by James Thayer
He swung again at the toppling beam, a blind blow. The blade bounced off the wood and cut deeply into Gray's calf. The front quarter of the shed drooped slowly to the ground, braces and posts and crosspieces cracking loudly. Still he swung, into the post, into the shingles, into the ground, into the post again. A tear almost made it down to his chin, but his frantic motion flicked it off to the ground. He brought the blade around again and again, and chips burst from the wreckage. Blood flowed down his leg and filled his shoe. His brow was damp from sweat and his cheeks shiny from tears. He swung savagely, the mad hiss-and-chop cadence filling the canyon. The old shed slumped further as the axe slashed into it again and again.
Five minutes or an hour might have passed. When he finally dropped the axe his hands were bleeding from open blisters and his right pant leg was damp and sticking to his calf. His breath ragged, he stumbled away from the wreckage. He left red footprints.
Gray collapsed on the front porch. He gazed without seeing at the distant pinnacles. The lowering sun coppered his face. He wet his salty lips. And again, for the thousandth time in two days, his mind produced the image of Mrs. Orlando.
And with it came the black cloud, the unshakable agony of grief and guilt. This cabin, his family home, had always been his refuge and his cure. This time it had not been enough.
Gray leaned against the trunk of a black cottonwood, his legs out in front and his feet dangling above the water of Black Bear Creek. He was sitting on a mat of blooming buttercups. The stream gurgled by, pooling and bubbling, idle at some spots and swift at others. A fine mist hung over the creek, softening the boulders that lined it and wetting the serviceberry and nettles that grew along the stream. The water's white hiss calmed him. Blisters on his hands were raw, blood showing at the surface. He was a quarter mile north of the house. The Weatherby rifle and a backpack also leaned against the tree. Bog orchids and ladies' tresses grew near the cottonwood's trunk.
He brought out a length of beef jerky, bit some off—not without a struggle—and began chewing. This wasn't minimart jerky made of leather a cobbler would reject, but beef jerked by Rose Schwartz down in Ketchum, beef with flavor that filled the head and then rushed down into the chest to seize the innards, a sensation so strong that anything else eaten the remainder of the day had no taste whatsoever. Gray chewed and chewed. He kept his fingers apart and his hands upturned on his lap. His palms and fingers stung.
A sniper was taught that when pinned down he had to move or die. Resting against the tree, Owen Gray was trying to move, to push his thoughts along quickly rather than let them rest, for when his mind halted it was on the horrific image of Mrs. Orlando, bound and gagged on the roof, dead by Gray's hand. He hoped he might be able to work the awful moment through, to leap from one rationalization to the next until he found one that alleviated his pain, and so he needed to keep his thoughts rushing forward. Move or die. A sniper also learned never to exit a hide by the same route he entered it. Maybe this lesson could also help, keeping Gray's thoughts from returning by the same route to the same grief. If he could just go through new doors, roll along to new territory.
His chin came up. He listened intently and searched the stream banks without moving his head. His father had taught Gray that it was possible to sense if someone were watching you, saying that you could feel a slight warp in the air, an eerie dissonance in the day. Gray felt it then. Still chewing, he slowly turned his head right. His hand inched toward the rifle. His gaze swept the banks and the underbrush and trees beyond.
Pale blue eyes were locked on Gray. They peered out from the shadows of a small dogwood, partially hidden behind the dark green leaves of an alpine laurel. Gray saw pink below the eyes. A tongue.
"A coyote," Gray said to nobody. "That's all I need."
The animal slipped out from under the tree and walked in a tight slink several feet closer to Gray. The coyote was on the other side of the creek, emboldened by the intervening water. It stepped into a dish of light that had made it through the overhead bough canopy. The animal was forty feet away, and its eyes never left Gray. Its coat was a dusty gray except for the buff belly. The fur on its legs was urine yellow. Its tail was bushy and handsome. The tongue hung out rudely.
"Beat it. I don't like carnivores staring at me for any length of time."
Gray lifted a small stone and chucked it at the coyote, a halfhearted toss that barely cleared the stream. The animal didn't move. Gray's hand stung from the effort.
