Never Far Away

by Michael Koryta

  Why had he gone into the house? Why hadn’t he waited until daylight? Or told his parents the truth and asked for help? He felt tears threaten again. He didn’t like imagining his parents. They’d be terrified. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to will a message to them: I am alive. I am in trouble and I am scared but I am alive.

  It was nice to imagine that it might work.

  When the driver spoke, it made Matt’s eyes snap open. The sound of the man’s voice was completely commanding, though it was not loud.

  “Do they have to file flight plans?”

  The other man, the white guy riding shotgun, seemed as startled as Matt. “Huh? What’re you talking about?”

  “A floatplane,” the driver said. “It doesn’t have to land at an airport, but it’s still in airspace. They’ve got to have contact with the tower, right?”

  It was a good question, Matt thought. He had a feeling that the driver wouldn’t ask any questions that weren’t good.

  “I dunno,” the man in the passenger seat answered. “I doubt it, since they don’t need to land at an airport. I mean, our helicopters didn’t talk to anyone, but that was different.”

  He laughed, and it was an unkind sound. The driver did not join in the laughter.

  “Maybe not so different,” the driver said. “She’s a pilot. She knows the game. She could have told him to go on visual flight rules and keep off the radio.”

  “Think he understands enough to actually follow the instructions?”

  “Maybe. Have to consider it.”

  “Well,” the passenger said, “he’ll either be there or he won’t. If he’s gone, we deal with it in another way.”

  “Yes,” the driver said. “If he’s gone. I still think it’s speeding up, though.”

  “What is?”

  The driver just looked at him.

  “Ah,” the passenger said. “Got it. You think we’re getting to the shooting.”

  Matt’s breathing seemed to stop. The shooting?

  “We owe the old man a call,” the driver said. “We were asked to let him deliver the finale. I think it’s coming fast.”

  Matt knew he was one of the reasons things were speeding up. One of the threats to their patience. He felt a foolish urge to pipe up and tell them not to rush, not to worry about him at all, please, please, do not worry about Matt Bouchard, he was nothing if not patient.

  “I’d like to have a location guaranteed before we call,” the passenger said. “Lowery won’t like that unknown.”

  There it was! That was the name, Lowery—it sounded like the seasoned salt Matt’s dad used when he was grilling. He put it on everything. Somehow, that memory made the tears threaten again. How silly was that? The image of his father sprinkling seasoned salt on a steak, that was the thing that would make him cry?

  His lip trembled and he bit down on it hard enough to taste blood. He wouldn’t cry again. He needed to pay attention.

  “The pilot boyfriend doesn’t have skin in the game,” the driver said. “Enough to let an innocent be killed? No.”

  “Gotta find him to make that case.”

  “I’m not worried about finding him.”

  The passenger gave a low laugh and said, “You’re the best in the game, bleak.”

  The driver glanced at him then. Just a glance, but Matt could see his face, and he saw the anger in it. Reproach. He thought the passenger had just made a mistake.

  Bleak.

  Like a name? Bleak?

  They drove on in silence, and Matt thought about what he’d just heard.

  Let an innocent be killed.

  There was only one innocent in this car.

  34

  When dawn broke in rose hues across Penobscot Bay, Dax pounded on the front door of a house in Owl’s Head. A man stumbled to the door. He was wearing gym shorts and no shirt and was bleary-eyed, his hair lifted with static and one cheek still showing the imprint of a pillow.

  “What’s the matter?” he said. Pronounced “mattah.”

  “Are you Andy West?” Dax asked.

  “Yeah. What’s the matter?”

  Dax held up his place mat from the diner. “I saw your advertisement for seaplane tours.”

  West blinked twice, slowly, as if hoping the second effort would make Dax vanish. “Are you high?” he said. “You gotta call the number, man, not show up at my house.” It dawned on him that his address wasn’t on the place-mat ad, and he cocked his head, looking more aware now, and said, “Who told you where I live? It’s not even six in the friggin’ morning, and you’re showing up asking for a tour? Get outta here. Sincerely, I don’t know what in the hell you—”

  With his other hand, Dax held up a stack of hundred-dollar bills. Let them both hover in the air. One place mat, one stack of cash.

