“Ambyr will come up,” Mike warned. “You know she will.”
All I could do was nod. “I’ll deal with that then. One step at a time, until we get in the car and finally go.”
As I moved out of the hangar, Mike clapped my shoulder reassuringly. “Okay, kid,” he said. “I’m just sorry about it all. Sorry that happiness—whatever, human happiness—is going to get away from you. Again. But it’s not fucking over, L.T. I know what you’re thinking; but if you found it with her, you can find it with somebody else.”
I could only chuckle. “Okay, Mike.”
“I’m serious, asshole. But for now—go take care of Marcianna. And yourself…”
“One and the same,” I said, moving toward the dirt path to the enclosure. “And you—just make sure you’re packed by noon, and that Gracie knows to lie low. Right?”
Only half-hearing his response in the affirmative, I was quickly swallowed up in a night that had seen steady rain replaced by an almost impenetrable fog.
Marcianna was at the gate long before I got there, her sensing of the killer above us making her anxious for company. But, as was usually the case when she detected any sort of danger (perhaps a pack of coyotes, in the past, or a black bear such as those she’d stood against on the mountain), she insisted on staying in front of me, once I was inside the enclosure; and her eyes, ears, and nose constantly searched the misty night, her spirit determined that if any harm was in the offing, it should befall her first. I picked up some twigs and branches on my way to the den, and once we were inside I built a fire, sufficient to comfort me but small enough that it didn’t make Marcianna feel any more nervous. And so we sat there, as I tried yet again to work out how I was going to get through the long night to come.
Soon, though, that problem began to be solved for me: true to Mike’s prediction, Ambyr appeared, finding her way into the enclosure and then the den with as little trouble as she had the first time she’d visited. She had taken great pains to make herself irresistible, wearing some kind of silver satin wrap (expensive, I recall thinking) that was open at the front almost to her waist, with only a pair of like-colored flats on her feet. Her freshly washed and dried hair, having passed through the mist, glistened in the firelight, and the overall effect was to make her seem a sprite that had just emerged from the forest above us. Once nearby, she sensed the heat of the fire, and heightened her allure by standing before it and turning around, the lines of her body plainly visible beneath the sheer wrap.
“You like, Mister-Doctor-Man?” she said with a smile; and it again grew difficult to conceive that she could have had so little visual knowledge of the effect she had on men; on me.
“Of course,” I said, perhaps less enthusiastically than she had expected: for her own smile faded, and she slowly found her way, with my help, into my lap. Once seated, she placed her delicately scented arms around my neck and her head on my chest.
“Worried?” she asked.
“Umm-hmm,” I noised, my face burying itself in her hair as my arms helplessly encircled her.
“Maybe even a little scared?” she pressed.
“Maybe more than a little,” I said, as she turned her face up to mine; and in that instant, all considerations of her being anything other than the remarkably liberating creature she had always been for me simply melted. Our lips met, and I came near to believing that all I had said earlier that night must have been a mistake, untrue, a series of lies. Not this girl, I prayed silently, not this one, God, please…And as the moments wore on, I even came close to believing it.
Close. After what must have been a half an hour or so, Marcianna’s ears went back, and she began to growl lowly. Bursting out with one of her peculiar chirrups, which reverberated somewhat painfully against the den walls, she dashed outside, there to stand and continue the call.
“Ouch,” Ambyr said, touching each of her ears gently. “What’s gotten into her?”
“I don’t know,” I said evenly. “Your guess, on that, would be as good as mine. Maybe better…”
Did she understand from my ambiguous little statement that I was aware of what was happening, and of her part in it? Certainly, she turned toward me in an unusual way, and seemed on the verge of explaining something. Her lips parted, she drew in a breath—but then simply declared, “Come on. We’re going inside, for your last night. I didn’t get all done up to roll around in the dust of this place…”
And so we stood, each playing our part without acknowledging as much to the other. I made no more hint of any awareness of things beyond that moment, but simply accepted that the night had to pass without incident. Once we were outside, with Marcianna following along and occasionally letting out that cry of hers and myself stopping every few feet to comfort her and try to reassure her about the temporary nature of any change to our usual rhythm of life that might be coming, Ambyr began to soothe her, as well, saying that she would be there if I was not, and that there was no need to feel like she’d been abandoned to her fate as had happened when she’d been a cub. Then, as we passed through the gate, Marcianna leapt up to put her forelegs on my shoulders; but it was Ambyr who literally talked her down, whispering in her ear and sending her on her way back to the den with an air of genuine peace of mind.
