Curds and Whey Box Set

by G M Eppers

  “I guess Gary’s right about that, Ross. Besides, Clara needs you.” I needed to get Ross onto another subject before we both got too depressed to think.

  I smiled and watched Clara eat another cracker, her jaws opening and closing, the food smacking as it mixed with her saliva, showing her tiny sharp teeth, her small, black, almost human hands extended in gastronomic ecstasy. Chewing with her mouth open. Really, raccoons have no manners, I thought wryly. But she was so adorable even with her lack of etiquette. “Can I ask why we’re taking Clara to Lake of the Woods?” I was careful not to mention Canada. If Gary knew I knew about the border crossing, he might do something to prevent me from contacting the guards. Like perhaps shoot me. I was worried about why he was so happy to see me on the bus. For all intents and purposes, I seemed expendable to me. I didn’t see any reason for him not to shoot me if I pushed his buttons. So it seemed a better idea, as the common saying goes, to keep calm and carry on.

  Gary was brief. “No.” He looked up to check our progress again, then went back to watching Ross with Clara. Traffic was getting sparse and the road was getting smaller. And the air was getting colder. I heard the heater bump up a notch.

  Ross offered Clara a raisin, but Clara wasn’t interested. He tried a vanilla wafer and a peanut, but the morsels just sat on the floor of the carrier as she waited expectantly for the next offering. “She’s finally full,” I told Ross.

  “Naw,” he said with certainty. “She just wants another cracker.” He took out another cracker and she reached her short arms through the carrier grating trying to get it, her little fingers opening and closing like a small child reaching for a cookie. He had to hold it up out of her reach while he broke it and again gave her half, which disappeared immediately, and ate the other half himself. She chittered at him. She didn’t want to share.

  I forgot about being uncomfortable about my own impending fate and suddenly worried about Ross. “What kind of crackers are those, Ross?” I asked innocently enough. Cheese was a popular flavor for crackers, and it concerned me. Ross was eating them, too.

  “Crispy Craboons!” He said with pleasure, stretching out the last syllable like a wolf howling at the Moon.

  I’d heard of them. Crab Rangoon flavored crackers. Now, that would probably send out alarms to most people, but in my business even those of us who are not cheese experts do pick up a few facts from time to time. Crab Rangoon is made with cream cheese, which, in turn, is made without rennet. Varieties of cream cheese are big sellers on the open market. I relaxed. No rennet, no Uber. They were safe. It made sense. Clara was used to cheese in her regular diet and since this was the only cheese being offered, naturally she preferred it. When she sensed there were no more crackers she would probably consent to eating the wafers or the peanuts.

  I took a look at Knobby, who was focused on his driving, though it was not difficult right now. We were down to one lane in each direction bordered by pristine snow, edged in plowed, rumpled hills. Gary had said north, but we were actually traveling northwest, having cleared Upper Red Lake. A road sign said that Lake of the Woods was 60 miles away, as the road veered right and went due north, and now the road was straight all the way to the horizon. Too bad the bus didn’t have cruise control, I thought.

  We rode for several minutes in tense silence, in which Gary checked his watch at least six times. “There’s a problem, isn’t there, Gary?” I asked, speaking calmly.

  I thought Gary would respond with a glare, or banish me to the back again, but he said, “They don’t know we’re coming,” without even looking at me. It looked as if he thought he had said it to himself and only realized after the fact that he’d said it out loud. Only then did he look up to meet my gaze, as if to say, “You didn’t hear that. I never said anything. I’ll deny every word.” But there was something in his eyes that made me keep trying. They weren’t cold and hard anymore like they’d been at the cabin. He was scared of something. He was absolutely terrified of something.

  “Who doesn’t know we’re coming?”

  Something was fighting inside Gary. Instead of answering my question, he said, “You guys made us leave the cabin before I made contact. I was supposed to call them on the shortwave, and I couldn’t and now they won’t know we’re coming.”

