Hunting Season (11 page)

Browne nodded. Acid they had, in vast quantities. No government agency would be putting a pattern together on missing copper. He thought about the pressure. Maybe another thirty batches, if they

could keep the process going. Pretty soon, they’d have to switch to the big pump. He finished up securing the hydrogen generator.

“All right. Let’s go down there and look around,” he said.

“Maybe it was just a late-season turkey hunter sneaking around; those guys cammo up pretty good.”

Edwin Kreiss made his move forty-five minutes after the sun went down behind the ridges to the west of the arsenal. He felt refreshed, having slept for a couple of hours in his hiding place. He had crept out to the tree line just before sundown and again memorized the features in the pile that were closest to the cap. Once darkness just about obscured the opposite tree line, he crept down on his belly through the tall grass, moving directly toward the creek. Mindful of that copperhead, he probed ahead with the rod, parting the grass carefully and probing the spongy earth on either side before slithering forward. The ground was not wet, but it was very soft, with occasional round rocks embedded here and there. It took him ten careful minutes to get down to within six feet of the creek bank, where he stopped to absorb the night sounds around him. His plan was to get into the creek itself and move upstream to the logjam, then get out and crawl sideways until he could retrieve the cap.

The sky above him was clear. A drone of night insects and frogs had begun and the creek bur bled peacefully right ahead. What if it isn’t Lynn’s cap? Wrong question, his brain told him. What if it is her cap? Then what? He forced himself to concentrate on the ground directly ahead of him. He no longer had the sense that someone was watching up in those trees. Even if someone was watching, no one would be able to see him.

Had all that been just a spook on his part? He thought maybe he should cross the creek, go up to the opposite tree line, and check it out for watchers.

No. Focus. Get the cap.

He probed ahead with the rod while he inched toward the creek bank.

The grass had a muddy smell. The cuff on his right sleeve hung up on something resistant in the grass. He pulled gently and heard a tiny chinking sound, like metal scraping on a rock. He froze. Metal? He backed up a few inches, turned his head very slowly to look into the darkness with his peripheral vision, but it was almost night now and he couldn’t see anything at all. His sleeve was free, so he rolled very carefully to the left and began collapsing the rod down to a two-foot-long staff. Then he pointed it into the grass at his right

and began parting the thick stems, moving the rod from side to side, advancing it an inch at a time, until he heard another clink. He put down the rod and snapped on one of his cuff lights, which threw a tiny red beam of light into the base stems of the grass. A sheen of steel reflected back at him. He parted more of the grass to expose the trap and gave a mental whistle. Had he been upright and walking through here, he might have stepped into that thing.

He considered his position. There were traps along the creek, big steel traps, capable of seizing, if not breaking, a man’s leg. He directed the tiny bead of light at the trap again and found the step trigger and the tie-down chain. This trap was much too big for small game: These were man traps

So why in the hell were there man traps out here? He carefully rolled the other way and began exploring the bank, going upstream until he found another trap. As long as he came at them low and from the side, they posed no threat. But for anyone walking along the creek, or down to the creek, to cross maybe… well… Then he wondered if there were any in the creek.

Browne and Jared walked quietly down the path toward the creek. The ghostly buildings of the industrial area were swallowed up behind them by the dense trees. Jared led, with Browne twenty feet behind him. They did not use lights, having used this path before. Browne trusted Jared’s woodcraft instincts; his grandson had been hunting the foothills of the Appalachians since he was a young boy and he was a natural woodsman.

Browne was also pretty sure that Jared’s skills had more than a little bit to do with his penchant for comforting some of the lonelier women back up in those gray hills. Jared was a big boy now, and if he wanted to take chances like that, it was on his own head. If nothing else, fooling around with some of those mountain women had probably sharpened up Jared’s defensive instincts. If Jared thought he’d seen something, then they needed to go take a look down along the creek area. That’s where those kids had come in.

Jared slowed as the trees bordering the path thinned out. They were getting closer to the banks of the creek. Browne patted the Ruger .44caliber revolver on his hip and began to pay close attention to his surroundings.

