Six
I STILL HADN'T HEARD FROM BOOKMAN, and I was trying to come up with another way to find out where the Russians were staying when he called me the next morning. "Talk to Chris Johnson," he said. "He's an Indian, lives up on the Passamaquoddy Reservation near Grand Lake Stream."
"You think he can find these guys?"
"He knows everything that goes on up there, and if he doesn't, he'll know how to find out. You're gonna have to hire him. Be better for you if you didn't mention my name."
"He don't like you?"
"Hahd to believe, isn't it? We may have worked at cross-purposes in the past, but it's authority he doesn't like, not me personally. Nice enough young fella, for all of that. He's a guide, takes rich people from Noo Yawk fishing and hunting. Gets a hundred a day, they tell me."
"How do I find him?"
"He don't have no phone, I don't think. Take a ride on up there, stop in the tackle store and ask. They're the ones that do his bookings, so they should know where he is."
"Thanks, Bookman."
"Just you remember what I said: no dead Rooskies in my county."
"I'll dump 'em up in Aroostook."
Bookman exploded. "Goddammit, Manny! I already got one dead man on my hands. I don't want any more problems than I already have. You better not be more trouble than you're worth."
"Don't worry, Bookman, I ain't a violent person. Who's the dead guy?"
"That stupid kid we picked up with the OxyContins. Last night he aspirated his own vomit and choked to death."
"Jesus."
"He was a good kid, once upon a time. Now he's dead, and whoever the bastard is, bringing that shit over, he can keep right on doing it."
"I don't know, man. There's not a lot of people up here. Somebody's bound to know who your guy is. Maybe this will piss them off enough to give you a name."
"I keep telling myself that. Remember what I said about them goddam Russians." He hung up.
I asked Eleanor if she would watch Nicky for me. "I'm embarrassed, how much he's with you and how little he's with me."
She patted my hand and smiled. "I don't think you realize how lucky you are, Manny."
"Well, I didn't want to just assume
"
She shook her head. "Your son is a joy."
Then I went and asked Nicky if he minded staying with her. I guess I was trying to treat him like an adult. I didn't know how you were supposed to treat kids. He took it seriously, too. "You're coming back, right?"
"Course I'm coming back."
He nodded gravely. "Can I come with you next time?"
"This is not a trip for fun. I have to go take care of some things. Anytime I go somewhere for fun, I'll take you with me. Okay?"
"Okay."
"In the meantime, you promise to mind Mrs. Avery?"
"Yep."
"You'll do what she tells you to do?"
"Yep."
He followed me up the stairs, stayed close to me while I grabbed a few things out of one of my duffel bags, and he followed me back downstairs again. God, I felt rotten. Every time I left him with someone I felt worse than the last time. He gave me a hug before I left, and that made it even harder. I had to get out of there before I started blubbering. Jesus. What I needed was to find a safe place to be with my kid, where he would have a chance to grow up and be normalI realized it as I drove the Subaru down Louis's driveway. It was Mohammed's fault, it was that fucking guy from Brooklyn. I promised myself, if I ever got loose of him and his business, I would never go back.
* * *
There was a store in Grand Lake Stream that sold, among other things, bait and tackle. I myself have never been fishing. You can buy a fish in a store if you want one, or order it cooked already in a restaurant, am I right? The guy had lots of gear for sale in the place, though, rods and reels and flies and special clothes, all sorts of crap. Sometimes I think accessorizing is the real point of any sport. There was no point to my fascination with birds, either, it was never gonna make me any money, and every time I hear about a new gizmo, a new scope or better binoculars or another book, you know I gotta have it.
I picked out a bucket hat, one of those stupid-looking things that fishermen wear, got a brim going all the way around to keep the sun off you, and I took it up to the register. The guy behind the counter was the only other person in the place, and he was watching some celebrity news show on a small television. "Find everything you were looking for?"
"Actually I'm looking for a guy, name of Chris Johnson. I was told he's the best guide around here."
"He's very good," the guy told me, "but you're out of luck. He's up the Allagash, taking some naychah photographahs to see the river."
"Damn. I got lousy timing."
"I can fix you up with another guide, if you want."
"Chris came highly recommended." It wasn't fish or deer I was after. I would have to talk to Bookman. I couldn't just take some guy at random.
"Well," the guy said. "He's been gone 'bout ten days, I imagine he'll be back fairly soon. Why don't you go ask his mother? She would prolly know bettah than me."
"You know her phone number?"
"She don't have a phone, but she lives right up the road." I paid for my hat, wrote down the directions to Chris Johnson's mother's house.
* * *
She had some serious pine trees around her house. Who knew those things got so freaking huge? Some of the branches seemed so large and so high, if one broke off in a storm it would crush her house like an egg crate. The house itself was very small, and under the corners you could see the cement blocks that held it up off the ground. It was green, with a reddish brown roof, more what you would call a cabin than a house. It had a deck at one end, gas grill in the corner. There was a carpet of pale brown pine needles everywhere, on the roof, the yard, and the deck. I parked the Subaru out front and knocked on the door.
The lady who answered was a short, broad, roundish woman, brown skin and eyes, black hair pulled back from her face in a bun. She looked vaguely Oriental to me. "Hi," she said. "If you're selling something, I'm too broke to even pay attention."
She had a soft voice, and her accent was different from the ones I had been hearing. "I'm no salesman. I'm looking for Chris Johnson."
