by D. J. Butler
“A cabin.”
“Are you sure?”
“Trust me, I’m an expert in trailers, and this is not one. Why?”
“Charlie said, at Dad’s office, when I was locking up and Charlie came up to me, he said he’d gone to the wrong trailer. I’m just thinking…maybe it has something to do with what’s down that road.”
“Maybe there’s a trailer down the road. Maybe there’s two, and Charlie went to the wrong one.” Evil shrugged. “But why would Charlie come tell that to you? Or your dad?”
I shook my head, stumped. “Maybe it’s irrelevant.”
“But you’re not thinking we’re going to go down that road, right, Bucky?” Evil asked. “Because that road will keep taking us east, and we’ve come just about as far east as we need to come. If we don’t go north now, we’re going to leave Jim sitting around and twiddling his thumbs at the marina, wondering where we are.”
“That wouldn’t be good.”
“Not with that guy on the loose with his rifle. And we still need to tell the sheriff about him. About all of it.”
“The sheriff.” I nodded. “Or somebody.”
“Somebody,” Evil agreed.
I went to where I’d dropped the science fiction novels and picked them off the floor. It’s not that I’m a neat freak or anything, but I was imagining what future investigators might think if they came poking around, trying to find out who killed Charlie Herbert and why. I didn’t want them to find Charlie’s copy of Empire of Silence on the floor, and my fingerprints all over it.
So I wiped the books’ covers with the edge of my flannel shirt, and put them back where I thought they’d come from.
“Right,” I said. “Let’s—”
Bang!
One of the house’s two front windows shattered, and a bullet hit me.
I fell.
Insanely, the thought that went through my head as I hit the floor was I should be screaming. I’m not screaming. What’s wrong with me?
The bullet hit me in the upper arm, my right arm. I felt my flesh tearing, and I felt the crack as the bullet hit bone. Glass showered around me as I toppled backward.
Then I hit the floor, and didn’t feel it at all.
“Evil,” I said.
He threw himself to the floor and skidded to my side. “No exit wound,” he said. “Bullet’s still in there.”
“Pretty sure my arm’s broken.”
He nodded. “The truck in the back. That’s our best way out of here. We get to the truck and drive off, he’s going to have a heck of a time getting that Corolla over the fence and into the backyard.”
“Depends on how long that road is.” I pointed.
“It’s our best shot.”
“No pun intended.”
“Of course not.”
“Thanks for not saying I told you so.”
Evil grinned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” From where he lay on his belly, he looked out the shattered window. “Think you can stand?”
“Probably.” I was feeling a little woozy, but I didn’t tell Evil that.
“I’m going to give this guy something to think about, slow him down. The minute I start shooting, you get up and run for the truck out back.”
“I don’t have a key.”
“Hey, sagebillies and internal combustion engines, remember? This is my field. I can hotwire it, you just need to get yourself behind the wheel with your head down.”
Before he’d finished his instructions, Evil was crawling across the floor to the unbroken window. Raising himself on one elbow, he peeped out the window’s corner into the front yard.
“I see him,” Evil said. “You ready?”
I nodded.
“Now!”
Evil started firing. Bang! Bang! Bang!
The window’s glass shattered and I heard cursing from the front yard, but as soon as the firing started I moved. I stumbled to my feet with my right arm hanging by my side. I shot a quick glance around the kitchen, looking for a peg with truck keys on it, just in case, but no such luck, and then I kicked open the back door and ran.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The yard behind the house was a gnarled mountain hillside, spotted with clumps of tall grass. My ankles burned, but I staggered down to the truck and yanked on the door handle. Mercifully, it opened.
I peeked behind me as I fell into the front seat. Evil crashed out the back door of the house and raced my way full tilt. I slid behind the wheel and slumped low.
Ahead of me, a tongue of asphalt wound down and left, into a valley and out of sight.
