Incredibly, a foot grazed the bottom. I pushed up, saw sky, disbelieving. I was still yards from shore, but I’d touched bottom. I wanted to laugh, for the mercy of it. I screamed instead. From the cramps twisting deep into my legs.
I half dog-paddled, half-stumbled to the narrow ribbon of slick moss at the shore and crawled out on my belly. I collapsed face down on to the mud, shivering, sucking in the cool musk of the shore with ragged breaths.
And cursing. I swore at everyone I could think of. I cursed wedge-headed, cheese-worshipping, damned-fool inbred hunters. And their mothers. And the women who ran places like Loons’ Rest. And their broom-beating, bat-stomping offspring.
I cursed Arthur Lamm, who might simply have been off camping. I cursed the lead-headed Herman Canty, stoic Northwoodsman, for not telling me anything definitive.
But mostly, I cursed myself. I’d almost died, not from gunshot, but from drowning in stupid panic.
A branch hung low above my head. I reached up and pulled myself up to stand. My legs wobbled and then calmed under my weight. Breathing came easier. After a moment I dared to let go of the branch, and bent to retie my shoe laces, loosened and slimed by ten thousand years of decayed plants and fish.
I started into the trees. The damp rotting carpet of last year’s leaves muffled my footfalls as I pushed my legs to move quicker. My hunter might still be in the woods, about to spray a last few thousand rounds into the trees before heading home.
Even stumbling fast, whole swarms of stinging insects found me, chilled wet meat, pulsing with blood – a smorgasbord of lake muck and sweat served up in a thick residue of fear. I didn’t slow to learn if they were mosquitoes, flies or gnats. They all stung like they were on steroids. Everything liked to hunt up in those piney woods.
Sooner than I hoped, I caught a shimmer of bright yellow through a thinning in the trees. Leo’s Porsche, designed for the autobahn, hunkered low on the scraped clay of the fire lane, as out of place in those woods as I was. I dipped my hand into the pocket of my jeans, came out with the keys. Water dribbled from the little electronic remote. I ran up to the edge of the fire lane.
And stopped.
The sloped nose of the sleek German car was too close to the ground. The right front tire was flat. As was the rear tire. I backed deeper into the dark shelter of the woods and dropped behind a massive oak, to think, to understand.
Two tires, flat, immobilizing the Porsche.
Someone wanted me trapped, defenseless, in the woods.
THIRTY
My cell phone was in the glove box, and not worth the risk of a sprint to get it, even if it did work in that particular patch of woods. It wouldn’t do any good anyway; the Porsche would never make the crawl out of the woods on flat tires.
I needed to run – run through the trees, run up the fire lane to the road, to the town. But a small part of my brain knew to beg to be rational. A man of the woods, used to tracking running prey in dark places, would expect that. He’d be waiting.
I scrambled to my feet and ran the other way, down to the lake. Every whisper of the wind came cold like the breath of a mad man with a gun; every creak of a dry limb the snick of a sliding rifle bolt; every snap of a twig the first crack of sudden gunfire. I got to the water and ran along the shoreline until it broke to feed the river. The water was rushing too fast to cross there. Only one direction remained now.
I ran up the bank of the river, to the rocks below the rickety bridge, and crept up to the edge of the road. It seemed deserted in both directions, but that’s what he’d want me to think.
There was no choice. I pounded onto the rotting planks, my footfalls jouncing loud on the loose timbers. If my shooter was within a half a mile, he’d know exactly where I was.
I got across in an instant, ducked into the woods and got snagged by a barky vine lying like a snake beneath the blanket of rotting leaves. I crashed down hard. Then, pushing up, dazed, I started to run only to get tripped again. Up once more, my legs were now too weak. I could only stagger from tree to tree in a kind of palsied shimmy, dodging vines when I could, falling when I couldn’t. Sweat burned my eyes. Horseflies, bigger than I’d ever seen, bit at my cheeks and my neck. Sometimes I swatted at them, my hand coming away bloody. Mostly I just let them bite. I had no strength.
Somehow, I kept moving. An hour and a half later, I got to the used-to-be gas station across from the Dairy Queen.
Both service bay doors were open. A man wearing dark blue coveralls straightened up from the front bumper of a rusting green Chrysler minivan to eyeball the blood, dirt and bits of bark and leaf shreds that clung to my skin and wet clothes.
‘Jesus, mister,’ he said. He was young, in his early twenties.
‘I had an accident,’ I said.
‘I guessed that already,’ he said, grinning.
‘I’ve got a car with flat tires in one of the fire lanes off County M. I need you to go out and fix the tires.’
He cleared his throat. I would have too, if I’d been confronted with someone bloody and slimed head to toe with lake muck and compost. ‘Is the car in the water?’
‘No.’
‘Then how did you get so-?’
I took out my wallet, extracted the bills, damp and stuck together like a thin sheaf of steamed cabbage, and peeled off a fifty. I laid it on the van’s fender. ‘It’s real money, just wet.’
He looked at the limp bill, then back at me. ‘How many tires are punctured?’
‘I don’t know. I’d gone for a walk. When I came back to the car, at least two of the tires were flat.’ I peeled off another fifty, pasted it next to the first one. ‘Do you have a gun?’
‘I hunt,’ he said.
‘The second fifty is for you to bring it along.’
He looked at my clothes and then at the two fifties, and then he shrugged. A hundred was a hundred, no matter that it was offered by a crazy man demanding he bring along a gun. He unpeeled the two fifties, went into the office, and came back with a shotgun. We got into his dented, powder-blue tow truck.
‘You up here on vacation?’ he asked as we rumbled down the road.
‘I came to see Arthur Lamm.’
He laughed. ‘I guess everybody knows him, leastways his car. Drives a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Mercedes Benz.’
‘Seen him lately?’
He shook his head. ‘There’s a story going around that someone in Chicago reported him missing to the sheriff, but Herman Canty says that’s nuts, that Lamm’s just gone camping. On the other hand, that Mercedes has supposedly been sitting idle, collecting bird drops, out at Lamm’s camp for quite some time.’
‘Do you know Herman well?’
‘Nobody knows Herman well, except maybe Wanda at Loons’ Rest.’
‘Herman drives a nice new truck.’
‘Noticed that, huh?’ he asked, a wide grin on his face. ‘Herman ain’t never worked much, yet here he is, driving an expensive machine. Somebody must have died for him to afford a rig like that.’
He came to a full stop at the bridge on County M. Shifting into low, he eased the truck onto the timber planks like he was rolling it onto eggs. ‘One of those fifties is for risking this bridge,’ he said, as the loose old wood shuddered beneath us.
We got to the fire lane a couple of minutes later and bounced up to the Porsche.
‘I’ll be damned.’ The tow driver made a show of looking at me with new respect. ‘I’m sorry, mister; I didn’t figure you for a Porsche.’
I picked a fleck of leaf off my shirt and flicked it out the window. ‘Understandable,’ I said.
I stayed in the truck when he got out. He walked over to the driver’s side rear wheel and squatted down. Pulling out a pocket knife, he picked at something stuck to the side of the tire, then got up, and moved around the car, bending to flick at each tire with his knife.