"If you had any idea how many coyotes the Gray family has killed over the years, you wouldn't sit there so complacently."
The coyote panted.
"You'd realize I'm a very dangerous fellow." Gray chewed the jerky. A half pound of the cured beef remained in his hand.
The coyote's snout was sharp and its ears restless. Teeth gleamed like pearls.
"The reason I don't like coyotes," Gray explained to the coyote, "is that if I had a heart attack right now—hypothetically, you understand—and were to roll over dead on the ground, you'd be over here in two seconds, ripping hunks of flesh from my corpse, our new friendship be damned."
The coyote ducked its head at some sound only it heard, and in doing so appeared to be agreeing with Gray.
"My friend Pete Coates tells a joke you'd appreciate. He said that one time he dated a woman so ugly he had to do the coyote trick. I asked Pete, 'What's the coyote trick?' Pete said that when he woke up the next morning with this woman in his arms he chewed off his arm rather than wake her up."
The coyote waited. Gray's bandaged calf ached where he had stitched the palm-sized flap of skin and muscle back to his leg with a needle and thread from his mother's sewing kit.
"I didn't think it was funny either." Gray paused, then said, "When I was on a mission in Vietnam I would be so in tune with the terrain that I would merge with it. I'd become a part of the soil and trees and bush. The enemy couldn't see me because I wasn't there to be seen. I was absorbed by the terrain. Are you listening?"
The coyote watched.
Gray glanced at the remaining beef jerky. When he held it out to one side as far as he could the animal's eyes followed it. "Just as I thought. You aren't listening. But I do admire undisguised greed. You want this meat so bad you are willing to reveal yourself to me, and that means you're mighty hungry. And this is truly superior beef jerky. Too bad for you."
Gray took another bite, gnawing it off with his teeth, smacking his lips for the coyote's benefit. "I'd go into enemy territory, entirely assimilated by the ground I was walking on. The field seemed to do my thinking for me, guiding me and warning me. I was so plugged into the bush that I lost my separate identity. I shared an awareness with the ground and all that was on it. If I were a hippie, I'd call it sharing my consciousness with the earth, but snipers generally aren't hippies. No surprise there, I suppose." Gray hesitated. "Is this too Zen for a coyote?"
The coyote ran its tongue along its black lips.
"That's what I'm out here doing now," Gray explained, his voice suddenly uneven. "I'm trying to get these goddamn trees and bushes to take over, to absorb some of what I'm feeling, to take some of it off me, goddamnit."
The animal sank to its belly, its eyes glowing like ice.
"But it's not working." Tears glistened in Gray's eyes.
Gray worked ferociously on the jerky, trying to hide his emotions from the coyote. The animal waited.
After a moment Gray could continue. "Here's another tactic I'm trying while you watch me. A sniper learns that much of what he sees is illusion." He held up his palm as if the animal was about to argue. "It's true. For example, distances are usually overestimated when the target is lying down, like you are. The same is true when the enemy can't be seen clearly against the background. And it's also true when the target is seen over broken ground. In all these instances the enemy is closer than you think, and so you generally become dead. Do you know why? Because your bullet soars over the enemy's head, alerting him to your presence, and he fire
s before you can get another round in the chamber."
Gray bit off a small piece of jerky. "The mind has performed a deadly slight. I'm trying to do something like that now, something more benign, and so, you'd think, more simple. An easy trick. All I want is to hide a memory, a little sleight of hand with a recollection." He chewed. "But it's not working either."
The coyote bounced up to sitting. It yipped once and bowed its head. The eyes were still fixed on Gray.
"Anguish and desperation aren't going to be fooled, are they?"
Gray rose to one knee. The animal was instantly alert, rising fully, ready to bolt, its tail down.
"This is the absolute nadir of my existence," Gray said. "Talking to a coyote."
