Cold Springs (31 page)

“The funny thing is,” David Kraft said, “I came back to Laurel Heights thinking I would make peace with the place. I wanted to help the capital campaign. I wanted to forgive them for failing Katherine. For failing me. And what's the first thing I find out? You. Ann Zedman had accepted you as a student, let her own daughter be friends with you. And I understood from day one what your family was doing, Race. Fuckin' A. They were pissing on Laurel Heights, shoving you in everybody's faces. For months, I thought about killing you, but I'm not an animal. So I planted the gun in your locker. I made sure you got kicked out. But you're a tenacious little prick. You and your family—I don't know how you managed it, but you got the capital campaign funds and pinned it on Mrs. Zedman. You killed John Zedman, made it look like Chadwick did it. You set that all up beautifully. And I started figuring, well what the hell? Let's see how far the little prick can take it. So I called the media for you. I did every fucking thing to fan the fire, make sure Laurel Heights went down in flames. But the thing is, Race—you've done about as much for me now as you can. You're part of the problem, too. Your family can't just walk away. So tell me the truth now—who's got the money?”

Race thought about it—the answer least likely to get him shot. “Samuel.”

“I'd like that. I'd like to believe he's alive. But see, I heard the hesitation there. I think Samuel's dead—a guy with an attitude problem like his couldn't live to be an adult. So who's got the money, Race? You might even live, you can tell me that.”

“I don't have any money.”

“One . . .”

Race imagined he was back on the fire escape, the metal rail peeling into oblivion, and Chadwick catching his arm—giving Race the chance to kill him, shoot him right in the face, but it would mean falling, bike-pedaling through five stories of air, and Race knew that was no choice at all. He had to live. He had to let Chadwick live. Even then, he couldn't fire a gun. How could he fire it now?

“Two . . .”

“There's nobody else,” Race said. “It's just me. Just me.”

“Three. Turn your back to me, Race. Kneel down.”

“You'll never get the money.”

“The money is secondary, Race. Very, very secondary. Now do what I said.”

Race turned, sank to his knees. His hands grabbed his ankles, and he felt the .22 in its holster.

“You know what I got in the car, Race? I got lead weights. Big, bowling-ball-sized things. They hold down plastic tarps in windstorms. I'm going to rope them around your ankles. You'll go down in fifteen feet of water right here—standing up. At low tide, the sunlight will just touch your fingertips. And you will rot there. Nobody comes here, Race. Nobody except me. This place is mine. Now I'm going to share it with you.”

And Race looked out over the dark stretch of shoreline—rocks and wind and the stench of dead fish, an acre of desolation with a view of two cities.

He felt the boards bow under David Kraft's weight. Race's fingers worked their way into his pants leg, around the grip of the .22.

“Don't forget your Mickey Mouse,” he told Kraft. “It's in my pocket.”

“Katherine's,” he corrected. And he patted Race's head, affectionately. “She gave it to me the week before she died. I'll remember, Race. Now why don't you pray or something? Do people still do that?”

And Race did pray, as he slipped the .22 out of its holster, trying not to move a single unnecessary muscle. He imagined his soul rising out of his body, the way his mother had always told him souls did, and choosing between trains—a BART train riding west, into the city, toward Norma Reyes, who was standing in her bathrobe on her porch. Or a fiery train east, toward Mallory and Texas, toward the Caldecott Tunnel where Samuel's condominium smelled like death, and Race would be another voice, another wisp of evil for the radio to drown out.

“This is for Katherine,” David Kraft said.

He gently pushed Race's head down, to expose his neck, but Race fell sideways, turning, bringing his gun up to David Kraft's wide eyes so that two blasts sounded at once—a single bright snap that echoed over miles of empty water and dissipated in the roar of the evening commute.

34

Mallory woke with a start. There were snuffling noises in the darkness, something scuttling through branches.

The fire was dangerously low, and she was still shivering. Her clothes felt like plaster of Paris, melted against her skin, and snow had frosted her shoes where they stuck out of the hollow tree.

