Her estimate of an hour's outing had been overly optimistic.
Burdened as she was by the need to move silently and without light, circumnavigating thickets of palmetto and stands of pine, the mile she had to walk took on the dimensions of a serious cross-country hike. Still, if it hadn't been for the mosquitoes, she would have enjoyed herself. The dark, the stealth, the knowledge that she was the hunter and not the hunted, gave her a sense of power and freedom. She thought of Hanson and his pig rifle, of hunters out for sheep and elk and deer, and wondered that they could find this same thrill with such helpless prey in their sights.
Complying as rigidly to her westward heading as the vagaries of nature would allow, she eventually reached the clearing she knew had to be there. When strung together, hints as to its existence had formed a compelling picture. Hanson had evicted Dot and Mona from Stafford's basement so he could store fertilizer, weed killer, and PVC pipe there. On the edge of Lake Whitney, the only reliable freshwater source on this end of the island, was a line straight as a die. Guenther had been shot but had neither seen nor heard his assailant. Days later Hanson was "removing something from earth and trees in the same part of the forest.
A marijuana field was the only explanation that fit all the facts.
The PVC pipe laid into Lake Whitney provided the needed water, the hapless U.S. taxpayers the fertilizer, the farmer's time, and undoubtedly much of the equipment used in the cultivation and the building of booby traps to scare off marauders-both accidental and those intent on stealing the illegal crop. It would have been one of these traps the Austrian had stumbled into: a shotgun shell rigged to a trigger device buried beneath the duff. With the plane crash and the shotgun incident focusing attention on this part of the island, Hanson must have decided to remove his booby traps, begin to fold his tents preparatory to slipping quietly into the night. That was what he'd been in the process of doing when Dijon and Anna had come upon him.
She secreted herself in shadow, a live oak between her and the moon, and studied the operation." Clearing" was too grandiose a term. What lay before her was more accurately an opening in the woods. Trees were scattered throughout-enough for camouflage, but widely spaced so sunlight could make it down through the canopy to the plants. For the space of an irregular acre, planted in a hodgepodge so as not to call attention to themselves from the air as a man-made cultivation, were cannabis plants. It looked as if Hanson had begun prudently. There were only ten or twelve mature plants and they'd been placed in careful disarray, most snuggled up to a palmetto or tucked in a grove of immature pines to disguise their nature from casual eyes and their bolder green foliage from calling attention to itself from the air. Hanson hadn't built any telltale structures. He either carried the tools he needed in with him each time or had them cleverly cached-probably in a shallow underground bunker.
A plot this size-of sinsemilla, a prime strain-carefully husbanded and harvested, would augment one's salary considerably. At a guess, Anna put the profit at about thirty thousand dollars annually. If he kept it on a small scale, Hanson probably could have gotten away with it for the seven years until he could once again retire and pick up pension number two.
Fortunately for law enforcement officers, enough is seldom enough. Apparently Hanson was running true to form and getting greedy. Dozens of immature plants had been planted in the open areas between the mature cannabis, quadrupling the size of the original plot, calling for more pipe for water, more fertilizer, making booby traps a necessity, and soon becoming obvious to low-flying aircraft. When this many plants matured, all but the most braindead pilot would question the dark green cancer spreading ])Cneath the dusty gray of oak leaves.
Until Slattery Hammond started flying drug interdiction, Mitch's little operation would have been fairly secure. Had Hammond seen the plot? Told Todd as the island's law enforcement ranger? Was their last flight the one in which he would show 'Fodd the plants? 'That seemed likely enough. As Alice Utterback said in the beginning, the job of drug interdiction brought with it its own cadre of enemies.
Considering Slattery's less than spotless reputation, it wasn't too great a leap of logic to picture him demanding a slice of the profits in return for his silence. Hanson, just absorbing the cost of expanding his business, chose to add murder to his credit list rather than blackmail to the debit column. Or Hammond saw nothing, knew nothing, and Belfore was the victim, the blackmailer, or both.
As Anna's mind opened to the possibilities, the details of the clearing began to manifest themselves. In the open area, a grassy place around a single lightning-blasted oak, was a derelict hog pen, its weathered boards falling together to form a ramshackle lean-to.
On either side of this structure, maybe twelve feet away, was a pile.
At first glance Anna took them for branches and other forest litter that had been cleared away to make room for the new marijuana seedlings.
The careful way they'd been stacked, in neat bonfire cones, intrigued her. Ten minutes motionless in shadow, eyes and ears open, convinced her she was alone. Rising to the obnoxious cracking of knees and ankles, she ventured out into the dappling of moonlight. The cones were of marijuana plants, young plants, rudely pulled up by the roots and tossed on what looked for all the world to be burn piles. A drug war? Villain number two destroying villain number one's cash crop for spite or business? On a plot as small and inaccessible as this one, that struck Anna as highly unlikely, but stranger things had happened in the history of the war on drugs. A war the average American was losing and the politicians and drug dealers were winning. Fear buys votes and drugs are a politically correct evil to rail against.
