MalContents (17 page)

The rural nature of Birchville was the real reason I was choosing it as a hideout; it was a town of know-our-rights conservatives. Everyone here was a member of the NRA, voted Republican, and took no cotton to strangers causing problems. No one here was going to crucify me for pulling my gun out to protect my family if that’s what it came down to. Hell, some of the townsfolk would probably help me along.

The Fishhook is almost completely made of logs, with your obligatory stag antlers, squirrel pelts and stuffed mallards adorning the walls. Artwork consists mostly of paintings of old English foxhunts, wilderness scenes, country landscapes, and over the lobby fireplace, a towering portrait of Gunther Hughes, who built the Inn back in the late 1920s. They had one room left on the front side overlooking the street. I paid for it without argument. Naturally the rooms with windows facing the lake would be booked up. Between the three of us, we didn’t have much gear, just my duffle bag (gun inside), Angie’s purse and gym bag—which contained her yoga clothes—and Mandy’s bookbag, which held her laptop and for all I knew a pack of cigarettes and a switchblade. “Please tell me we’re going home tomorrow,” she said as we ascended the rickety wooden stairs past an antique grandfather clock to the second floor. “This place smells like old man feet and I have no clothes to change into.”

“If we have to stay an extra day we’ll go into town and get you some clothes. In fact, I think that would be a good idea anyway, considering what you’re wearing.”

“Eww, I’m not wearing clothes from here. These people don’t even have all their teeth.”

“Mandy,” Angie said, her way of preempting further argument.

The room had two queen-sized beds covered in flower-print duvet covers, a large wall mirror between them, a bookshelf stocked with some old classics, and a small desk near the window. A telephone and writing pad sat on top of the desk.

“There’s no fucking TV?” Mandy said.

“Knock off the swearing,” my wife ordered.

“Ten bucks says I don’t even get a signal here,” Mandy replied, taking her laptop from her book bag. She turned it on and tried to find a wireless signal.

I placed the gym bag and gun on the floor next to the bed near the door and sat down on the mattress, took out my cell phone. “Be quiet, I need to call the police.”

“Dad, there’s one signal but it’s encrypted. It’s WEP. Help me crack it?”

“No,” I said.

“But you know how. Just do it.”

I shook my head as Angie went into the bathroom, turned the water on and started washing her face. A voice answered at the police station. “Hello,” I said, “this is Peter Baker, I need to speak to—”

“Mr. Baker. Detective Larson is looking for you. He’s not happy. Hang on while I connect you.”

Great. A few seconds passed, during which I listened to Mandy try to hack her way into some nearby resident’s wireless router. She swore each time her password guess failed.

“Mr. Baker?” It was Larson.

“Yeah. It’s me.”

“Where the hell are you?”

“Is this a secure line?”

“Yes, Mr. Baker, they transferred you. Nobody’s tracing my cell phone, if that’s what you’re thinking. I need to know where the hell you are. Right now.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“You are if I can’t come speak to you.”

I sucked in a breath, felt my gut gurgle. “You found the body on the roof? Did you see the guy in the cowboy hat?” I saw Mandy put her laptop down and look at me. Again, I saw real fear in her eyes, understanding that this was no joke.

“Mr. Baker, I am not fucking around. Where the hell are you?”

“I’m in Birchville. What about the cop? The bastard in the cowboy hat? What are you guys doing about finding this guy?”

“Mr. Baker, I have to ask you this and you’d better be straight with me: did you kill my officer?”

“What! Of course not! I told you . . . hang on.” I turned to my daughter. “Don’t leave the room, I’ll be right back.” With that, I went out to the end of the hallway, as far as the cord would allow, and stood outside someone else’s room. “Okay, I’m back. And no, I had nothing to do with this. I gave you the fucking disc this morning with the guy on it. I gave an audio tape to Valley but the psycho came and took it. Who is he? How’d he get to my house and kill that cop? Don’t you have anyone working on this!”

