A week went by. There was no news. Or no, there was constant news, but none of it verifiable or relevant. Adam had been spotted wearing a hoodie at Kentucky Fried, he’d stolen a car in Gualala, climbed through a window on North Harold Street in Fort Bragg and raided the refrigerator, pried open the newspaper machine and taken all the copies of the Advocate-News with his mug shot on the front cover. People had heard gunfire down by Glass Beach. Somebody found a wadded-up sleeping bag and two shell casings behind the utility shed in his backyard. A goat disappeared under mysterious circumstances. It was ridiculous. Community hysteria. And it devastated Carolee, who wasn’t able to sleep more than an hour or two a night and if she ate anything at all it was dry toast and coffee. He wasn’t much better himself. They had the TV on constantly and the radio too, the electronic voices in contention, one squawking from the living room, the other the kitchen. And while he refused to plug the phone back in, after that first night he and Carolee had their cellphones pinned to their ears, calling anybody they could think of who might be even remotely connected to what was going on out there in the woods. The chatter only seemed to make things worse, but it wasn’t the chatter that was killing them. It was the waiting.
Then one evening, past dark, when the reporters had given up and packed it in for the day, Rob pulled into the driveway in an unmarked car and just sat there a minute, as if gathering himself, then eased out the door and started up the walk. Sten had the door open by the time he reached it. Rob ducked his head, as if he were afraid of hitting it on the doorframe, but there was no danger there — he was a short man, short compared to Sten, anyway. “Mind if I come in for a minute?” he asked, and he wasn’t bringing good news, you could see that from the set of his mouth, and yet it wasn’t the worst either. Which meant that their son was still alive, still whole, still breathing.
Carolee was right there, her hands dropping helplessly to her sides. Her face was heavy, her shoulders slumped. There was no light in her eyes, nothing, just a sheenless dull glaze. What came into his head was that she looked as if she was drowning, but that was a cliché—no, she looked as if she’d already gone down. “Is it Adam?”
“Is there someplace we could sit for a minute?”
There was, of course there was, and in the next moment they were all three of them heading down the hall to the kitchen, to the oak table there, Carolee offering up everything she could think of — Coffee, did he want coffee? A sandwich? Cookies? She had some of those biscotti they made down at the bakery, or a drink, maybe he wanted a drink? — because the very request, Is there someplace we could sit for a minute, came hurtling at them with a force neither of them could bear.
Sten motioned to a chair and Rob pulled it out from under the table and sat heavily, Sten sliding into the chair beside him. “You know, on second thought”—Rob leaned back in the chair to call over his shoulder to Carolee, where she stood poised at the counter—“maybe a cup of coffee. If it’s not too much trouble.”
“So what’s the news?”
“I just wanted to ask — did Adam ever have any military training?”
“Military training? Are you kidding? He was never in the service. I told you, he’s unstable. And he’s been getting worse. Why do you ask?”
“Something happened out there today and I just can’t explain it—”
And now Carolee, who couldn’t hold it in any longer: “What do you mean — he’s all right, isn’t he? He isn’t hurt—?”
Rob just shook his head, then turned to look in her direction. “It’s not that. It’s just that I’m starting to have a bad feeling about all this — not to mention these goddamned news conferences and all the rest of the happy horseshit, because everybody, from the governor down, is putting pressure on me like you can’t believe. But today? We had SWAT teams out there from Sacramento and Fresno both — and more coming. Plus my men and the Alameda County Special Response Unit too. With dogs and helicopters and infrared. And these are professionals, believe me, and they’d just got here, the Alameda team, just staging out on this logging road near where the second crime scene is?”
The water Carolee had put on began to boil, a hiss and rattle of the pot on the stove, steam rising, but she ignored it.
“We made contact with him.” He held up a hand to forestall them. “He’s all right, for now. But I make no promises. Because what happened, to my mind, was beyond belief — or in my experience, anyway. He fired on them, Sten, actually opened up from cover. It was lucky nobody was hit. I mean, they were just standing around, getting their gear together, and suddenly they’re taking fire.”
Rob hadn’t been there, hadn’t witnessed it personally, but he’d talked to the men who had and he’d taken the report. Apparently Adam was moving around a lot — there’d been break-ins reported at some of the outlying cabins as well as at the Boy Scout camp and up and down the Skunk Line — and at two-thirty that afternoon he’d been coming up a trail that intersected the road where the staging area was. One of the team, who’d barely had a chance to climb out of his vehicle, spotted him coming toward them and shouted for him to halt and put down his weapon. Adam didn’t halt and he certainly didn’t put down his weapon. Instead, he ducked into the cover of the trees and started firing and that got the whole team down in the dirt and lighting the woods up because whether they were highly trained and disciplined or not, they found themselves taken by surprise and maybe they were spooked. At least initially. But they soon regrouped and established a defensive formation while the K-9 handler set the dog on his scent.
Once the firing stopped, their expectation was that the suspect would have fled at that point and that running him down should have been routine, taking into account the unfamiliar terrain, of course, and the fact that cellphones were useless out there and they had to rely on the more limited range of their radios. That wasn’t what happened. Adam outflanked them. And did it so quickly they were taken by surprise all over again, only now he was firing from their rear. Again, it was a miracle nobody was hurt. And when the firing subsided this time, the suspect did take off and the K-9 unit went after him.
Rob paused at this point. He had a cup of coffee before him now and he was staring down into it, slowly revolving the cup on its saucer. Sten found that he had a cup too, though he didn’t need it and it would just keep him awake. Carolee was standing beside him, leaning into him, all her weight concentrated in one hip, and if he felt that weight as a burden, so be it. This was marriage. This was love. Two bound in one, in the flesh, for better, for worse. Rob looked up. “I don’t know if you realize how good these dogs are,” he said. “They always get their man, I mean, always. I’ve never seen them fail yet, except in the rare case where the suspect shoots the dog—”
Carolee let out a sharp breath. “Not Adam, no—”
He was shaking his head again, whether in wonder or disgust or some combination of the two, Sten couldn’t say. “If he’d fired his weapon, that would have put us onto his location, so he didn’t.” A pause. “He was too smart for that.”