Hillman had taken my work phone and wallet, but not the cash in my front pocket. I got a cab to my shed safe house, even if the first three rushed off when they got a good look at me.
I hoped no one knew about the shed, but I had no choice anyway. I almost cried when I saw Shovel Pig. I clutched Shovel Pig to me like a family pet I’d thought I’d never see again. Heavy with all I’d gathered before leaving the house.
I pulled the go-bag out from under the tarp. It had a lot of medical supplies, including painkillers. Once I’d stabilized what I could, I had a bad idea: I tried calling my husband on Bog. No answer. So maybe that meant something had happened to him. Or maybe it meant he’d taken me seriously and wasn’t going to answer a number he didn’t recognize.
I’d bandaged my ankle. The Langer bullet wounds were through and through. Superficial. But I had a balcony bullet lodged in my shoulder, and ribs that might be broken. Passed out once before the painkillers kicked in. Moving kept me focused. The ways to move that hurt less. Not many.
Everything looked skewed and fuzzy. Kept being lucid and then not. I called the gym and left a long, rambling message for Charlie on the answering machine. I don’t know what it would sound like now. Mostly swearing and rambling and paranoid. The kind of thing you’d play for the jury. Charlie never called me back. I know my thought was that Charlie used to train boxers. Used to have a doctor on call. But I don’t really know why I did that. Charlie would’ve said fuck off and he would’ve been right.
Then I dialed Allie, on a burner phone. When the click came and Allie was listening but not saying anything, I began to babble, and whatever came out was so unconvincing, she hung up right away. The apologies. The pleading. Whatever I said.
That was it. The sum of my connections. I had acquaintances, colleagues, people I performed rituals of friendship with … but they weren’t friends. Not close friends.
I had no one. Except Silvina, in a perverse way.
I had her journal. I had her account of a trip down the coast.
The go-bag had a lot of cash in it, too, and prepaid credit cards not in my name, which I’d used cash to get. I had the family credit cards. Also, a fake driver’s license, name of “Joan Ark.” But my passport—that was back at the house. So stupid. No way I was going back to the house for it.
No choice. Or only bad choices. I took another cab to a used-car lot. I bought a clunker with cash. I got on the highway and headed straight for the coast, then took all the little hidden roads and detours. With a bullet in my shoulder and my busted ribs.
I had a list of Vilcapampa subsidiaries operating in the areas I passed through. Gas station chains. Dollar stores. Even plastics factories. A pipeline running out the back of beyond. I had to believe they could see me, in the sense that they might have remote access to on-site surveillance cameras. I would be loyal to local businesses. I always checked where the cameras were anyway. Hit the road in the morning with that in mind.
Fooling myself. I’d studied Silvina’s journal closely enough to put together a road map of her West Coast trip so long ago. To guess at places she’d stopped from the natural landmarks she mentioned. Even though once I passed through Crescent City, the details would get murky, my path slower, less sure.
As I performed these rituals, undertook these expeditions, I punished myself with the idea that I had been a diversion for Silvina or part of her sleight of hand. Meant to be roadkill. I spent sleepless nights in agony physical and mental, trying to focus on the positive. But always drawn back to destructive ideas.
I hated Silvina. I loved her. Didn’t know whether to blame her or just bad luck. I was in a state of shock and self-loathing I couldn’t convey to anyone.
At first, I slept in my car. I had a license, but not really. Everything was forged. A cop might or might not spot the deception. So I drove like a fucking granny. I drove like an ogre in a tiny lima bean of a car. But the coast was glorious when it came into view through the mist. As I put the sea behind me and began to head a little inland, I became sad. But being right on the coast felt too exposed, too obvious. Even the looming brutalist figureheads on the steel-and-stone bridges felt too obvious. Every time I was herded onto one, I felt there was a roadblock on the other side.
