Wisdom Spring (16 page)

It had been a bad winter, and the higher elevations were still snow-covered even this late in the season. Although normally a busy road filled with RVs and trucks with trailers that time of year, there were also times when we felt all alone travelling through the snowy mountain passes. While serene, it could also be nerve-wracking navigating the curvy roads. Always in the back of our mind was the potential threat of Hillstrom’s men cornering us out there in the middle of nowhere.

Jess had changed since the shooting. Although she had moments of anxiety from having killed a man, they mostly appeared in the middle of the night. During the day there were glimmers of a strength about her I hadn’t seen before. It was nothing we talked about, and in fact, I’m not sure she wanted to talk about it. There was something else, too. During some of the quiet times, I would see Jess close her eyes for anywhere from ten minutes to a couple of hours. She wasn’t sleeping though. The best I could figure was that she was meditating. Whatever it was, something was happening, as she always came out of it with a look of contentment.

Phone service was spotty at best, but I managed to call Scott and let him know where I was. I also called Joe. He said that so much negative information was being put out there about Jess—drug use, alcohol abuse, anger problems and a history of violence, among other things—that Mill decided it was time to present Jess’s side of the story. Even though they hadn’t yet found anything incriminating on Hillstrom, Mill was going to make the accusations anyway, without being too specific. He had a press conference scheduled in a couple of days.

“They also found the mole in Mill’s office,” added Joe. “He refused to say who he was working for, but there was enough evidence to prove he was collecting information. Mill threw him out on his butt. So that part’s over.”

I let him know that we’d be at our destination soon and would call him again then.

At one point I decided to turn Becker’s phone back on to see if any messages had been left. I was rewarded with a feast of information. There were close to thirty messages, all from “Unknown Caller.” They all started with some variation of “Where the fuck are you?” The early messages asked for an update, but the later ones sounded more desperate. They had reached Winnipeg but had no idea where to look. They had men stationed all over the place trying to spot my Beemer. One message reported that the plates on the car that Becker’s buddy had passed on were from a car rented by an operative who had gone missing. It ended with “What the hell is going on?”

I decided to take a chance. At that point it had been three days since I had last talked to him. I pressed the button to return the call and got him immediately.

“Where the fuck have you been?” came the familiar refrain.

“They got the drop on us outside Saskatoon. They came out of fucking nowhere. They had guns. Nothing we could do.” I tried to whine a bit. “We just now got free. We’re starving.”

“I don’t care about that, you moron. How could you let yourself get jumped? Do you have any idea how badly you’ve screwed up this whole operation? Do you know how many people I had to bring up here based on your info. Shit! So where did they go?”

“I don’t know for sure, but I heard her saying in the next room something about needing to go back to Washington. Something about that’s where the evidence is. I don’t know what she was talking about, but it sounds like they’re heading back to the states.”

“Shit, shit, shit!”

“So what do you want us to do?” I asked.

“You? Go jump off a bridge for all I care. You two are fucking fired! I don’t ever want to hear from you again. You may as well get a job at Burger King, ‘cuz I’ll make sure you never work in this business again.” He hung up.

I put the phone down on a rock, and using another rock, smashed it to bits.

“I could hear a lot of yelling,” said Jess. “What did he say?”

“We’re fucking fired. The good news is that Burger King is hiring.”

“Could it be that we might actually be safe for a while? Not only did I hear you steer them back toward Washington, but they’re no longer wondering what happened to Becker. Now that he’s been fired, nobody is going to be looking for the SUV.”

“Exactly,” I agreed. “That couldn’t have gone any better. I just decided to listen to his messages on a lark. I’m glad I did. We’ve just bought ourselves even more time.”

We needed to start thinking about the border crossing again. I suggested that Jess lie down on the floor behind the passenger seat and I would pile some things on top of her, but she didn’t like the idea.

“I know you’ll probably make it across the border without them searching your car, but what if you don’t. If they find me, we’re both in trouble. But if I find some other way to cross and they catch me, you’ll still be anonymous. You can continue to find something on Hillstrom.”

