We drove without speaking for most of the next hour, Alena at the wheel, myself beside her, Dan and Vadim in the back. The sky started to clear as we began climbing towards Mount Hood, and there was snow throughout the Cascade Range, and the trees were very green and very lush and very beautiful, and it reminded me of the little I'd seen of northern Georgia, where the Caucasus came down from the border with Russia. We stopped at a gas station in Welches to fill the tank, and Vadim and I took the opportunity to go inside to gather some supplies. He grabbed a six-pack of Budweiser and two bags of spicy Cheetos, and I made him put the Budweiser back.
"We do not want to be stopped for an open container in the car," I told him.
Vadim pulled a face that said that I absolutely needed to lighten up, then replaced the beer and got himself six cans of Red Bull instead. I went with two bottles of clearly-from-concentrate orange juice, and another two of water, and looked for something that wasn't purely high-fructose corn syrup. Failing that, I decided I wasn't hungry. I also grabbed a road atlas of Oregon.
Back in the car, now with Dan at the wheel and Alena seated beside him, and Vadim and I flanking the sleeping Illya at the back, we broke out the map and took a look at our options. Thus far, we'd done pretty well relying on our improvisational skills, but what we needed to do next would require seclusion and security. We had Illya; now we needed a place to button him up and do what needed to be done next.
"What are you thinking?" Dan asked. He asked it in Russian, maybe to see if I could keep up. "Take him out to the middle of the high desert, maybe?"
"It's the winter season," I said. "We want someplace quiet and discreet, and the further from Portland and the police the better."
"You think a vacation rental?" Alena asked.
"It worked for us in Georgia. We find a place that's not being used right now, maybe one that looks like it's only occupied during the summer. A fishing cabin, rather than skiing, say."
"So near a river," Vadim said. "Someplace near a river."
I checked the map. "Along the Deschutes would work. If we had access to a computer we could just do a quick search for vacation rentals, plug in the communities we like the looks of, see what's available, and see what's not being used at the moment."
"Hold on." Vadim handed me the can of Red Bull he'd been working on, then dug around in his pockets until he came out with one of the new Palm Treos, began fiddling with it. "Ah, it's going slow as shit, the coverage's no good out here. Hang on."
I looked to Dan, said, "Maybe we should keep moving while he does this."
Dan started the Pathfinder again, pulling us back onto the road. Vadim stayed bent over his Treo, occasionally muttering about how long it was taking for the pages to load.
"Okay," he said, after almost two minutes. "I've got a page here, it's got towns in Central Oregon with vacation rentals. Lots of towns. Bend, Eagle Crest, Sunriver-"
"Sunriver," I told him, checking the map.
There was another pause, this one perhaps half as long as the first, accompanied by more of his muttering about crappy connection speeds. "Got it. Lots of places. Lots of places, man, let me check availability, here…goddammit this is slow…yeah, okay, looks like about a dozen places we could use."
"Note the addresses," I told him. "We'll eyeball them when we get there, pick the one we like."
"This is amateur hour," Dan said, mostly to himself. "We should have had a location lined up before we grabbed him."
"We also should have known there was a woman and a child," I told him.
Dan didn't say anything else until we reached Sunriver.
CHAPTER
The place we liked was the third one we looked at, number 18 Cluster Cabin Lane, not more than a mile east of where the Deschutes River flowed past Sunriver. It was snowing when we arrived, and it looked like it had been snowing a lot, and keeping the roads clear up to the area around the cabin wasn't a civic priority. We did the last part of the drive with Dan swearing, working the Pathfinder in four-wheel drive.
Then he stopped the car and Alena and I each hopped out, telling him and Vadim to stay put and keep an eye out. We'd seen absolutely no traffic coming in, and the nearest cabin was perhaps half a mile away, and it had looked as cold and empty as the one before us did now. With the car's engine off, the only sound was that of the snow coming down.
Without a word, Alena and I each headed for the cabin, taking opposite sides for the approach. It was ugly, late sixties style, two stories tall, and on the ground floor almost an entire wall was floor-to-ceiling windows, shutters closed behind them. Not the best design for a winter place, and not the best design for the summer, either; in the first, the glass would conduct all the cold outside; in the second, it would trap heat with the sunlight. Snow had slid from the rooftop recently, plopping in a great pile along the east side of the house. In some places it came up to my knees, and once, while trudging around, it reached my hips. But the only signs that the snow had been disturbed at all were ours.
We met up again at the foot of the porch, and again stopped to listen and look around, still not speaking. It was almost eerily silent, that pure winter quiet that comes upon a heavy snow. It made the world beautiful, and it made the world even colder. Snow was melting in my hair, running down the back of my neck, and I shivered, and I saw that Alena was trying to keep her teeth from chattering. Neither of us was carrying a lot of body fat, and the weather was working on us fast.
"It'll serve," she decided. "How do we want to get inside? I don't want to break any windows if we can help it."
"We shouldn't need to." I pointed to the small, rectangular metal box that had been screwed into the wall of the cabin beside the front door. "If we can get that open, we've got the keys."
She stepped up onto the porch, brushing snow off her shoulders, and I followed her. There were ten push buttons set into the box, each corresponding to a digit, zero to nine, running in two rows with a sliding switch set in the space between. She pushed four buttons, tried the switch, then pushed the same four, but in a different sequence, and tried the switch again. The third time, when she tried the switch, the box opened, and she removed the key.
"Eighteen eighteen?" I asked.
"Tried that first," she said with a grin, turning to fit the key in the lock. "Then eighty-one and eighty-one. It opened with eighty-one, eighteen."
"They should be more careful with their combinations."
"They should." She turned the key, gave the door a good push, and it swung open.
"Get inside and get warm," I told her. "I'll get the others." There were three bedrooms, two with queens and one with two doubles, a full bathroom, a half bath, and a fireplace in the center of the main room on the ground floor. Vadim and I carried Illya inside while Alena set about trying to get a fire started and Dan headed back into town for groceries. We weren't going to need much; we weren't going to be here long.
We deposited Illya in one of the bedrooms with a queen, then duct-taped his wrists and his ankles. He was still out cold, though he mumbled when I pulled off his shoes and his pants. I covered him with a blanket to keep him from catching hypothermia before the heat could fill the cabin. Vadim began searching the rest of the building, less looking for danger than looking to see what he could find, and I joined Alena at the fireplace. She had a blaze already going, and smoke curled out over the mantle, spilling out into the room.
"Bad draw," she told me. "The chimney is cold. Soon as the fire heats the stone, the smoke will clear."