by Roland Smith
This made me smile. Coop had eaten a tuna sandwich almost every day since he had teeth. He said he had gotten a little sick of tuna when he was in the Deep, but I guess that was over now that he was above.
I wouldn’t have minded a tuna sandwich myself.
Outside there was a map of the park behind a Plexiglas-covered board.
We shined our lights on it.
Three hundred seven camping spots.
A horse camp.
“Eighteen yurts,” I said.
Alex pointed at the map. “There’s an airstrip.”
“This place is huge,” Coop said. “Maybe we should split up.”
“Forget it,” Alex said. “We already split up, and look what happened to Kate.”
“We don’t know if anything happened to Kate,” Coop insisted. “She might be perfectly fine. She’s probably hunkered down somewhere dry, watching them.”
I don’t think any of us believed that.
“We don’t have a way of communicating with each other if we do find something,” Alex said. “If I had known that Kate was going to jump on a bus and follow them out of town, I wouldn’t have sent her after them.”
“She’s a Shadow,” Coop said. “She knows what she’s doing.”
“The Originals also know what they’re doing. They trained her. We’ll stick together. For the time being anyway.” He turned off his flashlight. “It’ll be hard to see in the dark, but being blind is better than announcing we’re here.”
We walked on the right side of the road, ready to dash into the trees and hide if we heard or saw something coming our way.
The first landmark we came across was the airstrip. It was a wide asphalt swath cut into the trees with white lines down the middle. Alex turned on his flashlight, quickly shined it up and down the strip, then clicked it off.
“They fly in from the ocean, then turn around and head out the same way they came in. Didn’t see any parked airplanes, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t use the strip.”
“Kate said they were driving motor homes,” I said.
“They’re probably using everything to get around. Trains, planes, automobiles, trucks, motor homes, trailers, boats … Larry didn’t pick this park randomly. He thought long and hard about it. For years.”
“He knows how to fly a plane?”
“Not that I know of, but I wouldn’t put it past him. He, or one of the Originals, has had decades to learn. They didn’t spend all their time underground. And they have people working for them above.”
We walked on and came to the campsite area. It consisted of two outer oblong roads, one above the other. Inside the oblongs were three smaller circular roads with staggered campsites on both sides of the road.
The first dozen campsites were empty, which wasn’t surprising considering the terrible weather, but I imagined the campground was jammed in the summer.
I’d never been camping in my life. In fact, I’d never been to a campground. My parents’ idea of camping was five-star hotels, luxury resorts, and fancy cruise ships. Our family would probably die of starvation if we were forced to camp.
“Did you really camp here?” I asked Coop.
“Not really. I was hitchhiking up the coast. One of my rides dropped me here. I made a tuna sandwich and unrolled my sleeping bag. Then I met someone and they gave me a lift to Manzanita, where I stuck my thumb out again and headed north. I don’t remember much —”
“Quiet!” Alex hissed. “There’s a light ahead.”
There were actually several lights ahead on both sides of the road, and we could hear people talking.
Alex led us into an empty campsite.
“We need to check them out,” he whispered. “No use in our all going over to eavesdrop.”
“What about sticking together?” Coop asked. “I think we should all go.”
After a moment’s pause, Alex nodded. “But no more talking. If we can hear them, they can hear us.”
We quietly cut through empty campsites until we reached the one adjacent to the camp with the closest light.
Two camper trucks.
A big motor home.
A boat on a trailer.
There was a fire burning in the fire pit with a few plastic chairs around it and a plastic tarp spread above to keep the rain out. The motor home door opened. A big, unshaved guy stepped out. He was dressed head to toe in rain gear. He had a frying pan in one hand and a tin coffeepot in the other. He put them on the fire. A second guy stepped out of the motor home wearing a rain poncho. He lit a cigarette and looked up at the gray lightening sky.
“Another beautiful morning in Oregon,” he said.
The smell of bacon.
Cold water trickled down the back of my neck.
“On the bright side,” the other man said, “we’ll have the bay all to ourselves. Nobody in their right mind would go fishing today.”
There was activity across the road.
Lights from two other truck campers.
Voices.
Three more rainsuited men crossed the road and joined the first two men.
“Are you kidding?” one of them asked. “Breakfast outside in weather like this?”
“The bet was for breakfast, not where it would be cooked and served.”
“You have a perfectly clean and dry motor home.”
“And I want to keep it that way. You guys are drenched and stink.”
“Coffee ready?”
“Nope.”
“Fishermen,” Alex whispered. “They aren’t from the Pod. We should continue looking.”
“I’m going to talk to them,” Coop said.
“Why?” Alex protested.
“Because it looks like they’ve been here awhile. They might know something.”
“What? You’re going to just walk into their camp and ask them if they’ve seen Kate?”
“Let him,” I said.
Coop walked out into the middle of the road and started walking past their camp.
He didn’t look their way.
He didn’t speak.
He didn’t have to.
