by Peter Heller
He and Alison walked wide around the two other tables, respecting the new mandate to distance, and the couples smiled stiffly, which accentuated the sense of being pariahs. Jensen knew what he was about and Jack hated him then. Before, the man’s gruffness and plays at dominance had aggravated him, but he’d been around many men like Kurt and in the world he navigated he expected them. But now he felt the deliberate moves of a wolf, angling to cull his prey from the herd; and now that he had seen that line of kids, Jack couldn’t tolerate it. He wouldn’t.
They sat at their usual table in the corner and barely spoke. Shay slipped a cloth mask from her throat over her nose when she approached their table and she made no conversation as she served almond croissants and coffee and asked how they would like their eggs cooked.
When Shay was gone, Jack said, “I took a bike ride this morning. Tell you about it on the river.” Alison was breaking the croissant and did not look up but he could see that she’d heard him. When he saw Shay coming back with the coffeepot he said to Alison, “It will warm fast today. The first hour may have the best fishing. Let’s eat and go.”
“Fine by me. Better than fine.”
Bacon and eggs. All-American breakfast. They did not ask for another refill on coffee, nor did Jack ask Shay for the usual morning fishing snacks. They laid their cloth napkins on the table, pushed back, and left the lodge without looking back.
* * *
•
Who knew if the Takagis would fish. Or continue their “treatments.” Jack and Alison would start all the way downstream and fish up. He wanted to take another look at Ellery’s fence anyway. Alison seemed game to try anything, if not excited as on her first mornings. Well, this is what fishing was for, wasn’t it?
All his life, when things had gotten really tough, or confusing, or almost too beautiful to bear, Jack had gone fishing. He had fished through every joy and heartbreak. Fished when his mother died, when Cheryl had told him she loved him more than anything, when he had gotten into Dartmouth. He had fished after he lost Wynn, and fished when his father told him gently to come home. He had learned that it was much less a distraction than a form of connection: of connecting to the best part of himself, and to a discipline that demanded he stay open to every sense, to the nuances of the season and to the instrument of his own body, his own agility or fatigue. Above all it asked him to commit the whole of his attention, which he decided is the only way he truly knew how to love anything.
So whatever the hell was going on at the lodge, whatever perverse moves Jensen—or the elusive Den—had up his sleeve, there was not a damn thing to do this morning except fish. Often, when Jack bumped up against an intractable problem, he found that after a long session on the stream he had a solution.
They picked up their rods and jogged down the steps, and when they hit the river trail they turned downstream.
* * *
•
The prettiest trail. On any other late summer morning the slide of the bends, the gravel bars where white moths flitted in and out of sunlight and landed on purple asters—it would have made a heart sing. But this morning they walked as if they were going to a job neither particularly wanted to do. Halfway to the fence line, Jack turned through an opening in the alders and waded into the current. A few feet off the bank it poured over a wide boulder and threshed white with a loud rush. No one would hear them out there. She followed and they stood knee deep and shoulder to shoulder in a pool infused with bubbles from the pourover. He pulled his waist pack around to the front, opened it, and talked as he selected a fly.
“Like I said, this morning I took a bike ride.”
“Okay.”
“I’m gonna tell you something rough. But look like I’m explaining all about nymphing. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He told her. About taking his bike up the canyon in the dark and about what he saw from the grass.
He said, “They were in hospital gowns, naked underneath. They were terrified. One got prodded in the back. One I’m sure was the girl from the road. I’ve helped load pigs into the slaughter truck and that’s what they looked like.” He had trouble going on. Alison caught herself staring at him, waiting for him to continue, and remembered to unhook yesterday’s dry fly from the keeper and cut it free with her nippers. As she did she said, “You recognized two of the guards from Crested Butte?”
“Yes. At least one.”
“How old were the patients?”
“Patients? I’m not sure that’s what I’d call them. Maybe fifteen to twenty. Twenty-one. All young.”
“All you think from someplace else? Like newly arrived?”
“They had that look. When the boy fell and the girl got hit, two of them exclaimed in Spanish. The youngest was saying something to herself in what I think was Vietnamese, I’m not sure.”
Alison didn’t say anything. She couldn’t look at him or the fly he was tying on. She couldn’t look anywhere but at the river. Out here in the bright sun, the stream was all glistening rocks, spilling burble. He saw her chest rising and falling. “You think it’s sex trafficking? For addicted billionaires?”
“I don’t know. It didn’t seem like that kind of group. I mean they were in hospital gowns and like cardboard slippers and they seemed…I don’t know…weak. You remember the girl on the road.”
She watched the river. If she was seeing anything at all. He’d never seen her so contained. She seemed to be listening to the strains of the current as if to a distant flute.
“And like I said, I’m not sure addiction has anything to do with it. Despite Shay’s nondisclosure thing.”
Finally Alison said, “Are we gonna go get in your truck and screw Jensen’s lockdown and drive to the sheriff?”
Jack finished tying on the second nymph, bit off the tail end of tippet, and took off his cap. He rubbed his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. “That’s just it. I told you I saw a squad car running sweep into the gate the other day. And the one out on the road apprehending the girl. That’s just what we can’t do.”
