Alice surveyed her kingdom: a bed of pine needles with a thick, leafy branch leaning against a trunk for the roof, and all her worldly goods around her. Alice’s Hilton. This time yesterday she was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and watching Quantum Leap. She looked up: soon there would be stars; it wasn’t Quantum Leap, but it was something.
Tiredness came suddenly and Alice crawled under the branch, over her sleeping bag. She had needed to do this one thing—find a place to spend the night—and she had done it and done it well, so that was okay. Tomorrow, she would get some proper thinking done. She fell asleep with her arms around her baseball bat and with her pack as a pillow. Somewhere in the back of her mind she was aware that there are situations you can’t just think your way out of—she had learned the heartbreaking truth of it in the last months of her mother’s illness—but that night she needed the confidence to believe that she could find a way out of the mess she was in. And that, because she had the skills to make herself a bed out of pine needles, she could fix everything else too.
Alice woke up wrapped inside a darkness deeper than she had ever felt: her eyes were open and yet she was utterly blind. The pitch black was alive with whispers. An owl hooted sharply only a few feet above her and Alice remembered where she was. She crawled out from under her makeshift roof and shivered. How late was it? She couldn’t tell. She had fallen asleep in her T-shirt, and the summer warmth had held her for hours, but the night had come with a chill and it had sought out the lone girl sleeping on rough ground.
Alice turned on her flashlight, dug out her sweatshirt, and pulled it on quickly. She took two hesitant steps into the middle of the clearing, and waves of moths danced in the beam of her light. There was chirping, hooting, twittering, and wailing all around her. I’m not afraid, she said to herself, and to prove it she stood right in the middle of the clearing and counted up from one to sixty, until a loud rustle in the spruce behind her sent her rushing back to her den.
Nothing came for her, nothing followed her into her lair, and after a few minutes all the sounds blended into one motley rush of noise. Alice shivered inside the smooth, synthetic folds of her sleeping bag, and she told herself that it was only because she was cold. She fell asleep out of total exhaustion, thinking about the patch of open sky above her, an almost perfect circle, cut out of the forest and bright with stars.
There were no stars to follow when Alice woke up at dawn, and maybe for that reason—or maybe just because that’s how the world spun that day—she missed the way back to the trail, took the wrong turn, and headed deeper into the woods, farther and farther away from the red bike, which she would never see again, and from the matches, which she would never get to buy.
John James Walker had been in the US Army all his adult life and had retired in 1991, after Desert Storm, with the rank of warrant officer. He was born in Oregon, had hated the heat of the Iraqi desert, and couldn’t even bear the humidity of the US southern states. Since he’d left the army he had mostly hiked in the Rockies, living off his pension and keeping to himself. That was one way to tell the story. Another way was that he had barely escaped a charge of conduct unbecoming, couldn’t stand to live anywhere near his family—or, for that matter, most human beings—and preferred being alone on a mountain with his rifle and a hunting knife. He trapped small animals for food and filled his canteen in any of the numerous streams. The rest of his days took whatever shape the weather brought in the morning. A few times—for the sheer fun of it—he had stalked groups of hikers, crept through their camp as they slept in their tents, and written his name in the smoldering ashes of their fire. They never noticed; they would emerge from their tents as sleepy and helpless as newborns and never had the slightest idea that he had been among them.
Sometimes stalking was not enough of a challenge for a man of his tastes and experience.
It was this particular set of skills that had alerted him the instant the kid had begun to follow him half an hour earlier. He was small and Walker couldn’t fathom what he was doing alone so far away from anything and anyone, and yet the boy had not approached Walker straight out. He had shadowed him in an approximation of tracking that was nearly laughable; however, there was something meticulous about the boy. The mere fact that he hadn’t cried out for Walker’s help was interesting. It was a diversion from the routine, and John James Walker was in the mood to be diverted.
He pushed through the dense forest and into an alpine meadow. And on the edge of the tree line he spied a shadow following him. When it got dark, having tired of this game—he could have lost the little insect anytime he wished—in fact he’d had to slow down to allow him to keep up—Walker stopped, built a fire, and put on some water to boil. There were few luxuries in the life he had chosen, but coffee was one of them.
It was easy to slip away in the gloom and make a loop around the camp. He moved quietly, even if his quarry was a child, because that was how he had been taught to move.
The boy stood thirty yards away, edging toward the camp, peeking through the shrubs to see where Walker had gone. The man grabbed the kid by the scruff of his sweatshirt and lifted him clear off the ground.
“You’ve got to be careful sneaking around like this, boy, people will think you’re up to no good,” he said.
“Hey!”
“Don’t you try to kick me now, son. I have the right to check out who’s been stalking me.”
“Put me down.”
“You weigh about half a feather. If I were you, I’d use more manners and less kicking.”
“Put me down. Please.”
“There you go . . .” Walker dropped the kid and returned to the camp.
