'A few days in a jail cell won’t hurt me. I’ve done it before. But if these people are any of the things you think they are, then you can’t.' She paused for a moment, then said, 'Or any of the people you haven’t thought of yet.'
'What people?'
'I don’t know.'
'Why aren’t you saying it straight out? What is it?'
'Whoever it is wants you killed in jail before a trial. Doesn’t that have a familiar ring to it?'
He answered too quickly: 'No.'
'So you have thought of it.'
'I’ve thought of everything. I’ve heard those stories too, but not from anybody who would know. And not in St. Louis.'
'The contract on you is being circulated in prisons. Money doesn’t do a lifer much good. Other things do.'
'It’s not cops.'
'Nobody seems to be afraid that a prisoner who hears about it will take it to the authorities. It does make you wonder.'
He was irritated now. 'I wasn’t a dirty cop who knew things about other dirty cops. I did my job until the day I quit, and when I left, as far as I know, everybody else did his job too.' He simmered for a few minutes while she waited in silence. Then he said quietly, 'I’m sorry. I just... my life just kind of blew up. It’s taken a few days to get used to the idea that the last five years, when I was an accountant, were a waste. I was probably just being set up. I’m ready to give up everything I ever was, but I’m not ready to decide that everything I’ve ever done was worthless. Does that make sense?'
'Of course it does,' she said. She had gone as far as she could for the moment. Some of the rabbits took to it instantly because they had been hiding and ducking all of their lives. Some took longer.
As they drove along Ridge Road, the dense thickets of bright electric lights along the river faded and threw no illumination in front of them. Ridge Road had been laid out on the northern branch of the Waagwenneyu, the great central trail of the Iroquois that ran from the Hudson to the Niagara. The north branch had been placed just below Lake Ontario on the long, flat escarpment that was the prehistoric edge of the lake.
As she looked out into the darkness past the little pool of light that the headlamps threw, she could feel the Waagwenneyu under them, just below the pavement. In the dark, the road sliced through the middle of the property of some rich guy who thought of himself as a country gentleman. Her view was blocked by a dense second-growth of trees that the owner’s farmer ancestor must have left there to protect his crops from the wind. The thick trunks presented themselves one after the other and swept by, and the overarching branches fifty feet above nearly touched each other in the middle, and looking up at them put Jane a few inches lower, below the pavement on the Waagwenneyu. The path was mostly straight, winding here and there to avoid a thick tree or a muddy depression. It was narrow, only eighteen inches wide, but deep—sometimes worn a foot below the surface by hundreds of years of moccasins. This was the branch of the trail that took the Seneca from the Genesee valley and the Finger Lakes northwest into Canada. The other branch was now Main Street in Buffalo, and it ran to the shore of Lake Erie and continued along it into Ohio and beyond. Those were the paths to war.
In the direction they were traveling now, it was the trail home, to the soft, rolling country where the Seneca felt most safe. The world then was all tall forests that had never been cut, oak and maple and elm and hickory and hemlock and pine, alternating in stands and mixed together. Sometimes runners would move along this trail eastward to tell something urgent—alarms or councils. They ran day and night, naked except for a breech-cloth and belt, their war clubs stuck in the belt at the back and their bows strung across their chests. They always ran in pairs, one behind the other, silent, never speaking. They could cover a hundred miles a day, so the trip from Neahga, the mouth of the Niagara, to Albany, in the country of the Mohawk, took three days. In all that distance there was no point where the trail emerged from the forest. It was marked at intervals by hatchet gouges on the biggest trees, but the runners didn’t need to look. Sometimes they would glance up and to the left to navigate by the constellation of the loon, but most of the time they could feel the trail with the balls of their feet.
When the trees had thinned out again, Jane replaced them with ghost trees beyond the range of the headlights, so that what was beyond eyesight could be the great forest again, deep and thick and shadowy. The secret was that the forest was still here, the descendants standing tall in parks and groves and windbreaks. The Seneca were still here too, driving this road to jobs in Lockport or Niagara Falls, dreaming Seneca dreams.
There was a disturbance coming from outside her, a light that rushed up from behind and pushed the forest back on both sides, where she couldn’t feel it around her anymore. She sat up. 'How long has that car been behind us?' she asked.
'I don’t know,' said Felker. 'He just switched his brights on.'
'Think for a second,' she said. 'Was it there when we made the turn?' She knew the answer. It wouldn’t have been so dark if the other car had been behind them. It must be all right. They hadn’t been followed.
'I don’t think so,' he said.
The car came closer and closer, catching up quickly, but the driver didn’t dim his lights. Felker reached up and moved the rearview mirror to cut the glare of the rectangle of light that it threw across his eyes.
'There’s a long, straight stretch in a minute,' said Jane. 'When we get there, let him pass.'
'I’d be delighted.' He reached the section where the road straightened. On both sides were low, crooked fieldstone walls and houses built far back from the road, as houses had been when these were still farms. Felker slowed to forty, then thirty, but the car slowed too and stayed behind. Finally, he coasted off onto the shoulder and the car came up behind. When he had nearly stopped, the other car pulled to the left, its glaring headlights merging now with his to illuminate the slight decline ahead and then halfway up the compensating slope. The car slowly slid past and gained speed.
Jane stared at the back window while it was still in the beam of the headlights. There were four heads in it. That usually meant it was kids, probably farm kids who had spent the day in the city. Her eyes moved downward. It had New York plates, and that was a relief. But there was a license-plate holder around it with the name of a dealer.
'Does Star-Greendale mean anything to you?' she asked.
'Where did you see that?'
'People from around here buy their cars around here. I never heard of it.'
'St. Louis,' he said, frowning. 'Greendale is a town outside St. Louis. But it’s not Star, it’s Starleson Chevrolet.'
'Stop,' she said. 'Leave the lights on, but give me the keys. Somebody saw you get on the bus in St. Louis.'
She slipped out and closed the door, then ran to the trunk. She pulled everything out and tossed it into the back seat, then climbed over it. He watched her in the back seat as she opened the backpack. 'What are you doing?'
'The car has New York plates. They must have damaged them prying them off somebody else’s, so they left their holder on to cover it.' She was busy pushing shells into the long tubular magazine of the shotgun. 'They’re waiting for us up there somewhere. If we go back the way we came, we’re a half hour from anywhere crowded enough to lose them.'
He checked the load of his pistol and then snapped the cylinder back into place. 'There’s a box of ammo in my suitcase,' he said. 'I’d like to have that where I can reach it before we go ahead.'
'We’re not going ahead. We’re not dogs, remember?'
'What, then?'
'Take the backpack. Put your money in it, or whatever else you think is worth saving. Don’t leave anything here that will tell who you are—I mean tell anybody, even the police. Wipe off everything you touched.'
'We’re going to walk?'
She didn’t answer, so he quickly did what she had told him to. The money wouldn’t all fit in the knapsack, so he put some of it in his pockets. Jane put her leather bag over her shoulder and held her shotgun in her right hand. 'Time to go,' she said, and walked across the road. She swung her legs over the stone fence and into the empty cornfield beside it, then stood still as he hurried to catch up.
'All right,' she said. 'Walk only on the trenches between the rows. That’s the way the farmers do it because
