Forests of the Night

by James W. Hall

  “Everything’s busy,” Mary said. “They’re probably calling each other, a lot of backslapping.”

  “Keep trying. Call me when you get through.”

  When she snapped the phone shut, Parker was at her side, out of breath.

  “Gracey’s not in her room, not in your office. Nowhere.”

  Charlotte’s throat shut. Something hot and hard lodged there.

  “We’ve got to go,” Parker said. “Now, Charlotte.”

  “He took her? The bastard took her hostage?”

  “We don’t know that. Now come on.”

  Charlotte clawed through her purse, grabbed her holstered Beretta Cougar. Then sprinted after Parker.

  By the time she reached the truck, he was revving. Charlotte threw herself in the passenger’s seat as he peeled toward the street.

  “Left,” she said. “Left, north. Go.”

  Parker slammed through the gears, fishtailing onto Riviera.

  “Your headlights,” Charlotte shouted at him.

  He found the lever, got them on, bumped to high beams. Roared down their street, toward a four-way stop.

  “Which way?”

  “Straight, I don’t know. Yeah, straight. Best thing for him is to head for traffic. Up to Dixie. Assuming he knows his way around.”

  Parker fired through the intersection.

  “I don’t get it,” Parker said. “Why would Jacob take her? It just complicates things, slows him down.”

  “Maybe he got scared, thought he needed a hostage.”

  “Doesn’t make sense.”

  “Or maybe she went willingly. God knows. She was having a major mood swing.”

  Three or four blocks ahead, the Mercedes had pulled two wheels onto the shoulder. Parker was doing seventy through a twenty zone, maybe half a minute behind.

  “They’ve taken off on foot,” she said.

  But as Parker closed to a hundred yards, the Mercedes swerved back on the street and roared north toward the busy thoroughfare.

  “He was waiting. Like he didn’t want to lose us.”

  “Not good,” she said. “Some kind of game.”

  Her cell phone chirped and she pressed it to her ear.

  Sheffield was yelling over engine noise. Men shouting.

  “I’m standing in your living room, Monroe. What the hell’s going on?”

  She hesitated a moment, then began to fill him in, Parker waving no, grabbing for the phone.

  Charlotte leaned out of range and gave Sheffield their location, told him they were giving chase, and snapped the phone shut.

  “Goddamn it, Charlotte.”

  “It’s my duty. I have no choice.”

  “Your duty? Putting your daughter in jeopardy, those gun-happy cowboys.”

  “Getting my daughter out of jeopardy.”

  “Jesus Christ, Charlotte.” He hammered the wheel. “Jesus H. Christ.”

  Two blocks ahead, the Mercedes weaved back and forth, then took a sharp right into someone’s front yard, disappearing into the shadows. Probably trying to duck down one of the narrow alleys that laced the area.

  As Parker sped up, a pair of reflective eyes flashed in their path. A dog, a possum. He swung the wheel, hit the brakes, and the high-riding truck bounced over a curb, blowing through a hedge. Parker wrestled it back to the pavement and accelerated.

  Behind them she heard the chopper coming low and loud. A moment later their windshield turned to blinding white light. Parker flipped down the visor, used one hand to shield his eyes, kept going.

  “Those morons.”

  A booming voice ordered them to halt, step out of their vehicle.

  “What the hell’re they doing?”

  “Goddamn it. Sheffield doesn’t know about the car switch. They think we’re Panther.”

  “Great. Just great.”

  Charlotte flipped open her phone, then snapped it shut. It was useless now, things unfolding too fast.

  “Will they fire?”

  “Not the chopper, but they might.” She waved at the half-dozen cars peeling out of side streets, blue lights whirling, assembling a hasty barrier.

  “The Benz. That yard two houses down. Something’s wrong.”

  Parker took his foot off the gas, staring out at the men and cars, coasting at fifty-plus.

  “Don’t do it, Parker. Stop right here, let them take over.”

  But Parker shook his head. He grimaced so hard, the outline of his skull rose as if through the cloudy waters of his flesh. He was crossing some ancient line. Animal self prevailing over man-of-the-law.