The coast saved me, though, while I traveled next to it. The cold. The waves. The isolation. Like home but not like home. I kept thinking I’d gotten out of this place, these kinds of places. How I’d sneak off by myself once I could drive, from the farm and to the coast. Running away from home, except I had nowhere to go. Would sit in a freezing coffee shop watching the surf break against rocks. Then go back. But I had gotten out, no matter how my escape brought me back into proximity with who I had been.
Shovel Pig didn’t remember any of this. Shovel Pig must be in shock, too, but for different reasons. That was the kind of spiral of thought I tried to snuff out. Because it was ridiculous. But also because it was dangerous. To imbue the inanimate with feelings. To talk to people in my head who were not there, not physically in front of me. Like my husband. Like my daughter. Like Silvina. Always Silvina.
But as I drove—scared, paranoid—a goal emerged. Not just to hide, but hide with some small purpose. I told myself I’d find the houseboat Silvina had mentioned in her journal, leaping-off point for her expedition into the wilderness of the King Range. Find the houseboat and live there for a time, and then I, too, would plunge into the forest as she had. I would find what she had found there, something she couldn’t bring herself to put in the journal but I could sense was there, between the lines.
And if I didn’t find the houseboat? Then I’d just plunge into the wilderness beyond and accept whatever came next.
My wounds, somehow, seemed secondary. I’d fix myself only when cause and effect had been broken. I’d fix myself only when I could find a clinic or doctor who wouldn’t ask questions.
That took more than a month. My shoulder would never be right again. My leg might never be right again. I would never be right again.
Did I have daydreams, even then, of some return to my former life? Of a way back to normal? No.
But I’d found the houseboat. At least there was that.
[71]
I wasn’t alone on the houseboat, though. I wasn’t alone anywhere. Not a miracle, the voice that would come spiraling into my head. Not a miracle, the way I let it in. But how do you know what a miracle is anymore? Or what’s damnation?
Early on, after the balcony, the messages were either basic or bat shit. They came in over Bog, the phone I’d gotten at the conference. Confused me for just a second, like I was still using my work phone. Then I realized he’d found a way to bug it or use it from our time together at the bar as Jack and Jill.
That far-off magical time that would never return. When I also hadn’t been safe.
>>Hello, Jane. Things going well? Or a little … sideways?
>>Ever wonder about alkaloids and hallucinogens and hummingbirds? What a high that would be? You’re already high, in the mountains, but high, too. Just high and high and hi.
>>Hello, Jane. I started my day with toast and scrambled eggs. I snuck out during curfew to get the eggs. You just have to know the people. Who have eggs.
>>Did you know that Vilcapampa’s actually shoved in a basement somewhere, with a stroke? That was an actor you met. His wife runs everything now.
>>Did you see the cruise ships overrun with refugees? They’re just drifting out there, getting desperate. Circling the drain. Where can that lead? Talk to me about it.
>>You could turn me off anytime, Jane. Yet I know you’re receiving this. Why is that? Do you need me for some reason? Or you just have grown accustomed? I know the feeling.
>>Ever wonder if this is just a simulation? I do. I wonder every fucking day. Because it sure feels like someone external is turning up the heat. And I don’t believe in the devil.
>>I can’t see where you are. That’s clever. I don’t even know if you’re getting this. But you have to
know I’ll come for you soon. I’ve no choice. I know what you plan to do.
He didn’t know because I didn’t know. Not really. And I hadn’t replied. I just let him “talk.” He became a little unraveled when he didn’t have someone responding. Or maybe that was an act, too. Psyops, just like the dual purpose of the wig. Throw me off-balance. Keep pushing me forward. Make me believe in his reliable unreliability.
Sometimes I imagined half the texts were sent by an assistant. That’s why they didn’t stay consistent or on point. But I knew he was a loner. Takes one to know one. Except, unlike me, Hellbender was a loner who needed someone to acknowledge his wit, his brilliance.