At the edge of the red arc of firelight Mallory saw something rustling in the brush. She thought about the thing that had followed her yesterday. She moved her arm slowly, wrapped her fingers around an icy rock the size of a grapefruit. A month ago, she wouldn't have had the strength to lift it. Now, she hurled it at the dark shape—hoping she pegged it.

There was a sick crunch, and then a flurry of scuffling, which died down but did not go away.

Drawing her knife, Mallory advanced and found that her rock had landed squarely on the head of a football-sized . . . something. A giant roly-poly bug with hair. A thrill of terror shot up Mallory's spine, until she realized what it was—a stupid armadillo.

Its armor hadn't helped the poor thing. Its snout was crushed, and it was lying on its side, one glazed eye red in the firelight, a bubble of blood coming out of its nostril. Its claws scraped weakly at the air.

Mallory's fear turned to shame. She hadn't even managed to kill it, just torture it.

She was too numb to think. Some other part of her took over, and she approached the thing with her knife. She stuck at its head. The first stab missed, but the second hit home. It was still not quick, but the thing died.

It was the first time Mallory had killed, and she didn't like it.

She sat there trembling. The armadillo's smell was horrible—some defense mechanism, Mallory guessed—but she couldn't move away. She knew she should stoke the fire. She would probably die if she didn't.

In the end, the cold wasn't what got her moving. It was hunger. Mallory was disgusted with herself, but she realized the knot in her stomach wasn't revulsion, but the desire to eat.

She had killed her first animal. She felt like she owed the poor thing something—to make something good come out of its pain.

I can't eat that,
she told herself.

But the answer came immediately, Of course she could. Hadn't she seen them hanging dead in shop windows in Chinatown?

They have leprosy or something, Mallory remembered. The thing is disgusting. It's probably crawling with parasites.

So are you,
came the answer.
You have a day to walk. You'll never make it without food.

In a daze, Mallory went into the woods and got more wood. She heard more rustling sounds in the darkness, wondered if the presence that had followed her the day before was still out there.

Let it come,
she thought.
I'm tired of being scared.

She stoked the fire to a blaze. Then she went back to the armadillo.

She touched its shell, which felt like a warm patchwork of toenails. She turned the animal over and looked at its furry underbelly, its claws. She counted to herself—one, two, three—then made the first cut, splitting the body from neck to anus.

She was no hunter, no country girl. The best she could think of to give herself courage were science class dissections—she and Race freaking out over the fetal pig they'd named Wilbur—but the dissections hadn't been in the dark, with no gloves, and with the intent of eating the subject.

Mallory turned aside from the smell and the gore several times and tried to retch, but there was nothing in her stomach, and her hands were sticky with blood. She couldn't turn away from the work. She was covered in it.

She worked as if she were under a shell—as if she were the armadillo, and most of her upper brain functions had retreated into a safe, hardened place, leaving her body to its butchery.

At last, the armadillo was gutted, and Mallory had four slimy strips of flesh spit on a branch like a bloody shish kebab. She let the meat cook over the flames, watching the tiny slivers hiss and sizzle and burn at the edges, and her revulsion turned to fascination, and then to ravenous hunger. The smell was cooking meat, and her stomach approved.

She carried her prize down to the river and washed her hands, which seemed like an absurd civility once she'd done it. Then she went back to the fire and ate the meat, so hot it burned her tongue. It was tough and fine-grained, and tasted like pork chop. Mallory finished it all.

As she ate, she thought she could feel her eyes clearing, but then she realized there was a faint gray glow on everything. The dawn was coming. In the distance, she could hear a sound like sirens, but she knew it must be something else—some kind of bird waking up, or some forlorn animal.

She would walk again today, and she would get herself out of the woods.

A new energy wound up inside her like a motor. She looked at her hands, wondered how much of the red was fire and how much was blood.

Her old fears seemed absurd to her now. They belonged to a little kid two thousand miles away. Mallory could handle herself. She could damn well handle Samuel.

