"God, he's not coming this way?" Portia asked.
"No, he's going east." Lis looked at her sister. "It'll just be better to spend the night at the Inn."
"Okay by me." Portia shrugged and went to collect her backpack.
Lis rose. Owen squeezed her leg. What, she wondered, does that mean? Thanks? I won? I love you? Hand me my guns, woman?
"I won't be long. A few hours, tops. Come lock the door after me."
They walked into the kitchen and he kissed her for a long moment but she could see that his mind was already in the fields and on the roads where his prey wandered. He pocketed the pistol and slung his deer rifle over his shoulder. He then walked outside.
Lis double-locked the door behind him, watching him climb into the truck. She stepped to the window and looked down at the garage. The black Cherokee backed out and paused for a moment. The interior of the truck was dark and she wondered if he was waving to her. She lifted her own hand.
He pulled into the driveway. Of course Owen was right. He knew more about Hrubek than all of the pros did--the troopers, the sheriffs, the doctors. And, what's more, Lis knew too. She knew Hrubek wasn't harmless, that he wasn't wandering around like a dim animal, that he had something on his mind, damaged though it was. She knew these things not as facts but as messages from her heart.
Her cheek pressed against the window for a moment. She backed away and gazed at the uneven, bubble-flecked glass, realizing something she'd never thought of--that these panes had been made two and a half centuries ago. How, Lis wondered, had the fragile glass survived intact all those turbulent years? When she focused again on the yard, the truck's taillights were gone. Yet she continued for a long time to gaze at the shadowy driveway down which the truck had vanished.
Here I am, she thought in disbelief, a pioneer wife, staring into the wilderness after my husband, who's traveling through the night, on his way to kill the man who would kill me.
The lingering dust raised by the vehicles settled and their taillights vanished behind a hill far to the east. The night was still again. Overhead the clouds that swept in from the west obscured a sallow moon, which sat over a rock outcropping above the deserted highway.
There was as yet no hint of storm. No breeze at all. And for a moment this portion of highway was absolutely silent.
Then Michael Hrubek, pulling his precious Irish cap down over his head, pushed aside the grass and walked directly into the middle of Route 236. He replaced his pistol in the backpack.
GET TO
These words swam into his mind and floated there for a moment, doing slow loop-the-loops. He knew they were vitally important but their meaning kept evading him. They vanished and he was left with a prickling reminder of their absence.
What do they mean? he wondered. What was he supposed to do with them?
He stood on the asphalt and walked in a circle, searching through his confused mind for the answer. What did GET TO mean? Filled with a churning dread, he knew that they were jamming his thoughts. They: the soldiers who'd just been pursuing him.
Let's think about this.
GET TO
What could it possibly mean?
Hrubek again looked east down the highway, the direction in which the soldiers had disappeared. Conspirators! With their dogs on ropes, sniffing and growling. Fuckers! One man in gray, one man in blue. One Confederate soldier. And one Union, the man with the limp. He was the one Hrubek hated the most.
That man was a con-spirat-or, a fucking Union soldier.
GET TO
GETTO
Slowly the hatred began to fade as he thought about how he'd fooled them. He'd been only thirty feet away from the soldiers, holding his cocked gun, crouching down in a bowl of dirt high on a ledge of rock above them. They'd eased into the grass and found the bag he'd carefully placed there. Shivering with fear he'd heard their alien voices, heard the wet snorting of the dogs, the rustle of grass.
Hrubek saw the letters again, GETO. They floated past, then vanished.
Hrubek recalled the colored lights on the police car starting to spin. A moment later the soldiers returned to the cars and the one who hated him most, the lean fucker in blue, the one with the limp, got into the truck with his dog. They sped off east.
Hrubek crouched down and put his cheek against the damp road. Then he stood up.
"Good night, ladies . . ."
It was coming back to him. GETO. He squinted down the highway, westward. He was seeing not the black strip of asphalt but rather the letters, which slowly stopped swirling and began to line up for him. Like good little soldier boys.