“Hey!” one of the men called out.
They were all staring in Coop’s direction.
From that distance, in the dim light, they couldn’t have possibly seen what he looked like, whether he was male or female, or young or old.
It didn’t matter.
Coop wished them a good morning.
“Kind of wet and cold to be wandering around.”
“Come on over and get out of the rain for a bit.”
“Coffee’s almost brewed.”
Coop wandered over and introduced himself as Otto.
One by one, they shook his hand and gave him their names.
“How does he do it?” Alex said.
“He doesn’t do anything. He just shows up,” I said.
The men started talking over the top of one another telling Coop what they were doing there.
“We’re from the Bay Area.”
“We come down every year to fish and crab —”
“And drink.”
“And shut down our cop brains for a week.”
“Same week every year.”
“Without the kids and wives.”
“They go to a spa.”
“Well, not the kids. They’re in school.”
“We all live within a few blocks of each other. We hire a couple of babysitters to take care of the tribe. Get them to school. Get them fed.”
“Except for Martin here, who’s retired and divorced, the lucky bum. We let him join us yesterday because he’s an ex-cop from LA. The fraternity, you know. The brotherhood.”
“And he’s the best crab-pot man we’ve ever seen.”
“But terrible at poker.”
“We might pay for our vacation if his bad luck holds.”
“How about this rain?”
“The weather’s usually better than this.”
“Remember the weather three year
s ago?”
“Four years ago.”
“Five.”
“Anyway, it was worse than this.”
“But we stuck it out.”
“We always stick it out.”
“Otherwise the tradition would be broken and we might not be able to come back.”
“The wives might take the perk away …”
It went on like this until the coffee was poured, the bacon removed from the pan, and the eggs cracked.
My stomach was grumbling.
It was almost full light out now. Quietly we slipped farther into the trees so we wouldn’t be seen, although there wasn’t much of a chance of that because the men were completely focused on Coop. They wouldn’t have noticed a Sasquatch sauntering down the road.
It wasn’t until Coop was seated in one of the chairs eating a pile of bacon and eggs that one of the men asked him what he was doing there.
“Looking for a girl I know.” He gave them a description of Kate. “She was riding a bicycle.”
The men listened carefully, thought about it for a second, then all shook their heads.
“We would have noticed a gal like that.”
“Especially the bike.”
“What was she doing here? Camping?”
“Just riding her bike,” Coop answered. “I mean she might not have even been to the park. I don’t know her very well. We just met, but I wanted to see her again. Thought I’d walk through the campground and see if she was here.”
“You have a car?”
“I parked at the entrance. The windows were too fogged to see out.”
“Was she alone?”
“As far as I know.”
“Then she wouldn’t have been with the old folks.”
“What old folks?”
“Big group of them on the other side of the campground.”
One of the men pointed. “They were parked a hundred yards that way.”
“Six or seven rigs. Some of the motor homes were pretty nice. Diesel pushers. Humongous things. Must be nice to be retired.”
“Were?” Coop asked.
“Yeah. They pulled out last night.”
“This morning actually. About two. Made a lot of noise.”
“Weird time to hit the road, but old people do strange things.”
“Maybe the airplane freaked them out.”
“I think it was a helicopter.”
“Airplane.”
“Whatever it was, it tried to land on the strip a little after midnight. Made several low passes. It might have landed, but it was pretty foggy.”
“I thought I heard it take off a little after one.”
“Probably one of the senior citizens firing up their rig,” the retired cop, Martin, said. “No helicopter could have landed or taken off in this weather. Visibility hasn’t been more than fifty feet for twenty-four hours.”
“Could have been, but they all left at the same time in a caravan, don’t know why you’d start your rig an hour early.”
I wondered if they would have investigated further if they’d had their “cop brains” on.
Coop finished the last of his bacon and eggs. “Well, thanks for the information.”
“Do you have to go?”
Coop stood. “Yeah. I better be on my way.”
“Why don’t you go fishing with us. Set some crab pots. Martin will show you how. A lot of fun.”
“We have plenty of extra rain gear.”
“It sounds like fun,” Coop said. “But I don’t think I can. I have things I have to do today.”
“If you change your mind, we’re not leaving until tomorrow morning. If you come back tonight you can share in our fish and crab feed. Freshest seafood you’ll ever eat.”
“What was the girl’s name?” Martin asked.
“Kate.”
“If we see her what do we tell her?”
“Just tell her I was looking for her. That I’ll see her back in town.”
“Will do.”
Coop started toward the road, then stopped and turned around. “Out of curiosity, do you know which way the old folks headed?”
“Toward the sun,” one of the men answered.
“East?”
“South.”
“Old people go south for the winter.”
“Only dumb cops go north.” They all laughed.
Coop waved and walked down the road in the direction he had been going before breakfast.
I wanted to stick around and listen to what they had to say about their new friend Otto.
Actually, what I really wanted to do was walk straight into their camp and ask them for a plate of bacon and eggs.
