by D. J. Butler
I felt a little stupid. “Thanks.” I checked FindMe one last time, then took the condom and shoved my phone in. It went in awkwardly, with lots of tugging, and I couldn’t help but giggle. “This isn’t quite like health class,” I said.
“Yeah, the banana was closer to the…you know.”
I was glad my face was flushed already. “Shush.”
He took the phone and started blowing into the prophylactic. “Good thing I got a big—”
“Evil!”
“What? Condom, I got a big condom was what I was going to say.” He blew in one last lungful of air and tied the condom off at the end. It held, a dull white latex bubble with a little brick of a phone inside.
“Good job,” I said.
“No problem.”
I trotted over to the stream. The flow was wide and calm as it passed the campground, which was perfect. I laid my phone into the water in its prophylactic vessel and it quickly bobbed away. Hopefully it could get far enough down the canyon to be around the next bend before Ski Mask showed up. Hopefully it wouldn’t get caught on a rock.
“Now what?” Evil asked. “Squat down behind the tables and hope?”
“We can do better than that,” I said, and I shrugged out of my poncho. “Find a big patch of dirt where we can lay this down and lie under it.”
“Bucky.” Evil grinned. “You’re so romantic.”
“Shut up and do what I tell you,” I told him. “He’ll be here any minute, and he has all the guns.”
The first thing I realized when we were both underneath the poncho was that I smelled bad. Evil smelled worse, but that didn’t make it any better for me. We both needed showers and fresh clothing. For that matter, he probably needed a tetanus shot. Fortunately, I had my face pressed against the neck hole of the poncho. I did that so I could see better, but it also gave me more than my share of fresh air.
“This is snug.” Evil’s face was pressed against my shoulder and his knees crunched into my hip.
It was the worst cuddle ever.
“Shh.” I watched the canyon. We lay under the wool several hundred feet from the stream and the canyon center. The dry dirt beneath us was nearly the same color as the poncho, and the grass was tall enough to hide us. Well, not really to hide us. But we were inconspicuous, and if Ski Mask jogged fast enough, he just might miss us and trot on past.
He appeared upstream, and he was running fast.
He stared at the ground under his feet or at his hand. He had to be holding Evil’s phone and watching FindMe’s tracker screen, because he also occasionally shot glances ahead of him, down the canyon, where my phone was hopefully drifting along in its condom balloon boat.
The ski mask was peeled up now so that it just covered the top of his head, like a stocking cap, and I could see his face. Ski Mask, the man who had taken Evil prisoner and forced me to carry his message to Marilyn Wilding, was Michael Fellows, the guy who’d left his resume with Gladys and said he was looking for a job.
I slapped at my flannel shirt pocket out of reflex. I wanted to send Dad a message, warn him, but of course I didn’t have my phone.
“What’s going on?” Evil whispered.
“Shh. Nothing,” I lied.
In his left hand, Fellows held the long rifle. I was pretty sure Eddie Eagle wouldn’t approve of the way Fellows held the gun, but Eddie Eagle wouldn’t approve of running with a loaded weapon, either. Or taking potshots at innocent people, which is to say, me. Not to mention the Greek guy, Nick—he might not fit the ordinary definition of innocent, but Fellows had shot him in the head without so much as a warning.
Fellows looked around him again just before he drew level with us, and I had the terrible sinking feeling that I was meeting his gaze and he noticed me. His face was hard, fixed, and cruel, with none of the boyish handsomeness I had seen in it the day before. This Michael Fellows wasn’t a guy who would stand up and win cases in court; he was a man who would shoot you in the back.
Kings County District Attorney, my eye. I wondered who he worked for, and what he wanted. Had my encounter with Nick at the Wilding house gone according to his plan, had he intended to kill Nick? Or was killing Nick damage control, and was his plan something else? Was I supposed to come away with fifty thousand dollars? It didn’t seem likely, since Fellows had warned me to walk away from the house and be ready to run.