  He flattened the gas and picked his spot. Helmeted men in black were still piling out of their cars and vans, shotguns and assault rifles. But they were seconds too late setting up. Parker hurtled through the blockade, clipped a white Ford, nearly lost control. Their rear glass exploded and the slug blew out Charlotte’s window, filling her lap with broken glass.

  Twenty yards from the Mercedes, Parker stood on the brake and the pickup got sideways and began to tip, but he cut the wheel and brought it down. As they spun, Charlotte caught a glimpse of Parker’s silver car. Front end crumpled against a tree.

  Their truck finished its 360 and came to rest with its big bumper against the driver’s-side door of the Mercedes.

  Sirens howled behind them, and the chopper trapped them again in its dazzling lights. Through the shattered window, Charlotte saw long blond hair, longer and blonder than Panther’s. She wiped her eyes, threw open her door. Her daughter was slumped behind the steering wheel of the Mercedes, air bag deflated in her lap.

  Gracey’s head lolled against her half-open window.

  Charlotte unholstered the Beretta, held it two-handed above her right shoulder, and approached.

  Rumbling from above, the voice in the chopper commanded her to throw down her weapon. Her last chance or they would commence firing.

  Charlotte ignored him and stooped to aim inside the car. Her heart taking a wild flight around her rib cage. Just Gracey. No Panther.

  She heard Sheffield yelling at her. To her right she glimpsed Parker on his knees, hands raised. Visored men slammed him facedown into the grass, a knee in his back.

  Charlotte lowered her Beretta. As she reached out to grip the door handle, Gracey jerked upright.

  She straightened slowly, then turned her head to look out the half-open window and she smiled.

  Then Charlotte’s daughter began to giggle.

  “Gracey!”

  Powerful hands gripped Charlotte’s shoulders and struggled to force her down. Sheffield ordering them to stop. It was okay. This woman was a cop.

  “I fooled you,” Gracey said. “I told him it would work. You’re so smart, but you weren’t smart this time, were you, Mom? Were you? You played by the rules and see where it got you. Jacob escaped, didn’t he? He just walked down the sidewalk and left.”

  “Gracey, good God, what were you thinking?”

  She pulled open the door and hauled her daughter out.

  Her eyes flaming, Gracey looked around at the circle of men, guns drawn. Her father with his face mashed into someone’s lawn. In the blaze of the overhead light she extended her right forearm and admired it.

  “Look,” she said. “It’s turning blue.”

  “What’s she talking about?” Frank Sheffield was staring at the girl.

  “This is awesome. Steven’s going to love it. He’s going to freak.”

  Eight

  After Gracey’s scrapes were tended by the paramedics, she and Charlotte and Parker sat for an hour in Frank Sheffield’s car while the hunt for Jacob Panther ran its futile course. Then Frank drove them to the FBI field office in North Miami Beach, and until well after midnight they were confined in a small conference room, grilled by Sheffield and two other agents and a female federal attorney, a prematurely gray woman in her forties who was annoyed she’d been summoned so late in the evening.

  One of the agents wanted very much to press charges: aiding and abetting,
reckless endangerment of federal officers for Parker’s storming of their barricade. For well over an hour Parker quietly picked apart the agents’ arguments with questions delicately phrased to suggest that the recklessness and endangering had been brought on by the FBI’s failure to arrive at the correct address in a timely manner, and by their gross negligence in firing their weapons on innocent civilians. Parker had feared for his own life and his wife’s life because of the mistaken identity, and he felt he had no recourse but to run the barricade. A suit for damages wasn’t out of the question. The federal attorney said nothing, but kept shaking her head in reluctant admiration of Parker’s rebuttals.

  Early on, Charlotte managed to get Gracey excused from the interrogation. The girl sat in the waiting area watching Leno, while Parker and Charlotte were cross-examined. First and foremost, the agents wanted to know what information either of them had about Panther’s current whereabouts, his plans, his destination, anything he might have said that could help them focus their dragnet while he was still in the vicinity. But the Monroes could offer nothing helpful. Sorry. Panther hadn’t revealed any clues whatsoever about his destination or the location of his hideout.