“Well,” I said, watching Marcianna go. “That was impressive. What did you say to her?”
“Simple,” Ambyr replied, clutching my arm and reaching up to kiss me. “I told her not to worry—that, even if you get sick of me, she’ll have the rest of her life with you…”
It was as close as she would come to admitting that, when Mike, Lucas, and I hit the road the next day, whatever wondrous and terrible thing it was that had gone on between us would be at an end; yet it still offered no clue as to why. And that, as I’d told Mike, was what I most needed to know…
{i.}
We were in trouble almost as soon as we left Death’s Head Hollow.
“Ow, shit!” Mike clutched at one ear as he drove. “Lucas, what in the fuck—I’m barely awake!”
We had just hit Route 7 after a somber parting from Shiloh, and Lucas had announced that he would be serving as the mixmaster for our trip, having burned some CDs on Mike’s laptop that morning when Mike was off “getting his oil changed” at Gracie’s. It was well past noon, and I, like Mike, was still a little hazy; so when the stereo started blasting with (appropriately enough) the hard chords of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell,” it was a bit much for our driver.
“I thought we agreed to compromise and listen to PYX-106,” Mike complained further.
“Dude, I am PYX-106, okay?” Lucas said, spreading out in the back seat and donning a pair of Coyote Razor sunglasses that an older youth he knew from school who’d recently returned from his first tour of duty in Afghanistan had given him, and which imparted to Lucas an apparent sense of invulnerability. “Just without the commercials. So don’t fuck with it…”
“Excuse me?” Mike replied in disbelief.
“You heard me,” Lucas said. “Gonna be a long enough ride, Mike, but I can make it longer…”
Michael and I had planned our actual journey south fairly carefully, thinking that there might be a chance that some of our friends in law enforcement would take an interest in our sudden departure from Shiloh. We hadn’t originally felt like we needed to take an absurdly circuitous route: it would be easy for anyone who cared to check Mike’s speeding-riddled driving record to find out that we preferred the Taconic State Parkway to the other main arteries (the scenic but unbearably slow Route 22—about which we’d said and heard enough during our investigation—and, westward beyond the Hudson, the post-apocalyptically bleak New York State Thruway), so we figured we’d be safe simply choosing one of those alternate routes. But we soon decided that we’d better complicate our movements, due to the number of television news vans that were still lingering in Surrender and being turned back by Shiloh’s farmhands every time they tried to ascend Death’s Head Hollow. We chose to begin the trip wit
h a feint, taking 22 south and cutting across Route 295, which would take us toward the Taconic Parkway and make it look as though we were sticking to our habits; then, when we hit the crossing of 295 with Interstate 90, the westward side of which headed toward Albany and the Thruway, we would suddenly take it, and lose any followers on its maze-like access road.
“Brilliant, totally genius,” Lucas declared laconically, as Mike and I discussed all this. “But, moving on, now that we’re away from adult supervision, there’s one more important thing to discuss: where and when do we stop for beer?”