  “I’d really like that tour,” he said.

  Andy West looked at him for a long time. The screen door creaked in the breeze. “What’s going on, man?”

  “There’s a point to asking that question,” Dax said, “but there’s also a point to avoiding it. All you really need to know is that I’d like a pilot. Do you feel you need to know anything else?”

  West considered, then shook his head.

  “Excellent choice,” Dax said. “We’ve lost privacy in a lot of the world. I’m glad to see you Mainers still respect it.”

  “How much money is that?” the pilot asked.

  Dax appreciated that question. Pragmatic man. “Ten thousand. I suspect it’s more than your going rate.”

  “Not enough for me to be a friggin’ idiot and fly a criminal around.”

  “Harsh assessment of a stranger.”

  “Nobody offers money like that unless they’re in trouble. I don’t need trouble. Not even for ten grand.”

  Dax nodded, lowered the cash, and put it back in his pocket. He folded the place mat and put that in his pocket as well, and then he drew his knife and flicked the blade open.

  “You were so close to making the right choice,” he said. “Now you’ve lost ten thousand dollars and the opportunity for more. See how foolish that was? You could’ve negotiated. Now you can’t.”

  West stared at the knife, then back to Dax’s face. “I don’t want a problem. Please, dude.”

  Dax said, “You’ve got an ex-wife named Ashley who lives in Exeter with your ten-year-old daughter. Do you want to fly me up north, come back home, and be done with this by noon, or do you want me to leave you bleeding out on your porch while I drive down to Exeter to see Ashley and the kid?”

  Andy West said, “What the fuck.”

  Dax said, “Exactly.”

  Ten minutes later, they were on their way to the private airport in Owl’s Head, not five minutes from West’s house. West was driving, and Dax was at his side. The Knox County Regional Airport was quiet in the early morning. It was probably quiet most of the time. A few commuter planes down to Boston, a few private jets, and the occasional sightseeing craft.

  No one stopped them when they walked from the car to West’s plane, which was bright yellow with black trim. It looked, Dax thought, like a hornet or a wasp.

  Dax still had the knife in his hand but kept it hidden against his thigh. He was wearing a backpack that contained all of his own gear and carrying a flight bag that contained Andy West’s identification, cash and credit cards, and both of the guns in Mr. West’s legal possession. The shotgun was a cheap twelve-gauge pump, but the handgun was a quality Glock semiautomatic. Unfortunately, Andy had no ammo for the Glock, a sin for which he would have paid dearly at the Blackwell School for Curious Youth. Nevertheless, Dax had learned long ago that even an unloaded gun could be a persuasive weapon, so he’d brought it along.

  “I’m embarrassed to admit this,” Dax said as they approached the plane, “but I thought it would be on the water. I mean, I wasn’t sure a seaplane would have wheels. Dumb, right?”

  When West spoke, it was in a whisper, as if he thought someone on the empty stretch of tarmac might be ea
vesdropping. “Where do I need to take you?”

  “I think it’s called the Allagash,” Dax said.

  West stopped walking and rested one hand on the yellow wing of the plane. “Who are you running from?”

  “I’m not running from anyone,” Dax said. “All I need you to do is fly me up there, drop me off, and fly on back here. Then you go home and get back in bed and you do not tell anyone about this exciting plot twist in your life for, oh, one week. Sound fair? You’ll have quite the story, and you can share it with the world one week from now; I won’t mind.”

  “The Allagash is a big friggin’ place. You don’t care where I drop you?”

  “Oh, I have a destination,” Dax said. “But let’s get off the ground before we discuss.”

  He let the blade catch the sunlight again.

  “Okay,” West said.

