All six men turn to look at her.
“Frank needs you out back. You need to wait there for him. He’s coming out after he talks to the commissioner again.”
The six men turn toward one another for some piece of knowledge none of them has, and so Sigrid provides it. “Move it.”
And so they move it.
Alone by the water, she walks to the floating black raft and examines the controls. A steering wheel, a lever that adjusts the speed, a red button to start it, and—helpfully—keys in the ignition; they dangle from a fuchsia-haired troll.
There are two other small boats by the pier. The first with a Yamaha 75 HP engine started by a pull cord. The second boat has an old Honda engine that starts the same way.
Snapping open her brother’s Buck knife, she hops into the first boat and takes ahold of the plastic handle on the starter. She pulls it out of the engine as far as it will stretch and slashes it off. She hurls it under the dock and out of immediate view.
As quickly as possible—glancing back toward the building for signs of an enlightened SWAT team—she performs the same trick on the second boat. Their navy effectively sunk, aside from the Zodiac, she jogs back to the sun-drenched parking lot, removes the bottles from the Wagoneer, and enters the black raft. Throwing off the mooring line, she starts the engine by turning the troll head. Once she knows it is running smoothly, she lights three of the bombs.
With a nice arc, the first bottle lands a tad short of the SWAT truck, smashing glass and spewing liquid fire over the stacked gear bags. A thick black smoke quickly rises. If the team wasn’t on their way back before, they will certainly come running now. She has to hurry.
She presses the throttle forward and pilots the Zodiac away from the dock, bringing the bow into line with the open waters of Lake Flower. She and the troll pull away from the pier, the sheriff’s station, and what will soon be at least eight angry men.
She putters slowly past the two disabled boats; she tosses firebombs into those, too.
Certain of her lead now, Sigrid shoves the throttle into the forwardmost position and hauls ass away from the police station, leaving behind her a small war zone.
In her rearview mirror Sigrid sees Irving Wylie standing with his hands on his hips as the SWAT team and three other officers from the police station douse the fires with extinguishers retrieved from the van. That is all she can make out, though, because in a moment Irv and the others become nothing but wiggly lines and clouds of color in her vibrating mirror that become indistinguishable from the smoke and flames.
The boat is easy to maneuver. At high speed it skims over the surface of the lake like a stone tossed by a restive god.
Steady now, and on course, she familiarizes herself with the controls and sees that the commandos have helpfully mounted a dedicated GPS unit inside the windscreen of the boat. There is also a map of the lake district inside a waterproof plastic shield. It illustrates how Lake Flower orients almost due south and connects with something called Oseetah Lake; probably an Indian name she can’t pronounce.
The wooded edges of the lake blur into a wall of greens and browns as she speeds along. The night’s storm clouds have broken into billowing mountains. They cast patches of shadow on the land below. They blanket the green hills like spilled paint.
There is no reason not to do this, she tells herself. Only she can prevent Marcus from being harmed now. And the best way to do it is by getting there first.
Sigrid watches the GPS coordinates draw closer to the number Irv was told by the camper. Marcus is—or was, anyway—camping near a place called Pine Pond. The pond is inland and not connected to another body of water. She needs to reach the southernmost point of Oseetah, secure or scuttle the raft, and head into the forest by foot if she stands any chance of reaching Marcus before they do. She presses the throttle forward as far as she dares.
The Zodiac is stunningly fast. She has never been on a boat like this. She is partly protected from the wind blast by the screen, but her hair is lashing. A woman would have designed it all differently.
She opens the throttle farther when the lake turns from blue to black. If the boat had wings she would be flying. Each ripple on the water lifts the boat and slams it back to the surface. She thinks of concrete. Of Lydia’s fall.
Sigrid takes her hands off the wheel and ties her hair into a bun to keep the strands from whipping her eyes. She snakes the arms of her brother’s aviators over her ears and the lenses cut the glare. More comfortable, she glances down to the map to take her bearing.
If the map is any good—and belonging to the SWAT team, it probably is—there is clearly no place to land a helicopter close to Marcus’s last-known location; no bare spots, no roads into the woods, no field wide enough to accommodate the diameter of the rotors.
Even if they do manage to call in an airlift, they will have to fast-rope down into the forest, but that would be tricky and dangerous for anything but a properly trained team. Which they are unlikely to have available in the next hour. This is Saranac Lake, after all, not the Helmand province.
It is more likely, she reasons, that the team will get a new boat. They’ll follow her route and—like her—make their way by foot through the forest at the edge of the lake.
She looks at her footwear. They’re stylish and Italian.
She should have worn combat boots.
The Silence of the Hush Puppies
Irv stands, a bit forlorn, with his hands on his hips as the other officers put out
