with six rounds in it. There was a knife stuck in the belt at the small of his back. The coat was stuffed with jerky and crumbled biscuits. When she had taken them out, she felt a stiff spot in the lining, so she sliced it open with his knife and found a thick plastic packet full of money and identification cards.
Jane picked up her flashlight and searched the plateau carefully and methodically, beginning with the spot where she had first seen the man, then the hiding place where he had opened fire, then backtracking until she found the tracks where he had come up out of the valley, then simply walking back and forth to sweep the rocky, windblown expanse with her light.
When she returned, she found Pete waiting for her. They each took an ankle of the corpse and dragged it to the hillside. Pete had rolled some big stones aside and dug in the soft earth beneath them, filling his jacket with dirt, then dumping it out and filling it again. He had managed to dig about three feet down before he had hit bedrock. Jane helped Pete drag the body into the hole and push all of the dirt over it, then roll the big stones into place.
They walked back to the spot where they had left their packs, and Jane began to redistribute the gear. She put all of the money and most of the food in Pete’s pack with his pistol and his ammunition. Then she handed him the dead man’s map and compass. He said, “Why are you giving these to me?”
She turned on her flashlight and held it on the small pile of belongings the dead man had been carrying. “Besides the map and compass, he had identification, money, biscuits and jerky, bullets.”
“So?”
“Think about what he didn’t have. No tent, no bedroll, no pack, not even a change of socks. No car keys. There’s somebody else, coming along the trail carrying the heavy stuff.”
“Then let’s get moving,” he said. “If they’re carrying all that stuff, it should be easy to keep ahead of them.”
She handed him his pack. She pointed north along the ridge. “Go as straight as you can, to the north. In an hour, maybe three at the most, you’ll be able to see a lake below you on the right. That’s Cameron Lake. It’s in Canada, and at the end of it is a big, modern road.”
“But I can’t leave you out here alone, waiting for some killer.”
“You can’t do anything else,” she said. She put on her pack, stuck the killer’s .45 pistol in her jacket pocket. “I don’t work for you anymore. I quit. If you walk in that direction until dawn, you can be in Lethbridge by noon, and on a plane by dinner time. Head for Dallas. Rent a place like the one I told you about. If you use the papers in your pack, you’ll be safe.”
He held her shoulders. “Come with me,” he pleaded. The next words came out as though he thought they would be a surprise. “I love you.”
She bobbed up on her toes and kissed his cheek. “I love you, too. You’re my brother.” She slung the big sniper rifle over her shoulder, turned away, and began to walk.
Pete Hatcher stood and stared after her as long as he could, a tiny human form diminishing along the dark, rocky plateau. Twice he watched her drop onto a lower shelf where he could not see her, then reappear, climbing the next one. The third time, he did not see her again.
32
Lenny made his way along the trail with difficulty. It had been hard enough to walk ten miles a day carrying a hundred and fifty pounds of gear along a rough trail, but during the night a steady snow had begun to fall. The rocks and tree roots had acquired a thin glaze of ice and a covering of feathery snow that could turn an ordinary step into a broken leg. The path was getting harder to see, and in a few hours it would look just like the sparse pine forest around it. He stopped frequently to consult his compass and look for identifiable landmarks, but the snow whitened the air and hid the crests of the mountains like a fog. He was beginning to feel more and more uneasy.
At six in the morning he had calculated that if he kept to the trail, he would make it to the campsite at Goat Haunt by eight. Now it was after ten, and he was not sure he was even on the trail. The scraggly evergreen trees were beginning to look ghostly and unclear. A packing of white along one side of each trunk had made them begin to fade into the stillness of the landscape.
The fact that he had allowed himself to be put into this predicament was a source of amazement to him. He tried to follow the logic of events backward, but his mistake—his share in the blame for this disaster—could not be found in the recent past. It wasn’t anything he had done. It had only been his vulnerability to people like Earl.
A month after he had gotten out of the army, he had begun his long search for something to do that didn’t involve some guy who was no better than he was giving him orders. He had driven a cab for a while, but then a cop had pulled him over one night at the Burbank airport. The cop had said he didn’t have the right kind of driver’s license and then asked to see his cab permit, and then started writing tickets. There was the fine for the license, the fine for the business permit, and a ticket that said he couldn’t even ask for permission to get into the cab business unless he spent twelve hundred bucks repairing the cab. Lenny had not argued with him, because he was afraid the cop would search the cab and find the gun. Driving a cab at night in a big city was dangerous, and he had already needed to flash the little SIG Sauer P 239 to save the cash box on two occasions, but the cop wouldn’t have cared.
Lenny had used the cab to deliver pizzas for a while, until the expenses had outpaced the tips so dramatically that he’d had to sleep in it. Then he had traded the cab for an old pickup truck, a skimmer, and sixty feet of hose and become a pool man. That was how he had met Earl and Linda. At first Earl, at least, had seemed almost normal. When Lenny had come to clean and backwash the pool, Earl had generally been out working or training the dogs or something. But soon he had noticed that Linda never seemed to have anything at all to do. He would see her behind the curtains in her room, just standing there for twenty minutes, brushing her hair and watching him.
At first, the pool business had seemed to be right for Lenny. Just about every house in the San Fernando Valley had a pool behind it. If he could build up a list of forty clients, allot an hour a week for each one, and charge seventy bucks a month, he would clear twenty-eight hundred a month. With tips at Christmas and a markup on chemicals, he could stretch it to maybe thirty-five hundred. The best part was that it didn’t take Lenny anything like an hour to clean a pool. It took twenty minutes, tops.
After a few months Lenny had become convinced that it was virtually impossible to work the pools; keep replacing customers who moved away, got pissed off, or never paid at all; buy the chemicals; keep the books; and still live a decent life. If he drank too much one night, he couldn’t call in sick. He still had to spend the next morning squinting against the glare of the sun that flashed off the shimmering surface of some swimming pool.
He was just at the point of admitting to himself that the business was not as practical as it had looked, when Earl had begun to toss him tidbits to keep him solvent. Earl did it with the same manner that he used when he tossed a chunk of meat to his dogs: “I got something for you, if you want it.” At first it had just been watching the house and feeding the dogs while Earl and Linda were away.
For a long time he had not even known what business they were in. He could tell they made money at it, but sometimes it seemed to Lenny that everybody in the world was making money except him. It was like a joke that they had all heard and he hadn’t. Linda had been the one to tell him they were detectives.
Earl had asked him to watch some guy’s apartment. He had sat for three days listening to people on the radio bitching about the government, told Earl when the guy came home, and collected a thousand in cash. Another time, Earl had asked him to go pick up a package in Chicago. Lenny had received another thousand for taking a plane ride. The ease of it had suggested to him the plan of transforming himself from pool man to detective. The only way to get a license was to serve an apprenticeship consisting of two thousand hours of work for a detective agency, but he was, in a manner of speaking, already working for one.
It was only after Earl had agreed to put him on a time sheet but just pay him when he needed him that he began to see that the detective business was not what it seemed any more than the pool business was. He had logged barely a thousand hours on Earl’s fabricated time sheets before the day came when he called Earl to say he had found a suspect, and then watched Earl walk to the window, poke a shotgun through the screen, and blow the guy’s head off. That had been five years ago.