After a couple of minutes the child appeared in the shivering light of the fire. He was short, skinny, and filthy, and the bugs had been feasting on his pale skin. There was a rip in his jeans by the knee and he held his hands in tight little fists. A baseball cap was low over his head.
He had to hand it to him, considering that he must have been wandering in the woods alone for a while. Mostly the kid just looked pissed off because the man had grabbed him by the neck, like a kitten.
Walker poured some coffee into his spare stainless-steel mug and placed it on the ground.
“You look too young for coffee. Then again, you look too young to be out here. So we’ll split the difference.”
The kid approached warily, then sat down on the other side of the fire. He lifted the mug and blew on it to cool the steaming-hot drink.
“What do I call you?” Walker said.
“Adam,” the boy replied after a beat.
When it became clear that no more was forthcoming, Walker said, “A man of few words, I like that in a fellow.”
Alice blew on the coffee again. Holding something warm in her hands was wonderful, and though she hated coffee she took a sip. She had filled the bottle that had once contained chocolate milk with water from a stream, and it sat at the bottom of her pack. She was very hungry, but she didn’t want to mention it—truth be told, she didn’t know how to feel about the man she had been following through the woods.
She took a good look at him, the way her father had taught her when they were at the poker table: the man was older than her dad—maybe in his late thirties—and he hadn’t shaved for a while. He was tall and wiry, his cropped hair was the color of dust, and his stubble was graying. He sat watching her without a care in the world. And even young as she was, Alice knew that most adults would have asked her about her family, where she was from, was she all right. A barrage of questions should have been coming her way. Never mind the fact that he believed she was a boy—she had slicked her hair back under her cap—this was not the behavior she had expected from a grown-up. The man studied her as if she was a puzzle to be solved.
Alice noticed the rifle by his side and the knife strapped to his thigh, the camouflage pants and the brown T-shirt stained under the arms. Was he some kind of professional hunter? Was he a soldier or a vet? In the end,
with a puff of breeze, it was his scent that did it: it was something more than unwashed, it was almost goatish, and it set Alice on edge. She should get away from him, or just get him to take her someplace with other people. Her mind was spinning. The way he was looking at her made her nervous. Suddenly, without knowing why, she was particularly glad that he thought she was a boy, as if that made her somehow stronger, somehow less of a skinny little kid far away from home.
“Please, can you help me get to a telephone?” she said.
“How did you get lost? You hiking with your folks?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where did you start from?”
She told him the name of the place.
“How long have you been wandering around by yourself?”
“Since yesterday morning.”
“What happened?”
“I was messing around, I stayed behind and took the wrong path.”
“How old are you?”
Alice thought fast. “Almost twelve.” There was a very small chance that she could in fact pass for an eleven-year-old boy, but no older than that.
“You don’t look too bad for having been by yourself for so long. Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever skinned a rabbit?”
Alice blinked.
“Have you ever skinned a rabbit?” he repeated.
“No.”
“Well, that’s what’s on the menu tonight.”
“Okay,” Alice said, and the nugget of fear that had told her not to approach this man hours earlier pressed against her gut. “When . . . how can I get back to my family? I want—”
“We’re on the wrong side of Mount Baker, boy. There are no phones, no roads, no people. Tomorrow morning I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, you can find us some firewood.”
Alice hesitated.
“Go on,” the man said. “It needs to be dry—no green or wet wood. In winter I’d want to burn hardwood—oak, maple, and ash—but right now, I’m happy with softwood like cedar, pine, and spruce. Do you know the difference?”
“Not really.”
“What do they teach you kids in school?”
Alice was about to answer when she understood that he didn’t expect her to reply. By now, she hoped, her father would have started looking for her. He would have driven to Lime Kiln Park and seen that she was not there; he would have called her friends on the telephone and he would have been told that no one had seen Alice all day. At some point he might have ventured into her bedroom, stepping through the destruction she had inflicted with her baseball bat, and he would have seen her rage played out. Maybe he would have noticed her pack was missing, maybe not. Maybe he would have searched for her late into the night and called the police. Then again, maybe not: the switchblade knife had been buried into his bedside table as deep as her little-girl strength had allowed.
Alice sighed. The weight of her loss pressed down on her shoulders, and fatigue almost overwhelmed her as she dragged herself to her feet. She could not count on her father to come to her rescue, and she had firewood to worry about.
The man was taking a furry, gray shape out of a canvas bag in a side pocket of his massive olive-green pack. At least, Alice reflected, because she needed the small joke, I’m not the rabbit.
That night Alice fell asleep with a full stomach and, even though she had washed her hands three times and rubbed them hard with grass, the sensation of rabbit’s blood lingered on her fingers.
Skinning the rabbit had been awful and it had been made worse by the man’s obvious enjoyment of her discomfort. Eating the rabbit, on the other hand, had been wonderful. Alice was a child of one of the richest countries in the world and had never gone without food for more than a few hours: it had been a shock when she finished her supplies and had nothing to eat for more than twenty-four hours. Still, in a grubby, elemental way her sated hunger had overcome her guilt.
