En route home in the jitney van one afternoon, he noticed a disabled pickup truck on the shoulder and a middle-aged cowboy kneeling beside it to fix a flat tire. From a distance, the figure reminded Linder of Will Browning, and on impulse, he asked the driver to stop the van. But when he came closer to the cowboy, the resemblance to Browning vanished.
Later, on arriving in town, he stopped at the sandwich shop to buy a beer and spotted another uncanny resemblance. At the head of the line of customers was a young man with a wiry physique and long black hair that spilled over his ears and onto his collar like Rhee’s. Even the youth’s voice, though indistinct against the background noise, seemed to have an intonation and pitch like Rhee’s.
Once again, Linder felt compelled to approach the man but, as they came face to face, he saw that the youth was years younger than Rhee, not Asian, and far softer in body than the sinewy Rhee. Linder returned quickly to the end of the queue, shaken and half expecting to find someone next with a resemblance to Scotty.
Over dinner, while Mrs. Unger was in the kitchen, Linder’s thoughts turned to Scotty once more, recalling their first meeting in the camp infirmary, when Linder had given him Roger Kendall’s uneaten dinner and gained a loyal friend. Soon after, the Kaska had given him his compass and Linder had promised the dying Kendall to come to the aid of his wife and daughter in Utah.
That night his dreams returned, and Linder saw himself in a schoolroom with rows of long tables facing a blackboard. But instead of students, a dozen working-aged men and women sat at the tables and read newspapers, solved puzzles or slept. Linder noticed one woman in particular, tall and slender, dressed in freshly pressed blue jeans and a white sleeveless blouse. Her mahogany hair, worn in a ponytail, was streaked with gray and her olive complexion was tanned and lined from hard work and worry. She sat erect and seemed to stare at the vacant blackboard as if in a trance. As in his dream the night before, Linder seemed to observe her from all directions at once and even to read her thoughts and emotions. Instantly, he picked up vague feelings of failure, regret, and despair, and a longing to regain a sense of her life’s purpose. Drawing away from her now, Linder felt that the room and the building were very real indeed and perhaps within closer reach than he had thought. And as to who the woman was, there could be no doubt.
* * *
Throughout the weekend, Linder thought of little else but his dream of Patricia Kendall. By the time he awoke Monday morning, he believed he knew what the dream meant and had seized on a plan.
After work on Monday, Linder visited Jay in his office to report the completion of a special project Jay had given him. Jay praised his work and repeated his offer of a salary raise once his probationary period was over.
“That’s okay, Jay. I didn’t come here to hit you up for a raise. But there is something you could help me with, if you don’t mind my asking.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Jay said, tilting back in his swivel chair.
“I’d like your advice, based on your time at Kamas,” Linder began, checking to make sure the door was fully closed behind him. “I’m trying to locate someone who may have been transferred to Kamas to serve out the last months of her sentence. How do they handle releases over there? Do they use parole or probation or halfway houses? How might I go about making a discreet inquiry?”
Jay gave Linder a severe look.
“Helping you with something like that could come back and bite me in the ass,” he replied with a stern look. “I think maybe I’d rather give you the raise.”
Linder ignored the bluster and waited for Jay to go on. Though talking about the camps might be uncomfortable for Jay, the information sought from him was not highly sensitive and put him at little risk.
“The CLA won’t reveal the names of individual prisoners at a camp like Kamas,” he answered after a pause. “If your friend is there, you won’t be able to find out anything about her till she’s released. And it could be risky to ask about her even then. On the other hand, you might go about trying to find her by staking out the state employment office closest to where she lives.”
“What does the employment office have to do with anything?” Linder asked.
“Every released prisoner, political or criminal,” Jay went on, leaning forward now and lowering his voice, “is supposed to be placed in a job after he’s out, even if it’s some bullshit job like picking up trash on a road crew. But since there are never enough jobs to go around, until your friend gets placed, she’ll have to punch in at a reassignment center for four hours a day to qualify for benefits.”
Jay offered a conspiratorial smile, apparently pleased at exposing the small ways in which the regime controlled prisoners’ lives even after their release from captivity.
“These reassignment centers, how would I find them?” Linder asked.
“They’re usually located in the same building as the state employment office. That would be the town hall or county office building,” Jay explained. “So if this person were released from Kamas but required to stay in Summit County, as ex-prisoners usually are, you’d have to check the employment offices in each town in the county, starting with Park City, Heber, Kamas and so on.”
“Can you think of any other way I could track her down, maybe through a network of former prisoners or a support group for prisoners’ families?”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Jay replied, “but I could ask my dad. At one point he must have known some people in the New Underground Railroad, because they helped him arrange my release.”
“The NUR, here in Utah?” Linder had heard of the organization, but knew little about it, as the DSS had never succeeded in penetrating it beyond the arrest of a few low-level operators.
“Sure. As far as I can tell, the NUR operates in all the restricted zones. They help released prisoners reunite with their families and, in many cases, provide forged documents so they can start new lives outside the zones. Think of the NUR like the witness protection program, except that it hides people from the government, not for it.”
