“Without a transfusion, that would only do more damage. I don’t think it hit any organs.”
“Who thought to bring him here to a vet?”
Dr. Rosen said, “Ms. Loden.”
Kells looked at her, nodding, impressed. “So tell me about Grue.”
Where to start? She told him about Bert and, Rita, then about having seen someone in the trees at the country club. At the end she handed Kells the library flier.
He nodded, yawning. “This definitely complicates things.”
Rebecca stared. “Complicates things?”
“How accurate was your portrayal of him in the book?”
“I didn’t portray him. The character was based on Jasper Grue.”
“So you made him a little worse than he really was. But other than that, it was him. The thing about collecting last words?”
“That was him.”
“And his tracking abilities?”
“He bleached his coat and pants to blend in with the snow. The cons never saw him coming.”
“Bleach.” Kells nodded again. “That’s good, we should have thought of that. Never fired a gun?”
“Right.”
“Won’t use a sled.”
“Yes.”
“Stalking, rape.”
“Yes.”
“Okay. So he’s on foot, and by all accounts still hours away.”
“But he’ll get here. And if we move before that he’ll follow us again. He’s used to living off the land. That’s what made it so difficult for the FBI. Before his capture, he hadn’t slept with a roof over his head since age six. He could survive out there indefinitely.”
Kells yawned again. He pulled at some of the armrest strings, thinking. “Do you want my advice?”
“Yes — of course.”
“I would kill him.”
“Oh. I see, thanks. Knew you’d come up with something.”
“There are no restraining orders in Gilchrist, no police to call. He knows we’re armed so he’ll hang back awhile, because this is playtime for him. But you can’t just wait him out. You can’t hide and you can’t run away.”
“I was hoping you might help me.”
“Me? I’m waging a guerilla war here. Kind of have my plate full.”
She stared at him, unbelieving. “So what am I supposed to do?”
“What you need to do. Survival has a way of uniquely focusing the mind.”
That last sentence stuck Rebecca and she rolled it over and over in her head. “Survival...”
“ ‘Survival has a way of uniquely focusing the mind.’ I read your book. That line was one of the few truthful things in there. You have a mind for crime, but there’s distance in your fiction, a shallowness, a dishonesty. You’re better than that. Some of the things you wrote, the throwaways, the minor insights into the criminal mind. You’re intrigued by criminals and bad men, but you dress up this interest as entertainment. You’re hiding behind your prose.”
Here, finally, was the foreman of her existential jury. “Are you a killer or a book critic?” she said.
“I know you think it’s a mistake you’re here. Wrong place, wrong time. But there are no mistakes, only choices. Choices you’ve dreamed about in order to avoid actually making.”
Rebecca was too stunned to be offended. Did he have to do this in front of the others? “You think you know me because you read my book?”
“You took a criminal and dressed him up as a bogeyman for your fictional counterpart to slay. Now you’re stuck fighting your own ghost. He’s not interested in the rest of us except as impediments. You built him up, you’re going to have to tear him down again.”
Kells yawned again and settled deeper into the chair. “I have to check out for a few hours now,” he said. He turned to Tom Duggan. “The gas station, the one with the old-fashioned tanks. Is that the only one in town?”
Tom Duggan nodded. “Just the one,” he said.
“It’s outside the center of town. That makes it easy.” Kells crossed his arms snugly and put his head back. “Wake me at sundown. The three of us, the undertaker, the thriller writer, and the killer,” one last sideways glance at Rebecca before closing his eyes, “are going for a walk.”
Chapter 20
What she remembered most about their journey that night, three hours trekking on snowshoes through frozen backyards and deserted country roads, was the sound of the bird’s wings. In the windless snow-silence, Rebecca heard an eager flip flip flip as a woodpecker took flight, leaving one pine tree for another. The din of civilization had tricked her into believing that birds flew in silence.
It is a staple of science fiction that characters undergo “hyper-sleep” during space travel, their bodies working at a metabolic crawl in order to survive a voyage of thousands of light-years. That was how her mind was working now. Every hour spent in Gilchrist seemed to speed her farther away from her former existence, as though if she did not turn back soon, her home world would be forever lost.
The snow did not glow that night. The landscape stretched before them like deep space. She was soaked in blackness, as though imbued with invisibility. Kells was somewhere behind her, Tom Duggan a few steps in front. In the gloom it was like walking between two ghosts.
Only the eerie calm spared her total sensory deprivation. She concentrated on the sound of their snowshoe crampons chewing the snow crust.
Tom Duggan’s navigational skills impressed her. He went forward with determination, leading them out of the trees on the far side of a hill along a hump of snow that might have been a buried stone wall, joining what seemed to her an old logging road.
Snowshoeing had not come easily. Rebecca was just getting the hang of it when Tom Duggan stopped. She sensed him next to her, and they waited for Kells in the dark.
Kells’s bearpaws were undersized for his weight. He was huffing a bit, the outline of the shotgun barrel poking out of his backpack just visible. It occurred to her that he had not taken the smaller Uzi.
“Through these trees at the bottom,” whispered Tom Duggan.
Kells’s voice was disembodied, haunting. “Let’s go.”
A light shone faintly through the tree trunks. Kells led the way down the sloping wood until Rebecca made out the slowly rotating sign. IRVING, it read, between the top red half and bottom white half of a diamond. Below that: Quality Gasoline.
She saw a pair of old-fashioned pumps in front of a clapboard building, across a road scarred with sled tracks. It was almost a mystical scene, the snow falling around the lazy twirl of the illuminated sign. If ever a gas station could be described as being beautiful, this was it. Rebecca shrugged off her small pack and sat down behind a tree trunk to unstrap her snowshoes.
The only thing more miserable than shoeing through the snow was sitting in it. Light from the IRVING sign was spare, but it was the only torch in the night. The lonely gas station occupied one corner of a densely wooded intersection. A small house was just visible to the far right, shadowed and quiet. She made out more tread marks in the snow around the pumps, and a large, hand-lettered sign over the garage: No Car Foreign To Us. The building itself appeared abandoned, just like the rest of the town.
Perhaps “Enemy Fuel Supply and Storage Facilities” was at the top of me strategic objectives list in the standard CIA primer on civil insurrection. Rebecca had expected to be Kells’s lookout. Hanging back and observing was the perfect job for a writer. But when Kells donned his ski mask back on and started to move, both she and Tom Duggan followed. She did not want to be left behind.