The Rivers Run Dry (37 page)

I stumbled outside. We were shuffling, walking unevenly, Lowell limping beside me. The cars passing on First Avenue streamed white and red lights that shivered across the black night. I looked down, staring at the pavement, trying to shield my eyes from the neon in the windows, the street lights, the lights on the ends of cigarettes, lights flashing off Lowell's white teeth.

The food in my stomach climbed the back of my throat.

“Here we are.” He leaned me against the back passenger door, unlocking the car. I closed my eyes.

“You better lay down,” he said.

I felt him pick me up, wrapping an arm behind my knees, the other under my neck, as I collapsed across the backseat. He adjusted my arms and legs. Something like a blanket dragged my legs down. Then my hands.

“You'll be fine,” he said. “Take some deep breaths, Raleigh.”

I closed my eyes. One deep breath. I heard the car door close, the engine turning over. I took another breath. The car was moving, a gentle rocking motion. I took another deep breath and opened my eyes. The street lights were passing across the windows in perfect hexagons, purple magnesium and red iron and the bright yellow of pure gold. When the hexagons began cart-wheeling across the black sky, I decided I was seeing the chemical compounds, the shifting shapes of molecular structures as they formed into new minerals and the color changed. I sat up, fascinated.

“Feeling better, huh?” Lowell glanced in the rearview mirror. “That's a good girl. We'll be there soon.”

In front of us, two cones of white light tunneled down the highway. On either side, tiny lights danced. I tried to scoot to the side window, but couldn't get there and leaned over. The lights were moving to music. I could hear the abrupt pentachords the lights danced to, up and down, and realized it was water. Lapping water. Why was there water?

“Where . . . ?” I was confused. “My house?”

“I'm taking you somewhere better,” he said. “You're going to love it.”

I stared at the back of his head. He was nodding. When I looked down at my hands, they seemed foreign and familiar all at once. Two circles of gray metal wrapped around my wrists. I lifted my hands, the short chain clinking, secured to the car's floor. My heart jumped, as though trying to escape my body.

I opened my mouth. But what came out was not human. It was something guttural, the tortured response of a deaf mute.

“Now you're getting it, Raleigh. We're going back to the mountain. Let's try again. I don't know about you, but that last time was no fun. No fun at all. It just frustrated me.”

I pulled my hands up. The chain snapped. I pulled harder. Each effort more difficult.

“Look at that,” he said. “Half gone and you're still going to fight. Man, I love that about you.”

I kicked my feet across the floorboard, finding the chain bottom. Air seemed to leak from my lungs. I watched his eyes in the mirror, small blurry marbles, the shadows falling from his brow. He was speaking but I could not understand his words, his mouth seemed to move like somebody reciting vowels in an exaggerated manner, and I felt a distant buzzing sensation somewhere near the base of my spine. The sensation burred against my skin, running circles around my hips. Then suddenly, it stopped. And started again.

I threw my body against the seat.

He started laughing.

Paralytic, hands bound, mind firing with hallucinogens, I threw my body against the buzzing sensation. When it finally stopped, I leaned forward, resting my forehead on my forearms, my hands clasped together.

“Wh . . . wh . . . ” I tried again. “Where. Where are you taking me?”

“If I told you that, Raleigh, it wouldn't be a surprise. And you like surprises, don't you? You liked surprising Courtney. And you liked surprising me, taking her away. Now I get to surprise you.”

The Blazer swerved right. My body tumbled, caught by the chain before I hit the side door. Pain ripped across my face. I closed my eyes. No more fireworks, no more streamers. But even with my eyes closed, I saw molten lava running down a mountainside, bright red as blood.

He stopped the car and unlocked the chain, leaving the cuffs on. Pulling me off the seat, he yanked my head back, speaking into my hair, the same way he'd whispered on Tiger Mountain. Once again, he told me the rules of his game, how much fun we were going to have as he hunted me. I felt his hands, tearing at my waist.

The phone snapped off my belt.

“Did you call somebody?” he demanded.

I didn't reply. I couldn't.

“Don't want to play fair?” he whispered. “We won't play fair.”

Fair. Fair. Fair. The word trailed across my mind as if written in electric green neon. I begged the lights to stop dancing. But when they did, I wanted them back.

The woods were solid black. He was counting off the numbers again . . . “One . . . Two . . . Three . . .” His wicked version of hide and seek.

I stumbled forward, my hands cuffed in front of me. The trees loomed, long-armed creatures with seaweed hair. I saw scabs of blood on the rocks. The quarter moon sliced a black curtain like a guillotine. I fell, got up, fell again.

He would find me.

I turned in a circle. Darkness, darkness everywhere.

“I'm coming, Raleigh.”

Through the forest, I watched his flashlight flickering. I stared at the trees around me. They were dark columns, their high branches like umbrellas above my head. I walked behind one of the thick trunks and leaned my face against the bark. I could still see his strange light approaching, like a diaphanous white cylinder, falling through the forest.

I didn't want to die. And I couldn't fight him by myself.

When I lifted my head again, his feet were passing beside the tree. I didn't move. I didn't breathe. But suddenly he slowed, just as he'd done before, his predatory instincts those of a hungry animal. I watched him make a slow turn, sniffing the air for my scent, and I felt an odd resignation. Here. In the woods. No way out. It was beyond my ability to win. He still had his back to me, his sensory gifts telegraphing my close position. As I stepped out, he started to turn.

But he was too late.

