“There aren’t any grizzlies up here,” she said, “only black bears that like berries a lot. They’re big bluffers, and would much rather eat your garbage than you.”
“You know they can get to six hundred pounds?”
“Are you trying to scare me or comfort me? Anyway, until you mentioned them, I wasn’t worrying about bears.”
“I know.”
They wolfed protein bars. “The question is, should we head down to Spooner Lake, even though it’s dark?” Paul asked.
“I’ve been thinking. I just could swear I saw something in Connie’s eyes,” Nina said. “Just there at the end. Remember when she was talking about how Danny thought nobody cared if he lived or died and she said she did?”
“I remember.”
“She said, ‘Go ahead, track him down.’ I think she wants us to find him,” Nina said. “All that other information was to convince herself she wasn’t giving him away.” She got up, stiff-legged, and put her pack on her back. “I think she knows he’s here.”
“I think he couldn’t have brought these kids so far up,” Paul said. “We should try Spooner Lake.”
“No, Paul, he’s here!”
In the moonless night, she could just make out his shrug. “Up we go,” he said.
Danny closed the flaps down on the kids’ tent and tied it shut. Considering the number of pills he had ground up in their chocolate, they wouldn’t bother him until noon.
He felt like a ghost, cold, lifeless.
He went over to the pitiful fire and began tossing wood on it, all the rest of the wood he had taken from his mother, and made his own personal bonfire. After he got it burning big enough, and had drunk his fill of it with his eyes, he found the tape recorder. He pulled out a cell phone and dialed up Jolene and George.
George answered.
“I got someone here wants to talk to her grandma,” Danny said, enjoying the cry he heard on the other end. The phone clattered, and Jolene spoke next. “Danny? Where is she, Danny?”
He played the tape. Jolene started crying right after hearing the word
“Now put George back on the phone,” he said. Damn the woman. She couldn’t hear him through the wailing. He repeated himself, louder this time, and she let go of the phone.
“It’s me,” George said.
Danny put his face closer to the fire. “I got such a big fire going, George. Wish you could be here to experience it with me. But you don’t like hanging with losers, do you?”
“I’m sorry I said that, son. Now you-”
“Callie’s okay. She wants to go home, but that’s up to you.”
“Don’t hurt her,” George said. “We’ve talked. We’ll pay you the full amount. Twenty thousand. Just bring the kids back safe. Or leave them somewhere so we can come get them.”
“I’m going to need more money.”
Silence from George.
“I asked for the twenty. But you all thought, he set the fire, how’s he gonna collect? You forced me into all this mess.”
“It was just-you kept on setting fires-”
“So?”
“I-I won’t argue with you. I’m just waiting to hear how much.”
“An extra fifty grand.”
A pause, then George said, “Okay. On top of the twenty.”
“Get it,” Danny said. “Cash, unmarked, nothing over a fifty. I’ll call you in the morning about where all to leave the money and where to find the kids. This whole thing could be over by one o’clock tomorrow. It’s up to you.”
“Son, tell us where you are.”
“I’m not your son.” Danny punched End and looked around, paranoid again. The wind was rising, so the licks of fire flared out and blew sideways.
“It’s just possible,” Paul said, pushing a branch back for Nina, “that he’s dumb enough to build a fire.” They stumbled through brush that in the daytime would have been daunting, but at night was nearly impossible. Wind had blown in intermittent bursts for the past hour, so the pines shook and whipped above them, and dry leaves rained down. They reached the top of a rise, but had to march around for quite a while before they could see any distance through the thick black forest.
“No fires,” Paul said, disappointed.
“Keep looking,” Nina said. She did not let herself think about what the children might be feeling in the darkness of this night, because she knew knowledge of their fear would paralyze her.
She took Paul’s arm and pointed upward. She reckoned they had climbed to over nine thousand feet and still hadn’t hit treeline. “There!” she whispered.
He peered. “I can make out rocks… white…”
“Smoke,” Nina said. “It’s a pretty big fire. And the wind is coming up again.”
He watched for a long minute. “Controlled, Nina. At the moment. Let’s go.”
They began traversing along a steep slope to the left, toward a wooded gully where two hills came together, keeping well below the white plume. They were bushwhacking and it was hard to be quiet as they made their way across the talus slope. When they finally edged into the gully they found a swift meltwater stream and a gentle slope leading up.
They were on a huge ridge of mountains that flanked Lake Tahoe, looking down at the flat forests of Incline along the shore and out upon endless, distant, shining water. They moved even more cautiously now, until they judged they were within earshot. Then they slowed to a crawl.
