Free Bad Penny by John D. Brown Page B

about halfway between Rock Springs and Eden. He’d been at that location for some time.
    Sam raced along the highway. When they were about to the spot, Frank told him to slow down. Sam did, but the Nissan was nowhere to be seen.
    A knot of worry began to churn in Frank’s gut. He looked down at the tracker, looked back out at the barren land. The tracker said Tony should be right on the road.
    Sam pulled the van over to the shoulder. “Maybe it’s off a little,” Sam said. “I have a buddy who had a GPS once that was always taking him miles from his destination.”
    “How’s it going to get mixed up?” Frank asked. “There’s only one road.” The sagebrush was scrubby, but it was tall enough that if you dragged a body a hundred yards off the road, well away from the fence, nobody would find it. Nobody but the ants, the buzzards and crows, and the windy Wyoming sun. A body could disappear out there for years, until it was nothing but a few weeds growing up between bleached and dried ribs. Frank had run across enough partial skeletons of deer and cattle on his long jogs to know that.
    Frank’s worry began to rise.
    “You want to get out and look around?”
    “Go another hundred yards,” Frank said, “and then we’ll turn around.”
    What was he going to tell Kim? This just couldn’t be happening. A small white rage began to build in him.
    Sam moved forward slowly. Frank looked down at the tracker, trying to refresh it. The page hung and hung. Then his connection dropped. He had no signal.
    “Sam, you have cell service?”
    Sam pulled out his phone, opened it up. “Nothing.”
    Relief washed through Frank. It blew a huge hole in the dark mountain of despair that had been poised to crush him. “This was his last known position. All this time the stupid connection was trying to update.”
    “You want to search one of those side roads?”
    “No,” Frank said. “Just get on down the highway.”
    Sam looked up at the ceiling of the van. “Lord,” he said.
    Frank couldn’t tell if he was stating a request, gratitude, or giving a status update.
    Sam pulled back onto the road and accelerated to about eighty. A few miles farther they met and passed a pickup pulling a horse trailer coming the other way. A few miles past that Frank got service again. He logged back into the tracking webpage, clicked on Tony’s phone, and opened the map. Tony was up ahead about eight miles, moving on one of the streets in the town of Eden.
    And that’s where this would end. When Tony was safe, Ed was going to learn the meaning of tragic miscalculation.

6
Eden
    FRANK AND SAM drove into the Eden, Wyoming valley, which was not, alas, a lush garden for naked folks and fruit trees. It probably didn’t get more than seven inches of rain each year. However, there was one spot of green in the middle of the valley.
    Back in the 1800s, thousands of pioneers had rolled through here as they made their way along both the Oregon and Mormon trails. The Pony Express had built a station here. But it wasn’t until a man named Farson financed a big project back in 1907 to irrigate from the Big Sandy and Little Sandy rivers that snaked through the valley that anyone really stayed. The rivers weren’t wide and deep; they were smaller shallow things, and calling it “Eden” was all part of Farson’s PR. Still, the result was two little ranching communities about four miles apart, one named Farson and the other Eden, with a combined population of 628 souls. The land was green for a few miles around each community. Beyond that, it was all miles and miles of high plains desert, sagebrush, and wind.
    Frank had been up here a couple of times, the last time with Tony, to stop at the Farson Mercantile, the “Home of the Big Cone,” which served monstrous ice cream cones—the extra large was five scoops, each as big as a softball. But the locator said Tony hadn’t gone for Farson ice creams. It said he was stopped in Eden.
    Frank zoomed the map