“We can’t see his face in the video. It’s obscured by a big shadow. But we’re working on it. Right now, I’m more concerned about what happened to Officer Valley. I need a specific location where you are. And I advise you, if you had anything to do with this running is the worst thing you can do.”

Yeah, right, like if I really had killed the cop I could waltz into the police station, say sorry, and they’d hand me flowers. They’d shoot me on the spot. Part of me wanted to tell him where I was, but the other half knew this maniac would follow any police cars out to my current location. For now, I felt pretty good about losing this psycho. It wasn’t like he was afraid of the cops, that much was evident.

But the more I thought about it, the more it felt like too much stress to have both some whacked-out murderer and the police after me. Better to have the law on my side, I figured. After all, this was the twenty first century, there had to be ways to prove I didn’t kill that cop. Right? “I’m at the Fishhook Inn. I want protection but you need to make sure you’re not followed. I don’t want to go back to the station. If he got one of your guys he could get more.”

“I’ll call the staties to come get you and your family. You can stay with them until I get up there. We can hold you overnight there if we have to. Don’t fucking leave where you are now, you hear me? You should have come to us instead of running. You’ve fucked things up pretty good here.”

If he was looking for an apology, he could look elsewhere. “My family comes first, Detective. I wasn’t about to stick around while some cop-killer runs around my property trying to shoot me. Especially with my daughter’s school and my wife’s work just a short drive away. Sorry, I don’t feel bad about my decision.”

“Just stay put. Someone will be there in a few.” He hung up.

Back in the room, Mandy was surfing the web. “I got on. Wanna know what their password was? It was ‘Password.’ How stupid is that?”

“You can get in trouble for doing that,” I said.

Angie was looking out the window, one hand on her hip, the other opening the drapes. She let them fall back in place and turned to me. “I heard you on the phone with the police. What’d they say? And what’s this Mandy says about someone on our roof?”

“Nothing. Mandy was eavesdropping and she heard wrong. The police are going to come here. My guess is they’ll pick us up and take us to the station for a bit, then put a guard outside the room . . . if they let us go.”

“So we drove out here for nothing! Jesus, Pete, why the hell are you dragging us all over the place.”

“Not back home, the State Patrol station, wherever that is.”

“I’ll look it up,” Mandy said, clicking away on her keyboard. The way she was hunched over on the bed I could see a strap of her underwear peeking out of her jeans. “Pull your pants up,” I said. Suddenly I was getting real pissed at her. It was bad enough the jocks at school would be thinking ill thoughts about her, but God knew what this stalking nutcase would do to her if he caught up with us. Guys see girls dressed like Mandy was, they get ideas pretty quickly. She huffed and yanked them up over her belly button, adopted an old woman’s voice and said, “Are you satisfied, young man? Maybe later you can help me across the street. These weary bones ache so much.”

“Enough with the sass already,” Angie said. She came and sat down next to me on the bed. Whispering into my ear, she asked me, “How bad is this guy? Was he on our roof or not?”

Putting my hand in front of my mouth, I whispered, “It wasn’t him. Don’t worry about it.”

“Well, what does he want?” Angie whispered back. “Money? How much do we have? What’s in the account?”

“It isn’t about money. Said something about me making a bad choice before, and how he’s gonna make me pay. That’s all I know. Cops don’t know who he is. Shit, I don’t even know if the cops believe me at this point. The video didn’t show much. I wouldn’t be surprised if they thought I was making stuff up.”

“And you’re sure he wasn’t a client?”

“I’m sure.”

“I can hear you, you know,” Mandy said, still typing.

I ignored her and kept my voice low anyway. “The guy wears a big cowboy hat. Sticks out like a sore thumb. I’d remember him.”

“So what, we need to move now or something.”

“Cool, are we, like, on the run?” Mandy asked. “Does that mean I can be homeschooled?” She didn’t sound as frightened anymore. Probably felt better knowing the cops were on their way.

