The Harder They Come (17 page)

And then, abruptly, the Mexicans pulled off on the shoulder and Sten hit the brakes, put on his blinker—pointlessly, but it was an old habit—and followed suit. There was a logging road off to the left and a hundred feet on and he wondered if that was their destination, if they had their camp somewhere in there and didn’t want to give it away. They were stuck, that was what he was thinking. Couldn’t go forward, couldn’t retreat. Check and mate.

After a while, the driver of the pickup shut down the engine. The sun climbed higher by degrees. Shadows shortened. A jay called from the woods. “What are they doing?” Carey asked. “Why are they stopping here?”

“See that road up ahead?” He indicated it with a thrust of his chin.

“You think that’s where they’re headed?”

Sten shrugged. His stomach rumbled. “They’re in a spot now. They hadn’t counted on us being here, that’s for shit sure.”

Another fifteen minutes ticked by on the dashboard clock. And then finally, inevitably, the driver’s door of the pickup flashed open and the older Mexican stepped out and started back down the road toward them, his steps slow and measured, the cap still at the same jaunty angle. His face was flat, boneless, almost as if
it had been scooped hollow, and his nose was flat too so that Sten wondered if he’d once been a boxer. Or a rodeo clown.

The man came up to the window and leaned down to look in at him. “You need help?” he asked, his accent slow and stopped-up so that “help” came out as “hell.”

“No,” Sten said, shaking his head for emphasis. “No, we’re fine.”

The man seemed to consider this a moment, his look unwavering, a hint of menace seeping like a tincture into his squinting brown eyes.

“How about you?” Sten said. “You need help?”

Sighing, the man drew himself up and said, “No, we doan need no hell,” and then he looked off in the distance as if to find the words there for whatever was to come next.

Carbofuran. It was one of the deadliest pesticides known to man. A couple drops of it would kill you. And what happened to the bears? They died clawing at themselves, their guts on fire.

“You sure?” Sten said.

Another sigh. The man bent to look in the window again, his eyes hardening. It was then that he let the flap of his shirt fall open so that Sten could see the polished wooden handle of the revolver tucked in his waistband, but that was a mistake and it was going to cost him because he didn’t know who he was dealing with here.

Sten shoved open the door so suddenly the man had to step back, and then he was out on the naked strip of pavement, unfurling himself to his full height so that now he was the one looking down. “You know what this is?” he demanded and he could feel it coming up in him all over again and there was no stopping it, though the man shot a look to his compatriots, who flung open the doors of the pickup even as the acrobat in back sprang out and began coming down the road toward them and Carey hissed,
Sten, come on, it’s not worth it, let’s go
. “This is America, you son of a bitch. The United States of America. You get that?”

The man rocked back on his heels, his eyes locked on Sten’s, and for a moment Sten thought he was going to spit at him the way the prisoner had in Costa Rica, but that didn’t happen and a good thing too because he was a beat away from losing it. Here was guilt. Here was the shit of the world come home to roost right here in the redwoods. The man scuffed his boots on the pavement, then swung round without a word and started back for the truck, his arms outstretched to usher the other three along with him. Sten watched them climb back in. The doors slammed. Sun glinted off chrome. And the truck sat there—and so did Sten—till the minutes became hours and Carey, in over his head, talked himself hoarse on the theme of giving it up, of getting out of there before somebody got hurt, because they weren’t vigilantes, were they?

Finally, and by now it was past noon, the pickup’s engine roared to life and the driver cut the wheels hard even as the man in back—the acrobat—leapt down and started up the road on foot. He was lithe, tall, rabbity, and by the time the driver had turned the truck around and started back down the hill, he was jogging up the road, the bill of his cap pulled down tight now, fashion sacrificed to exigency. “Where’s
he
going?” Carey wondered aloud.

Sten didn’t answer. He just put the car in gear, swung a U-turn and followed the pickup back down the road, all the way down, past the supermarket and back out onto the Coast Highway, where it turned north and kept on going. At speed. And here was where the big engine had the advantage, though Sten tried gamely to keep up. By Cleone, they’d lost them, but Carey got the 911 dispatcher on the phone as soon as they were in range. “What do I tell them?” he asked, his face blanched and the armpits of his T-shirt soaked through with nervous sweat.

