Rehab Run

by Barbra Leslie

  “As safe as I can feel, under the circumstances,” he said. He paused. “Yeah, actually. I do feel safe.”

  “One way or another, we’ll find Dickie,” I said.

  “I think so,” he said. “But now that you’re out of hospital, my goal is really to get you back home safely.”

  “Sleep,” I said. “And drink some water, or you’re going to have a mighty hangover.”

  I went back to the living room and sat on the floor between Ned and Dave.

  “Back to the lake,” I said. “Tonight. Now.” I had a feeling about something, and there were people missing. There was no time to waste. I looked at Dave. “Do I seem fucked up to you? Too high to function?” I knew I wasn’t. I would want a bump in half an hour, but then again, adrenaline is a powerful force. I might not need it.

  Dave looked at me and nodded at Ned, who smiled like he was game for anything.

  “Jonas,” Dave said, “we’re going to the cabin. The three of you stay here.”

  “Call,” Jonas said. “Every ten.”

  “Nope,” I said. “It’s a dead zone there. No cell reception.”

  “Crap. Of course it is,” Dave said. “We’ll take the walkies.”

  “Really?” Ned said.

  “Actually, from two high places like this, in a rural setting, it can go up to thirty miles, depending on weather and other interference. I put the chances at fifty-fifty.” Jonas looked over his glasses at Dave. Who looked at me. I looked at Ned.

  “Fifty-fifty isn’t so bad,” I said.

  “We’re tough,” Ned said. “I have tattoos and everything.”

  “Plus, you can do accents,” I said.

  “That, too,” Ned said. “I’d say we’re golden.”

  Lydia fitted the holster thing onto me, quickly adjusting it around my hips and thigh like she’d done it a million times. I felt like an outlaw, a gunslinger, with it on. She stuck one of the guns she had cleaned earlier into the holster, after making sure I knew how to use it. Another Glock. I hoped very much I wouldn’t need it. I felt much better, but a couple of fingers were still a bit numb, though functional, and, despite the cocaine-fuelled adrenaline, I knew I wasn’t at my fighting best with my shoulder either. I went to the kitchen and, for luck, took a corkscrew and stuck it into my pocket.

  A corkscrew had been the tool that had taken down Michael Vernon Smith back in Maine. It hadn’t killed him, but it had saved the lives of people I loved, and, for me, it had become a talisman.

  The three of us stood in the kitchen and agreed quickly on a plan of action. We all changed into black clothing, and I was wearing my new gloves and my thigh holster. My nervous system was coursing with cocaine.

  Despite the awful reason we were there, and doing what we were doing, I’ve had worse evenings. And I could tell that Dave and Ned felt the same way.

  We slipped out the back door and into the night.

  TWENTY-NINE

  It was after one a.m., and we didn’t run into a single car on our way to the lake. We took a route that circled around the lake in the opposite direction from the way I’d always come. The road had more potholes, and if it weren’t for the seatbelts, we’d have been tossed around like dice in a cup.

  We were in a four-wheel-drive Jeep, with me in the back. In the front, Ned and Dave were calm, but the jokey attitude we’d all had back at the safe house was gone. They were all business, testing the walkies with Jonas, changing channels, and quietly discussing strategy, too low for me to hear over the truck.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m back here. Want to let a girl know what the plan is?”

  Dave turned around from the front passenger seat. “You and I are going into the cottage,” he said. “We’re looking for memorabilia, anything Dickie might have about his wedding, anything at all about their past as a couple, their young adulthood, yearbooks, whatever. I’ve got a hunch about something, and I want to see pictures. Also, any signs that anyone else has been there since the police cleared the scene.”

  “I’m going into the woods above the lake with a metal detector,” Ned piped up.

  “A metal detector?”

  “See if there’s anything underground, any hatch, door, whatever, covered with leaves.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Smart.”

  “This ain’t our first rodeo, little lady,” Ned said.

  “What’s your hunch?” I asked Dave.

  “Don’t bother. He never tells us about his hunches,” Ned said.

  “Until I’m sure. Otherwise, it might taint how you see things.”

