The boy was breathing hard and fast. Walt thought he might start to cry.
“Not beer, not a girl… then, what?”
Morgan Dodge spoke so softly that Walt had to lean down to hear him. The boy’s chin was flat against his chest.
“N… smok… in,” he mumbled.
“Didn’t catch that.”
“No… smoking,” he said deliberately. “It’s a lumberyard.”
There were NO SMOKING signs mounted everywhere.
“Bad for your health,” Walt said.
“Tell me about it.”
“Tobacco or something else?” Walt asked. “And remember, don’t lie to me.”
“A cigarette, yes. I’m not a hempie.”
“And if you tell Bob…” Walt said, leaving it hanging there.
“I need this job.”
“So you were outside.”
His head bobbed, chin still close to the chest.
“And you saw someone,” Walt said.
“A guy jumped the fence over there.” He pointed without looking up.
“Dressed how?”
“Hard to see. It was dark, man. I don’t know. All black, maybe. He was dark, that’s for sure.”
“He see you? Or did you call out, or what?”
“You kidding me? I freakin’ panicked. The cigarette and all. I’m like GI’ing the thing and trying to stamp out all the sparks and shit. I was so… stupid, GI’ing it right into the chips. I couldn’t tell if it was smoke or dust, but the more I stamped, the more of it there was. I could see myself setting the place on fire and trying to explain it to Bob. And then there’s, like, this noise behind me. I mean, this guy was one fast dude.”
Or there were two of them, Walt was thinking.
“Coming up behind me like that. I turned. He had a balaclava over his head. Like a ski mask, you know?”
“I know what a balaclava is,” Walt said. Inside, he was churning. This was sounding worse and worse. The Taser. The balaclava. A professional. Again.
“Guy does this Zorro move, and I’m, like, gone, fried. No idea what hit me. I woke up, lying there. No frickin’ clue how long I’d been there. God…” He rubbed his eyes. Walt had been right: he’d been crying. “I mean, I’m not out here, I never would have known anyone was messing around. Probably could have gone right on with my work and nothing would have happened. There are houses behind here, right? Nice homes. I figured that’s what he was after. Not this place. He was just cutting through, trying to rip off one of those houses. But, I swear to God, Bob hears this and I’m gone.”
“Doesn’t have to hear it from me.”
“Seriously?”
“You get a look at his face?”
“Nah. Nothing. It was the balaclava, you know? It was just so out of place. That was all I saw. And then he nailed me. It nailed me, whatever it was…”
“They’ll want to run some tests,” Walt said. “Just procedure. Nothing to worry about.”
“And the… you know…”
Bob was approaching.
Walt patted the kid on the thigh. “I’ve got what I need. How you deal with it, that’s your choice. But you’re asking the wrong guy if you want me to tell you to lie. Rule of thumb: it never helps anything. My calclass="underline" it’s better to man up and deal with reality. Lies tend to self-propagate. You know what that is?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
Walt hopped off the ambulance and took a long look around the yard. The kid’s theory about the houses down along the river was an interesting one, but he wasn’t buying it. One of the Caterpillars? One of the two tractor trailers? He tried to see a use for the split wood or any of the hundreds of stacked, limbless trees. There were several splitters that ran off diesel-powered hydraulics. How did stealing wine involve hydraulics?
For the first time, there was a tingle at the back of his skull. What if it isn’t about stealing wine?
Across the yard, he heard Bob blowing a gasket at the kid. Morgan caught Walt’s eye from a distance, clearly blaming him for him being on the wrong end of a rant. Bob steamed off toward the office.
Beatrice came to a heel and sat down obediently, as if Bob was angry at her.
Walt was going to have to try to make things right.
24
Her father had returned from a massage, and the sound coming from his room of the shower running caught Summer in the gut. A stock-market update was running on the flat-screen television in his room, the female anchor talking about “puts and calls.” For whatever reason, Summer thought about Enrico.
If she was going to do this, it had to be now, and just the thought of it flooded her with both excitement and dread. Despite being a moron and a loser, her father did his best. She was pretty sure he bent the rules and broke his word from time to time, but only because he was desperate to keep her happy. If it had just been him alone, he’d have bought a Barcalounger and surrendered himself to ESPN for the rest of his days. He sucked as a producer, but as a father he looked after her and cared about her, and would not approve in the least of what she was about to do.
Enrico, on the other hand, made her feel like she was already out of college.
She kept one eye on the suite’s living room as she began repacking her suitcase. She left the closet open so that if he happened to come into the room, she could hide the suitcase, hide her intentions.
She was sweating despite the room’s air-conditioning. Her head throbbed and her stomach felt squeamish. She’d never done anything like this. He would go ballistic. She had no idea what he’d do to her, but she knew it wouldn’t be pretty.
She flashed back to the voice on the BlackBerry call she’d taken for her father. There was a name attached to that voice-a face, even-but she couldn’t remember it exactly, couldn’t make a name stick to the face. She shook off her wondering and continued stuffing her delicates in the suitcase.
She trusted he was too consumed in the wine auction and his deals to notice any change in her, because she knew she wasn’t going to pull this off perfectly. She didn’t lie to him and he didn’t lie to her: this was an oath they’d made after her mother died. They were in this together. Only now she was deserting him. It made her feel a little crazy in the head. He didn’t deserve what she was about to do to him, no matter how much he tried to keep her being a kid instead of allowing her to be the woman she was.
Her hand hesitated, about to deliver a T-shirt to the suitcase. She could have undone this before it ever got started. He begged her all the time to talk, to tell him what she was thinking. But she put the shirt in the suitcase, continuing her packing.
There was no turning back now.
25
Walt heard the aspen leaves overhead, clattering like playing cards raking bicycle spokes. He watched Beatrice zooming around in the leaves on the ground, chasing phantoms and kicking up dust. This was where his heart was, he was reminded, away from town, away from his badge, on a walk with his dog in the backcountry. Gail’s abrupt departure from the marriage had driven him deeply into his work. In an instant, here in the sweet-smelling air, with the wind whistling past his ears, he realized he’d used his work as a place to hide. Leave it to Beatrice to reveal this truth to him.
Yellow police tape ran tree to tree, enclosing a thicket of golden willow. At the center were two camo-painted ATVs, the geometric shapes seen from the glider.