Sten went silently through the list of crimes—Being Mexican; Driving a New Ford XLT; Buying Too Many Groceries; Acting Suspicious—but he was already signaling, already looking up the road for the next left so he could turn round and head home. It
was one-twenty in the afternoon. The meat was rotted, the milk gone sour. And the eggs. Nothing worse than the smell of rotten eggs. He turned to Carey, Carey with his bouncing knee and too much white in his eyes, Carey in his jogging togs, Carey the vigilante. “Just tell them they were brandishing a weapon,” he said. “That ought to do it.”

“D
OESN
’
T HE SCARE YOU
?”

She was in the kitchen of the house on the banks of the Noyo, a weak sun sifting through the trees, and Christabel, who didn’t even know him and who was probably jealous—definitely jealous—had called to see how she was getting along in exile.

“No,” she said, “not at all.” And that was the truth. Adam could be as strange as strange got, no doubt about that, but what Christabel didn’t understand was that underneath there was an essential sweetness to him, a boyishness, an innocence you didn’t find in the types that took up space in the bars and stomped up and down the aisles of the hardware store with the oh-so-pleased-with-themselves smirks on their faces, which, sadly, seemed to be the only types available to women like her and Christabel. Plus, he was young. And handsome. A whole lot handsomer than her ex, Roger, who’d let himself go till he wasn’t much more than a belly with pants on it—or anybody she’d dated since. And built. She told Christabel that, as if she needed any justification, because who she dated was nobody’s business but hers, not even her best friend’s.

“He’s like a rock. I don’t know what he does—I don’t see him lifting weights or anything—but he’s hard all over.”

“Don’t get dirty on me now.”

She laughed. “I’m not. Really, I’m not. Just stating the facts.”

There was a long exhalation on the other end of the line, Christabel blowing out the smoke of her cigarette, and she could picture it, the way she threw her head back and pursed her lips as if she were channeling the smoke through an imaginary portal in the sky and sending it right on up to heaven, to God Himself,
who, after all, was the one who invented nicotine. “You’re just a cougar, that’s all.”

She didn’t deny it. In fact, it brought a smile to her lips. “Who me?” she said, and they both laughed. Then she said, “I thought you gave up smoking?”

“I did.”

“So what’s that puffing I hear?”

“Just having a little taste to see what I’m missing. Isn’t that what you’re doing—with Adam? Because don’t tell me you’re serious—”

It had been a week since she’d moved in and if he hadn’t been around much, that was all right. He was mysterious, always out in the woods, and when he wasn’t he was lying supine on the couch in a clutter of books and notepads or just staring into the gray void of the TV, which looked as if it hadn’t worked in years. If he had anything to say at all it was about Colter—Colter this and Colter that, the same story, over and over. And the cops, the cops really lit him up. Ditto the Chinese. Colter, the cops and the Chinese, those were his themes. When he was talking, that is, which wasn’t much. He disappeared early each morning, before she was up, but he was always there for dinner and always glad to see the food dished out on the plate, whether it was meat loaf or mac and cheese or bean burritos. Glad for the sex too. She’d never known anybody like him—it was as if he’d been locked up in a cage his whole life. He wanted it. He needed it. He was hungry for it. And so was she. She’d been abstinent so long she’d forgotten what it was like to have your blood quicken just thinking about somebody, to feast on the smell of him, to find yourself getting wet even before he had his clothes off, even before he touched you.

“You want to meet him? See for yourself?” A pause. “He’s sweet. He really is.”

Christabel said something back, but it was garbled, hampered by the connection, the signal weak out here in the woods, and there was no landline—Adam had ripped it out. And why? He
claimed the phone had been listening to him, spying on him, and if she doubted that—CIA, FBI, his mother, the Chinese—she couldn’t fault his paranoia. Or was it even paranoia—or just wariness, just being hip to reality? They were listening in on everybody and tracking their e-mails too, and that was a fact.

“You’re breaking up,” she said. “It’s me. Wait a minute”—and she stepped out the back door—“is this better?”

“I said, after what you’ve been telling me, he sounds pretty strange. Even if he is a stud.”

“What’s strange? Everybody’s strange. You’re strange. I’m strange.”

“You can say that again.”

“No, seriously, you want to come for dinner?”

“When?”