Maybe Hellbender was a fed. But it was just a theory. I couldn’t know for sure. No evidence, and fewer ways of searching than before. Allie’s long-ago, dredged-up secret report could’ve led me somewhere if only I’d been a hacker. But, also, even with the secret version of the internet available through Bog, I didn’t want to leave a trace. There were worse things than a Google search history.
“Reports in the literature of a second species in the genus Plethowen are apocryphal. Descriptions of this second road newt species are consistent in noting a much larger salamander. Many scientists think this second species is a myth. How could a larger version, a giant version, pass notice when the smaller, more suited for stealth and invisibility, is already dead?”
Was Hellbender like the giant salamander? Smoke and mirrors? The leftovers from some impulse I couldn’t see the beginning of. Except now I knew the salamander was real. Not helping was all the myriad ways pain robbed me of the ability to think. I held on to hauntings. The way Silvina never left me. The way Hellbender would not leave me alone. Except, I didn’t have Hellbender’s journal. I couldn’t suss him out at all. What could I invent out of a single bar encounter? What vital clue I would’ve noticed if I’d thought it important.
But if he was still texting me, then at least I had distance from him. Maybe that sounds odd. It was almost like I knew where he was if he kept texting. A sense of the enemy. Like his texts were depth charges, but as long as I kept quiet, at the bottom of the sea, holding my breath, I was safe.
The first thing I’d figured out was how to keep the voice in my head without letting it know where I was on the map. The second thing I’d done was change his name in my phone. Didn’t want that static confusion, that allusion to a salamander. So, instead: “Hellmouth.”
Imagine you miss your husband and daughter but you can’t ever see them again or dare to make contact or respond when they make contact. That you know they’re alive only if a lone text appears on a phone you shouldn’t have kept that hardly ever has its SIM card engaged. Or because there’s nothing in the newspaper about them being found dead.
Imagine you believe this charade of being a detective has a purpose, a point, and it’s not just about making sure you still have some connection to the world.
Imagine you still possess a half-burnt salamander you hope will give up its secrets.
Imagine the deep forest is right there, and you wonder why you can smell salt spray at all. But you know why the salt spray always brings you back to a burning warehouse.
[72]
The morning after I hit the man in the bar, I crawled from under the blankets to the bathroom and took a hot shower. I was used to the slight lurch of the houseboat under my bulk. Mornings were better for the pain, as if it had to wake up, too. Or was disguised by the regular aches of middle age. Or maybe the chill froze the pain.
The houseboat lay on the bank of a river a hundred miles north of the King Range. With the trees smothering everything, and islands of gray-green moss and lichen smothering the trees. Even in the cold. Remote, in how the overload of texture muffles sound and changes where it comes from. How even the trickling tease and sometimes surge of the river feels like a dream or memory of sound.
Lashed to the sunken, moss-covered riverbank, the houseboat lay in mud next to an eddy away from the main force of the river, which gathered momentum farther south. Just beyond, it bifurcated and, after some slick rocks, took parallel paths to the same destination. Beaver dam just around the bend of one.
Out the window, I could see my landlord’s “houseboat,”—more of a jacked-up mobile home—jammed against the opposite bank and up on rocks. A perilous pontoon bridge between me and him. I’d measured it. Only thirty feet, the river narrowing here, shallow and full of sediment. You might not drown, but you could get trapped in the mud. I didn’t trust him to get me out.
Silvina’s houseboat deserved only unglamorous descriptions, unlike my vision in advance. Derelict, prefab. Down to the wooden frame and the small windows with the off-white, frilly curtains. A galley kitchen. A living room and separate bedroom area, but not much else except a closet or two. I had to ignore the dull mold smell, which I knew would be like an alarm bell in the summer. The walkways looked out over the silt-choked river, and maybe someone else would’ve needed to sit in the broken-down chair outside to avoid going stir-crazy. But I liked dark, quiet places.
