Lake Country (26 page)

Justin handed her the phone and said, “She wants to talk to you.”

Maya flipped up the visor and shook her head.

Justin shrugged. Into the phone, he said, “She says to tell you she’s not here.” He held the phone a few inches away from his ear. Maya could hear Rose Ann’s miniaturized voice cursing a blue streak over the speaker.

They rode mostly in silence after that, following the Suburban off the highway onto a paved country road. The sun had come up. The landscape had changed to woods and meadows. Ropes of mist hung over the trees. Maya waited for her own phone to ring.

After a little while, she got the sense that Justin wanted to say something. It took him a few more miles to work up to it.

“Hey, I don’t know if you knew this,” he said. “I went to Missouri too.”

Maya did know that. And Justin knew that she knew it. They’d talked about it at the Fox and Hound one night after work, Justin’s first week at News7, before he’d finally given up trying to talk Maya into the sack and had moved on to Kimberly Cross. She said, “Is that right?”

“I came through a couple years after you.”

More than a couple
, she thought, but she gave him credit for manners. “I’ll be darned,” she said. “Small business, I guess.”

“I guess so,” Justin said. “I had Slater for 452.”

“Yeah? He’s still there?” Maya knew full well that Gerald Slater was still teaching. He’d been her senior adviser, and they traded letters at Christmastime.

She thought again of the day they’d discussed the Vietnam photo in Slater’s class. She wondered if Justin Murdock’s class had done the same.

“He’s still there,” Justin said. “Still talks about you too.”

“Oh?”

“He does a couple days on those Hemlock Hill stories of yours.”

This, Maya had not known.

Justin said, “What was the name of that town?”

“Clark Falls,” she said.

“That’s it.” He nodded to himself. “You know, when I first came here, I was actually nervous to meet you.”

“Come on.”

“Seriously,” he said. “Came in sort of crushing, to be honest.”

Maya didn’t know what to say.

Tentatively, Justin said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Ask away.”

Justin watched the road as they followed the Suburban around a slow bend through a grove of pines. They lost sight of the truck for a moment. He picked up his speed again as the road straightened out. Little by little, they made up the distance, and Justin finally asked his question.

“What happened to you?” He glanced at her as he said it. “Sorry, that came out wrong. I only mean …”

Maya nodded. “I know what you mean.”

“No offense,” Justin said quickly. “I guess I was just … you know. Wondering.”

“If it’s contagious?”

“No, that’s not what I meant.” He paused. “Or maybe it was. Sort of. I don’t know.”

“It’s okay,” she told him. “I’m not offended.”

“You always seemed sort of … unbeatable, I guess.” He shook his head. “That’s not fair, I know. I haven’t been here that long, we don’t even really know each other. I’m just saying.”

Maya thought about how to answer him in a way that would mean anything. It was the question she hadn’t answered for herself yet, and she didn’t know how to answer it for Justin Murdock. In the end she took the easy way out and told him the honest truth.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It happpened while I wasn’t looking, for whatever that’s worth.”

Justin’s expression told her that it wasn’t worth all
that much. At least not much that he could personally use. And Maya understood that too. She wouldn’t have been able to use it either when she’d been sitting where Justin was sitting.

Her phone rang. Maya glanced at the screen, accepted the call, and said, “I was starting to think you forgot about us.”

“I’ve been talking to Macklin’s ex-wife,” Detective Barnhill said. “And a couple auto mechanics who work across the street from Macklin’s bar. We think we know where you’re going.”

In the dream, Mike sighted down his rifle from the edge of a rooftop, unable to see the ground below. A hot wind blew in from the desert, obscuring his view. As he squeezed the trigger, a shape emerged from the haze. The rifle punched his shoulder, the round cracked through the air, the target stumbled and went down in a pile. At that moment, the sandstorm parted and he saw the face of the enemy. It was his own.

Mike’s eyes fluttered open. He squinted against the glare of daylight streaming in through the cabin’s east windows. His head felt cracked; each heavy throb in his skull made his vision bend. As he tried to sit up, a rush of vertigo swept his balance out from under him, and he had to brace himself with his hands against the floor and wait for the room to stop turning.