For most of the drive down 22 to its intersection with 295, Lucas continued to protest that a road trip was not a road trip without beer—“and not fucking Genesee, I want some primo shit!”—making it all the harder to discuss matters of substance; which was just as well, because there weren’t many matters of substance that we could discuss in front of the kid. So, things devolved into one more battle of insults between Mike and our consultant, while I gave up and stared out the window for most of the way, trying not to obsess over the fact that the extraordinary happiness I’d known with Ambyr in recent days, the latest chapter of which had been a very tender parting entirely consistent with an honest relationship, was almost certainly a thing of the past. Those parts of my brain involved in the processing and manufacturing of emotions continued to fight for some way out, some way in which all the things we suspected that Ambyr had done were defensible, either because of the possibility, which Mike had long advocated, that the throwaways organization had actually placed most of its children in happy homes, or because she was being coerced in a way that she couldn’t tell even me, probably to keep Lucas safe from harm. But my cognitive brain fought back hard, telling me that I knew these scenarios were unlikely, that whatever rationalizations she might have for the staging of the four deaths we knew of, to say nothing of her manipulations of other people, including me, would prove inadequate. I even tried the habit that Mike and I consistently warned our students against, listening to my gut; but all my gut told me was that I had fallen in love with a girl who had brought me out of years of torment, however briefly, yet who was still involved in something beyond shady. Had it not been me, had it been just another actor in a different case, I would have called the behavior common enough. But it didn’t feel common; not from the inside…
With these serpentine realities tightening on me, I didn’t notice for a long while that Lucas and Mike had suspended their bickering in favor of listening to Lucas’ classic rock collection; and I turned once to glance at the kid as he soaked up the ride and quietly sang along to Aerosmith’s “Dream On,” a song that had been released before I, let alone he, was born. A species apart, was Lucas; yet the specter of the looming heartbreak—or twin heartbreaks, if something had indeed happened to Derek—that would strike him if we could manage to prove our theories about the case and about his sister was very much of the cruel, common human world, and made me feel an increased affinity and responsibility for him. I didn’t really want or need anything else to feel sick about; and so at first, I was just as glad when Mike turned down the volume of the stereo a bit and quietly said to me:
“Hey. I know what it is you’re working over in your brain, L.T.—but if I might interrupt?”
“For God’s sake, do, Mike,” I answered quickly.
He smiled just a bit at that, then asked, in a voice that was still calm and controlled, “Could you tactfully take a look in your wing mirror and tell me what you see?” He was glimpsing as often as he dared into the rearview mirror, I noticed; and that was cause for concern. I carefully reached down to press the button that would manipulate the mirror just outside my window, hoping that Lucas would not notice the movement.
Which, of course, was an idiotic thought: having not only observed what I was doing but overheard Mike’s words, Lucas shot his head around to look out the back window, saying: “What? What is it, I don’t see any cops.”
“Shut the fuck up and turn back around, kid,” Mike said, keeping his order measured but stern. “Or better yet, sink down in your seat some. But do not turn your head around again…”
By now I had shifted my mirror to see just what Mike was talking about: “That,” I murmured, “looks remarkably like the cruiser we saw in Hoosick Falls. And the one guy driving it looks just as remarkably like the Fed we saw there, although they’re tough to tell apart.”
“ ‘Fed’?” Lucas echoed quietly, slipping down below the rear window. “As in ‘federal agent’?”
“Well, given your compulsion to show him your full mug,” Mike answered, “we’ll know in a couple of seconds. If they figure we made them, they’ll—ah, fuck, and there they go…”
“What, what, what?” Lucas asked, afraid to look up and out again.
“They just broke off,” I answered. “At the first available turn. Thus signaling, with their usual subtlety, exactly who they were.”
“Aw, shit…” Real apprehension now broke through Lucas’ usual attitude: “What the fuck, Mike, am I going to have to do hard time because you’re a shitty getaway driver?”
But Mike wasn’t even listening to him. “Keep your eye out, will you, L.T., and let me know if something or someone just as ‘inconspicuous’ pulls onto our tail?”
“Already on it,” I replied, my eyes on the wing mirror. “Take the Queechy Lake shortcut to 295—if it’s really them, and they’ve done their homework, their next logical pick-up point will be that shithole restaurant on the lake, right before we head west.”
“Yep,” Mike answered, focused intently on both the road and his rearview mirror. “You can sit up now, Lucas—they’re gone, for the moment. And I know I should’ve warned you, but—any time you hear me say something even vaguely like ‘Check who’s behind us,’ do not stick your sparkling little mug out the back window, got it?”
“Oh, I got it, all right,” Lucas answered, finally peering up and out the rear window again. “In fact, don’t be surprised when we stop for gas if you find out that I’m missing after you get back. I didn’t sign up for this shit.”
