Forests of the Night

by James W. Hall

  “Your butt is perfect,” Parker said. Sounding like he meant it.

  The trail leveled, then grew steep again, a half-dozen switchbacks, then a long stretch across a ridgeline.

  As they climbed, the air grew cooler and damper. Even though the rain had stopped, the night was still moist with its remains and the trail slick. If there was a moon somewhere, it wasn’t doing them any good.

  Every few seconds Parker flicked the flashlight on and off, focused on their feet. She caught glimpses of rocks and branches, dizzy swirls of gnats, skittering shadows. Though she’d been born a country girl and spent her first seventeen years in hilly terrain, hanging out for lonely adolescent hours in a nearby forest, she felt no sense of homecoming. This place was as foreign to her as if she had been transported to a remote corner of the galaxy.

  “It’s not far,” he whispered.

  “It’s already far.”

  A rock ledge loomed up, and the trail narrowed to only a foot across and rimmed the ledge. They had to duck under an outcropping four feet high. Charlotte didn’t want to know what was to her right, off in the darkness, but her senses told her it was a sheer drop and the distance to the bottom was exactly equal to the last hour’s upward trek. A swirl of vertigo made her stumble briefly, but she caught herself and plodded on. Gracey, Gracey.

  They bulled through a sticky-leaved bush and picked their way down a shallow dip in the trail.

  “Watch your head.”

  Parker took her by the shoulders and steered her through a narrow cleft in the rock, a fissure that required them to turn sideways. She smelled the damp and Parker’s sweaty scent, something that even after nearly two decades still gave her a prickle below her navel, his pheromones, that distinct aromatic signature. Whatever else was wrong between them, that wasn’t an issue.

  She bumped into his back and he whispered, “This is it. Sequoyah Caverns.”

  Behind them, Charlotte heard pebbles trickling down the cliff face, or maybe above them, higher on the peak.

  He took her hand and guided her into the clammy reek of the cave. She heard the hushed music of running water and the squeak of a startled creature, tiny claws scurrying over rock. He let go of her hand and moved away.

  “Jacob?” he called out quietly. “Gracey?”

  He was scuffing to her right. She drew her handgun and panned it across the darkness. Though a lot of good it would do her. She was dead blind.

  As she was swung the Beretta to her left, she saw a red flicker on the distant wall. She squinted till her eyes found the focus. A dot. A single red dot.

  “Down, Parker. Down!”

  She heard him stumble from ten feet away.

  “What?”

  Then a man’s voice. The booming command of someone armed and fully in control. A gang of men tromped through the cavern entrance, and lights exploded around her. She was tackled and thrown flat against the damp clay floor, her captor’s full weight on top of her and his hands scrabbling to disarm her and pull her wrists behind her back.

  She shut her eyes against the dazzle, enough candlepower to turn midnight instantly to noon. She didn’t struggle against the man’s iron grip, though he fumbled with his plastic handcuffs as if he was more nervous than she.

  “On the ground! Everybody flat on the ground!”

  Pinned to the damp earth, she managed to tilt her head enough to see the far wall dancing with red dots, the laser sights of high-powered weapons.

  Troops filled the room with their heavy breathing and the reek of cheap cologne and failed deodorant.

  The space was smaller than she’d pictured. Twenty by twenty. The men filled it to capacity, stamping like Thoroughbreds burning off nervous energy in a tiny corral.

  Gold FBI lettering on their jackets, a half-dozen men all cut from the same Superboy chunk of granite. The one atop her shoved her head back down, then she heard Sheffield’s voice.

  “Let her up. Cut her loose.”

  “Him, too?”

  “Him, too.”

  She blinked against the brilliance, ducking her head, shielding her eyes. Someone hauled her to her feet, snipped the plastic band from her wrists. She and Parker were nudged together, ringed by a special-ops team in blackface, and nonreflective clothes, night goggles, featherweight automatics.

  Charlotte stooped to retrieve her backpack, and a barrel banged her arm.

