Moving Day: A Thriller (17 page)

You have your life, but you don’t anymore.

It is this realm between, this inhabiting of uncertainty—having your life, but not having it—that she knows her husband is expert in. Armed with few specifics, few details, she nevertheless senses that Stanley Peke knows his way here. That no one is as experienced in these shadows as Stanley Peke. So she lets him lead. And she follows.

To live in someone else’s life for a few days—it is a reminder of what your own life once meant. Could mean again. And that, in the end, is the dangling leaf of hope—shimmering in the immense Western light, turning in the cool breeze, clinging firmly and miraculously to its branch—that holds her here.

Peke sits fishing. The light dances fiercely, dazzling, on the river. A postcard scene. A princely realm. Warm bright sun but cool dry breeze. A horizon to infinity in an unbroken blue. The day goes through him with its beauty. Fills him with its peace.
Fishing
is a fancy word for waiting—functionalized waiting. Which is perfect, because he is waiting on more than fish.

He casts his line, remains motionless, until he feels the sure, unmistakable tug, and reels it in. He watches the silver fish wiggle with an energy, a life force, that must be respected, before throwing it back.

He casts his line identically again into the loud peace of the rushing river.

A black bug crawls along the ground by his leg. It burrows in the dirt busily.

A Western bug—he doesn’t know what it is. Fat, though. Purposeful. Some kind of beetle, maybe. He watches it work.

Seven years old, living in the woods. The memory loosening in him, made to loosen by a conspiracy of circumstances, by layers of imagery revivified and close by—these brushy woods, the chill breeze, the empty land and sky. And, not least, by standing at a closed gate, wondering what is up that dirt road.

He watches the bug.

Suddenly he scoops it up in one hand, blocks its escape with the other.

He looks at it. Watches it scoot frantically around on his broad, ancient, creviced palm, looking for a path, an exit.

Then, impulsively, he slaps the black bug into his mouth, bites down a few times, hears and feels the unmistakable crunch in his jaw, then swallows.

Stanley Peke, epicure and connoisseur. Stanley Peke of four-star restaurants, of genteel chefs bowing at the table, of sommeliers standing obediently at the ready, a respectful two steps behind his chair. Stanley Peke of precious wines from special reserves, brought up from the corners of deep cellars.

As he suspected. As he remembered. Not bad at all.

The woods, the thicket, the dirt fields outside Cracow. All come rushing back in the taste of the bug. That is connoisseurship, after all. Sense memory bound to taste, rushing back with each bite. In Cracow, Abel taught him how to test the trash can food first—how to hold it in his mouth, what to taste for, to know it was OK to eat, before swallowing.

He is unchanged. It is still him. He is still the boy. The wily survivor.

He feels it welling up. A ball of rage, packed tight, pulsing. A dense fury, dense enough to have its own gravitational pull, like a geological body in space, the gravity assigning it direction and purpose. The rage harbored, intact, since seven, Peke is suddenly aware. Since seven.
Contain it. Contain it. Don’t descend to them.

His creeping forgetfulness has been only situational, he realizes. Nothing organic. Here in the fresh Montana air, he is focused. Alert.

He has been drifting, somnolent, with no need to think. The slow slide of complacency. Preparing to die. Now he is thrown back to an earlier time. When he was—at every moment—relentlessly preparing to live.

He picks up the fishing line again, methodically casts it again, feels the pleasure of its gentle tug, of its modest weight and momentum in air, the
plink
and settle into the sun-dappled river.

He waits.

Contain it.

He waits.

Another widow—this one via Annelle. A Florida job. Gold Coast matron, moving in with her family in the DC suburbs. Easy. Why not? They’ll make the Albuquerque delivery, do the Austin gig, then turn the white truck east.

To time it correctly means a couple of days and nights in Miami. Like shore leave for LaFarge, Chiv, and Al while Nick scouts it. And then, if it checks out, if the information is good, if the routes are safe, do the job on Thursday.

And after returning from it, a little break. Drive to Billings, fly to Seattle, on to Rio and Armando. To the hot breeze and the hot breath, to bury himself in hedonism, hide from himself in
Armando’s simple self-absorption. Armando. The love of a beautiful thing. His torso. His tan. It is nothing more or less than that. No need to understand it further. Armando. The love of a beautiful thing.

Soon, the huge white truck rolls out the gate.

On the move. The white, gleaming monster—an eight-hundred-horsepower, twenty-ton Grendel—heading off to gorge again on the infinite promise of America.