Kreiss finally reached the edge of the logjam pile and began to feel around for the hole of the big tree that had impounded all the flood debris in the first place. He was thirty feet away from the creek, moving back toward

the trees on the south side of the water. The cap ought to be about six feet south of the root ball on the big tree, maybe five feet off the ground and a foot or so back in the tangle. He found the edge of the root ball and retraced his handholds on the trunk, using the rod to estimate the distance.

He didn’t want to turn on a cuff light until he thought he was very close. When he was finally in position, he paused to look straight up. It was a dark, moonless night, but there was plenty of starlight streaming down through the clear mountain air. He adapted his eyes to use the starlight by looking first up the stars and then down and sideways at the top objects in the logjam. When he could make out individual branches and snags, he looked down along the logjam until he could make out the tops of individual trees on the other side of the creek. If there was anyone out here tonight, they’d be over there in those trees, where they could see down into the broad ravine cut by the creek.

He began to scan the dark mass of tangled debris with his peripheral vision, searching for a lighter contrast among all the roots, limbs, packed leaves, and mangled grasses. When he finally thought he had it, he set a cuff light for the dimmest red setting and pointed it into the tangle. The hat was right there. Keeping the light on, he pushed the rod into the tangle, very slowly so as to make no noise, and snagged the hat. He turned off the light, retrieved the cap, and stuffed it quietly into the chest pack without looking at it. Then he subsided to the ground to listen to the night.

The mass of the logjam rose up beside him. It felt like an avalanche, poised to drop on him. The hairs were up on the back of his neck again.

Browne stood to one side of the dim path. He was just able to make out Jared’s silhouette as he stood ten feet behind him. Jared was sweeping binoculars down into the ravine. The wedge of night sky showing through a gap in the trees was clear; the air was cooling fast. He didn’t really expect anything to happen tonight; if Jared had seen someone, they were at best long gone and at worst huddled around a campfire out in the deep storage area somewhere. For a moment, he had a prickly thought that whoever it was might have already gotten behind them and was even now creeping through the streets of the industrial area. The girl, he thought. Is this about the girl?

Jared was moving back in his direction. As always, Browne was amazed that such a heavy man as Jared could move so soundlessly through the woods. Not a twig snapped nor bush swished. He just seemed to get closer and closer, until Browne could smell the cigarette smell on him.

But then jared reached for Browne’s left hand. He took it gently, turned it palm up, and jabbed one finger down: He’d seen someone or something, and as best he could tell, there was only one of them out there.

Browne took jared’s hand. He drew the letter W on Jared’s palm with his fingernail, followed by the letter R, meaning, Where exactly is he?

Jared took Browne’s palm. He drew a wiggly line all the way across it.

The creek. Then he bisected that line with the flat of his thumb, twice.

The logjam, just below where those kids had drowned. Then he did it again, and where the two lines met, he drew his finger lightly up the logjam line and then jabbed his fingertip right there: south of the creek, on the other side, near the logjam, one individual.

Browne pulled the heavy pistol and pressed it into Jared’s hand. Then he tapped Jared once on the chest and squeezed Jared’s hand around the pistol grip, indicating he should take the gun. Then he took jared’s other hand, touched his own chest with it, and then his right ear, tapping Jared’s fingertips on his ear two or three times, and then he pointed Jared’s arm first to his own face and then off to the right, meaning, You take the gun.

I’ll go to the right and make noise. Jared nodded in the darkness, turned around, and melted back toward the creek.

Browne waited until he could no longer see the black shape of his grandson, and then he went off the path to the right, moving silently across the carpet of pine needles. When he judged he was about thirty feet away from the path, he felt around for a large stick, picked it up, took a deep breath, and then began yelling, “There he is! Get him!” at the top of his lungs while banging the stick against the trees around him and crashing noisily through the underbrush toward the creek.

