"Not that way. Take your clothes off."
"I'm cold."
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He didn't believe her, but he wouldn't argue with her. "Take your damned clothes off and do it for me—just for me this time."
She slipped out of her jeans and shirt and waited for him to tell her what to do, pretending that she had forgotten.
"You need music, don't you? I'll hum it for you so you can shake it up." He hummed "The Steel Guitar Rag" and beat a stick against the log with his good hand to give her the rhythm. "Dance."
But she only shuffled her feet and her hands covered her breasts.
"Let me see them. You sure as hell showed them to everybody else. Roll them like you used to, and wiggle your ass. Come on now. Da da-da ddh. Da da-da-da dah!"
She seemed to get it then, slipping back into the old nasty bumps and grinds, thrusting her pussy at him and then snapping it back.
"Roll them."
"Roll what?"
"Your tits. They're standing up real nice. Roll them for me."
She jiggled and bounced them, but she wouldn't roll them the way she once had, making them seem as if they were alive. She was deliberately holding back and it made him angry.
He sang faster, beat the rhythm faster, and she whirled and stomped, but she had grown clumsy, or more likely, she was being deliberately clumsy. She wanted the whole damned bunch of rubes out there, panting and clapping for her. He wasn't enough. His tentative hard-on shrunk, reversed by his rage.
"How many of those cops did you sleep with, you filthy cunt?"
She stopped moving and covered herself with her arms. What?"
All those horny cops back there in town. You slept with 1 of them, didn't you? The young ones, and the fat ones, "Tuen the tall one—the old one, that Sam—didn't you?" he's ugly. Don't say that."
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"You did, didn't you?"
"I only slept with my husband. You know that. I only slept with you."
"Liar. Put your clothes on. I don't want to see you dance any longer. You make me want to puke."
She cried and cried, long after the sun was gone. She begged him for forgiveness, and a long time later he let her creep next to him, although he lay rigid and unbending while she tried to fit herself into the spaces around his body.
"I love you. You know I love you. I don't know what I did that made you angry."
There would be no more nights, and only part of tomorrow. His arm was dead already. He could feel the infection where it crept into his chest and the nodes of his neck. She had drained him, well-nigh killed him, and he would be almost relieved to be rid of her.
The control he had left, the only choice that remained to him, was to pick which hour of the day he would destroy her. He thought that he might go with her this time and disappear from the treacherous sun that promised life and gave no life. They could fall together into the black void that had to be traversed before they could begin again.
29 \
Sam found Ling an undemanding teacher. Like most men of special skill, Ling required perfection of himself, but he was confident enough of his own ability that he had no need to criticize other men. Sam could sense a certain impatience when he bumbled, but that was quickly quelled. And he realized that it was his own inner screaming to make haste that caused him to plunge ahead too rapidly. He had managed to keep a fragile lid over his anxiety for days, simply because there had been so many steps to take and so many miles to retrace before he could expect to find Joanne.
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-•••mai,
Now that they were relatively close, with the possibility of coming upon her with each turn along the trail, the shackled foreboding had broken free. He remembered all the searches of his life where discovery had been barely—but effectively—too late. Children crumpled in abandoned refrigerators with air only just exhausted. Old men who had lain too long under bushes and died a scant fifty feet from busy thoroughfares; old women in sad little rooms who could not call for help while their hearts beat more and more faintly. Young women, their veins full of killing dope. All of them salvageable—if someone had come in time. He could not remember his rescues; he wondered if there had been any rescues, and recalled only those he had lost. In retrospect, it was clear that he should have found them, and he had not.
"Patience. Patience," Ling was muttering at him. "You must allow your conscious mind to focus clearly on what your eyes already see."
"But how the fuck do I know what's right and what's not?"
"O.K. Start with what you are trained to look for— cigarette butts, paper, buttons, old shoelaces, anything that people throw away or that falls off of them. That should be easier up here because this is wild land. They blocked this whole area off to hikers during the search, so nobody's gone beyond those blue streamers except the ones we're looking for. If they dropped something, it will be fresh. Right?"
