And then the Dump Road rush hour was over. I listened to Sophie breathing, Roxanne turning over, easing back to sleep. Sophie kicked me in the hip, said something in her sleep, and then she was quiet.
I was starting to doze off when I heard it. A car or truck rolling slowly past the house, engine idling. And then it stopped, the motor purring softly. I was awake now, heard another vehicle roll up. It stopped. The motor idled.
I got up and pulled on my jeans and shirt and socks, went to the closet and slipped the Glock off the shelf. I padded past the bed, reached down and snagged my boots. I put the boots and gun on in the kitchen, grabbed a black jacket and knit hat off the hooks, and eased out of the door and through the shed.
The wooden door creaked on its rollers. I stepped outside and the snow crunched under my boot. I froze. I waited for my eyes and ears to adjust.
The sound of idling vehicles was coming from somewhere between my place and Clair’s. I walked down the drive and then cut in along the line of spruce and fir. Eased up to the edge of the road and looked right.
There were two of them, dark SUVs parked back to back, lights out. I took a step, then another, creeping toward them against the black backdrop of the trees. There was movement and I froze. Peered into the darkness. There were two figures in the closest SUV, unknown number in the other. Gun held low against my leg, I was about to take another step when two doors popped open. The rear vehicle. Two more, the one in front.
Four figures materialized, equipment creaking and clinking.
Cops.
I slipped the gun back under my jacket.
They gathered in a clump and then one of them said, “Let’s go,” and they did, walking two by two toward Clair’s house. I heard the snap of a slide, a cartridge being dropped into a chamber. They receded into the darkness and I followed slowly, passing the still-idling SUVs, hearing the soft hiss of police radios.
And then there was the sound of boots running on snow-covered pavement, pounding on a door.
“US marshals,” a man’s voice shouted. “Open the door.”
Marta.
They called twice more and then there were voices, lower. I heard Clair say, “Do what you have to do,” and then they were inside. I walked slowly along the edge of the trees, saw one of them posted out front, the other presumably watching the back in case Marta went out a window.
They were too late. Marta had left at 4:08.
A sound behind me. I turned as a flashlight beam blinded me, a guy said, “Hands on top of your head.”
The cop from the rear of the house had circled back.
I put my hands on my head, said, “I’m a neighbor. I came out to see what was going on.”
He was a wiry guy with a glint in his eyes that said he loved the chase. His partner approached, too, gun out, pointed at my chest. They both had on flak vests with U.S. MARSHAL in white letters. The first guy said, “Keep your hands right there, sir,” and he reached in and patted me down.
He ripped my jacket open and yanked out the Glock.
“You expecting trouble?” the other marshal said.
“If it comes, it’s usually about this time,” I said.
“What’s your name?”
I told them. If it rang a bell, they didn’t let on.
“Where do you live?” the second cop said. He was older, the spokesman.
I told him that, too. Said my wife and daughter were asleep in the house.
“What’s her name?”
“Roxanne.”
“Your daughter?”
“Sophie.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“About fifteen years.”
“So you know your neighbor, Mr. Varney?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Know a woman named Marta Kovac?”
“Yes,” I said, “but not as well.”
26
k
We stood with them in Clair’s kitchen: me, Clair, and Mary. He was dressed. She was in pajamas and slippers and a pale blue fleece jacket. The other cops had us marshal on the backs of their jackets in big letters, too. In the cozy kitchen, it seemed like overkill.
One of them was a woman—Latina, short hair, strong like she did CrossFit. Her name was Ruiz and she was a deputy US marshal in charge of this fugitive task force team, she said. She had a phone in her hand, and she asked if we minded if she recorded the conversation.
We shook our heads.
“Marta Kovac was here at the residence,” she said.
“Yes,” Clair said.
“When did you last see her?”
“When we went to bed. Around ten.”
“Did you hear her leave the house?”
I looked at Clair. He could hear a crow’s wing flap, a fox yipping on the ridge a mile away, a hummingbird approaching the feeder.
“No,” he said.
“But she had a vehicle?”
“Yes.”
“Where was it parked?”
“Behind the house.”
“Could you describe the vehicle for us, Mr. Varney.”
“An orangish, brownish SUV sort of thing,” Clair said. “Foreign, I think, but maybe not. They all kind of look the same.”
“You don’t know the make or model? The plate number?”
He shook his head.
“How do you know Ms. Kovac?” Ruiz said.
“Met her a couple of times. She’s an old friend of a friend of ours. Louis Longfellow. He lives in Sanctuary. That’s about twenty miles south of here. Just east of Union.”
“An old friend, but you only met her twice?”
“She’s his friend, not mine. From high school. She just came up to visit us here.”
“Why?”
“She said the woods where Louis lives were making her nervous. She’s a city girl, was my impression.”
Ruiz looked to me.
“When did you first see her?”
“A couple of days ago,” I said.