“Could you ask Larry if he still has contacts with them? I might want to get in touch some time,” Linder added as he rose to leave.
“I’ll ask,” Jay responded. “But don’t get your hopes up. Still, if you ever find a safe way out of this damned country of ours, for God’s sake, take me with you.”
* * *
On the following Saturday, when the vitamin plant was closed, Linder took a bus to Park City and found the state employment office on the outskirts of town. The historic Old Town had been devastated by avalanches after five years of monstrous snowfalls that created mini-glaciers hundreds of feet deep at the upper elevations of the Wasatch Mountains.
Despite the population losses Park City suffered during the Events and the insurgency, and from the mass arrests and forced resettlements that followed, the town had stayed alive by attracting new inhabitants. Most recently, these had been military and security personnel, civil servants, and government contractors. But far more numerous were the refugees from California and Nevada who had fled natural disasters and civil unrest during the Events and became squatters in former rental units and vacation homes that the Unionist regime had seized.
Even now, years after the Events, these refugees subsisted primarily on government benefits, augmented by the proceeds of petty crime, and clashed frequently with long-time residents who had clung to their homes. Everywhere he looked, buildings were rundown and shoddily maintained, as the refugee squatters had little pride of ownership or incentive to make improvements.
Linder looked off to the mountains, where the town’s eponymous ski resort had been. There he saw oversize bulldozers push snow away from open gashes in the hills as newly licensed open-pit silver mines were being carved out from the former ski slopes. While the mines would offer much-needed employment for a few, the earth-moving equipment used to create them spewed dense exhaust into an atmosphere already toxic with smoke from the uncontrolled burning of local
coal and wood.
Linder kept a watchful eye on the street numbers along Kearns Boulevard so he would not miss the state employment office among the strip malls and flea markets lining the busy thoroughfare. In nearby meadows too steep for tent cities or FEMA trailers, wildflowers bloomed in a bizarre contrast between natural beauty and man-made blight.
Linder found the employment office beside a strip mall. A sign on the door confirmed that the office was closed on weekends, so he noted the office hours and walked across the street to a coffee shop to buy a cup to go. Two doors down, at a state liquor store, where sullen drunks milled about waiting for the doors to open, Linder asked the uniformed security guard whether the same sort of crowd appeared every day.
“It’s always worst at opening time and at five, when the rubber room empties out and the derelicts make a beeline to blow their wages on booze and weed,” the guard replied sourly.
It seemed that every main street and strip mall in Utah had at least one state liquor store. Linder had shopped at the Coalville branch once to buy a pint of gin and recalled the monumental headache he experienced after only a few sips. Later he learned that the state liquor monopoly carried only the rawest gin and vodka, along with ersatz whiskey and rum—altogether undrinkable stuff. As in the former Soviet Union, the excise taxes on alcohol had become a major source of revenue for the regime. Spirits and regulated cannabis were now advertised heavily on billboards and buses alongside state lottery tickets. Linder imagined the elders and bishops of Utah’s banned LDS church spinning in their shallow sub-arctic graves.
Nominal government control of alcoholic spirits did not, however, keep cheaper bootleg material off the streets. The illegal stuff was often tainted with wood alcohol and other poisons that killed or blinded its victims, sometimes with the very first swig. Though some decent whiskey occasionally made its way down from Canada and onto the black market, even that could be counterfeit and was generally not safe to drink, unless you brought it over the border yourself or knew the person who did.
Having settled on a plan for his next visit to the employment office, Linder walked a few blocks and caught the next bus for Coalville. On Monday, he asked Jay for an extended lunch break later in the week. Jay offered him Wednesday, and Linder rode a van from the industrial park to Kearns Avenue at midday, arriving at the employment office just before one o’clock to watch the applicants file in. He returned after work at five to watch them leave but saw no one with the slightest resemblance to Patricia Kendall.
The next week, he requested another long lunch break to observe the mid-day arrivals. Still no luck.
The week after that, he tried the employment office at Heber, east of Park City. One week later, he staked out the Kamas office.
By then, Linder’s foreman had begun to complain of his frequent absences and, not long after, Jay took him aside to inquire if he had any luck finding his buddy’s wife.
“Not yet, but I’m not giving up,” Linder replied wearily.
“How many offices have you covered?” Jay asked.
“I’ve staked out Park City, Heber, and Kamas, with no luck at all,” Linder answered. “I could go back and try them all again but I’m beginning to think it would be a waste of time. Assuming she’s not allowed to move out of Summit County, where else could she be?”
“Have you tried the Coalville office?”
Linder gave a quizzical look.
“Coalville?”
“Sure, even our little town has a rubber room for the unemployed. Why not give it a shot?” Jay suggested.
“Might as well,” Linder replied, brightening. “Do you mind if I leave a bit early tomorrow afternoon to check it out?”
“Go for it,” Jay replied, and resumed signing a stack of paychecks, for the next day was the last Friday of the month, and payroll was due.
* * *
At half past four the following afternoon, Linder stepped off the jitney bus at Center and Main and walked up to the receptionist’s window at Coalville City Hall.
