hair that coiled in a tiny trickle of blood on Ida’s cheek.
The trickle stopped. Seeped. Stopped.
Slowly, her powerful heart failed, fought, failed, fought.
Until.
63
Unseen in heavy fog, Danny drifted north, up the deserted lanes of U.S. 35. Cooler now, he took the long view.
A difficult task. Ruthless necessity. Like a killing in war-time. Tying off the loose end. She had to go. Living privileges revoked. Air stopped. Lights off. Her magnificent snatch and her cockeyed face stuffed in a hole in the ground like any other dead animal.
His thoughts swelled until he blundered on Profundity.
Like slavery and killing the Indians, her death was the regret-table, but necessary, price of admission to the American Dream.
The thrill propelled him miles and miles up the foggy empty road. Time elongated. Contracted. Stood still.
South of Duluth, he stopped at a Holiday to gas up. He saw a display of kids’ plastic sleds, marked down. Bought one. Might need it to pull the suitcase out of the woods, if the snow was bad. He also bought a flashlight and a thermos.
Duct tape, to wrap the canvas bags.
On impulse he got a half dozen jelly donuts. Filled the thermos with black coffee.
Back on the road, he gobbled the pastry, licking jam and sugar off his fingers. Driving the ghostly highway was THE BIG LAW/367
retracing his journey with Caren Angland. A pilgrimage.
Watch it. Don’t flirt with being caught.
The profilers counted on that. Gloating in the crime. Why Ed Kemper had frequented the Jury Box bar and hung out with cops. He was dangerously close to the profile, baiting Broker.
Had to watch that. “Control that,” he said out loud because, as the miles rolled beneath his tires and he drew closer to Cook County, he could feel the urge to settle it.
Creep into his house. Scamper around in the dark like the Manson disciples. Press the pistol against his sleeping head.
Surprise ending for
A night like this. One shot, then disappear into the fog.
He softened the hard thoughts. Self-dramatic. Spare the child-no-pardon the child. Noblesse oblige. Hey. He wasn’t a monster.
But then her eyes would still be there. Bugging him at night.
Have to think about that.
Focused, he drove past the red and orange blur of the Black Bear Casino sign without so much as a nod. God.
Where’d all this fog come from? Duluth was out there, someplace. Superior.
The distance narrowed to Cook County. Discipline was important now. He removed the nondescript pocket calendar card from his wallet on which he’d carefully copied the directions to the money stash from one of his old business cards.
When he was in the Orientation Center.
Flashed on Ida, sprawled, a broken doll among the vegetables. Shook it off. Never could have changed his life this much, this fast, without shooting through the keyhole of opportunity Keith and Caren Angland presented.
He’d still be going into debt playing the quarter slots at Mystic Lake. Be Ida’s latest goddamn rehabilitation project.
Ida. Past tense. Concentrate. The mileage and the map.
He literally had to navigate by them because his vision was so limited.
The road he wanted was represented on the map as a black and white checked line. A secondary gravel road. The number in a square marked it as local as opposed to county. Number 4. Just past Lutsen.
Then he had to turn 3.7 miles up that road and turn right onto the property of Keith Angland’s father.
Tension pounded a wedge of pain between his shoulder blades. He had to force himself to stop clenching his latex-gloved hands on the wheel. In the last forty-five minutes he had not encountered a single car. Only his low beams, pushing at the thick fog.
He barely saw the road sign for Lutsen. No hint of what lay off the road to either side. Solid cotton batting, opaque, white.
In first gear now, driving this slow, he was begging for a rear end accident. Some tanked-up Jack Pine Savage speeding.
And then, his road sign blurred in the mist. Number 4 on it. Danny stopped. Had to get out of the car and walk across the road to see the turnoff. He returned to the Accord and edged forward a few yards to make his turn.
A wet red shadow blinkered the mist. He jumped and then laughed out loud. Out of habit, he’d hit the turn signal.
Take it easy.
Carefully, he drove the road, his eyes constantly dropping to check the speedometer. He passed three miles and began counting off the tenths. Six rolled up and then seven. He stopped and got out again to scout on foot.
A chain. A chain. Linking two trees. In December, with no snow, there had been a rutted path filled with orange pine needles. Not much snow down on 61, but up here, in the woods, there was plenty of snow. The trees looked like faint black girders joining the white mist to the white snow.
He’d backtracked less than fifty yards when he saw the ragged horizontal line draped between two trees. Remembered the small yellow metal sign hanging in the middle.
PRIVATE.
Feeling in the snow for the key. Tin box under the rock, by the roots of the tree. He laughed again. It was turning into a night of hidden keys.
He stopped his searching. Peered into the solid wall of white. The obvious. Ida’s city car couldn’t make it through even this wilting snow.
And with no tracks to go by he could go off the path. Get stuck. Better to use the plastic sled, walk in. It meant leaving the Accord on the road. Had to risk it.
He returned to the car, backed up and parked. He pulled the sled from the backseat and exchanged his tennis shoes for the new Sorels. Took off the leather coat, put on his sweater, pulled the coat back on, a hat, gloves.
Hauling the flimsy sled, sweeping his flashlight before him, he set off through the drifts. No way the Accord would have made it through this. Couldn’t get lost, just follow his tracks back out. A hundred yards into the pines, he had his bearings. The shanty, the birch tree. The place was still engraved on his memory.
He figured his direction and set off into the pine thickets.
At first he couldn’t find the cistern in the snow. So he walked a circle and crisscrossed it until he hit the mound, knocked through the surface snow and found the tangle of rusty tin debris.
Calmly, taking pride in the way his muscles warmed to the work, he removed the layer of junk, and soon the black plastic peeked through the snow.
He brushed it off, shoved, pulled, yanked, and lifted it out with his new muscles. No work at all, with the sled.
Almost wanted to run; that’s how greased he was with the physical high, coming off of Ida.