“Did she tell you where she was living before she came to Maine?”
“Some island in the Caribbean. I didn’t catch the name. Didn’t mean anything to me. She said her boyfriend was killed in a home invasion.”
They exchanged glances.
“Did she say where she might go from here?”
Clair shook his head. Ruiz looked at me and I shook my head, too.
Mary said, “Are you sure you don’t want coffee? It’s no trouble.”
Ruiz declined for the team. And then she asked Clair, “Was Ms. Kovac carrying anything? On her person or in the vehicle?”
“Like what?” Clair said.
“Let’s say something like a sizable amount of cash.”
Clair glanced at me, shrugged.
“Not on her person, that I could tell. She was pretty slim, you could see that. You know how they wear those legging things and tight tops now. I never was in her car, so I can’t say.”
Ruiz looked at me. The other three did, too.
“She had a small bag when we saw her at Louis’s place,” I said. “I assumed it was her clothes.”
Ruiz nodded to the kid and he took my gun from his jacket pocket and handed it to me, butt first. Then he handed me the magazine. Ruiz reached in her back pocket, took out a couple of cards, and handed them to both of us. They had her name and contacts and the Marshals Service seal.
“If you think of where she may have gone,” she said.
“What’s she supposed to have done?” I said.
“Let’s just say that people down in the Caribbean want to talk to her. She was at the scene of a crime and fled before she could be questioned.”
“A person of interest, then,” I said.
“Yes. A person of a lot of interest,” Ruiz said. “
Or we wouldn’t be here.”
They left with much clomping of boots and creaking of equipment.
Mary said, “Marta seems like a nice girl. I hope she hasn’t gotten in with the wrong crowd.” And then she said she was going back to bed, and did.
I looked at Clair.
“It’s an Audi Q7 with Vermont plates,” I said.
“Right,” he said.
“As of a couple of days ago, she had a couple of million in cash in the back.”
“Yup.”
“Some of the time she was packing a handgun.”
“Some of the time,” Clair said.
I waited.
“What can I say?” he said. “Louis asked me to look out for her.”
I was up when Sophie came scampering down the stairs.
“Morning, sweetness,” I said, but she ran past me to the kitchen counter and hoisted herself up.
“They’re still there,” she said, looking at the platter of cookies.
“Where did you think they would go?”
“I thought you’d eat them,” Sophie said. “Where did you go? I heard you go outside in the middle of the night.”
“Actually, it was morning.”
“Where did you go?”
“There were some people outside I needed to talk to.”
“Who were they?”
“Just some police officers,” I said.
“What did they want?” Sophie said.
“They were looking for somebody.”
“Did they find him?”
“No,” I said. “They didn’t.”
“Is he hiding in the woods?”
“No,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“I checked,” I said. “Don’t you worry.”
Roxanne came down a minute later and started the coffee. Watching her move—nightshirt, black Patagonia, bare feet—made me feel human again. I made Sophie two pieces of peanut-butter toast. Cut up a banana and arranged the slices around the edge of the plate. She picked up a slice of toast and licked at the peanut butter. Moved her chair so she could see the cookies, then looked at me.
“I won’t eat them,” I said.
I had another cup of tea. Roxanne drank her coffee and looked at the news on her laptop. I’d read the Riverport Broadcast, the front-page story about Teak’s first court appearance that morning at ten. There was a blurry photo of him with his long hair disheveled, standing on a downtown street. I turned the paper over because of Sophie, but she didn’t seem to notice the newspaper at all.
She snatched a slice of banana and ate it, chomped a piece of toast. Then she slid down and ran for the stairs. Roxanne came over to the table and sat.
“Well?” she said.
“US marshals,” I said. “Looking for Marta.”
“Did they find her?”
“She’d left.”
“At what time?”
“A few minutes after four.”
Roxanne sipped her coffee, closed her laptop, and said, “Where are they now?”
“I don’t know. Tracking down the next lead? Trying to locate her car?”
“Where is she?”
“No idea. Gone.”
Roxanne said, “When I was a kid we played hide-and-seek. I always waited for the seeker to search a place and when they’d moved on, that’s where I’d hide.”
I smiled.
“You’d make a good fugitive.”
She drank some coffee, reached over and picked a banana slice off of Sophie’s plate. Ate it and took another. Ate that one, too.
“Where are you going today?” she said.
“Back up to Riverport. A few stops for this story.”
“We’ll be home at three-thirty,” Roxanne said.
“I’ll be here,” I said.
We left together at 7:25, Roxanne’s Subaru in the lead, Sophie in the backseat. It was crisp and dry, full sun from the eastern sky, snow glittering in the trees. At the main road, they turned right. I beeped and Sophie turned around and waved. With a pang I went left.
Hide-and-seek.
