But this is what I do know.
I caught my breath out in the parking lot, leaning against the Beast. When I could think again, I looked around. There were two cars in the lot—mine, and Claire’s. Which probably meant the other cottages were empty. I had the place to myself, except for a couple of corpses. My name wasn’t on the register, and my credit card wasn’t on the system. We’d taken Claire’s room, picking up where she’d left off. But my fingerprints were in the main house, and in Claire’s cottage. And the last thing I needed was for some Mendocino County sheriff to call Inspector Chang and tell him that my fingerprints were in Claire Gravesend’s cottage, a stone’s throw from a pair of corpses. I unlocked the Beast’s trunk and opened the toolbox. There was a clean engine rag on top of the socket wrench set.
I started in the main house, then went to the cottage, and finished with Claire’s rental car. I moved quickly, and purposefully, and I left no traces. In all, it took ten minutes. And then I was ready to move, and I knew where I needed to go.
24
I left Slaughterhouse Cove fast enough to lay down a new set of tire tracks in the parking lot. I hit the road and pulled hard to the right, and went north as fast as the Beast would take me. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if I caught up to the SUV. Rear-end it, run it off the road. Then bluff hard like I had a gun until I could get in close enough to try my fists. I didn’t know if that would work or not, but I knew I had to try. Madeleine’s life counted on it.
Assuming she hadn’t planned the whole thing. I still couldn’t say for sure it hadn’t been her finger on the trigger.
It was close to dusk when I turned onto the forest road. I hadn’t come upon the SUV yet. I drove the last twelve miles a little more slowly, letting the sky could bleed out and go dark, so that I could make a plan.
In the end, I spotted an overgrown pullout a mile from the last wooden trestle bridge. Loggers might have cut it a century ago. I backed the Beast into the narrow gap between the trees, going far enough back that she’d be out of view from the road, but not so far that she’d sink in the mud. I killed the engine, then went to the trunk and selected a long-shanked flathead screwdriver from the toolbox. I’d already taken a flashlight from the glove box.
I started toward the Creekside on foot, staying in the woods, well away from the road. I crossed the creek beneath the bridge, hopping stone to stone until I was in the middle, and then wading through knee-high water to a log that tilted onto the opposite bank. Just before I hit the driveway, I turned deeper into the woods.
From here on, I knew there could be cameras. I hoped they were mostly pointed at the driveway, and that the club didn’t have some other layer of security. I pictured laser trip lines. Motion sensors. And, worst of all, dogs.
It was getting darker, and now it was starting to rain. Overhead, the evergreen canopy blocked out the sky. The trees caught most of the drops before they reached the ground. But I could hear the prolonged shush of rain in the boughs above me. Ahead, in the failing purple-gray light, I could see a clearing: the parking lot, and the low-slung reception building. There were four vehicles in the lot. Three of them looked like they cost more than my Chinatown condo.
The fourth was a tan SUV.
I knelt on the forest floor, as close as I could get to a redwood trunk. I watched the clearing and I waited for full dark, which was a long time coming. It was early summer. The sun was setting at a steep angle. I spent the time looking for cameras in the trees and on the reception building. There were three in plain view. There were probably others I couldn’t see. I was just going to have to live with them.
The reception building had big windows facing the front. Even from my spot in the woods, I could tell there was no one inside.
I got up, walked out of the woods, and stepped into the clearing. I didn’t try to duck or take cover, and when I reached the crushed slate, I didn’t try to hide the sound of my footsteps. I walked to the SUV and came around the back, where I committed its license plate to memory. Then I walked around the side of the building and turned the corner to the back. There was firewood stacked along the back wall. Seeing it made me realize that I could smell smoke. The air was sweetly tinged with burning hardwood. It wasn’t coming from the fireplace in the reception building, but from somewhere else.
I walked beside the stacked wood and reached the back door, which had a window. I cupped my hands on either side of my eyes and looked in. It was dark, but for the green light of a digital clock. Enough to see that I was looking at a commercial kitchen. Steel worktables, a giant gas stove, a stainless door that likely opened to a walk-in refrigerator.
There was nothing for me there, so I went back around the building and found the path we’d seen earlier that day. No one had come to light the hurricane lanterns. The boardwalk led away into the woods, disappearing in the shadows. From ahead, in the darkness, I heard a sharp pop. A knot cracking in an outdoor fire. There was a murmur of low voices. I started down the path, trailing my fingers on the handrail so that I could keep my balance in the dark.
In two hundred feet, a set of wooden stairs came down the hillside and intersected with the main boardwalk. Looking up, I could see the outline of a cabin. There was a kerosene lantern on the porch rail, and a dimmer light filtering through the stained-glass window on the door.
But I could still hear the voices ahead of me, so I continued on my course. I passed five more cabins, each one bigger than the last, and then I saw a clearing. Firelight illuminated redwood trunks the size of buildings. I’d come through the younger woods to a grove of giants. Ten or more of the trees had to be a thousand years old. They stood in a circle, and within that natural enclosure, the members of the Creekside had built their gathering place. I crept closer until I could look down into it. It was a stone amphitheater, built into a natural basin in the center of the grove. At the bottom was a fire pit, and the logs burning in it were the size of wine casks.