"Right, I guess."
"That's fifty dollars extra a day, dep."
"O.K. Dammit. Right. Right. Right. You are all-seeing and all-knowing, you little bastard."
"So we look for little pieces of them."
"You could phrase it a little better, Ling. But I take your meaning."
"After that, we look for what the mountain shows us, where twigs are snapped, where leaves are crushed, where grass is flattened . . ."
'How are we going to know if it's been people or animals?"
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"If it was deer or goats, you can hardly see where they've been—their hooves are cleft; they don't smash the way-humans do." He walked along a sandy spot of trail and then into the brush, demonstrating. "Look now. See the positives? See those little segments of prints where you can spot where you cut my boot? See the angle where the buck brush gave and didn't quite snap back up? We're going to be working this in no more than fifteen foot segments. If you go more than fifteen feet and you don't see a positive, you've lost it, and you back up and hit it again."
"Fifteen feet! They're miles ahead of us!"
"Fifteen feet at a time, but if we work it well, we can do it at a trot."
"You trot—I'll walk."
"Make up your mind." Ling grinned. "You're not as stove-in as you pretend, dep. You've even got roses in your cheeks. When we get going, you're going to cut—you're going ahead, and I'll be behind you with my nose in the ground and my ass to heaven. When we run out of positives, that will mean we've either lost them or we've got them boxed in. Now, leave me for a couple of minutes. I need to meditate."
Ling turned his face up to the sun and closed his eyes, as if he was drawing from some psychic source, pulling something from the air that was completely incomprehensible to Sam.
What the hell.
The climb was rugged and Sam envied Ling his close-to-the-ground construction, the low center of gravity that let him climb so easily, and yet his own endurance seemed to have extended itself, and he experienced little of the fatigue and muscle ache he'd noticed before. He didn't deserve it; he had treated his body as a vessel to be filled with poison: booze and cigarettes. But the booze was gone; Ling allowed him little time to smoke and made him eat.
They were rewarded early on with many signs, so many that the task ahead seemed child's play. The green plaid shirt, its front full of old blood, lay scarcely hidden between
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two rocks on the way up. Sam folded it carefully and dropped it into an empty pocket of his pack.
The cigarette butt and the crumpled wrapper from a protein bar marked the summit for them, and they slid down and down again through the pines and larch forest. Ling shouted to him regularly as he sign-cut, finding something here—and here—and here that validated their direction. The meadow itself confirmed the presence, only recently, of more than one person. Wrappings and food packages rested there where the wind had tossed them against a circle of rocks, dried-food pouches, bandages—which made Sam's heart beat faster, although these blood stains seemed not to indicate serious hemorrhage. The ash of the camp-fires was deep; many fires had been built on the coals of previous fires.
He turned to Ling. "They were here for days."
"A long time. They might still be here."
They looked into the blank circle of woods ahead and saw nothing. Sam felt exposed, wished that Ling wasn't such a purist about weapons, and his skin erupted with goose pimples. He looked quickly around, framing consecutive sections of forest in his vision, and still saw no movement beyond wind ripple.
Something bright caught the sun. Probably mica embedded in the boulders or fool's gold. He gazed into the rocks' joining.
"What is it?" Ling said.
"I don't know. Something. Beer tab maybe." The ring came out of the stone crevice in his reaching hand, the limp daisies still trapped in its circle, and he stared at it, amazed. It was Joanne's; it was the diminutive of the other ring that rested in his shirt pocket along with Danny's watch, forgotten since the moment Moutscher had given them to him. Ling walked over and studied the gold band and the dead flowers.
"Hers?"
"Yeah. Just like his." Sam fished the bigger ring from his Pocket and set it beside Joanne's, wondering heavily why he
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should be in this lost place holding two wedding rings not his. "She must have left it as a marker to let someone know that she was here."
Ling held the flowers in his hand, studying them.
"How long?" Sam asked. "How long?"
