Lucas mulled that one, too, for about a second and a half. “Okay, okay, you got me. So what happened?”
“Well, that’s what I’m about to try to find out,” I said, urging Marcianna—who had become somewhat intrigued by the trail of blood and organs leading into the kiln—to move with me. “But if I had to bet, I’d say the deer was shot, not long ago, and gutted with a sharp knife…”
And then Marcianna and I moved inside the rubble-strewn structure.
The second kiln was far more open to the light of the rising moon, and by now my eyes were quite adjusted enough to take in the contents of the place quickly. With both satisfaction and deep disturbance, I observed the extent to which my hypothesis had been correct—and I quickly reported as much back to Lucas: “Unfortunately, kid, eliminating the impossible has once again left the only possibility.” I was attempting to sound detached and perhaps a bit amusing, in an attempt to overcome the deeply mournful scene of violation that lay on a pile of bricks in front of me: “It’s a doe—maybe the one we saw on the way up. She’s been split up the middle by a very sharp blade, wielded by someone who knew just what arteries and organs to nick in order to create the greatest blood flow. The carcass is secured to a brick pile with rope, in order to keep the gash open.” I noticed a small detail: “Nylon rope, although that could of course mean nothing. Or, on the other hand, something…” I moved forward toward the doe—but strangely, Marcianna held back, almost as if the carcass was an evil omen of some sort. “It’s all right, girl,” I said—but then I saw what was bothering her:
Amid the gore on the bricks lay the almost perfectly developed fetus of an unborn fawn. It was so awful and arresting a sight that it literally snatched the breath out of me for a moment; and when air did return, all I could do was let out some of Marcianna’s lead. “Okay, girl,” I whispered, thinking it best to keep this latest detail from Lucas. “Go back and stand guard with the boy…” This Marcianna did, obviously preferring to take on a live enemy rather than explore a butchered mother; for who knew how the latter reminded her of all the horrors of her youth, and of the bizarrely cruel man who had run the zoo where I’d found her.
I continued my examination more quickly, the sight of the fawn spurring my actions and thoughts. “The carcass is still quite warm,” I called, having touched the doe where I did not feel it would add to her insults. “She has not, in point of fact, been dead long. Probably placed here while you were distracted by our conversation, by someone adept at such things. There is a clean bullet wound through the skull—” And as I examined this, I tried not to look into the dead animal’s eyes: for the golden light of a deer’s life can take many minutes to finally be eclipsed by its dilating pupils, and it is one of the sadder sights imaginable, even without the devastation that had gone on in this case. “Large caliber, heavy load,” I concluded. But I did not tell Lucas that this was perfectly consistent with a .308 Winchester shot, fired from a Savage 10FP rifle.
“Uh—that’s all great, Doc,” Lucas called. “Now can we get the fuck outta here? Those bears are getting a little less nervous every second…”
With the same respect I would have shown any murdered thing, I untied the deer and let her carcass slip to the kiln floor—even though I knew she would be a feast for bears in a matter of minutes. And as she fell, she offered me that sight I had not wished to see: the last bit of gleam in her eyes, fading to black. Fighting against the urge to run with which this sight filled me, I leaned down and, again uselessly, lifted the appallingly warm form of the fawn and placed it back within the mother’s body; then, finally, having done all that human decency could do in the face of the onslaught to come, I hobbled quickly outside.
“Okay, Lucas,” I said breathlessly. “Give me the Colt, and get your ass over to the Prowler. Drive it here, and put the lights on high beam—with any luck, the bears will be blinded for a minute and Marcianna will be just confused enough to break off and get in with us. Go, go, go!”
Another minute or so, and Lucas had achieved his next task: the lights of the Prowler came flooding onto the scene, temporarily freezing the bears in place. I holstered the Colt and pulled Marcianna’s lead enough to get her to turn her head around and look at the machine—and, as I’d hoped, she knew what the sight meant: I was again dragged into the Prowler as she bolted for the passenger seat of the rig, while Lucas leapt into the back. I shifted into reverse, handing my cane to Lucas; and when we moved off, the bears charged forward. By the time they reached the kiln and tore into the doe carcass, however, we were on our way back down the old charcoal trail, moving even faster than we had on approach.
