Dennis Yates

Minus Tide

Chapter 1

“It’s your first dead body, Ann. Don’t worry. You’re not going to get hooked or anything.”

“I wouldn’t say this counts. A severed appendage is hardly a body, Mitch. And no, I don’t care for a cigarette.”

Mitch Young lit one up and dropped the pack back into his shirt pocket. His hands were shaky.

“So I guess you’re already hooked?” Ann said.

“I suppose I am. On cigarettes anyway.” Mitch had found that nicotine calmed his stomach. He’d taken up smoking his first week on duty, after arriving at the scene of a grisly car crash and immediately losing his dinner of chicken fried steak. It was obvious that neither occupant had bothered to buckle up. There was blood-stained windshield glass scattered all over the place. Like thrown wedding rice, he’d thought, except these folks were getting hitched with death. He’d set out flares on the dark road and waited for Sheriff Dawkins. The sheriff, a consummate chain smoker, had tossed him a spare pack and warned him to mind the spreading pool of gasoline.

“I don’t care what you think. An arm still counts in my book,” Mitch said.

“Tell me then, at what point does it not count? If it’s only a baby toe for instance?”

Ann ducked her head beneath his smoke and took a step upwind. Her black hair curled over her shoulders like a shimmering wave. Mitch couldn’t stop staring at her or grinning either. Ann was always so quick. Her appearance had changed a lot in just the three years since high school, when she’d kept her hair cut short and spiky, used makeup that made her look like a pale doll. Her skin was now lightly tanned and the bone beneath created pleasing angles to the eye. She had the face of a woman, he thought. But when I see myself in the mirror every morning I’m still that punk in junior high…

“I don’t know Ann, that’s a good question. Let me think on it for a while.”

A heavier wind kicked up and began to throw sand. Smelling faintly of salmon and snow, it seemed as if it had slid down directly from Alaska. Ann hugged herself and shivered.

“How much longer is the sheriff going to be?”

“Do you want to borrow my jacket?”

“I can’t stay all day waiting for him. By the time he gets here the tide will take that arm away.”

“We can go back to my car. I’ve got a thermos of coffee.”

Ann stared at the jumping nerves in his hands. What had happened to the cool operator she’d known for so many years?

“No thanks Deputy Young. I know all about you and cars. But I think I’ll take you up on your first offer.”

Mitch shrugged out of his jacket and handed it over. His face had turned red. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ann.”

“I think you do.” As soon as she pulled up the zipper of Mitch’s heavy jacket she felt better. Her legs were numb but she could deal with it for a while longer. I should stop teasing him, she thought. Maybe it’s how we’ve always gotten along, but today it just feels wrong.

“I guess I did have a reputation back in the day,” Mitch said, glancing at the sky for a break in the clouds. He noticed a strand of blue over the horizon, no thicker than fishing line. “But I’m a happily married man now.”

“I believe you, Mitch.”

“Is there something you want to tell me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I just wondered why you’re busting my chops.”

“I was only teasing.”

“Well it’s not very funny. I’ve got an image to uphold these days.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. I guess this whole thing has put me in a bad mood and I shouldn’t be taking it out on you. All I wanted was a nice run to clear my head before work. Then I trip over somebody’s stupid arm. And instead of pretending I didn’t notice I make the mistake of stopping to call you guys.”

“So it doesn’t matter to you if the owner of this arm could have been murdered?”

“I hate to break it to you, but Nancy Drew and I parted ways at a yard sale many moons ago. And what makes you think it was murder and not a fishing accident?”

“Because I’ve already checked with the Coast Guard. They’ve got no reports of anyone missing.”

“Have you ever seen such ugly tattoos? And what’s with the Cyclops?”

“Cyclops?”

“You remember reading Homer’s Odyssey don’t you? The cannibal giant with only one eye in the middle of his head?”

“Sorry. I guess I was too busy getting my skull crunched on the field.”

“Well whoever was attached to this hairy chunk of ink meat was probably some badass who had it coming. You ought to just bag it up and toss it in the trash.”

Mitch took a final drag off his cigarette and grinned. “My goodness, Ann. You’ve turned judgmental with age.”

“I bet you’re not surprised.”

“I guess not. After all the stuff you went through while we were back in school. But hopefully the past is the past now.”

“No.”

“No?”

“It never really is, Mitch.”

Mitch flicked the cigarette into a bonfire ring piled with dead coals.

“I didn’t think so.”

