‘DQ,’ she said.
I pasted on the best smile I could offer to such a creature. ‘You don’t have coffee for guests?’
‘DQ does egg sandwiches. You could have a whole breakfast.’
‘With ice cream, just the thing for a cold morning.’ I turned for the door.
‘You checking out?’
‘I’ll be gone by the end of the morning. Check-out is noon?’
‘Eight-thirty in season.’
I looked out the window. The Porsche was the only car parked on the gravel lot.
‘I imagine you need to hustle to get rooms ready for the next onslaught of visitors,’ I said.
‘Eight-thirty,’ she said.
‘I’ll leave the key in the room for when you come to make sure I didn’t steal either the towel or the hole in the middle of it.’
‘Illinoyance,’ she muttered as I went outside.
‘Cheesehead,’ I muttered back, but likely she hadn’t heard me, since I’d already slammed the door.
A truck shot from a parking space down the street and sped away. The truck was shiny and blue and I was fairly certain it was the one I’d seen in Loons’ lot the previous evening, which meant it belonged to Herman Canty, Lamm’s caretaker. If the rumors were true, that he spent his nights at the frigid Loons’ Rest, curled beside the gray-faced Wanda, the man was entitled to whatever haste he needed to get away.
I drove down to the DQ. It was closed, though the sign said it was supposed to have opened at six, almost an hour earlier. I wasn’t going to wait for someone to show up. I was anxious to speed out of that town, too. Besides, risking a launch of coffee in Leo’s meticulously maintained Porsche, as I so often did in my Jeep, was unthinkable. I drove on.
Fifteen minutes later, in the sheriff’s office, I regretted not waiting at the DQ. A massive caffeine-withdrawal headache had blossomed, and was pulsing along in perfect rhythm with the slow, doubting drone of the deputy sitting with his feet up on a brown steel desk.
‘Tell me again why you’re interested in Mr Lamm.’ The man’s tan shirt was stretched taut across his ample stomach, as though he’d often visited the DQ in Bent Lake.
‘He invited me up for some fishing.’
His face was too red, too early in the year, to have come from the sun, and I guessed that his shirt might have been tightened more from beer than soft-serve ice cream. He craned his neck to look outside the window at the Porsche. ‘Don’t see gear,’ he said, like he could see inside the trunk along with being able to smell a lie.
‘Arthur said I could use his.’
The deputy sighed and shifted in the chair. ‘Nobody seems to know where Mr Lamm has gotten himself to. People from his office in Chicago called up to report him missing. I sent two guys out for a day in a boat, and even hired a Cessna for an hour, but we found no sight of him. Then that damned fool Herman Canty up and says Lamm likes to go camping around this time of year. Wish to hell he’d spoke up before we hired a plane.’
‘Lamm’s family says it’s normal for him to be camping for so long?’
‘He’s divorced, no kids. Ex-wife’s out in California, and doesn’t much give a damn. She got an annuity out of him instead of monthly income.’
‘I heard a Chicago cop was up here looking for him.’
‘Some kid, I heard, but he didn’t bother to check in with me.’
‘Lamm doesn’t have a cell phone?’
‘I tried. His was switched off.’
‘How would I find Herman Canty?’
‘Hard to say, especially now that he’s getting about in that fancy new truck.’ The deputy tilted forward to sit upright. ‘You want to ask him about fishing?’
‘I want to ask him about Lamm.’
‘Herman will tell you Lamm’s out fishing for muskies,’ he said. ‘Ever fish for muskies?’
‘No.’
‘Then what are you fishing for up here, Mr Elstrom?’ he asked.
‘Something I can sink a hook into, I suppose,’ I said, and left.
TWENTY-EIGHT
I followed the bartender’s napkin map down roads designated with alphabet letters to junctions with roads marked with other letters, and finally came to the bridge on County M that the bartender had warned me about. It was a rickety, single-lane contraption of bleached wood and rusted brackets that looked to be spanning the narrow frothing river below more from habit than any lingering structural integrity. The bartender said the knee-high side rails were loose and the whole thing suffered dry rot. I took his concern seriously, and eased forward in first gear. Even barely crawling, the old planks shifted and rattled loudly, like I was disturbing old bones.