Voices, low and murmuring but unmistakably human, rooted Anna to the spot. On the tail end of the sound came a slash of light, two flashlights probing her darkness like Darth Vader's sword.
Instinctively, she dropped to the ground. Footfalls and light approached rapidly. Whoever it was moved without any attempt at concealment, probably unaware they were not alone. Anna was determined to keep it that way.
Directly in front of her, offering its questionable refuge, was the derelict hog pen. Choosing not to think about what other life-forms might have taken up residence within, Anna crawled beneath the rotting boards. Inside, there was just room to sit up, her head brushing the lumber. The sticky touch of spiders' webs trailed across her left cheek and she steeled herself for visitations from many species.
Trapped in the close dark of a sty, the Golden Orb, for all her impressive proportions, was preferable to brown recluses or black widows.
Contemplation of arachnids was pushed aside by the arrival of potentially more injurious beasts. Anna arranged her legs in a halflotus beneath her and folded her hands loosely in her lap, mimicking the attitude of meditating swamis. It was a position she could maintain for several hours if need be. In front of her was a triangle where the boards of her makeshift hiding place opened out onto the clearing. Though she felt exposed, she knew she sat far enough back in the shadow that, short of a direct beam of light shined in at ground level, she would remain invisible.
With a discipline born of long practice, she evened out her breathing and emptied her mind. In the forced calm the voices became recognizable. Hanson-as she had surmised-and one other, a woman. If she'd ever heard her voice before, she couldn't place it, and she settled down to listen.
"What a shame," the woman said.
"It was a crazy-ass thing to do anyway." Hanson." Cost is no object when it's not you paying."
" Still and all-"
"Hand me that."
These fragments were accompanied by the crisscrossing beams of light and the noises of rummaging: something metal, a chunk of wood or hard plastic, shoes stomping through dead leaves. The pocket of noise moved from the edge of the clearing toward Anna's shelter. Bars of light fell through the rude wood as the beams scratched over the tumbled-down hog pen. Anna cringed as if the light burned, but the touch was fleeting. Discovering her hiding place was not the
goal of this nocturnal excursion.
"Think anybody'll see it?" asked the woman.
"Not at night. By daylight nobody'll even know it happened."
An odor, peculiar in the wilderness, assaulted Anna's nostrils.
Lighter fluid. A gasp escaped her lungs and her heart began to pound. Forcing again an internal stillness, she felt the panic recede to a prickle on her scalp and a queasiness in her stomach. With a few deep breaths these symptoms, too, were banished.
The voices were ten feet away. The lighter fluid was not meant for her.
She heard the avaricious crackle of flame before she saw it.
When orange splintered through the boards of the sty, Anna put her eye to the crack. Hanson, squatting, his back to her, had fired the pile of marijuana plants. The glow lit the face of the woman next to him. His wife, Louise; this was a family business. Anna remembered Alice Utterback's cynical plan of a crime ring of middle-aged ladies. Utterback had been dead on. No one, Anna included, would have suspected Mrs. Hanson of any crime more sinister than munching a few grapes before the bunch was weighed at the local Sack & Save. Even on a moonlit night, in the woods, burning an illegal drug crop, Mitch's ivife looked innocent. She was in her fifties, slightly overweight, with chin-length brown hair tied back with a scarf. Big- rimmed plastic eyeglasses dominated her face, and her hands were protected by gardening gloves, the kind with elasticized cuffs and sprigs of little green-and-pink flowers.
Smoke from the burning pile drifted in Anna's direction. The light piercing her shelter became tangible as orange fog poured in.
She pulled the neck of her T-shirt up over her mouth and nose. The gesture was largely futile; cotton knit had no proven capability for filtering out noxious gases, but old habits die hard. The smell of the smoke triggered a time warp in her brain. Other than the occasional whiff from around a campfire or the cab of a vehicle she'd pulled over, Anna had not breathed marijuana smoke in quantity since college. The odor was unmistakable and, for a goodly number of those in her generation, nostalgic. It swept her back to the days when the world's great evils were either unknown or considered combatable; a time when she was an immortal, invincible and allpowerful in the sublime ignorance of youth.
From habit long dead and, she'd thought, forgotten, she inhaled the smoke and held it trapped in her lungs. In less time than it took to think it through, Anna realized what she was doing and breathed out. Jesus Christ, am I out of my fucking mind? She rubbed her face to clear it of real and imagined cobwebs.
"It'll go," Hanson said." We don't want a big fire anyway. Though I suppose if it got away it'd cover a lot of sins."
" Now, Mitch," the Mrs. said reprovingly, and Anna had an almost unbearable urge to laugh at the absurd domesticity of the scene.
"You know I wouldn't," Mitch defended himself. Anna bet he would the moment the apron strings were untied.
The two of them crunched together through the leaves, their feet and legs visible from the door of Anna's sty. Resisting the temptation to hold her breath-and so more smoke in her lungs-she focused on becoming at one with the spiders and the pig shit.