“Brake!” Evil shouted. He yanked open the shotgun-side door and threw himself in onto the floor of the truck. He grabbed the casing around the base of the steering column and ripped it off, exposing a mass of wires.
I released the hand brake.
“Right,” Evil said to himself, poking at the wires. “Now, which of these…?”
Just in case, I reached up and flipped down the sun visor. Tucked into an elastic band behind it was a key.
Bang!
The front and rear windshields of the truck shattered together, spraying cubes of safety glass all over me.
I grabbed the key. “Evil!”
He looked up. “What are you waiting for?” Sliding up beside me in the seat, he pointed the Glock out the back window and started firing again.
The truck coughed into life as I turned the key. I risked one quick glimpse ahead of me as I pushed the truck into drive, then ducked and let the vehicle roll.
“Is it Fellows?” I asked.
Bang! Bang!
“Are you saying there are people besides him who want to kill you?”
It hurt, but I laughed. Another shot from Fellows’s rifle whooshed through the truck’s cab.
“He’s on foot, right?”
“Yeah, but he’s gaining. You want to go a little faster?”
I felt the bump as the truck slipped off the shoulder and pulled the steering wheel left. My right arm wouldn’t move, so I only had my left hand to do it with. Feeling exposed, fearing a bullet to the back of the head at any second, I peeked over the dash to see where I was going and stepped on the gas.
A final bullet whined and banged away off the side of the truck bed, and then I’d made the turn. We had to be out of sight.
I scooted up a little higher.
“Evil,” I said, “I don’t feel so good.”
He set down the pistol. “Don’t get funny about this, but I’m going to take your shirt off.”
“I kind of feel like swooning, but I think that’s just loss of blood.”
“Could be just sight and smell of it, too. Most people aren’t used to seeing blood, and when they do they feel faint.”
“I feel faint.”
“Breathe deep and keep us on the road.” He held up a kitchen towel. It looked clean; he must have taken it from Charlie Herbert’s kitchen. “I’m going to slip your arm out of your shirt and bandage you.”
“Just the flannel,” I warned him. “You try and take my t-shirt off, I’ll wreck the truck. On purpose.”
Evil grinned. “Might be worth it, though.”
I grinned back and clutched the steering wheel for dear life with my left hand.
Evil was gentle. I’m not a hunter, but he is, and I hear from the kids who hunt that you have opportunities to administer first aid from time to time up in the hills, waiting behind blinds for deer to wander by. Whether it was because of practice or natural talent, Evil was patient and sure-handed. He eased my right arm out of its sleeve.
“Is there a lot of blood?” I didn’t look. I wasn’t afraid, but I was worried by how light-headed I felt. Fainting and crashing would be a bad way to die.
“Naw,” he said, “it’s nothing.” Then he did his cheesiest Monty Python English accent. “It’s only a flesh wound.”
“I’ve had worse.” My own bad English accent mostly sounded Australian, which sort of made it funnier. We both
laughed, and Evil wrapped the towel around my arm.
“That’ll do for now. But the bullet’s in you, and you need your arm set, and frankly I wish I had something to clean the wound with. We need to get you to a doctor.”
“Maybe this road will take us to the marina,” I suggested.
“Yeah.” He didn’t sound convinced. “Maybe.”
But to go back to the marina, the road would have to turn left—north. Instead, it weaved left and right, but continued basically straight—east.
The sunlight was bright in my eyes.
The end of the road was approaching. I could see it, with a tall stand of pine trees clumped around the edge of a hill. The hill was shaped funny—its side facing the trees was vertical. Like a cliff face.
I tingled.
“Evil.” My own voice sounded far away.
“Yeah?” He was looking out the back window.
“I think I might be passing out.”
The edges of my vision faded, and things in the center fell back. It was as if I was suddenly looking through the wrong end of binoculars. I felt my hand slip from the wheel.
Uh oh.
Then Evil was there. He grabbed the steering wheel, and threw his leg across mine. “Evil,” I murmured, a sort of objection, but of course he was going for the brake pedal.