Kreiss had crawled almost back to the edge of the creek when the hullabaloo broke out in the opposite tree line. He felt a stab of panic before his hunting discipline reasserted itself. Instead of springing into a dead run across the field of high grass, toward the safety of his own tree line, he lunged toward the noise and the creek, even as a heavy bullet smacked the hole of the big downed tree and a booming pistol report assaulted his ears from up on the opposite tree line. He rolled into the creek bed in the direction of the gunshot and made a split-second decision. If the watchers had been there for a long time, they’d expect him to run back the way he’d come, down the creek and then out through the tall grass, right into the man traps Instead, he scrambled as close to the undercut north bank as he could get and then slipped to his left under the big tree trunk and

into the tangle of the logjam. He ended up lying on his belly in wet sand, with one of the small waterfalls pouring ice-cold water onto his back.

Using the rod in his left hand and his fingers on his right hand, he moved sand aside like a giant sea turtle about to lay its eggs on a beach. As he wiggled deeper into the sand, he was able to move farther up under the logjam. With any luck, he could get all the way under it to the stream on the back side and get away, but, either way, they couldn’t get a shot at him while he was under all this debris. He kept digging and inching his way forward.

When Browne heard the shot, he stopped making noise and stood still by the edge of the tree line, keeping one tree between himself and the creek and waiting for jared. Obviously, Jared had been confident enough of seeing someone that he’d taken a shot. Then, to Browne’s left, a bright white flashlight snapped on, its beam traversing the creek bed from right to left quickly, and then much more slowly. He pulled his own light and began doing the same thing, putting his beam where Jared’s wasn’t. They searched back and forth along the area of the creek bed, and along the downstream edge of the logjam pile. Browne saw the occasional glint of steel as his beam hit one of the traps. He moved left to join Jared.

“Well?” he said.

“Saw him at the edge of the creek and the logjam,” Jared said, keeping his voice low.

“Blind once the gun went off. Missed him, though; heard the bullet hit that big tree.”

“Can you tell which way he went?”

“Into the creek. After that…”

Browne was silent for a long moment. He stopped his light when it illuminated Kreiss’s original path through the tall grass leading down to the creek.

“Well, nothing wrong with your instincts. There was someone out here. Question is, Why?”

“Way that grass is flattened down, he was crawling’,” Jared said.

“Whoever it was, he wasn’t hunting’. He was creepin’ this place.”

“This has to be about those kids, then,” Browne said.

“No way anyone could know about the other. Right, Jared?”

“Not from me anyways,” Jared said as he flicked the powerful beam up to the opposite tree line, hoping to flash some eyes. Nothing shone back at him.

“So that’s bad, then.”

“Yes, it is.”

“You want to keep looking? Maybe go get the dogs?”

Browne thought about it. Jared had three mixed-breed hounds he used for hunting wild pigs, but it would be hours before they could get back here with the dogs.

“No,” he said.

“I think we should get off the reservation for the night. Maybe leave it alone for a couple of days. In case this was just some guy wandering around. Tonight he’s scared. Tomorrow he might bring cops.”

“He’d have to admit he broke in here,” Jared said, handing back the heavy Ruger.

“If this wasn’t purposeful, then he’ll never come back.”

“And if it was…”

“Then I need to start patrollin’. You stay on the generator; I need to start hunting’.”

Browne detected the sound of anticipation in his grandson’s voice.

Above all else, Jared was a hunter. They made a few more sweeps of the ravine with their Maglites, and then Browne switched his off. He brought out a much smaller version of the big light and used it to guide them back up the path toward the industrial area.

Behind them, down in the ravine, Edwin Kreiss broke through the last of the tangle, pulled himself out onto a dry sandbar, sniffed the night air, and listened. Then he smiled.

On Monday morning, Janet Carter talked to Larry Talbot and Billy Smith about what she’d learned from Barry dark. Billy Smith was manfully trying to stay awake, but there was a steady parade of yawns.

“Am I mistaken, or didn’t the boss have a word with you Friday?” Talbot said.

“Yes, he did. Warned me off Edwin Kreiss and this whole case. But as I understand it, we get new info, we make sure it gets into the system. Billy, you finished the transmittal letter for the case file?”