A couple of yards to her left, the Hansons stopped and repeated the ignition process on the second burn pile. Smoke from both sides now; Anna fought to keep from coughing and giving away her location. The next time she had to pee in a bottle for the federal government's drug- screening lab, she was going to have a lot of explaining to do. The image struck her as unsupportably funny and she felt the giggles mixing with the coughs till it seemed she must explode. At that thought anxiety, bordering on mindless panic, swept through her so suddenly her bowels grew watery.
She was getting stoned.
She'd not been high, at least not on dope, since she'd given it up twenty-one years before. To fight off the demons, she tried to remember what she could of those long-gone days. Much of it was a blur. She remembered the silly things: the munchies and the giggles, the lethargy of sitting in front of an old black-and-white television watching Marcus Welby reruns. The memory of the bad acid trip that had forever ended her drug days forced itself into her mind and for a moment it seemed as if the precarious walls of her shelter were closing in of their own accord, flapping slowly like the splintered wings of a wooden butterfly.
Don't go there, she told herself in the words of a current clichd.
The clichd was one she particularly despised and the fact that she had used it sent another stab of irrational fear through her.
Fires on both sides were catching on well. The inside of the hog pen danced with the flames, an orange and black disco light-show without music. Anna closed her eyes against it and tried to think, tried not to breathe, and failed at both. Flickering red and orange played across her closed eyelids. Fight it as she would, she had the sense of falling- tilting first one way and then another as if she would topple from her sitting position. The crackling burned at her brain in a low-grade fever and her skin crawled with sweat and fear and God knew what else.
At length the busy noises abated and Anna dared to hope that the Hansons had gone away and she could do the same. Opening her eyes required more courage than she would have thought possible. Had keeping them closed not been the greater of the two evils, she doubted she could have managed it.
Directly in front of her, framed in the angle of rough lumber and illuminated by the light of the fires, the Hansons sat in folding lawn chairs. She in dark blue polyester pants and a sleeveless cotton shell that exposed too much flabby upper arm, he in faded uniform trousers and a worn polo shirt, each with a beer in hand: a Norman Rockwell vision of hell. Again laughter threatened to tear its way out of Anna's throat and again it was quelled by a wave of ice-cold fear.
Time ratcheted uncomfortably.
Anna had no idea how long she'd sat in the hovel breathing smoke. A minute, an hour, three? All seemed equally defensible.
Breathing was easier but whether the fires had grown hot enough to draw the smoke upward or whether the dope was having an anesthetic effect on her lungs, she wasn't sure. The impulse to cough had left her and she made a point of starting a "small blessings" list.
To keep her mind from wandering to less auspicious climes, she forced herself to concentrate on the Hansons. From all appearances they were relaxed, happy even. If Anna had had to categorize the tone they'd set for this bizarre evening's entertainment, she would have called it relief. The Hansons acted relieved.
How on earth they could be so sanguine about torching their cash crop mystified her. Of course, the way things were going, how her head remained on her shoulders was beginning to mystify her.
The time, effort, and risk that would have gone into farming the plot had to be considerable, but the sudden expansion to take care of the new plants and the demands they put on the cultivation didn't strike her as something to be so lightly-not to mention downright cheerfully- destroyed.
No answers suggested themselves. Time drifted. Anna drifted.
Once, twice, maybe a hundred times-she couldn't recall, nor did it seem particularly important-one Hanson or the other would abandon the lawn chair to poke up the fire or get another beer.
More than once, Anna had come gently back to earth having totally forgotten where she was or why. Each time, she was called back from the brink by the reality of the pains that were beginning to take over her body: aches in her ankles, numbness in her hips, itching on her legs and arms. With the unpleasant clarity born of discomfort the why of her predicament returned and she was reminded not to crawl out of the sanctity of her hog pen and ilito the lit clearing. Then more smoke would be sucked into her brain and, for a while, life would be on hold.
High was not what it used to be, she thought in a moment between the drifts. Too much paranoia had been added to the mix: fear of the consequences, of the years, but mostly of her own mind.
In her twenties she'd trusted it to guide her, answer her questions, make the right choices. Somewhere in her thirties she'd lost faith.
She
saw her mind now as a moderately useful, if highly overrated, organ, one susceptible to chemical storms, hormonal droughts, and the phases of the moon. Gone were the days when she could alter her reality with impunity. Being stoned had become less a matter of flying than of hanging on to some ragged edge of sanity and waiting for the smoke to clear.
The last thing she remembered was a sudden flare of light and Mitch Hanson's voice crackling through the saw of the flames: "Well, there goes the last of Ellen's college tuition."
"She saved her daddy's life. That should be worth at least a year with the Seven Sisters."
"Orinsing-" and an echo.
OLLY "AD REFUSED to Cry. She'd sat across the table in the Mpub, arm's length from Frederick, her nerves so tight he could almost hear them hum. the face he'd come to think of as exquisite-a word he customarily reserved for sculpture and fine porcelain-was closed to him. Pain was written clearly in the too-wide eyes and the controlled line of her lips, but he was not invited to solace her.
Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 05 - Endangered Species Page 21
