Dance of the Thunder Dogs by Kirk Mitchell

Author:Kirk Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

15

“ YOU’RE RUNNING LIKE porra, Dustin,” Michael said irritably. “Punch it, for Chrissake.”

“What’s porra?”

“Snot.”

The FBI SWAT team out of Oklahoma City had a one-hour jump on Ramsey and him. The two agents had linked up at the field office downtown so they could continue on to the extreme northeast corner of the state in a single bucar. It was now almost three in the morning, and they were ten miles beyond Tulsa on an I-44 that was empty but for big rigs. Even though they had taken Michael’s car, Mangas let Ramsey drive. He needed the time to think. The young agent drove at ninety miles an hour with the blue warning light flashing in the grille, but Michael knew his Ford would do a hundred.

Two mornings ago, Parker had left Ramsey handcuffed to the rail in his office building’s elevator. The agent’s cell phone had had a life of its own since that time. Once advised, the field office flew in a radio-electronic specialist from Washington to intercept any calls Parker made, but he arrived too late to monitor the first transmission. According to the cellular provider, it’d been made within the Elk City service area to a cell phone with a Maryland area code. The call had been placed about thirty minutes after Parker climbed out of the elevator.

Ramsey now proved that he was mentally going over the same events. He asked out of a silence that had lasted some minutes, “Any luck running down the subscriber to that first number Parker called?”

“No, not yet,” Michael answered. He didn’t add that he’d purposely kept that number to himself.

Ramsey was still smarting from his hours in the elevator. It was good for him to be ashamed. Shame seasoned you, filled you with the resolve never to be humiliated in the same way again. And he’d screwed up royally. The loss of his Handie-Talkie to Parker had compromised the bureau’s primary communication system in the state, rendering it virtually useless in the near term. Brilliant move, Michael thought to himself, but no use crying over spilled milk. Parker hadn’t drowned in the Canadian River, no use crying about that as well.

The second call had been placed yesterday, twenty-eight hours after the first. Transmission quality was too poor to monitor the conversation, no doubt owing to weak batteries, but it had been dialed from a roaming zone to a residential number in Quapaw, Oklahoma, named after a tribe relocated there from the lower Mississippi Valley in the early nineteenth century.

The Quapaw had nothing to do with Michael’s decision to call in the SWAT ninjas after a second call had been made to that number nine hours ago. However, a minor historical fact had much to do with his speeding up the interstate in the early morning darkness. In 1873, a rebellious element of a tribe along the eastern California-Oregon border was exiled to the Quapaw Agency in the Indian Territory, later Oklahoma. For the better part of a year they’d kept most of the U.

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