Once it was clear that we were safe from the bears, as well as from any of their relatives who might be hanging around the neighborhood, Lucas, who was crouching in the back on his haunches and clinging to the metal struts of the Prowler’s cab, seemed to calm down some, as did Marcianna. Both were helped by our speed, and Marcianna had the additional aid of my continuing words of reassurance, which were too soft for Lucas to have heard; but they did serve the additional purpose of getting my own heated blood back to something like normal temperature. We were halfway back down the mountain, however, before I got real confirmation of just how far back Marcianna had come from those moments of fiery-eyed confrontation with the bears outside the kilns: we hit a log that I hadn’t seen, being as it lay beneath the tunnel-like illumination of the Prowler’s bright headlamps; and when we were all tossed a good four or five inches from our seats and came slamming back down again, Lucas and I cursing in discomfort, Marcianna let out a moan of anguish and worry, sounding very young and very tired of all the evening’s entertainments. Then, inexplicably, she laid her head in my lap for a few moments; but, finding that position too cramped, she flopped her whole upper body into the spot, twisting it over so that her paws reached up and onto my left shoulder and the top of her head ground, not altogether comfortably for me, into my left thigh. I groaned predictably, but the whole thing only seemed to amuse the hell out of Lucas.
“Well, I guess she’s a cat, after all!” he called out, sticking his head between the metal struts he was grasping. “That’s just what Ambyr’s big tom does, when he wants attention for some reason. Damndest thing,” he concluded, staring at Marcianna; and then, almost helplessly, he reached forward, as if he meant to stroke her belly.
“Whoa, there,” I warned, staying his hand. “We don’t know her exact mood, yet, kid. Just because she may look like a big pussycat doesn’t make her one. Those weren’t mice, or even dogs, she was just squaring off against. Let’s give her a few minutes’ peace before we go getting all cute—she’ll let us know if she feels shortchanged on affection, trust me.”
Lucas pulled his hand back, saying, “Just trying to be friendly, Doc…”
“I know. But if this thing makes very little sense to us, imagine how she feels.” Then I checked the .45, making sure that, even with Marcianna all over me, I could get to it freely. For I was nothing like certain that we were yet in the clear from the unseen human antagonist who had meddled with our activities that evening.
His thoughts perhaps running along similar lines, Lucas picked up my cane and allowed himself another chance to pull the rapier free of its wooden casing, an action that gave him some measure of reassurance. “God damn, L.T.,” he said. “You are one weird kinda doctor. You know, back in the 1880s, you would’ve made a good suspect in the Jack the Ripper case, from what I read.”
“Very funny,” I answered, although I was in fact impressed by his correct dating and detailing of the Ripper crimes and their investigation. “Now sheathe that thing, will you, before we hit a rock and you end up impaled on it?”
Recognizing this very real possibility, Lucas reassembled the cane and laid it aside, then stuck his face back through the struts. “I still don’t get one thing,” he said, as we hit the steeper portion of the mountainside and I glanced down at Marcianna, who seemed, improbably, to have fallen asleep in her bizarre position. ?
??You said the deer was shot clean through the head, and probably with a decent-sized rifle, right?”
“That’s right,” I said, having expected this line of questioning.
“But it’d only been dead a little while, so…Why didn’t any of us hear the shot? We’d been there for a long time, listening to all your bullshi— I mean, to your fascinating conversation with Dr. Chang. There’s no way we could’ve missed it, even if it was a ways off. So what happened?”
“What happened, Lucas,” I said, trying to minimize any alarm my statement might cause, “is why we’re moving so fast right now. You can figure it out yourself, I’m guessing. You probably have, already.”
I glanced back for just an instant to see him shrug his shoulders. “Only thing I can come up with would be a silencer.” He waited for me to contradict him, and when I didn’t, that same tone I’d come to know well—half thrill, half fear—entered his voice: “No—fucking—way…” he said with a little grin. “That is awesome!” But then the reality of our situation set in: “Hang on a second. If that deer was shot by a—a—”
“You can say it, kid,” I told him.
