Was that Patrick’s secret? “When?”
“You didn’t know, then?” Haines was polite, but watchful. “It was only a week before his death. We questioned Cappy, but he had an alibi, provided by one of my own officers.” The chief’s face was tight. There was something that he wasn’t saying. “We were hoping to break that alibi.”
Vivian had the feeling that one of his officers was in for a long, hard week.
“Then we finally found the meth lab we suspected Cappy was running, and you know how and why we found it.”
She clearly remembered that night. Patrick scrubbing his face and arms, his desperate sobs against her breast. Sirens in the night. “When it blew up,” she whispered.
“Another death, more injuries. And now, the attack on your son—”
“Attack?” That word jarred her. “It was just a hit and run. Wasn’t it?”
“Not exactly. The attendant at the Chevron station said that that van had been kind of lurking, almost waiting for your boy, or for somebody. We have a description but no license plate numbers. We might get lucky.”
Almost waiting for your boy. “And you think that it might have had something to do with that explosion?”
“Ma’am … we don’t know what is going on here, but these people … drug people can be paranoid and vengeful. It’s just possible that some kind of war has broken out between two different factions, and that your ex-husband was involved. He was killed, and then in retaliation, the lab was blown up. Cap’s people tried to retaliate by killing your boy.”
Her legs felt unsteady. “Dear God.”
“We don’t know what to believe right now, but you and your boy might be at risk. You may not want to be in town for a few weeks—while we sort this out. Is there some place you can go?”
* * *
The nurse told Vivian to dial “9” for an outside line. She called Costumes, Period and spoke briefly with Charlotte Antony, her assistant, and got her to look at the slip of wrinkled paper tucked behind the phone.
She wrote the 800 number down, and then took a last moment to ask herself if this was really the best course. Vivian saw nothing else she could do, and punched the digits in.
A buzz, a click, as electrons flowed along the line. Then a male voice answered.
“Hello?” The voice on the far end seemed abnormally clear, as if they were very close, although the 800 exchange could have been anywhere in the country.
“Hi,” Vivian said nervously. “My name is Vivian Emory, and you sent my son an application for the summer camp?” She hadn’t intended for the last sentence to have a rising intonation, but couldn’t control it.
She heard a brief pause, and then a cheery answer. “Yes. That would be Patrick. You declined the invitation. Or do I have the wrong information?”
“No, no, I did. Is it too late to change my mind?”
“Ah…” funny sound there, odd tone of voice. “I don’t think so. He can make it after all?”
“Yes, but there is one condition. His father just passed away, and I … I’d have a very hard time letting him out of my sight for two weeks. Could you possibly use a volunteer? A chaperon or a cook? Would that be possible? I wouldn’t want any money. I’ll even pay my own board. I can help cook, and are you doing plays or skits? I can make costumes. Just please.”
Another pause. “That might be a bit difficult, but perhaps…”
53
TUESDAY, JUNE 26
At one thirty in the morning, Vivian was still packing, arranging, trying to allow for any problems Charlotte might encounter at the shop, hoping that the girl would finally grow into the job. Finally, half-exhausted, she sat at her computer, called up the word processing program and jotted a note.
“Dear Renny,” she wrote. “Your friendship has been a lifesaver during this period. I won’t be able to talk to you for perhaps ten days. Things have been terrible here. Patrick and I are going to a summer camp in Prescott, Arizona, at some place called Weinstein’s Folly. But when we come back…”
She paused, her fingers hovering over the keys, and then typed again. “Perhaps you’ll be coming back through the Northwest again. Truth be told, I wish you would.”
She hesitated, wanting so badly to watch his face when he read it, hoping that she wasn’t making yet another in a long line of mistakes. “I have to trust the sense of connection I have to you. It isn’t just in what’s said, it’s in the fact that we keep saying it, keep talking to each other, both wondering if there is anything there.” Her hands were shaking. “I want to find out. No, strike that. I need to find out. If you feel the same way, please answer this. Leave a message on my machine. Something, anything to let me know that I’m not making myself into the biggest fool in the world. Maybe a big city guy like you doesn’t have anything in common with a country mouse like me. But give me a chance to prove you wrong. I think I could.” She paused, her fingers hovering over the keys. “I think I want to.”