“I don’t know, tonight?” It was a Saturday, the day they usually got together for dinner someplace and then the whole hopeless charade of bar-hopping, singles night out, as if there’d be any male in any of those places who would be of interest to either of them, every last one too old, too young, too stupid or too married.

“Come early. We’ll have cocktails. Four-thirty? Four, even?”

A silence, as if Christabel were weighing all the stacked-up options of her glittering social life, and then she said, “I don’t even know how to get there, like what road, it’s not even marked, right? And that’s another thing—it’s just crazy what you’re doing. You can’t hide out forever—”

“A week isn’t forever.”

“What then—you going to stay the full thirty days till the dog’s out of quarantine? You think that’s going to satisfy them? You can’t just—why don’t you at least take him to the vet and have the vet give him a shot or some kind of certificate or something?”

It was as if somebody had laid a cold hand on her back—or no, an ice pack. All her fear and hate gusted through her like an
Arctic wind and froze her right there in place, her boots stuck fast in the dirt, her frame as rigid as the cinder-block wall and the trees that stood motionless all around her. Christabel was right: she couldn’t stay here forever, plus Sten was closing on the place and there’d be a new owner soon. And where did that leave her? She couldn’t go back to her own house because they’d be looking for her there, at least till the quarantine was up, and Christabel’s apartment was the size of your average cell at the House of Detention and she wouldn’t have her anyway because she couldn’t risk harboring a fugitive. And that was just how she’d put it, Christabel, the coward, the wuss:
harboring a fugitive
. Bow down and kiss their asses, why don’t you?
I could lose my job,
she’d said.

The fact was, Sara had already taken the dog to the vet and already mailed the proof of rabies/parvo vaccination to the court, knowing it most likely wouldn’t fly since Kutya had bitten the cop
before
he was vaccinated. But it was better than nothing. At least she was trying, though they had no right in any of this except the right of might, the right of their fraudulent and blatantly unconstitutional laws and their storm troopers in the shiny taxpayer-bought cars. And the judges and the courts and the DMV and all the rest of the parasitic bureaucracy they’d imposed on the American public. It was a house of cards just waiting for somebody to blow it all away. The leeches. The bloodsuckers.

“I already did,” she said. “But I’m not going to stand around and wait for some dickhead in a patrol car to pull into the driveway with a warrant, I’m not that stupid. And I’ll tell you another thing: I blew off the court appearance too.”

“Great. That’s just fucking brilliant. What do you want to do, go to jail?”

No, she didn’t want to go to jail, but there was no way she was going to bow down to them because that would just make her a slave like everybody else. In three weeks she’d go back to the vet and have him certify that the dog didn’t have rabies, not then or ever, and if they still wanted to come after her for a bogus
misdemeanor charge of obstructing police operations (!!!), well she’d take that risk. And bet anything—bet anybody—they’d forget all about it. Really, even in their puffed-up sick little world they must have had better things to do than harass somebody over a dog and a seatbelt. Like catch a couple serial killers or rapists maybe, wouldn’t that be a start?

“Whatever,” she said. The sun was warm on her shoulders, already defrosting her. Birds sang in the trees. It was a beautiful day, a glorious day, and here came Kutya around the corner of the house to rub up against her leg and sit at her feet in a cascade of hair. Chicken cordon bleu, that was what she was thinking, the classiest thing she knew how to make, because this was an occasion, or it was going to be, and she wasn’t cowed or bowed or stranded like some refugee floating on a raft, and Christabel was going to see that and appreciate it and they were going to party on down as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “Christabel? You there?”

Another long exhalation,
pfffhhhh
. “Uh-huh.”

“Listen,” she said, “let me tell you how to get here . . .”

Then she was in the kitchen, cleaning up after breakfast. She’d made eggs over easy and Canadian bacon with fried tomatoes on sourdough toast, enough for two (cooking for two already a habit, after all these years of cooking for one, one only), even though Adam wasn’t there to share the meal. She’d wakened at first light to the gentle release of the bedsprings and there he was, naked and slipping into his camouflage pants, in too much of a hurry to bother with underwear. Or too manly. Or juvenile or whatever. He didn’t look at her, didn’t even glance in her direction. Thirty seconds was all it took to lace up his boots, throw on a shirt and disappear into the bathroom, where she heard the buzz of his electric razor. She’d watched him shaving two mornings ago just for the thrill of it—her man, hard as rock, shaving his
chin, his cheeks, circling the taut slash of his mouth, then running the razor up over his skull and down the back of his neck, thirty seconds more, and he never once looked at himself in the mirror. And why was that? Mirrors spooked him, or so he’d told her over their third glass of wine at dinner that night. “Why?” she’d asked. He’d just turned away and in that soft breath of a voice said, “I don’t like what I see in there.”