“By a fucking sniper?” he queried, now full only of apprehension. “And the guy dragged the carcass into that kiln while I was right there? Then—” I glanced back once more to see his head on a swivel, as his voice lowered: “Then where the hell is the motherfucker now?”
“That is why we’re moving so fast. I don’t know; and I don’t intend to find out.”
“Holy shit. Ho-lee shit…” He stuck his head farther in toward me. “Fucking move it, then, Doc, what the hell! Are you driving with your phony leg, or what?”
I ignored this remark, in the somewhat vain hope that it would be the last I’d hear from my passenger before our return to the base of the mountain. But not thirty seconds had gone by before he piped up with:
“But—whose sniper?” Lucas was still apprehensive, but that quality of his—that readiness in the face of the unknown or of danger, which I was coming to realize was rooted in far more than mere adventurousness—had reasserted itself. “I mean—it’s not the military, right, there’s not, like, Special Forces guys involved in this shit. Right?”
“Right,” I said. “That, at least, I think we can safely rule out.”
“So—who, then?”
“Well,” I answered, deciding that the kid deserved a frank appraisal, “the BCI has got plenty of snipers, Lucas—remember, they’re basically the state arm of the FBI, although the chain of command gets a little complicated. But they pride themselves on their snipers. It was a BCI sniper who made sure that Latrell didn’t tell his story to anybody other than me the other night.”
“Yeah, but they wouldn’t shoot us—would they?” His voice took on an estimable, if somewhat naïve, indignation. “They’d never get away with it!”
I had to laugh, a reaction made easier by the fact that the lights of Shiloh were coming into view through the trees off and below the mountain trail. “No, kid, I don’t think they’d actually shoot us—but even the faintest possibility is reason enough to get ourselves home. Especially since they might, as a warning, take a potshot at Marcianna.”
“Fuck that shit,” Lucas replied, indignation still high. “They try it and they’ll find out how easy it is for a throwaway kid to get his butt on the local news and tell his story. Assholes…”
And it was at that moment—that quick second or two that it took Lucas to refer to himself as a throwaway child—that the fuller explanation for his behavior at these dangerous moments struck me: I’d never really seen or conceived of my young ally in that way, not with all his bluster, his angry indictments of his parents and defenses of his sister, or what I have more generally called his game attitude toward life. But now I saw more fully where that gameness came from; and it was not an altogether happy realization. Lucas had, after all, endured more than even most throwaways: his parents had not simply vanished—had not merely been there one night and gone the next morning—nor had they exiled him from their house; rather, they had carefully constructed a legally complex plan to disappear, over what could only have been weeks and perhaps months. It had been a plan that, once they were gone, had bound both of their offspring, as well as Lucas’ friend Derek (whose own parents had vanished at the same time), to each other particularly tightly, by deceitfully making Lucas’ blind sister, Ambyr, the guardian for the boys and creating what was, effectively, a new family. And while I was certain that the elder Kurtzes’ behavior throughout Lucas’ childhood had implanted a rebellious streak in their son, I was now also sure that his reckless attitude toward his own safety—everything from joining our investigation in the first place to insisting that he should go on every even potentially perilous mission during that undertaking—was the product of that very particular, that very calculated form of abandonment, as well. Such amounted, after all, not to the “usual” splitting or breaking up of a family, but to its deliberate and cunning erasure: what danger could he face with Mike and me that would begin to rival that experience?
This realization forced me to do a quick check of my own responsibilities and plans as we blasted our way through tree branches and onto the lower, safer reaches of the mountain road. It was too late to cast Lucas out of the investigation, of course: even had I wished to do so, he would never have gone. But his safety had, at a stroke, become more important than before; indeed, I realized, as I glanced down at the still (and still remarkably) slumbering Marcianna, and thought for an instant of that other game person who seemed now to have joined our cause, Gracie Chang, a great many things had changed, during our trip to the top of the mountain. The stakes of our endeavor had plainly been raised by one silenced bullet and three black bears on the Taconic ridgeline above Shiloh. Indeed, the dangers suddenly seemed more than merely evident: they seemed close.
