Dead Level (21 page)

Probably not. Eastport, with its saltwater-soaked air and its stubborn pride, rah-rah boosterism staggering companionably along beside pockets of crushing poverty, was in his blood as surely as the fat globules that floated off his meals of fried fish.

Left on High Street, left on Battery Street, out to South End and back, then out County Road to the town garage … when he’d finished his routine, he decided on the spur of the moment to do it over again. But even on the second go-round, there was no sign of Sam anywhere, or of Wade Sorenson, either, and no one seemed to at be home when Bob drove by their house on Key Street.

Jake and Ellie were probably still up at the cabin. So maybe the
two old people who lived there—Jake’s father, Jacob, and his wife, Bella—had gone somewhere, too: shopping in the market town of Calais, maybe, thirty miles distant. Lousy night for it, the smears of rain on Bob’s windshield alternating with streaming downpours as he drove, but it was the simplest explanation, and so probably the correct one.

Bob hoped that later when he went to the Happy Crab he would find Sam and Wade enjoying their own deep-fried dinners. Probably he would; thinking this, he reached for one of the sugar-free candies he kept in the car’s cup holder, unwrapped it, and popped it into his mouth.

The sour watermelon taste had begun spreading on his tongue when the squad’s radio blatted out a burst of static. Then a tinny voice out of county dispatch began relaying the information that there was a vehicle off the road, back in among the trees on Route 190.

Bob recognized the location, a mile or so past where he had just turned around and driven back into town. A passing motorist had called it in, the dispatcher said. Bob depressed the speaker button, bit down on the watermelon candy, swallowed the pieces, and hit the gas pedal, swinging the car around hard and flooring it as he spoke, identifying himself.

“On it,” he added, thumbing on his light bars and siren as the car’s speedometer leapt to sixty, wondering as he swung into the curve past the Mobil station whose family he would be either calling or visiting later this evening, depending on how bad the news was that he would be obliged to deliver.

The last thing Jacob Tiptree remembered clearly was seeing a deer step out of the brush by the side of the road. It was a doe, plump after a summer of garden grazing, mowing down lettuces and nipping off dahlias; now in autumn the deer herd had mostly moved to their wintering grounds, out here along the highway.

He might not have seen her at all if she hadn’t turned, her eyes reflecting
redly in his pickup’s headlights in the moment before she leapt.

He didn’t know how long ago that had been. Someone moaned in the darkness beside him.
Bella …

He couldn’t speak, understood distantly that it was because his face was jammed up against the steering wheel. It was cold in the truck’s cab, which felt unnaturally small and closed in, so they might’ve been here awhile.

Crushed in here … He tried to reach out for his wife, with him in the demolished pickup truck. But when he tried to move, a pain like a lightning bolt shot across his shoulder and into his chest. Something held him tightly between the wheel and the seatback; after a moment he realized that it was the engine, halfway into the passenger compartment.

Now he could smell motor oil, the sweet chemical stink of antifreeze, and the acrid reek of burnt electrical insulation. But not gasoline, thankfully. When he wiggled his face to try to free his lips, at least, he felt stuff crinkle from his forehead. A bit of it fell to his mouth, and when he tasted it he realized it was dried blood.

So they
had
been here awhile. Hours, maybe … There’d been no one in sight when they went off the road.

“Bella,” he whispered.

Silence. He couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not. Fear poleaxed him, turning his blood to cold sludge and his gut to a lump of ice. Then:

“I’m here, old man,” she whispered “But I can’t …”

“Don’t try to move.” Talking set something inside his mouth to bleeding again; he tried to spit, couldn’t, and swallowed the blood instead, felt he was going to vomit and knew he mustn’t.

He could feel her gathering herself beside him, getting her wits about her, her voice a little stronger when she spoke again. But what she said scared him more than anything so far:

“There’s a lot of blood.” Then she coughed, a wet, bubbling sound
that could not mean anything good, that went right through his heart like a sword. “Jacob …”

“Shh. Just hang on now, old girl, we’ll be all right. We’re not far off the road; somebody will see us. People go by here all the time. Someone,” he promised, “will come.”