A cool morning breeze drifted in through the screen door; Mike breathed the fresh air slowly in through his nose until his equilibrium returned. When he could move, he leaned against the couch and touched the back of his head. His fingers came away sticky with half-clotted blood.

Bryce the Fugitive Recovery Specialist sat in the leather chair a few feet away, boots up on the coffee
table, reading a back edition of
The Lake Country Herald
. He lowered a corner of the paper and looked at Mike over the edge.

“Morning,” he said. “I was starting to think maybe your head wasn’t as hard as I thought.”

Mike closed his eyes, but the vertigo returned, so he opened them again. Bryce had taken his feet down and set about folding his newspaper. He tossed the paper on top of the stack and leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

“You know,” he said, “I had this funny feeling you and I might cross paths again.”

Mike tried to swallow. His throat felt like a dry creek bed. He said, “Where’s the girl?”

“Why don’t you let me handle the questions? You’ve had a blow to the head.” Bryce reclined in the chair, then sighed. “Wouldn’t it have been easier on everybody if you’d just told me where I could find your buddy Darryl in the first place?”

Mike touched his scalp wound again. He felt a hell of a lump there, risen up in a bed of blood-matted hair like a pulpy orange with a split rind.

“Let’s work backward,” Bryce said. “Where’s the rest of the money?”

Without thinking, Mike reached for his back pocket. Empty.

“I know you’re probably thinking, this guy must be crazy to go to all this trouble over eleven thousand bucks,” Bryce said. “Am I right?”

Mike tried to pull himself together. He had to start thinking straight. He was in a jam here, and he needed a plan.

“Just so we understand each other,” Bryce went on,
“let me tell you the same thing I told the kid. It ain’t the money.” He shrugged. “But if I don’t
get
the money? Then I have to live the rest of my life with the idea that, somewhere out there, there’s a couple dumb-ass, low-rent, broke-dick leatherneck pussies walking around, believing they got one over on me. And that would disrupt my worldview. You know?”

Whatever Mike was going to do, he couldn’t do it from the floor. He hauled himself up and sat on the edge of the couch. His stomach lurched, and his vision smeared, and he was afraid he might vomit.

He hung on until the moment passed. When the couch stopped seesawing under him, he said, “How did you find the place?”

“There he goes with the questions again.” Bryce shook his head slowly. “You jarheads are stubborn, I’ll give you that. I just hope you’re not as stubborn as your buddy Macklin back at that shithole bar you like so much. Now
he
was hardheaded.”

Mike understood why Hal hadn’t called the police the way he’d promised.

Bryce said, “Do I have your attention now?”

“You have my attention.”

“Wow. If looks could kill, right? Lucky for me they can’t, I guess.”

“Lucky,” Mike said.

“Let’s try again. Where’s the money?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“It’s not your department, I get it. Who would I talk to? Let’s see.” Bryce pantomimed a man in thought. “Oh, right. Back to the first question. Where’s Darryl?” He put his elbows on the armrests of the chair, fingers laced. “I don’t know, maybe I’m
jumping to conclusions, but I just can’t help thinking that both questions have the same answer.”

The gun
, Mike thought, looking at the hardware hanging in Bryce’s shoulder holster.
If you want any kind of chance, you’ve got to get that gun away from him
.

As if reading Mike’s mind, Bryce reached under his arm and pulled the gun out of its seat. A big automatic. Nickel finish, black grip. He rested the weapon flat on his knee, finger indexed along the slide, muzzle pointing in Mike’s direction.

“Thing is, we haven’t got a lot of time left at this point,” Bryce said. “So let’s not make this harder than it needs to be. I’ll ask you one more time, and then it’s gonna get real easy. For one of us, anyway. Where’s Darryl?”

Mike had his eyes on the gun when he heard the rusty squeak of the screen door opening, followed by the wooden slap of the door dropping closed against the frame. He heard footfalls on the hardwood and looked up. The answer to Bryce’s question stood just inside the cabin, backlit by the morning sun.

At first Mike thought he was hallucinating. He hadn’t heard the sound of the Power Wagon coming up the lane. Hadn’t heard the porch boards creaking outside. Other than the sound of his own heart beating, and the occasional pop of an ember in the dying fire, he hadn’t heard anything at all. It was as if Darryl had simply appeared.

