“I don’t suppose your cellular is still usable?”
“The county wouldn’t okay the waterproof model. My cellular and my gun are both at the bottom of the pond. I needed to ditch
useless weight.”
“Maybe Calvin—”
“Also maybe not,” he said soberly. “Val, let’s forget outside help. We need to pick a route and get moving, while we still
have the darkness to work with and maybe only two men to work against. Obviously we can’t climb Crane Hill back up to the
plateau. How about the pool area? It’s not as high or as steep, and it doesn’t look that far.”
“They’ve made it unclimbable. We could go around by the sixth hole.”
“Too open, too easy to cover. What if we do our climbing well beyond the sixth hole? Farther north, more up toward the seventh.
Looks like there’s a pretty good curve between those holes—no way one pair of eyes could monitor the entire distance. The
residential loop road cuts well over to the west up there, right? We could hit it and work our way either south toward the
Blazer or north toward the gatehouse. They must have a real problem with their gate people at this point: can’t let them come
join the search, can’t tell them to go home. That might be our best chance.”
“Except for the climb up to the course. What they did in that area was sculpt out a bunch of gullies in places where the tree
cover got thin. When you walk the course up there, you’re looking at a low post-and-rail boundary on our side with regularly
posted signs that say something on the order of ‘treacherous slope, keep off.’”
“But is it negotiable?”
“In the dark? I don’t think so.”
“Okay, the slope on around to Crane Hill. It gets steeper as you head west, but it’s not a major climb.” He thought for a
minute, then shook his head in frustration. “I can’t keep track of all the changes they made over in that area. We’d have
to cross the golf course at some point?”
“Any way out of here we’ll be doing that at least once. Over there you’d hit the eighth fairway first. You could skirt around
the green, pick up the approach to the ninth hole, cut across—” I tried to reconstruct the route. “—it would be like a woodsy
shortcut around nine to the golf-cart road heading back to the tunnel. If you cut across that, there’s another woodsy area
between where the carts go and the wall to the plateau access road.”
“Could we parallel the access road on down to Route 5?”
“I believe so.”
“It keeps us on or near the golf course a lot, is the main drawback I see. What if we stay to the north of nine and work our
way down to the highway in that direction?”
“Mother Nature supplied her own gullies over there.”
“Then I think we have to go with this last route. They guess right, they may be able to spot us, but at least it gets us nearer
to a public road and gives us a few options. Okay?”
“Let’s go.”
Neither of us had much to say, walking along. I’m sure Baxter, like me, doubted we’d get out easily. Kyle and Thurman both
knew the terrain better than I did and between them could cover a lot of ground. If we weren’t able to make our way past them
before reinforcements arrived or it got light, we were going to die here.
Big choices, though, that they’d need to be making right now, with so much on the verge of unraveling, and so many ways that
could happen. I decided I would hate to be in their position. Not that I was enchanted with ours.
As we left the valley floor and began to climb, the trees became older and taller. They were white pines mostly, whose branches
had died back up to twenty, thirty feet, making us a vast high-ceilinged room to walk through. Only low-level plants could
grow underneath: sensitive and lady ferns, Solomon’s seal, wood violets, bloodroot, poison ivy. Nothing you had to worry about
tripping over, and the verticals were spaced out enough we could walk side by side.
I kept trying to get a fix on how Baxter was holding up. My entire body felt bruised and the walking wasn’t warming me up
much. He’d be carrying those handicaps, plus a shoulder that had to be hurting like hell. He carefully kept that side away
from me so I couldn’t tell if it had started to bleed from all the jarring. And shouldn’t he be in shock, at least a little?
He was keeping pace, though, and his legs seemed to have as much spring in them as mine did.
He caught me studying him and made a smile. “I hope your sense of direction is holding up. Mine’s already shot.”
“We’re heading mostly west and a little north,” I said without hesitation. I had no anxieties there. However it works, my
ability to orient is secure as long as I have at least a little vision of my surroundings. “At this pace, we shouldn’t be
more than ten minutes, tops, from where we cross the eighth fairway.”
“I want to test it first.”
“You mean like throw something out there, see if anybody notices?”
