On the Run (27 page)

“What worked? What did you
do
here?” I gasped.

“Remember that camouflage net they used to catch the emus when they got loose? I figured, no reason it wouldn’t work on a person too. So I dragged it out here and rigged it up in the tree with a rope . . . that rope . . .” She pointed to the thing now lying limp on the ground like an over-long rattlesnake. “Then I needed something to draw his attention, so he wouldn’t look up and maybe see the net overhead, so I put a package of Oreo cookies inside on the ground. And then I tied a barrier of dental floss across the opening so that when he ran into it the rope would let the net drop on him. And it did! I guess the branch the net and rope were attached to broke . . . but it worked anyway!” she finished triumphantly.

“Did you get directions for this scheme out of some mystery novel?”

“No, I figured it out by myself.”

I didn’t know whether to congratulate her or roll my eyes. Abilene had built a trap. Baited it with Oreo cookies. Sprung it with dental floss. I could see bits of crushed cookies littering the ground now. The ants were probably thinking there really was an ant heaven. Were the police going to congratulate us for Abilene’s creativity . . . or throw us in jail?

“And then you rigged it up all by yourself?”

“I suppose I should have told you—”

“Yes, you should have!”

“I was afraid you’d just worry yourself to death about it. Or have a hissy fit or something.”

I drew myself up to my full five foot one. “I do not have hissy fits,” I proclaimed.

“Will you people stop jabbering and get me out of here!” a male voice, apparently having heard enough, suddenly yelped from the tangle. He thrashed again, arms and legs flailing, rope whipping. The voice went panicky as he went into a hissy fit of his own. “Get me out of here! I’m suffocating! I can’t breathe!”

He sounded so close to hysterics that Abilene dropped the bat, and we plunged into the cloud of dust and started yanking branches and vines off the jerking figure.

A figure whose only line seemed to be, “Get me out of here!” which he kept shrilling at the top of his lungs. Lungs that, so far as I could hear, did not appear to be suffocating.

Abilene picked up the bat again when we could see his nose poking through the web. “I don’t think you’re in any position to make demands,” she pointed out.

Now I could see an eye surrounded by a red, sweating face peering through the web of camouflage netting.

“I’ll sue you! I’ll sue both of you for everything you’ve got. You can’t just go around setting booby traps for people!”

He might have a point there. Abilene, however, was not intimidated.

“I set the trap,” she said. “And what you see is what you get.” She stretched the old sweatshirt out from her body and lifted one foot to expose her cheap jogging shoes. “So sue away.”

A shaft of sunlight gleamed on the bald head above the angry eye. No, I realized, not bald. Shaved. I’d never seen him before, but instant recognition hit me. “Ute?” I said.

The shaved scalp strained against the camouflage netting as he tried to turn his head to get a better look at me. “So?” He sounded belligerent in spite of his trussed-up position. “Do I know you?”

So it really was Ute. I’d dismissed him as our possible skulker, thinking he’d never have left the kind of trail Abilene could so easily follow back to his campsite. Even now it seemed incredible that an amateur booby trap constructed of an emu net, Oreo cookies, and dental floss could have captured a man who had survived six weeks in the wilds with nothing but a pocketknife and matches. Yet it obviously had, because here he was.

“Why are you lurking around here spying on us?” Abilene demanded.

“Let me out of here!” he repeated. “This is killing me. I’m going to explode.”

His face was red enough that he indeed looked near detonation. “Maybe we’d better do something,” I said.

Abilene handed me the baseball bat. She stepped forward and yanked on the net, rolling his body several times like a hot dog on a grill. It didn’t free him, but loosening the net unpinned his arms from his sides and allowed him to spread-eagle his legs.

“Is that better?” I asked. I could see now that he was wearing camouflage-colored shorts, dark T-shirt, and heavy boots. Age is difficult to determine through the barrier of a net, also camouflage color, but I guessed him to be twenty-eight to thirty.

“I want out of here.”

“Not until we find out what you’re doing spying on us,” Abilene said.

He eyed me warily. “What are you planning to do with the bat?”

“Make one false move and you’ll find out,” Abilene growled.

Hey
, I thought, pleased,
we’re doing good cop, bad cop here.