I didn’t like it, but she made sense. So our final day in Canada was spent watching for opportunities for Jess. She had finally agreed that if nothing promising showed up, she would take the chance in the SUV.

Fortune, however, was smiling. At the campground that night we parked again in a remote spot, but across the campground was a humongous RV with a roof rack that was piled high with all kinds of gear. These were some serious RVers. The vehicle held a family of five, usually a safe bet to get across the border without problems. The father was packing things onto the rack when I sauntered over and asked him if he needed any help. He declined, but thanked me for the offer, saying that this was just the stuff they wouldn’t need that night, but that they were pulling out in the morning. I engaged him in conversation and discovered that they were heading for Alaska, to a campground in Denali National Park.

We were going to have to time it just right, but knew we had to try to get Jess up the ladder and under something on the roof rack in the morning before they left.

And that’s exactly what happened. After he stowed the last of the gear on the roof in the morning, the husband walked over to the camp store to check out. The wife and the three little girls were inside the RV, and the girls were making a racket. Jess looked around to make sure she was alone, then scrambled up the ladder. I saw her fiddling with what looked like a heavy-duty bungee cord, then slip under a tarp. Her hand popped out while she reset the bungee cord.

I didn’t wait for them. It would look way too suspicious for me to follow behind them. But I also wouldn’t be able to see if Jess got caught. I just had to trust. I hit the Canadian checkpoint soon after I left the campground and made it through using the same line I had used before. This was an odd border post, in that the U.S. post was thirty miles away, over a swampy marshland. Again I sailed through easily. I drove on to the first rest area I could find, and that’s where I set up my Jess vigil.

The waiting was interminable. After an hour I found myself pacing the parking lot, which wasn’t realistic. I knew full well that they would be longer than an hour. But after two hours, I was seriously worried—and there was nothing I could do about it. My imagination was running wild. I pictured Jess sitting alone in an interrogation room at the border. If she had been discovered, she’d be dead in a matter of days, maybe hours, and there was nothing anyone could do—Mill Colson, Joe Gray, the police, or me—Hillstrom’s army would make sure of that.

The three-hour mark was approaching when, in the distance, I saw a massive shape lumbering up the road at about thirty mph. It was them!

Now the big question: Was Jess still on top of the RV?

I was hoping that this being the first rest area since the border crossing, and with an RV full of kids, they would stop. They did. They pulled up close to me, and when the father got out, we greeted each other like long-lost friends.

“Thought that RV looked familiar,” I said. “Wasn’t that a weird border post? You have to go so far between the Canada and U.S. checkpoints.”

“We’ve done this route a couple of times, so we were prepared. Thought you’d be long gone by now on your way to Anchorage.”

“I kept waking up all night, so I was really tired. I pulled over and took a nap. Just woke up about ten minutes ago.”

The mother took the kids over to a small playground on the other side of the RV to work off some of their energy. The ladder was on my side, too close to the father for Jess to chance it. Her safest bet was to drop off the back of the RV—a long drop for her—unless the guy decided to join his family. However, he would have none of that. He had just spent three hours—and who knows how many days before that—driving with them. He was finding all kinds of excuses to stick near me and continue the conversation.

Looking over his shoulder, I could see Jess’s hand protruding from the tarp, trying to unlatch the bungee cord. Seeing as how he wasn’t about to leave, I had an idea.

“Hey, since you’ve done this route before, would you mind taking a look at my map?” ushering him over to the SUV. I opened the atlas on the front hood, and maneuvered him to stand with his back to the ladder.

I asked him about hotels, national parks, wildlife, and anything else I could think of to give Jess time to extricate herself from the tarp. I could see her from my vantage point. Her head was sticking out and she was looking around to make sure no other cars were entering the rest area. Luckily, it was a quiet road. She squirmed out of the tarp, remembering to hook the bungee cord again, and basically slid down the ladder and scooted around the back of the RV. I thanked Al—we were finally on a first-name basis—and pretended to prepare to leave. At that moment, one of his kids started crying. With a heavy sigh, Al told me to have a nice trip, and made his way around the front of his RV over to the playground.