They walked over to a cedar log and sat down. Ann found a stick and began drawing in the sand. She’d never had anything against Mitch. He just seemed painfully average when he wasn’t getting attention on the football field. Near the shoreline a raven pecked at a dead fish. Gulls circled above, but the raven ignored their bullying cries to move on.

“Can I ask you a question?” Mitch asked.

“I guess it’ll kill some time.”

“Did your stepdad ever try to contact your family?”

“Duane? In his own way he did. On Christmas eve he’d call from prison and sing Silent Night into the answering machine.”

“He didn’t talk to anyone?”

“No. I picked up once and he hung up on me. I guess it must have ruined it for him.”

“Did your aunt go to the cops about it?”

“What could have been done? He hadn’t broken the law. There’s got to be more to a harassment charge than singing badly to someone once a year.”

“But it must have made you feel nervous.”

“Maybe the first couple of times. Then it sort of became a sad joke.”

“Do you wonder if he would’ve come back here when he got out on parole?”

Ann watched Mitch’s fingers play with the brim of his hat. She noticed the dirt under his nails, just like the first day they’d met in school.

“I don’t think he was that stupid. There’re a lot of folks around here that wouldn’t have hesitated using him for crab bait if he’d tried.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Duane had to get his start somewhere, didn’t he? Before he got comfortable pointing a gun at people he’d rip them off other ways. Sneaky stuff that didn’t pay all that much. He was always on the lookout for new suckers, smooth talking them into parting with their money. Most folks were too embarrassed to do anything about it when they realized they’d been taken. But a few caught up with him, took what he owed in teeth. I guess that might be why he started holding joints up. His mouth was a mess. He couldn’t talk smooth anymore.”

Mitch shook his head. “I guess I hadn’t heard that about him. But you know how stories get told around here. Sometimes a big piece gets misplaced. People forgive when it becomes easier than holding a grudge.”

“Well there are still grudges out there, believe me. Maybe not so strong now. I sense their roots to the past are dying.”

“So what made you stay here with your aunt? I thought you were all set for college.”

“Believe me I was hoping to get out. Then my aunt almost lost her store when she got sick and had no one else to run things. I just want to be sure she’s back on her feet again before I make a move.”

“She’s lucky to have you here. But I also know you belong in college. You’ve always had the brains. There wasn’t a day in school that I didn’t see you carrying an armful of books. I still don’t know how a person could read that much.”

“It was my only way to cope after mom was gone. I don’t know if I’d still be here if books hadn’t kept me company.”

“I guess everyone needs a way to escape when things get rough.”

“Even you? I thought life was nothing but easy street for Mitch Young-star quarterback, married to the Prom Queen, an exciting career catching the bad guys.”

“It’s hardly easy. If you only knew…”

“Then tell me about it Mitch. Tear down my misconceptions.”

“It’ll have to wait until another time, Ann. Sheriff’s here.”

Chapter 2

Ann stayed to answer the sheriff’s questions and watch them prepare the arm to be sent to a forensics lab in Portland. The sun had burst through the granite colored clouds and warmed up the beach. Passersby gawked from a distance, but all they saw was a large cooler, the collection kit and a small shovel. A couple of wet dogs wandered in too close and had to be shooed away. Afterwards, Ann decided it was time to leave and handed back Mitch’s jacket. When the sheriff paused in cutting tape with a knife she sensed his eyes turning up toward her. A cold ball of tar dropped to the bottom of her stomach. She never did feel comfortable around the man. Back in school he always had a way of turning up at every girl’s carwash fundraiser with more caked-on mud than normal. And you knew he was around by the waft of his aftershave-heavy, like dead cow lilies steeped in tequila. Behind his back some called him Lady Dawkins.

“I need to ask you a favor, Ann.”

“What is it, Sheriff?”

Dawkins put a cigarette in his mouth. But each time he tried lighting it, a gust would blow out the flame. Ann watched the movement of his hands as they tried to outwit the wind. After several attempts he set them on his knees and waited for a break. Ann noticed the lack of a pinkie finger on the ruddy hand holding the cigarette. A waxen nub stood in its place. The rest of the digit had been lost since before she was born, when there’d been a mill down on the bay and the sheriff was still a pimple-faced boy saving up money for his first car.

“I’m hoping you’ll not talk to anyone about what you found this morning. It could affect the investigation if you did.”

“I understand.”

“It might take weeks before forensics has a chance to get to it. Small towns like us aren’t exactly at the top of their list.”

“I’m sure that’s true.”

“I’ll have Mitch let you know later what we find out.”

Grunting, Dawkins shifted around on the log until his back faced her. She heard the snick of his lighter and curses at the wind, Mitch’s stifled laughter coming from behind. She was surprised by how much more she liked Mitch now, wondered if he ever really was the stereotypical jock she’d once pegged him for.