But the truth was, he didn’t know how far off the road they might be. He didn’t remember swerving to avoid the deer, or if he had; he didn’t know whether they’d hit it or not, or how far the truck had traveled before striking something, a tree or a granite outcropping.

The crash had burst the truck’s windows, scattering glass pellets. He could feel them in his hair and on his face, stuck to his skin. Rain began, slanting in coldly, drenching and chilling him to the bone, and when he shivered, the pain went through him once more, worse now that he was awake and alert.

But the worst part was that Bella had fallen silent. Jacob couldn’t get an answer out of her anymore, and pretty soon he quit trying, fearing that any effort she made might be the thing that used up the last of her reserves, or nudged something wounded to bleed again when otherwise it might’ve stopped.

Maybe she was unconscious, or maybe she was just saving her strength. He hoped it wasn’t anything worse, and he had no way of finding out. Eventually he let his neck relax, resting the bridge of his nose against the wreck of the steering wheel, letting the pain wash over him. The pain, really, was nothing to him if Bella didn’t make it all right.

He still couldn’t move, though, and now his neck and back were stiffening up, freezing him rigidly into position. He sat that way for a long time in the cold and wet, in the darkness of the smashed-in truck cab. Thunder began rumbling, getting nearer; soon lightning flashes whitened the crazed safety glass of the truck’s windshield.

If Bella had a cellphone in her bag, he didn’t know about it, and he wouldn’t have been able to reach it, much less work it—he couldn’t feel his fingers, and his feet seemed not to be down there below the busted dashboard anymore, either—if he had.

He whispered her name again, and got no answer. Outside, the rain came down steadily. He lost consciousness once more, and sometime after that when he awoke to a siren’s wail and lights flashing, he hardly cared, certain that they were already too late.

By the time glass had finished falling out of the cottage windows, Ellie and I were on the floor, crawling together toward the woodstove and the chimney behind it. From the chimney, it was a quick scramble around and into the kitchen alcove.

Neither of us could breathe right, we were so scared, and we couldn’t see, either; the lights were shot out, it was pitch dark and raining outside, so there was no moon, and we couldn’t turn on a flashlight even if we could find one, because then whoever was out there could see us, too.

“Who?” Ellie whispered when she’d gotten her wind back.

“No idea.” Except for the rain still pattering down, there was only silence out there now. “But if whoever is out there gets in here with the shotgun,” I said—from the way the windows blew in, I thought it must be one—“we’ll be sitting ducks.”

I felt her nod beside me. “As small as this place is, just shooting randomly around a few times’ll do it,” she whispered.

How, I wondered, could this be happening? Two minutes ago I’d been tucked into a bed, tired from a day’s work, and now …

“Okay. My bag with the phone in it is on the counter,” I said.

Because we had to get out, and we had to let somebody know what was happening. Toot sweet, as my son, Sam, would’ve put it.

And the truck was right outside. “You run for the passenger door and I’ll jump in and start it,” I whispered.

“Uh-huh.” A pause, then, “We should call someone
before
we go. I mean, so they know what happened in case …”

In case we don’t make it
. That feeling of unreality washed over me again. But: “No. My phone’s turned off.”

I’d checked for messages after dinner, found none, and had
planned to do so once more before I fell asleep, just in case someone from home really needed to talk to me. In between those times, though, I’d turned it completely off to save the battery.

“It chimes when it powers up,” I added. Which we obviously couldn’t let happen. In all this quiet, the sound would be plenty loud enough to betray where we were.

Ellie sighed. “Okay. We can do it on the way out.”

Of the woods, she meant; in the truck. I snatched my bag off the countertop, hunkered back down. No sound came from outside, and neither did another shotgun blast.

Keeping low, we crept quietly from behind the counter, past the chimney on one side and the steep open stairs leading to the cottage’s second-floor loft area on the other. At least whoever it was hadn’t caught us up there, where we’d really be trapped.

Small comfort, but by that time I was willing to take whatever I could get.