“Excuse me,” he asked, noticing that the woman was already busy tidying up her desk for an early Friday departure. “I’m looking for the state employment office. Is it in this building?”
“It’s one more block north on your right,” she replied without looking up at him. “You can’t miss it.”
Linder walked the extra block to 100th Street North and found an imposing Romanesque-style building of carved stone dating from the town’s salad days at the turn of the twentieth century. He had never been inside, but knew it as the Summit County Courthouse. Noticing a recent addition at the building’s rear, he bypassed the front entrance and walked around the side. Finding no entrance, he retraced his path and found his way blocked by a Summit County Sheriff’s car driven by the same deputy sheriff who had nearly arrested him on his first day in town.
“Looking for something?” Deputy Eldon asked.
“Yes, the state employment office,” Linder answered with a sinking feeling in his stomach.
“Lost your job already?” the deputy sheriff accused.
Linder looked at his watch and saw that it was already quarter to five. He had only a few minutes to find the reassignment office and locate a place from which to observe the exit at a discreet distance. He decided to be frank with Eldon.
“Not at all,” he replied, avoiding a defensive tone. “I’m looking for the reassignment center. You know, the office where they make people sit and wait who don’t have jobs. I promised I’d be there at closing time and don’t want to be late.”
“What do you want to hang out with those people for?” Eldon challenged. “There’s hardly a one of them who’s not a drunk or a junkie. You’re not falling into bad ways, are you?”
Linder brushed off the insinuation with an easy laugh.
“No, actually, my boss sent me here to find one of his ex-employees. Company business,” he lied, knowing that he could get Jay to back him up if needed.
Eldon stepped forward and pointed to the left rear of the courthouse.
“Circle around to your left and you’ll find it in back by the parking lot,” the deputy directed. “But be careful around that crowd. They’re liable to trample you on their stampede to the liquor store.”
Linder thanked the deputy and arrived in the parking lot just in time to find a prime vantage point behind a parked SUV before the first of the unemployed streamed out with their pay in hand. Remembering Eldon’s comments about the sort of people he was watching, he touched his wallet reflexively to confirm that it still held his rent money.
While Linder mused over how suspicious he must have looked to the deputy sheriff when he had first queued up for work on South Main, he spotted three neatly dressed women step out the door. His heart raced when he saw that the dark-haired woman in the middle wore pressed blue jeans and a white sleeveless blouse, and even from a distance bore a striking resemblance to the person he had seen in his dream. All at once, his mind froze and for several moments he lost any sense of what he had planned to do next.
When the three women were nearly out of sight at the far end of the parking lot, Linder gathered his wits and set off in pursuit. The trio turned left and parted from one another at the corner of Main and 50th Street North. Linder followed the woman in the sleeveless blouse at a distance along 50th North into a residential neighborhood.
The further she went, the more exposed he felt. If she had spotted him and turned around now to look, it would be obvious that he had been trailing her, and she would likely quicken her pace. If he closed the gap, she might take fright and call the sheriff. But if he broke off pursuit without learning where she lived, he would have to start all over again the next week, and he did not want to wait that long.
As for what he would do if he caught up to her, he had no idea. How would he introduce himself? Did he dare use his true name and risk having Patricia or her daughter reveal it to someone else? If he did, would it be better to feign coincidence at meeting her in Co
alville or to confess that he had taken pains to track her down? Though coincidence might seem plausible at first, eventually the story would collapse and he would be caught in a lie. Yet, if he presented himself as Linder and Patricia had already learned that Warren Linder and Joe Tanner were the same man, why would she do anything else but scratch his eyes out or run from him at top speed?
Alternatively, taking the more cautious approach and introducing himself as Tom Horvath would make it nearly impossible to call himself Linder afterward. As he considered the various options, he settled on the idea of simply learning where the dark-haired woman lived and planning to approach her another day. At the next corner, the woman turned right and kept going south, across Center Street toward a school complex.
Of course, he thought, if this were Patricia, she would be on her way to the middle school to pick up Caroline. The school would have arrangements for after-hours activities so that working parents could pick up their students after work. And as they drew closer, Linder saw a dozen or more students lined up at the school entrance for their five o’clock pickup.
Linder crossed the street and watched from the high school parking lot as the woman resembling Patricia, now with her teenaged daughter, doubled back toward the north, crossed Center Street again, and followed 50th Street North to an apartment in an outbuilding behind a sprawling ranch house. Despite all the thought Linder had devoted to preparing for this moment, now that he was sure he had found Patricia Kendall, he remained at a loss over what to do next.
After walking to the end of the block and back again, keeping his eyes on the apartment all the while, he decided to leave and return the next day. Only then did he notice a hulking figure dressed in denim bib overalls emerge from the side door of the ranch house and approach the outbuilding. The man knocked and entered without waiting for a response. Linder approached for a closer look despite the risk of no longer appearing to be a casual passer-by. Two minutes later, Caroline burst out the door with a panicked look on her face, scanning the street as if seeking help. At the same time, he heard raised voices inside the apartment.
Exile Hunter Page 39
