Here Be Monsters (Tyler Cunningham) (12 page)

Tupper Lake, Stewart's Convenience Store, 1:47a.m.,

9/9/2012

“George, are you awake?” he had taken four rings to answer his phone, and sounded groggy when he mumbled something into the phone.

“Who the fuck is this, and how'd you get this number?” it sounded as though he didn't like being called on his private cell number.

“It's Tyler, George, the guy you tried to kill a few days ago, despite some perfectly good reasons not to do just that.”
I let that sink in, and waited on the line, listening to his breath for a few seconds.

“I told those morons that if they didn't see you dead, you're not dead, but in truth, I figured you probably drowned or bled to death.
Why am I talking to you instead of a tac-team of State Troopers? Not that I mind, but it don't make sense.”

“I want the same thing now that I wanted before...
to be left alone and living... only this time I want some money also.” I assumed that he wouldn't believe my motivations this time either, unless I added greed into the mix.

“How much, and why should I leave you alone instead of actually killing you this time?”

“I want $50,000 in twenties and tens, and you shouldn't kill me because this time I actually did leave a note, and this time I have more than guesswork... I literally know where the bodies are buried.”

“OK, come out to the house tomorrow morning for coffee, and we'll work it out.”

“No chance George. I left a GPS and a note explaining the way we're going to do this in the mailbox at the end of your driveway... don't tell the post office, it may be illegal... I want you to follow the GPS to a set of coordinates already programmed into it... there will be a note in a baggie giving you coordinates to another note, and so on... I'll be watching at one, or more, of the spots to see that you're not bringing a mob with you, and that you've got the money. After a couple of stops and bounces, I'll meet you at a final set of coordinates down near Old Forge. You give me the money, I go on a short vacation, and when I come back, I'll find someplace else to live, thanks to your relocation funds.”

“Sounds mostly OK, except I'm bringing my guys, so you don't ambush me in the woods.”

“If by guys, you mean Barry and Justin, that's all right with me, but nobody else... no new faces.”

“Fine, whatever.
Do I gotta get going now, or can I sleep until a decent hour?”

“Sleep George, you'll need your rest tomorrow...
wear clothes for hiking, and bring water and snacks for all day.”

“Fuck you!”

“Sleep tight.” I hung up, figuring that we were done.

I had gassed up and grabbed some food and water at Stewart's (
paying cash so as to leave no trace in case of subsequent inquiries
) and dry-swallowed another round of the dog-meds. I had a short drive to the spot where I was going to hide the second note, with the coordinates in it for the third location. My aim was to take George and the boys on a series of hikes to tire them out and get them used to being alone in the woods, seemingly wasting time. By the time we met up for the exchange later in the day, I wanted them all to be stressed and stretched-thin and ready to be caught unaware for the twist that I had in mind.

Bog River Falls Bridge, 2:31a.m., 9/9/2012

I have no idea why the bridge up above the Bog River Falls was built, but it looks to have been abandoned before it was ever put to use; I planned to make good use of it tonight and tomorrow. Route 30 is a two-laner, and Route 421 is a tiny road off of that; the bridge was on a tinier road (
really an overgrown Jeep trail now
) off of that, which didn't lead anywhere except to an infinite supply of wilderness. The road leading to the bridge has been mostly reclaimed by the forest, and walking down the cracked pavement mostly by feel in the glow of my headlamp's lowest setting, I was, as always, surprised when the clean and angular lines of the bridge loomed out of the dark.

It stretched more than 100 feet across the river, and was nearly four lanes wide.
I had spent a night hanging underneath the bridge (
from the network of support beams
) the previous winter in my hammock. That underside was my goal now. On the far side of the bridge, I climbed around and underneath the structure and climbed up and into the girders to hide George's second note where it would be plainly visible when they arrived. I was feeling a bit sore and tired by the time I climbed out from under the bridge and walked slowly back to my car to wait for dawn or a phone call, whichever came first. I checked to make sure that my phone was charged and that I had enough bars to make/receive a call, set my alarm for 5:30a.m., moved the car a bit down the road (
just in case George and company arrived earlier than expected
), and washed more doggie-pills down with a Gatorade before going to sleep. Dot was supposed to call me in a bit, but I had an alarm set just in case.

Bog River Falls Outlet, 6:37a.m., 9/9/2012

“Morning Boss! This is your henchperson, Dorothy, calling to report in on enemy troop movements. Out.”

“Dorothy, you're using a cell-phone, not a 'walkie'.
You can just talk, no need to use communications jargon... although I like the idea of having a 'henchperson'. What's going on?”