Gray tossed the remaining beef jerky across the stream. It landed five feet from the coyote. The animal leaped high and dove at the jerky, as it does when it hears a mouse beneath the snow. The jerky was the size of a hand. The coyote seized the meat with its teeth, shook it once to make sure it was dead, then tilted its head back and swallowed it whole, rapidly shaking its entire body as it urged the meat down its throat. The coyote licked its mouth again, then without another glance at the human it loped away, disappearing in the underbrush.
Gray's hands burned as he gingerly lifted the rifle and backpack. He began walking downstream toward the cabin. "Whining to a coyote. The absolute nadir."
CHAPTER TEN
The stolen station wagon began to fail after three hundred miles. With all its miles and years, it could not tolerate hour after hour of freeway driving. First to go was the air conditioner. Then a left rear retread blew away and was replaced by a threadbare spare. Then the rods began to knock ominously. But only when an idiot light came on did Nikolai Trusov pull off the highway to raise the hood. The fan belt had disappeared. The car needed a replacement. He would face less risk in finding a new belt than in stealing a new car.
He drove off the freeway and passed through a worn and grimy section of Cleveland, full of warehouses and light industry and potholes. It was nearing one in the morning. Tractor trailers and delivery trucks were on their night runs, but otherwise the streets were empty. Most businesses—the metal fabricators, sand and gravel lots, and oil distributors—were closed. The few open gas stations Trusov could find had minimarts rather than service bays. Street lamps cast silver cones of light on the roads.
He turned onto Center Street. A flatbed truck carrying I-beams was parked at the side of the road. The truck's mud guard had the inscription "Show Me Your Tits." On the corner was a freight company with coils of razor wire atop its security fences. He passed Lincoln Towing, a Mayflower Moving and Storage, and the Thor Gasket Company.
At the end of the block was a service station. The sign identified it as Hal's Independent Service, and the fluorescent lights shining down on the service island announced the station was open. The two service bay doors were closed, but the office door was open and lights were on in the office. Leafing through a magazine, an attendant was sitting in a chair, his feet propped up on a desk. The station wagon drove onto Hal's lot and up to a gas pump. The bell rang in the office.
Hal's Independent had seen more prosperous days. The fuel pumps were old models, with money and gallon totalizers that rolled on a reel rather than with digital readouts. The metal skirt below the dial face was splotched with grease and dirt. The panels above the dials carried no advertising and instead were marred by bits of old adhesive that had once held brand-name placards in place. The rubber fender guards around the nozzle were tattered. The station had once been painted white, but stains and smog and sun fading had stippled the building in brown and yellow. Plywood covered the window openings of the service bay doors. A sign at the corner of the building read "Rest Rooms Closed." Two black fifty-five-gallon drums were near the bay doors.
The attendant brought his head up when the station wagon arrived but continued with the magazine, a lurid publication called Gent, Home of the D Cup. He had a hand in his pants pocket and a cigarette in his mouth. He wore a Penzoil hat backwards on his head and a blue zippered sweatshirt open at the front. A book of matches and his Camels were in the pocket. Underneath the sweatshirt was a T-shirt that had imprinted on it "Nixon Was Cool." His face resembled a greyhound's, narrow and knobby with a weak chin. His ears had pendulous, sagging lobes. An empty Domino's Pizza box was on the desk near a manila envelope from the state patrol. Hal's Independent was still receiving mail even though Hal hadn't been to the station since his business went belly up. The attendant had opened the envelope and glanced at its contents, but it didn't have anything to interest him. The state patrol was always sending bulletins.
The gas jockey's name was Boyd Slidell, pronounced like the town in Louisiana, as he told his probation officer the first time they met. Early in life Boyd Slidell had mastered the art of stealing and stripping automobiles. His first auto theft occurred shortly after his thirteenth birthday, a T-Bird he still remembered fondly because he stole the car and learned to drive on the same night. He had separated dozens of cars and pickups from their lawful owners over the years. He liked to think there wasn't a vehicle made that he couldn't get into with a hacksaw blade or a length of clothes hanger wire in sixty seconds. At twenty-two, Slidell had mastered his craft.
He worked for the Sundstrom brothers, Cleveland's leading auto choppers. The Sundstroms were in the business of dismantling stolen cars and selling the pieces to parts shops. A carefully torn down automobile was worth four times more than the intact car.
