The Egret

by Russell Hill

  Did I feel remorse at the deaths of the driver and the wife? Now Winslow had a loss, just as I had a loss. The driver was incidental damage, and I was sorry he had been a victim. But the wife didn’t bother me. I hoped that Winslow loved her enough to grieve over her the way I had missed my daughter. Tit for tat, I thought.

  CHAPTER 32

  Susanville is a small town, at four thousand feet elevation on the edge of the Nevada border. Originally a lumber town, now its biggest employers are the two prisons on the outskirts of town. I found a small cottage behind an old Victorian house, and the woman in her seventies who lived in the house was happy to rent her cottage to me for what would have been a pittance in Marin County, “A hundred and fifty dollars a month,” she said. “Is that too much?”

  “No,” I replied, and pressed the cash into her hand.

  “So you’re a carpenter?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll find work here. What we need is a good handyman, somebody who can put up shelves and replace a window and build some steps. Can you do those sort of things?”

  “You bet.”

  I moved into the cottage, had a telephone installed and made a small advertisement that I pinned up on the bulletin boards at the grocery stores, a coffee shop and the hardware store. EXPERIENCED CARPENTER. NO JOB TOO SMALL. There were strips to tear off with my new telephone number. Everything was cash for me. No bank account, and I found an old truck rusting behind a service station that still had license plates. I took them, fashioned what looked like a current sticker on the corner of the plate and drove carefully.

  It was the second week when Mrs. Carlson cornered me. I had already done two jobs as a handyman, neither one of them paying much, but it was a start. “A man was looking for you,” she said.

  “He wanted me to do a job for him?”

  “He didn’t say so. He said he was looking for the owner of your Toyota. He had the name wrong and I told him so. I caught him snooping around your cottage. He was a big man, maybe the biggest I ever saw, and I saw a lot of big men when my husband was alive and the mills were working. But this man was built like a truck, if you know what I mean.”

  “When was he here?”

  “You must have gone down to the grocery store. Your car was still here, but there was no sign of you, so I guessed that you walked to the store. Yesterday afternoon.”

  Somebody looking for me. How could anyone know I was in Susanville? I was seven hours from Marin, and nearly three hundred miles. Then I remembered that I had gassed up the car in Chico and again that first night I was in Susanville, using my Standard Oil credit card. It was the only noncash purchase I had made, and Winslow was the CEO of an oil company, and a few phone calls was all it would take for him to get the history of my card use. And he had somebody sniffing around. I would have to move again. And this time I would have to be more careful.

  “If he comes around again, would you let me know?” I said.

  “By all means. He didn’t look like the kind of man who was up to any good. I had half a mind to call the sheriff.”

  “No, don’t call the sheriff. And thanks for letting me know.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Where to go? That was the question. Maybe over into Nevada. There were places in Nevada that were isolated, small towns connected to the mining industry and even Basque sheepherders who grazed thousands of sheep on arid hillsides. I would, once again, have to depart without notice, slip away in the night and find a place where Winslow’s thugs couldn’t track me down. But I wasn’t quick enough. The big man showed up again.

  I saw him in the driveway, standing at the street, and Mrs. Carlson’s description was accurate. He was built like a truck; wide shoulders, no neck, arms that hung down his sides like big fenders, a waist nearly as wide as his shoulders, and no belly on him. Nothing but muscle. He wore oversize denims and a khaki shirt and his head was shaved clean, and gleamed in the sun. He stared at the house. I took the Glock out of the toolbox, made sure there were bullets in the magazine and chambered one of them. I crouched at the small window next to the front door and watched. He stood for a long time and then Mrs. Carlson appeared on her front porch. She called out something to the man and he turned to face her. He didn’t reply. At least his lips didn’t move. Then he turned and walked back up the street, away from the house. He didn’t exactly walk, it was more of a roll, his legs working in short strides, his stocky body erect and solid and imposing. He was more than six feet tall, a giant of a man. No wonder Mrs. Carlson was worried. Don’t call the sheriff, I said to myself. Don’t bring the sheriff into this.