  “It’s okay,” Sheffield said. “They’re clear.”

  She picked up her backpack, dug out the black gadget, and looked at it. No green light. Nothing. She hadn’t accidentally tripped the switch.

  Frank shook his head in annoyance. Another man drew up to his side. His superior or counterpart. They were dressed in civvies. Same blue jackets, none of the killing tools that hung from the other men.

  “Special agent in charge of the Carolina Bomb Task Force.” Sheffield gestured at the man. “Joe Roth. Joe, say hello to Mr. and Mrs. Parker Monroe of Miami, Florida.”

  Roth looked at them, then back at Sheffield. Growled under his breath.

  “Where is he, Monroe?”

  “Who are you looking for?”

  “Don’t be cute. Where’s Panther?”

  “What makes you think he’d be here?”

  “Whose name were you calling out just now?”

  Parker shrugged. No idea what he was talking about.

  “Don’t fuck around, Monroe. You came all this way for a face-to-face. We both know that.”

  “Told you,” said Roth. “Guy’s smarter than that. Didn’t I tell you that? This Panther’s one slippery bastard.”

  “You told me.”

  “What is this thing, Frank?” Charlotte held out the black gizmo.

  “Okay, so I tinkered with the truth. But only a little.”

  She saw one of the men at the edge of the pack holding a small GPS by his side, a pulsing dot in the center of the screen.

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “Transmits a steady signal,” he said. “What could I do, let you go running off? You could’ve hurt yourself. Think of the lawsuit.”

  “And if I’d had a real emergency and was counting on your help, I’d have been screwed, huh?”

  “We knew where you were at all times.”

  “Well, that’s reassuring. You could’ve located my body. Great.”

  She sidearmed the gadget at him, and it bounced off his chest.

  Sheffield rubbed at the spot while some of his team fought off smiles.

  “You were in with him?” Parker said. “You tricked me?”

  “Sheffield tricked both of us. And for what?”

  She looked around the empty cave. Nothing but bare rock and clay floor and the ooze of water down the broken face of one wall.

  She glanced at Parker and saw that he’d shifted his gaze and was staring at the smooth wall behind her. She turned to look.

  At eye level there was a primitive drawing in what looked like chalk: a tall, thin dog standing upright on its hind legs, looking perfectly at ease.

  “What’s that?” Roth said. “Some Indian thing?”

  “Kids,” said Sheffield. “Rich summer camp kids.”

  “Where’s the naked girls then?” Roth said.

  Sheffield went over and touched a finger to the edge of the drawing and tried to smear it. He looked at his finger, but nothing had come off the wall.

  “Isn’t chalk,” he said.

  “No more touching,” said Roth. “We got a crime scene here.”

  “What crime?” Charlotte said. “We’re out for a hike and you guys come out of the trees to terrorize us. That the crime you mean? Police harassment?” Taking one of Parker’s lines.

  Frank shook his head and gave her a wincing grin. Nice try.

  “Your daughter showed up,” Sheffield said. “Couple of hours ago.”

  Charlotte swung around.

  “Where is she?”

  “We lost her.”

  “What!”

  “Pickup truck she was rid
ing in turned off on a side road, disappeared.”

  “You bastard. You had her in your sights but didn’t stop her. Just the thing you promised you weren’t going to do.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “Look, Charlotte, your daughter’s in the vicinity, that’s the good news. We’re homing in on her. Got our people interviewing some yokels who were standing around when she got off the bus. She looked okay to our guys. Looked healthy, maybe a little frazzled from the trip but healthy.”

  “How would your guys know what healthy looks like?”

  Charlotte pushed past Sheffield and stalked to the mouth of the cave.

  “So how about it, Counselor?” Frank stepped over to Parker and brushed the crumbs of clay off the front of his shirt. “That drawing have any significance to you? Some scrawny dog standing on its hind legs?”

  “None,” Parker said. “None whatsoever.”