  We passed a police cruiser coming from the direction of the lake, and Dave calmly told me to get down. We had discussed this. I slithered to the floor and felt in my pocket.

  I had a tiny bit of cocaine folded in tin foil in my front pocket. If I felt myself flagging, I was going to do a quick bump at some point. I was just hoping not to be caught with it by the police. The weapons were hidden so expertly inside a fake spare tire I felt sure we would pass any random inspection, but there was no use worrying about the police now.

  Being arrested is one thing. Being stalked by psychopathic killers is another thing altogether. Most of us would rather be in a cell than a grave.

  Ned turned onto a road that I wouldn’t even have seen. It was unmarked, save a garbage collection shed at the end. We were deep into the woods now, though in one patch it looked like some clear-cutting had taken place.

  Ugly, but harder for a killer to hide. Then again, harder for us to hide.

  I didn’t bother asking Ned how he knew the way. He’d been at Rose’s for a while, and no doubt had explored pretty extensively. He’d probably attended just enough of the group sessions to avoid getting kicked out. Then again, the rules at Rose’s were so lax that I doubted he could have if he had tried. Not bringing drugs onto the property seemed to be the only one written in stone.

  Evan apparently had. And Sarah. And they were both dead. And while I hadn’t heard as much, I would have laid bets that the same had been true for the poor bastard Laurence and I had found trussed up on Dickie’s bed.

  “Wait a minute,” I said.

  “You can get up now,” Dave said. I hoisted myself onto the backseat, then slipped and fell back down.

  “Oof,” I said. I righted myself. My face was red.

  “You move like a cat, Danny,” Dave said. “Smooth.” He and Ned both had big grins on their faces. They both looked happier than pigs in the proverbial shit.

  “Yeah, yeah, fuck you both,” I said. “And I mean that with the utmost respect, of course.”

  I was grinning too. I realized I was happy, too. Sitting around puzzling things out was great and all, and God knows I had appreciated being able to have a little R & R in the form of cocaine. But this? Driving into the night, putting myself into the path of danger, with the added bonus of possibly helping people?

  This is what I was made for. For better or worse. I felt it as surely as I felt love for my family, and as surely as I felt the presence of Ginger watching over me.

  Dave stuck his hand back without turning around, and I grabbed it. He squeezed it and let it go. Ned met my eyes in the rear-view mirror and winked. We were in this together. It felt like such a luxury, to be doing this with people who had the same blip in their genetic makeup, the same predisposition for running toward danger instead of away from it. Luckily, we were the good guys. Our addiction to adrenaline and danger could be satisfied by this, instead of robbing banks or committing much worse crimes. This must be what firefighters feel like, I thought. Running into buildings that other people are running away from.

  I wasn’t sure if Dave and Ned had the same propensity toward violence that I did, however. Obviously they were ready for it, but I didn’t know them well enough to know if they got the same visceral satisfaction out of it that I did.

  “Hey. I’m sorry about your nose,” I said to Dave. “Back in the desert, I mean.”

  “Danny, Dave’s nose has been broken so many tim
es, he’s got a reward card with the plastic surgeon,” Ned said. “Pay for nine surgeries, the tenth is free.”

  “Like you with the dentist,” Dave said. He turned to me. “Ned’s like a hockey player. He’s been hit in the mouth so many times I think there’s only one of his original teeth still in his mouth.”

  We laughed. The road was narrowing, the trees heavy here, old-growth evergreens. It was both beautiful, in the headlights, and menacing.

  “Wait,” I said. “How did anyone know Sarah was hiding weed in the basement? I mean, how did the killer know, unless she specifically told him?”

  “Or her,” Ned said. “But yeah. Good point. Sarah kept herself to herself. She wouldn’t have shared that information with any of us. Not until the night she found Evan’s body down there.”

  “And she told everyone in that room. The police, Laurence and me, you. But she was taken directly afterwards.”

  “So somebody either saw what she was doing because there was a hidden camera there…” Dave started.

  “Or the killer, one of the killers, was one of the police there,” I finished.