  They got in the plane. The single prop started easily and ran smoothly. Dax listened while West spoke to the tower and nodded approvingly when the pilot kept his voice neutral. They taxied, took off, and flew toward the rising sun, then angled back in the opposite direction. Beneath them, the water was colorful with lobster buoys. Boats were already out. A fisherman’s day started early. Good clean work.

  “You’ll do the right thing for your daughter, won’t you?” Dax asked.

  “Stop talking about her.”

  “It’s a matter of motivation. You need to be motivated for me to trust you. Understand?”

  West’s face was tight with fear, but his hands were steady on the yoke. Another good sign. Dax didn’t like jittery pilots.

  “The wheels retract,” Dax observed as they flew northwest. “That’s what I wasn’t considering. It seemed like a choice to me, that you’d have either wheels or floats. But you’ve got the best of both worlds, don’t you? It’s not a seaplane. It’s an amphibious plane. Much more sophisticated.”

  West said, “You told me that once we were in the air, I’d learn my destination.”

  “The destination is a place called Roman Island Lake. You know it?”

  The pilot nodded.

  “Great,” Dax said, settling back into the seat. “Fly on, Mr. West.”

  Roman Island Lake interrupted the Allagash River’s flow like a blood clot. It was north of any property that Leah Trenton and Ed Levenseller owned but Dax had decided to start north and work his way south. He believed Leah would have sought her outermost point of security, which was on Upper Martin Mountain Pond, but he also suspected that she’d be highly attuned to the sound of approaching aircraft.

  Dax didn’t want to frighten anyone.

  Andy West had an inflatable Zodiac dinghy stored in a bag beneath the plane and a 9.9-horsepower Mercury to power it. A bonus. Dax wouldn’t need to waste time stealing a boat.

  “I wish you hadn’t said anything about my daughter,” Andy West murmured.

  “You should’ve taken the money, then.”

  The North Atlantic had fallen away behind them and the low mountains of the Camden Hills were gone. A decent-size town came and went. Bangor? Too far east to be Augusta, too far north to be Portland, and there weren’t any other decent-size towns in Maine. The world was giving way to forest now, an interminable stretch of pines, and I-95 lay below them, straight and glimmering, like a single plowed furrow in ground that had proven to be untillable, inhospitable. Then the plane banked northwest, the highway was gone, and only the forest remained, pockmarked with lakes and frothing ribbons of river.

  Dax’s left arm ached. He did not like the view from here. Dax rubbed his arm and faced the pilot. He did not need to see the woods and the rivers. He needed to watch the human beside him, learn the mistakes specific to this unique specimen, and merge those lessons with all the other mistakes of other humans he’d watched.

  Clear eyes, curious mind, empty heart. Recipe for success.

  “What?” Andy West said, feeling the presence of Dax’s stare.

  “Just fly. The rest will take care of itself.”

  They flew. The forest seemed to gain depth as they pushed north, the trees sealing in on one another until the woods had a textured, overlapping look from above. As the sun rose, the hues of green brightened but the blackness was never completely gone. It would be a very dark wood from the ground, Dax realized, and it would be hard traveling.

  A mountain with a hint of snowcap on the peak rose to their left.

  “Is that Katahdin?” he asked.

  “What’s that matter to you?” Surly.

  “I’m a curious man and I’d hate to miss this opportunity to learn a little,” Dax said. “The chance might not come again.”

  West shook his head and didn’t speak. Dax sighed and leaned toward him with the knife. “The place mat promised tours,” he said.

  West wet his lips and said, “Yes, that is Mount Katahdin.”

  Dax leaned back in his seat. “Excellent. We’re now north of the end of the Appalachian Trail. The terminus, if you prefer to be more technical. Which word do you like, Mr. West? End or terminus?”

  Nothing.

  “Or conclusion,” Dax said. “We could say conclusion instead of end, couldn’t we? The outcome. The endpoint. The expiry. Which term do you like?”

  “Stopover,” West whispered.

  Dax laughed. “That’s very good,” he said. “I enjoyed that one.”