What was his connection with Nick, that he would want to kill him? Was one of them the man who killed Charlie Herbert? What was going on at the Wilding house that had so far resulted in two deaths? My head spun from the centrifuge of questions rattling around inside it, and I was glad I was lying down to start with. Otherwise, I might have fallen over.
And then I realized the dumb thing I’d done; I’d given my phone to a man I knew was a murderer. A man who had used Evil’s phone to trick me into thinking he was Evil, and forced me to do his will.
Once he had my phone, what might he do?
The device had a password, of course, and the screen saver would certainly have kicked in and locked the phone by now. Still, the password was a simple four-digit PIN and not particularly creative, just the street number of the Fun Lanes. He might figure that one out. Or maybe he had a device that would trick my phone—he was some kind of professional killer, after all, like a secret agent or an assassin. If that kind of technology really existed, he would be the guy who had it, wouldn’t he?
What if he texted Dad, claimed to be me, and told Dad to come out to some remote spot?
But why would he even do that? I tried to reassure myself.
It didn’t work. The fact was, Fellows had been one of the men who had broken into Dad’s office. Not the one who had shot Charlie Herbert, apparently, but he’d proved himself a killer since, and he was a kidnapper and a liar to boot. He wanted something from Dad, or Dad’s office, and if he had my phone he might use it to get what he was after.
Fellows jogged out of sight downstream.
I dragged off the poncho and took deep breaths. “We have to go back up to the house.”
“Is that safe?” he asked. We both climbed to our feet, and I left the poncho where it lay. It was dirty from the ground, but so was I, and I knew if I ended up out of doors after the sun went down, I’d be glad to have lugged it around all day. On the other hand, I was really tired.
Tired won.
“No,” I said, remembering that Marilyn Wilding had sicced Nick on me. “But I have to warn Dad.” And Sheriff Sutherland? But no, I still had no idea which of his deputies was dirty. Or if he was dirty. “We can’t follow him down, he’s got a gun. Maybe we can loop up around and borrow one of the Wildings’ cars. Or hike down the other side of the mountain.”
“A gun?” Evil looked at me funny. “Which gun did he have?”
A light went on in my head. “The rifle,” I told him. “Which means he left the shotgun behind.”
“We could use that, you bet,” Evil said. “And there’s a phone in that cabin I was tied up in. I don’t know for sure that it works, but if it does you can call your dad from there.”
I didn’t wait for any more encouragement. Looking over my shoulder to make sure Fellows hadn’t found my phone and turned back, I jogged upstream. Well, stumbled is more like it. I must have looked like one of the walking dead, shuffling raggedly along the side of the water and cursing under my breath.
Evil followed.
“You know, there’s a reason I carry a condom in my pocket all the time,” he grunted.
My legs ached; the few minutes of lying down had made all my muscles knot up, and now they rebelled. I forced them to do my will by sheer whip-cracking effort. I reminded myself that my life might depend on my ability to move as fast as possible; that helped.
“Is now the right time for this?” I asked.
“It isn’t what you think.”
“Okay.” I looked over my shoulder. “I owe you my life. I guess you can tell me why you carry a rubber in your pocket.”
“Wat
er,” he said.
That surprised me so much it took me almost a minute to organize a response. When I finally collected my thoughts, though, at least the first words out of my mouth were clever and sophisticated. “What the crap are you talking about, Evil?”
“Water,” he repeated. “Look, it’s a wilderness survival thing, same reason I always carry a pocket knife. You can fill a big condom with enough water to last you a day, maybe. So I never go anywhere without one.”
“Are you pulling my leg?” Even the act of saying the word leg reminded me of how stiff and sore my own legs were, and I winced.
“Nope. Also, you can start a fire with them.”
I tried to imagine what he was talking about, and couldn’t. “Okay,” I finally said. “I’ll bite. What do you mean?”
“A condom full of water refracts light, just like a magnifying glass. You remember burning ants with a magnifying glass when you were a kid?”
“I never did that. It’s more of a boy thing.”