“Well, well, well,” Bryce said. He smiled. “What’s your name?”

Darryl ignored him. To Mike, he said, “The hell you still doing here, anyway?”

Mike couldn’t believe the stupid idiot had come back. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

Darryl shrugged. “Turns out that hospital in Brainerd never saw any dumbshit grunt come in with a cut-up hand and a cut-up girl.”

Bryce said, “Ahem.” He stood from his chair.

Darryl looked back and forth between Mike on the couch and Bryce the Fugitive Recovery Specialist. “I’m interrupting something,” he said.

Once again, Bryce had been right.

By the time Toby returned to the back bedroom, the girl was already down for the count. She was still on the bed where he’d left her, still curled up facing the wall. Her shoulders rose and fell in a slow, steady rhythm. Toby took the old rocker in the corner and sat with her.

He didn’t realize he’d conked out too until a loud noise woke him up so suddenly that he practically threw himself out of the chair. Daylight brightened the curtains over the bedroom window. How long had he been asleep?

Toby had no idea. All he knew was that it sounded like the cabin was falling in. He scrambled to his feet, feeling such great thuds and tremors through the floorboards that he could almost imagine something prehistoric coming out of the woods. Toby pressed his ear against the closed bedroom door and tried to listen, but he couldn’t hear anything besides a crashing racket.

What the hell was going on out there? A big part of Toby didn’t want to know. But he didn’t want to stay
trapped here in the bedroom like a rat in a box either. He looked at the girl. She hadn’t moved a muscle. Toby had no idea how she could still be sleeping through this.

He left her and crept down the hall. The commotion grew louder, and when he finally peeked around the corner, what he saw made his mouth go dry.

Mike Barlowe was sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth, clutching his right leg like it was trying to stand up without him. The leather couch was tipped over on its back, chairs overturned this way and that. There were blankets and newspapers and garbage strewn everywhere. The coffee table was a splintered pile of busted-up wood.

Toby saw that they’d finally accomplished their mission: They’d found Darryl Potter.

While Mike Barlowe writhed on the floor in obvious agony, Potter and Bryce circled each other in the rubble like a pair of wolves. From where he crouched, out of sight behind the corner of the sideboard, Toby found himself thinking about that thing he and his gamer buddies used to play in junior high:
Who’d win in a fight between King Kong and Godzilla?
Not in the movies, but, like, in a real fight.

Who’d win: Wolverine vs. Predator? Iron Man vs. RoboCop? Christopher Walken vs. Harvey Keitel? The list of matchups had gone on like that forever, and all these years later Toby found himself with a ringside seat to a sick one, an epic, live and just getting started:

Bryce vs. Darryl Potter.

Who’d win?

Toby watched Bryce shrug out of his empty shoulder
holster and toss it aside. He watched Darryl kneel down by the hearth and stand up again, holding a knobby stick of firewood in his fist like a club. He watched them circle, weave, and go straight at each other, and he decided then and there: He didn’t want to know.

Screw this. Just totally screw it. This wasn’t a video game. It wasn’t a movie from one of his buddies’ dad’s DVD collections. This was Uncle Buck’s fault, sending Toby a psycho like Bryce on what should have been a damn milk run. So Uncle Buck could deal with it. And Bryce could tell his own damn story.

Crawling on his hands and knees, Toby scooted out into the open, just far enough to grab Bryce’s leather jacket from where it had flown off the back of the couch and landed in a pile on the floor. Then he scooted back for cover again as fast as he could scoot. He dug around in Bryce’s pockets until he found the keys to the Navigator.

Toby stopped by the bedroom on his way out. The girl was still sleeping like the dead.

Unbelievable.

Screw it. It wasn’t like he could carry her out of there. He was a numbers guy.

He hustled through the kitchen, through the mud porch, and banged out the back door into the cool morning sun. Toby ran in a crouch around the front of the cabin and then sprinted up the lane. Past the shed. Around the curve of the lake. He didn’t stop until he reached the spot where they’d left the Navigator in the trees.

Parked directly behind the Navigator, blocking Toby’s exit, was an old white pickup, its warm engine
still ticking under the hood. Keys still hanging in the ignition.