by Brad Parks
I was just coming out of another dissatisfying Friday afternoon call when I bumped into Mitch, coming back from the library for the three P.M. count with a stack of books under his arm.
“Damn,” I said, nodding at his collection. “You leave any for the rest of us?”
“Just trying to keep my mind off what I’d normally be doing this weekend.”
“What’s that?” I asked, because my policy since we started becoming friends was that if Mitch ever opened the smallest conversational door, I was going to attempt to enter it.
And then he said something that made me instantly forget my struggles with Amanda.
“A hunting trip with some buddies.”
A hunting trip. The words gave me a tingle. I may not have known much about hunting, but I did know hunters often hunted near their hunting cabins.
Their secluded, illicit-document-laden hunting cabins.
This was what I had been waiting more than a month for; what I had been wheeling and dealing and wheedling to arrange ever since I entered through that split-log fence at the front entrance: for Mitch to mention hunting in my presence.
Without sounding too overenthusiastic, I said, “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, some college buddies and I went every year the weekend before Thanksgiving. We told our wives not to buy turkeys because we might get ourselves one. We drank a lot more Wild Turkey than we ever shot, but whatever. You a hunter?”
“Sure,” I said. Then I modified it with, “A bit.”
I did the so-so shake with my hand. I didn’t want to overcommit, lest I get trapped into a detailed conversation about barrel-twist rates. The closest a kid from Hackensack, New Jersey, came to shooting anything was when we played Big Buck Hunter at the local arcade.
Still, West Virginia Pete would never be antihunting, so I added, “Less so after the kids were born. It just didn’t seem fair to Kelly to leave her on a Saturday or Sunday morning when I had already been working all week.”
“I hear you,” he said.
“What kind of hunting did you do?” I asked, hoping that was the correct formulation of that question.
“Bowhunting. No offense to rifle hunters, but if you ask me, that’s not really much of a sport. That’s practically a trip to the grocery store. With the scopes they got, they can put down a deer at a hundred fifty, two hundred yards. Where’s the sport in that? The animal doesn’t even have a chance to know you’re there. It’s not fair.”
Tommy Jump would have pointed out that hunting would never be truly fair until the animals got rifles, too.
“I hear you. Anyone can do this,” I said, mimicking a trigger pull.
“Well, exactly. On the other hand, you get a bow with a fifty-pound draw on it, and you know you got to get within thirty yards to get a kill shot, and you better damn well be downwind, and if you so much as think too loud you know that deer is going to take off? Now you’re talking hunting.”
He got a dreamy, far-off look. “Last year when we went out, I was going out to one of my usual spots, making way too much noise, just checking out the property, when I caught sight of this big, mature buck, a twelve-pointer at least, biggest spread I ever saw. I usually don’t go for bucks because we have a rule: You gotta eat what you shoot. A young doe tastes way better. But this guy, he was magnificent. I just had to have him. I’d battle my way through a tough venison steak if it meant having his head on my wall. And I swear when I first saw him, he turned, and he looked at me and he stared me down for a moment, like, ‘Oh yeah? You think you can take me down? It’s on.’
“Then he took off. I tracked him a little bit, and I got the sense of where he had been hanging out. There were some droppings I thought were his. I told the guys I was with, ‘Okay, that one’s mine.’ The next morning, I was up at three A.M. I wanted to get up in a blind while he was still sleeping. So there I was, waiting for him, freezing my nuts off, because you got to stay real still if you’re going to have a chance.”
He set down the books so he could demonstrate the position he was in, as if the story wouldn’t be complete without visuals.
“Well, two hours later, it’s starting to get light, and along comes Mr. Buck. He’s coming down the hill toward me. At that time of the morning, you’re still getting cold air settling from the top of the hill down into the hollows, so he can’t smell me yet. All I’m doing is waiting for him to get a little closer, a little closer, a little closer. He’s so damn big, the last thing I want to do is try to take him from too far out, because if all I did was wound him, that’d be a damn shame for everyone involved. As I’m waiting, the sun is getting closer to the horizon and there’s getting to be this orange glow coming over the next hill, and I know I’m running out of time, because he’s going to bed down again soon. So I draw my bow and I get him lined up. I mean, I’ve got the most perfect shot of the most gorgeous buck I’ve ever seen.”
He cocked his elbow and pulled back an imaginary bowstring while keeping his other arm straight.
“And then,” he said, and I waited for him to narrate the bloody conclusion to this story.
But he just relaxed his arms.
“You didn’t shoot?” I asked.
“I couldn’t. That big boy had been out in those hills for a long time. He was probably a great-great-great-granddaddy, and I just thought, ‘You know, he’s been on one hell of a run.’ I couldn’t bring myself to end it for him. All I did was stand up in the blind and yell, ‘Gotcha!’ Just so he knew who had won.”
“Ha!” I said.
“I swear, he looked up at me, like, ‘Yeah, you got me.’ And then he tore ass off through the brush. Just seeing him run made it all worth it. Magnificent.”
“Did you ever see him again?”
“Nope. That was last year. Back then I would have told you I’d be out again this year looking for him. Never knew this was going to happen.”