This morning she’d got out of bed while he was in the bathroom, throwing on a terrycloth robe his grandmother had left behind, and followed him into the living room. “You going out in the woods?” she asked, though she already knew the answer—and knew too not to pry. He had something out there, a bunker, a fortress—it could have been a treehouse, for all he let on—and it occupied him all day every day. Or maybe he was hiking. Maybe that was it. Whatever it was, it sure kept him in shape.

He didn’t answer. Didn’t even bother to nod. It was morning and in the morning he didn’t have much to say. They were close at night, in the dark, very close, but what they were doing together didn’t need words. When he’d been drinking, which was a pretty regular thing—daily, that is, and she joined him because why not?—he’d open up to her as much as he was capable of. He wasn’t a talker. That was all right with her. She could talk for two.

“You want me to make you a sandwich?”

Still nothing. He just slipped on his backpack, took up his rifle and slung it over one shoulder. She noticed he was wearing the knife he’d got at Big 5, the sheath looped over his belt at hip level. And he had his canteen, of course, dangling from the pack, and whether it contained 151 or water she couldn’t say. His boots shone—he polished them every night, the sound of the rag snapping back and forth the last thing she heard before he came to bed. Everything about him seemed to gleam in the light, from the boots right on up to the barrel of the rifle. For her part, she didn’t know one rifle from another—guns didn’t interest her—but this one was some sort of military thing with a clip on it. “What’s
with the gun?” she asked. “You going hunting?” And then she tried to make a joke of it: “Bring me back a couple of squirrels. I make a mean squirrel stew.”

He’d glanced up at her then, as if seeing her for the first time. His eyes were clear, a bright transparent blue that went so deep she could have been looking into the ocean and seeing no bottom to it at all. “For protection,” he said.

“From what?” And she couldn’t help herself: “Cougars?”

If he heard her, if he recognized she was making a joke, he never let on. “People,” he said, “motherfuckers, creeps, assholes. Cougars eat deer, people eat everything.”

“And they’re not going to eat you?”

He gave her a smile then—his version of a smile, anyway, the corners of his mouth lifting ever so subtly in acknowledgment—and started out the door, ducking his left shoulder automatically so as not to strike the lintel with the muzzle of his rifle. She wanted to call out to ask him if she should expect him for dinner, but checked herself—she wasn’t his mother. She wasn’t a nag either. And what he did, for as long as he was going to do it, didn’t matter to her. This was temporary. It was a week. Maybe it would go three weeks more. Or maybe . . . but she didn’t want to think beyond that.

She went to the door and watched him stride to the cement-block wall and go up and over it as if it were nothing. Like Jackie Chan. Or the new James Bond, whatever his name was. And what was that martial arts thing called, where you just run right up a wall?
Parkour
. Adam was a master of that. Of course, he could have just strolled through the doorway his father had made, but he refused to—he wouldn’t acknowledge it, didn’t even seem to see it. If it was up to him he’d seal it up again, she knew that, but then it would be pretty inconvenient for her when she wanted to haul in a load of groceries or take the dog out for a walk, and what was she going to do, use the stepladder? Plus, how could you sell a house with no way in? And Sten intended to sell it, no matter
how his son felt about it, and he’d taken her aside and told her as much. The house was in escrow and he didn’t want anything screwing up the deal—the buyer was a friend of his and Carolee’s who was taking the place as is, grandmother’s furniture and all, and he’d agreed to let Adam stay on till the end of the month. Her guess was that they needed the money to pay down the mortgage on the new place in Mendocino, which had ocean views, and ocean views were anything but cheap.

Crossing the yard herself now, Kutya trotting along behind to pause and pee and sniff at her ankles, she came through the doorway just in time to see Adam heading down the slope to the river. The sun glinted off his shaved head and sparked at the muzzle of the rifle, and then he was in the shadow of the trees and she lost him a moment before he reappeared on a bend in the path, moving fast, double time, always double time, as if somebody—or something—was after him.