“You don’t have to keep me in the loop, Sheriff,” Ann said to the slumped figure. “I’m really not that interested.”

But she wasn’t even sure if he’d heard her.

Chapter 3

About a month after Ann had found the arm, Mitch stopped in her aunt’s store and paid for cup of coffee and a pack of gum. She hadn’t seen him for a few days. He seemed to be in a hurry.

“No cigarettes today?” Ann asked. “Or did you already quit?”

Mitch walked over to the counter where they kept the condiments. He started tearing open packets of sugar and dumping them into his cup. Ann knew there’d be five in all, followed by six containers of cream. She noticed his hands were shaking badly, and there were some bloody bandages wrapped around the knuckles of his right hand. Mitch’s pants weren’t pressed as usual, but wrinkled badly at the knees. His leather boots were scuffed with white marks instead of waxed a shiny black.

“I thought we were on good terms since we hung out at the beach together. Aren’t you going to talk to me?”

“Sorry Ann. I’m running late. Sheriff needs me to be somewhere right now.”

“How’s Tammy doing?”

“She’s working at the 101 today. She’s been working extra shifts lately, trying to save up money for when the baby comes.”

“I heard about it. You two must be excited.”

“We are. But we don’t get to see each other much. Have to keep telling ourselves it’s not a permanent thing and that we’ll get through it.”

“Well, I wish you all the best.”

“Thanks. And to answer your question, I did quit smoking.”

“How? Getting too expensive?”

“There’s that… But it was really coach Burn’s doing. He caught me lighting up the other day and gave me hell. Said he didn’t care if I was even on duty, he’d kick my ass anyway.”

“And it worked?”

“Coach Burns doesn’t make threats, Ann. I’ve spent too many years on the field with him to think otherwise.”

“Looks like he must have slapped you around some.”

Mitch glanced at his hand, lowered it behind the counter. “That wasn’t coach. I slipped on the jetty the other day and went slam dancing with some boulders.”

“Did you break anything?”

“Naw, just cut up some. Could still be a little infected.”

“What happened to the boy?”

“Dumb kid would have inner-tubed to Japan if we hadn’t gotten there in time. He was cold and wet, but alive. Had that look in his eyes that told me he wouldn’t be going into the water again for a long time. Well, I think I ought to get going now.”

“I’ve been wanting to ask. Did you ever hear anything back about who that arm belonged to?”

Mitch pressed the lid down on his cup of coffee. He glanced around the store to see if anyone was listening in. Old Walter was in the back, carefully picking out his tomatoes. Fifty years working for the railroad had taken away most of his hearing.

“Nothing but the guy’s age and stuff like that. Of course if his finger tips hadn’t been nibbled off they could have taken prints.”

“And the Cyclops tattoo?”

“They’re still looking into it. I think as far as the sheriff is concerned, finding the owner of that arm is a low priority right now.”

“That’s too bad. Seems to me there could be something important getting missed.”

“You never know what will turn up eventually. I thought you weren’t all that interested?”

“I wasn’t. But mysteries have always been that way with me. If I’m inconvenienced by one I get annoyed and won’t give it my attention. Then one day I’ll suddenly remember it and I’ll want to know what happened.”

Mitch zipped up his jacket and peered outside. He had dark shadows beneath his eyes and up close Ann thought she saw a deep bruise healing were the shadow of his hat covered his upper forehead. She wanted to ask him if he’d gotten that while saving the stupid kid.

“I wouldn’t waste any more time thinking about it, Ann.”

“I won’t.”

“Hey, if you feel like it maybe you’ll want to stop in at the 101 and say hello to Tammy. With me being gone a lot she’s been pretty starved for talk.”

“She doesn’t get her fill at the 101?”

“Only chit chat, you know. She’s always liked your company, Ann. Told me that she misses those days when the two of you used to go out kayaking together.”

“Maybe I’ll stop in. I’ve got to run an errand first.”

“Mrs. Notham?”

“You got it.”

Mitch forced a smile. “When I worked for your aunt that one summer, I probably went out to her place four days a week. Can’t say it wasn’t worth it, she always tipped me with a plate of cookies and a glass of milk.”

“She’s still at it.”