GETO 4
Hrubek's mind was filling with thoughts, complicated thoughts, wonderful thoughts. He started walking. "I'm gonna see you cry. . . ."
GETON 4
There!
There it was! He began trotting toward it. The letters were all falling into place.
GETON 47 M
The dogs were gone, the conspirators too. The fucker with the limp, Dr. Richard, the hospital, the orderlies . . . all of his enemies were behind him. He'd fooled them all!
Michael Hrubek searched his soul and found that his fear was under control and that his mission was as lucid as a perfect diamond. He paused and set one of the tiny animal skulls in a nest of grass at the base of the post, muttering a short prayer. He then walked past the green sign that said RIDGETON 47 MILES, turned off the road into the cover of brush and began to hurry due west.
2/
Indian Leap
9
On her parted lips he rubs the petal of a yellow rose.
His eyes are fixed on hers, two feet away, close enough for him to penetrate the orbit of her perfume, not so close each feels the heat radiating from the other's body in this chill room. She reaches out for him but he motions curtly for her to stop. Her hands acquiesce but then rebelliously reach slowly to her own shoulders and dislodge the satin straps of her nightgown. They fall away and the cream-colored garment drops to her waist. His eyes stray to her breasts but he does not touch her and, as he again commands, she lowers her hands to her sides.
From the green-and-russet tangle of a rosebush, the reigning plant in the darkened greenhouse, he lifts away two more petals. These, pink. He holds them in his large, confident fingers, and lifts them to her eyes, which she closes slowly. She feels the petal skin brush over her lids and continue down her cheek. Again he makes a circuit of her mouth, both petals coursing slowly over her half-open lips.
She wets these lips and tells him playfully that he's destroying one of her prize flowers. But he again shakes his head, insisting on silence. She leans toward him and nearly succeeds in planting a contracted nipple against his forearm but he sways back and their bodies don't touch. A petal caresses her chin then slips from his fingers, spiraling to the slate greenhouse path on which they stand. He snatches another from the shivering bush. Still, her eyes are closed, her hands are at her sides. As he has insisted.
Now, he brushes her earlobes so gently she doesn't at first feel the touch of the flower's skin. He presses the valleys behind her ears and caresses the soft wisps of white-gold hair.
Now, her shoulders, muscled from carrying tubs of earth like that out of which these rosebushes grow.
Now, her throat. Her head tilts back and if she opened her eyes, she'd see a cluster of pale stars awash in the speckled glass. Now, he weakens and kisses her quickly, the petals disappearing from his spreading fingers, which grip her neck and pull her to him. Her breath, matching her desire, rushes inside her, pulling with it his own. She moves her head in a slow circle to increase the pressure of his touch. But he's too fast for her and he dodges away. He stands back again, dropping the crushed petals and tugging more from the thorny stem beside them.
Her eyes still are closed and the anticipation grows unbearable as she awaits the next touch, which occurs on the lower part of her modest breasts, and she sets her teeth as her lips spread in what could be taken for a snarl but is rather ev
idence of will. The roses move slowly along the arcs of her breasts and she feels too the drag of several of his fingers, a much rougher feel yet equally provocative. . . . Soft and rough. Fingernails, petal flesh. The heat of his touch, the cold of the greenhouse floor on her bare feet.
She feels pressure as slight as a breath. She's astonished that such a large man is capable of such subtle motion. He kisses her again and the sensations from his lips and fingers fire through her.
But he won't hurry. The pressure fades and vanishes and she opens her eyes with a plea for him not to stop. He again closes her eyes and she obeys, listening to a curious ripping sound. Then silence, as her neck and breasts are covered by two huge handsful of petals, which fall away from his hands and trickle to their feet.
He kisses each of her eyes and she takes this as the sign that he wants her to open them. They gaze at each other for a moment and she sees that, no, not all the petals have fallen. One remains. He holds it between them, a bright-red oval from a John Armstrong plant. He opens his mouth and places it on his tongue, like a priest dispensing host. She desperately works the nightgown over her hips and reaches for him, enveloping him in her arms, sliding her hands into the small of his back. He leans forward. Their tongues connect and as she pulls him down on top of her, they transfer the red petal back and forth until it disintegrates and they swallow the fragments as they swallow each other.