"He isn't here," she said. "Come on inside and I'll take down your information so he can get back to you." She stood holding the door open. The central room was the living room, dining room, and kitchen. The walls were knotty pine, and the floor was linoleum with an oval rag rug. It felt like a comfortable place. I took the seat she offered me at her kitchen table. "Are you trying to arrange a fishing trip?"
I hadn't bothered to think of a scam to run on her, and I couldn't think of one now. "Not exactly." She took a seat across from me and waited. "You know Taylor Bookman?"
She nodded. "Sure."
"He told me to ask for your son."
"Didn't think you looked like a rich white man after a trout."
"There are two guys up here somewhere," I told her. "Two Russians, gangsters from Brooklyn. I've got something they want, and I can't let them have it. Plus, I think they're holding a friend of mine against his will. They were staying in a motel down in Calais, but they moved. They're supposed to be in a cabin near here, but I don't know more than that."
"Why don't you go to the police? Won't they help you?"
"I haven't had much luck with the police in the past." That was sure as hell the truth. "I think I need to find out more information before I involve cops."
The expression on her face never changed, but her voice did, just a little bit. "Did Taylor Bookman tell you that my son could help you do something to these men?"
I shook my head. "Not my style. No, what I'd like to do is see if there's some way I could steal my friend away from them, let them think he got loose on his own. That way, they'd have to go chase him and leave me alone."
"A coyote," she said, "and not a wolf. Nothing wrong with that, I guess. Well, Chris won't be home until next week. I tell you what, if you pay me his day rate, I'll help you find them, but if you do something bad, I'll help Bookman find you. Deal?"
"Bookman was the one who sent me here to begin with." She waited, said nothing. "Deal," I said.
"Okay," she said. "First I'll have to make a few phone calls, just to find out where they are. Do you have some quarters for the pay phone?"
"I got a cell phone in the car."
"You get a signal up here?" She sounded surprised.
"It comes and goes. We might need to stand outside."
"All right," she said.
We went out to the Subaru. I had my binoculars and a
Stokes Field Guide
on the front seat. "Coyote," she said. "Are you a birder?"
"I'm just learning," I told her. I figured out what it was about her speech, she used the proper words and diction and all that, but she did it like a person who has learned English as a second language. No slang at all, and no street, but there was the vague presence of another tongue underneath it all, another world, another life.
She picked up the glasses and scanned the woods around her house. "Aren't we all," she said. "Where's your notebook? Did you get a grosbeak yet?"
"I don't have a notebook. Where do you see a grosbeak?"
"You have to have a notebook. You need to know the date, the time of day, was it raining, was the bird in flight, what color were the primaries, how about the secondaries and coverts? What color were the feet, and the beak? You can't remember all that." She handed me the glasses. "Right over there in those alders. Three feet off the ground on a branch, black head and back, red throat, white belly. Male rose-breasted grosbeak."
I found him, half hidden in the brush. "God, he's beautiful." I handed the glasses back to her. "You are really good."
She shook her head. "This is my home ground. I saw him at one of the feeders out back. I knew he had to be around here somewhere. Did you find that phone?"
I came reluctantly back to the real world. "Yeah, I got it."
She leaned her butt on the hood and made a series of phone calls. She could have been calling her grandmother in Texas for all I knew, because while she would greet in English whoever answered"Hello, Willie," she said to the first onethe rest of the conversation was in what I assumed was her native tongue. When she was done she shut the phone off and handed it back to me. "Handy little gadget," she said. "Well, Coyote, I've got good news and bad news. The good news is, I know where they're staying. The bad news is, it won't be easy for you to get close. Get in, I'll show you the place."
We took off. She leafed through my field guide while I drove, following her directions. She hardly looked out the window. She reminded me of Hobart, in the way she seemed to be of this place. I wondered what that must be like, to have some special part of the world where you belonged. "So tell me," I asked her. "You live up here your whole life?"
"No," she said. "I used to live in Queens, back before my husband got killed."
I almost drove off the road. "No shit! Queens?"
She smiled then, but I could tell from the look in her eyes that she was evaluating me. "Do you think I'm like a tree, planted up here?"
"Hey, I didn't mean nothing, I'm just surprised, that's all. What made you pick a place like Queens?"
"My husband was a steelworker. We moved down to the city so he could find work. We thought we could save up some money. Get ahead."
"What happened?"
"One night on his way home from work, someone pushed him in front of the subway train. Take the left up past that gas station."
"Jesus. I'm sorry to hear that."
She shrugged. "Are you religious, Coyote?"
"No."
"Neither am I, but it would be nice if one of them was right, though, wouldn't it? Left again, right up ahead there."
* * *
It was about a half hour's ride from her house. "Pull over here." We were on a narrow two-lane road, forest on one side, fields on the other, sloping gently away from us. There didn't seem to be a farmer attached to the fields, they were pastures with no cows, growing tall yellow grasses that swayed with the rhythm of the morning breeze. More of those rock walls. In the field closest to us there was an iron farming implement of some kind rusting away, looked like something you'd tow behind a horse or a tractor to scrape the dirt into rows. A pair of ruts in the grass ran down the edge of the field next to a rock wall, leading down toward a narrow lake that was maybe three quarters of a mile away. "Down there," she said. "There's a cabin on the far side. That little road you're looking at is the only way in. I don't think you could get in there without them seeing you. There isn't even anyplace you could hide this little truck and walk in."