With Child

'Yes? Well, I'm sorry Lee can't see you.'

'Jon would love it even more. Get out of here, Al. I need to go.'

'Watch your, back, Martinelli,' he said, and surprised them both by reaching out an arm to embrace her shoulders briefly. In a moment, he was standing on the roadside, watching her drive away, before he turned and got into the back of the governmental car that followed her for a while before turning off to join the rest of the watchers on the low hillock three miles south of the cabin where Jules Cameron was being kept by the man who would be her father.

Kate decided that sweaty hands and heart palpitations were not unsuited to the role she was supposed to be playing, so she might as well not try to hide them. She pulled up in a tentative manner in the dirt space in front of the cabin and sat for a moment, studying the two sleek Doberman pinschers who stood inside their high-wire cage that adjoined the house. They were studying her in turn through the wide spaces of the wire, their heads down, their jaws shut in concentration, their eyes hungry, as she opened her door and cautiously got out of the car. Nothing moved, including the dogs, although she knew that Kimbal and Jules had been inside as recently as when she'd dropped Al, or the FBI men following her would have let her know. Besides, his pickup truck was still there, parked under the bare tree that in the summer would shade a part of the dog run.

She walked around the back of the car, keeping it between her and the dogs, and walked up the two worn wooden steps to knock at the screen door. She stepped back down onto the packed earth, turned her back on the door, and waited.

Tense as she was, she didn't hear the inner door open until the man spoke.

'Yeah?'

Kate spun around, laughing nervously at the shadowy figure behind the screen. His right hand was on the door, his left hand resting on the jamb at shoulder level. She squinted up at him.

'You startled me,' she said, with just the slightest drawl in her voice, and tittered again.

'What do you want?' he said.

'Well, I'm lost, I think. At least none of the roads much resemble the directions I was given, and haven't for some time now. I wonder if you might tell me where I am.'

She felt his eyes on her, and wondered where Jules was. 'Where d'you want to be?' he asked.

'A place called Two-Bar Road? Here, let me get my map. I'll show you.' She went to the car, aware of his suspicious gaze burning her, a gaze echoed by the two animals off to her right. She opened the passenger door, took out a crumpled and completely unfolded Oregon road map, and carried it back to the house.

He had not moved. He did not move when she stood on the lower step and fumbled with the awkward sheet, balling it up rather than folding it to the place.

'See, I was here, and - here's the place. It's just a driveway, but they call it Two-Bar Road. It's there where the circle is - see? D'you mind if I open the door so you can see it? That's better. So, can you tell me where I am now?'

No sign of Jules, not even in the slice of tidy room she could see when he allowed the door to open just enough to bring his right shoulder out and point to a place on the map with his index finger while his left hand stayed glued to the inside door jamb - with a gun, she speculated, nestled up against the wood trim and held tightly in place? Kate fancied she could smell gun oil.

'You're right here,' he said, his ringer in the blank space forty miles from the imaginary Two-Bar Road.

'Am I really? Oh no. And it'll be dark by the time I get there. How on earth did I get way over here? Oh well. Let me just make sure I have it right. I don't suppose you have a pen? No, don't bother,' she drawled, although he had made no move toward stepping inside his house. 'I'm sure I have one in the car.' She went back to the passenger side of the car, rummaged about in the fake leather handbag, and came back with a cheap ballpoint pen. One of the dogs was smelling the air for her scent, its muzzle protruding from the cage up to its eyebrows. 'Those are certainly powerful-looking dogs you've got there,' she said to their owner. No response, and Kate was torn between the building fury that nothing whatsoever was happening and the need to maintain her line of helpless chatter.

'Let me just mark this down here. Now where was it?' Where the fuck is Jules, you bastard? she thought. 'Okay, I've got it. So I go back to here and then turn left; that should get me there.' God, this is her father; she's got his hands, and they have the same eyebrows. 'I don't suppose I could use your telephone, just to call and let them know I'm coming?' She knew that he had no telephone, but it was, after all, the sort of thing a lost woman would ask.

'I don't have a phone.'

'You don't? Well, I guess it's quite a ways from nowhere. Yours was the first place I saw for miles.' Surely she's heard me, Kate thought in desperation. She has to be here, and the cabin is too small for her to be out of earshot. I'm going to have to leave; he's not going to let me in. She wavered, then decided to try just one last nudge. 'Just one more thing, then, and I'll let you get on with your evening. I wonder if I could be really intrusive and ask if I could use your bathroom? If I have to go another hour on these roads, I'll just burst.' At least I know you have indoor plumbing, you bastard. I don't have to worry about being pointed to an outhouse.

He studied her, looked over her shoulder at the beat-up car, and then took his right hand off the door and stepped to his left. Taking a deep breath, and mightily tempted to elbow him in the gut as she went past, regulations be damned, she went up the two steps and walked past him into the house, into a room with a threadbare braided rug on the worn linoleum floor, mismatched sofa and chairs in front of an oil-drum woodstove, and the arsenal of a survivalist on racks on the walls. She had just time to notice an open book, a spiral notepad, and a pen on the Formica kitchen table when her body froze at the sound of a shotgun shell being jacked into place.

'Turn around,' he said. She did so, slowly.

'What are you doing?' she demanded in outrage and fear, neither of which were feigned, not with the barrels of a shotgun two feet from her chest.

'A woman like you would rather pee her pants than come into a lonesome house with a strange man. Who sent you?' Shit, it wasn't just Jani who gave Jules her brains, thought Kate wildly.

'Marsh?' a tentative voice said from behind Kate.

Kate jerked, and then with her hands well out from her sides, she swiveled her head to look at the inner door.

Jules was wearing grubby, overly large jeans and a plaid shirt that had to belong to Kimbal. On her feet were the boots they had bought in Berkeley, one of them with string in place of the original laces. Her haircut had grown out and had a hacked-off appearance. A wide bruise darkened her left cheekbone, and her eyes looked at Kate without recognition.

'Go back to your room, Julie.'

'But Marsh, I just wondered —'

'Julie,' he said in a voice like a quiet whip crack, 'I said go.'

The child looked out from under her lank bangs at her father, and at Kate, then stepped back into the room and shut the door quietly. Kate turned her head back to the man with the shotgun.

'Is that what you wanted to see?' he demanded. 'That's my daughter. She's mine, and if that bitch of a mother of hers sent you to fetch her back, that's just hard luck for you. Out.'

For a moment, Kate felt weak with relief: He was going to let her drive away, thinking her an informal envoy, and no great damage would have been done. However, halfway to the car he said, 'Stop right there. Hold out your left hand.'

She knew the sound of the rattling metal even before the handcuffs hit her wrist. The sharp jab of the shotgun barrel against her spine kept her from moving, but she broke out in a sweat, oozing fear, and it was all she could do to keep a whimper from finding its way up her throat.

'Other one,' he ordered, and when she did not move, he barked, 'I'll shoot you down right here if I have to.'

He won't, she tried to tell herself. There's no reason for him to do more than drive me off his land in some humiliating manner. Besides, I do have backup; a dozen men are watching through their scopes from that small hill off in the distance. Just keep him calm, and delay. If Jules has the sense to go out the back window, they'll see her and move up quickly. Just take it slowly…

She bent forward so he could have her right hand, and felt the metal cuff slip around it. Kimbal took the gun