Alex had a different plan.
“We’ll go counterclockwise, then cut through the woods and figure out where the Pod was parked.”
“If it was the Pod.”
“It was the Pod all right. Motor homes! Larry’s brilliant. No hotels. No train or airplane tickets. Paying for everything with cash. No trace. They must have headed out from the East Coast separately. Met out here.”
We cut across the road about a hundred yards upwind of breakfast and began weaving our way through empty campsites. I wondered how we would recognize the Pod’s campsites if they had already left.
This turned out not to be a problem.
Coop had beaten us there.
We no longer needed flashlights.
The sun was up.
The bicycle was bright yellow.
The front wheel was twisted.
The derailleur was smashed.
The frame was scratched, but the words were clear.
Property of Ocean Inn Hotel.
And the phone number.
“It looks like it was hit by a car,” I said.
“Maybe we should tell the cops,” Coop said.
“That’s up to you,” Alex said quietly. “But I don’t think Larry would hurt her. That is, if he has her.”
“The bike is pretty clear evidence that he does,” Coop said.
Alex was silent.
Coop looked at me. “What do you think we should do?”
I was all for telling the cops, catching the next flight home to McLean, Virginia, and trying to forget that any of this had ever happened.
But it wasn’t as simple as that.
Alex finally spoke. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told Pat back at the library —”
“I’m going to use the restroom,” I interrupted. “Whatever you decide is fine with me.”
There was no need for me to hear Alex’s reasoning again. I’d thought a lot about what he had said. It had made good sense in the library, but I wasn’t sure it would hold up in the woods, standing over Kate’s smashed bicycle.
Coop’s call.
I crossed the road to the restroom.
When I finished and stepped back outside I could see they were still talking. I didn’t want to interfere. I had no idea what we should do. If Alex was right about not being able to stop Lod until we knew what he was planning, then we should follow the sun. If Kate was in danger, then we should tell the camping cops.
If Kate was in danger.
If they even had Kate.
If Kate was still alive.
What if they had hit her bike and she had run off?
What if her showing up had spooked them into taking off in the middle of the night?
She could be hiding.
She could be injured.
She could be limping her way back to the Ocean Inn.
Whatever Coop decided to do we had to make sure she wasn’t in the park or back at the hotel.
I pushed open the door to the women’s restroom. Another first. Never been to a campground. Never been inside a women’s restroom. It was pretty much like the men’s restroom, except there were no urinals hanging on the walls. The Pod, or someone else, had been using it because it hadn’t been cleaned. Paper towels on the concrete floors. Dirty sinks. I opened a stall door. I flushed the toilet. I opened
the door to the next stall.
Kate had been here.
She had left us another note.
On a paper towel.
7 vehicles. 2 cars pulling trailers. 3 motor homes. 1 camper. 1 van. I think. Could be more. Heading south on 101. I’m in a small motor home. They aren’t going to hurt me. I’m fine. See you down the road.
Kate
I ran across the road waving the paper towel.
before I discovered them. I had just entered the park on the bicycle. I didn’t really have a plan except to ride through and see if Bella and Bill’s motor home was there. I should have known they would set up sentries at the entrance and Guards throughout the park. That’s exactly what I would have done. They must have had a car hidden in the trees. She didn’t turn on her headlights. I didn’t hear the car. One moment I was pedaling along through the cold fog. The next moment I was flying through the air. I hit a tree, or a rock, and blacked out.
When I opened my eyes I was inside Bella and Bill’s motor home looking up at the underside of the dinette table. Bella was bandaging my hand. My other hand was handcuffed to the steel pole beneath the table. Bill was bandaging my leg. There were others in the motor home, but I couldn’t see them from under the table. I had a gag in my mouth. I was choking. I couldn’t breathe. I started to struggle.
Bella put a knee on my chest and sandwiched my face with her powerful hands.
“Stop!”
I stared up at her, hyperventilating.
“I’ll take the gag off, but if you call out I’ll kill you where you lie.”
I nodded.
Someone passed a butcher knife down to her. She brought the big knife toward my throat.
“I am not kidding, Kate. One sound and I’ll cut the noise off with this.”
I nodded again.
She cut the gag and pulled it away.
I took several gasping breaths.
“You should have just slit her throat.” It was LaNae Fay. “There are a million places to stash a body here. Throw her off a cliff. Let the sharks have her. She was born in the Deep. No record of her ever existing. No problems.”
“Shut up, LaNae!” Bella hissed. “We have to find out how she found us. We can’t kill Lod’s granddaughter without his permission. You’re lucky you didn’t kill her with the car, or we might be slitting your throat right now.”
So LaNae had been the one who hit me. Bella was an Original, much higher in the Pod than LaNae, and didn’t like her. No one liked LaNae. She was fiercely loyal to my grandfather and was tolerated because she would do anything for him without hesitation, without question. Lod used her to do the jobs no one else wanted to do.