  So he was supposed to meet someone, or a number of someones, at this Lake of the Woods place, but he hadn’t been able to tell them he was on the way. Were these mysterious someones supposed to take care of the border guards before we got there? That would be plausible. There had to be at least two or three guards at a border crossing, I would think, and there was no way Gary would be able to subdue them with his single .38, which was already missing at least one round. They would have long range rifles, most likely. He had to go there. Chased from the cabin, it was his only choice. For some reason, he needed to meet these people, but now felt that we were heading into an ambush. Maybe he would surrender when we got there and that would be that. Even after all he’d done, I certainly didn’t want to see him get shot. Please, I thought to myself, let him surrender.

  About an hour later, the road became all gravel and came to an end at the edge of a very large frozen lake. The surface was still and glasslike, but it couldn’t be very thick. It was only mid-November. Knobby glided the bus to a stop on the snow covered gravel. There was no border crossing here. There were no guards or patrols. Just the lake from one horizon to the other, interrupted by a few small, tree-covered islands.

  As soon as the bus came to a stop, its engine idling noisily, Gary climbed off the bus, out into the snow, staring up at the sky. The .38 was still in his hand out of habit more than anything else. At least, that’s what I started telling myself. He paced, not knowing what to do. If he had a phone, he didn’t say. I had the impression these weren’t the kind of people you contacted by phone, anyway, unless it was a burner to be discarded. I watched from the bus as Gary paced through the snow.

  “You know,” said Knobby after a good five minutes, “we could just drive away and leave him here.”

  He was right. We had Clara. Ross, who’d held Clara on his lap the entire time, was oblivious to the fact that he was nearly out of crackers. He couldn’t tear himself away from the raccoon. While his brother paced outside, he reached into his pocket and came out with another peanut. He reached in again, looking for a cracker, and found none. It was only then that he looked up and could not see Gary anywhere. “Gary?” He said, timidly. Immediately, he panicked. “Gary!” But he didn’t get up and go looking. He glanced down at the carrier. “You stupid! You’re out of crackers!” He said, and he slapped himself on the cheek. “Stop it, Gary, don’t hit me. I’m sorry.” He slapped himself again. “I’m supposed to tell you when I get low so we can get some more. I forgot. I’m bad.”

  He prepared to slap himself again, but I grabbed his hand and held it. “No, Ross. You’re not bad. Don’t do that.” But inside, I was gasping. It hadn’t been Gary hitting Ross on the ransom call. It had been Ross hitting himself. Gary probably wasn’t even there. When Gary wasn’t around, Ross invented him. “Gary’s outside, Ross. I’ll get him for you.”

  But I didn’t have to. Just as I was going to get off the bus, Gary, glaring at me as I backed away down the center aisle, climbed on. “We can’t stay here. We keep moving.” He turned to Knobby. “Drive”.

  “Where? There’s no more road, Gary.” Knobby had no choice but to oppose him, despite the .38 pointed at his face.

  “Over the lake. It’s frozen.”

  My jaw dropped open in horror. “Gary, no! That’s suicide. There’s not enough ice to support us let alone a bus. We won’t do it.”

  He whirled in the aisle and faced me. “We have to get across this lake and this is the only way.”

  “Then shoot us,” I said, simply. “We’ll be dead either way.”

  Somewhere deep inside, Gary knew we were right, but he threw all reason away. “We keep moving,” he said again. “Drive, old man.” Again with the old man
, I thought.

  Knobby, wisely, refused. “I agree with Helena,” he told Gary. “We’re dead either way. Shoot us. I’d rather bleed out than drown in freezing water.” With that said, he put the bus in park, and shut off the engine. It gave a few shudders and then went still, adding another option to our list of ways to die: freezing to death in an unheated bus. If it refused to start again, we wouldn’t even be able to go out the way we came in.

  “No,” said Gary, mostly to himself, denying the fact that whatever his mission was here he had failed. It ended here. “No.”

  Enraged, he came at me, the gun still in his hand but largely forgotten. His large hands were positioned to wrap themselves around my throat. If he had kept his senses, the whole ordeal could have ended much differently, though I might not have been around to see it.