My hands were already raised and I dropped the cuffs over his head, yanking the titanium links against his throat. A gurgling sound crawled from his mouth. He dropped the flashlight. With his free hand, he clawed at my skin. With the other, he beat against my arm with his gun. I twisted, pulling my body away. The gun waved through the dark, a spasmodic threat. I yanked harder, and for some reason I heard his gurgle as the color puce, an ugly smudge that disappeared into the dark. When the gun fired—white light—my arms burned. But I did not feel pain. Instead, I felt warm, an enveloping sensation that pervaded my arms, my heart, my legs. There was no fear. Because I could not win. I knew that. It was not my battle.

I felt a quick snap in his neck. He dropped, limp, dead weight that took me down with it. We fell as one to the forest floor and lay beside each other, close as lovers. I listened, not releasing my grip until he stilled, then shoved my knees into his body, rolling him, and removing my handcuffs from his neck.

I stood, looking down at Officer Lowell.

The flashlight lay on the side of the trail, burning like a box of sunlight. When I picked it up, it felt heavy. I tucked it against my waist, pointed it at the ground, and slowly made my way back through the trees, the rocks, the night. It appeared to be filling again with strange colors.

chapter twenty-nine

J
ack Stephanson stood at the foot of the white bed.

“Get me out of here,” I said.

He kept staring at me.

“Hello? Get me out of here. I hate hospitals.”

“Raleigh, who am I?”

“You're Jack, a major pain in the—”

“Who do you work for?”

“The FBI. What is this, an interrogation?”

He sat on the corner of the bed. “You've been fading in and out all night. I want to make sure you're all there. You keep calling me Daddy.”

My face burned with embarrassment. “Just get my clothes. They put them in the bathroom.”

“McLeod promised to fire you if you walk out again.”

I dropped my head on the pillow. Two IVs ran into my left hand. “How long have I been in here?”

“You're going on twenty-four hours,” he said. “Your aunt just left with that crazy clairvoyant.”

I waited. “What happened to Lowell?”

“He's in ICU. You crushed his windpipe, gave the guy a tracheotomy. Not bad for somebody on acid.”

“Is that what it was?”

“Blood tests showed LSD. You were tripping so bad, they knocked you out so you could sleep it off.”

The pictures came back suddenly, brutally. “I was sitting at a table with him. I ordered a Coke. My phone rang. I went out-side—it was you.”

He nodded. “Your car broke down taking Felicia into rehab. You asked me to get that junker towed. You said Lowell called it in to the state police, but they had no report of it. And then they said Lowell wasn't even working. That's when I got concerned. Did you notice him following you?”

“No. But I wasn't looking for him.”

“I called your cell a second time, after I found out he wasn't working, it rang and rang. Then I heard you gasping. Harmon, you sounded like you were croaking.”

I was. “How did you find me?”

“I was calling you from the office line. I used my cell to dial 911 and they got coordinates on your cell phone—Bureau phones have embedded GPS. The pings pinpointed your location, right off Sunset Way. Issaquah PD fired up cruisers, sirens blaring. And ten minutes later you come walking out of the woods like Gretel on acid.”

“It was him. All along.” I felt sick.

“Harmon, just because a guy carries a badge doesn't mean he's on our side.”

“Badger,” I said.

“What?”

Badger,
I thought. Claire the Clairvoyant had seen a badger, foaming at the mouth. And this badge that turned. “This feels so personal,” I said.

“Him coming after you?”

“That, and the betrayal. He acted like one of the good guys.”

“Couple years back, we had an agent who double-dipped on drugs. When it all came out, I started to wonder who to trust. But I got over it.”

“How?”

“Start counting the good ones, the really good ones. They outnumber the bad, by a wide margin. And you'll appreciate them more when you realize what it takes to stay good.” He paused. “I'm going to call McLeod, see if we can spring you out of here.”

He patted my leg and walked out of the room.

It took me four days to approach normal. When I asked to come into the office, McLeod sent me away. Finally, he told me to drive over to the VanAlstyne's estate.

“The wife wants to talk to you,” he said.

All the unmarked sedans were gone, and Mrs. VanAlstyne answered the bell herself. The assistant Sequoia was nowhere to be seen.

I followed her through the foyer, into the grand living room, the house filled with a strange quiet. When we sat on the moss green couch, she placed an electronic baby monitor on the coffee table.

“She's having nightmares,” she said, by way of explanation for the monitor. “The doctors said I need to be there as soon as she wakes up.”

After somebody's worst secret is exposed and they realize they're going to live, the extraneous parts of their life tend to disappear. Only the elemental remains. In the case of Alex VanAlstyne, her hair appeared wiry now, strands of gray lifting from the shanks of platinum. She rested her hands in her lap. She needed a manicure.

“My husband and I want to thank you,” she said.

“You don't need to.”

“I realize we did not get off on the right foot at the beginning. But of course we were under such pressure. We were so worried. You understand.”

“Yes, I do.”

“I want to extend an apology for our previous attitude toward you. And toward the FBI. If there is ever anything—
anything
—we can do for you, please let us know.”

“Thank you,” I said.

But her eyes held a question.

“She's asking to see her father. I know she means her birth father. The psychiatrist believes it would be a good idea. But I haven't contacted him because, well, didn't you suspect him of being involved in all this?”

She wanted the wedge to widen. But Bill Johansen was nothing more than a wild-eyed born-again Christian, a believer modeling his life after John the Baptist.

There was a connection, however, and it was significant.

“Mr. Johansen has a neighbor who calls the police regularly about his dogs,” I said. “The officer who came out on the complaints became a regular visitor. Mr. Johansen is a talkative sort, and he eventually told the officer about his concerns for Courtney, about her lifestyle. He asked the officer to talk to her at the casino, thinking it might scare her. The officer learned all the details of her life, including what she was worth, monetarily speaking. He befriended her, learned all about her life. And when he wrote the ransom note, he knew Johansen's penmanship. And then the shirt,” I said.