She made herself a promise that she would tell the truth when she got out of the woods.

Mallory sat, becoming comfortable with the idea, steeling her courage. The cold didn't seem so bitter now, and she sat by the fire until the sun came up, a murky yellow stain on the thick gray clouds.

35

Chadwick dreamed the snow was turning to rain, drizzling against the doors of the porch. He dreamed of police sirens, and his own breath turning into the soft vibrations of a silenced cell phone.

His eyes opened. His cell phone was rattling on the nightstand. There was a warm empty furrow in the sheets where Ann had been, and the rain he'd imagined was the shower in the bathroom. Somewhere in the distance, emergency vehicles keened like coyotes as they moved through the hills.

The morning sky was dismal gray. Chadwick had a moment of disorientation, wondering why the windows were on the wrong side of the room, why his bed was against the wrong wall. Then he remembered, halfway through the night, Ann had moved down the hall to her guest room. She had insisted, in case somebody knocked on Chadwick's door in the morning. She didn't want to embarrass him. But he had followed her, and the next few hours had infused his limbs with a pleasant weariness he was reluctant to shake off.

His phone vibrated again. He picked it up. The LCD read:
7:06 A.M. Caller: Cold Springs.

He didn't recognize the speaker at first—a woman's voice, asking what the hell he had done.

Chadwick processed the question. “Kindra?”

“The FBI,” she told him. “Get the hell out now.”

“What?”

“That guy Laramie, a couple of other feds, maybe half a dozen county deputies. They just left here for the Hill Country Sheraton.”

He knew the police were scheduled to visit Cold Springs this morning. He was prepared for that. But seven in the morning?

He was about to tell Kindra he wasn't at the Sheraton. He was right upstairs, probably not fifty feet from her. But the sirens kept wailing, fainter and fainter, and some instinct told him to keep his location to himself.

“What happened?” he asked. “They found Pérez?”

“Yeah, they found him.”

“He making trouble for us?”

“The biggest kind, Chadwick. He's been murdered.”

Each granule in the texture of the ceiling abruptly came into sharper focus. He sat up in bed. “Where?”

“You don't have time, Chad. Those cops—”

“Tell me.”

A beep—a waiting call on Chadwick's end of the line—cut off part of Kindra's profanity.

“A farmer found the body,” she told him. “Pérez was laying face up on the side of a dirt road, tangled in a fence. According to Laramie, he was hit by a car, then took a bullet in the head. Satisfied?”

“We left Pérez alive.”

“Yeah. And then what happened?”

“I didn't kill him.”

“Shit.” Jones almost sounded disappointed. “That lady at the convenience store—she called us in, gave the police our description. African-American woman, six-foot-eight white guy, psycho runaway girl—how many trios like us in Fredericksburg? I don't know how Laramie knew to question your little friend Joey, but he did that, too. They had me answering some pretty uncomfortable questions. The things they were saying about you . . . I'm sorry, Chadwick. I had to tell them about the Sheraton. Best I could do is warn you.”

In the bathroom, the shower drizzled. Ann's voice hummed a soft tune that sounded like a lament.

Chadwick reached under the bed to retrieve his gun box, then remembered he wasn't in his room. “Kindra, listen—any cops still at the school?”

“Three or four. Plus the sheriff. Why?”

“What are they doing?”

“Pissing off Hunter, mostly. They had a search warrant for your room. Hunter wouldn't let them search the rest of the lodge, so now they're waiting to get a new warrant faxed over. That guy from Oakland, the homicide sergeant—”

“Damarodas is there?”

“Yeah, the FBI dudes and he didn't get along too great. They left him here while they went after you. Damarodas wasn't too happy about that.”

“What about Mallory?”

“I'm supposed to pick her up from the woods right now. Damarodas has a court order to see her. Hunter was going to fight it, but after the news from San Francisco . . .” She hesitated, as if waiting for him to finish her sentence.

“What news?”