Sometimes, you just had to step out on faith. She pushed the button, sending her message irretrievably out across the Internet.
54
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27
A battered dust-gray Honda van struggled along the narrow dirt road up to Weinstein’s Folly, a white Dodge SUV on threadbare tires bouncing along just behind. The van stopped, and a short, slim blond ball of energy clambered out. If Marty Feldman had sired a daughter with Goldie Hawn, their offspring might have resembled Janie Stein. With short blond hair, Armenian nose and boyish hips even as she neared forty, Janie combined the optimism of an eternal child with the discipline and focus of a Marine drill instructor.
The SUV pulled up behind her, and Janie waved as Ocean Rhodes and Paris Tuckwil emerged. Ocean was lanky, loose-limbed, with shoulder-length blond hair. A brown belt in Hapkido karate, he was counselor and camp sports director. Eight years her junior, Ocean was Janie’s life partner, and had been since she first saw him dancing tai chi on a Mazatlan beach in 1993.
Paris was buxom, tanned, and hyper, with long brown hair and legs sufficiently Junoesque to resemble an R. Crumb cover girl. An A.A. in Graphic Design, Paris was Janie’s arts and crafts director for the week.
Janie stretched, transforming the knots in her back and shoulders into little heat eddies. “Well,” she said, “I figure the others will be along in a couple of hours. Our work’s pretty well cut out for us.”
Ocean wagged his shaggy blond hair. About five percent of the time, in the wrong light and at the wrong angle, he resembled Janie’s older brother Tim. The other ninety-five percent of the time he triggered feelings that were dizzyingly unfraternal. “They’d better get up here. Hate to navigate a road that narrow at night.”
“Oh, its alright.” Janie sniffed deeply; the air was clear and cool. “Put that thought right out of your head. We’re gonna have a great time.” Excitement percolated inside her like a great hot bubble. Eight months of the year she worked as a bank teller, dreaming of summer. Now summer was here. “I had my doubts about this guy Park, but look at this place. It’s perfect, and if you give me any lip, I’ll brain ya.”
Ocean grinned. “I have to admit, it’s brown but beautiful.”
“Sort of like me,” Paris said, admiring her tan. “How’d you find this place?”
“I didn’t,” Janie said. “It was handed to me.”
Paris wrinkled her nose. “A little dry for my taste. That’s the lake?” She pointed north.
The camp was set on a bluff above an incline harsh enough to make their engines whine and grind for the last 300 meters. Steep ridges on either side gave a sense of compression, of nestling. Beyond the camp lay a shallow valley, and on the far side of that valley, another rise, leading to a higher bluff set in a densely wooded saddle.
Janie pointed up the rise. “That’s Charisma Lake. We’ll set the obstacle course up there. We have hiking trails—”
Camp owners Del and Diane Withers appeared from the direction of the mess hall, all smiles and greeting. Del wiped
his flour-stained hands on an incongruous lace-frilled white apron. “Howdy!” Del said. “You must be Janie.”
“And you must be Mr. Withers. Your land is beautiful.” They shook hands.
“That it is,” he said proudly. “Folks round here call it the Folly.”
“Why’s that?” Paris asked.
He gestured expansively. This was obviously a story he enjoyed telling. “Well, Old Moisha Weinstein put a lot of work into it back in ’32. He was a big movie mucky-muck. His son couldn’t get into a summer camp of some kind out in California ’cause of being a Jew. So daddy built him and some of his Hollywood friends their own camp. Pretty darned nice too.”
“Well, our kids will love it.”
“Expecting fifty?”
Janie scratched her neck, ending a small black fly’s irritating dance. “That’s the word. Haven’t met ’em though.”
