Lake Country (17 page)

Mike sighed. He turned and looked at Darryl, sitting back there drenched in sweat, paddle resting on his knees. He shook his head. Couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Darryl looked out at the water, somewhere in the vicinity of the spot where Mike had tossed in the gun. “I guess I jammed you up pretty good this time,” he said. “Didn’t I?”

“If I were you right now,” Mike said, “I wouldn’t be worried about me.”

“I didn’t mean to get you in on this.” Darryl looked up from the water. “Probably hard to believe, huh?”

It
was
hard to believe. In fact, Mike didn’t see how it could have been possible. And yet the fact that Darryl seemed to believe it somehow made perfect sense.

“Let me ask you something,” Mike said.

“Okay.”

“How does a trained United States Marine not know how to paddle a damn canoe?”

Silence for a beat. Then: “They kicked me out, remember?”

Mike put the spotlight down between his feet, hauled up the second oar from the bottom of the canoe. “Try to do what I do,” he said, and started paddling.

In a minute they were gliding toward the opposite shore as if pulled in on a rope. Even with the hot throb in Mike’s dislocated knuckle, the work of paddling calmed him. As he focused on his strokes, he felt in control for the first time all day. There was something soothing about being able to make the canoe go in the direction he wanted. The pain in his hand only made the result of his efforts more satisfying.

“Let me ask you something else,” he said over his shoulder.

Darryl said, “Sure.”

“How long have you been planning this?”

Nothing for a few seconds. Then: “
Plan
would be overstating it.”

“Bullshit.”

“Nope.”

“You knew where they lived, man. That architect and his family.”

Darryl didn’t deny it. “Loose scenarios may have crossed my mind.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Can’t say I actually
planned
to do anything ’til I did it.”

As they neared the same cut in the cattails he believed Juliet Benson would have used, Mike transferred the paddle from one side to the other. “So, just out of curiosity,” he said. “When you were coming up with this nonplan of yours. What the hell was your exit strategy?”

“
Strategy
would be overstating it.”

“I’m getting that.”

Darryl’s voice changed pitch. He was looking out
over the water again. “Guess you could say there was a blaze-of-glory component involved.”

Mike steered them through the reeds by the light of the moon. He thought of the .45 Darryl had claimed was unloaded. He tried to remember the weight of it in his hand. He couldn’t decide whether he believed it had been empty or not.

But for the first time the idea came to him, with a chill on his neck and a feathery sensation in his chest, that “exit” hadn’t been part of Darryl’s thinking at all.

At least not the way Mike had meant.

He pulled up his oar and turned in the bow and looked at Darryl. Darryl worked on unsnarling his paddle from the thatch of cattails standing up all around them.

After a minute, Mike said, “And Toby’s money? What was that for?”

Darryl cocked his head as though just now remembering that gym bag he’d stashed under the coffee table at the cabin.

“Well,” he said, “the other thought was, I’ve never been to Canada.”

“Jesus,” Mike said, and he laughed. It felt good, even though nothing was funny in the least. “You really are a head case.”

“Yeah, well,” Darryl said. “Takes one to know one.”

Mike put his oar in the water. He could touch the soft bottom with the paddle now. He poled them toward shore like a gondolier.

Behind him, Darry said, “But there’s a difference between you and me, Mikey.”

“Yeah,” Mike agreed. “One of us knows how to drive this thing.”

He felt a drag then, and the canoe seemed to hang up. He turned to see Darryl with both hands on his oar handle, gaze fixed on the starboard gunwale, forcing the paddle down into the muck three feet below them.

“You told me this thing one time,” Darryl said. “You said the worst dreams you had after you got home were the ones looking down your rifle at somebody.” He raised his eyes. “Always woke up squeezing the trigger, you told me. Remember?”

“I remember,” Mike said.

Darryl nodded and looked off. “What I never told you, Mike?”

Mike waited.

“I had that dream too.” Darryl shrugged. “Only for me it wasn’t a nightmare.”

Mike said nothing.

“And it never has gone away,” Darryl said. “Know what I’m saying?”