A fire lane had been cut into the woods one mile farther on. A half-mile after that, an eight-inch white board, with ‘Lamm’ written on it, was nailed to a tree beside two narrow clay ruts heading into the trees. I followed them to a clearing.
Herman Canty’s shiny blue pickup truck was parked beside a dark Mercedes 500 series sedan made opaque from a rain-pocked mixture of dirt and bird droppings. I parked the Porsche and got out.
The log cottage facing the lake looked right for a rich man wanting to pass as poor. The timbers were splotched with moss, the black tarpaper roof was curling at the bottom, and green paint was flaking off the door and window facing the parking area. There was no lawn, just weeds in abundance, some two feet tall.
Capping the rusticity of the entire enterprise was a privy set far enough into the woods to provide splendid opportunities, while enthroned, for the intimate study of thousands of insects. I would have visited such a privy only under extreme distress, and then at warp speed.
The Mercedes was locked. I’d just begun rubbing the grime off the driver’s window when a man stepped out of the cottage. He was lean, tall and grizzled with unkempt gray hair and a week’s worth of unshaved beard stubble. Without doubt, he was tough enough to get through every word of the entire Sunday New York Times in the privy in the woods. Assuming, of course, that the man knew how to read.
‘Herman?’ I asked.
‘Yep.’
‘I came up to see Mr Lamm, but I understand he’s not here.’
‘Yep.’
‘People from his Chicago office reported him missing?’
‘Yep.’
For sure, the man must have enjoyed old cowboy movies.
‘You told the sheriff there’s no need for worry because Arthur takes off sometimes, for days on end, to go camping and fishing?’
He said nothing.
‘That’s a yep?’
‘Yep,’ he said. ‘His business friends called me over at Loons’. Told them the same thing.’
‘You didn’t know he’d come up until you saw his car? You didn’t actually see him?’
He stared off into the woods. ‘Mr Lamm likes to take off, is all.’
I looked past him, toward the lake. An orange rowboat, barely floating above the waterline, was tied to a collapsing dock. ‘Lamm’s boat is still there.’
‘Huh?’
‘How can Lamm be off camping if his boat is still here?’
He blinked rapidly and licked his lips. After a minute, he said, ‘He has two.’
‘Mind if I look around?’
There was nothing friendly about the way he was now looking at me. ‘What are you doing here, mister?’
‘Arthur told me to come up any time for the fishing.’
Herman spat into the clay. ‘Sure he did.’
I started walking toward the lake. Herman bird-dogged me from ten paces behind like he was worried I was going to make off with one of the trees.
When I got to the dock, I pointed at the boat. Barely two inches rode above the water. ‘You’re sure Arthur took a boat like this one?’
‘Yep.’
‘Must have bailed it out first.’
He spat again. ‘I imagine.’
‘Why didn’t he bail out this one while he was at it?’
Herman shrugged. ‘He only needed the one.’
‘You’re the caretaker here, right?’
‘I look after things.’
‘Why haven’t you bailed out the boat?’
He looked away again.
‘When Arthur gets back, tell him I came up to drop a few worms,’ I said. I felt his eyes on me all the way to the Porsche. I hadn’t bothered to give him a name. More importantly, he hadn’t bothered to ask for one, as though he never expected to talk to Lamm again.
I drove the half-mile to the fire lane and pulled far enough into the leafless trees to hope the Porsche would be hidden from the road. The day had warmed. I left my pea coat in the car and doubled back through the woods. I wanted another look at Lamm’s camp without Herman’s breath misting the back of my neck. I got within sight of the privy when the sound of a loud engine came rumbling low along County M.
The woods hid the vehicle, but I guessed it was a truck, shiny and new and blue. Herman Canty, the man who’d made sure I’d left Lamm’s clearing knowing nothing more than when I arrived, was driving slowly, maybe searching into the trees to make sure I had gone.
I held my breath, straining to hear any easing of his gas pedal. The engine loped on, low and steady. He didn’t slow at the fire lane and, in another minute, the big-barreled exhaust had gone.