I couldn’t see anything. I felt Evil nearly lying across me and squirming as he tried to control the truck, but it felt as if we were going faster. I sucked in a deep breath of air.
Evil cursed.
My vision came back, and I saw that we were barreling toward the pine trees. Evil was trying to step on the brake, but I was in the way, and he was instead forcing my foot down on the accelerator.
“Bucky!” he shouted.
I couldn’t shout anything back. I didn’t have enough breath.
Instead, I grabbed the handbrake and yanked it up.
The truck screamed in protest and drifted sideways, turning as if it wanted to begin a parking lot donut and at the same time shuddering as if it might fall apart. I was still on the edge of fainting, and I saw trees and hillside spin around in my vision, like a wilderness crown over Evil’s head as he tried to control the wheel. We spun, rocked, bounced…
And stopped.
Evil banged into the steering wheel and then fell on top of me, squeezing the last air out of my lungs in a pathetic little whoof. Immediately, he jumped back, collapsing into his own seat.
“Bucky!” I couldn’t see him, and he sounded a million miles away.
“Present.” I inhaled slowly, my head tingling. “Breathing.”
Evil laughed. As my vision crept back I started laughing, too.
“Well,” he said finally. “Let’s get you inside. There’s got to be some stuff in here we can use. Rubbing alcohol and a real bandage, for example. Some fluid for you to drink.”
“Inside?”
Evil pointed. I looked and saw that the sheer cliff face I had noticed as I was blacking out was not natural. The front of the hillside had been carved away, and embedded in its face was a sliding metal door, like you’d find on a big self-storage unit.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“Don’t you?” Evil climbed out of the truck and walked over the door. He had the Glock in his hand, and he pointed it at the heavy padlock that hung on the door, closing it. “I think it’s pretty obvious we’ll find some useful things behind this door. And maybe even informative things. Maybe we’ll learn what Charlie Herbert was up to.”
“Like what?” I opened my door and stumbled out. I looked up the road behind us to be sure Michael Fellows wasn’t in sight. We’d got a head start on the assassin, as I was coming to think of him, but he could catch up, especially if we stopped moving. “Charlie Herbert was a computer programmer.” As I said it, repeating what Dad had told me, I realized it might not be true.
“Yeah? You see any books on computer programming in Charlie’s house? You see any computers?”
I shook my head.
Bang! Evil shot the padlock, which jumped, and then fell to the ground.
Evil grimaced from pain and effort as he bent to grab the handle of the rolling door. With a grunt, he heaved the door up and shoved it into the ceiling.
Behind the door, and going deep back into the hill, stood row after row of marijuana plants.
I stared. I saw drip pipes, fans, and misters. I saw thermometers and bags of soil mixes. I saw long white lights, softly shining. All over, I saw gloves and trowels and utility knives.
And row upon row of leafy green marijuana plant.
“How much do you think this is worth?” I asked.
Evil snorted, and then I realized he wasn’t standing next to me anymore. He’d turned from my side and was rummaging through a standing rack of metal shelving. “What makes you think I know the street value of weed?”
I shrugged. “Fair enough. But you know some surprising and even useful things.”
Evil shot a glance at the plants, sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth and squinting past his thumb. “Rough estimate?”
“Rough estimate,” I agreed.
“A lot.” He turned from the shelving with a first aid kid in his arms, the Glock tucked into his belt. “I’d say the street value of this weed is a lot. You want to get technical, I’d say it probably even amounts to a shizload. Even legal.”
“It isn’t exactly legal,” I said. “It’s still against federal law and the state laws in plenty of states. And I hear banks don’t like it—they won’t deposit your cash if you’re selling marijuana to earn it.”
“Yeah? That gives me an idea for a business.”
“Marijuana farmer, like Charlie Herbert?”
Evil scratched his chin. “I don’t want you to think I’m too much of an expert, but I think in marijuana terms, this is no farm.”