Putting my hands out blindly, I found the doorknob and turned it silently, then swung the door open, fast. “Go, go, go,” I chanted, and Ellie flew out with me right behind her.

We scrambled into the truck, and I found the key in the cupholder and jammed it into the ignition. The engine roared and the headlights came on, a sudden blare of illumination: trees, boulders, and brush but nothing and no one else.

I stomped the gas and we shot out of there like our hats were on fire and our tail ends were catching, as my dad would’ve put it, out through the open gate toward home.

“Damn,” said Ellie as we bounced along the dirt road.

“What?” I glanced over at her. She was frowning at her cellphone, which she’d plugged right away into the dashboard charger.

“Battery’s dead again. Maybe it’s …”

The truck’s glaring headlights turned the forest into the set of a low-budget horror movie, garish and stark. I flung my bag sideways at her, grabbed the wheel again as we hit a rut.

“Use mine.” She took it; the familiar chimes tinkled as its screen’s
greenish glow lit. Which was when I realized what it was that I hadn’t noticed when we first got into the truck.

“Ellie—” Her scream cut me off; I slammed on the brakes. A man stood in the road smack in front of us, grinning.

Holding a shotgun. The sudden stop jolted us both forward; I felt the steering wheel slam my rib cage, heard Ellie’s hands smack the dashboard’s hard plastic.

And when I looked up again, the man was gone. “Ellie, when we got in the truck there were no …”

Lights. The interior cab light hadn’t gone on. Neither had the two little bulbs by the rearview mirror.

“I can’t find it,” said Ellie frantically, scrabbling around on the floor and then patting at the seat around her. “The phone, it fell when we stopped so fast, and now I can’t—”

Great
. I hit the gas again. “Well, we’ll just have to make it out of here on our own, then, won’t we?”

From beneath the truck came a loud bang and then the
clank-clunk
of the muffler getting knocked off the undercarriage by a rock we’d have cleared if we hadn’t been going so fast.

A bolt of fright went through me; at first I’d thought it was a shotgun blast. Luckily, though, by then my hands were clamped so tightly to the steering wheel that a bomb couldn’t have loosened them.

So we managed to stay on the road. “Who the hell was that?” Ellie breathed, twisting around to peer out the back window.

“No idea.” Actually, I did have one; I’d gotten a halfway decent look at him. But that wasn’t the important thing now.

“Ellie, the cab’s interior lights aren’t working.” Outside, the night flew by; if I drove any faster, I risked losing control on the rough road.

But we had to get out of here, to where there were people and … “He must’ve disabled them,” I said.

A porcupine waddled out in front of us; I braced myself, but he made it across somehow. We were nearly to the culvert; past that there was still plenty of rough road between us and safety, though.

Ellie found the broken dome-light plastic with her hand. “Why would he do that?” she wondered aloud.

“No idea.” The headlights picked out the metal culvert’s rim and then the pond’s surface. I recalled Bob Arnold’s warning on the dangers of flooded roads.

The road itself was dry, however, and we’d be across the culverted section in moments, slowing only for the gulley that the flood had cut in it earlier. And that would be no problem if I was careful, or so I thought, but then a number of things happened fast:

First, in the reflection of our headlights off the pond, a dim shape upstream began
moving
, sliding sideways and then up out of the water entirely. That big log, I realized, that the Calais cop had said was damming the stream …

He was removing it. But even before I understood this, water began pouring through; a
lot
of water, straight at us. A
wave
 …

And then we were in it. In the headlights the water roiled, swirling and gushing. The tires slipped, fighting for purchase on a road now turning liquid underneath us.

We hit the gulley before I could brake. Suddenly the water was much deeper; the truck began moving sideways. “Ellie, we’ve got to get out.”

She was ahead of me, already reaching for the passenger-side door handle. But it wasn’t there.

Mine, either. I could feel the sharp edges where it had been sawed off; we’d have heard him doing it, maybe, but we’d had that music on, so … As I thought this, the tires caught on a low scrim of brush lining the road, and the rushing water carried us over.

Headlight beams strafed the sky; then we were pressed together against the passenger-side window, which unfortunately had hit a rock or something when it landed.