“Don't yank my chain.” Kindra's voice sounded brittle. “Did you do it, or not?”

“Should I pick an offense, or are you going to tell me?”

“John Zedman's body was found yesterday, in a townhouse in the Mission.
Your
townhouse.”

Chadwick stared at the clouds. He thought if he could just get to the window, crack it open and let the cold air sting him awake, he'd be okay. He'd realize Kindra's voice was just another sound he had misinterpreted in a dream.

“Zedman was shot dead,” she said. “He was wrapped in a plastic shower curtain, driven into the city, hauled up a flight of stairs by somebody pretty strong, then stuffed in a small storage closet, doused in cologne to hide the smell. Sick shit, Chadwick. Killer could've just dumped the body in the ocean off Highway 1, but he wanted Zedman to rot in your old house, where your daughter died. Damarodas said the placement of the gunshot wounds was a lot like what happened to that kid nine years ago—Samuel Montrose. They figure the murder happened about the time you were in town, the night you and I separated.”

Chadwick's mind fought the image, rejecting it like a splinter under the skin. He tried to remember John in his linen shirt and pajama bottoms, standing on his porch in Marin, the sunset at his back. John drunk on champagne, a $7,000 kindergarten quilt draped over his shoulders as he goaded Chadwick to show him karate moves. John clasping his shoulder, his breath stinking with gin, telling Chadwick that everything would be okay—they could tackle any problem. They had daughters to think about.

“Chadwick?” Kindra asked.

John could not be dead. Chadwick could not have spent the night with Ann—finally given up his guilt, tucked it under his bed for a few hours with his gun box—only to receive this news.

“Listen, Chadwick.” Kindra's voice caught on his name. “Get off the phone, all right? Move. I don't care what you did, just get out of town. They catch you . . . Shit— I got to go.”

The line went dead.

Bathroom faucets squeaked off. Pipes shuddered. The roar in Chadwick's ears didn't subside.

He stared at the LCD on his phone:
You have missed one call.

He didn't want to retrieve the number. He figured the FBI wouldn't leave a message anyway. But he checked it, saw the San Francisco area code, the little envelope icon indicating voice mail. He replayed it.

Norma's voice:
“Pick up, Chadwick, you sorry
pendejo.
Race Montrose is here with me. Listen to him.”

The boy's voice came on the phone.

Chadwick listened, and for the first time he understood the trap closing around him. He saw everything he cared about destroyed, himself left alive to take the blame. And the last person to die would be the one Chadwick's conscience could least bear to lose.

He can describe her day,
John had said.
He can tell me what she had for breakfast and where she slept and every punishment you put her through.

Chadwick buttoned his shirt, tugged on his boots. He thought of Mallory alone in the woods, her GPS bracelet blinking, betraying her exact position.

Ann came out of the bathroom wearing a White Level standard-issue towel, water beading on her shoulders. Her smile died when she saw his expression. “What is it?”

“Get dressed.” He tossed her a blue dress from her suitcase. “The police are here. They think we're in San Antonio, only reason they haven't busted down the door yet.”

“Bust down the door? Why?”

He told her the news—Pérez dead, John dead. He told her about the phone call from Norma and Race.

Her face, already flushed from the shower, turned redder. She crumpled the dress in her hands, threw it at his face. It expanded between them, the shell of a woman, then melted to the floor.

“You—did—this.” Her words punctured the air like an ice pick.
“You
brought me here. You brought this on my daughter.”

“Ann—”

“I should have insisted on seeing her, taking her home. But I stayed with you. I chose you over my family again. You pulled me off course, yanked me into some goddamn fantasy. Norma was right, Chadwick. She was right about you.”

His chest hurt from her words, but he concentrated on Mallory—on the steady green blink of her GPS bracelet, the morning hike that would be taking her closer and closer to the dirt road that wended through the center of Cold Springs.

“Ann, listen. We're closer than anyone thinks—that's our only advantage. I know the pickup area. I can get to Mallory. But we're losing time.”