“First, Boooooo about no comms-jargons!
Second, thanks! Third, I was parked at the Bartlett Carry turnoff like you suggested, and a couple of minutes ago saw a single yellow crew-cab truck go by. I pulled out a minute later to follow them down the road. I had to slow down a bit at the Panther Mountain parking lot to avoid two guys, one looked like Justin and the other had to be Barry based on your descriptions. I didn't see George, but he could be letting them climb the mountain while he finishes his first cup of coffee. There were no other cars or trucks with them in convoy or in the parking lot”

“Thanks Dorothy!
Did they see you?”

“Not likely...
I kept my high-beams on when I passed, and they were focused on finding the trailhead. I made the turn at Wawbeek Corner, and drove back into cell-range down by the Upper Saranac boat launch. They should be back down in a few minutes, do you want me to circle back and report when they are headed your way?”

“Nope, thanks for the offer, but you should go to work and help clean and feed homeless beasts.
I feel bad enough that I've involved you to this extent, but I couldn't figure out how to watch them and get done what I needed to do. Now though, you should clock out as henchperson, and clock in at the shelter. I'll talk to you later.” Strangely, I felt as confident as I sounded, although there were probably a nearly infinite number of things that could go wrong from here on out; things were going to get exponentially trickier and riskier until a tipping point sometime around midday when they would resolve themselves in one of only two ways... that I could see.

“Good luck, and Tyler...
do what you have to do to come home tonight, OK?” I don't think that Dorothy had figured out my endgame yet, but if she had, I'm sure that she would have approved. She sees the world in simplistic terms, and tends not to worry much about what happened yesterday.

“Will do.
Remember to drop your phone and SIM-card in two different lakes on your way to work, and give Gandhi a cookie from me. Evil Mastermind over and out.” I closed the clamshell phone, walked over to look at the Bog River dumping into the bottom of Tupper Lake, stripping the SIM-card and battery out as I went and chucked the phone and card as far as I could (
tossing the battery into the lower end of Tupper Lake seemed needlessly eco-hostile, and I regretted not mentioning it to Dot, although she would probably forget to ditch the phone altogether
).

I walked to the Element and hopped in, ready to turn it around and get headed towards the end of George's treasure hunt, realizing how much I didn't want a flat-tire or dead alternator right now.
The car started up and seemed to run smoothly enough as I pointed it towards Long Lake and points south. I could feel George and Justin and Barry move through a similar arc in time space about one hour and 30 miles behind me.

Hoss's
Country Corner, 7:58a.m., 9/9/2012

I had stopped in Long Lake to top up my gas and get some cokes and jerky and nuts to keep me going for the day, when the sign at Hoss's grabbed my attention. Hoss's has grown from a simple country store into a complex of connected buildings and services, offering everything from Adirondack souvenirs to fancy coffee to haircuts to bait to ice cream to internet access... it was the last that pulled at me, despite the fact that I was in something of a hurry. I gave the bored kid at the counter a twenty dollar bill, indicating the coke I had taken from their cooler and an unoccupied computer with the same waving hand gesture. Signing in, and then logging in to my iGoogle page and gmail was a matter of a minute, and gave my significantly-too-crazy day a slight tinge of normalcy; weeding out the hundreds of useless emails to end up with three that I wanted to read took a few minutes though. The first was a robo-email from the TLAS, inviting me to a food-related benefit for the beasts, and I RSVP'd in a fit of optimism (
hopefully not jinxing myself).
The second was from Gregory Simmons, saying that Jacob Hostetler had come by with a still warm apple pie and ten pounds of smoked bacon from his farm, begging Mike to pass them on along with Jacob's desperate pleas to come up with a more meaningful way to let him thank me for saving his daughter's life (
that seemed a bit dramatic to me, but with farm-fresh Amish bacon in the equation, I was willing to live with it
). The third was from Meg, reminding me about dinner tomorrow night, and that I had agreed to bring dessert; I googled tiramisu, found a couple of the best/easiest recipes, and emailed them to myself. I threw all of the emails into a “9/2012” folder, and logged out... of gmail, igoogle, and Hoss's system... and eventually, Long Lake.

Out in the Element again, I tried to figure out where Justin and Barry (
and maybe George too
) were at this point; my mental map and timing mechanisms placed them in Tupper, driving prudently (
there are lots of cops on all three roads in and out of Tupper
) with coffee and donuts from Stewart's past the huge swamp where I had seen my first Adirondack moose a few years earlier. They would likely be tromping out to the ghost-bridge in a few minutes and back on the road only a bit after that; I needed to get moving. I was having more fun than seemed proper or judicious or moral, and had to tell myself not to forget why I was doing this, remembering my not-so-great best-case version of how the day would end; even so, I still felt good, despite the steady ache in my shoulder. I swallowed my next round of pills, a bit early but I might not get a chance later in the day, dropped off another treasure-hunt note at the next site, and drove towards some serious middle of nowhere, to get lost, and hopefully find the solution to my problems.

