Dead Level (9 page)

And now his planning and polishing had finally paid off: he was back in his own familiar territory of downeast Maine, hundreds of miles from where the cops were looking for him.

He was, he congratulated himself, so smart and lucky that he could hardly stand it.
Free
, he thought with a burst of delighted exhilaration.
No one telling me what to do anymore, or how and when to do it
. When you were behind bars, you could barely blow your nose without somebody trying to give you static about it.

He could hardly believe the pleasure of just being out of there, as if he’d been inside a pressure cooker and someone had taken the lid off. No more orders, no more work duty, no more pretending to be a good little boy.
Free …

But he was also hungry, thirsty, and in need of a warm, dry place,
free of insects, field mice, and any other pesky wildlife that might prevent him from getting a decent night’s sleep.

Fortunately, though, he knew how to take care of all these needs. He’d grown up hunting and fishing here, and he knew every path, trail, and road in Washington County, not to mention every house, garage, and backyard clothesline in the area.

These new jeans he wore, for instance: he’d had to roll the cuffs up and cinch the waist with a length of wild grapevine, but otherwise they weren’t bad. His boots, too, were stolen off a back step; no doubt they’d been left there by some poor guy whose shrewish wife nagged him about mud in the house.

Women
, Dewey thought, tossing the apple core away. Somehow they always managed to mess up a man’s life. But then the memory of how clever he’d been returned: his jacket and sweatshirt, too, were pinched from different places. That way no one would twig to the notion that someone had stolen a whole outfit.

So now a bunch of pudgy, limp-spined husbands were going to come home from their stupid office jobs, Dewey imagined, and want to know where their stuff was, and when their wives didn’t have an answer for them maybe they’d grow a pair, find the nerve to smack the women upside the head a few times. It was the only way to handle them, Dewey knew, and the sooner a guy manned up to it, the better.

And if he went too far, it was the woman’s own fault, Dewey thought as he stepped over a log, up onto a rock, and sideways off the path to avoid a muddy patch. Tracks on the dirt road were one thing; people walked or drove there a lot.

Back here, though, he didn’t want anyone getting any ideas, like maybe that the famous prison escapee, Dewey Hooper, wasn’t really headed south out of Portland, hundreds of miles and a whole world away from the backwoods of downeast Maine.

That instead, he’d deliberately stolen three cars and then crashed or abandoned them one after the other on purpose, like dropping a trail of breadcrumbs. A trail for the cops, who had fallen for it, at least
from what Dewey had read in the newspaper he’d fished out of a trash barrel that morning.

The grassy path narrowed between a pair of massive boulders that stuck up like the two sides of a doorway. Beyond them, the thicket of mostly brush and saplings he had been walking through darkened to mature woodland, a patch of it that two centuries of loggers had not yet quite gotten to.

The forest canopy spread green and fragrant over his head, a few patches of blue poking through and the air cooling suddenly. Dewey felt his neck and shoulders relaxing for the first time in years. A couple of miles ahead, the lake’s few rustic shoreline cabins were mostly empty now that the summer season was over.

But in them there would be firewood and drinking water—you couldn’t drink out of the lake unless you wanted a nasty gut bug called beaver fever—plus coffee and food, mostly canned stuff left by the summer people. At least one would have a rowboat or a canoe he could use, too, and he might even find some guns.

By tonight, Dewey would be tucked up snugly in one of those cabins, with a fire going in the woodstove and beef stew from one of those cans warming in a kettle on it, coffee in a percolator, maybe even biscuits if they’d left biscuit mix. He’d be warm and toasty, with not a soul suspecting he was nearby.

And even if anyone spotted, say, the smoke from the chimney or light from a window, he might still be okay. This time of year it was mostly only hunters who came out here: good old boys, many of whom wouldn’t tell on him, he felt certain.

Because Dewey wasn’t the only guy who’d ever wanted to slap some mouthy broad halfway to kingdom come, that much he knew for a fact. And it wasn’t his fault, either, that instead of halfway, as it had always been before when he’d needed to teach Marianne a lesson, that last time it was all the way.

He plucked the other apple from his pocket. Biting in, he let the sweet juice and pulp dribble down his lips.

That last time, he’d actually killed her. And no good-luck charm in the world could do a thing about that.

Not that he cared, he told himself firmly.
Boohoo
, he thought as he made his way through the forest toward the nearest of the lakeside cottages.
Boohoo with a freakin’ cherry on it …

But then he stopped. Directly ahead, the trail continued uphill between more boulders; he knew the way, having been here before many times, hunting and trapping.

To his left, though, the land sloped down into a hollow with what remained of a long-dead tree sticking up out of it: a twisty gray trunk denuded of bark and aged to a silvery sheen with sharp daggers of broken-off branches stabbing out in all directions.

Dewey stared at the tree, or rather, at what was under it. A circle of stones marked where someone had built a fire of sticks very near the tree trunk. From its lower branches hung pieces of clothing: shirt, pants, jacket. A pair of boots stood with toes nearly touching the charred campfire remnants.

To Dewey, the scene described disaster: someone had gotten wet, fallen into the lake, maybe. Maybe it was late, and as cold out here as an October night in the Maine woods could be; getting back out again in wet clothes had looked iffy. Starting the fire, drying the clothes, and waiting until it was light had looked better to someone.

But the tactic hadn’t worked, and now as he approached the dead fire, Dewey saw who that someone was.

