Enjoy walking, gentlemen, he thought.
Then, with the briefcase tucked under his arm, he climbed back up to his vantage point on the hill.
CHAPTER 17
Curiosity
Curiosity killed the cat. That was one of Grampa Elie’s sayings.
Perhaps Nick should have just headed straight toward the reserve. By his map it was only fifteen miles away now, and the unmaintained road between the reserve and the abandoned logging town looked to be a straight shot. But Nick was curious about two things. The first was what would happen when they tried to start that helicopter. Wanting to know that did make sense. If, despite the sand in the gas, it could fly, then they’d still be able to search for him from above.
The other thing he was curious about was the briefcase. It was heavy, stuffed with something. Clearly something important to Dead Eyes or he would not have taken it with him. Money? Bearer bonds? Whatever it was, it had been worth a man’s life.
There was enough dawn light now for Nick to see clearly to read. And from his place concealed on the hill, he could still keep an eye on the copter and see anyone who might be coming his way—though he doubted the men hunting him had realized he was there.
He opened the briefcase. No money, just documents and a thick plastic bag with thumb drives in it.
It didn’t take long for him to figure out who the murdered man had been. A lawyer. His name was Nathaniel Ho, and his offices were in Ottawa. That was what it said on his business cards, as well as on the driver’s license and credit cards inside the wallet Nick found shoved down into the bottom of the briefcase.
Why he’d been killed took Nick a little more time to figure out. But when he saw the names— circled in yellow with a highlighter—in one of the documents, he began to understand. The document was the transcript of a secretly recorded conversation—probably on one of those thumb drives. The names were of two very important men in the Canadian government. The conversation was about payoffs for clearing the way to set up oil-fracking operations on First Nations lands. The oil exploration the other Natives on the train had been talking about. Those lands included the reserve where Nick was heading. The lawyer had been employed by a group of First Nations tribes to help stop the drilling. And he’d been doing his job too well. A chill went down Nick’s back. This was way bigger than he’d suspected.
Nick closed the briefcase. Taking a length of string cord, he fastened it to the back of his pack.
Think. What does this mean?
Were Dead Eyes and Blondie and the copter pilot the only ones after him? Or were others being called in? Would others be waiting for him at the reserve? Be logical.
Trust your intuition. That’s what Aunt Marge said. And his intuition was telling him that there would not be more pursuers. Dead Eyes had screwed up by not just having a witness but by also letting him get away. The fewer who knew, the better. The more people involved, the more likely the killer’s mistake would be known and he’d be in big trouble.
What Nick had to do now was make sure that more people knew about what had happened— about the killing, and about what was in the briefcase. Safety in numbers.
Reach the reserve. Find the office of the tribal police.
There was movement below. Three men were walking toward the copter.
CHAPTER 18
Found
It was Dead Eyes, Blondie, and a tall, skinny man Nick assumed was the pilot. The three of them moved with calm assurance to the copter.
Sure of themselves, Nick thought.
The pilot climbed in on his side, and the other two followed him. Dead Eyes settled into the front seat, while Blondie climbed in back, pulled out his rifle, and cradled it in his arms. Nick watched as they strapped in and the pilot leaned forward to start the engine. It started to turn over, but the clanking, grinding sounds that followed were pleasing to only one set of ears— Nick’s. The helicopter’s blades turned once, then the whole machine shook. It didn’t blow up— like in a Hollywood film—but the cloud of black smoke that shot out of the machine’s exhaust pipe and was carried away by the wind was satisfying enough.
The three men climbed out of the disabled helicopter. Dead Eyes was holding the blanket that had been covering the briefcase. The wind was too strong now for Nick to hear what they were saying, but from the way Dead Eyes was waving his arms, it was not a happy conversation. The bald assassin’s degree of displeasure was made even more clear when he knocked the pilot down and began to kick him.
But Dead Eyes only kicked him twice before stopping, turning, and staring up at the hill where Nick was watching.
It sent a shiver down Nick’s spine. Even though he was certain there was no way he could be seen, concealed as he was, far away as he was, he still closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, Dead Eyes was no longer looking his way. He had something in his hand and seemed to be talking into it. It looked like a satellite phone or a walkie-talkie. The pilot was still on the ground, curled into a defensive ball. Blondie was running back toward the building where they’d spent the night.
Crap, Nick thought. There might be no way he could have been seen, but somehow—he knew in his gut—Dead Eyes had sensed him. He had to move fast. He slid down the other side of the hill to the trail below it and began to run.
As he ran, he was thinking ahead, making sense of what he’d just observed. The helicopter was out of the equation now. But Dead Eyes had been communicating with someone. Maybe someone who was waiting on the reserve. That was one thing. The other was the way Blondie was hurrying back to the old town as if to get something. Nick hoped it wasn’t what he thought it might be.
He’d covered at least a mile now. It was hilly, one hill after another, but easy running. The trail he was on had once been a road. Back when the logging town was in its heyday, there’d been trucks on that road. And the town had electricity then. There were still utility poles, short ones, along the old road. The remnants of broken wires that once carried phone messages and power drooped like vines from some of them.
“They say there’s five senses,” Grampa Elie had said to him. “Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. But there’s also the one I call feeling, when you feel something beyond what those five other senses tell you, and you just know it’s true.”
That feeling sense was now telling Nick what to do as he kept running, even though he hadn’t yet heard the sound that would tell him what he felt was right. He stayed on the old logging road as it rose up over another rise, then curved right on the other side to bypass a deep gully and go between two straight, good-sized trees. Nick stopped. A thin electric wire hung down from where it had been fastened onto one of those straight trees.
