his coffee cup.
“Okay, I’ll do it, but you have to help. I’ll take care of the nasty stuff, don’t worry. But you have to be there.”
“Okay.”
“And I want a third of Empty Mile. I told you I was interested in it and it seems like fair payment for what you want done. Especially as Tripp wants all of it.”
The thought of being connected to Gareth through the land made my blood run cold, but we were going to be connected anyway if we killed Jeremy Tripp, so I said yes. I didn’t really have a choice.
“Okay, a third.”
“And we’re talking a full one-third share, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Water rights, a share in the timber if we cut any trees down, mineral rights… that sort of thing.”
“If you want.”
“Cool. We’re going to be partners, Johnny!”
“Tripp is only going to hold off a day or two before he goes to the police on the fire thing.”
“That won’t be a problem. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now.”
“It’ll take me a week or so to get the ownership papers for the land changed.”
“We’ve got a deal, dude. I trust you. Shake my hand and it’s done. Just do the papers when you can.”
He held out his hand and as I shook it I felt like I was being pulled into a long dark tunnel from which there was no exit except some dreadful future where everything was dangerous and irrevocably changed from the way it was now.
“This partnership could really benefit you, Johnny. If we ever need to put any money into the place I could leverage the cabins.”
A little while later Gareth left, saying he’d call me the next day when things were set. I deliberately didn’t ask him how he planned to do it. I didn’t want to know any sooner than I had to.
I sat by myself in the Black Cat for another half hour, thinking about how easy it was for humans to do things that changed them forever. One decision. One action. That was all it took. I was poised between two versions of myself-innocent and killer. In moving from one to the other I knew I would lose part of who I was, and I wondered, that afternoon, if there would be enough of me left to recognize when it was all over.
Back at the cabin, when I told Marla things were in motion, she seemed to accept it until I came to the part about the price Gareth had exacted.
“Are you fucking joking?”
“What was I going to say? I can’t do it by myself. And he
“It means he’ll be here all the time. Don’t you understand that? It gives him an excuse. Are you blind? Have you just kind of missed that I can’t stand him anywhere near me? He hates you, Johnny. And he hates me. And he’s not going to waste a fucking minute of this.”
“What was I supposed to do?”
Marla looked at me and shook her head. For a moment her mouth worked, but whatever it was she wanted to say was strangled by her despair and in the end all she could do was lift her eyes to the ceiling and shriek.
CHAPTER 30
The morning of the next day started with Gareth calling and asking about the garden at the back of Jeremy Tripp’s house.
“Can other houses see into it?”
“No, it’s cut straight into the forest.”
“Does it have a fence?”
“No.”
Gareth seemed pleased with this and told me to keep my phone on me and to be ready to go sometime in the afternoon. He called again around three and told me to get over to Old Town as fast as I could. I met him on the main street there. He was parked a hundred yards back from Oakridge’s only movie theater. I pulled up behind him and got into his Jeep. As I slid into the seat he reached across and I was forced to clasp hands with him.
“You ready, Johnboy? This is where the tough get going.”
“I guess.”
“I’ve been following him around all day. He’s been in town with Vivian getting more signatures for his fucking petition.” Gareth nodded down the street at the theater. “Now they’re watching a movie. They just went in-that gives us a couple of hours.”
“To do what?”
“They’re using Vivian’s van-she’s been driving, like the good little pig she is. Which means Tripp’s car is back at his place.”
Gareth took his cell phone out and turned it off.
“Yours too, dude. Don’t want to be traced.”
He started the Jeep and made a U-turn and we drove north out of Old Town, out of Oakridge, and into the belt of forest that separated the Slopes from the town. It was BLM land here and there were no houses among the trees. The only traffic that used the road was either tourists or people who lived in, or worked for, the big houses higher up. But it was late in the year now and there were few tourists visiting Oakridge and we didn’t see a single other car.
We didn’t speak until Gareth pulled the Jeep off the road, into a fire trail a half mile short of where the houses of the Slopes began. The land here was steep and as the car made the turn I looked back over my shoulder, down the stretch of road we’d just traveled up, and saw a long narrow straight that made a right-hand turn at the bottom so tight it looked like the road dead-ended in a solid wall of trees. We bounced along the trail for several hundred yards then Gareth stopped the Jeep and got out. He took a backpack from the backseat and slung it over his shoulder.
“End of the line, Johnny. We have to walk from here, I don’t want anyone seeing the car.”
“Through the forest?”
“Yeah. Tripp’s on Eyrie. That’s off the road we just came up, another half mile or so. And his place is about five hundred yards along it. So all we have to do is head uphill from here and we should hit his backyard.”
Gareth took a compass from his pocket, checked the direction, and stepped off the trail into the trees. The forest here felt threatening. It was a place men did not usually come and it seemed to me that our presence violated the way things were supposed to be.
Whatever Gareth had in his backpack made a metallic clinking, and that and the forest and what we were going to do started to work on me. I began to picture one horrific bludgeoning scene after another.
Gareth must have seen the fear on my face.
“Relax, dude, we’re not going to chop him into pieces or anything. All we’re going to do is make a little alteration to that fancy car of his and then he’s going to have an accident.” Gareth held up his hands. “Totally hands-off.”
We continued our way through the forest. The ground was steep and covered with a thick carpet of dry brown pine needles that slipped under our feet. We made slow progress. I kept my eyes on the ground as much as I could and tried to convince myself that killing someone by engineering an accident wasn’t quite as bad as stabbing the life out of them.
It took us half an hour to get level with the properties on the downhill side of Eyrie Street. Gareth’s navigation was slightly off and because we couldn’t see more than twenty yards on either side of us we unknowingly walked through a corridor of forest between two properties and almost blundered out onto the road. From there, though, we got our bearings and it only took us another couple of minutes to backtrack and find the rear border of Jeremy Tripp’s garden.
We stood hidden at the edge of the trees looking out at the bright expanse of lawn. The archery target was
