of the taillights: easy enough to keep in sight.
Highway 99 came up ahead. He led me across the overpass, then onto the southbound entrance ramp. He drove in the fast lane; I stayed in the slow lane at a distance of a couple of hundred yards. But wherever he was going, he wasn’t in any particular hurry. His speed hovered between sixty and sixty-five.
We traveled down the freeway about ten miles. Then an exit sign loomed ahead-Highway 104, Jackson-and when he put on his directional signal and started off onto the ramp, I realized suddenly where he was going. Knew it in that instant the way you know or intuit certain things, with a sense of utter inevitability. Knew it with a feeling too dark, too full of bitter irony to be elation but close to elation just the same because it was fitting, it was a kind of cosmic justice. I could not have picked a better night to catch up with him or asked for a better place to have it all end.
Highway 104 leads to the central Mother Lode, connecting with Highway 49 just north of Jackson. And there could only be one possible reason for him to drive up to the Sierras alone at this time of night.
He was going to the cabin at Deer Run.
The Last Day
Traffic was sparse on 104-nothing much along most of it except flattish farmland and the Rancho Seco nuclear power plant-so I let the distance between Brit and me widen until the Mercury was out of sight ahead. No percentage in my hanging close to him now; headlights in his rear-view mirror might alert him to the possibility that he was being followed. And I wanted him to get to the cabin well ahead of me, to have time to skulk around outside, let himself in through one of the bedroom windows, find out I had escaped, and think about the implications of that before I walked in on him. Fifteen minutes’ head start, at least. That way I would ensure that the last act of our little two-man drama took place inside the cabin.
I drove at a steady fifty, and by the time I covered the twenty-five miles to the Highway 49 junction, he must have picked up ten of those fifteen minutes. Traffic on 49 was just as sparse but I held my speed down along there too. Jackson, Mokelumne Hill, San Andreas-little gold country towns that teemed with tourists in the summer, that were deserted clusters of old wood and brick and false-front buildings at this hour of a March night. No,
The sky was clean and moonlit up here, too, the air cold but without the sharp wintry bite of last week. There had not been any snowfall since I’d left; in fact the weather must have stayed warm and dry. Once I got up past the snowline, the road was not only clear but in places the windrows along it had melted completely. There were dark patches and furrows in the open meadows where the snowpack had thawed and water had begun to run off.
It was fifteen miles to Deer Run this way. In all that distance I saw no sign of Brit, encountered no other car traveling in either direction. Here and there I saw lights from cabins built on ridges or down in hollows or back among trees, passed through a little cluster of lights that marked the tiny hamlet of Mountain Ranch; but mostly I drove through black and moonstruck white, alone in the night, not thinking much now because there was no longer any need to think. Transition, that was all this was. Dead time-the long empty minutes before the condemned man and his executioner come together.
But there was one thing I should have thought about; I realized that when I reached Deer Run. The place had an eerie look at this hour of the morning, everything still and empty. The only lights anywhere were nightlights inside Mary Alice’s general store. The through road and the ones that branched off it were all clear, shiny in the moonlight like bands of black silk loosely arranged among the hill folds. As with the terrain below, what had been mostly unbroken snowfields just last Sunday now showed ragged black at the edges, as if with some encroaching fungus, and spotted black in low places that could be reached by both the wind and the sun.
It was the roads that made me think of the access lane to the cabin. Last week it had been choked with snow. What was it like now? And how would Brit travel it-on foot or in his car?
I made the turn onto Indian Hill Road, braked, cut the headlights but not the engine. If the access road was still packed with snow, and he wanted to go up by car, he would have to stop and put chains on the rear tires; and if he wanted to go up by foot he would have to use snowshoes. Even if the snowpack had thawed enough so that the road was passable without either chains or snowshoes, traversing it would be slow work. So no matter how he did it, it would take time-probably more time than I had allowed him so far. If I could help it I did not want him to see me coming before he got to the cabin.
I made myself sit there, fidgeting, for ten minutes. I had intended to take a full fifteen but the stress was getting to me again, bunching muscles, putting the twitch back in my hands. Without even making a conscious choice I put the transmission in gear and flicked on the headlights and went on up Indian Hill Road.
Its surface stayed clear and dry all the way up. There was evidence of thaw on the access lanes to other cabins in the area, including the one to the Carder A-frame. All the visible cabins I passed were dark; the only illumination came from the Toyota’s headlamps probing the road ahead, the moon glinting off stretches of open snow.
When I climbed to where the tree-clad hillside walled the road on my right I slowed to twenty and rolled my window down for a better look at the snowfield that was opening up on the left. I saw the Mercury as soon as I came around the last bend below the access lane to the Lanier cabin. He had pulled it into the lane by ten feet or so and it sat there dark. If I had seen any sign of him on the road or anywhere else in the vicinity I would have driven on past and out of sight above-just a local resident coming home late-and then waited another few minutes before doubling back. But there was no sign of him.
I eased over behind the Mercury, stopped at an angle that blocked it off from Indian Hill Road. The thaw had had its effect here, too: Parts of the lane’s surface were visible and the skin of snow on the rest looked to be no more than eight to twelve inches deep. I could also see that he’d gone along it on foot, without snowshoes; in the moonshine his tracks in what was left of the snowpack were clearly outlined.
I shut off engine and headlamps, got out of the car. The wind made a thin, preternatural murmur as it blew across the meadow, but it carried no other sounds with it. I buttoned the bush jacket to my throat, slid my hands into the pockets and gripped the butt of the.22, and tramped ahead along the lane.
The footing was slick in places and I had to move at a retarded pace. But that was all right because he would have had to do the same thing. Twice on the climb to the top of the first hill I blundered into pockets of deeper snow, but I got out of them again without doing any damage to myself. The cold wind slapped at my ears and cheeks, numbed them a little; but it also braced me, kept me alert and in control for what lay ahead.
Near the crest I slogged over to one of the spruce trees and went up the rest of the way in its shadow, to keep from skylining myself in the moonlight. But I needn’t have bothered. I could see all the way to the cabin from there and Brit wasn’t in sight. His tracks went right up near it on the left, then vanished among the trees. He must be inside by now-but the cabin was still dark. Good. My timing had been just right. He hadn’t found out yet that I was gone. When he did he was certain to put the floor lamp on to investigate.
I moved downslope, hurrying as much as I could. I was halfway up to the cabin on the other side when the light went on; I could see the glow obliquely through the shutters on the front window, more clearly where it spilled out across the snow from the side window. I started to draw the.22, remembered how cold can numb bare fingers in a short space of time, stick the flesh to metal surfaces, and let it stay where it was.
Snow crunched under my boots as I moved up the last stretch of ground to the cabin, but the wind’s murmurings were loud enough to cover those sounds. The ground directly in front of the cabin door had been thawed and wind-scoured enough so that I didn’t have to walk on snow at all to get to it. I put my left hand on the latch and stood listening: the wind, little unidentifiable noises from inside, the pounding of blood in my ears. The door should be unlocked; I had left it that way and he wouldn’t have had any reason to lock it. I took the gun out, drew and held a breath. And opened the door and went on through in a shooter’s crouch, both arms out and both hands on the.22.
“Hello, Brit,” I said.
He was over near the shelves that contained the remaining few provisions. He whirled, froze with one hand up in an unintentional mockery of a greeting. But I couldn’t see him clearly enough yet to identify him. The lamp was in front and to one side of him so that his face was shadowed under the bill of his cap. Shadows crouched everywhere