"They were picked—maybe three, four days ago. Not longer. Whoever picked them isn't here now, and hasn't been since last weekend. Sam, they could be to hell and gone or to Spokane by now."
"What does your gut tell you?"
"Give me the rings. Let me hold them."
Sam dropped them into Ling's open palm and watched the tracker close his fingers over them, slow his breathing, and disappear someplace into his head. Minutes later, Ling handed the rings back.
"So?"
"His ring is cold—but we know that. Hers is still warm, and she's not far away. Not close, but between here and where the trees end before the highway. And . . ."
"What?"
Ling was silent.
"Say it anyway."
Ling looked into the woods until he spotted the trail. He shouldered his pack. "Her ring is getting cold, and I didn't want to hold it any longer because it made me sick. She's in trouble."
The positives were hard to find, but Ling found them. When they broke out of the trees and into the avalanche slopes, it was still early afternoon. True to his word, the copter pilot found them, circling low until Max waved his arms and signaled with thumb and forefinger. The bird slid sideways along its air channel and disappeared over the woods behind them.
Full dark trapped them at Fireweed Camp. Sam paced the campsite, filled with tension that had no energy behind it. Ling left him alone. It was a drab camp, offering nothing beyond water and wood for their fire.
After a supper of jerky and hardtack, Ling fell asleep at
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once and left Sam gazing into the fire for what seemed like hours. He tried to calculate what day it was, or even what time. There were no days in the wilderness and no time except for day and night. When he could fight it no longer, he slept so solidly that he did not hear Ling's snores or the fire crackling—or even the cougar screams that began an hour after midnight and continued until dawn.
The two men headed out while the sky was still gentian, only slightly streaked with pink, and Sam found Ling strangely subdued as he moved ahead, hurrying more than he had before, but still marking positive signs.
The boot markings that had become familiar appeared on the trail with regularity, and Max Ling turned onto the Stiletto Trail with no hesitation at all. Neither of them spoke. They made the ridge beyond the rock cairns and Max pointed to a pile of feces.
"Cougar."
When Sam's voice finally broke free, it was gravelly. "They attack?"
Ling shook his head. "Naw. Old-time stories about cougars carrying off babies. Never found one that wasn't a made-up scare yarn." He lowered himself onto the rough trail. "Used to be an old look-out here. Burned or blew away, or both. Sam ..."
"Yeah?" He reached automatically for a cigarette.
"Don't smoke."
"Why?"
"We're close to whatever we're looking for. There were two people going in. Then there are prints of one person— big boots—going out, going in again. But he didn't come all the way out, and she didn't come out at all."
Sam's blood slowed down. He reached for a smoke again, and remembered he could not light it. His hand stayed still in front of him. "What does that mean?"
"I don't know. They're probably still in there."
'Then let's go."
The worst was she was dead, lying ahead of them in some arther meadow. At least he would know. The best? She was
lve—injured perhaps, captive possibly—probably—held
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by a faceless man who'd worn a bloody green shirt, who was strong enough to tear Danny's arm from its socket, whose boot print measured fourteen inches. He was a cop and he always expected the worst. Danny was dead. He'd known that all along. And Joanne's body was probably waiting for them now.
Ling moved in a crouched trot along a fresh field of green, and Sam tried to bend his own length into a semblance of the Indian's stealth. He did not want to see her body; seeing Danny had been enough. He held his breath unconsciously, fe. ring the sickly sweet odor that would soon rise up and meet them.
Ling dropped to his belly, and they both crawled then to the stone notch where the larch trees gave a measure of concealment. Then Max looked down onto the plateau below and grunted with astonishment.
"What is it?"
The tracker grunted again, and Sam could make nothing of it. Ling's left hand moved along the ground, signaling Sam to slide up next to him. The last three feet of their search seemed to take him longer than all the rest of it.
He saw, and looked away, stung with a mixture of shock, embarrassment, and disappointment that they had followed the wrong trail, stalked—not Joanne and her captor, but the naked lovers below. Ling had taken him on a wild-goose chase, tracked the wrong quarry.