  “Holy shit,” Ned said. We were silent for a second.

  “We don’t even know we’re right about all of this,” I said. “This theory, I mean.”

  “No, we don’t,” Dave said. “But that’s why, in situations like this, we only trust each other,” Dave said. “Police are just like the regular population. Most of them are good, decent people, but pinning a badge on somebody doesn’t make them exempt from doing horrific things.”

  At a fork in the narrow road, Ned turned right, away from where I judged the lake to be. We couldn’t see it from here. He pulled the Jeep over as far as he could and cut the engine. We sat in silence in the dark car for a few moments, waiting for the night and the wildlife to adjust back to silence without the engine, and for us to get our night vision and hearing adjusted.

  The fact that I could hear properly from both ears might, I knew, save my life tonight.

  Dave passed me a headlamp, but told me to keep it off for now. As agreed earlier, we got out of the car as silently as we could, and Ned retrieved the weapons from the back. As I stuck mine back into the holster, Ned smeared some black stuff from a little tin onto my forehead, cheekbones and nose, and did the same with Dave. His touch was quick and businesslike.

  Ned indicated the direction Dave and I would go, and where he was heading, back into the woods with the metal detector. We each had flares, in case we got into trouble, and Dave passed me a walkie-talkie, but it was turned off while I was with him. If we split up for any reason, I would turn it on. It was set to the right frequency, agreed upon with Jonas. We had agreed to meet back at the car at four a.m., if nothing happened before then.

  Ned and Dave exchanged some hand signals that I didn’t understand, but looked practiced and rehearsed, and something like you might see in a military movie, or from a baseball catcher to his pitcher.

  Then Ned disappeared into the trees, and I followed Dave in a slow, quiet jog down the middle of the dirt road, back to the fork.

  Eyes and ears open, Danny. I heard Ginger’s voice in my head. My body felt good, despite my time in the hospital. Our pace was slow, and I matched Dave’s steps.

  Then, around a bend, I could see the moonlight shining off the lake.

  We were on.

  THIRTY

  I followed Dave. My breathing was easy enough, despite the cocaine and my recent brush with death. I tried to listen for anything in the woods, anything that shouldn’t be there. I was thinking not only of a killer with a rifle, but of whatever animal or animals that had fed on poor Sarah Gilbert.

  We hadn’t gone far when Dave pointed ahead. Dickie’s cabin was about a hundred yards away. The bush was thicker from this side; I wouldn’t have noticed the driveway until we were on top of it. Dave slowed to a walk, and I followed his lead. The ground crunching under our feet sounded cacophonous to me, but I couldn’t tell if that was an effect of the hearing having returned in my right ear. I touched the Glock strapped to my thigh, for comfort as much as anything else.

  We walked slowly down Dickie’s driveway. Dave had unholstered his weapon and was carrying it by his side. I opted to keep mine where it was – I wasn’t quite as comfortable with guns as he was, and I hoped I wasn’t going to have to use it.

  Loons were calling to each other over the water, and the air smelled very faintly of woodsmoke. Someone on the lake had their stove going; it was a cool night. But there was no smoke coming from Dickie’s cabin. It was dark. There were no police around. There was no one around. I couldn’t even see any patio lanterns around the lake from here; it was midweek and the holiday weekend was over. Dave indicated that he was going to keep his eyes on the cabin and I was to watch the woods.

  We reached the outhouse. Dave flung the door open and stood to one side, but judging by the smell emanating from its interior even from ten feet away, I doubted anybody would want to take refuge in there. The thought nearly made laughter bubble up out of my throat. My tendency to nervous or sad hysteria had to be quashed, and quickly. It was all so surreal.

  I bent over at the waist and took a deep breath. I thought of Sarah, tied to a tree, in terror and pain, and my urge to laugh went away.

  We walked in silence to the cabin. It seemed as deserted as deserted can get. There was police tape over the door, which I broke, while Dave took something from his pocket and unrolled it. Lock-picking tools. While he worked on the door, I wished I had the night-vision goggles as I scanned the woods. I half expected to see a red cap moving through the trees, but nothing.