Nick stuck his rabbit stick under his belt. He grabbed the wire and pulled on it. He stumbled back as a twenty-foot length of cable came free. He looped one end around the tree that had held the wire, chest high, then wrapped it around itself to fasten it tight. Next, he looped the other end of wire around the other tree, pulling it taut and tying it just as firmly. The way the road dipped and curved there, that dark wire across it wouldn’t be visible right away to anyone coming fast down the trail. A runner would see it, but not …
RRRRRRMMMMM!
The sudden sound from the road behind him told Nick his intuition had been correct. Three hills back, they came into sight. Dead Eyes and Blondie on a four-wheel ATV, going at least forty miles an hour. Dead Eyes was driving. Blondie, rifle slung over his shoulder, was on the back.
They’d seen him. Nick turned, pausing to make sure they saw the briefcase tied to his pack, just before they went down the hill and he was out of sight. Then he began to run.
Keep your eyes on me, he thought, not looking back, but counting as he ran, the roar of the ATV getting louder, closer.
One, two, three, four … WHAM!
At the sound of the crash, he stopped to look back. The ATV was on its side, no longer running, but its wheels were still spinning. Blondie
was pinned under it and not moving. Nick began to walk back toward it. Those men might have been trying to kill him, but he couldn’t just leave if they were badly injured and he could help them.
As he came closer, now less than a hundred feet away, Nick still didn’t see Dead Eyes. Had the wire across the road taken him out too?
Nick stopped when he saw motion off to the right. A man was pulling himself stiffly up the slope from where he’d been thrown into the gully. Dead Eyes. He bent over and picked up the rifle that had been slung over Blondie’s back. Then he turned, glared in Nick’s direction, and raised the rifle to his shoulder. Dead Eyes showed his teeth in a wolfish smile, blood dripping from the corner of his mouth. At this range—fifty feet away now—he couldn’t miss. Nick didn’t move. It was quiet now. The wheels of the ATV were no longer spinning
This is the point, Nick thought, when bad guys in books and movies make little speeches about why they are doing whatever it is they’re doing and what they’re going to do to the good guy.
But instead of making a speech, Dead Eyes just pulled the trigger. Nothing happened aside from a clicking sound. He looked at the rifle, ejected the unspent round, and jacked a new bullet into the chamber. He aimed a second time at Nick—who was now standing with his hands out to the side, palms up. Once again he pulled the trigger. And the gun didn’t fire.
Nick reached into his pocket, pulled out the firing pin, and held it up.
Dead Eyes growled, dropped the rifle, and charged head-down at Nick.
Again, Nick didn’t move. At least not until the last second. That was when he stepped to the side and hit Dead Eyes in the back of his head with the rabbit stick. The burly man went down like a puppet with its strings cut.
He was still breathing. So was Blondie, even though it looked as if he had a broken ankle after Nick pried the ATV back upright. It didn’t take long for Nick to strap the two men’s arms together behind their backs, elbows first, then wrists, making the bonds more secure with a layer of electric wire. Ankles next. Then, after dragging each of them to separate trees and sitting them up, Nick used the rest of the roll of duct tape from his bag to fasten them in place.
A crackling sound was coming from down the slope where Dead Eyes had been thrown. It was a two-way radio. As Nick picked it up, a voice came out of the walkie-talkie.
“Alpha One, this is Bravo. Have you secured the package?’
Nick thought for a moment, then pressed the SEND key. “Bravo,” he said, lowering his voice into a growl that he hoped sounded like Dead Eyes, “Abort! Abort!”
He pulled the back off the radio, popped out the batteries, and dropped both the radio and its batteries into the saddlebag on the side of the ATV where he had strapped the rifle.
Always avoid littering, he thought. Then he looked at the two men duct-taped to the trees and shook his head. He’d let someone else take care of picking up the rest of the rubbish.
It took a few tries because the motor had been flooded, but he got the ATV started. Half an hour later, he was on the reserve. The sight of its buildings and paved streets and the motor vehicles looked strange to him after his time in the woods. The engines, people’s voices, radios, phones, and all the other sounds of so-called civilization were even stranger.
It was easy enough to find the Tribal Police building. The cop cars outside the wide log-cabin structure and the big sign made it a no-brainer. Nick parked the ATV, picked up the briefcase, climbed the steps, and walked in the open door.
The man behind the desk looked up at him and did a double take.
“Holy cow!” he said, holding up a sheet of paper with Nick’s picture on it. “You’re that kid who was lost.”
Nick shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “I’m found.”
About the Author
Joseph Bruchac is a writer, storyteller, proud Nulhegan Abenaki citizen, and respected elder among his people. He lives in the Adirondack mountain foothills town of Greenfield Center, New York, in the same house where his maternal grandparents raised him. Much of his writing draws on that land and his Native American ancestry. Although his northeastern American Indian heritage is only one part of an ethnic background that includes Slovak and English blood, those Native roots are the ones by which he has been most nourished. He works extensively on projects involving the preservation of Abenaki culture, language, and traditional Native skills, including performing traditional and contemporary Abenaki music with the Dawnland Singers. He is the author of more than 140 books for children and adults. He discusses Native culture and his books and presents storytelling programs at dozens of elementary and secondary schools each year as a visiting author. For more information, visit josephbruchac.com.
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