‘How long have we been following him?’
‘I don’t know. My watch has stopped.’
‘Stopped?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Mine too.’
They compared watches. The time on Andrea’s watch showed five minutes later than her husband’s, but Andrea always set her watch five minutes fast. Both watches had stopped at the same time.
‘That’s weird,’ said Chris.
‘This is all weird,’ said Andrea. ‘And it’s going to be dark soon.’
Her voice cracked slightly on the word ‘dark’. She was holding it together, but only barely.
‘We could go back the way we came, but what good would that do?’ he said. ‘We’d be back in the same position that we were in earlier. We have to trust him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that’s what people do when they have no choice.’
‘He means us harm.’
‘Come on, not this again . . .’
‘I’m telling you. And I’d swear he’s leading us in circles.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘I don’t
She saw the stranger’s head tilt slightly, as though he had heard what she said. She couldn’t get over how dark his silhouette was. Even when the light had been good, she’d been unable to tell how he was dressed, or discern the lineaments of his face. He was like a shadow given life.
‘What’s he doing now?’
The man’s gestures had changed. He was pointing to his right, jabbing a finger in that direction. Once he was sure that they’d seen what he was doing, he raised the same hand and waved them farewell, then disappeared into the trees, away from whatever he had been pointing at.
‘He’s leaving,’ said Chris. ‘Hey, where are you going?’
But the man could no longer be seen. The shadow had been absorbed by the greater shade of the forest.
‘Well,’ said Chris, ‘we may as well go see what he was pointing at. Could be a road, or a house, or even a town.’
Andrea adjusted her pack on her back and followed her husband. Her eyes kept returning to the patch of darkness into which the stranger had vanished, straining to penetrate it. She wanted him to be gone, but she was not certain that he was. She sensed him waiting in there, watching them. It was only when her husband spoke that she realized she had stopped walking. She willed her feet to move, but they wouldn’t. She wondered if this was how vulnerable animals reacted when faced with a predator, and if that was why they died.
‘He’s gone,’ said Chris. ‘Wherever he was taking us, we’re almost there.’
The hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end. Her skin prickled. He isn’t gone, she wanted to tell him. We can’t see him, but he’s still out there. He’s led us somewhere, but it’s nowhere that we want to be.
The slightest of breezes arose. It was almost a blessing until they smelled the stench carried upon it. There were birds in the air now: crows. She could hear their cawing. She wondered if crows were attracted by dead things.
‘It’s stronger now,’ said Chris. ‘It smells like a rendering plant. You know, paper mills smell real bad. That could be what’s causing it: a paper mill.’
‘Out here?’
‘Out
He reached out for her hand again, but still she did not respond in kind.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to go.’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You stay here, and I’ll go see what’s up there.’
He moved away from her, but she grabbed at his pack, holding him back.
‘I don’t want to be left here alone.’
He smiled. It was his other smile, the indulgent, patronizing one that he gave her when he thought she was failing to grasp something very simple, the one that made her feel about nine years old. She thought of it as his ‘man smile’, because only men ever used it. It was ingrained in their DNA. This time, though, it didn’t make her angry, just sad. He didn’t understand.
Chris came to her, and gave her an awkward hug.
‘We’ll see what he was pointing at, then make our decision, okay?’ said Chris.
‘Okay.’ Her voice sounded tiny against his chest.
‘I love you. You know that, right?’
‘I know.’
‘You’re supposed to tell me that you love me too.’
‘I know that as well.’
He gave her a playful poke in the ribs.
‘Come on, I’ll buy you a drink.’
‘A cocktail. With champagne.’
‘With champagne.
Hand in hand, they walked to the rise.
12
As predicted, the evening news bulletin contained a lot of information about Perry Reed and his activities, both business and personal. At 10.40 p.m. the night before, while I was still mulling over what I had just been told of airplanes and lists, Henry Gibbon and Alex Wilder, two close associates of Reed, king of the far Northeast’s used auto dealers, were stopped by police and DEA agents as they drove their respective vehicles from the parking lot of a biker bar ten miles east of Harden. When the cars were searched, the trunks were found to contain a combined total of $50,000 worth of OxyContin and heroin, which came as a surprise to Gibbon and Wilder as a) they were not heroin dealers; and b) the trunks had been empty when they parked the cars. In addition, Wilder’s car contained substantial quantities of child pornography on a number of USB drives, and a cell phone with more than a dozen suspected providers of child prostitutes among its saved contacts. Both cars were registered to one Perry Reed of Harden, Maine.
At one a.m., a fire swept through the auto lot at Perry’s Used Autos in Harden, aided by high winds and thirty gallons of ethyl alcohol as accelerant, destroying his entire inventory, all of the buildings on the lot, and the titty bar adjacent to it.
At 3.30 a.m., Perry Reed was arrested following a search of his house that produced a large quantity of discs and USB drives containing twenty-five thousand pornographic images of children, and a cell phone programmed with numbers identical to those found on the phone in Alex Wilder’s car. In addition, police discovered an unlicensed Llama pistol with pearl grips and a chrome finish, a pistol that would, following examination, be found to have been used in the shooting dead of two men in an apartment in Brooklyn the previous year, and possibly the severe beating of their female companion whose head injuries had left her in a persistent vegetative state. Their numbers, too, would be found on both Wilder’s and Reed’s cell phones, and Perry Reed’s prints would be found on the weapon, having been lifted from a coffee mug in his office and transferred to the gun before it was planted, a fact that was obviously unknown to the police and, indeed, to Perry Reed.
One of the detectives was later heard to comment that Perry Reed was officially in more trouble than any other single human being he’d ever encountered in the course of his entire career, closely followed by Alex Wilder, with Henry Gibbon a distant third. The arrests were credited to an anonymous tip-off, and everyone seemed pretty satisfied with a good night’s work, with the possible exception of Perry Reed who was pleading innocence and demanding to know who had burned down his auto lot and titty bar, but since Perry Reed was now facing the