And that, of course, was precisely the effect that our adversary (or adversaries) had tried so hard to achieve, that night; although none of us suspected that they had not yet completed their work…
{vi.}
Once we had safely reached the yard of the barn, Marcianna suddenly woke and sat up, looking about as if we had never left the place; but when I pulled to a halt and stepped out of the Prowler, the manner in which she shot from the machine and nearly knocked me over bespoke a great happiness to be home. I told Lucas to return the ATV to its place in the shed behind the barn while I fetched a slab of beef for my companion and walked her up to her enclosure. Once he had performed his task, the kid raced to catch up to us, glancing about as if he expected sniper fire to start raining in at any minute. He soon lost this apprehension, although Marcianna, as soon as we got her safely through her gate, quickly picked up her dinner and trotted off to her den—an action that told me that she, too, was feeling none too secure.
Whatever Lucas’ attitude, however, it was finally time for him to go home, and he knew it. At first he was fully prepared, in keeping with his character, to march off alone down Death’s Head Hollow, encouraged by the fact that the bright moon was by now illuminating the entire landscape; but when I reminded him that the same moon glow that he found so reassuring would only allow our latest adversary to draw a nice bead on him as he strode defiantly along, he decided, with great condescension, that he would be willing to wait for Mike to return and give him a ride down to town. He did continue to protest that it could take hours for my partner to reappear, given that he might have pulled off the hollow so he could finally “gnaw on Gracie Chang’s face for a while”; but in fact he knew better, seeming certain of Mike’s quick return and, paradoxically, disappointed that my partner would be spending the night on his own.
I then felt the need to remind Lucas of something that he had requested when he first arrived that afternoon, something that had seemed to me little more than a social obligation, at the time, but that I now found a pressing concern: the question of Mike’s and my visit to his home, to meet his sister, Ambyr. I told him that, in light of
all that had happened, even a minimal sense of responsibility required that I keep her informed at least of the basics of his role in the investigation; and that when Mike and I came to his house I would therefore be as honest as professional discretion would allow in explaining to his guardian, not only who Mike and I were, but just what had happened during the case thus far. This, of course, did not make Lucas particularly happy; but I think that even he, after the evening we had just endured, understood that secrecy and deception were not the ways to go, anymore—not completely, at any rate. We agreed that the visit should take place as soon as possible: and given that the BCI would be making their arrest the next day, and probably planting their evidence soon thereafter, Mike and I needed to be on call until at least Tuesday. I was sure that Frank Mangold intended for Steve Spinetti and Pete Steinbrecher to discover the frame, thereby giving it independent credibility, and that my partner and I would get a phone call from the sheriff or his deputy soon thereafter. By Tuesday afternoon, however, when both Mike’s and my classes finished conveniently early, we’d be able to make the time to come to Surrender. I agreed to bring Marcianna along—secretly, as we had discussed—and with that subject settled, the headlights of Mike’s car appeared as if on cue, snaking their way up the hollow road.
Mike himself was in far too jolly a mood to even question the notion of driving Lucas home, or something close to home, which made me wonder what had, indeed, happened during his drive back down the mountain and then out the hollow with Gracie; however, I had no doubt that, once our young apprentice was home, my partner would be full of a detailed description for me. And so I directed Lucas into the passenger seat of the Empress, where he shrank down behind the dashboard and declared (much to Mike’s mystification) that he didn’t want any sniper taking a shot at him under the mistaken impression that they would be “popping” me. To Mike’s look of concern I held up a calming hand, saying that Lucas would doubtless explain the meaning of his demented remark on the way to town; and on that typically dysfunctional note, the car roared off again, and I turned to make my way slowly into the hangar. It had, all things considered, been an exhausting evening; and when I’d finally climbed into the JU-52 and tucked my .45 and field glasses back into the bottom drawer of my desk, I took a pull off the Talisker bottle, drew out a cigarette, and lit it, returning to the hatchway and hoping for a moment of peace during which to smoke. But then something caught my eye down below, something that I had missed on my weary entry: