Years before, Johnny had built the cabin in a thickly timbered gulch that gave shade in the summer and protection from cold winds in winter and was hard to see from either the lowlands or the sky. The abandoned log road that led to the cabin had caved along the edges and was considered treacherous and unusable by both hunters and U.S. Forest Service personnel. On the first day of Johnny’s escape from federal custody, he and Amber had parked Amber’s vehicle behind the cabin, pulled a tarp over it, and covered the tarp with pine boughs. They used the woodstove only in the daylight hours and gathered only fuel that was dry and worm-eaten and would burn with maximum heat and little smoke.
The cabin was snug and watertight, stocked with canned beef and vegetables a cousin of Lester Antelope’s had backpacked over the crest of the mountain. In wistful, self-deceptive moments Johnny and Amber almost believed their geographical removal from the outside world had somehow changed the legal machinery that was waiting to grind them up.
But if Johnny and Amber had forgotten the relentless nature of their enemies, Lester Antelope’s cousin had not. He had left Johnny a Lee-Enfield carbine, a British officer’s model with peep sights, a lightweight stock, and a bolt action that worked as smoothly as a Mauser’s.
Then one night they heard sounds whose source they couldn’t identify-a footfall in the woods, a tree branch snapping, shale sliding over rock surfaces on the hillside. Johnny walked out in the trees and listened, the moonlight as bright as a flame on the pool where they drew their water. He came back to the cabin, poured a cup of cold coffee, and told Amber he had seen the freshly churned tracks of elk in the pine needles.
The next morning Amber saw Johnny oiling the carbine on the back step, pressing cartridges with his thumb down into the magazine, his skin netted with the sunlight that broke through the canopy overhead.
“We have plenty of meat. I wouldn’t squeeze that off up here,” she said, stepping into the doorway.
“A griz might try to get in at night. They can smell food a long way,” he said.
“I’m not afraid of jail,” she said. “Don’t do what you’re doing, Johnny.”
His face was bladed, his cheeks slightly sunken. “You’re not afraid of anything,” he said.
“Losing you.”
“If they nail us, it’ll be for good. No second chances this time,” he said.
“Don’t say that. They don’t have that kind of power.”
“I let them take me without a fight. They asked me what I thought of the Atlanta Braves,” he replied. He lowered his head and rubbed the oil rag along the carbine’s barrel, his thoughts hidden.
She remained standing above him in the doorway, the wind blowing down from the crest of the mountain, through larch trees whose needles had turned yellow and were starting to fall. He locked down the bolt of the Lee-Enfield, a piece of cartilage pulsing on his jawbone.
“If they come for us, we go together,” she said.
“That’s no good. No good at all,” he said.
She placed one hand on his shoulder for balance and sat down beside him. She picked his hand off the carbine and held it between hers. “If they come for us, we’ll run. There’re places in British Columbia they’d never find us,” she said.
“That’s right,” he said, taking his hand from hers. “We don’t have to worry about the griz, either. They’re looking for food down low. They won’t bother us.”
He worked the bolt on the Lee-Enfield and jacked the cartridges from the magazine onto the ground. “See? All this was about nothing,” he said.
But five minutes later, when she looked out the kitchen window, she saw him picking the cartridges for the Lee-Enfield out of the dirt and wiping them clean on his shirt before he stuck them in his pocket. That night, after she and Johnny went to bed, she thought she heard the engines of helicopters high above the trees.
She woke at false dawn. The cabin was cold, the woodstove unlit, and Johnny’s side of the bed empty. She put on her jeans and Johnny’s Army jacket and went out into the backyard. The privy door hung open, squeaking on its hinges. Her vehicle was still under its tarp and cover of pine boughs, the canvas stiff with frost. In the grayness of the woods she couldn’t see the movement of a single warm-blooded creature-not an owl, a rabbit, a deer mouse, a hooded jay, or even robins, which only yesterday had filled the trees in flocks on their way south.
She went back inside the cabin and absently let the door slam behind her. The sound was like a rifle shot in her ears, and out in the woods she heard a large bird, perhaps an eagle, take flight, its wings flapping as loudly as leather in the dead air.
The carbine, she thought.
She went into the bedroom and pulled open the closet door, where Johnny had put the Lee-Enfield before he went to bed last night. But it was gone.
She dug her cell phone out of a drawer, then hesitated before clicking it on, trying to remember what she had heard once about law enforcement agencies tracking cell phones by satellite. Billy Bob had told her to get off the phone, that his own line was tapped. He had also told her to use a land line, she thought. She had done what he’d said, pulling the tarp and pine boughs off her vehicle and driving to a truck stop, taking a risk she didn’t want to take again. No, satellite track or not, she would not leave the cabin again.
She activated the phone. As soon as she did, its message chime went off. She hit the retrieve button.
“It’s Billy Bob. Call me at the office or home. Everything is okay,” the recorded voice said. Then the transmission broke up.
There were three other messages with the same callback number on them, each of them impossible to understand. She rushed out the back of the cabin and climbed up the gulch until she was out of the timber, standing on a crag that overlooked a long, sloping mountainside covered with Douglas fir. She hit the dialback key on the cell and waited, her heart beating, her breath fogging in the cold.
THE PHONE RANG in my kitchen while Temple and I were eating breakfast.
“Amber?” I said.
“Tell it to me fast. My batteries are almost dead,” she said.
“Where are you?”
“Tell it to me, Billy Bob. Hurry!”
“You and Johnny are free.”
“Free?”
“Darrel McComb caught some of Karsten Mabus’s thugs on tape. Johnny’s clear on the homicides.”
“Why didn’t Darrel tell us?”
“Darrel is dead.”
“Dead?”
“One thing at a time. How could Darrel know where you are?” I said.
“He brought antibiotics to Johnny’s cabin. He’d followed me there once during his”-she hesitated-“during his voyeur stage. He figured that’s where we were hiding. I can’t think through this. How did Darrel die?”
“Mabus’s men tortured him to death. Darrel had taped a recorder to his leg. He wouldn’t give Johnny up.”
“Oh, Billy Bob,” she said.
“What?” I couldn’t tell if she was expressing grief over Darrel McComb’s death or at something she hadn’t told me about yet.
“Johnny left before dawn with a gun. He believes the Feds have found us.”
The cell phone made a crackling sound, then went dead.
IN THE PREDAWN darkness Johnny had heard the thropping sounds of a helicopter and for a moment he did not know if they came from his dreams or somewhere above the gulch. He lay awake as the grayness of the dawn grew inside the trees, then sat straight up in bed when he heard, this time for sure, a motorized vehicle working its way up the log road.
He dressed and slipped the sling of the Lee-Enfield over his shoulder, put on a slouch hat, and without a coat walked out into the cold, up the hill into woods that were speckled with frost. He followed a deer trail to the top of the gulch, then entered a long, flat area where the trees were widely spaced and he could make out the log road that accessed his cabin.