“We just want to know what you’re doing here,” I said in soothing, good-cop tones to counter Abilene’s threat.

He made a stab at dignity. “I’ve been employed here—”

“You’re not employed here now. We are. Frank Northcutt hired us to take care of the ranch and the emus after—” Abilene broke off, her glance at me questioning.

I nodded approvingly. Best to find out what Ute knew before giving our position away.

Ute muttered what seemed to be a unanimous opinion, except for Abilene’s, on the emus. “Stupid birds.”

“So you’re not here to steal emus or give them IQ tests,” I said and repeated our question. “Why are you here?”

“I . . . needed to find something.”

“Something that belongs to you?” I asked skeptically.

“They owed me money.” It’s difficult to make out an expression on a face concealed under a camouflage net, but he looked like a man who, as soon as he’s spoken, realizes he may have made an incriminating statement. People are dead. They owed him money. Not good.

The net changed shape like some weird blob of camouflaged bread dough bubbling with yeast as he punched with hands and feet against the restraining strands.

“I’m dying here, I tell you,” he panted.

Abilene was not moved. “How much money did they owe you?” she asked.

“Forty dollars. And I sure wouldn’t kill someone over forty dollars!”

“Who mentioned killing?” Abilene challenged.

“Maybe you should tell us about the Northcutts’ deaths,” I suggested. He could know Jock and Jessie were dead from news reports, of course, but somehow this sounded like a more personal knowledge. “We understand you had a disagreement with them, and they fired you.”

“Yeah, which is why they owed me forty dollars. But I didn’t kill them! They committed suicide, the two of them together. At least that’s what the note said.”

“You saw the note?” Abilene asked.

He struggled to sit up. Abilene lifted the net to help him. Within it he swiped his hand across his mouth. “Yeah, I saw it,” he muttered.

“I think you’d better tell us about this,” I said.

“Here? Now?”

“Why not? We have plenty of time. We’re not going anywhere.”

The sun had crested the wooded hills and mountains to the east, but a few fluffy clouds still glowed cotton-candy pink. A songbird trilled from a nearby treetop, and a tiny wren peered with beady eye out of the stacked brush, then swooped down to capture an Oreo crumb.

Ute’s shoulders moved in what might have been a shrug of resignation as he apparently figured out that he wasn’t going anywhere.

“Okay, Jock and Jessie fired me. I didn’t like their stupid job anyway. They were just using me for grunt work. Taking care of those stupid birds. Fixing fence. Mowing the stupid yard. Jessie handed me the pay I had coming, and I left.”

“Why did they fire you?”

“I complained about having to gather up the emu droppings and put them on a compost pile.”

“They were acting normal at that time? The Northcutts, I mean, not the emus.”

“As normal as they ever were.”

Probably an astute observation, although I didn’t comment on it. “And then what?”

“When I got to Dulcy I looked at the money and realized Jessie had shorted me forty dollars on what I had coming. At first I was just going to let it go, but then I started getting mad. What a couple of cheapskates! And after I’d done everything from wash the Hummer to crawl under the house looking for termites. A week or so later I came back.”

“And how did the Northcutts react?” I asked.

“They didn’t. They were right there on the sofa. Dead.” The words came out flat and emotionless, but I saw his throat move in a big, convulsive swallow. Shock at finding the bodies? Or something else, something much more sinister, such as guilt?

“How did you get in?”

“I had a key to the gate. They’d made me give back the one they knew I had, but I’d had another one made that they didn’t know about.”

“You left the gate open when you came in?”

“No, I closed and locked it behind me. Jock and Jessie were real sticklers about that. The gate always had to be locked.” His eyebrows scrunched together, as if he were annoyed with himself that he’d followed their rules even though he was both fired and angry.

“You had a key to the house too?”

“No, they’d never let me have a key to the house. Or sheds. I parked around back and knocked, but there wasn’t any answer. The Hummer was here, so I figured they were out in the woods. Shooting at each other with paintballs or some stupid thing. I tried the door.”

“And?”

“It was unlocked.”

“So you decided this was an invitation to go inside?”

