by Roland Smith
He can be so irritating. I wanted to scream.
“It’s too late for that,” he said. “He’s long gone.”
“You don’t know that!” I shouted.
But I knew he was probably right. Alex had had his own agenda the whole time, and we had been scratched off it.
Coop walked down the stairs, tap, tap, tap, ignoring my outburst.
“Let’s go, Lil Bro.”
We walked across the campus toward the parking lot. Students were still wandering around. Night classes, I guessed. We came to a large group of students setting up equipment in the campus events field.
“I need to check this out,” Coop said.
Of course he needed to check it out. At this rate, we’d be getting to the parking lot around sunrise. I followed him into the center of the field and saw they were setting up tripods, cameras, and telescopes.
“What’s going on?” Coop asked.
Everyone immediately stopped what they were doing and smiled at him. It looked like some of the girls might faint. I revised the parking lot ETA to tomorrow afternoon.
“Astronomy class,” one of the girls said, then they all started talking at once.
“Some of us made our own telescopes.”
“We even ground the glass for the lenses.”
“Hope they work.”
“Newspaper is coming to do an article.”
“We’re lucky it cleared up.”
“Would have had to scrap the entire show.”
“What show?” Coop asked.
Everyone stopped talking and stared at him.
“The lunar eclipse,” a boy answered.
Coop’s eyes went as wide as the moon.
Mine too, I suppose.
Coop was born twenty years ago on Christmas Eve during a lunar eclipse in a traffic jam on the 495 Beltway in Virginia. Kate’s parents were murdered during that same lunar eclipse in New York City and thrown into a Dumpster.
“We have to go,” Coop said.
“If you get a chance, come on back.”
“The eclipse won’t start for a few hours.”
“We’re going to have food.”
“What’s your name?”
“Where are you …”
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap …
I almost had to jog to keep up with Coop. He didn’t slow down until we were around a corner.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. Maybe it’s everything. I don’t know. But it kind of freaked me out.”
“I can see that.”
By the time we left the campus, he looked less freaked-out. We crossed the street to the parking lot.
The camper was gone, but Alex had left us the boat.
“It’s going to be interesting for whoever runs the lot to find a boat without a truck tomorrow morning,” Coop said.
We walked over to it.
I hoped Alex had thought to throw our packs into the boat before he took off. He hadn’t, but he had left my sleeping bag. It was rolled out between the benches. It was covering something. Something the size of a human being.
We stared down at it.
“Is that your sleeping bag?” Coop asked.
“Yeah,” I said, my mouth suddenly very dry. “It was rolled up behind the front seat.”
Coop turned on a flashlight and slowly reached his other hand over the gunwale. He took ahold of the top of the bag and quickly flipped it back.
I was sure it was going to be Alex. That someone killed him and had taken the camper.
It was a woman. Her gray hair was shaven within a quarter inch of her scalp. She looked to be in her fifties, maybe her early sixties. Her brown eyes were opened in surprise. Blood from the back of her head was still leaking onto the bottom of the boat.
“It just happened,” I said.
Coop felt the artery in her neck.
“No pulse, but she’s still warm.”
I’d never seen a dead person. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. My stomach lurched, but I continued to stare. I had no idea who she was, but there was something familiar about her. Something …
“I think she’s a Pod member,” I said. “I recognize her from the newspaper sketches. Her hair was longer, but she’s one of them. I’m sure of it.”
“Her name is LaNae Fay,” Coop said. “I saw her on the video from the gas station. But how did she end up dead in our boat?”
“Alex?”
“Probably.” Coop covered her face.
“I guess we should call the police,” I said. I took the phone out of my pocket.
“That would be the logical thing to do, but not necessarily the right thing to do. If we call the police, and stick around, they’re going to haul us in. When we tell them our story, they’re not going to believe it … at first. We’ll have to get them to call Agent Ryan. She’s going to tell the police to hold us. I doubt that Arcata has an FBI office. There are only seventeen thousand people here. This means that agents would have to fly or drive in from somewhere else. By the time they get here and get organized, it will be too late. The Pod will have already done whatever they’re going to do.”
“We could call Agent Ryan, quickly tell her what’s going on, then get out of here.”
Coop thought about it for a moment. “Okay.”
He gave me the number. I punched it in and was about to hit the talk button when he stopped me.
“What?”
“Wait a second.”
I looked up at the full moon, giving him a chance to think about it.
“None of this has to do with the lunar eclipse,” Coop said. “The eclipse is something personal to me because I was born during an eclipse, and may be personal to Kate because her parents were murdered during the same eclipse.”
“I was looking up at the moon because I don’t want to look down at the dead woman in our boat,” I said.
I hadn’t thought about the lunar eclipse, or anything else, since we found her.
“Oh,” Coop said.
“But the lunar eclipse thing is interesting, and pretty weird.”
“I doubt the Pod even knows there’s a lunar eclipse tonight. I guess I should have sent the postcard to Agent Ryan a couple of days earlier.”
