Garth shook his head. "Hasn't anyone from around here ever gone up to look for him?"
Jan Garvey nodded. "Yes; once. And one of the men in the search party almost had to have a leg amputated after he walked into some kind of mantrap Gary had set. After that, everyone has just left Gary alone. There may be a lot of traps like that up there; Gary's still fighting the war in his mind."
"I'd think he'd be a danger to hunters and hikers," Garth said, still visibly upset.
"Oh, he most certainly is. The county has posted the entire area, and everyone around here stays well away from any of the sites where fires have been spotted. Also, we try as best we can to warn away strangers; a few years ago, one man came back with a story about how a wild man had almost killed him. So far, obviously, we've been lucky. Don't expect help from anyone, state troopers included, if you do decide to go up there looking for him." The woman paused, smiled thinly. "Colletville and the surrounding towns really don't want it known that we're running a kind of huge, open-air insane asylum for one maniac on public lands."
Garth grunted, walked across the room, and stopped directly in front of the woman. "Whatever happens, we won't make trouble for Gary, or this town." Garth paused, reached out and gently gripped Jan Garvey's shoulder. "I don't mean to frighten you, but there are a few things you have to know. I very much wish that Mongo and I could walk out of here with you now and take you to dinner, but we can't. We can't even be seen together. Mongo and I have been very careful. As far as we know, we weren't followed up the Thru-way; nobody who shouldn't know is aware that we're in Colletville, or that we've talked to you. But we can't be absolutely certain. Now, just in case we're wrong and men come to talk to you, you simply tell them about this conversation-all of it except for the part about Gary Worde. That's very important. Nothing that you know is a threat to these people, but Gary Worde may very well be a threat. If you can follow these directions, everyone-including your friend in the mountains-should be safe."
"I understand," the woman said evenly. "I know you're going to look for him. Please be very careful. Remember that he's crazy."
Garth smiled, jerked a thumb in my direction. "So's Mongo. The two of them will get along just fine."
After leaving the school by a back entrance, we went through our usual ritual of driving slowly and watching in our rearview mirrors for lights. There were none.
Despite the storm, we found a place where we were able to pick up a pizza and a six-pack of beer for our dinner. Back at our motel, before sitting down to eat, Garth called his precinct station house.
There was news.
The NYPD had kept in touch with the Seattle Police Department regarding the deaths of Loan Ka and his family, and Kathy. The Seattle police, at Garth's urging, were treating the deaths as murders, but still had no leads in the case. However, something curious had happened within hours of the explosion, and the police there were wondering if Garth thought there might be a connection. Three local Hmong, men with criminal records for extortion and illegal use of explosives, had been found murdered, their corpses dumped in an alley near a station house. The men's bodies had been mutilated, skinned from the necks almost down to the waists; the coroner's report indicated that they had been alive when the skinning had been done, and it was the torture that had killed them. Furthermore, the right thumb of each man had been severed, and the missing digits had not been found.
Garth suggested that Seattle be advised not to waste any more time or manpower on the case.
15
The next day we outfitted ourselves with camping and survival gear, and supplies. We bought small-bore rifles and ammunition, then used another chunk of Veil's ten thousand dollars to rent a large, heavy Jeep with four-wheel drive. With our gear and a half dozen ten-gallon cans of gasoline strapped down in the back of the Jeep, we headed up into the mountains.
We knew we were going to have to get lucky; we could drive for weeks through the Catskills without seeing any sign of our quarry, and the problem was further complicated by the fact that our hidden veteran certainly wasn't going to be hanging out near any main road. After all his years in the mountains, Gary Worde would almost certainly have built at least one semipermanent shelter, but it would be far away from roads, people, and towns. Besides the extra gasoline, Garth and I had purchased sturdy hiking boots.
The starting point for our search would be the mountain where Garth thought he had spotted a campfire the night before, and that was the general direction-south by southwest-in which we headed, constantly keeping our eyes on the Jeep's dashboard compass. Occasionally we veered off the main road to explore ice- and snow-covered side roads. While Garth drove, I scanned the surrounding countryside with high-powered binoculars, looking for signs of-anything. What I saw was a lot of deer, a few hearty winter hikers exploring the foothills, and a group of brightly clad cross-country skiers. That was it.
The mountain where Garth thought he had seen the fire turned out to be ten miles away-which probably meant that he hadn't seen anything more than some random reflection of light in the window glass. It made no difference; we had to start somewhere, and that mountain seemed as good a place as any. Without some glimpse of fire or smoke, our chances of finding Gary Worde were a good deal less than minuscule.
For lunch we ate sandwiches from our large, well-stocked ice locker, then turned on gas-powered space heaters and waited in the Jeep until nightfall. We took turns sleeping and searching the tapestry of night for the tiniest speck of fire on the mountain, but sighted nothing. At dawn we crossed that mountain off one of the five topological maps we had brought with us, started up the Jeep, and headed for the next mountain.