P
eke stands again in the dusty silence, outside the rickety metal gate. The harsh red blinking hasn’t altered in days.

He looks down into the dirt by his feet. He smiles.

New deep tire treads. Fresh. The tire treads are running the opposite way now. Going out.

His heart beats harder beneath the big, featureless Montana sky. His body fills with a kind of glory. A vindication. An aliveness.

An old Ford Fairlane moves crisply on the road into town. Out here, its speed, the urgency to its movement, translates into nothing unusual to observe. There are no respected speed limits. Speed is your inalienable right.

At an intersection in town, Peke drives in over the gravel and pulls up to the pay phone on the outside wall of the filling station. One street up from Freedom Café. He dials. He says his name several times into the receiver, as his call makes its way again up
the hierarchy. Moments of suspension. A series of clicks. Until Daniel’s voice is once again at the other end.

Peke utters the three words he has patiently waited days to say.

“Send the truck,” he says.

T
here is an old man standing alone on a dirt road in Montana, squinting at a closed rusted metal gate in front of him.

Is he wandering? Is he lost? Those in a passing car might think so and stop. But it is unlikely that a car will pass by. It’s too remote. There’s no reason to be out here.

A white plastic supermarket bag is clutched in each of the old man’s hands. Perhaps he’s collecting cans by the side of the road.

Minutes before, he pulled his Ford off the road into the high brush several hundred yards past the gate and shut off the engine. As he walked away from the car, he looked back to be sure it wasn’t visible from the road, submerged in high brush and high weeds and grasses like a sunken ship.

Now Peke looks at the gate, as if he has come upon it unexpectedly. He stares at it a moment.

Then he pulls the gate aside, his face muscles clenching slightly against its loud, rusty, swinging squeak, and begins to walk up the path of dirt road. He walks up the middle of the road, an old man alone, slightly swinging the white plastic supermarket bags.

He can’t ask the truck to enter the property without his looking first. Without his being sure. He’s asking something far out of the ordinary, after all. He must take responsibility.

The woods and brush open onto a clearing.

An old farmhouse. A couple of trailers—vintage-looking—on cement blocks. A couple of late-model pickup trucks. And behind them a hundred yards, a huge storage barn—an unpretty, efficient farm building—utilitarian and immense.

He does not have much chance to take it all in.

Two sleek, snapping black dogs are racing furiously, flat out, toward him, across the weed-and-dirt field. Big mutts, but with plenty of Doberman in them. Waiting for this moment all their dog lives.

In that angry, whirling moment of their approach—barking, snarling, choking on their own enthusiasm, he knows now what he suspected. Why there is no fencing. Why the gate can be swung open. Why there is no other protection system. Because it’s this. Protection, Montana-style.

And he has a quick, vivid, instant, blackened vision of the other dogs. The officers’ dogs. The dogs he learned from.

The dogs are closing in . . . almost to him . . . preparing to leap. Their Doberman sleekness makes them bullets of black. Preparing to leap . . . but not yet committed to the attack. He sees them looking, judging, examining, processing angles and smells and sounds and sights and sensations in their dog brains.

Dogs trained haphazardly, no doubt. Dogs taught with a casual love of violence. Trained to attack, trained into aggression out here, but almost certainly not having, in this wilderness, anyone to actually attack.

At this moment, Peke, letting out a furious, piercing scream, runs straight at the dogs, just as they run at him.

It is not a human sound, nor a human behavior at all. Not something they have seen in a human.

One dog falters for a moment.

Peke focuses on that one. Roars at it. Then abruptly stops his roaring to stare at it. Staring at them both now.

Both dogs have stopped.

I have seen much worse than you. You’re nothing. Nothing. You know that, don’t you, in your little dog hearts?
It is etched in his face, obvious in his stance, full in his own heart.

In theirs, too, apparently.

Because now they circle warily. Snarl. Growl.

Peke circles, too. Snarls. Growls.

Then Peke begins laughing. Howling hysterically. Raucous human laughter. A sound, a happy sound, they undoubtedly know.

They bow their necks, paw the dirt in confusion.

He looks in their eyes. Looks all the way into their black eyes like they are equals. Stares into their souls. And they seem to know it. As if they have met one of their own. A kindred being.

One dog whimpers for a moment in puzzlement.

Then, in a sort of culmination of his staring, Peke empties the two supermarket bags. From each bag, an immense slab of Idaho beef falls to the ground.

They look stunned for a moment at the meat. Then leap to it, each dog settling down onto its haunches and going to work, shredding and feasting.