Drift (32 page)

Maria put her hand on her forehead. “Um, yeah,” she said, still groggy. She sat forward and grabbed her shoes, then stood up unsteadily.

When I turned around, Simpkins’s expression was about what I expected. I gave him a nice big smile. “You leave now, you could be back before the end of
Saturday Night Live
.”

64

Stan Bowers’s voice mail picked up on the second ring. The bastard was screening me. I immediately hung up and called again, and the voice mail picked up on the first ring. On the fifth call, he picked up.

“Go away, Carrick,” he said. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“Just a quick question—”

“No, Doyle. No. Not yet. Someday, maybe, looking back and laughing, but not now.”

“I just need to know what kind of flour it was.”

“What kind of…? Are you fucking kidding me? It’s past midnight. What are you, making a cake?”

“I just need to know, then I’ll leave you alone.”

“You are un-fucking-believable. How do you know I’m not asleep or banging my wife?” He sighed, then I heard him rustling paper. “Okay, here we go: ‘Eighty micron, dry-milled, de-germinated, high-amylose white corn flour.’ Okay?”

“Thanks.”

He hung up without another word.

*   *   *

Rupp’s Mustang wasn’t in his driveway. I thought about breaking in and having a look around, but instead, I turned the car around and made a right at the intersection half a block away and parked so I could watch his driveway.

Then I waited. I tried to switch into stakeout-hibernation mode, but with limited success. Over the next several hours, my brain kept kicking on, either thinking about my mom and Frank, or thinking about the crazy, messed up little town of Dunston, with its meth fires and heroin busts and assholes with guns, its strange fields of genetically modified corn and disappearing apple trees. And its strange flu epidemic. Even my paranoid brain couldn’t make them all fit together. It began to ache as it tried, and I felt great relief when Rupp finally arrived. I waited a couple of seconds, then started up the car and went after him, turning up his driveway and parking the Mustang.

Even in the dark, I could see that his tires were covered with mud.

He jumped when he saw me, but he recovered quickly, rolling his eyes. “You? Are you kidding me?” he said, without his accent. “Do you know what time it is?” He seemed younger, more vulnerable.

“Mind if I come in?”

He took a deep breath and stood up straighter. “Actually, you know what? Yes, I do.” The accent was back. “I’m actually quite busy, and it’s late. What do you want?”

“I just wanted to tell you, you were wrong about the apples.”

“Really?” He laughed, and it sounded almost real, but not quite. “Wrong how?”

“Turns out someone figured out a way to do it. Apparently they were whatever you said, massive intellectuals or whatever.”

“They must have been.”

I leaned forward and lowered my voice. “Between you and me, a friend of mine in DEA said they tapped a bunch of phone lines. They’re getting very close to putting it all together.” I straightened up, backing off a step. “So, I just wanted to say thanks for your assistance. I’ll make sure you get credit for your help in solving this.”

“It was nothing,” he said softly, gazing into the distance over my shoulder.

“No, you’d be surprised. A lot of people wouldn’t have helped. So thanks.”

I put out my hand for him to shake. When he did, his palm was clammy.

Back in my car, I pulled out of the driveway and made a right at the intersection half a block away. I drove up the block, turned off my headlights, then turned around and coasted back to the corner to wait.

Five minutes later, Rupp’s Mustang backed out of the driveway and screeched off in the opposite direction. I gave him a few seconds to put some distance between us. Then I went after him—not too close, but keeping the Mustang’s distinctive taillights ahead of me.

Luckily, I had a pretty good idea where we were going.

As we were getting close to Bayberry Road, I lost him for a moment. But then I caught sight of his taillights out of the corner of my eye, disappearing down a driveway behind a farmhouse on my left. It was one of the houses Nola and I had driven past the day we went to Hawk Mountain. She had said the family had kept the house but sold the land. I guess they sold the driveway, too.

As I watched, the taillights appeared again, much smaller, on the other side of a barn. Then they disappeared behind a gentle rise.