I drove west to Unity, caught the Riverport Road, joined a line of cars trailing a slow-moving pickup. I pictured an old couple headed up to Riverport to do some shopping. No hurry. Dunkin’. Walmart. Home Department and home.
The lucky ones.
Even at this speed I’d be there by 8:45. I figured I’d go to the arraignment early, get the lay of the land, snag his court-appointed lawyer for comment. Still a half-hour to kill.
I drove past fields, woods, frozen bogs with black streams showing like giant snakes. Muskrats and beavers holed up for the winter. Then the truck-stop fringes of Riverport began to show, and I took the first exit and a left, headed up the south end of Main Street. There were gas stations, used-car lots, storefront businesses, some still surviving, some with windows boarded up like coffins. I passed the city’s only casino, drove another mile and slowed, watched the street numbers dwindle, waited for the sign for River City Comic Cave. Spotted it, hand-painted and peeling, and pulled over.
I parked across the street, got out, and crossed to the door. There were superheroes arranged in the window—faded posters, dusty action figures frozen in midflight. I tried the door and it was locked. I cupped my hands around my temples, felt the bruise from Mutt and friends, peered in.
Someone was moving, toward the back. I knocked on the glass. The figure disappeared. I knocked again, louder. I heard a man’s voice, then the figure reappeared and he started toward me.
From the other side of the door he said, “Fifteen minutes.”
I held up my New York Times ID like a badge.
He flipped the deadbolt, then turned his back and walked away. I opened the door and a bell jingled over my head. I stepped in and it smelled musty, like a box full of damp books.
By the time I got to him he was standing behind a tall counter like Scrooge in the counting house. He was sixty, maybe, big but chubby, wearing a T-shirt with a faded image of Captain America. His khaki trousers were cinched tight just underneath a roll of flab. His hair was thinning and streaked with gray, pulled back into a ponytail. He had both hands on the counter as he said, “I figured one of you would find me eventually.”
I introduced myself.
“Thought you were a cop.”
“Common mistake,” I said. “What’s your name?”
He hesitated.
“Reggie,” he said.
“Reggie what?”
“Just Reggie.”
“Like Madonna?” I said.
“And Bono,” he said.
I took out my notebook. Wrote “Reggie” in big letters and looked up and said, “So you know him.”
He nodded.
“A frequent customer?”
“Only shop in town. People go to the Internet now, but you don’t get the same—”
He gestured toward the poster-covered walls. Wonder Woman was soaring just behind his head.
“Atmosphere?” I said.
“Community,” he said.
“Right.”
I wrote that down. Community.
“Teak reads all of this?”
“Devours it. Thor, Superman, Spider-Man, Green Lantern, Captain America, Flash, Wonder Woman, Plastic Man. Teak’s very knowledgeable.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “What’s Hakata?”
“That’s his own superhero. The one he invented. Hakata, the Finnish god warrior.”
“Why Finnish?”
Reggie shrugged. “Same as why Thor? A lot of this is based on mythology. When I met him he already had done all this research on Finland, had a whole world all figured out. All these Finnish gods, and they come back to save us.”
“And Hakata is one of t
hem?”
“Right. Wears this black hood and mask. Red H on a chain around his neck. Carries an ax with special powers. Kind of like Thor’s hammer. Sent to Earth to save us from the forces of evil.”
I was writing. He waited, then said, “You know he’s nuts.”
“I’m aware of his illness.”
“Nothing against it. We’re all crazy in our own way,” he said.
“So what does Hakata do?” I said, steering him back.
“Fights demons, enemy kings. Teak’s thing is that the evildoers can inhabit anyone’s body. So Hakata is always trying to sniff out who’s real and who’s an evil creature in a person’s body. Hakata’s ax has the power to detect an impostor.”
“And then he kills them.”
“About the only thing you can do with an ax,” Reggie said.
He nodded to the wall of comics. “It’s all allegory, you know. I mean, the Bible isn’t literally true, but it still sets out a code of behavior.”
I looked at them. “But he believes all of this was real.”
“Pretty much. Especially when he’s, you know—” He twirled his finger beside his ear.
“And how often is that?”
“Not all the time. Not even most of the time. He goes seriously off his rocker every two or three months. He told me the meds make him feel like a zombie and he had too much to do. I guess the lady at the shelter had to keep on him to take his pills. So I started nagging him, too. If he came in and he seemed all agitated.”
“Was he violent at those times?”
“Not exactly; not in here. Sometimes kind of manic, talking about Hakata, and that he had a mission to go on. Other times he was just real quiet, but you could tell stuff was whirling around inside his head. That was the only time he seemed scary. Because even though you didn’t know what he was thinking, you knew it was some crazy shit.”
Reggie reached under the counter like this was a holdup and he was grabbing for a gun. He came up with a stack of papers, laid it on the counter. There was a handwritten title page, hakata, son of the thunder god. Below the title was a crudely drawn picture of a guy with a hood and mask and the red H on his chest.
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