“What do we do if it’s them?” she whispered in Paul’s ear.
“The minute we see them,” Paul said, “we get the cops up here. We are not going to mess with this guy, Nina.” She nodded.
The gully flattened into a saddle cleft by the spring. They slowed even more as they approached what appeared to be a campsite, bordered at the back by huge boulders of fallen rock. They heard a voice-Danny Cervantes.
“I never liked you either, Darryl,” Danny was saying into a mobile phone. He looked like John Walker Lindh fresh out of Afghanistan, hair out of its customary ponytail, clothes dirty and disheveled, lit by flames that played over his skin like dancing demons. They had to move in close to hear him say, “Oh, they’re sleeping good tonight, Darryl. I drugged them. You know I’m no doctor, though, I had to guess how much would keep them out of my hair for the rest of the night.” He then spent a few minutes assuring an apparently frantic Darryl that he was “ninety-nine percent sure” they were still alive before shutting the phone.
To their surprise, after hanging up, Danny left the campsite, heading directly around a nearby bend.
“Where’d he go?” Nina whispered.
“My guess is, he wants a bigger fire.”
Nina ran over to the campsite and tried to open the tent flaps, but they were tied shut. “Callie!” she hissed. “Mikey, are you there?”
Paul was by her side. He helped her fumble with the tent ties, and they both called to the kids.
“Rip them off!” Nina said, tearing at them. She was trying to locate her penknife, when they heard a sound in the woods.
Within two seconds, Paul had hold of her, had run her out of the camp area and back into the dark forest.
He looked back toward the clearing. They could hear Danny now, but they couldn’t see him. Taking her by the arm, Paul walked her quietly farther from the campsite, although they could still see it, and could hear Danny, who was apparently gathering more dead wood, judging by the sticks and branches that flew roughly toward the fire.
Paul called Crockett. He ran down the situation and their location as well as he could, then shut his phone. “He patched me through to the local police. It will take them a while, Nina. It’s a good thirty minutes up from Incline Village if they go slow along the back road, and there’s no other easy way in. They don’t want to scare him off, or scare him into doing anything to the kids. They’ll have to go slow, like we did.”
Nina made a call to the poison center and was told exactly what she thought they would tell her about the Ambien-get the kids to throw up and get them to a hospital. Now.
“I’m going back there.”
A log as thick as a lamppost flew into the camp.
“Nina.” Paul took her in his arms. “Listen to me. You’ll put everyone in danger.”
“They may be dying! I’m not afraid of him.”
“Be patient, Nina. We’ll watch over them until the police arrive.”
“You don’t understand!” she said. “You…”
“Don’t have kids?”
She could feel his eyes on her, beams from his soul shooting through the dark.
“You think I’m making the wrong decision because I can’t appreciate how serious the situation is? You think I don’t care because I don’t have kids of my own?” His voice had leveled to flatness.
Heart pounding, breath coming in bursts, Nina shook her head. “No, of course not. Paul, I’m sorry…”
They waited for some time. Nina leaned against Paul and took comfort from him. She checked her watch frequently.
No sound came from the campsite.
Then they heard a crash as Danny broke through some bushes by the tent, bottle of whiskey in one hand, and a can of kerosene in the other. He had obviously already made headway on the bottle, because he was humming.
Nina and Paul crouched down. Paul had his gun out, Nina noted, and felt relieved at the sight. At least no more overt harm could come to the kids while they were watching.
“This is good,” Paul said in her ear. “Maybe he’ll pass out.”
But as the minutes ticked by, Danny got drunker, and seemed not at all inclined to doze off. At one point he stumbled directly toward them, stopping at the first line of bushes, and let loose a gurgling flow of vomit. After that, he seemed livelier than ever, collecting more wood to keep the bonfire going, keeping it big, and keeping it under control. Nina thought a forest fire was not in his plan for the evening, and was thankful.
The sheriff’s officers did not come, and did not come.
Danny’s happy song turned into muttered cursing. His face, scratched and lined by firelight, drooped as his mood shifted. He peed into bushes. He drank some more.
He picked up the can of kerosene. At first, he contented himself with splashing a few drops toward the fire. It blazed up. Once he made a small fire next to it, and stomped it out.
“He could kill himself doing that,” Paul whispered, his face grim. “That can could explode in his hand. Damn, he’s so close to the tent.”
She heard indecision in his voice. She, too, couldn’t decide whether to rush him now-the dangerous can of fuel he was wandering around with could burn the tent-but a moment later, Danny,