I ran the last yards through the trees and down to the shore. I could see no other cottages or clearings at Lamm’s end of the lake, no places where someone could see me prowling around. Several channels split the shoreline across the lake, leading to other lakes.
I stepped onto the narrow dock. The orange rowboat shifted uneasily in the water. The next rain, even if it was light, would drop it to the bottom of the shallows.
I went up to the cottage. It had three windows at the front, facing the lake. The middle one was unlatched. I slid it open and slipped through.
There was one big room, furnished simply with two vinyl sofas, a couple of sturdy wood rockers, a table and four straight-back wood chairs. Two gray metal-frame cots were folded up in the corner. I imagined the sofas would pull out for extra sleeping. A small, butane cook stove stood next to a large, wood-burning heat stove. Burned-down candle stubs stuck in glass ash trays were set beside two lanterns on a shelf above the back window. There was no refrigerator because there was no electricity; a dented green metal cooler rested in the corner, ready for ice or chilled water from the lake.
I went back out the window and down to the shore. The almost-submerged orange wood boat still nagged. Unless it had a hole in it, Lamm should have bailed it when he was emptying the other. Or Herman, simply because that should have been his responsibility.
Unless neither of them expected Lamm would ever come back.
I bent to look closer at the boat.
Something zipped like a bug into the water five feet from my arm. In the fraction of the instant I needed to think it was an insect, rifle fire exploded the stillness around me. A second bullet zipped even closer, not two feet away.
I dove into the murk of the lake.
TWENTY-NINE
I hit muck in an instant. I was too close to shore, too easy a target for a man with a gun.
I clawed blindly at the spongy decay, grabbing madly to pull myself down and away. The water was ink, thick with the sediment I’d stirred up, slimy in my nose, gritty in my eyes. The saw-edged weeds scratched at my face and ripped at my hands as I tugged at them, one handful after another, to get deeper, farther from shore.
My lungs begged for air, but death was a gunshot waiting at the surface. The water was deeper now, clearer. I let go of the cutting weeds and began breast-stroking through the frigid water to stay down, fighting my lungs, counting, ten more strokes, then nine and five and then no more. I lunged up for air, my eyes shut for the crack of gunfire, the burn of a bullet.
No explosion came. No burn, no pain. I gulped air, dropped back under.
Ten new strokes, and ten more, then up again, gasping, pawing at my face to clear my eyes. Lamm’s cottage was two hundred yards away.
My jeans and shoes were lead, tugging me down. I let them pull me under, and breast-stroked below the surface toward the center of the lake until I could do no more, and came up to look. The brown log cottage was lost in the blur of the trees at the shoreline. I made wide circles with my arms, staying up, watching for movement. Nothing moved at the shore.
A thousand iced daggers pricked deep into my legs. My strength had gone; my shoes were dragging weights. I needed to untie them and let them fall away but, barefoot, I wouldn’t have a chance of outrunning anyone in the woods.
A thought struck, so perfect that I hugged it like I was hugging life: A killer would have killed. I’d been a plump target at the shore and then swimming the first yards away. Anyone close could have easily put bullets into me. But there had been no more gunshots after the first two.
It had been some fool hunter, sure. I was way up north in the land of the gun-toting free, where everybody got armed at birth and shooting wild was a part of life. Hell, by now my hunter was probably a mile away, resting on a termite-infested log for a mid-morning bite of bratwurst and cheddar, perhaps even lifting an ear flap on his plaid cap to scratch his pointed head and wonder why he never hit anything.
Damned fool hunter. Damned fool me.
I’d panicked over nothing.
Cramps hit, great contorting pulsations that dug into my legs with iron fingers. I dropped under the water, doubled over to knead my knuckles into my right leg, then my left. The cramps dug back deeper, relentless in the frigid water.
Damned fool me. I was going to drown if I didn’t get out of the water.
I kicked for the trees, flailing my arms at the water as the great electric curls of pain wrapped tighter and tighter around my calves. My hands as well began to cramp, too weak to do anything but slap at the water. Swallowing water, I went down.