  Then the federal attorney joined in. She wanted very much to learn why a notorious fugitive, the subject of a yearlong national manhunt, would show up at the door of a well-known defense attorney. Was Parker Monroe by any chance offering his services to the young man, or had his services already been engaged by Panther?

  Certainly not.

  Well, be that as it may, was it possible that Mr. Monroe was in a position to negotiate a surrender of this man?

  No, he was absolutely not in that position.

  Then what the hell was the purpose of Panther’s appearance at the Monroe home?

  A simple social call, Parker had repeated, over and over. Panther’s uncle Thomas and Parker had once been close friends, and Panther was simply stopping by to say hello. Charlotte kept silent on that one. Technically it was true. Throughout the whole ordeal, Parker continued to be scrupulously honest in answering every question, yet somehow he managed to avoid revealing that Jacob Panther was his son.

  In a way she was grateful. Because Charlotte knew the revelation would keep them in that conference room for hours more, covering and re-covering the same ground. And their coming days and weeks were likely to be monopolized by more interrogations. She would no doubt be suspended from work until the FBI was satisfied that she and Parker had told all they knew. And, worst of all, Gracey would be subjected to a whole new set of stresses that were very likely to worsen her condition. So Charlotte had deferred to Parker’s knowledge of the law and his skillful dodges, at least for the moment.

  Withholding such information might or might not be illegal, though she knew it was at the very least unethical. Even though it wasn’t immediately clear to her how the FBI’s investigation might be aided by knowing that Panther was related to Parker, she still had to work hard to restrain her cop instincts. Her training told her that every scrap of information mattered in an investigation. It was impossible to foresee how one fact or another might pay off.

  But by that hour of the night she was exhausted and bewildered and wanted desperately to bring an end to their ordeal, and get Gracey back to the safety of her home. So she kept her mouth shut, telling herself it would be better to sort this out with Parker in private before she came clean with Frank Sheffield. There was time enough for that tomorrow.

  After they returned home, Charlotte stayed by Gracey’s bedside until her mutterings died away and she fell into a heavy sleep.

  Then she went to their darkened bedroom and slipped into the sheets beside Parker.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Not now, Charlotte. We can do it tomorrow. You know I’m not going to bullshit you. I need to absorb this first, get it straight in my head.”

  “Screw that, Parker. Talk to me.”

  “Look, I know you’re angry and you have every right to be, but please, let’s do this tomorrow, okay? Whole truth, nothing but. I promise.”

  She rubbed at her eyes, tried to soothe the thudding pain.

  He rolled over and kissed her good night. A quick, dry touching of lips. Not the most memorable kiss, or the warmest. But it was their unspoken pact. Never in their seventeen years of marriage had they gone to sleep without that kiss. Whatever arguments may have estranged them during the day were to be resolved by bedtime. And the kiss had always served to put their petty squabbles officially behind them.

  Although, on this night, no kiss on earth could have accomplished that.

  “No, Parker,” she said. “It’s going to be now. Not tomorrow, when you’ve had time to polish it up. I want the whole thing. Unvarnished. Now.”

  A slant of moonlight cut across their sheets. Parker took a long breath and blew it out, then began the tale.

  Charlotte had heard most of the story so many times before that it had taken up residence in the recesses of her mind, living alongside her own memories with such heft and vividness that sometimes she found herself unintentionally mingling her own youth with Parker’s.

  The violence, the fire, the trial, all of it he told the same way she’d heard it a dozen times before. But tonight he added something new. The story of the Cherokee girl. The youthful love affair. And hearing that part, that missing thread that interwove the rest of the events of that terrible summer, changed everything.

