been lucky. Don't expect help from anyone, state troopers included, if you do decide to go up there looking for him.' The woman paused, smiled thinly. 'Colletville and the surrounding towns really don't want it known that we're running a kind of huge, open-air insane asylum for one maniac on public lands.'
Garth grunted, walked across the room, and stopped directly in front of the woman. 'Whatever happens, we won't make trouble for Gary, or this town.' Garth paused, reached out and gently gripped Jan Garvey's shoulder. 'I don't mean to frighten you, but there are a few things you have to know. I very much wish that Mongo and I could walk out of here with you now and take you to dinner, but we can't. We can't even be seen together. Mongo and I have been very careful. As far as we know, we weren't followed up the Thru-way; nobody who shouldn't know is aware that we're in Colletville, or that we've talked to you. But we can't be absolutely certain. Now, just in case we're wrong and men come to talk to you, you simply tell them about this conversation-all of it except for the part about Gary Worde. That's very important. Nothing that you know is a threat to these people, but Gary Worde may very well be a threat. If you can follow these directions, everyone-including your friend in the mountains-should be safe.'
'I understand,' the woman said evenly. 'I know you're going to look for him. Please be very careful. Remember that he's crazy.'
Garth smiled, jerked a thumb in my direction. 'So's Mongo. The two of them will get along just fine.'
After leaving the school by a back entrance, we went through our usual ritual of driving slowly and watching in our rearview mirrors for lights. There were none.
Despite the storm, we found a place where we were able to pick up a pizza and a six-pack of beer for our dinner. Back at our motel, before sitting down to eat, Garth called his precinct station house.
There was news.
The NYPD had kept in touch with the Seattle Police Department regarding the deaths of Loan Ka and his family, and Kathy. The Seattle police, at Garth's urging, were treating the deaths as murders, but still had no leads in the case. However, something curious had happened within hours of the explosion, and the police there were wondering if Garth thought there might be a connection. Three local Hmong, men with criminal records for extortion and illegal use of explosives, had been found murdered, their corpses dumped in an alley near a station house. The men's bodies had been mutilated, skinned from the necks almost down to the waists; the coroner's report indicated that they had been alive when the skinning had been done, and it was the torture that had killed them. Furthermore, the right thumb of each man had been severed, and the missing digits had not been found.
Garth suggested that Seattle be advised not to waste any more time or manpower on the case.
15
The next day we outfitted ourselves with camping and survival gear, and supplies. We bought small-bore rifles and ammunition, then used another chunk of Veil's ten thousand dollars to rent a large, heavy Jeep with four-wheel drive. With our gear and a half dozen ten-gallon cans of gasoline strapped down in the back of the Jeep, we headed up into the mountains.
We knew we were going to have to get lucky; we could drive for weeks through the Catskills without seeing any sign of our quarry, and the problem was further complicated by the fact that our hidden veteran certainly wasn't going to be hanging out near any main road. After all his years in the mountains, Gary Worde would almost certainly have built at least one semipermanent shelter, but it would be far away from roads, people, and towns. Besides the extra gasoline, Garth and I had purchased sturdy hiking boots.
The starting point for our search would be the mountain where Garth thought he had spotted a campfire the night before, and that was the general direction-south by southwest-in which we headed, constantly keeping our eyes on the Jeep's dashboard compass. Occasionally we veered off the main road to explore ice- and snow-covered side roads. While Garth drove, I scanned the surrounding countryside with high-powered binoculars, looking for signs of-anything. What I saw was a lot of deer, a few hearty winter hikers exploring the foothills, and a group of brightly clad cross-country skiers. That was it.
The mountain where Garth thought he had seen the fire turned out to be ten miles away-which probably meant that he hadn't seen anything more than some random reflection of light in the window glass. It made no difference; we had to start somewhere, and that mountain seemed as good a place as any. Without some glimpse of fire or smoke, our chances of finding Gary Worde were a good deal less than minuscule.
For lunch we ate sandwiches from our large, well-stocked ice locker, then turned on gas-powered space heaters and waited in the Jeep until nightfall. We took turns sleeping and searching the tapestry of night for the tiniest speck of fire on the mountain, but sighted nothing. At dawn we crossed that mountain off one of the five topological maps we had brought with us, started up the Jeep, and headed for the next mountain.
We spent three days and nights driving through the mountains in a twenty-five-mile radius around the town of Colletville and were about to give up when, near midnight of the third night, I glanced to my right through the binoculars and clearly saw wisps of smoke rising in the distance into a sky brightly illuminated by a full moon. I quickly checked the map, saw that we were ten miles away from the nearest town. We parked the Jeep off the road, slept for a few hours, and at dawn loaded and hitched on our backpacks. We checked our pocket compasses, then headed off in the direction where I had seen the smoke.
After a day of hiking west, we both began to suspect that my sighting of smoke might have been as phantasmagorical as Garth's sighting of fire in the schoolhouse window back in Colletville. By nightfall, two city boys were thoroughly exhausted from tramping over hill and dale. We pitched camp, built a huge fire to cheer ourselves up, but didn't have the energy to cook. We ate cold cuts washed down with beer, then talked strategy-or lack of it. Just before sundown we had spotted, far in the distance, the top of what appeared to be a fire-lookout tower, close to the top of yet another mountain. Before going to sleep, we decided that we would try to make it as far as that tower the next day, and then turn back if there was no sign of Gary Worde; there seemed no sense in throwing away good time after that we would have already wasted in a futile search.
Over the river and through the woods…
We were again up at dawn at the beginning of what looked to be a fine, bright day. Refreshed, we cooked ourselves a big breakfast of eggs and Canadian bacon, cleaned up the campsite, and started off again in the direction of the lookout tower. After a half hour of walking we reached the top of a rise and were relieved to see below us a dry streambed which looked like easy walking and which appeared to meander off in the general direction of the tower. I led the way down the hill, entering a thick outcropping of fir trees. I was the first to see the streambed again when we emerged from the trees, and it was almost enough to give me a heart attack; thoroughly startled, I yelped in astonishment and jumped backward, bumping into Garth.
In the few minutes that it had taken us to walk down the forested hillside, something had appeared in the streambed that definitely hadn't been there when we'd started down; sitting on a huge boulder not ten yards away from us was a fairly large man. He was wearing a blue, fur-lined parka, faded jeans tucked into high-top laced hiking boots. His thinning brown hair looked clean but was very long, pulled back from his face and tied in a pony tail, and he had a full beard which reached the center of his broad chest. His eyes were large and brown, perhaps a bit too bright. Large hands were wrapped around a sturdy walking stick which he had laid across his knees. Powerful field binoculars hung on a leather strap around his neck.
'You've got to be Mongo Frederickson,' the man said, pointing a stubby index finger in my direction. He looked more than a bit bemused.
Garth and I glanced at each other, then back at the man. Our rifles were stuck in sleeves in our backpacks, not easily accessible. 'Who the hell are you?!' I snapped.
'My name's Gary Worde,' the man said easily in a deep, rather pleasing baritone. 'If you are Mongo, then the sour-looking big guy with you is your brother, the cop. Are you two looking for me?'
'How the hell do you know who we are, and what makes you think we're looking for you?' I asked, feeling rather foolish.