We spent three days and nights driving through the mountains in a twenty-five-mile radius around the town of Colletville and were about to give up when, near midnight of the third night, I glanced to my right through the binoculars and clearly saw wisps of smoke rising in the distance into a sky brightly illuminated by a full moon. I quickly checked the map, saw that we were ten miles away from the nearest town. We parked the Jeep off the road, slept for a few hours, and at dawn loaded and hitched on our backpacks. We checked our pocket compasses, then headed off in the direction where I had seen the smoke.
After a day of hiking west, we both began to suspect that my sighting of smoke might have been as phantasmagorical as Garth's sighting of fire in the schoolhouse window back in Colletville. By nightfall, two city boys were thoroughly exhausted from tramping over hill and dale. We pitched camp, built a huge fire to cheer ourselves up, but didn't have the energy to cook. We ate cold cuts washed down with beer, then talked strategy-or lack of it. Just before sundown we had spotted, far in the distance, the top of what appeared to be a fire-lookout tower, close to the top of yet another mountain. Before going to sleep, we decided that we would try to make it as far as that tower the next day, and then turn back if there was no sign of Gary Worde; there seemed no sense in throwing away good time after that we would have already wasted in a futile search.
Over the river and through the woods…
We were again up at dawn at the beginning of what looked to be a fine, bright day. Refreshed, we cooked ourselves a big breakfast of eggs and Canadian bacon, cleaned up the campsite, and started off again in the direction of the lookout tower. After a half hour of walking we reached the top of a rise and were relieved to see below us a dry streambed which looked like easy walking and which appeared to meander off in the general direction of the tower. I led the way down the hill, entering a thick outcropping of fir trees. I was the first to see the streambed again when we emerged from the trees, and it was almost enough to give me a heart attack; thoroughly startled, I yelped in astonishment and jumped backward, bumping into Garth.
In the few minutes that it had taken us to walk down the forested hillside, something had appeared in the streambed that definitely hadn't been there when we'd started down; sitting on a huge boulder not ten yards away from us was a fairly large man. He was wearing a blue
, fur-lined parka, faded jeans tucked into high-top laced hiking boots. His thinning brown hair looked clean but was very long, pulled back from his face and tied in a pony tail, and he had a full beard which reached the center of his broad chest. His eyes were large and brown, perhaps a bit too bright. Large hands were wrapped around a sturdy walking stick which he had laid across his knees. Powerful field binoculars hung on a leather strap around his neck.
"You've got to be Mongo Frederickson," the man said, pointing a stubby index finger in my direction. He looked more than a bit bemused.
Garth and I glanced at each other, then back at the man. Our rifles were stuck in sleeves in our backpacks, not easily accessible. "Who the hell are you?!" I snapped.
"My name's Gary Worde," the man said easily in a deep, rather pleasing baritone. "If you are Mongo, then the sour-looking big guy with you is your brother, the cop. Are you two looking for me?"
"How the hell do you know who we are, and what makes you think we're looking for you?" I asked, feeling rather foolish.
The bearded man shrugged his broad shoulders, touched the binoculars slung around his neck. "I've been tracking you for the past two hours from the top of the lookout tower back there. From the way the two of you trip over your own feet, you're sure as hell not hikers-and there are no hiking trails in this area, anyway. So I asked myself, what would an odd pair like you two be doing around here? A mutual friend, Veil Kendry, talks about you a lot. Let's just say I put one big guy and one little guy together and came up with your names. Did Veil send you with a message for me? Is he all right?"
Garth unhurriedly unzipped his parka, reached inside, and withdrew his service revolver. He cocked the hammer, walked out into the streambed, and put the gun to the man's head. It wasn't a very friendly thing to do, but I definitely agreed with his next point. "For some reason I don't believe you, pal," Garth said in a quiet voice that carried clearly in the sharp, cold air. "I try to put you together, and I don't come up with any answer at all. Now, what's your real name, and what are you doing here?"
The gun bore touching his forehead didn't seem to bother the man. His expression didn't change at all as he rolled his eyes in my direction and raised his eyebrows slightly. "Mongo? Tell me why I shouldn't be who I say I am."
"You don't match up with the report we got. Gary Worde's supposed to be the wild man of these mountains, and nobody's even seen him for nine years. You don't look or sound very crazy to us, but you do look too Goddamn well fed and well dressed to be the man we're looking for."
"Who told you all this?"
"A friend of Worde's in Colletville."
The man frowned slightly. "Then Veil didn't send you?"
"No. As a matter of fact, you might say we're looking for him."
"Why are you looking for him?"
Confused and uncertain of what to say, I said nothing. While it was certainly true that this man casually sitting on a boulder in the middle of a dry streambed didn't match up with anything Jan Garvey had told us about Gary Worde, it was also true that it wouldn't make any sense for our trackers-assuming they knew about Gary Worde, which was a big assumption-to sit this man down in our path to try to trick us. It bothered me, as did the man's seeming indifference to Garth's gun at his head.
"You'd best answer my question," the man cautioned in a tone of voice that sounded oddly like a threat.
"When was the last time you saw Veil Kendry?"
"I don't measure time the way you do. It was three seasons ago."
Spring. Veil had pulled one of his disappearing acts in the spring, for about three weeks. "He came here?"
"Yeah. He visits me at least once, sometimes twice, a year."
"Why does he visit you?"