  He lay flat on his stomach and watched through the telescopic sight. The agents of the federal government were standing on the trail now, their harsh lights keeping them in bold relief. They were joking and talking loud. He passed his sight across the faces of four of the men. Square-jawed with tight military haircuts. He could probably nail three of them before they knew what was happening. With his flash hider and sound suppressor and his dark clothes, he could no doubt stay concealed through the whole tumult and, in the chaotic aftermath, sneak away down the hill.

  It was tempting. If only to have something to show for the evening.

  But he maintained discipline, waiting for the group to clear the mouth of the cave and head back down the trail. He waited an hour more, until the forest had begun to whir and rustle with the activities of nocturnal creatures, and the darkness once again reclaimed its rightful domain.

  Twenty-Two

  “Call off the dogs,” Charlotte said to Charlie Mears.

  It was nine-thirty on Thursday morning. In her jeans and bra, she was perched on the edge of the rumpled bed, using the phone in their room at the Holiday Inn in the village of Cherokee. She’d been put on hold for ten minutes, then handed off to three other hard-ass secretaries before she worked her way to FBI Assistant Director Charles L. Mears.

  “Which dogs?” Mears said.

  Charlotte had slept fitfully. From the shadows under Parker’s eyes, she knew he’d shared the mind-churning darkness with her.

  Charlotte described Sheffield’s raid the night before, the storm troopers. His use of Gracey as a decoy.

  When she was finished, he was silent.

  “You there?”

  “Frank was acting on his own authority. I may have a slightly grander title than Special Agent in Charge Sheffield, but when it comes to fieldwork, I can’t intervene in the investigative process. It’s his show to run.”

  “My daughter’s a runaway. I’m doing what any reasonable parent would do, go out and try to find her. I don’t give two shits about some fugitive you guys are after. If I happen to bump into Jacob Panther, I’ll arrest the son of a bitch because I’m a sworn officer of the law. But finding my daughter is number one. And there isn’t any number two.”

  Parker stood in the doorway with a bath towel wrapped around his waist. His cheeks foamed with shaving cream.

  “My husband thinks we should call the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility and put a very large turd in Sheffield’s file.”

  “He was simply performing his duties. I doubt you’d make much headway with OPR.”

  Charlotte said, “Well, then you should rethink how much you need my assistance in Fedderman’s project.”

  Charlotte listened to Mears silently consider the issue. She had no way to know the politics of the situation. But she understood from her years with Gables PD that people up the food chain could damn well interfere whenever and however they wanted.

  Though she was playing the Fedderman card, it was hard for her to imagine that some simple intuitive quirk she possessed was worth enough for the feds to compromise their goddamn procedures, jeopardize a case on their Top Ten.

  Thankfully, she was wrong.

  Mears said, “The director very rarely takes the kind of personal interest in recruiting individuals that he has taken in you, Officer Monroe. He saw something remarkable in your test results, as we all did. So I suppose that qualifies you to have one wish granted.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll do what I can to see that Sheffield leaves you alone. No tails, no surveillance, you’ll be out of his sights. You and your husband are private citizens with all the rights and privileges and responsibilities. You may do what you need to do within the bounds of the law to secure the return of your daughter, keeping in mind that you are a sworn police officer and you must not in any way knowingly interfere in the efforts and actions of federal agents.”

  “Is that off a TelePrompTer?”

  “My wife says that all the time. I have a robotic delivery. Talked that way as a kid. What can I say? I’ll get Sheffield to back the hell off. You do what you have to.”

  Charlotte thanked him again and hung up.

  “Free at last,” she said to Parker.

  He gave her a don’t-be-so-sure smile and said, “Standingdog Matthews has been having a series of strokes. He’s in a hospice run by the tribe. It’s a few miles west of Cherokee.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  He held up his cell phone.

  “Reception sucks, all these mountains. Miriam ran down that stuff and a few things on Martin Tribue, the airport vic. He operated a construction company, Tribue Engineering. His father’s the congressman, brother’s the sheriff for the tribe. Named Farris.”