“The police are here. You said so. Tell them.”

“The sheriff won't believe us, even if we had time to persuade him. We have to get to Mallory
now.
Ourselves.”

A knock on the door—hard, insistent.

Chadwick held Ann's eyes. If she opened that door, if she trusted the police, Mallory died. And yet, he knew there was no winning for him. Even if Ann trusted him, he felt certain he would leave this room having lost her—having finally awakened her to the fact that he was as good for her as a cold knife across her neck.

A muffled male voice told Ann to open up. The voice called her by name, announced himself as a police officer.

A screen rolled shut over Ann's face—the intimacy of last night, the tenuous happiness of five minutes before completely locked away.

“Go,” she whispered. “I'll stall them. Go out the window.”

“But—”

“My daughter,” she said, her eyes hard. “Save her if you can, Chadwick, but I won't trust you with that alone. I'm talking to the police. I'll open the door whether you're here or not. Now get the hell out.”

And then he was on the porch, and over the railing.

From his own balcony, Chadwick would've landed in the snow—a short, gentle slope, only a few feet from the concealment of the woods.

From Ann's balcony, he realized where he would land only mid-fall, after gravity made second thoughts impossible. He dropped straight onto the back deck of Hunter's office, crashing on top of a county deputy. The deputy's temple connected hard with the icy wooden railing on the way down. Hunter and Sergeant Damarodas stood three feet away, frozen in mid-conversation. In that second, Chadwick might've escaped—over the edge of the deck and into the trees—but by the time he recovered his own equilibrium, Damarodas had a pistol in his hand.

“Mr. Chadwick,” he said. “You're working on your entrances.”

“Stow it. Mallory Zedman is in danger.”

Hunter and Damarodas traded looks, as if this continued a topic they'd just been discussing. Chadwick sensed a kind of reluctant alliance between them, and he registered what an odd pair they made—Asa in his brown Armani suit, his hundred-dollar silk tie, the outfit he reserved for courtrooms and television appearances; Damarodas looking like a fast-food restaurant manager in his polyester blends and his blue tie that might've been a child's clip-on. Only their expressions made them soul-mates. They were soldiers pinned down in the same trench—men who had been forced to swallow a sour solution to a mutual problem.

“We got to stay right here, amigo,” Hunter told him. “My lawyers are on the way. Until then, I'm afraid you've already given Laramie and Kreech enough rope.”

“Asa, give me the GPS locator. Otherwise Mallory's going to die.”

The tendons in Hunter's neck strained to burst his collar. “Jones is on the way to pick her up. Olsen is following her in the woods. She'll be all right.”

“You're wrong.” Then Chadwick told them about the call from Race Montrose. At Chadwick's feet, the crumpled deputy groaned, curling tighter into fetal position.

“The sheriff will never believe this shit,” Damarodas said, but Chadwick could see his mind working furiously, fitting the pieces into place. “We leave this lodge, especially with an injured deputy lying there—we're going to bust open a legal shit-spout a mile high. Special Agent Laramie's gonna get a hell of a promotion.”

“Damn,” Hunter said. “God damn it—nobody fucks with my trust that way.”

He reached in his coat pocket and threw Chadwick the GPS locator—a green bar of plastic the size of a deck of cards. “You'll never make it on the roads. Police got the gates blocked.”

“Straight overland,” Chadwick said. “Faster, impossible to follow. Gray levels should have the stables open by now.”

“You're certifiable,” Hunter told him. “Damarodas, give him your gun.”

“What?”

“He overpowered you,” Hunter said. “Remember?”

From somewhere inside the lodge, Sheriff Kreech's voice called out, “Mr. Hunter! Where the hell'd you go?”

Chadwick locked eyes with the sergeant.

Damarodas raised his gun. Then he dropped it, raised his hands in surrender. “Shit-spout a mile high. I'm going to fucking hate myself in the morning.”

Chadwick scooped up his gun and hit the railing—tumbling toward the woods and the river, where islands of snow were spinning downstream.