Boyd Slidell rose from his chair to peer out the door at the Ford and its driver. With any luck the customer would pump his own gas. His hand was still in his pocket. He returned to the chair.
Hal's Independent Service had lasted thirty years, but the business had gone the way of so many service stations, and four weeks ago the Sundstrom brothers had rented the building from a management company representing the bankruptcy court. The Sundstroms figured they had two months in any one location before the police found them, so they changed addresses more often than Boyd Slidell changed his shorts, as Bobby Sundstrom liked to say. Sundstrom also liked to brag that a hundred thousand dollars' worth of tools were in the service bays: power drills and saws, air hammers and wrenches, compressors, blowtorches and acetylene welders, electric metal saws, portable lighting units, hydraulic hoists and electric winches, and dozens of ripping and prying tools. The plywood over the bay door's windows was not due to broken glass but so nosy passersby could not peer in. An automobile ceased to exist within thirty minutes of arriving at one of Hal's service bays. Parked behind the garage were two three-quarter-ton Dodge trucks the Sundstroms used to deliver the parts. The brothers kept the gas bay operating as a cover for the chop shop. This night Boyd Slidell was expecting the delivery of a silver 1991 Pontiac Firebird just as soon as Danny Anderson found one. Slidell was going to call the brothers when the Firebird arrived, and the four of them would dismantle the car in a frenzy of hacking, tearing, yanking, cutting, and sawing. Boyd Slidell loved his work.
The asshole in the station wagon at the service island wasn't pumping his own gas, just staring out his car window waiting for help. A big fellow wearing a cap and a frown. Something was familiar about the customer. The station wagon had New Jersey plates. Shaking his head with resignation, Slidell flipped the magazine onto the desk and walked out toward the station wagon.
"Put gas in the car. And I need a fan belt." The words were said with obvious effort and a gnarled accent.
Any more Polacks in Cleveland, the place will be like Chicago. And why did the Sundstroms insist on keeping up the façade of the all-night service station? Pumping gas was beneath Slidell's dignity, a talented man like him. He stared at the foreigner a moment, considering telling him to take his piece of dirt station wagon somewhere else. Didn't see many of these old fake woody wagons anymore. Goddamnit. Bobby Sundstrom had told him to pump gas if anybody came in, and do it politely.
"With your big gas guzzler, you'd better turn
the engine off while I pump gas," Slidell said. "Otherwise you'll never leave the station."
No laugh from the foreigner. Christ, how do they get into this country? The Polack looked like he'd taken a few cuffs to the head. A rough dude, looked like. Had the foreigner been into the station before? He was sort of recognizable.
"I'll go see if I have a belt that fits," Slidell said. "We don't take no credit cards."
Not that this Polack was likely to have any. Slidell shuffled back to the station's office, lighting another cigarette. He put the matches back into his pocket and exhaled. He looked down the street, hoping Danny would hurry back with the Firebird so they could get to work.
He hesitated at the desk. Something about the Polack nagged at him. His eyes fell on the state patrol manila envelope. And it came to him. A mean grin spread across the car thief's face. He pulled out the contents of the envelope. He was right. He laughed shrilly with building excitement. Fifty thousand dollars for information leading to Nikolai Trusov's arrest and conviction for murder. Christ, Slidell could do anything he wanted to with a murderer. And Slidell could be a hero. Maybe he wouldn't have to visit his goddamn probation officer twice a week anymore. Boyd Slidell, hero. He cackled again.
He returned to the service island carrying the envelope and another piece of paper in his hand, his walk a cocky pump and roll. He lifted the gas nozzle from the boot and flipped the reset lever. The Polack was just sitting there behind the steering wheel. Slidell brought out his matches.
"Hey, Polack, recognize yourself?" Slidell held up a five-by-seven black-and-white photograph of Nikolai Trusov, delivered to every airport, bus station, car rental agency, and service station in every midwestern state. Pete Coates had organized the distribution with the help of the FBI offices, police departments, and state patrols.