  I had already backed up as far as I could go. I ducked his first lunge and grabbed the only weapon I had. Moving quickly, letting my training and instinct guide my movement, I wrapped my weapon around Gary’s neck, crossed the ends in front and pulled. Enjoying the look of surprise on his suddenly purpling face, I held it relentlessly until I felt him weaken. He clawed at the thing for a moment, awkwardly, suddenly realizing he had a gun. He tried to get a useful grip, but I jerked the glarf around his throat tighter. “Drop it, Gary.” For good measure, I repeated myself on both counts. The gun clattered to the floor and he reached for me instead. Using the leverage from the glarf, I spun him around. It’s far easier to choke someone from behind. I let up a little, not wanting to actually choke him, just hoping to control him. In our struggle, I felt my foot hit the gun and heard it go careening across the floor of the bus. “Talk to me, Gary. Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.” Other than the fact that it would be against the CURDS code of ethics, I thought.

  “I’m unarmed!” He reminded me, gurgling a little.

  “You weren’t a minute ago. You held Knobby at gunpoint. You held Clara at gunpoint. You shot out the radio.” At the end of each sentence, I pulled the glarf tighter, then loosened it again, punctuating my speech with his grunts.

  Gary tried to pull away, making it even worse for himself. He pulled at the glarf. “What the hell is this thing? Yarn? Are you crazy?” But the yarn wouldn’t break, no matter how much he pulled at it. And I have to admit, the udders, or fingers at the end were perfect for entwining around my own fingers to keep a very controlled grip. Knobby told me later that Gary got a very scary, confident look on his face, just before he stopped clawing and brought his elbow down sharply right into my ribs. Into THOSE ribs. Shooting pain erupted in my side and I heard myself call out, but I didn’t let go of the glarf. Then he did it again before I could recover and respond. I lost my grip on the glarf and he slipped away from me. I fell to my knees, stumbling against the bench seat, dropping the glarf and its trailing yarn on the floor, reaching blindly for a seat back to stop my fall. My vision swam, and I heard rather than saw what had to be the gun sliding across the floor of the bus and, still blinded by searing pain, I tried to find it.

  I had no idea what was going on ahead of me. I didn’t know if Gary had gotten off the bus or had ordered Knobby once again to drive over the ice, this time coerced by my obvious pain. I finally felt something solid and grabbed it, the handle very cold against my bare palm. Blinking to clear my vision, I held my fire. It would do no good to shoot wildly. It could ricochet and hit Ross, Clara, or Knobby.

  When I could finally focus, I saw that Gary was down, with Knobby’s legs wrapped around his neck, the rest of him lying awkwardly all the way down the bus steps. Knobby, his butt on the ribbed floor next to the gear box, held onto the buckled strap from his seatbelt, using only his legs to keep Gary from running away. Gary struggled against the scissor lock, his hands pulling at Knobby’s legs. Pain still throbbing in my side, keeping the gun in one hand, I grabbed the glarf that had fallen away after Gary jabbed my ribs, taking it with me as the single strand of red yarn trailed off of it, unraveling from the ball in Roxy’s bag.

  “Get away from me!” Gary yelled, his hands now swiping ineffectually at my legs as I calmly straddled him.

  “Hold him, Knobby!” I called as I gathered the opposite ends of the unfinished glarf. Here was the test of exactly how strong this yarn was as I pocketed the .38 long enough to grab Gary’s hands. I flipped him over, ramming his face into the top step, and jabbed my knee into his lower back, grabbing his hands one by one and using the glarf to tie them behind his back, pulling the awkward knot as tightly as I could. Turning around, I straddled him backwards and wrapped the trailing end of the yarn around his ankles. He kicked it loose, but I used my knees to hold down his lower legs, surprising myself at my ability to balance on the bus steps, and kept at it, wrapping the yarn over and over again until I ran out. I used the last couple of feet or so to slip it between his ankles and tie the whole bundle to the glarf around his wrists, so he was trussed up like a rodeo calf, crying into the ribbed rubber matting.

  I let him roll to his side to save his face from further injury, but his nose was bleeding and there was a scrape on one cheek. “You don’t understand!”

  “You all right, Knobby?” I asked. Knobby still lay on the steps, his legs underneath Gary, making no move to get up.

  “Nope,” he said simply. “Both knees are out.” His breaths came in short bursts as he tried to control his pain.

  Ross, now that the fighting was over, looked at Gary over the carrier on his lap. “Did you fall down, Gary?”