  I set about packing things up. My tools were all in the car except for the toolbox. It only took a few minutes to fill the duffle bag. There was no point in leaving during the daylight. He could easily spot me and follow. Better to leave in the small hours of the morning. I would drive down 395 and turn into Nevada, then go north toward Contact. It would be easy to see if anyone was following me on those empty roads. And in Contact I would trade cars, buy another used car, pay cash. There had to be somebody in a town that small and isolated who would be willing to take my Toyota off my hands and, for an exchange of cash, give me something else to drive. Something without California plates.

  I left a hundred dollars cash in an envelope for Mrs. Carlson with an apology for leaving without notice. Just after midnight I put my bag and the toolbox in my car. I put the Glock under the driver’s seat where I could reach it. I drove out of Susanville toward the east, hooked up on 395 and drove south. There were no headlights behind me. The road was empty, but I was sure that they hadn’t just let me drift off into the night without noticing. If they had gone to the trouble of tracking me down in Susanville, then they would continue to keep track of me.

  At Alturas I went east into Nevada, took the highway south until I came to Interstate 80 just east of Sparks. By now it was three o’clock in the morning and the only other vehicles were the occasional eighteen-wheelers on an allnight run. Interstate 80 was easy, little traffic, and I kept the old Toyota at a steady seventy miles an hour. In Winnemucca I stopped, put gas in the car, and drove on toward Wells. I reached Wells at five, and stopped at a huge truck stop, idling big rigs surrounding me. Inside was a twenty-four hour café, and I had a trucker’s breakfast, went to the toilet, splashed water on my face, and took Highway 93 North out of Wells. It was an empty two-lane road. Nothing behind me, no cars coming my way for more than an hour. Eventually I saw signs for Contact, and when I reached it, the sun was up. Contact was virtually empty. It had obviously once been a nice little town, but it was largely abandoned, empty shops, and I drove on toward Jackpot, the last town before Idaho.

  Jackpot was more promising. Lots of motels and several casinos and the big lure seemed to be gaming for people who dropped down over the state line from Idaho. I found a motel for forty bucks a night, and collapsed.

  The next morning I put my original license plates back on the car and I looked for a car dealer. There were none. But there was a tire shop and when I asked, the fat guy behind the counter said, “You trying to sell your car? Had a run of bad luck?”

  His words were a stroke of luck. “Yes. What I’d like to do is trade down, maybe get a bit of cash in the bargain.”

  He took a look at the Toyota, checked the tires, asked if he could drive it. He got behind the wheel and we toured what little there was of Jackpot.

  “I’ve got a Ford Explorer,” He said. “It’s got a hundred and fifty thousand on it and the four-wheel drive is broke, but the tranny is good and the engine is OK. I can give it to you with five hundred cash for this Toyota.”

  It was a rip-off, that much I knew. But he was used to gamblers down on their luck and I decided to play the part.

  “How about six hundred?” I asked.

  “No. Five hundred is my limit.”

  The Ford Explorer had a crack in the windshield, but the shift was smooth and the engine seemed smooth as well. The seats were well-worn. Somebody had
used this vehicle heavily. Still, it had Nevada license plates, ran OK, and I would be shed of the Toyota.

  “OK, I said. It’s a deal.”

  Inside his office he got out some papers and asked to see my California license.

  “Can we do this on a cash basis? Let me do the paperwork? All you have to do is file a quit claim and you’re no longer connected to it.”

  He looked at me. “You got the papers for the Toyota?”

  “All of them. Pink slip, ownership. But I’d like to keep my name out of this.”

  “I can do that,” he said. “I’ll file a lien against you for non-payment for a set of tires. You give me an address, and I’ll send the letter and the car becomes mine, no questions asked. That suit you?”

  “Perfect,” I said. There was no doubt he had done this before.

