Hunters (28 page)

"I'll wait with you if you like," Michael
said.

Jean shook her head. "No. Go in and sit with
her. Chuck, you go in alone. It'll be easier to strike up a
conversation that way."

"Good thinkin', Jeannie. With luck, we'll be
back before you freeze."

Jean wasn't taking a chance on that. She
started the jeep's engine several times in the half hour that
Chuck, Michael, and Sam were inside the diner. As she sat alone in
the cold, she knew that Michael was probably right, that the longer
they remained in the snow-covered woods of northern Pennsylvania,
the greater their chances of being caught.

Still, she could not help herself. The need
to know that Ned Craig was dead had become the greatest need in her
life, far greater than her need to protect animals by stopping the
killing. The Wildlife Liberation Front, along with the foul
weather, had done what it had set out to do.

But her hatred for Craig still burned as
brightly as ever, more so, she thought, since her unsuccessful
attempts to shoot his woman, run him down, and, most recently, to
catch the pair as they fled. She had to see him dead. She didn't
care that much about the woman, and had only tried to kill her in
order to hurt Craig. But if she got in the way, she would die too.
A bullet to the head. Hanging was for Craig alone, and she hoped
they could corner him in a remote place where she could carry out
her plans for his execution.

Those pleasant thoughts ran through her head
until the three returned and climbed into the jeep. "What did you
learn?" she asked impatiently.

"Oh, not much," Chuck said, handing her a
paper bag. "Learned that Darlene in there makes one helluva good
BLT—brought one out for you. Learned that boy, this snow just keeps
coming, doesn't it?" He held up a hand and grinned. "
And
the
name of one of the only people who probably knows where the hell
Craig is. The guy's Larry Moxon, and he's the Law Enforcement
Supervisor for this neck of the woods. Craig used to be his deputy
before they both got promoted. They're like best buds. Anybody
knows where he's at, it's Moxon."

"Did you also happen to find out where this
Moxon lives?"

Chuck beamed proudly. "A mile or so north of
town. Little log cabin all on its lonesome. Think we oughta visit
him?"

"Let's go," she said, but Chuck had already
started the jeep.

It was 1:30 when they got to Larry Moxon's
house, which they identified by the name on the mailbox. The
driveway, which ran a hundred yards from the road to the house, was
covered with snow. Tire tracks were nearly covered over, and there
was no vehicle visible near the house.

"Think he went out for the day?" Michael
asked.

"Looks that way," Chuck said.

"Maybe," Sam suggested, "he just went out to
stock up for the next storm. Y'know, bread, toilet paper, all that
stuff."

"Maybe." Chuck looked at Jean. "Way I see it,
we got three choices. Sit out here and wait for him, maybe hours.
Go and try to find him, though I don't have any idea where. Or pull
the jeep around behind the house and wait for him inside."

"What if he has somebody with him when he
comes back?" Michael asked.

"Oh yeah, like forest rangers with those
dinky little revolvers," Sam said with her usual sneer.

"One of those 'dinky little revolvers' killed
Andrew," Michael reminded her.

"Oh fuck it," she said, "we got assault
weapons. Hell, I could use a good firefight right about now."

"Nobody's gonna be with him, pussy," Chuck
said to Michael. "And if anybody is, Sam's right, we'd have 'em
outgunned ten to one."

"We'll wait inside," Jean said, ending the
argument. "Drive up."

The jeep cut through the snow with unexpected
ease. Jean was pleased to see an empty, slant-roofed carport behind
the house. "Guess he could've been here all along," Chuck said as
he pulled the jeep under the roof.

"Guess he wasn't, though," Sam said.

They each took a gun, then walked to the back
door, which Chuck broke open in seconds. It led into an entryway
off a small kitchen, and they stood in the doorway listening for a
moment to the silence before they entered.

"Wait here," Chuck said, and went through the
house commando style, kicking open doors to the two bedrooms and
the bathroom. "Okay," he said when he rejoined them, "it's empty
all right."

"Thanks for the tip, General," Sam said. She
looked around at the well appointed kitchen, opened the
refrigerator door, and nodded approvingly. "Plenty to eat, so what
else is there to do?"