Lis Atcheson remained lost for a moment in this memory then opened her eyes and gazed out over the flowers in the greenhouse, listening to the pleasant hiss of spray from the watering system.
"Oh, Owen," she whispered. "Owen . . ."
She set down her packed suitcase and strolled through the damp, fragrant room, then out the lath-house door to the flagstone patio. She looked out over the lake.
The black water lapped persistently.
Troubled, she noticed that the level of the lake had risen another several inches in the last twenty minutes. She glanced to her left, toward a lowlying portion of the property--the dip in the yard behind the garage, where Owen had stacked the extra bags. A creek trickled into the lake there and the marshy shoreline was obscured with rushes. She couldn't see how well the barrier was holding but she didn't particularly want to walk down the narrow, slippery path to find out. Owen was a meticulous--often fanatic--worker and she guessed that he'd built a solid levee. Her own engineering efforts, in the center of the yard, looked shoddy. The water was almost up to the level of the bags she'd dozed upon after she and Owen had made love; it was only eighteen inches beneath the top row.
She walked closer to the lake. Above her, no stars. She couldn't even discern the underside of the clouds; the sky was flat and smooth, a gray-blue monotone, like the flesh of a shark. Were the clouds moving or not? Were they a hundred feet in the air, or ten thousand? She couldn't tell.
Vague motion, nearby, startled her. The shell of the large tortoise jerked again as the ungainly creature lumbered toward the lake. Fiercely intent on its goal, the animal scuttled over rocks and roots too high for its reptilian feet, slipping often. Why the urgency? Lis wondered. Was some eerie premonition about the storm prompting the thing to seek the safety of the lake? But what would a tortoise have to fear from the rain? With a loud splash the animal caromed off a willow root and sliced into the water. There, it became a perfect airfoil and cruised eloquently just beneath the surface for a short distance then dove out of sight. Lis watched its wake vanish and the water turn once again to rippling black silk.
She strolled back toward the house, through wide, trellis-covered patches of overturned dirt--her formal garden. She paused before the one rosebush that still retained a number of petals. When she was young, Lis had plotted to dye her hair the copper color of a plant this shade--an Arizona grandiflora--and paid for it with a whipping when her father, in one of his Saturday-morning raids on the girls' room, discovered the Clairol, hidden beneath her mattress.
She clicked a brittle thorn with her nail then lifted away a few dead petals. She rubbed them against her cheek.
The horizon in the west flared brilliantly with a broad gray-green flash. It had vanished by the time her eyes flicked to that portion of the sky.
The petals fell from Lis's hands.
She heard the kitchen door opening then closing. "I'm ready," Portia called. "You have your suitcase?"
Lis walked to the house. Gazing at the yellow windows she said, "Listen, I have to tell you--I've changed my mind."
"You what?"
Lis set her suitcase inside the kitchen door. "I'm going to finish the sandbagging. Taping the greenhouse. It could take an hour or so. I'd really like you to stay too but if you want to leave, I understand. I'll call you a cab."
Emil was sorely tempted by the aroma of grilling burgers and onions but he knew his job and kept his butt planted on the ground.
Trenton Heck himself cast a longing eye toward the truck-stop diner but at the moment the reward money was his main thought and he too ignored the smell of a much-desired cheeseburger. He continued his discussion with the Highway Patrol trooper.
"And he really seemed set on Boston, did he?" Heck asked.
"That's what the driver said. He was babbling about it being the home of our country or something."
Fennel, drawing nearby, said, "He was a history major."
Heck looked up in surprise.
"Yup. That's what I heard."
"He went to college?" This made Trenton Heck, with only eleven hours of credits toward an associate degree, feel very bad.
"One year only, before he started to go wacko. But he got himself some A's."
"Well. A's. Damn." Heck pushed aside his personal chagrin and asked the HP trooper if he'd have the truck driver step outside for a minute.
"Uhm, he's gone."
