Tonk nodded dully He was fascinated by the lure embedded in his flesh. Britney and Raga seemed to be fascinated with it as well.
Sharply Britney turned. 'You said you were the game warden, right?'
Joe nodded. 'I read somewhere that there was a game warden present when the exploding cow was discovered a week ago,' she said. 'And that the place where the explosion happened is close to here.'
Raga was suddenly more interested in Joe than in Tonk's mishap.
'That was me,' Joe said. 'I was one of the first on the scene.'
The campsite seemed to have quieted, and Joe was being examined by all three campers with a different level of intensity than just a moment before.
'That's why we're here.' Raga declared. 'To find the place where they claim Stewie was murdered.'
It took Joe a moment to respond. 'Who says he was murdered?'
Raga displayed a self-satisfied smirk. He shook his head as if to say I'll never tell you.
'Did you find his body?' Tonk asked, forgetting his own injury for a moment.
'All we found were his shoes,' Joe said. 'There wasn't a body to find.'
'I fucking knew it,' Tonk said, stepping forward to stand abreast of Raga. He spoke with the loopy intensity patented by generations of the drugged and dispossessed: 'I fucking knew it, Raga!'
Joe stared back at Britney, who was performing surgery on him with her eyes.
'You found her body but you didn't find his, right?' she asked.
'The state investigator's report concluded that he had an accident with explosives,' Joe said. 'The sheriff agreed with that. Accident, not suicide. And definitely not murder.'
Raga laughed derisively 'Yeah, like President Kennedy's little 'accident'.' Tonk agreed by nodding his head vigorously
'Stewie Woods is not dead,' Britney Earthshare stated. Joe felt a chill crawl up his spine. Then: 'Stewie will never be dead. They can't kill a man like Stewie.'
Oh, Joe thought. That's what she meant.
'Just like they couldn't kill Kurt Cobain, or Martin Luther King, man,' Tonk chimed in.
'I understand,' Joe mumbled, not understanding. These three campers were not much younger than he was, but were so entirely different.
They asked for directions to the crater. Joe saw no reason not to give them. He pointed back toward the Hazelton Road, told them it was about six miles up, and where there was a turnout where they could park.
'I knew we were close,' Britney said to Raga, 'I could just feel it, how close we were.'
'That's why you're here?' Joe asked.
'Partly' Raga said. 'We're on our way to Toronto to an anti globalism rally Britney's speaking.'
She nodded.
Joe turned to go.
'The people who did this will be back,' Britney said quite clearly as he walked away He stopped, and looked over his shoulder. 'They can't kill Stewie Woods that easily' she sang.
***
JOE WAS BACK UP on his perch before he realized he had forgotten to ask Tonk to show him his fishing license. But he stayed in his truck.
Things were certainly more interesting since Stewie Woods had died in his mountains. Although the official investigation was already all but closed, and obituaries and tributes to Stewie had faded from the news, unofficial speculation continued unabated. That there was a strange, disconnected underground made up of people like Raga, Tonk, and Britney who now came to see the crater was disconcerting. They seemed to know something--or thought they knew something--that the public did not.
He hoped this had been an isolated incident. But he doubted it.
7
Bremerton, Washington
June 14
OUTSIDE A HUGE tree-shrouded home in a driving ram, the Old Man waited. Next to him, in the cab of the black Ford pickup, in the dark, was Charlie Tibbs.
The Old Man stole glances at Charlie, careful not to turn his head and stare directly at him. Charlie's face was barely discernible in the dark of the cab, lit only by the light from a distant fluorescent streetlight that threw a weak shaft through the waving branches of an evergreen tree. The rivulets of rainwater that ran down the windshield cast worm like shadows on Charlie, making his face look splotched and mottled.
They were here to kill someone named Hayden Powell, the owner of the house. But Powell had not yet come home. The Old Man and Charlie Tibbs had driven up the fern-shrouded driveway two hours before, just as the storm clouds had closed the lid on the sky above Puget Sound. They had backed their black pickup into a tangled thicket so that it couldn't be seen from the road unless someone was really looking for it. Then the rain had started. It was relentless. The rain came down so hard and the vegetation was so thick that the wide leaves, outstretched toward the sky like cartoon hands, jerked and undulated all around them as if the forest floor was dancing. The liquid drumbeat of the storm intimidated the Old Man into complete silence and made the atmosphere otherworldly