  I kept my hand on my holster, and tried to tune out my busy brain and just be part of the landscape, let my instinct and my primordial senses take over.

  Something was wrong. I felt that something was wrong, but I couldn’t see or hear anything. I unsnapped my holster and kept my hand resting lightly on the grip of the Glock. But for whatever reason, I didn’t think the danger was coming from inside the cabin. There was someone out here that shouldn’t be, but unless they moved or made a sound, me trampling through the forest in no particular direction wasn’t going to do anybody any good.

  I was worried about Ned. I wanted to get inside. I wanted Dave to walkie him, make sure he was okay.

  I heard the lock turn. Dave turned on his headlamp and, with his gun extended in front of him, went in to make sure it was safe. I stood in the doorway, heart pounding, ready to run inside if Dave needed help, or run into the trees if I spotted anyone.

  I had never felt so alive. And I was very glad that Laurence wasn’t with us.

  I heard Dave moving through the small cabin. Then in a quiet but normal voice, he told me to come in and lock the door behind me.

  He was closing the curtains, for which I was grateful. I turned my own headlamp on, and went inside.

  * * *

  We had discussed protocol – well, Dave and Ned had, and I had listened. All our walkies were switched to silent and would vibrate with incoming messages. Dave and Ned had headsets for theirs so they could be hands-free, but they didn’t have all their equipment with them, and there were only two headsets. I was told that if I was separated from Dave and in trouble, to just press the button and shout bloody murder into the walkie – and even without the walkie-talkies, I’d probably be heard. But if I was in a situation where making noise was not an option, we’d use Morse code, SOS.

  Dave holstered his gun and radioed to Ned that we were in. We waited for his reply, his assurance that he was safe.

  When it came, I realized I had been holding my breath.

  “Okay,” Dave said. “Closets, drawers, cubbyholes. Any place where people keep their papers, whatever. Keepsakes.”

  One thing I have never had is a desire to root through other people’s stuff. I’d seen bits in films where a woman stays over at her boyfriend’s place and as soon as he leaves, she starts rooting through his drawers or his laptop, trying to find dirt. Inevitably,
she finds some, and that never leads to anything good. As far as I’m concerned, a certain amount of privacy should be allowed every human. Ginger and I had shared a bedroom growing up, and she wrote in a diary every day. She only hid it between her mattress and box spring because she knew Mom or one of the boys would find it irresistible. She could have plopped the thing open on my face while I was napping, and I wouldn’t have read it.

  As far as I’m concerned, what goes on in a person’s head or in their past should be their own damn business. Unless, of course, that information could stop people from dying. Or losing bits of their body to somebody’s knife. That’s when all bets are off.

  At least, that’s what I told myself as I opened Dickie Doyle’s closet, looking for skeletons. Metaphorical skeletons, that is: any literal ones would, hopefully, have been found by the police by now. They probably weren’t interested in Dickie’s credit card statements or the sympathy cards he’d received after Rose died. At least, if they were, they hadn’t taken them, because that’s what I found in the shoeboxes at the bottom of Dickie’s closet. I put the sympathy cards to one side. Dave hadn’t told me about his hunch yet, so I had to guess.

  For a middle-aged man of means, Dickie sure didn’t seem to own much. The sum total of his wardrobe took up about four feet in the closet and consisted mostly of white t-shirts, which looked ironed, and flannel work shirts. A couple of pairs of khakis – I checked the pockets; nothing but gum wrappers – and jeans, and one black suit. Probably the one he’d worn to Rose’s funeral. He must have had more clothes, more… everything, when Rose was alive. He’d obviously gone all Walden Pond and gotten rid of most of his worldly goods. But someone who had loved his wife as much as Dickie Doyle had loved his must have mementoes.

  I had gone through every pocket and even reached my hand into the toes of the two pairs of sneakers – small feet – that were at the bottom of the closet. Two shoeboxes of bills and cards were the sum total of personal shit.

  I moved to the dresser and glanced outside to the main area, where Dave was taking every book out of the bookcase and leafing through, shaking them out.