Two men sat next to each other on the stone bench nearest the fire. One was in faded jeans and a checked flannel shirt. The other wore dark slacks and a sports jacket. They both had full heads of hair, but neither had the blond curls that Larry had described.
“No, it wasn’t like that,” Sport Jacket was saying. “It wasn’t nearly as close a call as the historians say. They blow it out of proportion in the retelling.”
“It sells more books,” the other man said. “But I heard you were there for the whole thing?”
The fire cracked again. A fountain of sparks swirled upward. The men were holding wineglasses. A bottle stood on the bench between them. I stepped into the amphitheater and moved laterally until I was behind the men.
“Where’d you hear that?” Sport Jacket said. “That I was there?”
“Here, by the fire.”
“You’re pretty new here, though.”
“A couple of years.”
“And how are you finding it?”
“So far, so good,” Flannel Shirt said. “If you’re anything to go by, then I’m all in. Look at you. And seriously—is it true you were there? Right in the thick of it?”
Sport Jacket took the bottle and held it toward the fire to see how much was left. He poured, first for his companion and then for himself. Then he tossed the empty bottle into the fire.
“Not just that. I knew them. All the players—Khrushchev, in particular. Now, you take LeMay—Curtis was crazy, but at the end of the day, he followed orders. And Jack wasn’t going to give that order unless Khrushchev went first.”
“Sure.”
“Nikita didn’t want to die. He liked his dogs too much.”
I couldn’t see his face. Just his broad shoulders and his thick hair. Which was enough to know that what I was seeing and what I was hearing couldn’t possibly add up. Anyone old enough to be on a first-name basis with Jack Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev would count his years with three digits. This guy didn’t look like he was much past fifty. I was figuring out what to do with that when a woman�
�s soft voice spoke in my ear, a whisper that was as intimate as it was familiar.
“Turn around, Crowe.”
Her hand on my shoulder urged me around, and I turned. Madeleine. My body went rigid with anger. But when she stepped out of my shadow and stood in the full glow of the fire’s light, I saw that she wasn’t really Madeleine. Her face was the same, but her hair was a foot longer, and she wore it in a thick, intricate braid. There were a few more lines on her face than Madeleine’s or Claire’s. A looseness under her eyes, and small creases, as if she’d been squinting into the sun. I guessed she was about forty. Which pegged her point by point to Larry’s description.
She even had the jewelry, colored gemstones that sparkled around her wrist and on her trigger finger. I saw the jewels with complete clarity. In fact, I couldn’t stop looking at that hand. She was holding a small automatic pistol, and it was pointed at my chest.
“My son and I had a bet,” she said. “He said you’d never make it this far. I said otherwise. And I love being right.”
“Congratulations.”
“Same to you,” she said. “But there’s one thing I’ve been dying to say to you. Since we got the first report about you.”
“Which is?”
“Goodbye.”
I’d been focused on the gun. I hadn’t noticed the men who’d emerged from the darkness on either side of me. But suddenly there was a man on my left, grabbing my arm. As I was turning toward him, I saw the second man in my peripheral vision. His arm was a blur of motion.
A couple of years ago, I was sitting in court after testifying in an uncommonly bitter divorce proceeding, and the next witness was a medical doctor, who proceeded to opine that it was impossible to remember the blow that rendered you unconscious, and that anyone who claimed such recall was a liar. At the time, because of my allegiances in the case, I wasn’t inclined to believe him.
Now I’m not so sure.
I have no recollection of the impact. I have no memory of falling, but I must have. I have two chipped teeth I can’t explain, and there is a hard lump on the right side of my chin that feels like a splinter of bone.
The first thing I remember—and this has to be an hour or two after the fact, judging from what I now know about the back roads of Mendocino County and the time it takes to drive them—is the sharp taste of vomit in my mouth, and then the smell of it, and then the cold wetness of it down the front of my shirt. Then I remember my head, the pulsing agony of the lump growing off the crown of my skull. When I tried to reach up and touch it, I couldn’t move my arms. My hands were bound behind my back. It was this realization that woke me up entirely.
I opened my eyes. My right eye wasn’t pulling its load. Instead of a clear picture, I was just getting bright fog. I closed it, and then the view made sense. I was in the back seat of a moving vehicle, on the right-hand side. It was still dark. We were bumping down a poorly graded dirt road, making ten or fifteen miles an hour. The forest around us was completely dark. I turned my head to the side and saw that I shared the back seat with a man. Young, fit, clean-cut, and not anyone I knew. The driver could have been his twin brother.
The man beside me leaned across and jammed the barrel of a gun into my ribs.
“Hey,” he said, but not to me. “He’s awake.”
“So?”
“You want him back asleep?”
“He needs to answer questions when we get there. You think he can do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then let him be.”
The man withdrew his gun from my ribs and held it just under my left eye.
“You hear that?” he said. “You’re lucky.”