“All I have to do is hit Talk.”
Coop shook his head. “Same results. We wouldn’t make it out of town. Every cop within a hundred miles would be looking for us.”
“We’re leaving town?”
“We need to get to the park, or at least I do.”
“If you mention us splitting up one more time, I’m going to split your lip.”
Coop grinned. “Sorry.”
“I mean it.”
Coop looked back into the boat. “We need a head start. Maybe we can leave a note with Agent Ryan’s phone number and a rough outline of what we’re doing. By the time someone discovers the body, we’ll be long gone.”
“Hitchhike?”
Coop nodded.
I reached into my pocket and realized my writing stuff was in my pack, but I did find my digital recorder. I held it out for Coop.
He shook his head. “Go ahead. You’re better at it than I am. But make it quick.”
When I finished I hit Play.
“That sums it up pretty well,” Coop said. “But maybe you should add something about what we’re going to do.”
“Okay.”
I hit the record button.
“We’re going to hitchhike to the state park. Maybe catch up with Alex Dane. Maybe find Kate. Maybe figure out where the Pod is going. Someone has to stick with the Pod and find out where they’re going and what their plan is.
“I guess that someone is Coop and me.
“There isn’t anyone else.”
Coop said.
He held out his hand for the recorder.
I gave it to him. “Where are you going to put it?”
“Somewhere where it won’t get lost.
Somewhere where they won’t miss it. He flipped the sleeping bag off LaNae, this time revealing her entire body. Lying next to her right hand was a knife. Coop shined his light on the blade. There was fresh blood on it.
Alex did not get away unscathed.
“You think he’s okay?” I asked.
“I’m not sure that Alex was ever okay,” Coop answered, flashing his light around the rest of the boat. “There.”
One of the oars was drenched in blood. “Guess we know how he …”
“I guess so,” I said, wishing he’d get this over with.
He put the digital recorder in LaNae’s hand, wrapped her fingers around it for several seconds until he thought it would hold, then covered her up again.
“Let’s go.”
He put his hood up and started walking with his head down as fast as I had ever seen him walk.
Tap, tap, tap.
We passed several people on the sidewalk. None of them even glanced at us. I realized that Coop’s hood-up-head-down-fast-walk was a disguise. He didn’t want to be stopped. He didn’t want to listen to anyone. He wanted to get to where he was going, wherever that ended up being.
“When are we going to start hitchhiking?” There were plenty of cars driving by.
“This is all local traffic,” Coop answered. “Getting in and riding a few blocks isn’t worth it. We’ll walk to the edge of town and catch someone heading south to Eureka.”
We walked.
And walked.
Traffic started to thin, then almost disappeared altogether. We left the lights of Arcata behind and started walking on the shoulder of 101, which was called the Redwood Highway through this stretch.
Four lanes.
Two north.
Two south.
Coop finally stopped.
He pulled his hood down and looked up at the sky hanging above Arcata Bay and the Pacific.
“The eclipse is starting. The blood moon.”
A reddish brown was spreading across the full moon.
“How long does it take?”
“Two or three hours from start to finish.”
I couldn’t help but think about the woman’s blood in the bottom of the boat.
We watched for a while, so intent on the slowly changing moon that neither of us heard the truck until the door slammed closed. A camper was parked on the shoulder thirty feet in front of us. A man walked toward us.
“Alex?” I whispered.
Coop shook his head. “Our camper is a different color.”
It was difficult to see what color the camper was, lit only by taillights, but it did appear to be darker than the camper we’d been driving.
“We weren’t even hitchhiking,” I said.
“Otto?” the man asked.
“Yeah,” Coop replied.
“I thought that was you,” the man said, putting his hand out. He was at least six feet tall, dressed in overalls, and looked like he hadn’t shaved in days.
“Martin, right?” Coop shook his hand.
It was the retired cop from Nehalem Bay, the one the other cops had been poking fun at.
“Did you find that girl?”
“No,” Coop said.
Martin looked at me. “Who’s this?”
“My brother, Axel.”
“Ha! Your parents must have been Jules Verne fans. Journey to the Center of the Earth, right?”
A well-read ex-cop.
“Martin Holds.” He put his huge hand out to me. I shook it.
“Where are the other guys?” Coop asked.
“Back with their families by now. I decided to spend a couple of extra days fishing.”
“How’d you recognize me? It’s kind of dark along this stretch of road.”
“Once a cop, I guess … I didn’t know it was you for certain, but you were the same height and same build as the kid we met at Nehalem. You being with another guy kind of threw me off — I thought you were traveling alone. But what the heck. Worth checking it out. Enjoyed talking to you up north. We were all hoping you’d come back and go fishing with us.”
“I got a little hung up,” Coop said.
“Where are you headed?”
“Humboldt Redwoods State Park.”
Martin looked us over. “You’re traveling kind of light to go camping.”
