“Feel like telling us?” I said.
“Wait’ll I get through cooking,” the counterman said. “You know? One thing at a fucking time.”
“Things are simpler in the country,” Hawk said to me.
I drank some coffee. Hawk and I had alternated driving and trying to sleep on the drive up. My eyes felt like there was sand under the lids.
The counterman had the eggs and ham and home fries on the plate just as the four-slice toaster popped. He brushed melted butter on the toast and served us breakfast. I took a bite. The home fries had been frying for a long time.
“Now what was it you wanted to know?”
“Russ Costigan,” I said. “We want to know how to get to his place.”
“Yeah, well, it’s easy enough. Biggest goddamned place in the mountains. Russ has got a bundle, you know? Good guy though. Acts just like folks. Just like folks, you know. No airs. Nothing fancy. Just comes in here buys his stuff and goes. Always got a pretty good story to tell, too, Russell.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Russ is a sketch, all right, and I’m dying to hear some good jokes. How do we get to his place?”
“Easy,” he said, and told us.
“Thank you,” I said. “Who thought of the nice fence idea outside?”
“The tires? Ain’t that something. The wife thought of it.”
“Dynamite,” Hawk said.
“When you see Russ,” the counterman said, “tell him it was me gave you directions.”
We finished breakfast and went out to the Volvo and headed up Route 410. Towering evergreen rain forest, bright air, streams splashing vigorously downhill.
Ah wilderness.
CHAPTER 17
THE ROAD TO THE LODGE WAS WHERE THE counterman had said it would be. A dirt road that curved up into the high evergreen forest without a sign of life. It was ten thirty on a warm fall morning. There was birdsong in the woods and the faint soft scent of Puget Sound easing in on a light breeze. I drove on past the road and parked a mile away.
“They ain’t going to buy Br’er Rabbit here,” Hawk said.
“I know.”
We got out of the car and stepped into the woods. The trees were so tall and dense at the top that the forest floor was relatively uncluttered and dark, with only modest undergrowth.
“We’ll go straight east,” I said. “Keep the sun in front of us. Then in maybe half an hour we’ll turn south, see if we can circle in around the lodge. If we miss it short we’ll cut the road.”
“We miss it long we walk to Oregon,” Hawk said.
The people at the lodge would expect us. But they didn’t know when to expect us. We had time. We could be patient. We could look carefully. Susan maybe wasn’t happy but she was probably safe. Put her one up on me. The ground beneath our feet was thick with the accumulated autumns of a century. The trees through which we moved reached straight up, bare-trunked and austere, until the branches thickened near the sunlight and spread out and interlaced. Sometimes we had to skirt a tree that had fallen, the barrel of the trunk maybe five feet in diameter, its branches broken by the fall, the root mass suspended and higher than my head. There were birds in the woods but no sign of anything else. At eleven o’clock we turned south, keeping the sun now to our left.
At twenty past eleven I smelled woodsmoke. I looked at Hawk. He nodded. We stopped, sniffing the air and listening. There was no human sound, only the bird sounds and the light wind moving in the woods.
“They waiting for us, they going to have people out in the area,” Hawk said softly.
I nodded. The smell of the smoke lingered. We began to move slowly and carefully through the woods. It was hard to locate the direction the smell came from, but it seemed vaguely ahead and right and we inched along in that direction. I had the automatic out, a shell up in the chamber, the hammer half cocked. Ahead and off to my right I saw a glint of sunlight reflected off something. I touched Hawk’s arm. He nodded and we moved toward it, putting each foot carefully down on the soft floor of the woods, walking very carefully, looking before each step, straining to listen and smell and see. Watching for people with guns, watching for sticks that would snap loudly if we stepped on them. Watching for electrified wire or television cameras.
Then below us, across an open area on the opposite wall of a small hollow, was the lodge. A huge chalet with a lot of glass and a high steep roof. There was a wide fieldstone chimney rising on the north end of the building and the smoke we had smelled had drifted from it. A balcony ran the length of the building across the second floor. The railing had fancy carved risers in it, and behind the balcony the wall was of glass sliding doors that faced southwest.
Hawk murmured beside me, “The hills alive with the sound of music, babe.”
In front of the lodge, on level ground on the floor of the draw, was a macadam drive with a turnaround circle. The drive was lined with a rustic fence and at intervals a streetlight that was made to seem a lantern. There was a red jeep with a white canvas top parked in the turn around beside a black jeep Wagoneer with fake wood side molding. The only movement was the woodsmoke curling up from the chimney.
“Homey,” I said.
“Y’all come,” Hawk said. “Walk on in and have some mulled cider by the fire.”
“No trouble expected.”