  I hopped down to the ground from the steps of the bus. Now it was my turn to look up at the sky. We were all going to freeze to death out here. I couldn’t even haul Knobby and Gary back onto the bus and close the door. Then I remembered my phone. But as I took it out, I heard a very welcome sound coming from a distance. It was the distinctive sound of helicopter blades chopping through the air and a few moments later a black dot appeared in the sky to the south. As it got closer, I recognized it as a Sikorsky Black Hawk transport helicopter, and “FBI” was stenciled on the side in wide block letters.

  Chapter Two

  Bitingly cold wind spun around us in a torrent, stirred by the blades of the Black Hawk. Gently, it came to a landing several yards from the bus, down the shore of the frozen Lake of the Woods, and the blades began to slow. They were still spinning as the doors opened and people began jumping out, bending over as if the blades were not three feet higher than their heads. Most of them wore gray trooper parkas, the fur linings rippling in the breeze created by the chopper blades. Two wore similar black jackets. I stood near the bus, rubbing my hands against the cold, watching my own breath leave my mouth in little wispy clouds.

  Billings was the first to reach me. “Mom! Are you all right?” Before I could answer, he’d looked around at the scene. “What happened here?”

  Butte and Fergie noted the obstruction on the bus stairs and I stepped back to give them room. “We caught the bad guy, that’s what,” I said. Casually, they grabbed Gary by his bound arms and legs and tossed him into the snow like a sack of potatoes. He began crying again, crying inconsolably. Most bad guys go down with considerably more dignity than that.

  Ignoring him, Ban joined the two men at the steps. “Knobby?” Butte asked.

  Billings backed up and looked, too. “Knees?”

  “I can help him,” said Ban, remembering about his capless knees from our conversation at the Mayo Clinic. “But he’s not going to like it.”

  From the stairwell, I heard Knobby’s shaky voice. “Don’t worry. I’ve done it before. It’s been a long time, but I’ve done it before. Let’s get it over with.”

  Ban positioned herself across his ankles. “Hold on to the bus. Hold on tight. Do you want something to bite on?” There was no answer. Knobby must have shook his head. Ban firmly gripped Knobby’s left ankle and yanked hard. While Knobby was still screaming from that, she grabbed the other and did the same. “Butte, help me get him into the snow. The cold will keep any swelling to a minimum.” Between t
he two of them, and with only a few weak screams, he was soon sitting up against the bus, his legs straight out in front of him. “Stay there a minute,” she said when she was finished. “Don’t even think about getting up yet.”

  “No problem.” He faked a shiver and winked at her. He was sweating, but it wouldn’t be long, though, before the shiver was real.

  “Anyone got some painkillers?” Ban called out loudly.

  The question reminded me. “Yes. Butte does.”

  “I do?” Butte looked lost.

  I crossed over to him and pointed at the HEP belt. “Let me have that back –.“ I was going to say more but he was already unbuckling. He couldn’t wait to hand it over. I snapped it on quickly, and got the bottle of generic Tylenol out of a pouch. I shook two into my hand and gave them to Ban, who passed them to Knobby. Knobby tossed them in his mouth, then grabbed a handful of snow to help them go down. I took the two in my hand and dry swallowed them with a fairly violent flick of my head.

  Billings noticed. “You okay, Mom?”

  “It’s nothing. Gary didn’t go down without a fight. I’ll be fine.” The bottle went back to the pouch.

  After seeing she had no more patients to tend, Banana jumped the steps of the bus in one long-legged stride. I saw her sit by Ross and gently lift the carrier from his lap. I wanted to get on the bus and share the reunion, but held back. Ban deserved privacy for that. Besides, I had business to do outside the bus.

  Eyedeneaux and Roxy were staring at Gary lying in the snow, face down, trussed up like a Christmas goose. “Is that my glarf?” asked Roxy.

  “Your what?” Eyedeneaux shot a confused look at Roxy, who stood with her head bowed in mourning, as if she had spoken a foreign tongue. I mean, a really foreign tongue, like Swahili or Urdu.

  I shrugged. “It was the only thing I had. He had a .38, you know.”