  “They have this place sewed up.”

  “Seems that way.”

  “So I’m still on the payroll?”

  “Probation.” He ran a finger through the foam on his cheek, sizing up his bristles. “You break my balls about being honest, not telling you about Lucy Panther, about Mother being part Cherokee, but meanwhile you’re off consorting with the feds, making private deals.”

  “Probation, huh?”

  “End of the week you come up for review.”

  “You sure about that cave drawing? It could be kids.”

  “It could be, but it’s not. That’s a likeness of Standingdog. Jacob left it. He’s guiding us.”

  “I don’t like games.”

  “Well, he was right not to trust us. If he’d shown up last night, he’d be in jail right now, or dead.”

  “What you mean is, Parker, he was right not to trust me.”

  “You keep giving everything I say the worst possible twist.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yeah, I think you do. I think you’re severely knotted up about all this shit, and I’ve become the fall guy.”

  Then a phone was ringing. So muffled it might be in the next room.

  “Yours,” Parker said, and pointed at her backpack on the nightstand.

  She got it out, looked at the caller ID: OUT OF AREA

  When she answered there was static, then a disconnect.

  “Nobody,” she said.

  Parker swung back to the bathroom mirror and went to work with his razor. She looked at his back—the V still there, waist trim, shoulders wide. A body maintained on the Salvadore Park tennis courts three nights a week and weekends, when he wasn’t at trial. The body still stirred her. It was his mind that was giving her trouble.

  His goddamn persistent, all-embracing optimism and faith in the goodness of humanity despite all evidence to the contrary. His sneaky bargains with his mother, his hot and heavy teenage love affair. When she ticked off the list, ran it through her head, it seemed paltry. Certainly nothing worth shaking the foundations of their marriage. And maybe he was right about her giving everything he said the worst twist. Like the way she kept hearing him invoke the Qwik Mart holdup and her legal salvation. It might simply be her own guilty projection. An unwillingness to come to terms
with the fact that she owed him her life, always would. She had to consider that. Bite on it a while, see if it was real.

  Her phone peeped again and she picked it up, still looking at Parker’s trim torso, the muscles working under the flesh as he reached out and wiped a path across the foggy mirror.

  “Hi, Mom, it’s Gracey. Your daughter.”

  She froze. Barely recognized the voice. A prank?

  “Gracey?”

  Parker turned from the mirror.

  “So I called Dad at work and he wasn’t there, then I called home and Fredericka was there feeding the cats and she told me you’d gone on a trip. Lucy was after me to call you guys. Joan, too. Everybody said I should, that it was the right thing, so I did. You know, to check in. Make you feel better.”

  Too bubbly and alert. Not the picture she’d built in her head, a kid on the run, unraveling.

  “Where are you?”

  Parker came over and sat beside her on the edge of the bed.

  “Where are you, Mom?”

  “We’re in Cherokee, North Carolina. Where are you, Gracey?”

  The reception faded, and Gracey’s words turned to garble.

  “Gracey?”

  Her daughter was talking to someone else, and in the background a woman’s voice answered her.

  “Same place, Cherokee,” Gracey said. “That’s pretty amazing, you tracked me down. I’m impressed, Mom.”

  “Are you okay? Do you have your meds?”

  Parker stuck his hand out for the phone.

  “We have to keep moving, Mom. Lucy says to tell you to meet us this afternoon at five P.M. Jacob and Lucy have something they need to talk to you about. It’s like really important. Life or death.”

  Charlotte waved his hand away.

  He lowered it and looked up at the ceiling. Patience, patience.

  “Lucy?”

  “Yeah, Lucy Panther.”

  The breath lodged in Charlotte’s throat.

  “Butts on the Creek barbecue,” Gracey said. “Five o’clock. It’s on the main drag in Maggie Valley, whatever that road is, where all the tourist shops are and everything, moccasins, tom-toms, all that crap.”

  “Butts on the Creek barbecue?” Charlotte repeated for Parker.