“Huh?” She turned. “Is that what you think? The locals are in on it? All the law?”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t know what it is. All I know is these guys aren’t fucking around. Jensen and Cody both made a point of saying that the sheriff wouldn’t touch the crazy shit going on around here. And then I see that car. One misstep and I’m guessing we’re toast.” He snugged his cap back on. “Also, it’s hearsay or whatever. If I’d had my phone, I was so shocked I probably would’ve forgotten to take a pic anyway. These are serious dudes, with serious money. Even if you went to the law you’d have to have pics, something. And Ken…there’s nothing. All I saw was an old boot.”
Her eyes flashed. He saw the heat in her face. It wasn’t a girlish blush. “I’ve got a guy,” she said.
“You do?”
“Yep. His name is Vincent Serra. You met him.”
“I did?”
“Remember? The head of my security when I’m on tour? That first night?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“He’s my friend.”
Jack said, “Cast while you tell me. I never know when we’re on frigging camera. Let’s work downstream, so cast across and let them swing down.”
* * *
•
She fished and as the flies drifted, and as she lifted her rod and tightened the line for a roll cast, she said, “He was FBI. Division chief at the San Francisco field office. He knows everyone everywhere. We never have a single problem on tour. Not with local police or gangs or bikers or anyone.”
“Whoa.”
“Yep. He came to one of my concerts twelve years ago, when I was just breaking out. It was in a band shell down in the Presidio. He came backstage afterward and flashed that gold badge. ‘Am I under arrest?’ I said. He said, ‘Only if you ever stop singing.’ He s
aid it was the best version of ‘Boulder to Birmingham’ he’d ever heard. He said he cried. And then he said, ‘I’m retiring in two years, and I’m gonna be the head of your security. If you let me. I’m house-trained and I don’t eat too much.’ ” She laughed. It surprised Jack—the gust of mirth. “Well, that was sort of a lie. He can eat an eighteen-inch pizza for a snack.” She cast again.
“Ha. I could eat a pizza about now. Comfort food.”
“If we got him pics he could call it in. He’d do anything for me, but he has a way of getting his ducks in a row first.”
Jack whistled. He thought, “Not we. We don’t get pics, I do.” He thought how he’d probably already endangered her by oversharing. How he was getting her in deeper and deeper. Wasn’t that what he always did? Run his people into danger. He said, “I’ll get pics. Tomorrow morning. Would the line of kids be enough?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither.” I know less and less about anything, he thought. And then he said, “Doesn’t matter, you need to leave. Like today.”
She reeled in, swung the bottom fly into her left hand, and stepped back so she was facing him. “I told you, I can’t go home. And you know what?” He shook his head. “Nothing on earth I can’t stand worse than a bully. Or a user.”
Jack didn’t say anything. She wasn’t done. “When I was coming up, I saw shit that would make you ballistic. Young women of real, raw talent twisted and bulldogged into people—things—they were not. Women silenced and used. They tried it on me and guess what?”
He felt the icy current pressing his knees.
“They screwed with the wrong outfit. I don’t walk away from it now or turn my back. On anything like it.”
Well, Jack thought, they had that in common. He had been suspended from high school for knocking flat the star quarterback, who had just stomped and spit on a new boy from Chihuahua, Mexico.
Jack blinked against the sun. “Okay,” he whispered. Then he said out loud, “I guess. Let’s reel in and head down to the fence. I want to take another look anyway.”
“I don’t really feel like fishing much, but okay.”
She held her rod up and turned and they waded out of the sun and into the shade of the bank.
* * *
•
They found the path again. The trail wound through the leaning spruce and emerged in a grove of poplars whose leaves spun in sunlight like chimes, and it ended abruptly in a barbed-wire fence. The four strands of barbed wire were stretched tight right across the creek on stout posts. Which Jack was certain was illegal—blocking a navigable waterway, navigable by kayak certainly—but ranchers did it all the time. Nothing else unusual. Except the knowledge of dogs, which were wholly vicious by the sound of it. Or was that part even true?
“Guess we’ll start again here,” he said.
She’d been carrying her own rod despite his insistence that it was part of a guide’s job, but she let him take it and unhook the bead-head pheasant tail from the keeper and yank six feet of line off the reel in two quick tugs and break the fly off in his teeth. He did the same with the fly higher up, and then he reached for a wooly bugger streamer that was hooked to a patch of foam on the outside of his waist pack. He held the two inches of streamlined black fur in the sunlight so that she could see the threads of sparkle and the weighted brass eyes that had been tied into the soft minnow mimic. “Wanna try a streamer this morning? A whole new tactic. You’ll strip it in like a wounded minnow.”
“I feel a little like a wounded minnow. Fuck Jensen.”
“Okay, then you won’t even be pretending.”
She twisted her lips and was very glad to be with someone who could find a shred of humor on a morning like this. If Jack’s father had his maxims, so did Alison’s mother. Her mother had been a nurse in Murphy when one stripped slope of the copper mine outside of Ducktown collapsed and killed seventeen men and injured dozens more. Mama K always said, “Laughter makes you tougher.” Short and sweet, which is just how the woman was herself.