“Just the gent you’re working for?”
“Yep. I’m just a gun for hire.”
“Done much of this kind of thing?”
Only when I’m not punching the clock. “Been a river guide, worked with Outward Bound and a couple of the county boot camp programs. Just love the kids.”
“Amen to that,” Withers said. “Say, will your boss be coming up today?”
“No. Later in the week, maybe.” She paused. “He’s not exactly my boss, but he’s paying the bills. My crew and I get together every summer, bum from camp to camp across Arizona and New Mexico. Been doing it for four years.”
“Sounds like fun. But don’t the money people want to know what you’re up to?”
She scratched a thread of blond hair away from her eyes. “I guess my reputation precedes me. I was just told to model this year’s program on one I did last summer that got a little write-up in the Tucson Daily News.” She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Cash is in the bank, and the kids are on their way.”
Some shadow of uncertainty flitted across Del’s face, like a dark bird flying across the sun.
“Mite weird, but everybody spends their money a little different. Can’t say I’m sorry.”
Janie studied Withers for a minute, wondering if she could trust him. She decided she could. “You know what? Me neither.”
They both laughed, enjoying that curious intimacy created by mutual antipathy for a third party.
“Y’all come on up to the house. We’ve got some cider, and we should orient you.”
Janie waved the others to catch up.
* * *
In two hours Janie’s crew had completed their basic inspection. Withers had toured them through the cabins, the showers, the archery field, the sports center, revealed the secret workings of the kitchen, the twin propane tanks, the trails and scenic spots, and the path up to the eponymous artificial lake.
Their entire camp was about three times the length of the regulation-sized soccer field, which lay north of the main complex. At the western edge of the field were a pair of basketball courts, a handball court, and the equipment hut and archery range. To the south lay the campfire pit, a cluster of bunk-houses, the mess hall, the activity hall and more shower rooms. Trails snaked off in all directions. North lay another incline, a shallow valley large enough to swallow the soccer field, and another rise.
“And up north there is the lake,” he said. “Truck already delivered your equipment up the far side.”
Janie smacked her hands together briskly. “Then I guess we should just get to work.”
“I reckon so,” Withers said. He was still in a great mood. It was night and day from the way he had responded to the mysterious Mr. Park.
* * *
During the day, Janie and her crew constructed or refurbished the obstacle course, which spread around the lake and extended off onto the hiking trails. They found a ten-foot climbing wall, a spider web of interlaced ropes, a balance beam and stumps, and other useful things left over from a Boy Scout jamboree. They adapted, dressed up, repaired and improvised. The sun lay dying on the west ridge when they finally trudged back down the narrow trail toward the main camp. Mr. and Mrs. Withers awaited them in the mess hall with meat loaf, corn bread and leafy green salad.
Mr. Withers’s smile was warm and welcoming. “Looks like you soldiers put in a heck of a day today. Just a heck of a day.”
Paris groaned, lying back on the bench with her head in Janie’s lap, staring up at the ceiling. “Well, everything starts tomorrow, you know? Time and tide.”
“And kids,” Janie added, raising her water glass in a toast.
“And kids,” the others echoed. The adrenaline was starting to run now. In her mind’s eye, Janie saw a camp crowded with happy kids. Running, jumping, swimming …
It was going to be great.
* * *
East of the mess hall, up in the woods, two men were watching. Each, in a previous life, had been a combat NCO, used to hard living and stress. Each had, for decades, led a far more mundane existence: families, mortgages, wives, children, cholesterol counts, bad backs. They were Schott and a man named Silvestri, and for this week, these few terrible days, they were back down the rabbit hole, following another man’s orders. Unlike Vietnam, this time they understood fully why their terrible actions were required. That understanding wasn’t entirely palliative, but it quieted the nightmares.
Schott and Silvestri wore orange jackets identifying them as workers for a mythical central Arizona utility company. If anyone asked, they were merely surveying for underground cables, said cables to be laid in the fall.