The living room held plenty of comfortable
chairs, a TV, and a VCR with a stack of videos on top of it. "Ah
shit, seen most of these." Sam flicked on the TV and flipped around
the dial. "Doesn't even have cable out here. I want my MTV."

"Yeah, well, you're not gonna get it," said
Chuck. "Sit down and read a book or something." He gestured to a
chess board on a small table by the fireplace. "Play a game of
chess. Mikey probably knows how, don't you, Mikey?"

Michael sat on the raised hearth of the
fireplace, set his assault rifle on the carpeted floor, and picked
up a magazine. "I don't want to play chess," he said softly.

"Me neither," said Sam, and, with the barrel
of her weapon, swept the wooden pieces off the board so that they
rattled against the bricks of the fireplace, startling the others.
"Chess sucks."

Jean ignored the girl and looked at the
papers on a desk in the corner of the living room. A sheaf of maps
was pushed to one side, and she looked at the top one. It read
Potter County, Sector 4
at the top, and was one of the most
complex maps Jean had ever seen, detailing not only roads, but
trails, streams, and hills, charting their steepness with a
confusing multiplicity of curving, parallel lines. The tiny symbol
of a tower was near a spot where the lines were most numerous, and
was circled in red ink.

Jean swept the other maps away, and found a
red pen beneath them. She picked it up, scratched a few lines on
the Potter County map, and saw that the inks matched. The circle
around the tower had probably been made recently.

"Look at this," she said, holding it out to
the others. "What is this, a contour map?"

"Topographical map," Chuck said. "Shows the
shape of the land." He pointed to the circled tower. "That's one of
those fire towers."

"It's just been circled," Jean said. "The
pen's right there."

"Aren't gonna be any fires in the middle of
this snow," Chuck said. Then his eyes narrowed. "Hey, that other
tower I saw? They got cabins at the bottom. Where the lookout guy
lives, I guess."

"You think like Craig and his woman went to
one of those?" Sam asked. "To what, like hide out or
something?"

"It's possible," Michael said. "I'll tell you
one thing, though. I don't want to go running off to Potter County
on a wild goose chase. I want to know that he's definitely there
first."

"This guy Moxon would know then, right?" Sam
stroked the barrel of her weapon. "I mean if he's the one who
circled the map, right?"

"He knows why he circled it, that's for damn
sure," Chuck said.

Jean tapped the map. "I think we should go
here. Now."

"Jean, that's crazy." Michael shook his head.
"Moxon could have circled it for any number of reasons. It doesn't
mean Craig's headed there."

"It
does
," Jean said, wondering if she
sounded as irrational as she feared. "I've got a feeling about
this."

"Oh, a feelin'," Sam said, laughing. "Well
shit, if Jean's got a
feel
in', then I think we oughta go off
through the fuckin' snowstorm to someplace a hundred miles away
that we probably won't even be able to fuckin'
get
to, to
see if Craig's in this tower where we don't even know the hell
where it
is
!"

"Well put, Samantha," said Jean dryly. "Very
eloquent."

"Aw, fuck you," Sam said, throwing herself
into an overstuffed armchair.

"Sam's right, Jean." Michael wrinkled his
face at the lounging girl. "Though it pains me to agree with
her."

"And you too, Mikey," Sam said, giving him
the finger.

Michael ignored the gesture. "Suppose Craig
went the opposite direction? Over to, say, Clarion County?"

"He was driving northeast," Jean said coldly.
"He was heading toward Potter County, damn it."

"Yeah," Chuck said, "but he was also heading
toward Cameron and Sullivan Counties...and New York State, for
crissake. There's a whole lot of shit that you get included under
northeast, Jeannie. Now I'm with Mike and Sam—all we gotta do is
wait for this Moxon guy to come home, and we find out slam-bang if
the tower's the place."

"By that time," Jean said, "the storm might
start again."

"Hey, if it does, I swear to God I'll get us
there anyhow. With those chains and that jeep the sonovabitch would
have to hide at the North Pole to be safe. Now let's just wait for
Moxon. Nobody's gonna find us here, and we know this guy knows what
we
want to know. Okay?"