She was thinking that when she heard the barking. Not barking so much as pitched yelps and yowls. Not just one dog, but maybe half a dozen, more. Sounded like a frenzied coyote pack cornering a hurt elk. Jack dropped the hand that held the fly and their heads came up. It came from beyond the fence, from Ellery’s somewhere.
“Good God,” Alison said.
“What I was thinking.”
“Sounds like frigging murder.”
“Hold on.” Jack handed her the rod and dropped the fishing pack.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Sick of wondering about everything. I’ll just be a minute.”
Her jaw dropped. “You’re going in there? What about the mastiffs?”
“Exactly. Don’t worry, after this morning I’m not going anywhere without this.” He unzipped his waist pack and showed her the black Glock 26 nestled between two fly boxes. “Jensen doesn’t know about this one. I’ve carried it in my truck since I was sixteen.”
She nodded. He unbuckled the waist pack and shoved the handgun under his safety belt at the back of his waders and pulled the camo tech shirt down over it. “Be right back. Please don’t move.” He stepped to the fence, stopped, turned back. “Almost forgot. Lemme borrow your phone.”
She dug it out swiftly from a large side pocket of her vest.
“It swipes to camera, right?”
She nodded.
“ ’Kay, be right back.”
He grabbed the top of the nearest post and used the third strand of wire like the rung of a ladder and, careful not to tear his waders on the barbs, he vaulted the four-foot fence like he’d done it a million times, which he had. And was gone.
He ran. Open woods here, fern under the aspen, and he turned away from the creek and ran up the hill toward the clamor. Within a hundred yards it benched out and he was weaving fast through pinewoods and then he saw the barn at the edge of the field and smelled the familiar scents of horses, manure, sawdust. He could see through the straight trunks of the lodgepole the packed dirt yard and off to the right the circular rail fencing of a corral and to the right of that, and connected by a chute, the high shiplap walls of maybe a squeeze chute for vet work, but it wasn’t. It had four walls about seven feet high and no roof, it was some kind of pen…and he caught the movement from the barn.
He bent low and ran forward tree to tree to get a better look and froze. Two men in black caps, not the bearded one, were dragging someone out of the barn by the armpits. Whoever it was had long black hair that dragged in the dirt and her head lolled—he could see now it was a she—and she was naked and unresponsive. She was emaciated, too, Jack could see her ribs like stripes in the bright sunlight and then he saw the purple birthmark running down the back of her leg. It was the girl from the morning, the one with the bindi, the one who had been weeping. And Jack knew she was dead. Something in the way her legs bounced over the ruts, in the loll of her head and the color of her arms. And somehow, with the dogs whining and yelping, and the image of death running before him, he thought to pull Alison’s cell phone from the chest pocket of his waders, which he’d folded down. He unzipped and pulled it out and began snapping pictures. The men were in no hurry. They dragged the body of the girl across the yard and disappeared behind the board wall and then Jack heard a shout and a change in pitch from whines to snarls and tortured barks and a ripping that he could never unhear.
* * *
•
He made himself back up. Made himself work across the level bench tree to tree, made himself move one foot, then another. But he stumbled once in the clumsy waders over a blowdown branch, and he made himself stop, one hand on a tree, and breathe.
Once he was over the hill, he ran and skidded down through the trees to the river and entered the aspen grove and clambered over the fence. She stood from h
er seat on a sandstone block.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“I…We thought…” Fuck it. He unzipped the wader pocket, tapped the phone, handed it to her.
“What is it?” She turned herself so the phone was in the shade. “A barn?” She spread two fingers over the photo. “It’s…Oh.” She froze. “A girl?” He nodded. “The dogs? The frenzy of the dogs?” He nodded. “One of the girls from…?”
“Yes.”
“Was she—?”
“I think she was dead. I hope so.”
“Oh.” Alison sat back on the rock, gagged. A dry heave and she pressed her forearm over her eyes for a second. When she looked at him it was as if every passion in her had distilled and her eyes held a clarified anger he could barely meet. She said, “The girl is wasted. Away, I mean. She looks starved.”
“The others didn’t look much better.”
“I—” She sat. Jack heard the morning wind spin the leaves in the canopy. He saw the track of a tear on her cheek. “A young girl. What the hell is going on up there?” she said.
“What the hell is going on down here? This is supposed to be ‘Ellery’s.’ None of it is true. It’s all part of the lodge and it’s all a lie.”
“Part of what?” she said. “Doesn’t matter. We have a photo. We can go straight to town and text it—”
She stopped herself. Probably thinking about the deputy and the girl on the road, and the squad car going through the gate at Kreutzer’s—how that was one thing they definitely could not do.
“Look,” he said. “We’ll find a way.” Did he believe it? His heart was hammering. He scanned the woods, the riverbank. Once he and Pop had hunted the Gore Range in November. He’d walked out along a drifted ridge in a light blowing snow and when he walked back in the evening he saw that his tracks had been covered most of the way by a big mountain lion. He felt that way now.