  “Is there any place I can hole up here in Jackpot for a while?”

  “Not likely. You’d be better off in Twin Falls.”

  “How far is that?”

  “Less than fifty miles.”

  “What about the Nevada license plates?”

  “We get Idaho plates here all the time. They get Nevada plates. Nobody pays any attention.”

  So I went farther north. The landscape was desolate until I got into Oregon, then it began to green up a bit. The Snake River Canyon ran along the edge of the town, and the town limit sign told me there were forty-four thousand people living there. Surely it was a town where I could get lost. I drove around a bit. The Perrine Bridge, a massive steel structure spanned the Snake River Canyon and the Shoshone Falls spilled in cascades just outside of town. I stopped at a Chamber of Commerce booth on one of the tree-shaded downtown streets and asked about housing.

  I found a room in a lodging house, and settled in. Two days later there was a note under my windshield wiper. “YOU CANT ESCAPE YOUR FUCKED,” it read in block letters.

  They had, somehow, found me. Perhaps the tire dealer in Jackpot had been paid off. Or they had put a tracking device in the Toyota and that was how they traced me to Jackpot. Whoever was doing the tracking knew their stuff.

  CHAPTER 34

  I got out my road atlas. Whoever had put the note on my windshield knew my car and the license plates. I would have to do it differently, but this time I would crawl under the car, inspect it for some sort of device that would enable them to hunt me down. I crawled under the car and began the inspection, working from back to front, carefully running my fingers into every possible place where something could be placed. And sure enough, I found a cigarette package sized device tucked into the frame, secured with some sort of heavy mastic. I carefully pried it off and crawled under the car next to mine. I stuck it onto the frame. I had no idea whose car it was and no idea where he drove it, but by the time they found out where it was, I would be long gone. I found a sporting goods store where they sold fishing licenses, hunting licenses, and basic camping gear. I bought a sleeping bag and a foam pad, a small gas stove, several canisters of gas and a set of pans, nestled inside each other like Russian dolls. I bought a Coleman lantern and another jacket, this one a thick outdoorsman’s jacket. I bought a big can for water and tablets for purifying water. A young woman who worked there helped me round out my camping gear. When I was done, I knew that, with food supplies, I could stay several weeks in some out-of-the-way campground, off the grid.

  That evening I pored over my maps. If I took the tiny grey-lined roads, paved and sometimes unpaved, I could go over into Oregon, go south back into Nevada and find a campground somewhere on the Marys River above Elko. There was one road that ran, straight as an arrow, south from Oregon, between two mountain ranges. An examination of the campground guide I had bought at the sporting goods store, showed several unimproved campgrounds in the National Forest there. I found one, Gance Creek, that seemed ideal. There was a turnoff to a ranch, and the road ran almost ten miles before it passed the ranch, then wound up into the mountains. The campground showed no permanent fire pits or tables, just a notification that it was open in the summer. I could go there, wait two weeks, and then go south, heading toward Colorado since it would be approaching Fall and I didn’t want to end up in the snow.

  I left, once again, at night. Within a few hours, I was in Oregon, turning south. The road was narrow, not much more than a wide lane, sometimes paved, often just smooth gravel that came up into the wheel wells like rifle shots. It was mid-afternoon when I got to the ranch turnoff. The roads were straight, as if they had been planned with a laser beam, mile after mile of sagebrush and buckbrush, punctuated periodically by white-faced cattle that raised their heads at the sound of the approaching vehicle. I passed the ranch, a few low-slung buildings among a grove of cottonwoods and began to climb. Gance Creek Campground was truly isolated. There was a tiny creek that meandered through bristly brush, and evidence that cattle occasionally wandered through the campground.

  I set up camp, feeling satisfied with myself. My days were quiet, reading in the folding camp chair that I had bought, collecting firewood and building a fire to keep myself warm and to cook, saving the gas stove for emergencies. It was the kind of life that I had imagined spending with my daughter. She, too, liked the outdoors and I knew that she would have liked this little clearing among the scrub oaks and pines.