There had been little or no conversation with the man over the evening, aside from his instructions on how to handle his knife: he had not volunteered his name, and Alice had not asked for it. She had followed his directions and proved herself surprisingly adept with the knife—a silent apprentice who had thrown up in the stream, quietly and out of sight.
Alice did not want to fall asleep; she felt more alone now than she had the previous day wandering through the deserted valley, because “The Hunter”—that’s what she had decided to call him—behaved like no other adult she had ever met. Even in Vegas, two years ago, where she had been a kind of mascot to the poker pros in Joey Cavizzi’s basement, where her father had played, they had treated her as the little kid she was, even if she understood the game almost as well as they did. This solitary man who had not tried to reassure or comfort her—a lost eleven-year-old boy—was an unknown quantity. Alice decided that, unless he was going to take her back someplace safe the following day, she’d get away from him somehow.
She was aware of how ridiculous that notion was, and yet she clung to it. Sleep didn’t come for a long time because she waited for The Hunter, on the other side of the fire, to fall asleep first. When his breathing deepened and slowed down, she allowed herself to let go and drift into ragged, unsettling dreams. She was wrapped in her sleeping bag, her head on her pack and her arms around her baseball bat.
Chapter 30
“Can you hear me, Charlie One? Over,” a man’s voice whispered in his earpiece.
“I hear you just fine, Charlie Two. Over,” the man said.
“Just checking,” Charlie Two replied, and then added as an afterthought, “Over.”
Charlie Two had checked twenty minutes earlier and no doubt he would check again soon, as he had done all night at regular intervals.
Charlie One rolled his eyes and shifted a little against the branch that was supporting his back. He had built the tree house for his boys two summers previously and they had practically lived in it ever since. The day he had finished hammering planks and nailing timbers to the spruces in his backyard, though, he would not have believed that one winter night he would use the plain wooden structure to stalk a human being.
The idea had begun in the diner that afternoon and had taken hold very fast, as most ill-advised notions seem to, when the patrols of state troopers and sheriff’s deputies had spilled out onto Main Street. Ludlow was not their town and—as much as the efforts of the county and state law enforcement agencies were appreciated—Ludlow men were not going to sit idly by while someone else was protecting their families from a madman. Most men—and quite a few women—Charlie One knew owned a rifle, and even those who didn’t hunt knew how to point and shoot the thing if necessary.
It had been decided in half whispers, and by the time everyone had returned home a plan was in place: there would be lookouts in shifts until dawn, and if any person was seen creeping through the side streets in the middle of the night during the “shelter in place” they’d better be a trooper or have a darn good reason. No more than four, maybe six, officers had been left to keep an eye on Ludlow overnight and it was an inadequate number, even with the small knot of streets that radiated from the center of town.
The “volunteers”—as they had decided to call themselves—were only doing what any person in their right mind would do in a similar situation. Some of them—like Charlie Two—had never even gone deer hunting, and yet fate had seen fit to put them on the front line of a manhunt. That’s the way it goes, Charlie One reflected, and he rolled his shoulders to keep them from cramping in the cold. You step up or you get stepped over.
The wind had died down and the air was still; snow was on the way, and every breath was a frosty blade poking at his lungs. Cold nipped at his fingers, even though the man wore many layers of clothing and was wrapped in a sleeping bag, and he badly wished he could run around a little and warm up. The man had a thermos of black coffee and one of Swiss Miss hot chocolate, and he had pretty much gone through both already, which—he now realized—posed its own s
et of problems. He needed to wait until the next round of checks and then he would—what did his father used to say?—empty the tank.
A few minutes later his earpiece croaked to life, and one after the other, the voices of seven volunteers spread around the town confirmed that all was quiet and safe in their square of the grid. It had been George Goyer’s idea—being a pilot, of course—for everyone to have code names, in case anybody was listening who shouldn’t be. George lived out of town and thus was not on the volunteers’ roster, but the name thing had been his contribution—and it was a good one.
The man sniffed; his breath was warm and damp in the folds of the sleeping bag he had pulled up to cover his mouth. He was supposed to be a lookout but, unless he brought the night-vision goggles to his eyes, he saw little past his own gloved hands. His backyard was as pitch-black as those on either side of it, and the road was barely lit by the pallid glow coming from Main Street and the portable lights of the state troopers.
Charlie One clicked on the goggles and the world became a vivid green screen. He was glad his wife was fast asleep and the drapes were drawn—he could see they were drawn—because she wouldn’t have approved of what he was about to do. Call it the first line of defense, he told himself with a smirk as he rested his Ruger carbine on the floor of the tree house and gingerly stood up. He fumbled through the layers of sleeping bag and clothing and managed to unzip and relieve himself onto the ground below with a patter like rain on dry dirt. No, he thought, his wife would have definitely not approved, but it was probably the only fun he’d had in hours—being on a stakeout was not as much of a hoot as it had seemed in the diner.
Sweet After Death Page 18