Deep woods near Tahawus, 9:28a.m., 9/9/2012

The road up to Tahawus from Newcomb, New York, is like a portal through time. The road ends at a trailhead leading hikers up into the High Peaks Wilderness through a back door that allows them to avoid the crowds that you tend to see when hiking in from the Lake Placid side. Also on the road from Newcomb is a ghost town, the leftovers from a series of mines and mining enterprises over the last 150 years; they have taken lead, silver, garnet titanium, and iron out of the mountains in unbelievable amounts over the last 150 years. The wild country is a mix of private and public land, but both the public and private lands are generally deserted and abandoned; it was the perfect setting for the scene that I wanted to play out with George and his guys.

I came across my first wilderness mine shaft almost ten years ago, while exploring another chunk of wilderness a bit south and east of this spot, closer to Lake Champlain.
I did some online, library and physical research, and found that there were dozens, maybe hundreds, of them scattered throughout the Adirondack Park, some only a few yards from mouth to terminus, some going unbelievably deep into the Earth. Over the years I'd found some, explored a few, mapped more for future exploration, and even thought about building a home or retreat inside one; which prompted more research and learning about caves and the special circumstances and care and procedures for spending time in what I had heretofore considered to be just holes in the ground. It was another example of mapping unknowns to expand my world, in this case into the subterranean. In cataloging and examining my world map, this was the best cave that I could think of for the use that I had for it today.

I didn't think that Barry and Justin were trackers, but even though they would expect to see some sign of my earlier passage, I wanted to minimize my impact on the forest around the mine opening, so that they wouldn't be thinking of me; just a walk in the woods to get another set of coordinates in a colossal waste of time before they could meet, and most likely kill, me.
I had parked the Element far enough away (
and on a side road leading away from the coordinates
) so they wouldn't pass or see it when trying to find the closest spot on the road to the coordinates that I had given them. I walked up to the yawning and hungry mouth, dark in the bright woods, carefully picking the spot that each footfall would land, and thinking my way ahead through the next few hours (
equally carefully picking the spot where each future action/reaction would take me
).

I had picked this mine because my memory of it indicated that it would meet my needs perfectly.
It was on private land, which would discourage trespassing, but the owner was an Italian mineral exploitation consortium that had been sitting on the property for years. They had fired the property manager years ago when they realized that he cost more per year than any damage done by vandals could possibly amount to over the course of a decade. The mine opening was big enough that it wouldn't threaten Barry or Justin too much, unless they were severely claustrophobic, in which case I was counting on their allegiance to (
and fear of
) George to keep them moving inside. The opening went into the side of the hill at a few degrees below the horizontal for about twenty feet before it began sprouting smaller side-passages to the left and right and came to a T-junction about a hundred feet in. The tunnel going to the left from the T-junction went about thirty feet before ending in a wall, the one to the right went the same distance before the floor dropped away; as I remember, the pit was roughly a hundred feet deep (
a dropped rock took a touch more than two seconds to splash into the water at the bottom
). The pit was about ten feet across, with a single ancient plank across it making a bridge to the far side where the tunnel continued for another ten feet before a turn in the shaft ended my knowledge of what came next (
I was exploring alone, and had no desire to test the plank's strength after who knows how long in the mine
). I emptied my Gatorade, re-checked my gear, pee'd against a nearby tree, turned on my headlamp, and headed into the mine.

I paid special attention to the floor of the mineshaft as I picked my way in, mostly smooth but with some rocks and sticks in places. I didn't leave footprints so much as disturb the stuff on the floor, and since I couldn't avoid doing that, I decided not to worry about it.
When I was most of the way down the shaft, I scouted the remaining side-tunnels, and picked one about twenty feet before the T-junction and put my shoulder bag and gear a few feet in behind a pile of ancient boards and wire. I continued down to the T-junction, cracked a chem-light, placed it gently on the floor, and placed another one eight feet back from the edge of the pit, on top of a Ziploc bag containing the note for George and Barry and Justin. Mission accomplished, I retraced my steps, grabbed my gear, and prepared myself for the next stage of this plan.

I spent a few minutes wondering if I should be concerned about my lack of guilt, or if I should worry about trespassing, or any of the other, more serious, crimes that I was about to commit.
I concluded that, while perhaps I should, nobody blames a snake or a pig or a dove for being a snake or a pig or a dove (
certainly not the snake/pig/dove
), and so I wouldn't blame me for being me. This was almost certainly a specious argument, but I had an easy time convincing myself (
which is, at the end of the day, the wonderful thing about specious arguments
). I enjoyed some more philosophical games and riddles, and was able to ignore the wet and cold for a while, until I heard Barry and Justin twig-snapping and huffing and cursing their way through the woods towards me.