I closed my eyes again and slumped forward until my forehead kissed the front seat. With my hands bound behind my back, it was an easier posture. Minutes passed. The SUV pounded down the road. It must have gone this pitted route a thousand times before. Its shocks had long since given up. The ruts and potholes didn’t matter. I rode them out. I didn’t feel them any more than a blackout drunk feels the rumble strip, or the sudden lurch as his car pitches off a cliff.
And beside me, the man with the gun didn’t say another word. I gathered he approved of my unconsciousness.
Of course, I was entirely awake.
I was riding out the bumps and thinking through my options. They didn’t look good. My one bit of hope was that they needed me alive long enough to answer questions. Since these men weren’t asking me anything, their role was probably minimal. They were just taking me to my interrogator. If their only job was to deliver me alive, then maybe I had a chance. When I made my move, they might hesitate to shoot.
The SUV slowed down, and the road surface changed. We hit a smooth patch, followed by a rattle of metal, and then another smooth patch. A cattle guard set inside a concrete skirt. We continued down a gravel road for ten more minutes, but the grade was better. The driver sped up considerably. The tires were kicking rocks into the undercarriage. Then he slowed, made a right-hand turn, and we were on pavement again, accelerating rapidly.
As an experiment, I moved my feet a few inches apart. My hands were bound, but my feet were free. On top of that, they were bare. They felt bloodied up, which was a mystery for a moment, until I realized what must have happened. After they clubbed me unconscious in the amphitheater, they’d had to move me somehow. They probably grabbed me by my hands and dragged me. Somewhere along the way, my shoes had come off. My socks, soaked from the creek crossing, wouldn’t have lasted much longer.
I cranked the new facts into the formula and recalculated my odds. In the end, my conclusion was simple. I could work with this.
25
We were only on the paved road for a minute or two, and then my opportunity came. The driver braked, and laid his hand on the horn. I opened my good eye. We were coming into a small town. Ahead of us, a fuel tanker was pulling out of a parking lot and onto the highway. It must have been hauling a full load. It was moving at a walker’s pace, tracing a broad curve that took it all the way across our lane and the turning lane, and a couple of feet over the last solid yellow line. Its exhaust stacks were spewing black clouds. We came skidding to a near-standstill just before we hit it. My driver craned to the left to see if there was anything coming at us from the opposite direction, and the man beside me did the same thing.
I knew I wouldn’t get a better chance than this.
I pitched myself forward, put all my weight on my right leg, and kicked sideways with my left. I gave everything to that motion. My bare foot caught the man next to me in the back of his head, rocketing his face into the window. The impact was like an ice block getting smashed with a sledgehammer. The tinted glass became an opaque spider web. Instead of shattering, it bulged outward.
I didn’t need to see what would happen next. The way a hitter knows where the ball will land at the instant his bat connects, I knew the man wasn’t getting up. If I hadn’t dealt a fatal blow, I’d given him something so close that the distinction didn’t matter inside of my time frame, which wasn’t long. I fell back onto the seat, swiveled until I faced my own door, and brought my bare feet up. I got the lock with my big toe, then pulled the door handle with the toes on my other foot. I kicked the door open and was sliding out of the moving vehicle when the driver finally reacted. He hit the gas, which accelerated us in a fast jolt toward the tanker, and then he slammed on the brakes. My open door swung forward, rebounded at the end of its arc and would have slammed shut except that my right foot was in the way. The small bones of my ankle stopped it. I cried out, then kicked it open with my left foot.
Again, I lunged for the opening, focused on nothing but the blur of pavement. But I made it nowhere.
The driver had reached around and grabbed my shirt collar. He began to haul me back in. I flipped around, my shirt twisting with me. He didn’t let go. Both my feet were outside the door now, dragging on the asphalt. With bound hands, there was only one option. I bit his forearm, clenching down as hard as
I could. I shook my head back and forth until my mouth filled with his blood. He bellowed, and I gagged. Then he let go.
I fell out sideways and hit the road.
I felt the SUV’s rear tire graze my back, and then I was skidding on rough asphalt. I hit a divot, tumbled ankles over shoulders, and wound up on my knees. In that moment, I was beyond injury. Pain would come later. Right then, every nerve in my body was laser focused on one thing. Survival.
Fifty feet away, the SUV skidded to a halt. The tanker was already receding into the distance. It was just a pair of red lights, moving away. Its driver either had no idea what had happened behind him or he’d correctly assumed it was safer not to be involved. So I was on my own. I did a one-second scan, making decisions as I saw things. On one side of the road there was a steep hill. At the top, dark trees stood out against the moonlit clouds. There’d be great cover at the top, but getting up the incline would be impossible. On the other side, where the tanker had emerged, there was a long parking lot and a wooden building. I saw a sign, letters etched in neon. Boomer’s Saloon. The parking lot was empty.
The SUV’s reverse lights came on—my cue. I stood up and sprinted.
I ran the first hundred steps in darkness, listening to an engine revving behind me, to tires spinning on rough pavement. Then, suddenly, my shadow was stretching out in front of me. I could see bits of broken glass in the parking lot. Cigarette butts and bottle caps. The SUV had backed up and swung around. It was coming at me.
Blood Relations Page 19
