The Big Dirt Nap

soon.

The light was fading but I had a picture of the spot on my phone and Lucy had given me a description of what she could see from the cabin; I tried to match it up with what I saw from my perch on the side of the dirt road. She told me the lake was on her right.

'That's west,' I said.

'Is it? Oh yeah, setting sun.' Clearly she hadn't been a Girl Scout. Neither had I for that matter—west was the Henry Hudson Parkway and east was the FDR, what else did you need to know in Manhattan?

'I've got it!' she said. When Lucy rented the car, YoDrive had provided her with a TomTom, a portable global positioning system. Since no New Yorker leaves anything of any value in her car, she had automatically taken it with her. She rummaged through her bag to get the Tom.

'Great! What does it say?'

She waited for a satellite signal. Finally the screen lit up. 'It says I'm screwed. I'm at the corner of nowhere and battery low,' she said, frustrated. 'I'm a speck. What's the point of this thing? You have to know where you are to know where you are.'

I told her to minimize the screen to see as much of the surrounding area as possible. She was somewhere west of 95, which was not much help since so was most of the United States.

'Plug in Titans as a destination,' I said. If she'd used it on the drive up it would have been her last address on the TomTom. She groaned.

'I didn't use it. The clerk at YoDrive said all I had to do was take 95, so that's what I did.'

'It's near Academy Road. Start with that.'

Titans's exact address was on my Jeep's system and I ran to get it before the power drained on Lucy's Tom. We waited until her handheld unit processed the information. She was eleven miles from Titans, but the TomTom was having a rough time choosing a route selection since there weren't any established roads through the reservation.

'Keep at it,' I said, 'and call me back if something comes up. Wait a minute, give me your longitude and latitude. Maybe I can figure out how to use that to find you.'

'How do I do that?'

I told her to hit browse map but it was too late. The TomTom ran out of power.

'Lucy, is there electricity in that cabin?'

'No.'

'Well, light some candles and make a fire. And save your cell power. Turn it back on in one hour. I'll call you to let you know where I am.' Assuming I knew.

Before I risked losing my cell signal, I made one more call.

'Paradise Diner.'

Babe and company were gearing up for the dinner crowd, not as busy as breakfast or lunch, but busy enough so that Babe didn't answer the phone herself.

'She's with some customers. Want me to get her?' Alba, the budding rock singer/waitress, took a message. I could hear her making change at the register, and she read the message back to me with no reaction at all to its contents: Lucy missing, searching Quepochas reservation, just in case you never see me again. Paula.

'Okay, so, like, is that it?'

'That's it.'

Thirty-one

A former colleague once dragged me to a foreign film called The Wages of Fear, starring Yves Montand, a French hottie from the fifties. The movie was about a couple of guys who were so broke they agreed to drive a truck filled with nitroglycerin across the proverbial hundred miles of bad road. Most of the film showed a nervous, white-knuckled driver and a wild-eyed passenger stopping and starting the car while they navigated the treacherous road.

All I needed was the passenger.

Farther on from the spot where I'd spoken to Lucy, the road had fewer switchbacks, but other than that, it was really only good for mountain goats or Dall sheep. The kind you see in National Geographic magazines and wonder how the hell it is they don't fall off the side of a craggy bluff. Luckily the Jeep is the automotive equivalent of a mountain goat. All of those car commercials that are so obviously Photoshopped to show cars at the tops of arches and hoodoos in Colorado or Utah actually have some basis in reality.

As long as I kept to a snail's pace, I made progress. The road had to have been at a forty-five-degree angle in some spots and even more in others with only intermittent stretches where I could kick butt and drive a whopping eight or ten miles an hour.

Even with my brights on I could only see about twenty feet ahead of the car. Without another vehicle in front of me as a frame of reference, the road seemed to get narrower, at times seeming just inches wider than the Jeep. Branches scraped both sides of the car. I pulled left to avoid them on the right and a stubby shrub reached in and left a long scratch on my cheek, scaring the hell out of me. Then I overcompensated and hugged the mountain so closely on the next turn that I smacked in the passenger-side window. The sound startled me and I stopped to survey the damage. To the car and to my face.

I slid out of the car, clinging first to the door, then the hood. In the headlights I saw hundreds or maybe thousands of gnats or midges, so dense they looked like mist rising from the ground. I brushed them from my arms and flicked them away from my face and hair. I inched around to the passenger side and saw the mirror hanging by a shred of plastic. I tried to snap it off, but one thick plastic-coated wire wouldn't give up the ghost. I held the mirror and looked at my distorted reflection. There was a long pink line on my face that was puffing up but no blood. I convinced myself the image was magnified and the scratch wasn't really as long as it appeared.

The bugs were getting to me so I hustled back to the driver's side of the car, stumbling on a few loose rocks. I remembered reading somewhere that small rocks gouged out of a road or hiking trail were frequently evidence of bears looking for food. Oh, good. Another thing to worry about. I climbed back into the driver's seat, and continued creeping uphill for almost another hour.

The mountain flattened out a bit after the next two sets of switchbacks and I had my fingers crossed that I could get past them before the sun went down completely. I unconsciously leaned in with every turn as if that would make a serious aerodynamic difference inside a two-ton vehicle. I was so intent on reaching the mesa I forgot my promise to call Lucy and didn't do it until reaching the relative safety of a clearing just short of the top.

Until I stopped driving and got out of the car I hadn't realized how tightly I was gripping the steering wheel; when I released it the tension drained from my neck and shoulders.

Just to be on the safe side, I reached back into the car to put on the emergency brake; that's when I noticed the odometer read 24,507—I'd only gone six miles. I speed-dialed Lucy's number but there was no answer—she must have still had the phone turned off; I'd check back in fifteen or twenty minutes.

I hadn't eaten anything all day and was starting to feel it. I never kept food in the car, other than the occasional Zone bar, and I checked the storage box between the driver's and passenger's seats to see if I'd get lucky.

Bingo. Chocolate mint. Okay, it was a little hard, but it was better than nothing. I walked to the back of the car and opened the hatch. The case of bottled water I usually had stashed in the car was covered by the tarp and garden tools that had shifted in the course of my climb up the mountain. I moved the tarp, the pitchfork, and some hand tools and cracked open a bottle of water. I sat in the back dangling my legs and looking at the stars.

High on the mountain, I thought I saw a light. Hopefully it was Lucy in the Crawfords' cabin. Then I looked down at the long slow climb that I'd just made, and saw something else—two specks of light. Moving slowly, but definitely moving. Judging by how long it had taken me, it would take whoever it was at least an hour to get to me, so that gave me an hour to get to Lucy.

But I had a bigger problem. First there was the overpowering smell. It was a steaming pile of fresh scat.