spoke: “Stay on Five-eighty? We’re going to be at Altamont in a minute. How far—”

A sound like a dull slap.

Jo clenched her jaw. “Wylie’s driving someplace against his will. And he’s trying to leave a trail, to tell people where he’s headed.”

Wylie’s voice came through again, shaky now: “Why are you doing this?”

The other voice, distant, more muffled than before. Words too hard to make out. Jo held the phone closer to her ear.

“You know what the score is,” the voice said.

Who was in the car with Wylie? A man, or a woman with a deep voice . . . was it a jealous husband? A former lover? Because the voice sounded on the edge.

“Shut up. Or”—noise—“punishment.”

The recording cut out.

“Damn,” she said.

Punishment.

“We have to get this to the sheriff’s department.”

She ejected the SIM from Gabe’s phone and sealed it in the Ziploc baggie. They hurriedly gathered their gear, and Gabe shouldered his pack.

“Hang on,” she said.

They were too deep in the wilderness to get a signal strong enough for a phone call. But sending a text message required only a weak signal and only for a few seconds. She typed a message to Evan, headed: URGENT. She queued up all the data she’d pulled from the damaged SIM, and pressed Send.

Message failed.

She tried again. Messages placed in queue. Will be sent as soon as possible.

Jo hefted her backpack. The voice on the phone had unnerved her.