Robert B. Parker (17 page)

The forest was handsome. There were white and
gray birch, white pine, and oak. There were clumps of second-growth saplings and the low tangle of ground vines. The ascending sun made shade and light patterns through the tree leaves. Even though it was only early September, the sumac this far north was beginning to show color. He couldn’t see very far, and as he moved through the woods he looked and listened with physical effort, feeling the stress of his concentration tightening the muscles of his neck and shoulders.

As the day warmed the insects became more active and Newman stopped to put insect repellent on himself and his wife. Their hum was still frustrating but they didn’t bite. Birds moved and sang in the trees and before them in the bushes. There were squirrels, too, looking to Newman oddly out of place in the woods, as if they belonged in parks and front yards.
Christ
, Newman thought,
pretty soon I’ll run into some pigeons and then I’ll see a wino sleeping on a bench
.

They had walked in silence and tension for an hour when they cut the trail. Here, where they crossed it, the trail was rutted slightly, and worn in some places to bare earth. He raised his right hand, palm open. Janet stopped behind him, next to his shoulder.

“Is it the same trail?” she whispered.

“Must be,” he whispered. “How many can there be up here?”

“Which way is their camp?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I can’t tell if we are above it or below it. I’d guess we’re below it. If we were above it I’d assume we would have crossed that stream.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, but it stands to reason. The stream was running southwest. We’ve been moving northwest. If we
were above their campsite we should have crossed the stream.”

“I still don’t see why.”

“Well, take my word on it,” he said. “If you can’t picture it, I don’t have time to draw a picture for you.”

She was silent.

“Of course streams will go strange ways, they follow the land.” He was talking so she could hear, but in fact he was talking to himself. He often did that, talked to her so he could hear himself think. “But all we can do is go with the best guess, the most reasonable possibility.”

He pointed up the trail with his forefinger, making a decisive stabbing motion with his hand, his thumb cocked.

She said, “I still don’t see …” and stopped talking as he looked at her.

She nodded. They stood together looking up the trail.

“We can’t just walk up to it,” she said.

“I know. We’ll have to go along it in the woods. Every little while we’ll swing over and cross the trail. Then we’ll go a ways and swing back over and so on. That way we make sure that the trail’s still there.”

“What do you think they’re doing?” she said.

“If it were me I’d hide in the woods near camp and wait for us to come back. But I don’t know. They’re used to bullying people and having people scared of them. They may think we’re running. They may be crazy mad. They may chase us.”

“So you think they are out in the woods trying to find us?”

“Either way,” he said. “Maybe in ambush. Maybe chasing us.”

“Well don’t we have to know which?” she said.

“We can’t,” he said.

“But can’t you make a guess?”

“No. We have to assume both things. Sort of a variation of negative capability.”

“I don’t like it,” she said.

“Me either,” he said, “but there it is.”

“Well, let’s go. The sooner we find them the sooner this is over with.”

They began to move up the trail, keeping to the right of it fifty feet, looking and listening carefully. There was wind, more than had blown since they went into the wilderness. It was not uncomfortable, but it stirred the branches as if someone were there, and it rustled the leaves as if someone were coming. They moved even more slowly and carefully. Hearing the bird and insect noises, the tree noises, the sound of their own movement.

The noise of the woods was continuous. It was one of the things that surprised him most about the forest. It was never quiet. The great, still forest of his imagination was derived from photographs and paintings. The real forest was always alive. Birds, frogs, cicada, squirrels, and things he didn’t know of chirped and chittered and keened and hummed and grunted and rustled day and night. He was listening for human sounds.

It took them an hour to go a mile. Newman had a red scratch starting at the corner of his left eye and running across his cheek, and Janet’s lip was puffy from an insect bite. Newman’s stomach rolled emptily as if it had overreacted to the handful of raspberries it had gotten and was now digesting more than it had received.

They turned left and crossed the trail. It had veered toward them and they were barely ten feet from it.

“Jesus,” Newman said, “not good. We might have walked right into them. We’re too close.”