  But West was not laughing, and he didn’t appreciate the banter. This was one of the things Dax hated about traveling alone. He could be at peace alone, but it would be so nice to have a companion who understood you. What his father and uncle and aunts had had.

  His left arm throbbed. Phantom pains from bones that had knit back together long ago. He shifted in his seat, seeking relief from the constant shudder of the aircraft. Even phantom pains could be loud presences.

  Katahdin was out of sight and the big lakes were vanishing but the rivers were widening. Andy West brought the plane’s nose down, and through the shimmer of the spinning prop, Dax saw an elongated lake between stretches of river, like a knot someone had forgotten to untangle. “This is the place?” Dax asked.

  West nodded once. His face was turned away from Dax, angled down and to the left, scouting the island. Looking for a landing zone, presumably. But Dax didn’t like his expression. There was a touch of the conniver to it.

  “You been here before?” Dax asked.

  “Roman Island?”

  “Yes.”

  “Only in a canoe. Never flown into it.”

  From within the throb deep in that damaged bone, a voice rose up like the Yellowstone Caldera come to pay a visit: Remember that he’s not as useless as he seems, Dax. He’s a bush pilot, even if he gives cute little tours during the summer months. Has a gun and a Zodiac and has used them. He’s got some resourcefulness. Maybe he’s got something in him that you don’t see.

  It was easy for him to imagine that the voice was his father’s. To remember the sound and cadence and the lessons left behind.

  Roman Island clarified in front of them. Dax watched the odd tangle of lake in the center of the river widen to greet them, the island stuck there in the middle, and suddenly the warning voice was gone and that song from Reservoir Dogs was in his head: I got the feeling that something ain’t right.

  “Don’t land by the island,” Dax said.

  “What? You said put it down at Roman—”

  “Instructions have changed. Cope. Adapt. And do not put me down by that fucking island.”

  West looked pained, and that expression told Dax he had made the right choice, although he wasn’t yet sure why. West had been too pleased about the descent to the island, and Dax believed that he’d lied about visiting the place only once and in a canoe. There was something down there that appealed to West, something more than merely the chance to get rid of his passenger. Dax didn’t know what it was, but he knew that it was true, felt it in the way he felt the ache from that perfectly healthy but once broken arm.

  “Go north,” he said. “Far end of
the lake. Far out of sight of the island.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with landing at the—”

  “Thought you hadn’t landed there before.”

  West opened his lips, closed them, then tried again. “I know the water. I can just put us down there like you wanted and then—”

  “Do I sound like I’m open to opinions?”

  They flew over the island at about five hundred feet and kept pushing north. Dax studied the place as they passed. Maybe a dozen camps in all, if that. Some with signs of life, but others appearing to be shut tight for the season.

  Several boats. Faster boats than the Zodiac, if he needed to steal one.

  The island vanished behind them and the lake opened its cold gray arms ahead and Andy West said, “Put it down or circle?”

  “Put it down.”

  “It’s all rock on that shoreline, man. I can’t taxi up and drop you off, not like I could have on the island.”

  “I’ll live with it.”

  West shrugged and prepared to land. When they were about thirty feet off the surface of the lake, West brought the nose up slightly. The floats met the water, and West brought the throttle all the way back, idling the engine. They were now down on the lake with about two hundred feet separating them from a long low esker of rock.

  “Would you have done that if the wind was blowing harder?” Dax asked.

  West frowned and stared. “Done what? Landed?”

  “Idled the engine. If the wind was really blowing, wouldn’t you have wanted some power?”

  West considered him as if seeing something new—and possibly more alarming. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t have with the wind. Then I’d take a powered flare. But to do that, I’d need to eat up more of the lake.”

  Dax nodded, pleased with both West’s explanation and himself for understanding it.

  “Very good,” he said. “I appreciate the insight. Take us over to that far cove.” He pointed to an area where a horseshoe-shaped cliff surrounded the water.