Across the street was the abandoned farm with the tax issues—the Denby place, Nola had called it. I pulled up into the driveway and parked in the back. Careful to look both ways, I darted across the street and kept running, across the fields, in the direction Rupp had driven.

My internal compass was spinning, as it had been since I’d come out to Dunston, but I knew we were heading east—toward the farm next to Nola’s property, toward the big tent where I’d almost been shot two days earlier.

65

As I topped the rise behind the barn, I saw the Mustang’s taillights, bouncing and jostling over the dirt road fifty yards ahead of me. Running low through the tall weeds, I stayed back from the road itself. The lights disappeared and reappeared several times as I chased them over the rolling landscape. I came up a small rise and saw Rupp stopped at a fence below. The fence extended as far as I could see, and I wondered if it was connected to the fence next to Nola’s farm. As I dropped to the ground and watched, a large section of fence slowly rolled to the side. Rupp drove through, and I paused, watching longingly as it rolled back into place. I was getting really sick of climbing that damn fence, but I ran along it until it disappeared behind some trees, so I could climb it with some kind of cover.

Once inside, I crept along quietly, until I found myself looking down on the compound. The huge white tent extended off to the left, and the trailer sat at an angle next to it, extending off to the right: the area where the trees had been extended out from where the tent and the trailer met, like the third spoke of a three-spoked wheel.

The same two pickup trucks were sitting on the gravel. Parked next to them, Rupp’s shiny Mustang looked as out of place as ever.

Two guys armed with assault rifles were standing at the foot of the steps to the trailer, on the side facing away from the tent. Rupp was talking to them, waving his hands in the air. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but I could hear the stress in his voice.

The guys with the rifles were at least a head taller than Rupp, and they stood close, looking down at him. Rupp made a move to go around them and up the steps to the trailer, but one of them stepped in front of him to block his way.

I could hear the guards laughing as Rupp protested. Then a guy with a shaved head appeared at the trailer door, and they stopped. I couldn’t hear what he was saying either, but he barked and they snapped to attention. He waved Rupp up the steps, and together they retreated into the trailer.

I wanted to get behind that trailer and listen in on their conversation, but if I ran straight over there, they’d see me for sure. Instead, I took off in the opposite direction, circling all the way around the complex, around the far end of the tent. As I rounded the tent, I heard a noise and dropped into a crouch.

I had never felt the hairs on my neck stand up, but I felt like a Rhodesian Ridgeback as a guy in a full hazmat suit emerged from the tent, pausing under the spray of a hazmat shower. He must have been under there for a full minute; then the spray stopped and he stepped out. He shook off the excess and removed his hood as he disappeared around the far side of the tent.

I circled even farther out into the corn stubble so I wouldn’t be seen. As I rounded the tent and the far side of the trailer came into view, I saw another hazmat shower, out past the edge of the gravel.

I waited another few seconds. Then I sprinted toward the trailer, creeping up to the middle of it, right about where the door and steps were on the other side. Standing in the middle of the angle formed by the tent and the trailer, I was very aware that if anyone discovered me, I would be cornered.

I could hear Rupp and the other guy going back and forth inside the trailer. The windows were too high to look in, but I found an old cinder block off to the side and I moved it over. Balancing on top of it, I was just high enough to look in the window and listen to what they were saying.

“Probably bullshit,” the bald guy was saying, “but it don’t matter, because we ain’t changing shit without Levkov’s say so. He’s the boss.”

Rupp looked insulted. “What do you mean, he’s the boss? He’s not
my
boss. We’re both the boss.” He seemed to be having a hard time maintaining his accent.

“Well, what can I tell you. He’s
my
boss. Look, if you want, I can call him—”

“No, Leo, you dumbass! The phones are tapped. You can’t call him.”

“I guess we’ll wait till he gets here, then.”

“We can’t wait, either. Carrick said the bust is imminent. We have to move things up.”

“Look, if Levkov says we’re moving it up, we’ll move it up. But if not, what’s the difference? Today, tomorrow, whatever.”

“The difference, you idiot, is the difference between them showing up in the middle of the fucking release, or them finding a bunch of bulldozers building cheap houses.”