They crossed the trail and stopped forty-five feet into the woods on the left side of it. “We shouldn’t be walking bunched together like this,” he said. “If we blunder into them they could kill us both with one shot.”

“I’m not going to walk alone,” she said. “I’ll get lost.”

He looked back behind him. “Stay behind me as far as you can and still keep me in sight. Then if I’m nabbed you can still operate. You saved me last time.”

“All right, but if I whistle like Chris taught us”—she whistled softly between her teeth,
see soo
—“you wait and if you don’t see me, come back.”

He nodded. “If you get lost stay where you are. I’ll find you. Otherwise we’ll go around in circles for each other.”

She turned away to look back of them. “Of course they could come up behind us.”

“Yes,” he said. “You’re no safer back there. We cover each other. If I need you I’ll whistle the same way.” He smiled at her. “You know how to whistle don’t you?”

“Just pucker up and blow,” she said. She smiled. It was an old joke from a favorite movie. And it seemed somehow to ease the oddness of their situation.

They found Karl’s camp in the early afternoon. Newman saw the orange tent through the trees. He raised his hand. Twenty feet behind him Janet stopped. Her hair was wet with sweat and stuck close to her head. There were scratches on her face. Newman gestured her forward and she came up beside him. She had the .32 in her hand. Newman put one finger to his lips. Then he pointed at the tent. She nodded. He could feel the vertigo in his stomach. His legs felt weak. He looked at her face, scratched and sweaty, without makeup, showing strong bone structure and no fear. He’d looked at the face so long it seemed somehow permanent. He felt reassured, safer with her beside him.

They listened. There was no human sound from the camp. He put his lips close to her ear.

“We’ll circle it,” he said. “If they are staking it out we’ll come behind them.”

She nodded.

“Remember,” he whispered, “you only have five shots in that thing before you have to reload. Don’t waste them.”

She nodded again. They started very carefully around the camp. A quarter of the way around the camp’s perimeter they found Hood’s body. It was thirty yards from where he had died. It lay facedown under some low-clumped sumac. One hand was under him and the other lay palm up by his side. The fingers half closed. Ants crawled in the cup of the hand and more ants crawled around the black area of dried blood between his shoulder blades where the bullets had emerged. Death had released Hood’s sphincter control. Janet put her clenched fist against her mouth. Newman looked down once, and looked away. He put one hand on Janet’s arm and moved her away from Hood’s body.

It took them ninety-six minutes to complete the circle. No one was near the camp.

“Let’s get closer,” Newman said.

Crouched, they inched closer to the clearing and stopped finally, squatting beneath the down-swooping bows of an old white pine tree, silent on the thick mulch of needles around the foot-thick base of the tree. There was a cluster of stones grouped to form a fireplace, but there was no fire. The orange tent had its flap open. A packboard lay by the open flap. Around the fireplace there were several camp cookery utensils. Starlings were pecking at something in one of the pans. Three sleeping bags, still unrolled, spread out around the fireplace like spokes from a hub. The foil wrappings of freeze-dried food were scattered about the clearing. A half-full bottle of Canadian Club stood on the ground near the tent. Two packboards leaned against the flat rock over which the stream flowed. Another packboard hung from a tree behind the tent. A ground squirrel skittered
across the clearing. The sun slanted from the west now, behind them, and dust motes danced in its rays in the silent space. Fresh dirt and a mound of stones at the far edge of the clearing showed where they had buried the boy.

“What now?” she whispered.

He shook his head.

“Let’s destroy it,” she said.

He looked at her. Faintly, almost like an internal sound, a ruffed grouse drummed far off. The sound registered only at the edge of Newman’s mind. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

He looked around him. “Get kindling, dry twigs, sticks, leaves, we’ll pile them in the tent and then throw everything in there and set it going.”

“What about a forest fire?”

He shook his head. “Woods are green. There’s been a lot of rain. The tent is surrounded by dirt. Shouldn’t spread far.”

“Aren’t you going to get kindling?” she said.

“No. I want to be able to shoot when we step out there if they really were hiding and we missed them.”