Incredibly, a foot grazed the bottom. I pushed up, saw sky, disbelieving. I was still yards from shore, but I’d touched bottom. I wanted to laugh, for the mercy of it. I screamed instead. From the cramps twisting deep into my legs.
I half dog-paddled, half-stumbled to the narrow ribbon of slick moss at the shore and crawled out on my belly. I collapsed face down on to the mud, shivering, sucking in the cool musk of the shore with ragged breaths.
And cursing. I swore at everyone I could think of. I cursed wedge-headed, cheese-worshipping, damned-fool inbred hunters. And their mothers. And the women who ran places like Loons’ Rest. And their broom-beating, bat-stomping offspring.
I cursed Arthur Lamm, who might simply have been off camping. I cursed the lead-headed Herman Canty, stoic Northwoodsman, for not telling me anything definitive.
But mostly, I cursed myself. I’d almost died, not from gunshot, but from drowning in stupid panic.
A branch hung low above my head. I reached up and pulled myself up to stand. My legs wobbled and then calmed under my weight. Breathing came easier. After a moment I dared to let go of the branch, and bent to retie my shoe laces, loosened and slimed by ten thousand years of decayed plants and fish.
I started into the trees. The damp rotting carpet of last year’s leaves muffled my footfalls as I pushed my legs to move quicker. My hunter might still be in the woods, about to spray a last few thousand rounds into the trees before heading home.
Even stumbling fast, whole swarms of stinging insects found me, chilled wet meat, pulsing with blood – a smorgasbord of lake muck and sweat served up in a thick residue of fear. I didn’t slow to learn if they were mosquitoes, flies or gnats. They all stung like they were on steroids. Everything liked to hunt up in those piney woods.
Sooner than I hoped, I caught a shimmer of bright yellow through a thinning in the trees. Leo’s Porsche, designed for the autobahn, hunkered low on the scraped clay of the fire lane, as out of place in those woods as I was. I dipped my hand into the pocket of my jeans, came out with the keys. Water dribbled from the little electronic remote. I ran up to the edge of the fire lane.
And stopped.
The sloped nose of the sleek German car was too close to the ground. The right front tire was flat. As was the rear tire. I backed deeper into the dark shelter of the woods and dropped behind a massive oak, to think, to understand.
Two tires, flat, immobilizing the Porsche.
Someone wanted me trapped, defenseless, in the woods.
THIRTY
My cell phone was in the glove box, and not worth the risk of a sprint to get it, even if it did work in that particular patch of woods. It wouldn’t do any good anyway; the Porsche would never make the crawl out of the woods on flat tires.
I needed to run – run through the trees, run up the fire lane to the road, to the town. But a small part of my brain knew to beg to be rational. A man of the woods, used to tracking running prey in dark places, would expect that. He’d be waiting.
I scrambled to my feet and ran the other way, down to the lake. Every whisper of the wind came cold like the breath of a mad man with a gun; every creak of a dry limb the snick of a sliding rifle bolt; every snap of a twig the first crack of sudden gunfire. I got to the water and ran along the shoreline until it broke to feed the river. The water was rushing too fast to cross there. Only one direction remained now.
I ran up the bank of the river, to the rocks below the rickety bridge, and crept up to the edge of the road. It seemed deserted in both directions, but that’s what he’d want me to think.
There was no choice. I pounded onto the rotting planks, my footfalls jouncing loud on the loose timbers. If my shooter was within a half a mile, he’d know exactly where I was.
I got across in an instant, ducked into the woods and got snagged by a barky vine lying like a snake beneath the blanket of rotting leaves. I crashed down hard. Then, pushing up, dazed, I started to run only to get tripped again. Up once more, my legs were now too weak. I could only stagger from tree to tree in a kind of palsied shimmy, dodging vines when I could, falling when I couldn’t. Sweat burned my eyes. Horseflies, bigger than I’d ever seen, bit at my cheeks and my neck. Sometimes I swatted at them, my hand coming away bloody. Mostly I just let them bite. I had no strength.
The Confessors' Club Page 12