“Well, yeah,” I said, again trying to be as casual as I could be. “You and your buddies go to the same place every year?”
“Uh-huh. I got a cabin up in Chattahoochee National Forest. Been in my family for a long time.”
“Chattahoochee?” I said, now pouring on the enthusiasm. “Get out! My uncle has a place there. I used to go there as a kid. That’s where I learned to hunt. My dad and I would go out with my uncle. He was a big bowhunter, just like you.”
Because of course he was. Uncle . . . Burt.
Burt Goodrich. Bowhunter. Friend to all. Except deer.
“Huh, small world,” Mitch said.
“Real small,” I said. Then, ever so smoothly, I asked, “Where’s your place, anyhow?”
“We’re way in the eastern part. Up twenty-three, just past Tallulah Falls.”
“Dang! That’s where Uncle Burt’s place is. We weren’t but a few miles from Tallulah Falls.”
“We’re on the east side of twenty-three, maybe a mile or two as the crow flies from the Chattooga River. That’s where they filmed Deliverance, you know. They called it the Cahulawassee in the movie, but everyone up there jokes about it. You see a stranger when you’re out hunting, and you know one of your buddies is going to go, ‘Squeal like a pig, squeal like a pig.’”
He chuckled at this. I wanted to get us away from discussions of classic movies and back into geography.
“Yeah, I think Uncle Burt was right off twenty-three,” I said, like I was now traveling it in my mind’s eye. “It’s been a while, though. I can’t remember the name of the road. I want to say it was a left turn. We’d be coming from up north, so we’d be traveling south.”
“Was he north or south of Tallulah Falls?”
“North,” I said, gambling. “What about you?”
“Same thing. Jeez, what are the chances?” he said, getting excited. “He’s not on Camp Creek Road, is he?”
“No, that’s not it,” I said, becaus
e the last thing I needed was to get pinned down on the exact location of my fictional uncle’s fictional cabin. I deflected the question back at him with: “That’s where your place is?”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “We’d be traveling north, so it was a right turn for us. Just past Tallulah Falls.”
“Camp Creek Road,” I said. “I feel like I’ve seen the sign. Are you directly on Camp Creek Road? I’ll have to tell Uncle Burt. He goes down to his cabin all the time and he’s always rambling around the back roads. Maybe he’s passed your place?”
“I doubt it. We’re one of the turns off Camp Creek Road, maybe a mile or so down. It’s just a little dirt road, and it’s got a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign, so people tend not to go down it unless they know it.”
“If you want, I could tell Uncle Burt to check out your place, make sure it’s holding up okay.”
I held my breath, silently praying I’d hear, Sure, that’d be nice. Let me give you the address.
What I got was: “That’s real kind of you. We got neighbors who check on it. There are only a few houses up our road, and we’re all part-timers. We kind of all keep an eye on each other’s places.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” I said.
I didn’t want to push my questioning—or my luck—too much further, lest it raise any alarm bells. This had to seem natural. I could always have “Uncle Burt,” aka Danny Ruiz, just happen to be down that way, then ask more questions based on specific knowledge. I was only one month in. With five months to go, I could be patient.
So I lobbed out a breezy, “Sure is beautiful in those parts.”
“God’s country. We have five acres that back up against US Forest Service land, so you feel like you own the whole world.”
“That sounds just like Uncle Burt’s place,” I said. “He’s got this little stream running through it. We used to catch crawfish in there. Just heaven.”
“Mmm. One of the first things I’m going to do when I get out of here is go back up there for a visit,” he said. “Maybe you can come by if you’re out too. I’ll teach you to bowhunt for real.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
Then, as gracefully as I could, I extricated myself from the conversation.
I couldn’t wait to get to a phone.
* * *
• • •
I didn’t reach Danny on any of my first three attempts, but on the fourth he answered with a testy, “I’m in a meeting. Would you stop blowing up my phone?”
“This is worth ducking out of a meeting,” I said.
“You better not just be calling me because you’ve gone through all that fish.”
“No. But I do need a favor. A buddy of mine here needs someone to check in on his family’s hunting cabin.”
“Really?” he said, and from the way his voice was climbing the ladder, I knew he understood what I was really saying.
“Yeah. He’s worried about it being empty now that he’s here.”
“I got you,” Danny said. “What’s the address?”
“It’s not that simple. My buddy doesn’t know the actual address. He said he always got there by feel. But based on what he told me about it, I think maybe you can find it.”
Then I talked him through what I knew: Chattahoochee National Forest. North of Tallulah Falls. Off Route 23. Down Camp Creek Road. After a mile look for a dirt road guarded by a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign. The parcel in question would be roughly five acres and back up against USFS land.
“Okay. Let me start digging. Call back in two hours.”
Over the next two hours, I entered the fantasy where Danny found that property . . . obtained a search warrant . . . uncovered those documents.
And the whole thing would take, what, a few days? A week, max?
I wasn’t sure what I was more excited about: collecting the money, returning to normalcy with Amanda, or not having to share a roof with ninety criminals every night.