They spoke little to each other, and so far had not activated the Bell Systems SatPhone representing their only link to the outside. With patience born of desperation, they watched, and waited.
Soon, now. Soon.
55
PALO ALTO
Wearing brown workmen’s uniforms, two former Marines named Chuck and Hennings used a stolen key to admit themselves into the basement of Advanced Systems’s research facility. Service records suggested that the basement hadn’t been entered for three months, since the last inspection of the gas heating system.
Days of careful observation suggested that no one would enter for the next twelve hours. After that, it wouldn’t matter.
The two men worked efficiently. Chuck shut off the gas while Hennings attached a specialized plastic splitting valve, allowing gas to travel through the system as usual while simultaneously siphoning off a few cubic feet a minute. A device very much like a weather balloon was attached to the left branch of the valve. Into that balloon Hennings bled a small metal cylinder’s pressurized contents: pure oxygen.
The two men checked the connections, then left, taking the metal cylinder and locking the door behind them.
During the hours that followed, the balloon slowly inflated, the gas mixture pushing it around the contours of the room until it swelled to fill all available space. Gas continued to hiss into it until a pressure sensor shut the valve off. The black plastic sack now contained several thousand cubic feet of a highly volatile mixture of methane, ethane, and oxygen. Two remote detonators assembled from pieces available at any Radio Shack were taped to the inside of the balloon.
Silently, with that patience known only to the mechanical and the dead, the lethal device awaited its signal.
56
PRESCOTT, ARIZONA
Vivian Emory drove at about eight miles per hour, her rented station wagon’s springs and shocks jolting on the rutted dirt road. Beside her, Patrick felt a little deflated and tired, but beneath the fatigue lurked a low-level energetic buzz, a restless impatience that grew more intense with every passing mile.
He stared out the window at the internested web of spruce, fir and ponderosa pine. They had driven north through the desert, west through the foothills and then north again through the mountains. Since leaving Phoenix airport he had sensed they were entering alien territory, embarking on a great and mysterious journey.
“You act is if you’ve never seen a tree before, Pat.”
Another layer of fatigue seemed to roll away. “It feels like I haven’t. Look!”
Up ahead of them, an orange school bus was rolling to a halt, clouds of fine gray dust drifting about its wheels as excited kids piled out. Their car pulled up, and Patrick eased to his feet, favoring his sore right hip.
Three adult counselors were in sight, two male, one female. All held clipboards, and were calling out kids’ names. It seemed a happy confusion.
“All right,” bawled a lean, surfer-dude type with a name tag reading, appropriately enough, Ocean. “Check your enrollment sheets. In the top right corner you’ll find a number. Evens come with me…”
“Odds with me.” That one was named Jason. He was barrel-bodied but not fat, freckled, and decked out in a banana-yellow T-shirt. All he needed was a beanie with a propeller on top to complete the picture.
“That’s appropriate,” Ocean said. He reminded Pat of the gentle folks at the Inside Edge.
“Hey!” Jason said, and jostled him. It was corny, manufactured jollity, but funny nonetheless. The kids lined up quickly. Jason and Ocean passed out bunk assignments and information sheets. The campers snatched their packets and ran off, exploring.
A chunky kid with pink, punked-out hair and a badge reading: HI, MY NAME IS BUCKY! scooted past, chattering to a couple of friends. “This is so phat!”
Two of the busload were black, and carried themselves with a brittle inner-city wariness. Their badges read MATHIAS and HUGHIE. They were wiry, intense, as cautious as alley cats. They walked as if joined at the hip, gestures studiedly relaxed. They watched everything, reacted to nothing. Patrick’s heart raced. Isolated in Claremont, he had known precious few black kids, and none possessing this level of sly physicality. Intimidation and fascination dueled in his mind. Fascination won out.
Mathias approached Patrick, looming a head taller and half again as wide across the shoulders. Despite his ogrelike stature, he seemed friendly enough. “Where you stay at, man?”
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