“Yeah, well, I did. You can start a fire that way, if you fix that little white light on a dry piece of tinder, or leaves. And it turns out you can do it with a condom, too. After a pocket knife and a blanket, a condom’s just about the most useful survival tool a guy can have in the mountains.”
“I’m surprised they don’t sell them at REI.”
Evil laughed. “Nope. The wilderness survival condom is pretty much strictly the secret of us non-REI shoppers. Along with the aspirin bottle survival kit and the garbage bag rain slicker.”
“Those don’t have the same romantic applications though, I suppose.” We were in sight of the rock drop and the barbed wire again. I really wished I had my phone back and was watching Fellows’s location on FindMe. I felt an itch between my shoulder blades as if he were right behind me with the rifle at every step.
Evil shrugged. “Hey, you want to be prepared if you meet a girl.”
I bent to use my hands as well as my feet as I started scrambling up the slope. Cold water splashed against my forearms and ankles, startling me and perking me up. “If you meet a girl, huh? Flattering. I guess just any one would do. I suppose I should be glad you don’t see me as interchangeable with a farm animal.”
Evil grabbed my ankle and stopped my forward climb.
“Hey,” he said. “It was a joke. You know I’m not like that, and if I ever wanted to be with a girl… I mean, when I want to be with a girl…well, you know I’m sweet on you, Bucky…I mean, Becky McCrae.”
“Woman,” I corrected him, and kept climbing. “Get moving.”
He splashed up the stream behind me. “Besides,” he added, “just ’cause I’m a sagebilly doesn’t mean I’m a deviant.”
“No,” I agreed, squishing underneath the barbed wire and smearing more mud on my jeans. “You come by deviancy more as a matter of personal choice.”
“I’m glad of one thing, though,” he said, following me.
“What’s that?” I scanned the valley below. The sun was crossing noon above us and descending into afternoon, and the valley was a warm, dry yellow. Fellows wasn’t in sight, but in my mind’s eye I saw him just around the bend and coming my direction. I turned and climbed up into the defile that led to the Wildings’ house.
“I’m glad I didn’t get the lubricated condoms.”
I squinted over my shoulder, and the screwed-tight expression of mock disgust on Evil’s face made me laugh. “Ronald E. Patten,” I puffed. “You’re alright.”
“Please,” he said. “Call me Evil.”
We chugged up the defile like a two-car creeper train, putting one boot in front of the other and ignoring the pain.
“Wait,” I said, just as I thought Nick’s body—and the dead deer—should have been about to come into view. I was whispering. “What about Marilyn Wilding?”
Evil chewed his lip. He whispered back. “What about her?”
“She sent Nick after me with a gun. She heard shots. What did she do then?”
Evil considered. “Called the cops?”
“Maybe.” I hoped not. I was already nervous enough about the Howard County Sheriff Department. And assuming Sheriff Sutherland wasn’t involved in the burglary and shooting in Dad’s office, it would still look really bad for me to be caught on the scene of a second felony in twelve hours. “Or did she get another gun and come out after him?”
Evil looked around us, tilting his head back and forth as he examined the ridge behind us and the sun sloping off toward the Flats.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“I’m thinking we leave the shotgun. If we cut across that way”—he gestured—“we ought to hit that little cabin he had me tied up in. There’s a phone. We can call Jim, or the sheriff, or the FBI, or whoever you want. Heck, maybe we ought to call 911 and tell ’em we need to be life-flighted down to the hospital in Boise or Spokane.”
It wasn’t a bad idea, actually. Except that Michael Fellows had my phone. “I have to warn Dad,” I said, and I started crawling out of the defile in the direction Evil had pointed.
“Shoot.” Evil followed me. “It’d be kind of fun to lie down on the landing skids of a helicopter and watch Hells Canyon zip past underneath, don’t you think?”
“I think I’d vomit,” I said. “And I don’t know if they’re called landing skids.”
“In matters of combustion engines and bitchin’ modes of transportation,” Evil advised, “never, ever go up against a sagebilly.”
