But the dog had contacted him, that was for sure, because the dog came back with his backpack, or a backpack. Which contained Hershey’s Kisses, a whole sixteen-ounce bag of them, a bottle of gin, ammunition for a.22 rifle (strange, because the recovered casings from the initial firefight were from the Norinco), and half a dozen packages of freeze-dried entrées — the imported ones, from Switzerland, that weren’t exactly cheap. They’d sent the backpack to the lab for DNA testing, but really, there wasn’t much point since it was ninety-nine percent certain it was Adam’s. The SWAT team officer had seen him, positive ID, engaged him, and how he’d ever managed to get away from the K-9 unit was just a mystery.
Sten heard himself say, “What if I went out there?”
“You can’t do that. Too risky.”
“What if I, I don’t know, went up the train tracks with a bullhorn or something, and called him to give himself up? Or the train. What if I took the train up there and just kept calling all the way up and back again — it’s better than nothing. I’ll tell you, sitting here is killing me. And Carolee too.”
Carolee had an arm round his shoulder, bracing herself, and he felt her grip tighten now. “I could go too,” she said. “He’d listen to me, I mean, more than—”
“Me? You mean more than me?” He could feel the anger coming up in him, anger at her, anger at Rob, but most of all at Adam, Adam with his thrusts and parries and the way he hid behind his debility, pulled it down like a screen to excuse anything, and so what if he was the principal’s son? Was it really all that much of a burden? They’d tried to send him to another school, any school he wanted, but he wouldn’t go, wouldn’t behave or act normal or even try, wouldn’t do anything anybody wanted except to please himself. “Because I’m shit for a father, right, is that what you mean? Because he hates me?”
“You’d have to wear body armor,” Rob said, giving him a long cool look. “I wouldn’t let you go out there without it.”
Carolee pushed the hair away from her face and leaned in over the table, looking from him to Rob, her eyes fierce. “I’m going too.”
“I can’t allow that,” Rob said.
“Can’t allow it?”
“Too dangerous.”
But she wouldn’t have it. She stood there glaring at the sheriff, the cords of her throat drawn tight. “I can’t believe you,” she said, her voice rising till it broke. “You think my son would ever dream of hurting me? His own mother?”
32
ON THE MORNING THE sheriff finally called to give his permission, Sten was still in bed. A long stripe of bleached-out sunlight painted the wall over the night table, where the clock radio showed half past ten. Carolee was nowhere to be seen, gone, he remembered, down to Calpurnia to work at the game reserve, Just to get out of the house because I swear I’m going to start screaming any minute now. He’d taken a sleeping pill in the middle of the night after something had awakened him — a random noise, a scurrying in the dark — and he’d lain there for what seemed like hours till he got up, made his way to the bathroom and swallowed an Ambien, dry, and then staggered back to bed. When his cellphone weaned him into consciousness, he didn’t at first know where he was, his head fogged with the residue of his dreams, dreams that bucked and shifted and left his muscles kinked with anxiety till he felt as if he’d been crawling through a series of decreasingly narrow tubes all night long.
He was going to ignore the phone — he was trying to ignore it, two weeks more having dragged by since Rob had stopped by the house to quiz him on the subject of Adam’s military background, the police presence in the hills inflated till there was a virtual army out there and still no news, no hope, no reason to do anything but lie flat out on your back like one of the living dead — but those two sharp bleats, followed by a pause and another pair of bleats and then another, were too much for him. He pushed the talk button and heard the sheriff’s voice coming at him, a morning voice, caffeinated and urgent.
“Sten?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit, I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“No, I just — you know how it is.” And now all his fears came to squat on his chest like a flock of carrion birds with their long naked claws. “What’s the news? Tell me quick.”
“No news. Nothing. Zip. No contact. But what I’m calling about is I think it’s a good idea you going out there and see what you can do. We’ve arranged it with the railroad people.”
The railroad people. Sure. Of course they’d be involved. Why not? They wanted this thing over with as much as anybody because they’d been shut down now since Adam started in — and that meant no income, no tourists being hauled up the hill by the hundreds and paying forty-nine bucks apiece for the privilege, which in turn meant that everybody who owned a motel or a restaurant or even a gas station was hurting too. The irony of it. But it was beyond irony — it was like some black-hearted joke the universe was playing on him. If before he couldn’t step in the door of a restaurant or coffee shop for fear of some total stranger sending over martinis or picking up his tab, now he didn’t dare show his face because of Adam, because of what Adam had done to Carey Bachman and Art Tolleson and what he was doing, single-handedly, to the local economy. The forests were closed, off-limits. And if the forests were closed, what was the attraction for the tourists — or anybody else, for that matter? Take Back Our Forests. Right. Take them back from Adam.
“Can you be ready today? For the afternoon run? That’s at three-thirty?”
He said, “Yeah, I guess,” but it came out as an airless rasp and he had to repeat himself.
“We’re going to hook you up with a bullhorn, just like you wanted, because frankly we’re all getting kind of desperate here. But you’ll wear protection, I insist on that. And we’re going to have a select group of agents on the train, a few females too, so it looks like the tourists are out again because we don’t want to make the suspect — Adam, I mean — suspicious.”
What could he say? The words were wadded in his throat. He needed water, needed breakfast, needed an aspirin. “So if he comes to me, you’ll take him? Is that it? Is that the plan?”
“Listen, I don’t want to risk any lives out there, and yes, that would be the ideal solution.”
“If I can get him to come.”
“Yeah, if.”
“And get him to put his gun down.”
“It’s a big if. But I tell you, at this point I’m willing to try anything.”
There was a silence.
“And if he won’t put it down, assuming he even comes to the sound of my voice?”
A sigh. The squawk of a radio in the background. “I wouldn’t want to speculate.”
The railroad was strictly a tourist thing now, though originally it had been used for bringing logs down to the mill at Fort Bragg, now defunct, like everything else, and he hadn’t been on it more than three or four times in his life. The Skunk Train. With its cartoon skunk logo that made everything seem so innocuous and appealing, though the nickname had come about because the train had originally burned crude oil for heat in the passenger car and that left a sour odor hanging over the tracks. Half-day trips took you to Northspur from the coast or down from Willits up above. And you could see and document the redwoods without having to exert any more effort than it took to set down your wine glass and lift a camera off the seat. For his part, when he wanted to see redwoods, he used his legs. And what he smelled out there wasn’t crude oil or diesel or even woodsmoke from the old steam engine they sometimes ran but just what nature offered up. Not that he was critical. Or complaining. Every town needed an industry, and now that the mills were gone, this was the next best thing. Let the tourists go gaga over the big trees, let them grow fat and fatter. It was fine with him.