Well, I’ll be damned. Bentley Hodell, you old son of a bitch. Ain’t seen you in a dog’s age
.

The man’s nearly naked body lay where it had fallen, half in and half out of the fire circle. Dewey recognized the short braid of frizzy gray hair, the hooked nose, and most of all the big gold signet ring on the right hand, stretched out as if grasping for something it could never reach.

Not in this world, anyway. Bentley had won that ring in a card game, Dewey recalled. He’d been there when it happened, in the back
room of the Happy Crab sports bar in downtown Eastport. Afterwards, Bentley had bought everyone a drink, then given Dewey a ride home.

And now here he was, naked to the elements. Or nearly; Dewey couldn’t remember when he’d seen a man so pitifully exposed. From the looks of things, Bentley must’ve been out here bird hunting; a shotgun lay broken open on the ground a ways back from the fire circle. But then something more happened; heart attack, maybe.

Something fast, it looked like to Dewey, and that, anyway, was a blessing. Bentley had been a good guy. He didn’t deserve to be lying out here in just his skivvies.

On the other hand, the jacket he’d been wearing looked good and warm. Carhartt, it was, blue denim with a red wool lining. A pair of truly sturdy boots would be better than the cheap ones Dewey had on, and even the pants hanging from the dead tree’s branch had flannel in them; Dewey could see it where Bentley had rolled the cuffs up, to make the pants as short as his legs.

But they would fit Dewey just fine.
Sorry, buddy
, he thought at Bentley, reaching for them—then drew his hand back as a pang of uncertainty struck him; this making-his-own-decisions stuff was
hard
.

If he took the clothes, he’d have to leave Bentley out here naked, and that idea rubbed him the wrong way. Not that he felt any more responsibility for old Bentley than he did for anyone else; it just felt like bad luck, was all. He couldn’t put the stolen clothes he was wearing on the other man’s body, though, because sooner or later, Bentley would get found.

Maybe not this year, or even next year or the year after. No doubt a search party had already gone by; it was a lot harder finding a lost guy out here than a person might think, especially if the guy wasn’t moving or making noise due to being dead.

First, snow would cover him. Then, when spring came, weeds and bushes would leaf out, hiding this dead-tree hollow.

On the other hand, some other bird hunter could wander out here tomorrow and happen across him, and if that occurred Dewey didn’t
want Bentley’s body to be wearing a set of stolen clothes. Chances were slim that anyone would recognize the outfit.

But they weren’t
none
. So Dewey faced a choice: leave his old pal here bare naked, or nearly so. Or leave a fine, heavy jacket and pair of trousers—and boots, don’t forget the boots—for a corpse who couldn’t get any good out of them.

Damn
, Dewey thought, because he sure as hell was going to put something on old Bentley; if nothing else, simple modesty demanded it. Dewey wanted the pants, boots, and jacket, but if their situations were reversed, he knew Bentley would do it for him, not leave his skinny shanks lying all which-a-way on the cold forest floor. Poor guy looked like a plucked chicken left sitting in the icebox, Dewey thought with a rare twinge of pity, and leaving him that way was … well, it was unmanly, somehow. It was the kind of thing a real dirtball type of guy would do.

And Dewey certainly didn’t think he was one of those. So he had no choice. He could take the jacket, but the rest was going to have to go back on Bentley, and what a delightful chore
that
was going to be, Dewey thought resignedly. Pulling the shirt and pants from the branch where poor Bentley had hung them to dry, Dewey approached the body and crouched by it, wondering where to start.

First he lifted an arm by gingerly encircling the cold, blue wrist with his thumb and forefinger. Then he did the same with a leg, discovering that at least Bentley wasn’t stiff anymore. Bad luck about the clothes, but …

A sound came from the vicinity of the trail. Dewey couldn’t believe it at first, but bad luck came in threes, didn’t it? And if poor Bentley being dead at all was one, and his clothes being off-limits to Dewey was two, then …

Whistling. Somebody over there was approaching slowly along the trail, crunching through fallen leaves, stopping and starting and making all the noise in the world, and on top of it—

“Yankee Doodle.”
Some damn fool was strolling along, whistling it,
like it was the Fourth of July or something. And if there was one thing he hadn’t wanted out here, it was company. He glanced at Bentley’s shotgun, but he could see it wasn’t loaded, and anyway, after lying out here in the elements, who knew if it would even fire?

Maybe whoever it was would go on by, he thought hopefully. Or—but then suddenly Dewey knew just what to do, to solve his visitor problem
and
his clothes problem.

Hustling to the base of the dead tree, he hoisted himself up by using old branch stubs as handholds, stabbing himself twice on their sharp ends in his hurry but not caring. When he got up high enough, he eased around the trunk until it hid him.

The visitor was still loitering along, whistling. Leaning around the tree’s trunk, Dewey cupped his hand to his mouth and called out just loudly enough to be heard:

“Hey! Hey, you! C’mere!”

Looking puzzled but unsuspecting, the visitor obeyed, while peering around unsuccessfully to find where the voice had come from and instead spotting Bentley Hodell’s body with the shirt and pants lying next to it.

“Psst!” Dewey eased out to the front of the tree again, and the visitor—youngish guy, backpack, stupid clothes, sandals, for God’s sakes—turned and came toward him, looking shocked.

“There’s a … there’s a … dead man,” the visitor managed, pointing a shaky finger, and when he got close enough Dewey leapt on him.

CHAPTER
4