He dropped the stuff back into the box and took a stumbling step backward. It was dynamite, a form of it, at least. He’d been around a construction site or two, had worked for about six months at a quarry up near Bedford, knew enough to understand that dynamite wasn’t made of red sticks with wicks at the end like in some cartoon. But he hadn’t seen a long, continuous tube like that either. And here he’d been, hammering away at the damn box with a crowbar…. Maybe you couldn’t set the shit off without a detonator, but that wasn’t an experiment he wanted to try.
He closed the lid carefully and stepped back from the box, wiping sweat from his face. Best not to smoke a cigarette in this place, that was for sure. He wondered how old the stuff was. Ten years? Fifteen? More? Probably wasn’t even usable at this point. There was a shelf life to explosives, and the way he recollected, it wasn’t long. Again, something he’d just as soon not find out in person, though.
He went back to the truck and dropped the crowbar into the bed and leaned on it with his forearms, looking around the dim, dank barn and feeling the sweat drip off his face and down his spine. He felt alone, as alone as he ever had in his whole life. Wanted to check in with Danny, see what the word was down in town, but he didn’t trust the cell phone anymore. Maybe the radio would give him a sense of the situation. He got in and turned the battery to life, having no desire to start the ignition with a boxful of old dynamite not fifteen feet behind him.
There was a partial expectation in his head of hearing an “all-points bulletin,” like something out of an old gangster movie, calling him armed and dangerous. Instead, he listened to fifteen minutes of shitty country music and never heard so much as a mention of the murder. He gave up then and waited until it was on the hour, when they always did a short news update, and tried again. This time they mentioned it, but said only that a man from Chicago had been killed in a van explosion in French Lick and that homicide was suspected.
It was stuffy as hell, even with the windows down, and the heat made him sluggish. After a while he felt his chin dip and his eyelids went weighted and his breathing slowed.
The shadow-streaked barn faded from view and darkness replaced it, and he prepared to ease gratefully into sleep. Just as he neared the threshold, though, something held him up. Some warning tingle deep in his brain. A vague sense of discomfort slid through him and shook loose the shrouds of sleep and he lifted his head and opened his eyes. Ahead of him the closed barn doors looked just as they had, but when he exhaled, his breath formed a white fog. It was pushing on ninety degrees in here, he had sweat dripping along his spine, but his breath fogged out like it was a February morning. What in the hell was that about?
He felt something at his shoulder then, turned to the right, and saw he was no longer alone in the truck.
The man in the bowler hat was beside him, wearing his rumpled dark suit and regarding Josiah with a tight- lipped smile.
“We’re getting there,” he said.
Josiah didn’t say a word. Couldn’t.
“We ain’t home yet,” the man said, “but we’re getting on to it, don’t you worry. Like I told you, there’s a piece of work to be done first. And you made a bargain to do it. Made an agreement.”
Josiah glanced down toward the door but didn’t go for the handle, knowing on some instinctive level that he couldn’t get out of this truck now and that it wouldn’t matter even if he did. He turned back to the man in the hat, whose face seemed to be coated with the same shimmer Josiah had noticed in the dust motes caught by the streaks of sunlight in the barn. Only the man’s eyes were dark.
“You don’t look grateful,” the man said. “You ought to be, boy. Didn’t have to be you that I selected for the task. Nothing requires it. I’m bound by no laws, bound by nothing your sorry mind can even comprehend. But I came back for you, didn’t I? Because you’re my own blood. All that’s left of it. This valley was mine once, and will be again. You’re the one who’s going to see to it. Time to start showing gratitude, because ain’t a man alive can help you now but me.”
The man turned from Josiah and gazed around the barn, shook his head and let out a long, low whistle.
“It’s a fix you got yourself in now, ain’t it? There’s a way out of it, though. All you got to do is listen, Josiah. All you got to do is listen to me. You can count on me, yes, you can. Ask anybody in this valley, they’ll tell you the same. They’ll tell you that you can count on Campbell. Consistent as clockworks, boy. That’s me.”
His head swiveled again, dark eyes locking on Josiah’s.
“You ready to listen?”
Wasn’t nothing Josiah could do but nod.
The rain had stopped but the clouds were still winning the bulk of a struggle with the sun, allowing the occasional insurgency but then stomping it out quick, when Eric left Anne McKinney’s house to go back to the hotel. She followed him out onto the porch and pressed the bottle of Pluto Water into his hand.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Of course. Doesn’t take much brains to see you need it bad. But it isn’t going to work forever. So…”
“I’ve got to figure something out before you run out of bottles. Because then there’s none of it left.”
“Sure there is,” she said. “Hotel’s got it coming in through pipes.”
“What? I thought they stopped making the stuff decades ago.”
“Stopped
“You can still take a mineral bath?”
She nodded. “One hundred percent pure Pluto Water.”
“Maybe I’ll sneak some gallon jugs in there, fill them up, and go the hell home. Pardon my language.”
“Son,” she said, “I was having your sort of week, I’d be saying a lot worse.”
“You saved me today,” he said.
“Held it off. You ain’t saved yet.”
That was true enough. He thanked her again and went to the car, felt the water soak instantly into his jeans when he sat. The seat and dashboard were drenched, but his cell phone, dropped onto the passenger seat and forgotten, was dry. He picked it up and saw nine missed calls, ignored them all, and called Alyssa Bradford. Got no answer. Hung up and dialed again, and then a third time, and this time she picked up on the first ring.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was hushed, and he was so surprised that she’d actually answered that for a moment he said nothing.
“Sorry,” he got out at last. “You’re sorry. Do you understand that I’ve spent my day with police because a man is
“I don’t know anything about that,” she said, and now it was clear that she was whispering intentionally. Someone was probably in the room with her or nearby, and she didn’t want this conversation to be overheard. “Listen, I can’t talk to you. But I’m sorry, and I don’t know what to say except that you should leave that place —”
“Why did you hire me?”
“What?”
“You didn’t send me down here to make a happy little memory film, damn it. The bottle was part of it, but I want to know what you really were hoping to find out.”
“I was tired of the secrets.” She hissed it.
“What does that mean? What secrets?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. Not to you. Just—”
“Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter to me! I’m the one down here dealing with murders, not to mention the effects of that fucking water! Someone from your family knows the truth, and you need to find it out. I don’t care if you have to go into that hospital and electroshock your father-in-law back into coherence, I want to know—”
“My father-in-law is dead.”
He stopped. Said, “What?”
“This morning, Eric. About four hours ago. He’s dead, and I need to be with my family. I don’t know what else to tell you. I’m sorry about everything, but let it go. Leave that place and get rid of that bottle and good luck.”