For just a moment, Mike didn’t see the Darryl Potter in the canoe with him. Instead, he saw the beat-up Marine leaning over him in the back of a Humvee. In his mind, Mike saw a white smile in a battle-grimed face, and he recognized that face for what it truly had been: the face of a soul at ease. A man in his element, doing a job he’d been cut out to do. Happy.

If he honestly thought about it, Mike couldn’t say that he’d ever seen Darryl look so content with himself anywhere else. And he believed he understood now, all these years down the road, what he’d somehow never understood about Darryl before today:

Darryl Potter hadn’t caught his discharge working mud slides in the Philippines.

He’d gotten it the day the 4/8 shipped home from Iraq. The Marine Corps had taken away his medals and his benefits, but that came only later. And it wasn’t what any of this business with Darryl was about. Not the drugs or the booze. Not the bar brawls. Not the nights in the brig or in plain old jail. Not a gym bag full of Toby Lunden’s cash. And not Juliet Benson either. Not really.

Darryl Potter didn’t need any medals. What he needed was an enemy.

When Mike stayed quiet, Darryl repeated his question. “Know what I’m saying, Mike?”

This time, when Mike looked at him, he had a powerful feeling that it was going to be one of the last times he looked at Darry in a while.

“Not a clue,” he finally said.

Darryl chuckled softly. “Hell,” he said. “Me either.”

Juliet Benson had made it about two klicks into the woods by the time Mike caught up with her. A series of smart decisions had delivered her most of the way to that point, but it had taken only one bad one to do her in, and it struck him with a pang of genuine discouragement that she’d needed his help after all. He felt connected to the girl by then, irrational as it was, and he’d been pulling for her.

Mike started at the stand of sumac where she’d stashed the canoe. It looked like someone had been stabbed to death in the bottom of the thing, the sun-dulled aluminum smeared dramatically in crimson. But the blood tracks dried up at the trail of broken underbrush leading away into the timber, and Mike concluded, with renewed admiration, that she’d found something she could use to wrap her feet.

Whatever she’d used had soaked through a couple hundred meters into the woods, where he began picking up dollops of blood again in the spotlight beam. Before long, the blood signs dried up once more. Mike imagined mud and leaf litter from the forest floor gradually kneading into clammy poultices underfoot, caking her soles like accidental slippers.

At one point, at the edge of a shallow ravine choked with deadfall, where a drainage culvert tunneled under the rock lane and emptied into the timber, he’d lost her trail completely for about an hour. At first he assumed that she’d emerged from the timber and had taken to the lane after all—at least long enough to hop the ravine and be on her way.

But there was no sign of her on either side. After forty minutes of searching the ground, it occurred to him that she could be hiding under his nose, and he used the spotlight to check the inside of the culvert pipe itself. He found nothing but an empty cylinder choked with cobwebs and sludge. It was as if she’d been airlifted out of there.

Then, a hundred paces down the line, he finally found the spot where she’d crossed the washout. And there, within moments of crossing himself, he found the spot where she’d made her mistake.

Why? That was what confounded Mike at first. That she had chosen, in her compromised physical state, to navigate the wicked terrain of the ravine—instead of risking half a minute’s worth of exposure in open ground—was one thing.

But so far she’d kept the moonlit lane on her left for nearly an entire winding kilometer. She’d had it right there, always within sight through the trees, a white ribbon guiding her out of this place. She’d done it just the way Mike would have told her to do it. Just the way he’d have done it himself, if he’d been her.

So why the hell did Juliet Benson decide, here, to turn
away
from the lane and follow the bank of the washout deeper into the woods instead?

She wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t reckless. She wasn’t
tripping along by the seat of her pants. She had a plan, based on every piece of evidence Mike had observed so far, and it seemed like a good one. Up until this very spot she’d been sticking to it.

That was when it came to him, and the answer was so obvious that Mike felt stupid for having to ponder the question at all.

What could have made Juliet Benson deviate from her plan for no good reason he could identify? The same thing that caused a perfectly good Marine to lose focus when tracer rounds suddenly turned a pitch-black sky into screaming neon spaghetti overhead, that was what.

Fear.

Something had scared her, simple as that. Something unexpected had turned her away from the road, disrupted her mission, driven her off route. This time Mike didn’t have to think very hard to guess what that thing had been.

