The next step was getting control of Eric Shaw and Alyssa Bradford. It wasn’t something he could accomplish with them in that hotel, but luring them out of that hotel and into a place more suitable for his needs was going to be a difficult task. The only person he knew who had any ties to them was that big black kid.
Wait a second. Wait just one moment, Josiah, use that head on your shoulders.
He called Danny back.
“Anything happening?”
“Nope. Nobody’s come. I wrote down the license plate of that-”
“Great,” Josiah interrupted. “Now tell me, Danny, you said when you followed him earlier today, he went to Anne McKinney’s house. Right?”
“Right. Got out of his car and left the engine running and the door open and…”
Josiah tuned him out, thinking now of the old woman’s house, that lonely, isolated place on the hill outside of town, no neighbors for a half mile in any direction.
“Okay,” he said. “Just needed verification. You stay awake and watching, hear? I’ll be in touch.”
He hung up in the middle of a question from Danny, feeling a tingle in his limbs now, puzzle pieces fitting into place, giving him a sense of the whole. He had the crucial next step, and it was time to get moving. Dawn would be on him soon, and the less of daylight he saw, the better.
It would be a long hike, and there was a temptation to try and avoid that, but in the end Josiah relented. He didn’t want to run the risk of taking his truck out on the roads, not even for a short drive. He filled his pockets with shells and took his shotgun, was just out of the barn when he stopped and went back and opened the door to the truck and tossed the wad of cash he’d stolen from the detective onto the driver’s seat. He’d tell Danny to come get it. Danny’d earned that much, no question. Josiah didn’t feel any great sense of loss, handing the cash over. Funny thing, but the more consumed he became with the concept of debt, the less concerned he was with money itself. Now, what kind of sense did that make?
It was beginning to rain again when he left the timber camp and walked into the woods. Gently so far, but with thick drops and an uncommon humidity for these hours opposite the sun. He hiked up to the highway and then pushed back into the trees, keeping about forty feet from the road. All told, it was probably six miles of solid hiking to Anne McKinney’s, which would take at least two hours going through the brush. If he was at her home by dawn, that would be good enough.
What Josiah wanted out of this was only what was owed to him. There was a dollar figure to it, and he’d settle upon one eventually, but it started with answers. He was damn sure owed some answers, and he had a feeling-no, an assurance by now-that they weren’t the sort of answers got offered up in conversation. They were the sort of answers got offered up when you had a gun barrel to someone’s head.
He worked his tongue around his mouth and spat, that taste of tobacco growing. No cars passed on the dark, empty highway, and though the shotgun was awkward to carry, he was making good enough time, tramping along through the wet underbrush and working up a sweat. He’d spent years bitching about this place, promising himself he’d get out of the town someday and never look back. But out here in the woods, no other people around, no buildings or houses or hotels, he could appreciate what it had. It was beautiful land, really, rich and filled with strange gifts. It was the valley of his birth, the valley of his ancestors. Wouldn’t be so terrible if it ended up being the valley of his death, too. No, that wouldn’t be so bad at all.
The whole place was supposed to be coming alive again, was supposed to be on the threshold of a grand return. There were those who doubted it would happen, but the groundwork had been laid, and those hotels shone beside their casino, and through it all nobody remembered the Bradfords, nobody recalled that Campbell had been the man that made it work for years. Hell with Taggart and Ballard and Sinclair. Some men had visions, others had deeds.
“They forgot you, Campbell,” Josiah whispered as he ducked under a branch and came up into a wind-whipped burst of rain. “You loved this valley more than any of them. Still do.”
He should have felt strange to be talking to his dead ancestor, maybe, but he didn’t. Felt close to him, in fact, felt the meaning of blood kin in a way he never had before. They were shared people, he and Campbell. Different versions of the same blood. Now, that was heavy stuff.
“I’ll make ’em remember you,” he said. “Might have to burn this whole town down to do it, but I’ll make ’em remember you, and I’ll get what’s owed to us.”
That last notion-of burning the town to the ground in order to see Campbell get his due-lingered in his mind. He envisioned those damn hotels going up in the same way the private eye’s van had, a burst of white-to-orange heat, and he smiled. That would be fucking gorgeous. See the shining dome of the West Baden hotel exploding into a cloud of flame? Yes, that would be as sweet a sight as he’d ever happened across. Wouldn’t be as easy as blowing that van up had been, though. It would require a good bit more than a pocketknife and a cigarette lighter, would require time and high-grade explosives and…
He stopped walking. The wind had died momentarily but now it returned in an irritable gust, blowing a squall line of rain into his face. It hit hard, the water like pebbles on his flesh, but he didn’t so much as blink. Just stood there staring into the dark.
High-grade explosives.
He’d just walked a few miles away from an abandoned timber camp where a box of explosives sat, those strange sausage-looking dynamite strands. It was old stuff, probably not even potent enough to blow. Certainly not worth the walk back, because even if he had the shit, what in the hell was he going to do with it? The shotgun would be all the assistance he required. And yet…
It had been there for him. A box of dynamite, sitting in a barn that had stood empty for as long as he could remember. It felt almost planned, felt almost… promised.
All you got to do is listen, Josiah. All you got to do is listen to me.
Yes, that was a promise. Consistent as clockworks, that’s what Campbell had called himself, and who cared that he was a dead man-he was a stronger friend than Josiah had left among the living.
He wiped the rainwater from his face and turned his head and spat and looked up at the hill he’d just climbed down, a slow, painstaking climb. No way he could carry that box of explosives all the way to Anne McKinney’s house. Not if he had all day, and he didn’t. He’d have to take the truck, and that was one hell of a risk.
“That shit won’t even be good anymore,” he said. “No way it’s still good.”
And yet it was there. As if it had been waiting for him. And all he had to do was listen…
He was halfway back up the hill before the rain started again in earnest.
47
THERE WERE NO VISIONS.
Eric couldn’t believe it after the first hour-and half of the bottle-had passed, went back and drank the rest down, waited thirty minutes, and started on the second bottle.
Nothing.
The headache might have faded. Might have. It didn’t worsen, but didn’t disappear either, and his hands shook unless he held them clenched together. A tremor had taken hold in his left eyelid, too, made it hard to watch Claire, the damn thing fluttering constantly, twitching. This was not good.
He got back into bed as dawn rose, lay behind Claire’s tightly curled body and stroked her arms and smelled her hair. Her presence was comforting, but still the water’s lack of impact nagged at him. He could go for Anne’s water in a few hours. Maybe that would help. But he was no longer sure that it would, and he was sure that it wouldn’t be enough. Not after the way he’d gone through it tonight.