That’s because a guy who just bashed a woman’s head in took our backpacks, I thought.
“We’re meeting some other people there,” Coop said. “They have our gear.”
“I’ll give you a lift. I’m going right by there. I’m fishing my way back to LA. I like driving at night. Less traffic. You’ll both have to ride up front with me. The camper is a toxic-waste dump.”
We walked up to the truck and opened the passenger door. It was hard to believe that the camper could be worse than the front seat.
“Just sweep that trash off the seat.”
We pushed the empty cans, bottles, candy wrappers, burger boxes, and chip bags onto the already garbage-compacted floorboards. Coop took the middle, which I appreciated. It meant I was able to crack open the window and breathe.
Martin talked about fishing, LA, his girlfriend, his apartment, his days as a cop, all the way through Eureka to the little town of Fortuna, where something happened to him. He stopped talking in the middle of a sentence.
I waited for him to continue, but the only sound was the old truck camper rattling down highway 101. A minute passed, then two minutes, then Coop finally said something.
“You okay, Martin?”
It took him ten more seconds to answer. “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just kind of curious about you and your brother. You know a lot about me, but I don’t know anything about you. You’re kind of tight-lipped.”
The reason Coop had been tight-lipped was that Martin had been loose-lipped, like everyone else who had ever talked to Coop, never giving him a chance to speak.
“What do you want to know?” Coop asked.
“Let’s start with your real names. I don’t believe the Journey to the Center of the Earth thing.”
Uh-oh, I thought.
“Axel and Otto aren’t your real names. I need to know who you are.”
The simple-cop-on-a-fishing-holiday thing was over. In an instant, he had transformed into a smart, suspicious, no-nonsense cop.
“My name is Cooper O’Toole, but I prefer to be called Coop.”
Martin looked over at me. “And you?”
I glanced at Coop. He gave me a resigned shrug.
“My name is Patrick O’Toole, but I prefer to be called Pat.”
“Younger brother?”
“By five years.”
He turned his attention back to Coop. “So what are you really doing out here?”
“It’s a long story,” Coop said.
Martin looked at his watch. “If I drive slow, we have about a half hour before we get to the park. If you don’t finish your story by the time we get there, I’m going to drive by without stopping.”
“For what it’s worth,” Coop said, “I was going to tell you the truth before we got there, or have you drop us off before we got to the park so you didn’t get caught up in any of this.”
Martin looked at his watch again. “Now you have twenty-nine minutes.”
Coop started talking. He summarized almost everything that had happened from the moment he got to New York until Martin picked us up, leaving out a few key things, like the flash drive, the satellite phone, and the dead woman in the boat. Coop had probably forgotten about the flash drive, but he hadn’t forgotten about LaNae. Probably best not to share this little detail with a cop, even an ex-cop. If Coop had told him, Martin might have thought we were accessories to murder. Why else would we have rushed out of town?
“What kind of gun did the old guy have?” Martin asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It had six bullets. I have them in my pocket.”
“Any other ammo in the pack?”
“No.”
; “Did you check the camper for ammo?”
“No.”
“And you say he flew in to Portland?”
“That’s what he told us.”
“Then he probably bought it off somebody out here to avoid the waiting period,” Martin said. “The gun probably didn’t come with extra ammo.”
I wasn’t sure why he was spending so much time on the empty gun.
He pulled the camper off to the shoulder.
“What are you doing?” Coop asked.
“Wrapping my mind around everything you just told me.”
“We need to get to the park.”
“I understand. The entrance is a mile ahead. If what you say is true, providing they are still at the park, they’ll have sentries posted. We won’t get very far if they figure out who we are. We need to take a few minutes to think about this. So, that girl Kate was snatched up at Nehalem?”
Coop nodded.
Martin laughed. “I got those SF cops’ phone numbers before I left. Wait till I tell them we were parked less than a hundred feet from the Pod, fishing. It’s going to kill them. Every cop in the universe is looking for those wackos. They’re going to regret taking off so fast to get back to their families.”
“This isn’t your problem,” Coop said.
“It’s more my problem than it is yours. Once a cop, always a cop. You don’t have cell phones?”
Coop shook his head. I followed his lead.
“Unfortunately, neither do I. Mine is on the bottom of Nehalem Bay. The smart play would be to drive ahead, find a phone, and call in the cavalry. The question is how fast can they get here, and what kind of cavalry are they?” He drummed the steering wheel with his fingers for a moment. “I think we should just pull into the front entrance.”
“They’ll see us,” Coop said.
“Of course they’ll see us. That’s the point. From what you said they’ll see us even if we try to sneak in a back way. It’s a campground. We’re in a camper. Weary travelers looking for a place to sleep in the middle of the night. Nothing suspicious about that. And I suspect that your friend Alex went into the park the same way. They aren’t blocking the roads, checking each vehicle with flashlights. If they tried to do that the park staff would be all over them.”
“They’ll recognize us,” Coop said.