“Absolutely,” I told her. “Your first class is on how to dress like a lady.”

“Heard that one already,” she replied. “You need new material.”

Then I looked at my wife. Should I tell her about the timetable involved in this crazy mess? That we had till midnight or the guy said he was going to find us and kill us? Of course not. She was too much on edge as it was.

Pushing myself off the bed, I went to the window and looked out. A minute passed in silence, then another. No state patrol cars arrived. It was starting to feel weird, yet familiar. The waiting game. Just like in the shop earlier in the morning, with the gun to my head.
Tick.
Nothing.
Tick.
A snippet of thought, a vision of my stalker walking through the parking lot. My mind playing tricks.
Tick
. Nothing. No cops. No killer.
Tick.
I’m going bonkers.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

“Where the fuck are the cops?”

“Probably stuck on the highway dealing with this shit,” Mandy suggested, turning her computer screen toward me.

“What did I say about the swearing,” Angie said.

Mandy pointed at me. “Well he said ‘fuck.’”

I put my hands up. “Okay, everybody stop swearing.” Then to Mandy: “What are you talking about?”

She had found a real time traffic map on a local newspaper’s web-site. The exits at the north and south of Birchville had big red dots on them. “What’s that?”

“Well, down here, a bread delivery truck is on fire, stopping traffic. And up here, a salt truck overturned. Stopping traffic.”

Across the room, Angie shot me a look that dared me to suggest it was anything other than our friendly neighborhood killer. But the notion this guy could cause such a mess and seal off the ramps to town was preposterous. It had to be some weird coincidence. “Not even,” I said, answering her silent decree. “Someone crashed, someone else was rubber necking and crashed as well. The roads are icy. You see it all the time.”

“I’ve never seen it,” Angie replied. “Not the exact two ramps to town.”

“Me either,” Mandy added.

“Shit,” I said. It just came out. I didn’t care about not swearing anymore. Frustration was seeping from my pores. My eyes automatically landed on the duffle bag carrying my gun.

An hour passed. The cops did not show up. I called Detective Larson again and he said between the cop-killing at my house, and the accidents on the highway, law enforcement was spread thin. He assured me someone was on their way to get us and we needed to stay put. To say he sounded stressed out would be like calling Ebola a casual annoyance.

Outside, the sun was going down. The sky was a rainbow of orange, pink and purple bands.

Mandy was streaming news coverage of the crashes from a local television website. Fire crews and police were all over the place. The highway was at a dead stop and drivers were being told to avoid it if they could.

“I’m getting hungry,” Angie said, reading a
People
magazine she’d found in her gym bag. “Do they have a restaurant here?”

“Not at the lodge, no. We passed a McDonald’s a few miles back.” The thought of leaving them alone in the room made me tense. What if the guy showed up when I was out? What if I came back and he was waiting for me, standing over my dead wife and daughter. “On second thought, I’ll call the front desk and see if they can order us a pizza.”

When I picked up the phone the line was dead. Tapping the hook did nothing to make it work. I set it back in the carriage and saw Angie glaring at me again. “I’ll go down to the front desk. Probably ice on the wires or something.”

“Dad, it’s never a bad wire,” Mandy said. “Maybe we should just drive to the police station?”

“No. I don’t want to be out on the road. Someone could steer us off into a ditch or something. I mean, you know, it’s icy is all. Look at all the accidents already.”

“Pleasant,” Angie said, understanding the real meaning behind my statement. “Hurry back.”

The worn, wooden stairs creaked as I took them down to the first floor and cut through the small den. With the sun down, the room dimly lit, and all the wooden architecture around me, I felt like I was in the belly of a pirate ship. Next to the sofa and recliner was an old hand-made shelf with board games—checkers, chess, Candyland, Connect Four, and a deck of cards. I made a mental note to take the cards and checkers up to the room to give us something to do.