Ute ignored the sarcasm in Abilene’s question, though he sounded defensive when he said, “They owed me the forty dollars. I figured I’d just go in and take it out in groceries. They had so much they’d never miss a few cans of stuff. But when I-I looked around to make sure no one was in the house—” Another of those convulsive bobbles of his throat. “There they were. On the sofa, blood and . . . and brains all over.”

“You didn’t call the police?”

“I thought about it. I really did,” he said, his tone defensive, as if we’d accused him of dereliction of duty. “But then I figured, even if it
looked
like they’d killed themselves, and the note
said
they had, maybe I’d get accused of something. I hadn’t been . . . shy about telling people how Jock and Jessie had cheated me. A lot of people knew I was teed off about it. So I figured it would be better if no one knew I’d even been near the place since they’d fired me.”

“You just quietly left?”

“Well, no,” he admitted reluctantly. “I was thinking about the money they owed me, and how the job wasn’t what it was supposed to be. They wouldn’t even let me stay in the house, can you believe that? I had to sleep in my old van.”

“So all this entitled you to . . . what?” I asked.

“I decided I’d look around a little. They owed me.”

“So you stole their gold coins?” I suggested.

“What gold coins?” He sounded so astonished that even I had to believe he didn’t know anything about gold coins. If there were gold coins. Maybe there’d never been any more than that lone coin Mac found. “I never saw any gold coins.”

“Drugs, then?” Abilene asked.

“There weren’t any drugs. Except for that herbal junk Jock thought was going to bring back his hair and Jessie thought would take away her wrinkles. That ginkgo stuff, and ginseng and St. somebody’s wort and vitamins I never heard of.” He sounded scornful or perhaps miffed by their lack of interest in real drugs, I couldn’t tell which.

I remembered the packages of herb medications I’d seen in the bathroom cabinet, and we’d since found an even larger variety in the kitchen cupboards. I also remembered the medicine cabinet looked as if it had been rifled.

“So you went through their medicine cabinet, looking for something more interesting? Or saleable?”

“I felt sick to my stomach. Who wouldn’t? All those flies and blood and smell. I was about to throw up. So I looked for something to take. I wasn’t about to use any of that herb junk, but I did find some Tums.”

Yes, I remembered that open bottle of Tums.

“Were they dealing drugs?” Abilene asked. “Real drugs?”

“Dealing drugs? Jock and Jessie?” He gave a snort. “No way. They were peculiar, suspicious of everyone and real cheapskates. Except when it came to buying all that survival food and gear, and the herbal stuff, of course. But a half ounce of pot on the property would’ve sent them into orbit. They made that plain when they hired me. No drugs. And no cell phones.”

An odd combination, but I could believe it of the paranoid Northcutts. Though I did wonder if they were concerned about brain-eating cell phone waves or overheard conversations. I also had my doubts about total compliance with these drug rules from our shaved-head, net-wrapped acquaintance here.

“But you figured some drugs would be okay, maybe a little buying and selling to make a buck on the side, as long as Jock and Jessie didn’t know,” I suggested. “A local deputy stopped you once.”

He squinted through the net at me as if curious how I knew about that, but he apparently decided not to question it. “I had a bad taillight on the van. No big deal.”

“That’s all?”

“What do you mean?”

“You were nervous. Like you were worried the deputy might search your van and find something incriminating.”

“I may have been a little nervous,” Ute admitted. “I didn’t know what my buddy might have on him. Turned out he didn’t have anything. But he was nervous because he thought maybe I did. We got a good laugh out of it.”

One of those things where you had to be there, I guessed. “Who was this buddy?”

“An actor friend from California. He was between jobs, so he headed to New York to look for stage work and stopped to see me on the way.”

Abilene and I looked at each other. Ute wasn’t quite living up to our dark and dangerous expectations. Although he could be sitting there lying through his teeth, of course. Being trussed up in a net didn’t necessarily guarantee honesty.

“I’m dying of thirst here. How about a drink of water?”

It was a ways across the clearing to the house, and Abilene said, “I’ll go get it.”

She ducked out the opening, and I watched through a peephole in the brush as she jogged toward the house.

“Hey, who
are
you people anyway?” Ute asked, his tone complaining.