"He's gone? Didn't you tell him to wait?"
The trooper shrugged, looking placidly into the civilian's eyes. "It's an escape situation, not an arrest situation. I got his name and address. Figured he didn't need to stay around to be a witness or anything."
Heck muttered to Fennel, "Address isn't going to be real helpful. I mean, what're we supposed to do? Send him a postcard?"
The trooper said, "I asked him a bunch of stuff."
Heck slipped the harness off Emil. The trooper looked even younger than the Boy and would have no seniority over anybody. The Highway Patrol had a separate budget for salaries and they hardly ever fired anybody. Heck'd had the chance to put in for Highway Patrol when he first joined. But, no, he wanted to fight real crime.
"What was he wearing?"
"Overalls. Boots. Work shirt. Tweed cap."
"No jacket?"
"Didn't seem to be."
"Was he drinking?"
"Well, the driver didn't say. I didn't exactly ask that. Didn't see any need to."
Heck continued, "Was he carrying anything? Bag or weapon? Walking stick?"
The trooper looked uneasily at his notes then at Fennel, who nodded for him to answer the questions. "I don't exactly know."
"Was he threatening?"
"No. Just kind of goofy, the driver said."
Heck grunted in frustration. Then he asked, "Oh, one more thing. Just how big is he?"
"The driver said about six five, six six. Three fifty, if he's a pound. WWF wrestler, you know. Legs like a side of beef."
"Side of beef." Heck gazed into the blackness in the east.
Fennel asked him, "Is there enough trail to follow?"
"It's not bad. But I wish it'd rain." Nothing brought out a latent scent better than a gentle mist.
"To hear the weatherman tell it, you're going to get that wish in spades."
Heck hooked up Emil again and refreshed the scent memories of the dogs with Hrubek's shorts. "Find, find!"
Emil took off down the shoulder of the road, Heck paying out the dark-red rope until he felt the twenty-foot knot. Then he followed. Fennel and the retrievers too. But they hadn't gone fifty feet before Emil turned and nosed
slowly toward an unlit, dilapidated house squatting in an overgrown yard. A spooky-looking place, with a sagging roof and shingles like old snake scales. In the window was a sign. Hunting Goods. ETC. Deer dressed and mounted. Pelts bought and sold. Trout too.
"Think he's in there?" The Boy uncomfortably eyed the black windows.
"Hard to say. All that animal work'd confuse even Emil."
Heck and Fennel led the dogs to a cockeyed fence post and tied them up. The men drew their sidearms and simultaneously chambered bullets and put the safeties on. Heck thought, Don't let me get shot again. Oh, please. I got no insurance this time. Though what was behind this prayer wasn't hospital bills of course but the horror of a scalding bullet.
"Trent, you don't have to do this."
"From the sound of this guy, you need everybody you've got."
Conceding, Fennel nodded then motioned the Boy around back. He and Heck walked onto the front porch quietly. Heck looked at Fennel, who shrugged and knocked on the door. There was no answer. Heck leaned forward and looked through a grimy window. He leapt back suddenly. "Jesus! Oh!" His voice clicked into a high register.
Fennel drew down on the window with his Glock. He squinted. Then laughed. Six inches away, through the muddy glass, was the rearing form of a black bear staring out at them, taxidermied into ferocity.
"Goddamn," Heck said reverently. "Son of a bitch, I nearly dampened my pants there."
Fennel pointed to a sign propped in another window. Closed First Two Weeks of November. Happy huntin'.
"He's telling everybody he's going away? Don't this fellow know about burglaries?"
"He's got himself a watch-bear."
Heck studied the creature with admiration. "That'd be the first thing I'd steal."
Then they found the door that Hrubek had kicked in. The men entered cautiously, covering each other. They found the traces of the madman's shopping spree but it was clear he was no longer here. They reholstered their guns and returned outside. Fennel told the Boy to call Haversham and tell him where they were and that Hrubek did in fact seem to be making for Boston.
They were about to continue up the highway when the Boy called, "Hold up a minute, Charlie. There's something here you ought to see."