I built a fire and broke into the grocery stash. Tonight's entree was Dinty Moore Beef Stew. It seemed like most of what I'd eaten the last couple of days had come from cans. Still, filet mignon wouldn't have tasted better to me. Laurie looked skeptical while it was heating, but she took to it fast, finally abandoning her spoon to sop up the gravy with slices of bread, then licking her fingers clean.
And Madbird, God bless him, had stuck that brandy bottle into the sack. That, she was very happy to see.
Now the fire was burning down to embers and so was I. Adrenaline and the speed had both worn off, and I felt like my veins were full of lead. I still had another dozen or so of the crosstops, but I'd reached the point where nothing could take the place of sleep. I got to my feet and trudged down to the creek to wash the dishes.
Weather-wise, we'd gotten a break. The elevation here was a good six thousand feet, and I'd feared that the rain might turn to snow. Instead, it had lessened as we'd gone deeper into the mountains, and this area was still dry. But the clouds blowing in from the west gave only occasional glimpses of stars, and the moon was a barely visible blur. The storm might move right on through, or settle in and get serious. The air was thin and sharp and clean with the scent of the forest. Even this early in the fall, the night wind carried the news of winter.
I scrubbed the kettle and utensils with a Brillo pad, and the stew cans, too. There were a lot of bears in the Scapegoat, including a fair number of grizzlies. They weren't any more likely than people to be around this particular spot, but it didn't pay to advertise. I brushed my teeth with a new toothbrush from Hannah's bag. She was on my God bless list, too. I carried everything back to the van, stashed it in the front seat, then got a shovel and went to put out the fire.
Laurie was sitting huddled on the other side, watching it in that kind of hypnotized glaze that was easy to fall into, especially with fatigue and alcohol.
"Time to crash," I said.
She looked at me swiftly. "What?" Her face had a peculiar expression-confused, alarmed, even a little wild-eyed. Her trance must have been deep.
"We've got to sleep."
She shook her head, maybe to clear it or maybe in disagreement.
"Well, I've got to sleep," I said. "Stay up if you want. Just make sure you put this out when you're done. Bust up the embers and cover everything with dirt."
Her face and voice both turned suddenly sharp.
"I know how to deal with fire."
She stood up huffily, plucked a Kleenex out of Hannah's bag, and stalked out to the far edge of the circle of firelight. I hadn't intended to insult her wilderness skills, but I was feeling touchy about fire just now. I leaned the shovel against a tree and headed in the other direction, to give her some privacy.
The forest was a lot like around my own place except that everything was magnified. The trees seemed ancient and gigantic, swaying and moaning as if the creature the Indians called the Wendigo was up there running across their tops. The wilderness wrapped around me with such intensity that after twenty yards, I felt like I might never see another light.
I picked my way along a little farther and came to a treeless rocky slope that gave me a window of open sky. I took a piss, apologizing half-unconsciously to anything I might offend, and started to turn back. But I kept standing there instead, with the wind crawling inside my shirt and lifting my hair.
Wesley Balcomb wanted me dead, badly. If Laurie was right, not distance or police or even prison-for either him or me-would stop him.
And now I wasn't just on the run. I was on the run with his wife, who had betrayed him.
On the drive here, she'd told me how she'd come to be waiting for me. She had kept her promise to keep tabs on Balcomb, even watching him with binoculars when he left the house. Late this afternoon, she'd seen him drive to the fence around their compound and toss a black plastic garbage bag over it into the weeds. He'd seemed furtive, although it was Sunday and the place was deserted. Then he'd driven on into the ranch.
That would have been just about the time I'd seen him at the shed.
He clearly hadn't thrown the bag at that particular place by accident. It was a dead end, one of the dirt roads that had been blocked off by the fence, with nothing around and no outlet. But it was a good drop spot. A vehicle could turn off the highway and drive in a quarter mile to the fence's other side, hidden by trees and without having to go on the property.
A few minutes later, a nondescript modern sedan, like a rental, did just that. It sounded like the same vehicle John Doe had been driving when he'd delivered the money to my place. I'd realized by now why Laurie called him that. He was the most ordinary-appearing man I'd ever seen, the kind you looked right through and wouldn't remember thirty seconds later. No doubt that was part of why he was good at his job.
He got out of the car and picked up the plastic bag that Balcomb had thrown. When Laurie recognized him, her fear jumped to outright terror.
"What happened to make you so afraid of him?" I'd asked her.
She'd shivered and said, "That's the story I said I'd tell you. But I don't even want to think about it now."
John Doe opened the bag to check its contents, and she caught a glimpse of a rifle inside. She'd already guessed that he was here to kill somebody, and the most likely candidate was me. She didn't dare call the sheriffs for fear of her husband's wrath. She tried to call me, but I wasn't there to answer. So she ran to her SUV and drove to my place as fast as she could, hoping I'd have come home by the time she got there.
But my cabin was dark and empty. She couldn't chance waiting there-if John Doe showed up, that would just have gotten her killed, too. She started to take off, thinking she could find a hiding place along the highway and flag me down. But she feared that John Doe was close behind her, and Stumpleg Gulch Road was barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other. If she met him, he'd certainly recognize her. She pulled her SUV into the trees, intending to wait until he drove by and then sneak on.
Her instinct was a good one. His car soon came into sight. But instead of driving farther, he stopped short of her and hid his own vehicle in the trees. She knew he'd hear her engine if she started it. So she sat there for close to two hours, shivering with cold, fear, and a dread of watching helplessly while I drove into a spray of gunfire.
But when headlights did appear, they belonged to a pair of sheriffs' cruisers.
Laurie almost wept with relief. She didn't know what was going on, but John Doe wasn't going to be shooting anybody with sheriffs around. After they passed, she started her SUV and eased her way through the trees toward the road, thinking that with the distance and the sound of their own engines, they wouldn't notice her.
But John Doe did. He appeared out of nowhere, smashed the passenger window with his rifle butt, and had the muzzle to her head before she had time to comprehend it. He got in the seat behind her and told her to keep driving.
He had probably assumed the same thing she had-that he'd been made somehow and the deputies were looking for him. He didn't take his own car for fear it had been identified, so he'd started to escape on foot. Then he'd heard the SUV or seen its silvery shape moving through the trees.
I had to hand it to Balcomb again. I'd gotten a good enough look at the rifle to be sure it was Kirk's Mini-14-he stored it inside the ranch office when he left the property because his Jeep was vulnerable to theft. Balcomb had given it to John Doe so the slugs found in my body would identify it as the murder weapon. Kirk's disappearance would remain a mystery, but the sheriffs would assume it had to do with the grudge between us-that he'd settled it and then vanished again. Balcomb didn't know for sure that he was dead, but even if he'd turned up, there'd have been a cloud of confusion to cover Balcomb-and Kirk would have been the one who'd have had to explain his way out of it.