As soon as he was out of sight, Jess ran over to the SUV. I opened the back door on my side and she jumped in, ducking out of sight. I got back in and we took off. A minute later she was sitting in the passenger seat, trying to stretch. She reached over the seat and grabbed a bottle of water from a bag. She drank half of it before breathing again.

“I’m so thirsty,” she said with her next breath. “It was stifling under that tarp. I’m glad they stopped at this rest area. I don’t know how much longer I could have stayed under there.”

At Tok, we got onto Highway 1 heading south and made it to Anchorage late in the afternoon. We were only a couple of weeks shy of the summer solstice, so the sun hadn’t gone down—and probably wouldn’t until much later, and even then only for a short time. We stayed the night in a very “Alaska-looking” hotel, and were off early the next morning for Homer.

Again the views were breathtaking and we found ourselves poking along. As anxious as I was to see my brother—it had been almost two years, during a trip he had made back east—we were in no hurry to arrive.

Finally, we reached Scott’s house, which was on a hill overlooking Kachemak Bay and the mountains on the other side. We got out of the SUV and Jess just stood and stared in wonderment at the view. She said, “I could live here forever. This is heaven.”

“That’s what I said when I visited for the first time,” I said, my arm around her waist. “Then my brother described the cold dark winters and I wasn’t so sure after that.”

I hadn’t seen this house. The times I visited had been soon after he arrived, and he was renting a house. He bought this one after my last visit. It looked as if it had been put together in pieces over the years. Rooms had been added, and the additions didn’t always look like the part of the house they were attached to. It didn’t seem overly homey from the outside. It was a “working” house—sheds, stacked wood, a henhouse, even right down to an ax stuck in a log. Then my brother appeared at the door.

Scott had really taken to life in Alaska in his eight years there. He looked as much the part as his house did. He was a bit shorter than me, probably 5’10” and had gained a fair amount of weight over the years. He had a head of bushy black hair and had grown a full beard that showed the occasional flecks of gray. In all, the perfect Alaska caricature. Once he became sober, he had trained to be an EMT, then had gone off to paramedic school. Upon graduation he got a job as a paramedic in Detroit, working in the worst part of the city, attending to gunshot wounds, stabbings, and drug overdoses, and making a name for himself in the process with his skills and fearlessness. Two years in the battle zone was enough though, and he longed to be away from the city. How he ended up in Homer was still a mystery to me, but he loved it. He cut back somewhat on his paramedic work, now just being on call at the local volunteer fire department. Over the years he had also become a motorcycle mechanic, a chef, a carpenter, and, upon moving to Alaska, had even gotten his pilot’s license. Basically, Scott was a jack-of-all-trades, and a master of most of them. He earned enough to get by and was happy. He got along with everybody and loved the little things in life. In so many ways, his life had become much deeper than mine, and I envied him for it. Maybe it was a good time for me to take on some of those qualities.

Standing solemnly next to him was Max, his German Shepherd. I had heard countless stories about Max. He was a former police dog who had been retired with his owner when the cop retired. Within a year of retirement, the cop found out he had lung cancer and was no longer able to care for Max. A friend of his knew Scott and knew he’d be in good hands with him. Max looked the part of a police dog. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he asked me for some ID.

“Hey bro,” Scott called out, taking in Jess at a glance. “Where’s your Beemer?” He bounced down the stairs with an agility that belied his weight, Max close behind, and gave me a bear hug. “I’m really sorry about Karen,” he said.

I had a momentary feeling of guilt that I wasn’t wallowing in misery about Karen. But circumstances had changed that. Besides, she was always in the back of my mind, and would always be there. Deep down, I knew she forgave me for all that had happened, and that brought me some comfort.

“Thanks. It’s getting a little easier.”

 Scott cocked his head and said, “But I’ve gotta say you look good … relaxed.”