“That’s relying too much on jittery nerves. If somebody’s there to notice, his move is to sit tight and wait for phase two,
with a good idea where to look. No, I want you to hang back in the woods while I cross. If nothing happens, you come on over.
If I draw fire, you’ve still got options.”
“No way. We could crawl.”
“You could; I can’t. Wouldn’t, anyhow—it’s a damn slow way to move and you make a big block of target if your shooter’s anywhere
in range. Crouch-run, zigzag a little is the better percentage. And I go first, not because I’m a chivalrous male but because
I’m quicker moving than you are and I’ve practiced this kind of thing.”
“Yeah, but have you ever done it for real?”
“Within the hour. When the shooting started up there on the plateau you moved maybe five feet from where you’d been. That’s
probably when they shot your backpack. With the leisure to come looking they could’ve flushed you real fast. I covered a lot
more territory, and then I had to reposition again to give you a safe way over. We go with our strengths, Val. You’re in charge
of getting us to the fairway, I’m in charge of getting us across.”
Period, end of discussion, his tone decreed. Was that right? If he was up to par, probably. With that shoulder, it was difficult
to see how he could manage to do any fancy maneuvering. So before we got there I’d need to decide whether to grab him and
hold him back.
I hadn’t yet made up my mind before it was too late. We both saw it was about to open up ahead. I assumed we’d get to the
verge and at least look both ways before anybody attempted to cross the street. This was not Baxter’s plan. When we were maybe
five feet from the clearing, he took off.
What followed was silence, after a brief interval of which he motioned me on across. “Okay?” he asked, looking pleased with
himself.
“We have enough other people to play games with,” I muttered. “The next one, tell me first.”
“You’ve got it. So now we work our way around the eighth green till we pick up the approach to the ninth hole. With all this
vegetation we’d be lucky to hear a golf cart coming before we can see it, and I doubt they’ll be using running lights. Better
we stick close to the woods than try to make time.”
I sat down, back to one of the trees, and started to remove one of my soggy sneakers. “We’ll also need to do something about
your shoulder. I can see it’s bleeding.”
“Just a little. I’ll be okay.”
The shoe off, I pulled at the heavy tube sock “Do you have a handkerchief in your pocket?”
Deciding I meant business, he extracted one. I got my shoe back on and stood up. “Press the handkerchief over that front hole.”
Not wanting to contemplate sanitation, I looped the sock around and tied it tight. “That’s the best we can do for now. Let’s
go.”
Sticking close to cover did slow us down. It took at least another fifteen minutes to reach the green and pick up the path
toward the ninth hole. After we’d hugged that for what seemed like a very long time, we could see it starting to open out
in the distance, which meant we were far enough along to make the cut across the woods. I told Baxter.
“Okay,” he said, “same drill. Get a couple of trees back before I move.”
“Here?” I asked, complying.
“Fine. I’m off.”
And so, a fraction of a second later, was a shot. Cautiously, I worked my way out to where I could scan the area. Baxter had
dropped, of his own volition or not I couldn’t tell, until suddenly he rolled over to his right. There came a second shot.
Kyle’s voice seemed too conversational to be traveling the distance from where the rifle flash directed me to see him, standing
in the golf cart. “The other one, come out too, please.”
“No, Val!”
“Yes, Val, because if you don’t, I’m going to motor right on up to range for a can’t-miss shot. See?”
Sure enough, the golf cart advanced. After brief hesitation, so did I. But just a little.
“Damn it, Val!” Baxter muttered.
I ignored him. It did seem to be my turn to call the best option, and surely keeping both of ours open was better than putting
an end to his. Though I didn’t immediately see how.
“Why don’t you go over and sit down there, right beside him?”
“I like it here better.”
“That wasn’t a question.”
“Can you hit two separate targets at that range, Kyle? Without giving one of them a chance to get the hell away?”
The cart slowed to a stop, though he didn’t cut the motor. I let out the breath I’d been holding. “Stay where you are, then,
if it makes you happy. I’ll keep you pinned down until Thurman gets over here from the sixth green. That’ll make it one gun
per target.”