I kept my head down and scooted up the slope. It crested in a warty knob of rock, mottled with lichen on one side, and I paused to let Evil catch up. I wished he’d been further behind, so I could have rested.
“How far do you think we are from the body?” I whispered.
He crouched beside the rock with me and pointed. “Right over there’s where the guy was standing when he pulled the trigger.”
That put us within a stone’s throw. I had to look. “The guy uses the name Fellows, by the way.” I dropped to hands and knees and crawled forward, keeping low in the grass and moving slowly. In this warm weather, the lower canyons and foothills of the Ups become rattlesnake country, and the last thing I needed was to put my hand into a nest of baby rattlers.
“You know him?” Evil followed.
“He’s the guy who came to my office. To Dad’s office.” Grass poked me in the face and the warm vegetable smell of it filled my nose and throat. Good thing I’ve never suffered from hay fever.
Evil grabbed my ankle again. I yanked it away, not in an irritated way, but out of principle.
“Is all this about you, somehow?” he asked. “Or Jim? Your dad?”
“Not unless we’re the last of the Romanovs and don’t know about it,” I said. “We’ve got nothing to take except the mortgage on the house and the Fun Lanes.”
“They are Howard County’s only bowling lanes that are also a law office,” Evil said.
“Don’t forget the bar.” I crawled forward on my belly.
Nick lay dead on the bottom of the defile below me, not far from the second of the two dead deer. His shotgun still lay under him, and I saw no sign of anyone else.
Evil crunched onto his elbows beside me, scattering a beetle that ran across the back of my hand. “I could go get the gun,” he whispered.
I grabbed his wrist. “No.” I wished I could see the Wilding house and the vale it sat in, rather than just the slope leading up to it and the pine woods on the slope. “No one’s moved the body, which means… I don’t know what it means.”
“Mrs. Wilding probably didn’t call the sheriff, for one thing,” Evil suggested.
“But why?”
“She’s in on it,” Evil suggested. “Fellows is her accomplice, and together they lured the other guy out of the building to kill him.”
The suggestion rang hollow to me. “That’s an awful lot of work to kill a guy. I can’t be sure, but I think Marilyn Wilding might have been sleeping with that guy Nick. Or maybe he was her son. Steps
on.”
“There’s a big difference between a lover and a stepson. Usually.”
“She was hanging around him…pretty undressed.”
“So, lover.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “So if she wanted him dead for some reason, it should have been as easy as shooting him in the back.”
“She didn’t want blood on her own hands.”
“Well then she could have sent him out for a donut and had Fellows shoot him in the back. Involving me doesn’t make any sense.”
“So…Marilyn Wilding and Nick somebody on one side, and Fellows somebody on the other.” Evil held up fingers as he talked. “What’s going on? And who else is in on this?”
“Michael Fellows. But that’s got to be a fake name. Someone in the sheriff department,” I said, feeling miserable. “Maybe the sheriff, maybe just a deputy.”
“For what? This has to be about the Wildings somehow, doesn’t it?”
“Sure seems like it. He had a lot of money, I guess, but this isn’t the wild west. You can’t just shoot people and take their cash.”
“The wild west was never like that,” Evil said. “You’re thinking of Detroit.”
I chuckled, but I was perplexed.
“Come on.” Evil tapped me gently on the shoulder. “This is bigger than us, whatever it is. Let’s get to the cabin and call your dad.”
I followed him. We ran hunched over, which might have been pointless and certainly looked silly, but it made me feel better to at least try to stay hidden. I felt better still when we dropped down a slope and into another shallow depression with a house in it. This house was a ragged little A-framed cabin, it was surrounded by trees, and in the gravel strip beside it was parked a car I knew: a blue Corolla. Michael Fellows’s California rental.
Evil turned back to hiss at me, and I realized I’d stopped. “Stay focused, Bucky!”
I straightened up and ran through the trees. I ran faster than Evil or he let me catch up, because I beat him to the door and tried the handle.