I’d “rented” it from an angry white guy with a mud-spattered pickup truck he drove somewhere late at night. He lived in the almost mirror image across the bridge. I don’t think he owned Silvina’s houseboat, but why argue since the money he was asking for was so paltry. Didn’t know if he was a militia member or made illegal drugs or was just escaping something. “Are you Jewish?” “What the fuck do you care?” “All right, then.” The wary side-eye of aliens from different solar systems. Bound by mistrust.
Mostly, though, I thought he was the standard bullshit libertarian, and once, while he was out, I’d made sure to put a little surprise under his pathetic stub of river deck. Just as insurance. Also made sure he got a good look at the arsenal I took out of the trunk of my car when I moved in.
I dressed like usual: overlarge plaid shirt, jeans. My only other choices were my hiking pants and shirt or a white blouse and dress slacks. I liked to look more local than that, saved the blouse for going into banks or places more urban. It looked like a sail on me. Usually, I wore a black baseball cap. Which I guess was like putting a baseball cap on a bear.
Seven miles through a maze of dirt roads to the houseboat. No one could follow me without being seen. Still, I doubled back, I took precautions. I often left the car a mile from the houseboat, hidden under branches in deep undergrowth, and walked the rest of the way.
That morning, after coffee, I went to meet my client at a breakfast joint. What would Silvina think if she could see me now? An unanswerable question.
But this was my life. For a little while, at least.
[73]
Nora lived three towns over, which was the kind of distance I had learned to prefer. A forty-year-old office manager, a redhead with faded freckles who worried her husband was cheating on her. This was my sixth case, sixth different town. Five had been about infidelity, the last about an intruder that turned out to be a raccoon. I didn’t charge for that one. But I should’ve.
I never took any serious cases, advertised my services in the local penny-pincher classifieds, whichever area I’d decided to focus on for a while. I had a fake name, fake driver’s license, and a sharp-looking business card with a laid-back handle: “Plain Jane Investigations.” But my rates were so low, people didn’t even care about my ID. I didn’t list the name of my business in the ads. I was cautious; even Shovel Pig rarely left the houseboat. But, then, Shovel Pig contained the sum total of my old life. Practically a holy reliquary.
“He’s always late to everything. Couple times, he’s been at the office overnight. Won’t answer his phone.”
She was wearing a more thread-worn version of the blouse I’d left in the houseboat. Or the curtains in the houseboat. She smelled of bandages, blood, and vinegar. Or I did.
“Anywhere you want me to start?” I asked. It was better if I didn’t have to do a lot of work.
But Nora was somewhere else.
“We’ve got two small children
,” she said, like she had to convince me to take the case. Or like that would help me solve the case. Two small children had never solved a case. The two small children would almost certainly like to be left the fuck out of this.
“I’m sure it’s nothing.” Something I said a lot. “But best to be certain, in my experience.” Which wasn’t much. “Because otherwise this can seriously affect your life … Does he have an assistant?”
That broke the spell.
“Yes. Someone he’s training at the car dealership. A man. Jim.”
Which clearly ruled out the assistant, to her way of thinking. I made a note to check out Jim. If I had to. If it got that far.
“Is he a regular at any bars or restaurants?”
She gave me a short list, which also gave me a list of places locals went. Useful because I didn’t know this town, and Silvina had been here long ago.
The bar from last night was not on her list. A little out of range, or too rough for a used-car salesman.
“He has a poker night with Ed on Fridays. It’s at Turtle’s.”
Tomorrow was Friday. I knew Turtle Fred’s. A weird regional chain, with franchises always built next to a pond. Stormwater. Wastewater. Natural. Didn’t matter, it seemed. Served wings. I hadn’t eaten there because it had several health citations, and the folks hanging out in the parking lot tended to be conducting business.
“Who’s Ed?”
“A high school buddy. They played baseball together. Most of his friends are Ed’s friends.”
The breakfast came: poached eggs on toast for her, a full breakfast of scrambled eggs, hash browns, corned beef hash, sausage, and oatmeal for me.
While we ate, mostly in silence, I marveled at how the world worked today.
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