She nodded and gathered an armload of dry sticks and twigs. “Okay,” she said.

He said, “Stay down. We’ll scooch out behind the tent and cut a hole in the back and stuff the brush in that way.”

“What if they’re back that way?”

“Then we get shot at. But if they’re not they won’t see us. It cuts down the odds. If we go in the front way they can see us from every place.”

“Let’s go,” she said and handed him her knife.

He went to his knees, the carbine pushing before
him in his right hand, the knife in his left, and crawled into the clearing. Nothing happened. He crawled to the tent. No sound. The starlings continued to forage in the cookware. He drove the point of the knife through the nylon fabric of the tent and sawed a hole. No one was inside. He peered through. There was an open sleeping bag, a roll of toilet paper, a pack, nothing else. He gestured to Janet and she pushed her armload of tinder into the tent. With the hunting knife he whittled some shavings and scraps of bark from one of the sticks. He crumbled several handfuls of the toilet paper. Then he took a butane lighter from his shirt pocket and lit the paper and shavings. The flame caught the paper at once, flickered at the edge of the shavings. A tiny spiral of smoke rose. Then the flame began to nibble into the wood in a tiny black-edged crescent. Newman moved more twigs and bark scraps closer. The fire spread.

“Let’s get the other stuff,” he said.

They stood up, Newman’s eyes scanning the blank wood-line around them, and ran for the packboards. “Take that one on the tree,” Newman said.

His wife shoved it into the tent. The flames were crackling now in the dry wood. The sleeping bag began to smolder. Janet ran to the other side of the clearing and picked up another packboard. Her husband had two slung by the shoulder straps over his left arm. He held the knife blade in his teeth and the carbine in his right hand. He threw the two packboards into the tent through the open front flap. Janet put the last packboard in. The sleeping bag was burning.

“Will the tent burn?” Janet said.

“It’s nylon,” Newman said. “It should melt, and when it does it will carry the burning meltage into the pile of packs and stuff. Or it should.”

They turned and slipped back into the shadow of the woods. Behind them the tent fabric began to shrink and then coalesce. Holes appeared in it as burning trickles of melted chemical dropped onto the fire below. The fire burned hotter. “Uphill,” Newman said.

She followed him without a sound as they climbed over the tabletop rock and splashed through the stream that splayed across it. Behind them ammunition in the packs began to explode in rattling pops. The tent diminished into a seething wallow of chemicals and flame. The smell of it filled the woods, oddly foreign, an industrial smell in the pristine forest. The starlings flew away.

The upgrade was steeper now as they moved up the trail, Newman first, Janet behind him. Almost at once they were out of sight of the camp, though they could smell the fire and hear the ammunition rattling off. Janet had the knife back in her scabbard. Newman had the hatchet stuck in his belt at the small of his back. He carried the carbine with both hands now, ready to fire. His hand tense on the trigger guard, listening for footsteps, fearing the sudden confrontation as the trail bent and the enemy came hurrying down toward the fire. But they met no enemy.

They stopped to rest.

“Why uphill?” Janet said.

“I figure they’d be looking for us downhill, and I didn’t want to run head-on into them coming up the trail.”

“Why wouldn’t they be looking for us uphill?”

“Because we were downhill last they saw of us. Because like us, I bet their whole mental orientation is downhill, back toward the lake and the cottages and, you know, civilization. When we ran yesterday, which way did we go?”

“Downhill,” she said.

“Right. In my mind we’re on the end of a long string that stretches back to the lake but not ahead. You know?”

“Christ, you think in such elaborate pictures.”

“I know. And I know you don’t. I see ideas, you think them. It’s one reason we argue, I guess.”

“Now what?” she said.

“Now we swing around through the woods and go back down past them.”

“Why didn’t we do that in the first place?”

“Because we had to get away. We were in a hurry. Now we’re not. Now we can sneak slowly back and cut them off below. We can’t let them get out of here. They know who we are. We have to kill them all. If any one of them gets away we’re as good as dead.”

“I know.”

“Four men,” Newman said.