“Okay, let’s go,” Russ said, closing the cell phone and returning it to its owner. “If we follow this stream, it’ll empty into a pasture just above the Stuyvesant Inn’s land. We’ll just need to follow the cow fence at that point. I’m thinking it’ll be maybe a half-hour walk. The hospital’s sending an ambulance to meet us there. Clare, let me take that for you.”
She shook her head. “The best way to do this, since we’ve got an extra man, is to rotate.”
“Okay, five minute’s rotation.” He glanced at the bankers, who quivered with suppressed excitement. “Fall in,” he said. “March!” Clare cast him a sidelong look, but the other three sprang to it like retrievers on the scent.
By the time Russ had taken his turn lugging the unconscious geologist and then rotated out again, they were clearing the woods and entering the upper pasture. They lifted Waxman bodily over the barbed-wire fence and struck off down the fence line, their path impeded by nothing more than the occasional large rock or cow patty. Within ten minutes, Russ spotted the inn’s mauve-and-turquoise exterior, and he realized he hadn’t properly appreciated that beautiful paint job before.
The group crossed over the fence a second time and headed across the rolling meadow toward the inn. He heard a chorus of high-pitched, frantic barks as they approached, and he thought he might get down and kiss every one of those mop head–size dogs. And when Stephen Obrowski and Ron Handler appeared at the back door, waving and hallooing, it felt as good as seeing his own men greeting him from the squad room at the station house.
They lugged Waxman around to the front of the inn, where Karl and Annie, two of the regular Millers Kill EMS team, were waiting to drive him to the Glens Falls Hospital.
“What’n the blue blazes happened to him?” Karl asked while Annie checked his vitals.
“He fell off a cliff,” Clare said.
“Then he crashed in a helicopter,” Russ added.
“Sounds like a bad comedy sketch,” the ambulance driver said. “You sure a marching band and a steamroller didn’t go over him, too?”
Standing beneath the shade of the big maple, watching them pull away with Waxman, Russ was still shaking his head. “I can’t believe that guy has survived to this point,” he said to Clare. “Maybe there is something to this God thing of yours after all.”
Up on the porch, the paintball–playing bankers were regaling Obrowski and Handler with the exciting tale of their adventures. The younger man was ushering them in through the double doors. “Chief, come on in,” Obrowski said. “It’s too hot to stay outside. We’ve got fresh lemonade.”
Russ shook his head. “I’ve got a squad car coming for me,” he said. “I’d better wait for it here.”
“Reverend Fergusson?”
“I think I’ll stay out here with the chief. You’d just have to burn any furniture I sit on anyway.” She plucked at her clothes. “I would surely appreciate some of that lemonade, though.”
“Coming right up.”
She plodded up the porch steps and collapsed into one of the wicker chairs. Russ followed her, dropping the backpack to the floor before sitting down. Beyond the shady maples and the thin gray road, the valley rolled away in pastures and cornfields and distant farms, a crazy-quilt landscape stitched by rocky outcroppings, steep rises, and stony brooks. The valley shimmered in the heat, oddly one-dimensional under the colorless sky, and for a moment Russ felt that he was in a dream, that the wicker furniture and the wooden floor and the far-off farms would disappear with a shake of his shoulder and he would be back in the green leaves, looking for death over every nameless, numbered hill.
Obrowski brought out lemonade, a whole pitcher of it, and two blue glasses stacked with ice. He arranged them with a flourish on a round teak table midway between their chairs. “Unbelievable,” he said, pouring their drinks. “Were you really flying the plane that went down, Reverend Fergusson?”
Clare accepted one of the glasses. “Helicopter,” she said. She had a look in her eyes that made Russ think maybe she, too, was uncertain how much of this was real.
“Those bankers of yours are quite something. I’ve never thought much of the paintball crowd that shows up on the weekends around here. I remember once when Bill Ingraham went with his business partner. He told me it was the most pointless exercise he had ever undertaken in his life, and that included his draft-induction physical.” He laughed. Russ took his glass from Obrowski and drained it so fast, all he was aware of was the slide of the cold and tart-tasting liquid over his tongue.
Obrowski looked at Russ, then at Clare, then back at Russ. “I’ll leave you two to catch your breath, then, shall I?”
The screen door banged behind him and they were alone. He poured himself another glass of lemonade and drank it more slowly. Thinking about the whole incident with the helicopter made his stomach ache, and thinking about the whole thing with Clare made the rest of him ache. So he propped his feet on the backpack, looked at the slightly unreal scenery, and thought about Waxman. Waxman taking Peggy to the gorge and hitting her up for money. Threatening her, fighting with her, a lucky push or punch—lucky, because she wasn’t a big woman and Waxman must outweigh her by quite a few pounds—and he goes over the edge.
With his backpack.
Christ.
“Clare,” he said.
“Hmm?”
“Waxman’s backpack was down in the ravine with him.”
“Yeah, you told me.”
He took his feet off the pack and bent forward. This was the reason his subconscious mind had ragged at him to keep the thing with them, from the ravine, to their wild ride, to their headlong flight through the forest.
“Why would his backpack be in the ravine with him? If you’re extorting someone or fighting, would you be carrying your backpack?”