“We’re not stopping for gas,” Mike said. “We’re all topped off. And yes, you damn well did sign up for this. What’d you think, that the other side was just going to let us cruise down to the city without following us to find out where we go and what we know? Well, we’ll find out at Queechy Lake—if they’re not there, maybe they’re dumber than I think…”
The road between Routes 22 and 295, which wound around the remarkably undeveloped shores of broad, calm Queechy Lake, came upon us relatively quickly; and as Mike made the sharp turnoff and began the curving run, Lucas, his brain as ungovernable as ever, looked out and asked:
“Hey, what’s a ‘Queechy,’ anyway?”
The question surprised me: “You’ve never seen Queechy Lake before?”
“No,” he answered defensively. “Some of us never got the chance to go places, L.T. But what’s it mean, if that’s not too stupid a question for me to ask?”
“Not stupid at all,” I replied, still eyeing my mirror. “Just that nobody can answer you. The name is an old Mohican term—never been defined.”
“No shit?” Lucas said more quietly, watching the lake—which was always most scenic in late afternoon—with far more respect. “So, like, this is serious Last of the Mohicans territory, hunh?”
When I told him it was, the kid grew silent, having a moment that seemed profound—which made it all the more disheartening when I looked up and saw what we’d feared: the running lights of an unmarked cruiser like the one we’d just avoided, coming on as the vehicle started up on our approach to an old restaurant on the lake’s western edge. “Shit,” I said. “Okay, windows up. And hit the deck, Lucas. Mike, don’t look to the side—let me do it, we don’t want them to know for sure that we’ve made them…”
“Whatever you say, boss,” Mike breathed.
“Aw, really?” Lucas whimpered from the floor in the back. “I’m gonna spend the next
five to ten years getting ass-raped because you two clowns couldn’t figure out how to—”
“Shut the hell up, Lucas,” I answered. “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you, but we haven’t actually committed a God damned crime. So stop whining.”
“We haven’t?” the kid said hopefully. “We’re not, like, fleeing the scene of—”
“Of what? The most we could even get pulled over for is your presence, and since I have an agreement from your guardian saying that Mike and I represent your family, they can’t even try that. We’re being subtle, here, because we’d rather not be obvious about where the fuck we’re going.”
“Quiet, guys,” Mike said, now cruising to a stop at the intersection that would put us onto Route 295. Glancing into his mirror without moving his head, my partner frowned in disappointment. “Yeah—they’re coming behind us. At a distance, very carefully. Fuckers.”
“It’s all right,” I said evenly. “Our evasion plan will still work—we just know we were right about them taking an interest, so we’re lucky we worked it out. Now the problem is, how good are your driving skills, Michael? Think you can lose them at the 90 turnoff?”
“If I can’t,” Mike answered quietly, as we pulled out and headed west, “we may just have a problem…” He glanced into the rearview mirror and kept a very grim look on his face. “Because these guys seem to know what they’re doing. And that calls for some—extreme solutions…”
“Meaning what?” I asked, glancing into my wing mirror and seeing that the cruiser behind us was, indeed, executing perfect shadow moves: never too close, never too far, no chance for us to see their faces or anything else, but no chance—seemingly—for us to elude them, either.
“Don’t ask until it happens,” Mike replied. “Which may be sooner than we’d like to think…”
In the end, the success or failure of our attempt to elude the car that was now ghosting ours would come down (or so I thought) to some deceptively simple maneuvers: leaving the quaint little speed-trap town of East Chatham, where the posted limit suddenly sank from fifty-five to thirty-five miles an hour, then rose again a mile or so later, Mike would have to floor the Empress, until we hit the right-hand turn onto a byway called Rock City Road, which was the first leg of the winding route one had to take to gain access to the westbound lanes of I-90 and Albany beyond. The signs for the turnoff appeared only shortly before Rock City; so, assuming we could gain some distance on our company while they were still in the speed trap of East Chatham, it seemed just possible that we might be able to vanish from their sight at that point.