“Looks like a lot to me.”
“Yeah, but compared to what? I mean, I think a real professional outfit would have a bunch of these sheds. Or a canyon full of Stinkweed. This is to real marijuana farming what raised beds in the backyard are to Monsanto. This is just a small business, or for personal use.”
“That was well put,” I said. “Color me impressed. So, big-time weed farming for you, then.”
“Nope.” Evil grinned. “Marijuana banker. Could you see yourself married someday to a big city marijuana banker? Or maybe a marijuana banker in a small city, like, say, Boise.”
“It wasn’t really what I had in mind.”
“What did you have in mind, then?”
“I hadn’t planned that far.”
“So you’re not saying no. Hold still.”
I leaned against a heavy table stacked deep with weed. From the first aid kit, Evil dug out a tube of betadine. Then he pulled off the kitchen towel and smeared the antiseptic on my wound, which stung, and turned my arm red where it wasn’t already.
“That probably hurt a bit,” Evil said.
“You’re supposed to tell me in advance.”
“I’m just a poor sagebilly,” he clucked, “doing the best I can.”
“Man, you so want to be one of the Dukes of Hazzard,” I said.
“I want both of us to be the Dukes of Hazzard. I’m generous that way.”
“You think it’s generous to imagine me wearing a pair of Daisy Dukes?”
Evil snorted. “What are you talking about? I had you cast as Uncle Jesse.”
“I do look pretty fetching in overalls.”
From the kit he also took gauze and tape. “I don’t suppose you’re carrying a tampon?”
If I hadn’t been in so much pain, I might have slapped him. “Really, Evil? That’s what you’re thinking about right now?”
He shrugged. “Absorbs blood. That’s what they made them for in the first place, didn’t you know that? Plugging bullet holes on the battlefield.”
I felt dumb. “No, I didn’t know that,” I admitted. “I guess maybe I ought to start carrying one around, in case I g
et shot.”
“Or I could,” Evil said. “I got a big wallet. A tampon would kind of be a matching set, you know, with the condom?”
“Kind of,” I said. “But not really.”
Evil rewrapped my wound.
“This is only temporary,” he said. “The bullet’s still in there. How you feeling? Lightheaded? Cold?” He touched my forehead. Checking me for symptoms of shock.
“I need water.”
“I’ve got something better.” Evil jumped back to the shelving and brought me two bottles of Gatorade. “Warm,” he warned me, “but I’m pretty sure they haven’t been opened.”
“Perfect.” I gulped half a bottle of orange Gatorade before coming up for breath. The effort left me gasping, and my mouth tasting like salt. “Now let’s get out of here before Fellows catches us.”
I took a step toward the door and fainted.
When I came to, Evil was hauling me to my feet again and leaning me against the table.
“Come on, sailor,” he said. “I’ve got a better idea.”
He disappeared down among the weed for a moment, and when he came back he had a wheelbarrow. “It isn’t clean, but it’s got wheels.”
I looked at the wheelbarrow, big and black and rusting. It held a thin layer of soil in its bottom. “Correction: it’s got a wheel.”
“Fair enough,” Evil agreed. “Pretty sure it still qualifies as a bitchin’ mode of transportation. Now sit your butt down before you fall…again. And stay awake, Uncle Jesse.”
“In a wheelbarrow?”
“We have to go off road from here. I don’t think it’s too far, but we’re talking about little trails, not roads that will fit a truck. Maybe something with a higher suspension and bigger wheels would work, anyway, but not the truck we have.”
“You’re going to push me?” But I sat down.
“And take this stuff.” Without waiting for my agreement, Evil dropped into my lap the Gatorade, a lighter, a rolled cigarette, and the pistol. Then he grabbed the wheelbarrow handles and pushed me toward the door.
The lightheadedness I felt made the cigarette seem all the stranger. I held it up and looked at it. “This has to be a joint, right?” I sniffed it; it smelled like pot. “Tell me it’s not yours.”