  Nine

  Parker’s father was named Charles Andrew Monroe, but to the two hundred boys who filled the log cabins of the summer camp he owned and operated for more than twenty years, he was known simply as Chief. Camp Tsali occupied two hundred acres of mountaintop land two days’ hike west and south of Asheville, North Carolina. Meadows and old-growth forest laced with clear streams and ancient Indian trails, all perched on a craggy knoll that gazed out at the very heart of the Great Smoky Mountains. From the front porch of the tribal lodge or the open-air dining pavilion, a boy could stand and gaze out at the silhouettes of eight mountain ranges stacked back to back. Forty miles of misty wilderness in every direction.

  Chief was six feet tall, with a mane of black Irish hair, wide shoulders, an outdoorsman’s ruddy complexion, and the resonant voice, the hard blue eyes, and the quiet but commanding presence of a four-star general who had never lost a battle and by God never would.

  Each June another crop of innocents journeyed up the steep gravel road and dragged their duffels from expensive cars and trooped like pilgrims before Charles Andrew Monroe. Their fathers and mothers stood shyly in the background, entrusting their sons to Chief with the understanding that he had two months to transform their boys into men, or at least accomplish that part of the task they themselves were incapable of. And he rarely disappointed them. Before the summer was done, he would anoint each of his boys with a powerful dose of his manly charisma, a wafer of himself on every tongue.

  As his only child, Parker could have expected some larger share of his father’s attention, but instead he got only that one wafer, and only when it came his turn. But it was no hardship. For those summer months, he moved out of his own bedroom in his parents’ two-story log house and blended in with the other campers, and he was more than content to bathe in the distant shine of his father’s magnificence. The luckiest boy alive.

  Until that moonless August night when Parker was fifteen.

  Like all the other cabins, Parker’s was constructed from oak logs, unchinked and unscreened, open to the cool night air. Eight simple canvas cots, arranged bunk bed-style. A single lantern hung from the ceiling, and big luna moths danced in its sputtering light until taps was blown each night.

  That summer a college boy named Corky Bondurant was the counselor for Parker’s cabin. Corky was a fleshy man whose flatulence was ceaseless and toxic. Consigned to the bunk below him was Nathan Philpot, a slender boy from Durham who had spent most of that summer whining to be removed from the gassy chamber beneath Corky. Across the cabin
and well out of range of Corky’s farts, Parker occupied a breezy top bunk by the door, and below him was Thomas Dark Cloud Panther, a full-blooded Cherokee.

  Thomas Panther was one of the handful of hard-luck cases that Chief admitted to camp each summer. Thomas and his family lived in a one-room, tar-paper shack on reservation land down in the valley. Badly schooled, sullen, and unskilled in white man’s sport, Thomas Panther clashed daily with one or another of the affluent kids from Atlanta, New Orleans, and Charleston who populated the camp, cocky boys with prep-school breeding and shocks of blond hair, who played expert golf and tennis on their private-school teams and studied diligently so one day they could partner up with their fathers in law practices or surgeries at the best hospitals in the South.

  Thomas, like most of his tribe, seemed to know far less about the myths and history of his own people than Chief did. Parker’s father was an ardent student of all things Cherokee. He embraced the myths and lore and magic of those native people so fiercely it was as if he were determined to substitute their noble ancestry for his own Scotch-Irish lineage.

  At Camp Tsali a large portion of every summer day was spent in diligent imitation of primitive Cherokee life. The boys bathed in the icy lake, prepared and cooked much of their own food. They felled giant poplars and locusts and maples, then worked the wood, turning the larger portions into logs to be used in building projects and the smaller pieces into bows and arrows, blowguns and hatchet handles. For two months those suburban boys prowled the forests like young warriors, their ears tuned to the slightest vibrations of animal life, slipping through the pathless woods as surreptitiously as moonlight.

  They killed and skinned squirrels and other small game, and from the pelts they fashioned loincloths, vests, moccasins, and fur caps. From yellow pine they carved dugout canoes and tested them on the lakes and white-water rivers. They whittled dance masks from buckeye and basswood and once a week performed in the big ceremonial ring the Green Corn Dance or the Eagle Dance, chanting in Cherokee and whirling around blazing bonfires.