Now the bald guy was stepping up close to Rupp, looking down at him just like the two guards had done. “Now, you look here, little dick. You watch how you fucking talk to me, okay?”

Rupp looked like he had something really smart to say. Maybe he figured it was even smarter not to say it, but I never found out, because the cinder block I was perched on suddenly crumbled. I pitched forward, my outstretched hands slamming against the side of the trailer. I heard a commotion inside the trailer, then the door banging open on the far side, followed by shouting.

Hemmed in by the trailer and the tent, my only escape was the open space off to my left. But even if I made it, a single burst from one of those assault rifles would cut me in half before I could hope to get away. At any second, gunmen were going to come streaming around the end of the trailer and probably around the tent as well. Frantically, I looked around for a place to hide. Ten yards away, up against the tent, was that big gas tank. It wasn’t much of a hiding place, but it was the only shot I had.

I took off, trying to ignore the agonizing tingle up and down my back as I anticipated for a hail of bullets. I slid behind the tank, but the back of it was smooth and flat. There was nothing to hold on to, no way to pull up my feet. There was a hook holding the fuel hose, but it was too flimsy to support me and would have left my hand exposed. Other than that, the closest thing to a handhold was a ridge of peeling paint that came away in my hand as soon as I touched it. If there’d been a solid wall behind me, I could have braced myself between it and the tank, pulled up my legs and stayed hidden for a while. But with the tent, there was nothing to brace against.

They wouldn’t take long to find me back here.

I could see a flicker of flashlight beams, and the voices grew louder as the gunmen got closer. I could picture them spreading out, creeping warily toward me. A couple of them might have gone out across the field, in case I had gotten enough of a head start to make it that far. But the others were coming toward me.

I took out my gun, but didn’t risk the noise of cocking it. When they got close enough, I’d try to take them by surprise—maybe down one or two of them before the rest tore me to pieces, or until someone shot the gas tank and we all went up.

It was the closest thing to a plan I could come up with, but it sucked. Mikhail’s description of my life notwithstanding, I didn’t want to die. But it was looking more and more like that’s what was going to happen.

The notion flashed through my mind that my entire family would then be gone: my mom, my dad, and me, all in the space of six weeks. A wave of memories washed over me, happy times, trips to the beach, sledding with my dad. Well, not my dad, but Frank.

I tried to picture my dad: playing catch with him, or hiking by the creek, sitting through a Star Wars triple feature. But all those memories were of Frank. I tried to conjure memories of my dad, but all I could come up with were images from photos, one Christmas morning, and now that restraining order. That and the hole he left behind. My eyes blurred, and I thought to myself, “Now?”

The voices were getting closer, and I knew if I let the gunmen get much nearer, they would shoot me down like a cow at slaughter.

Looking down at my feet lined up behind the stanchion holding up the tank, I made a deal with myself: The moment a flashlight beam played across my boots, that would be my cue to go down in a blaze of glory.

That was when I glanced at the tent and saw the patch over the jagged hole in the plastic sheeting from my previous escape. The image of the hazmat suit standing under the shower gave me another chill, but it was the only chance I had. I dropped to the ground, tore open the patch, and squeezed into the tent.

66

For a moment, I lay motionless between the potting table and the plastic, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness and listening. But it was quiet.

Part of me wanted just to stay here, hidden and quiet. Eventually they’d find the hole, though, and then they would find me. If my plan was to hide and be quiet, it would have to be somewhere else.

The smell of the place was more intense than I remembered, and I could hear the hum of a fan. The air was warmer, and it tickled my nose, made me want to sneeze. As I rolled out from under the table, I could see dim light filtering down through the plastic ceiling. A haze hung in the air. It reminded me a little of the mist from the crop duster, but this had a heavier, denser feeling. Darker.

Through it, I could detect faint movement, a sensation of motion just out of sight. I looked down at the ground, squinting in the darkness, making sure I wasn’t about to trip over anything as I stepped closer to the flowers growing on the rack closest to me. Then I realized I wasn’t looking at flowers. I was looking at butterflies. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them.