To burn off extra energy, I went to the gym and tossed the medicine balls around for a while. Then I pounded the track. As I washed off the sweat afterward, I was already counting the remaining number of times I’d have to use that soap-scum-encrusted shower.
They would start calling dinner at five o’clock. But Danny’s two-hour deadline was just before that. So with ten minutes to spare, I called him.
“Hey, got anything?” I asked hurriedly, after the recording that informed him he was receiving a call from a federal correctional institution.
“We think so,” Danny said. “We used satellite imagery to find a dirt road that fit your buddy’s description. This is the high-quality USGS stuff, not the junk you get from Google Maps. Then we matched it with local property tax records. There are six properties down that road. Four of them were smaller than five acres. Of the two remaining, one is registered to a guy from South Carolina. The other is registered to a family trust. It looks like the place: five point one acres backing up against US Forest Service land.”
There was no one milling near the phones, so I punched the air a couple of times in celebration.
“How soon do you think you can check it out?” I asked.
“Well, it’s a funny coincidence. I just so happen to be going down to Georgia this weekend.”
CHAPTER 33
They took Delta to Atlanta. Didn’t everyone—FBI agents, crooks, and everyone in between—take Delta to Atlanta?
Gilmartin wanted to rush out Friday night. Ruiz argued that it didn’t make sense to try to find a remote cabin at night. They could wait until the morning.
They hopped on the first flight out. Because it was a Saturday, and because they anticipated a day of tromping around in the Georgia wilderness, they dressed casually. No suits. No FBI logos. Straight-up civilian clothes.
They didn’t even bring their weapons with them. Too much hassle.
Once they landed, they hustled to the rental car center and asked for a truck with four-wheel drive. Before long, they were on their way out of Atlanta in a green Jeep—a very non-FBI vehicle—angling northeast on Interstate 85.
The morning was dark gray, fifty-four degrees. Georgia in November. Other than when Gilmartin gave Ruiz directions, they talked little. The route was straightforward enough. It was divided highway, except for when the roads briefly merged for the town of Tallulah Falls.
After they got back out into the countryside, it wasn’t too much longer before Gilmartin called out, “Okay. This is it. Camp Creek Road.”
Ruiz slowed and took the short exit ramp. They reached a T in the road.
“Take a right to stay on Camp Creek,” Gilmartin said, his vanilla accent sounding more like a GPS than most GPSs.
Then, before too much longer, he ordered, “Slow up here.”
There was a small dirt road, jutting off to the left at an obtuse angle. At the mouth of the road was a black sign with orange lettering that warned, PRIVATE PROPERTY.
“This is it,” Ruiz said. “This is exactly like Tommy said it would be.”
Ruiz turned, and they departed the asphalt. The Jeep’s tires spun slightly, finding the remnants of loose gravel buried under the dirt. The road tilted upward. Trees hung over them, growing together as they reached for the sky, turning that little rutted track into an arboreal tunnel.
They passed a house on the left. Then one on the right. They were simple getaways. Neither appeared to be currently occupied.
Then Gilmartin pointed and said, “Turn here.”
There was a narrower path off to the left, one that had been even less frequently traveled. The ruts were deep enough Ruiz was glad for the Jeep’s higher wheel clearance. Dry yellow grass clogged the middle of the track.
Finally the driveway flattened out. They entered a small clearing, just like they had seen in the satellite picture. They looked for the cabin, the garage, the shed.
Except wh
ere the satellite photo had showed the three structures should be, there was nothing.
Not a wall. Not a roof. Not a foundation.
Nothing but three empty patches of dirt and some scattered debris.
Ruiz muttered, “What the—”
“Someone beat us here,” Gilmartin said.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. But whoever it was, they cleaned the place out.”
CHAPTER 34
Herrera had found the cabin, broken into it, and, after a thorough ransacking, found nothing.
Just like the banker’s wife.
Unlike the banker’s wife, he hadn’t stopped there. Because, really, if you were Mitchell Dupree, and you had the FBI and a cartel after you, and you had something that bulky you absolutely had to stick somewhere, and you had a tucked-away hunting cabin no one knew about, isn’t that where you would hide it?
The documents simply had to be somewhere in, around, or under that cabin. By Herrera’s estimation, they consisted of nearly four thousand pieces of paper. Plus whatever folders or partitions were needed to organize them. Herrera was thinking a banker would use banker’s boxes.
Herrera just needed to be methodical about finding them. He also needed reinforcements.
It had taken him a few days to get a crew up from Mexico, through the tunnel; and then a few more days to arrange the proper equipment for them.
Sledgehammers. Pry bars. Drills. Saws. A jackhammer. A backhoe. A dump truck.
The larger equipment was rented. Herrera didn’t worry about anyone noticing or asking questions. For one thing, the cabin was so remote. For another, who would pay attention to half a dozen Hispanic construction workers? There were few parts of America anymore where that was an unusual sight.
Once Herrera got his team in place, he set it into a controlled destructive fury. The men started in the attic and worked their way down. And they were thorough: ripping out walls, removing insulation, exposing the bare bones of the cabin to make sure they had missed nothing. They carted the place out, one chunk at a time, to the dump truck.