You
, he thought. His stomach sank at the clarity of the logic.
She was running from you
.

From the edge of the ravine, Mike imagined looking through Juliet Benson’s eyes. He imagined the sight of the Power Wagon coming up the lane, headlights strobing across the trees. He could almost hear the rocks crunching under the tires in the distance, the Doppler echo as the truck passed over the empty culvert pipe and rolled on toward the cabin at the end of the road.

Of course she’d been scared.

The girl was tough, all right, but she had to be running on fumes by now. She was hurt, surely cold, probably dehydrated. Possibly hungry. Who knew if
Darryl had given her anything to eat all day? The sight of a strange new vehicle arriving at Rockhaven would have cleared all bets from the board.

Who else might be coming, as far as she knew? Who knew how much farther she could get before they came after her?

At least she could use the ravine as a landmark. She could hide herself down amid the deadfall if it came to that. And the ravine had to lead somewhere. Away from traffic, first and foremost.

Half a click later, the ravine petered out into a gully, then a trench, then a crease, and finally disappeared into a low sprawling bowl of marshy ground.

Mike found her hiding under the root snarl of a fallen pine tree, not more than fifty paces back in the timber, a good bit farther removed from safety than she’d been when she’d started. Though to say that he found her would have been assigning himself more credit than he probably deserved.

The truth was, she’d heard him coming first. She’d seen the spotlight and watched him pass by. She’d watched him come back again, and when he neared her hiding spot, she screamed, “Stay away!”

The shrill bark of her voice in the stillness startled the breath out of him. Mike jumped half out of his skin. He almost dropped the spotlight. If she’d been a land mine he’d have been blown to high heaven. Or somewhere.

“I’ve got a knife,” she called out. Voice trembling. “I’ve got a big-ass knife, and if you come near me I’ll cut you wide open.” Louder: “Don’t you come near me!”

Mike stopped in his tracks, heart pounding in his
neck. The moonlight barely penetrated the timber here, and the darkness felt like a physical presence all around him. He stood for a minute and caught his breath.

“I’ll kill you if I can,” she yelled, a disembodied warning in the gloom. “Do you hear me?”

He triggered the spotlight and swung the beam slowly toward the sound of her voice. In a moment he saw her, a mud-streaked face not twenty paces away, crouched behind the roots like a cornered animal. Her hair hung limp on her scalp, sticking to her face in damp tangles. Her eyes shone in the light, and she squinted against the beam.

She hadn’t been bluffing, Mike saw. She did have a knife. She held it out in front of her, white-knuckling the wooden handle with both hands. The long, thin blade trembled in the air, and Mike identified the weapon immediately by its shape: a six-inch fillet knife. She would have found it in the canoe shed with all the rest of the fishing tackle. Probably in the same place Darryl had found the stringer and the bait bucket he’d used to accessorize her room.

Mike let up on the trigger. The spotlight beam faded slowly as the bulb cooled. Darkness again.

“I’m warning you,” she said. “Stay away.”

But all the bark had gone from her voice. He could hear that she was on the verge of crying.

“Juliet,” he said. As softly as he could and still make himself heard. “My name is Mike. I’m here to take you home.”

Silence.

“Juliet?” He listened. “It’s safe now. Okay? I’m going to get you out of here.”

He heard a ragged breath in the darkness. “Who are you?”

“I’m Mike,” he told her. He thought about lying to calm her down, telling her he was with the police or something. But she wasn’t stupid, only terrified, and it wouldn’t do much for the trust-building effort if she sensed he was lying to her.
Hearts and minds
, he thought, and kept it simple. “I’m a friend.”

“Are you from the white pickup?”

“That’s right,” he said, sounding like something straight out of that sci-fi theater show his roommate at the VA hospital used to watch on television.
My name is Mike, and I come from the white pickup
. “I know you’re hurt. But you don’t need to be scared anymore. Okay?”

For a minute he couldn’t hear anything but the sound of her breathing. Shallow and quick. Mike resisted hitting the spotlight to check on her. He forced himself to stand there and wait until she said, “Mike?”