There were a lot of caves in this part of the state. I'd assisted in two manhunts over here right after leaving the FBI. An escaped killer had been able to hide out in a cave for more than a month. He'd been caught through his own stupidity. He just couldn't resist firing at a deputy sheriff who was getting too close. He must have studied the Watergate manual on how to conduct successful burglaries.
A mother raccoon and one of her babies watched me from a branch above. For me, they're the nobility of the forest, combining as they do intelligence, cleanliness, inventiveness, and the occasional tendency to the comic pratfall. Jim Carrey has nothing on these folks. I wanted to stop and look up at her. But this wasn't the time for it.
In all likelihood, the shooter had fled. Then again, since we knew nothing about him, maybe he had a reason to wait for me in the woods. Unarmed, uncertain of the geography, I'd be easy prey.
I had an instinctive sense of the general direction where the bullets had been fired from. I wondered if I'd gotten myself lost. Then I started seeing the clear, cleated impressions on the damp path.
The shooter made it easy for me. Near a small clearing, I saw a pine tree that heavy hiking boots had chafed. Whoever had shot at us had climbed up several feet on the lightly branched tree. The tree was next to the path. The angle gave him a good, almost direct shot at the asylum. The boot wound on the pine was damp and fresh.
The prints showed three rows of deep V-shaped rubber cleats on the soles. Whoever it was had left a clear impression. I'd never seen this particular formation before. I doubted it was common.
I spent ten minutes rooting around in and off the path looking for shell casings. A rifle had been used. A bolt action, the shooter could easily keep track of the casings. A semi-automatic, they'd kick out and be difficult to find. I worked deeper off-trail, scattering a number of animals in the undergrowth, foliage and shrubbery rattling frantically in their wake.
I reached down through years of rotted vegetation. Sort of like reaching into a corpse. The undergrowth held an amazing number of pop bottles and Twinkie wrappers and exploded firecrackers. There were even a few mud-streaked photos from some of the more downscale men's magazines. Apparently, the male forest animals had a great interest in the siliconed ladies of the human species.
I gave up. The gods never allotted you two pieces of luck in the same day. I was starting back toward the path when it glinted, winking, in a stray angle of sunlight. There was just one of them but that was all a lucky man needed.
It was bottleneck shaped and the same chamber as the M1 bullets used in WWII, 30.06. I wasn't an expert, but I'd seen enough Ruger 77 shell casings to recognize it with no trouble.
I dropped it in my pocket. Then I pushed the hell out of my luck by looking for another piece of evidence. Maybe he'd dropped his wallet. Or maybe he'd even left me a note: I DEEPLY REGRET FIRING AT YOU PEOPLE. HERE'S MY ADDRESS AND PHONE NUMBER.
A few minutes later, the gods no doubt chiding me for my foolish luck-pushing, I walked back to my car.
THREE
"Of course Robert needs to tell the local police," Laura said on the way back to town.
"I just want to go back to Chicago," Tandy said from the backseat. "I just want to forget this whole thing."
"Sweetie," Laura said, "may I remind you that sweeps are less than five weeks away in most of our major markets and that if we don't get back up to our old share, they're going to put us out on the street?"
"You don't take it as a bad omen?" Tandy said. "Somebody shooting at us?"
"Omens I leave to you," Laura said. "My job is to see that we get renewed for next season. Because if we don't, there goes the three-book hard/soft deal Lloyd is trying to set up for us at Random House. And that means there'll be no book to tour with when we go to England next summer. And if we don't do well in England, we can just forget about the rest of Europe."
"God, I don't know how it ever got so screwed up."
"What got so screwed up, hon?" Laura said.
"You know," Tandy said, sounding eleven or twelve, "everything."
Laura had been tilting her face to the backseat. She turned frontward now. Her jaw muscles tensed. She stared at the countryside.
The town was coming in view. Three structures were tall enough to rise above the rest of the town: a silver water tower with BRENNER painted in black on the side, and two church steeples, one with the traditional cross on the tip, the other with a simple, yearning spire.
To the east you could see a giant shopping center of some kind. "What's that?" I said.
"Factory outlet," Laura said. "Eighty stores. Gucci. Neiman Marcus. Ralph Lauren."
"Out here in the boonies?"
"People come from all over the state. It's open twenty-four hours. You should see that place on weekends. You wouldn't believe it."
"What happened to the town?"
"Antiques," Tandy said from the backseat. "I've never seen so many antique stores in a small town before." She seemed happy, as if her sisterly spat hadn't happened. I'd been right to change the subject away from the shooting.
"That's all that they had left," Laura said. "The factory outlet wiped out all the merchants, so everybody converted to antiques and boutiques. There's even a head shop; you know, like in my mom's hippie days. The chamber of commerce type who showed us around said that they're actually making more money than ever."
Then came the town itself. The fall trees, burning fires of yellow and russet and red leaves, painted the flame-blue sky and lent a watercolor perfection to the small frame houses on the edge of the town limits. The houses got bigger the closer we got to town. I'd checked up on Brenner last night. It had come into being shortly after the Civil War, when returning soldiers had formed a co-op of sorts to store, process, and ship grains. The trouble was, the towns along the Mississippi had not only trains but steamboats for their cargo. Brenner never had the growth and expansion opportunities of the river cities.
The houses got bigger as we neared the downtown area, Victorians and colonials and even a vast, marbled Italianate-style house that looked like something Busby Berkeley and George Lucas had designed during a long session of drinking cheap liquor. This was no doubt the area where the local gentry lived. Ancient servants' quarters could be seen on a few of the estates.
Downtown was three blocks running north-south. Most of the businesses were housed in two-story buildings with dates chipped somewhere into their fronts. For some reason 1903 had been a big year; three of the buildings bore that date. Video Village was housed in a store that had been built at the turn of the century and had probably had a hundred different tenants in that time. How could you have explained to a person of the early 1900s that someday you could buy these little cassettes, you see, and take them home and play them on your TV set? He'd be just as baffled as I would be if a man from 2098 tried to explain to me some of his time's inventions. The library was an Andrew Carnegie, a tiny redbrick Grecian-style structure on a busy street corner. The date 1911 was above the door. It would be quiet inside, and a dusty reverence would have settled lightly upon all the books. Maybe even upon the people themselves.
I was about to say something about a time warp when our part of the century came rushing to brash, plastic, fat-sodden life. Pizza Hut, Burger King, McDonald's, and Arby's lent the local air dash, splash, and trash. Lunchtime cars filled the various parking lots and drive-up windows.