  I was there a week when I heard the engine. I assumed it was the rancher, checking on the cattle that I had occasionally seen on the hillsides surrounding the campground. But when the vehicle pulled into the campground it looked suspiciously like the Range Rover that I had seen in Earl Winslow’s garage, and the figure that stepped out of it was my giant, the extra large man who had stood in the driveway in Susanville.

  How had he tracked me? Had I not found the device that enabled him to find me here in this isolated place? Had there been a second device planted on my Explorer?

  “What the fuck do you want?” I shouted.

  He stood, motionless, silent.

  Then he spoke. “You will come with me.”

  “No, I won’t fucking come with you. I don’t know who the fuck you are and I’m not going any place with you!”

  “You have no choice.” He began to move toward me. He must be armed, I thought. But he intends to take me back to face Winslow. He’s been hired to track me down and capture me. I was the egret in the marsh and the coyote had spotted me and was about to pounce.

  I reached back to where the Glock was tucked into my belt at my back. I had not been without that gun since I had set up camp. I slept with it clutched in my hand and if I dropped my trousers to take a shit, I laid it on a rock within easy reach. I brought it around and aimed it at him.

  “Take one more step and I will shoot you,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think you will. Aiming a handgun like that is a special art and it’s highly likely that if you do pull the trigger, you will miss.”

  “Somebody as big as you would be hard to miss,” I said as he came closer, pausing to open his jacket. I could see a gun in a holster at his waist.

  “You see, we are at what might be called a standoff,” he said. “But I am trained to shoot my weapon. You are not.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know everything there is to know about you, my friend.” He took a step and I fired. The shot missed him and he reached for his gun and I fired again, this time the bullet slammed into his shoulder and he wheeled, as if he were changing direction, then turned back to me, still drawing out the gun. I fired again, this time the gun jumping in my hand, almost jumping out of my hand, and I continued to pull the trigger until it clicked, empty and he stopped, bent over, clutched at his stomach, and a grunt came from him. I had shot him again.

  I stood there, waiting. He was on the ground, on his side, and I knew that I had done great damage to him. And he was surprised that I had done so, had not expected me to be accurate, had expected that he would capture me and drag me away, only he was struggling with the pain and I stepped forward. I leveled the gun a
t his head, not unlike the way I had aimed the gun at the head of the truck driver in West Marin.

  ‘No,” I said. “You will not be taking me away,” and I pulled the trigger again. The gun did not fire and I realized that I had emptied the magazine. I went over to the Explorer, reached under the driver’s seat and got out the carton of cartridges, carefully filling the magazine again. I went back to where he lay, his hands still clutching at his stomach. I raised the gun, pressed it to the side of his head and pulled the trigger. A hole appeared in his temple and his head slammed back against the ground. “And you were wrong. I was quite willing to shoot you. And I had enough shots to do the job, even though I am shitty at aiming.” The gun was warm in my hand.

  It was difficult to drag his body to the edge of the campground. He must have weighed three hundred pounds. I got out my new camp shovel, the one I had used to make myself a latrine, and began to dig. It was not a deep hole. There was no point in making it deep, only deep enough to discourage foraging animals from dragging his body into view. I pushed his body into the hole. I filled up the hole and I gathered stones from the campground to cover him, and had myself a scotch. Now I had a new vehicle, a good one, a black Land Rover with four-wheel drive and the full rhino gear, something that would go anywhere. I could leave my Ford Explorer here at the campground and eventually the rancher would discover it and it would be registered to someone who had sold it to that tire dealer in Jackpot and I was in no way connected with that transaction. Unless the tire dealer got co-opted by the police, but I had the feeling that he was the kind of man who said little to the police. Still, it would be a long time before Winslow found out that his thug was dead and his car was gone, and I could convert that car into a new one easily.