CHAPTER 20
Midnight. This was the time he had agreed on with himself. The cautious part of him had argued that it would be better to wait until one or two in the morning, when absolutely nobody was awake, but he was too cold, too stiff, and too tired to wait any longer. The flashlight showed the hands of his watch coming together at the top of the dial. He stood up. It was time for action.
With this decision, his adrenalin started to flow faster. Gone was the cold. Gone was the tired feeling. It also stimulated his bladder, so he peed against a tree. As his pants became wet from flying spray, he discovered a cardinal rule of outdoor life: don’t piss into the wind. Now his pants were more soiled than they had been already.
He had been sitting in a grove of pine trees near their tent, staying away from the bears, getting up and moving from time to time to generate a little warmth in his body. During that period, no sound had come from the tent. They must be sleeping the sleep of the young and naive. Soon they would sleep forever.
A few cars had driven slowly past. Three had stopped and flashlights had been shone around the campsite from the cars-or maybe it was the same car each time. The trees surrounding Alfred blocked the light, keeping it from exposing him. He figured that a Park Service employee was checking to make sure Penny and Gary were all right. That meant people were looking for him. That was not good news.
Alfred swung his arms in circles to make sure they were operational. He lifted his feet and silently marched in place. He drew the hunting knife from its sheath under his jacket and practiced wielding it with his right hand. Holding the knife gave him a confidence he wouldn’t have felt without it. It was better than a gun, more reliable, as well as quieter and more efficient.
He had almost mastered the art of walking silently on the forest floor. His night vision, after several hours outdoors, helped him see the occasional pinecone that might make him stumble. He felt like an Indian guide, at one with the woods. He had never felt this way before. He padded toward the tent, his ears attuned to the slightest noise from within. There was none.
All the patrols in the world wouldn’t keep him from doing what he had to do. Or keep him from making his escape afterward. He was smarter than the police, smarter than Penny and Gary. In the future, when people put him down, he would have the secret satisfaction of knowing what he had done here tonight.
He could see well enough to avoid the rope that stretched from the top corner of the tent, diagonally down to where it was fastened to one of the stakes that held the tent in place. He went carefully past the stake to the tent and lowered himself to his knees. He would have to crawl through the opening in the triangular front of the tent.
The lack of space within was a blessing, because he wouldn’t have any trouble finding his prey. One thing he didn’t know was which one of them slept on the right and which one on the left. He should learn that information with the first stroke of the knife. He wanted to dispatch Gary first.
Alfred reached forward and touched the canvas material, feeling for the vertical zipper he knew was there from the time he had gone into their tent at Crater Lake. His fingers moved silently until he found the zipper handle. The zipper separated the two flaps of the front of the tent-forming two triangles within the larger triangle.
The zipper was zipped, of course, and so were the two horizontal zippers, one for each of the flaps. He paused, listening. All was quiet inside the tent. The noise of a zipper might wake them. He would have to work fast. It would take two hands to undo one zipper. He didn’t have time to undo both the vertical and horizontal zippers. He would undo the vertical zipper and then go in.
He carefully placed the knife on the ground where he could instantly locate it. He grasped the handle of the zipper with his right hand and held the tent material just below it with his left hand, to keep it from snagging as he unzipped it.
He took a deep but silent breath and yanked the zipper upward. It went halfway up and stuck. He quickly moved his left hand up, grasping the two flaps of the tent just below where the zipper was stuck. He yanked the zipper again with his right hand. This time it went almost to the top of the tent.
He didn’t have time to raise it any further. He grabbed the knife and parted the unzipped triangles of canvas with his arms by simulating a breaststroke. He hit a vertical tent post as he did so. He dove through the gap into the interior, knocking the post over and bringing the tent down on top of him. He landed on his left hand and tried to raise the knife with his right.
His knife hand hit the top of the tent, which now covered him like a blanket, making it difficult for him to wield the weapon. He made a few clumsy thrusts with it until he realized that something else was wrong. Gary and Penny hadn’t moved or made a sound. He couldn’t feel their bodies beneath him, and his knife wasn’t hitting anything but the sleeping bag, the tent floor, and the ground underneath.
It dawned on Alfred that they weren’t inside the tent. He stopped slashing and felt all over the sleeping bag. It was empty. He put down the knife, fumbled in his jacket pocket, and pulled out the flashlight. He had been going to use it to make sure they were dead. He turned it on now and shone it around the collapsed tent as well as he could. This only verified what he already knew.
“Why is that car sitting there by itself?” Penny pointed to a campsite with a car parked at the entrance. Even in the dark she could see that there were no other signs of camping activity on the site: no tent and nothing sitting on the picnic table. The car looked out of place.
Gary shone his flashlight at the car. “That’s a Ford Falcon.”
“A blue Ford Falcon. Is that the license plate of the car Alfred stole?” Her carefree feeling of a moment ago was replaced by a tightening of her gut.
Gary dug into his pocket and pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper. He shone the flashlight on the paper and read the information written there out loud. Then he shone the light on the license plate of the car. It was a Montana plate.
“It’s not the same.”
“Shine the light inside.”
They walked up to the car. Gary shone his flashlight through the window into the front seat. Penny saw several brochures and maps sitting on the seat, along with a bag of chips.
“What about the back?”
Gary shone the light through the back window. All she could see there was a hat, something like a cowboy hat.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” she said. “There’s no camping equipment in the car. In fact, there’s almost nothing in the car.”
“It does look suspicious.”
“I’m not going back to the tent.” The thought of being inside that cramped space in the dark, without knowing who was prowling around outside, engulfed her with a feeling of claustrophobia.
“But what can we do?”
“We’ve got to call Detective Landon.”
“It’s night. He won’t be working.”
“Somebody will be working. He said to call anytime.”
Penny looked pleadingly at Gary, but she couldn’t see his face very well. He was silent for a moment. She knew she’d never be able to sleep in the tent.
“There’s a phone booth at the campground office,” Gary said. “We can call from there.”
Penny clung to Gary’s hand as they walked toward the entrance to the campground. He wouldn’t let them be hurt. Her imagination magnified every sound they heard. When a bear crossed the road in front of them, she was grateful that it wasn’t something worse.
Gary made the collect call. Penny listened as he explained the situation to whomever was on duty. He talked for about five minutes. Before he hung up, he agreed several times with whatever the other person was