"Because he's my friend," the man said with a slight shrug of his shoulders. "We practice together in these mountains."
"Practice what? Martial arts?"
His answer was to execute a series of maneuvers so fast I couldn't follow them. The bearded man ducked forward and to his left beneath Garth's gun, which clattered to the rocks as the side of the man's hand hit Garth's wrist. In what seemed less than the flicker of an eyelid, Garth had been disarmed and turned around, with one of his arms held in a tight hammerlock. The bearded man's right forearm was across my brother's windpipe.
Feeling like nothing so much as a winded commuter who has just seen his train pull out of the station, I drew my Beretta and started to circle around to where I might get a clear shot at the man who called himself Gary Worde. "Let go of my brother, or I'm going to put a bullet through your head."
"Put the gun away, Mongo," the man said easily. "You're lucky I recognized you as the Frederickson brothers, or you'd both have been dead a few seconds after your brother here pulled his gun on me. Put yours away."
"Let go of Garth first."
"No."
Garth was turning blue. I released the hammer on the Beretta, flipped it in my hand, and offered it to the bearded man butt first.
"I didn't say I wanted the gun," the man continued. "I just asked you to put it away." I dropped the gun into the pocket of my parka. The man immediately took his forearm away from my brother's throat-but he didn't release the hammerlock. "You still haven't answered my question, Mongo. If Veil didn't send you, what are you doing here?"
"We think you've got some answers we need to know."
"What are the questions?"
"What was Veil doing in Saigon near the end of the war, just after he'd been pulled out of Laos? Do you know?"
Shadows moved in the man's eyes, and his jaw muscles clenched and unclenched. "Why do you need to know?" he asked softly.
"It's a long and complicated story. The bottom line is that Veil's in big trouble; somebody wants him dead, along with us. We believe that the key to who's hunting Veil, and why, lies in something that Veil was involved in during the war. It's Veil's past we're hunting, and that's why we're here."
"Oh, shit," the man said as he abruptly released Garth and half turned away. He waved one hand in front of his face, as if trying to chase away invisible gnats-or something else. "So that's finally going down."
Garth and I glanced at each other in surprise as the bearded man suddenly started walking away. Garth picked up his gun, then ran after the man and grabbed his arm.
"Gary, I'm sorry! We don't understand. What's going down?"
Gary Worde shoved Garth's hand away, kept walking. His shoulders were hunched now, as if against the cold. Without looking back he motioned for us to follow him.
Garth and I walked in silence on either side of Gary Worde as he walked west in the dry streambed. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets, and his shoulders remained hunched. After a half mile or so he turned to his right and climbed up out of the bed. We found ourselves on a cleared path running up the face of the mountain on which the lookout tower stood. Panting and sweating from the quick pace Worde had set, Garth and I stopped to adjust our backpacks. Still silent, Worde helped us by removing some of the heavier articles from both our packs. He wrapped the articles inside my sleeping bag, hoisted it over his shoulder. Then we started off again.
"What you heard about me in Colletville is true," Gary Worde suddenly said in a quiet voice so low that Garth and I had to strain to hear him. "At least it was true back then. I couldn't-can't-make it anywhere there are people just going through their regular routines day in and day out. The fact that they don't know or think about the things that happened in the war only makes me think about them more; if you will, my memories are like air rushing into the vacuum of other people's forgetfulness or indifference. That's when I get… crazy. It's when the bad dreams come."
Worde shuddered, cast an anxious look at Garth and me. We returned his gaze and nodded, but remained silent. Garth reached out, squeezed his shoulder.
"Some people would say that the army let me out of their nuthouse too soon," the hidden veteran continued as we reached the top of the mountain and walked along its crest. Around us was nothing
but forest, rolling hills, more mountains. "That isn't true; I never would have gotten better there. They had me doped up with chlorpromazine, and all I did was sleep all the time. But I still dreamed. I would have died there, and I guess they finally came to realize that. They gave me a permanently refillable prescription for lithium, the name of a shrink at a V.A. hospital in the Albany area, and let me go. I came home to Colletville."
We started down the opposite side of the mountain. Halfway down, beside a swiftly moving stream, was a log cabin which looked sturdily built and came complete with glass windows. Perhaps three-quarters of an acre of forest had been cleared around the cabin, and there were a number of patches of broken ground where I assumed vegetables were grown in the spring and summer. Pelts of raccoon, fox, muskrat, beaver, and deer were curing on stretch racks in the cold air and sunlight. A skinned deer carcass, half butchered and covered with a muslin cloth, hung from an eave of the cabin, and on a chopping block next to the stream lay an ax and a rifle. Cords of firewood were stacked around the sides of the cabin, and smoke drifted up from a stone chimney.
Gary Worde had again lapsed into silence for some time before we'd approached his cabin, and Garth and I sensed that he was trying to center and gird himself for the psychological turmoil talking about the war would entail. Garth and I helped him prepare a meal of venison and vegetables, served on skewers, which we ate sitting on wooden stools around the huge, open hearth in the center of what served as the cabin's living room. Afterward, he brewed coffee and served it to us in carved wooden cups. It was almost sundown before he spoke again.
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