Jean didn't have to think about it. "No. I
want him now. I
know
he's here."

"Aw shit," Sam said, shaking her head. "You
don't know
nothin'.
"

"Four hours," said Chuck. "We wait for Moxon
that long. If he doesn't show, then we leave. Look, Jeannie, it's
three against one. I know you're the big boss lady, but you can't
do it without the rest of us. And we all think we should wait
for Moxon, right?" He looked at the others, and both Sam and
Michael nodded.

Jean felt fury building up inside her, but
she knew Chuck was right. It was just a feeling she had, nothing
more. Still, she knew Ned Craig was at that tower, and that would
be where they would find him. If they could get there.

She controlled her temper, and didn't push
it. With the chains on the jeep, she felt confident that they could
eventually get to wherever they were going. Trying to be patient,
she once again examined the topographical maps, while Samantha
Rogers roughly jammed a cassette in the VCR and pushed play.

It was a Jim Carrey movie, and for the next ninety
minutes she tried to ignore Sam and Chuck's whoops of laughter, and
moved between the maps and the front window, watching for Larry
Moxon's vehicle, growing more impatient as the darkness fell.

L
arry didn't get
home until 6:30. He had spent most of the morning at Camp Kessler
with the state police, and the rest of the day in the St. Mary's
police station, working with Chief Statler through a voluminous
pile of paper and reports. He was also frequently on the phone with
Harrisburg.

When he had gotten back to St. Mary's with
Statler, one of the deputies told them that Ned Craig had phoned in
with a suspicion that a jeep had followed him out of town. When the
deputy drove out to Goetz's Summit, he had found nothing. "But
Christ," he had said, "by then the wind was blowing the snow so
much I couldn't have seen an eighteen-wheeler stuck."

Larry Moxon wasn't a drinking man, but after
what he had seen the night before and this morning, the only thing
he could think of after leaving the station at 4:30 was going into
the dark confines of Al's Bar and having a stiff one. And when
people asked him what the hell was the real story behind the rumors
they'd been hearing about what had happened out at some camp, he
told them, as bluntly and explicitly as he could.

He wanted them to be frightened, frightened
enough to stay out of the woods. The killers were bad enough, and
the snow was going to be worse. It had already started when he left
the bar at 6:00. As he walked through the flakes to his car, he
thought he left behind him a room full of scared people. At least
he hoped so.

Since he still didn't have much of an
appetite, he had nothing to eat at Al's, and the three CC's he had
imbibed in an hour and a half made him lightheaded. He thought he
could drive home safely, however, and figured that he wouldn't be
going fast enough to cause any real damage if he hit anything. Odds
were he'd just wind up stuck in a drift. He took the drive slow and
steady, angry with himself for having had too much to drink and for
driving when he knew damn well that he shouldn't.

Still, he felt much better now than he had
when he walked into Al's, almost as though he had left behind his
sickness over what had happened at Camp Kessler along with the
vivid descriptions he had given. Or maybe, he thought, it was just
the booze.

It was a good thing that he knew this road so
well. He just put himself on automatic pilot, which felt only
natural, since the whirling snow made it seem as if he were flying
rather than driving. This was a colder snow than yesterday. That
one was wet and heavy, with the temperature hovering just below
freezing. This snow, for all its delicate flakes, was a dry,
serious snow, the kind that could last for days, an arctic snow
that could turn the woods into an icebox, locking roads tight, and
burying forest lanes so that not even the deer would know where
they were.

The Blazer made it up Larry's long, drifted
driveway with no trouble, but when he rounded the corner of his
house, he felt suddenly disoriented at the sight of the jeep there.
At first he thought it might be Ned's, but then his fuzzy mind
remembered that Ned drove a green and white game commission Blazer
just like his own. He was sober enough to know that he had not seen
any tracks on his driveway, and realized that whoever it was must
have been here for some time. He did not yet think that anything
was wrong.

That possibility came to him abruptly when
four people appeared in his headlight's glare. No sooner had he
seen them than they were gone, and he had no time to wonder where.
The door of his Blazer was yanked open, and something grabbed him
and tried to pull him out of the driver's seat. But his seat belt
was fastened, and the shoulder strap cut into his neck.