I heard the staticky sound of the cart’s intercom, the barked instructions. I’d bought us what—at golf-cart speed maybe ten
minutes, tops? “You made a good guess, about where we’d head.”
“I have a logical mind, just like you. It was hard to tell if we’d done any damage before you went off the wall, or how well
you’d survived the jump. But even if you were still in great shape, all your options for getting out of there sucked. I picked
the one that sucked least and stationed Thurman where he could cover the least unlikely of the other possibilities. It wasn’t
a major challenge.”
Baxter stirred, very slowly, into a sitting position. “That kind of clear-headed thinking, Kyle, how did you ever get into
such a hopeless position in the first place?”
“If my position’s hopeless, what the fuck would you call yours? In the very first place, Thurman and I were off by ourselves
discussing possible repercussions from that damn mudslide Johnny Armitage caused. What it might have exposed. We made sure
we were out of earshot. Normal earshot. But Ryan, with his insatiable urge to spy on people, had invested in one of those
sound enhancers they advertise for hunters and birders.”
“And tuned in on the wrong critters,” I couldn’t resist commenting. “The dumpsite cave is somewhere under the parking lot?”
“Afraid so.”
“The stuff must be leaching out a hell of a lot, then, if you were worrying about the mudslide.”
“There’s been some spread. Nothing we can’t handle. But Ryan understood all too well what would happen if word got out. He
made the mistake of placing a financial value on his understanding.”
“I take it Clete didn’t feel like paying anymore and told you to do something about it?”
“Baxter, I get goddamn tired of people supposing all I’m good for is to take orders from Dad. It was Thurman’s and my problem,
and we solved it.”
“So we see. But you’re not seriously telling me your dad was unaware of the original problem. The toxics that had been dumped
here.”
“He was till he’d bought up most of the land. It was Thurman’s fault we found out then. After all the papers were signed,
Toby Babcock brought us this cardboard box full of mildewed maps and journals and what have you that different members of
the family had kept for God knows how long. Dad thumbed through for like five minutes before he got bored. He’d have trashed
the lot. But Thurman’s into things like that, so he took the box home and found one more ledger about the Albany Univers dumping
than we chose to let survive, officially. He went up to Albany to see what the company’s records looked like and then ran
a bunch of tests. After which he told Dad we shouldn’t build on the plateau— toxins from wood-preservative stuff were leaching
out already, and once we started excavating we’d likely stir up the PCBs in the plastics plant waste, too.”
“But Clete elected to ignore him.”
“Dad knew Hudson Heights would be just another golf course development without the plateau. And he does not ignore problems,
Val, he works around them.”
“By creating the world’s thickest elevated parking lot?”
“Could you have come up with a more effective roof? We built out to make ourselves a buffer zone on the slopes and routed
all drainage down to the quarry pond area, where no one ever went, until tonight. The few minor problems that emerged we handled
as they came along. Nobody suspected a thing.”
I picked up the soft purr of another golf cart approaching. “You disposed of the problem ledger. Also some of Albany Univers’s
records, am I right?”
“Thurman eliminated as many references as he dared. For those people around here who remembered the dumping, we could volunteer
the remaining records and substantiate them. Dad decided it would fly, so he went for it.”
The other cart had drawn just about abreast with Kyle’s.
“Even knowing those toxics would be an ongoing problem?” I asked.
Kyle started his cart forward again; Thurman’s briefly lagged, then kept pace. “For crissake, they’re not hurting anyone!
Apparently there’s no way to stop the leaching entirely, but things are under control. Nothing’s in jeopardy except a few
damn plants.”
“The real point is, Val,” Thurman broke in, “and you know this as well as I do, once people find out there are hazardous wastes
buried under the plateau they won’t come anywhere near it. It wouldn’t do any good to point out that I’ve never measured a
PCB level high enough to hurt anything, or that the chromated copper arsenate contamination has showed a steady reduction.
It’s that same sort of irrational fear you invoke when you use the word nuclear. Stupid, but very real. I know a woman with
a Ph.D. who had to drive from Newark to Akron shortly after the Three Mile Island accident. She detoured around the entire
state of Pennsylvania.”