“It’s a good thing some things don’t change. Well, I better get moving.” Mitch grasped the brim of his hat with his good hand and hunched outside. It was still early afternoon and yet the distant mountain range was darkened as if it were much later. The rain was coming down sideways, warmed by the tropical trough from which it had descended. Ann watched Mitch get into his patrol car and pull back onto the highway. She wondered what the sheriff needed him for. There was something changed in his voice. His normal, easy-going tone seemed replaced by a poor imitation, and Ann had sensed that he was hoping she wouldn’t notice the difference. He’s trying to cover up his stress, she reminded herself. They’ve got more on their plate than I can possibly imagine.

Ann thought about Tammy, of how they’d drifted apart. At one time in their lives they’d been inseparable. When you were young, she thought, you had that feeling that you and your friends were like passengers on the same ship cruising into the future. Boyfriends would come and go, but you’d always be there for each other in the aftermath of tears.

In their junior year they’d both taken up kayaking. It was their way of getting away from everyone and clearing their heads. Some weekend mornings they’d launch from a pebbled beach into thick fog. The tide would be coming in and they’d paddle with it for hours. And then as the fog cleared, they’d find themselves far up a river that fed into the bay, surrounded by forests busy with kingfishers and bald eagles and they’d come onto shore and eat lunch and talk until it was time to put in again and let the changing tide pull them back to the sea. That was what made fighting the current all worthwhile-lying back in the sun and letting it take you on its silver back to wherever your mind wanted to go.

Chapter 4

After Ann helped carry Walter’s groceries to his car, she returned to the register and sat down with the local paper to finish an article she’d started earlier about minus tides. An extremely low minus tide was expected in two days, exposing places along the coastline and the bay that hadn’t been seen for years. When the last one occurred the remains of ancient trees had been unearthed-tar-black, seaweed-bearded stumps mostly-as well as the bleached skeletal remains of an old ship had been discovered. Ann was no stranger to the low tides, and when she was younger she would set her alarm clock so she could get down to the beach and see what she could find. The sensation was always unusual-to be able to finally walk around starfish-covered boulders and tide pools that were normally inaccessible.

It wasn’t surprising to Ann that the dramatically low tides had found a permanent niche in her subconscious. She would often dream about them-find herself walking ever further away from the beach she knew and into a subterranean world of unusual landscapes and sunken treasure. Normally such dreams were pleasant and hard to let go, but occasionally they would turn into nightmares. One in particular involved the large seamount that stood a quarter mile off the coast and provided a home to puffins and gulls. Ann dreamed that she was able to walk out to it and climb up it, and when she got to the top she discovered a secret house carved deep into the basalt. There was no one there when she went inside-only musty maps and brass telescopes-but fascinating anyway and in the dream she’d become so distracted that she’d forgotten to keep an eye out for the incoming tide. When she did finally look out of the stone turret, the tide was all the way in to shore and she’d been faced by the terrifying realization that she was trapped.

A couple of tourists from the Midwest came in to buy candy and postcards, peppered her with questions about the area and how bad the storms got. Ann told them about a battering winter storm a couple of years earlier. How the waves had broken through the picture windows of a beachfront restaurant and carried away an entire bar in the middle of the night. People were still finding full bottles, some crusted with barnacles from years at sea, but amazingly the contents were still drinkable. It was funny how the sea would hang on to things before letting them go. Some of the lost bottles that were returned to the restaurant were even put on display.

Not long after the couple left, a poorly kept muscle car pulled into the parking lot. Its hood was freckled with rust. There were several dents in the front bumper and part of the grill was reattached with balling wire. Ann had no idea who it belonged to. No one got out, but she could hear its throaty engine when the driver fed it gas. The headlights stayed on and the windshield was too fogged to see who was inside. Was the driver staking out the store? Am I going to get robbed while nobody’s around? She jumped when the phone rang, and as she lifted the receiver to her ear she noticed the car back out and speed away.

“Traver’s Market.”

“What’s the matter, Ann?” asked her Aunt Kate.

“Nothing.”

“You sound out of breath.”

“I just got spooked is all. Someone must have changed their mind about coming inside. Or maybe they just pulled over to read their map. It’s already getting dark out. Must mean the storm is coming earlier than they thought.”

“Then why don’t you close up a little early?”

“But it’s only 4:15.”

“That’s fine honey. I just put some potatoes in the oven for dinner. I doubt if there’s going to be much more business today.”

“But Mrs. Notham always comes in just before I close to pick up something she forgot. Yesterday it was shortening, and the day before she needed aspirin.”

“Then why don’t I give her a call and check. If she needs something you could drop it off on your way home.”

“I’m sure there will be something. I think I’ll stop by the 101 for a few minutes and see how Tammy is doing. I’ve got a bunch of cinnamon rolls here that are going to be stale by tomorrow, thought I could bring for her and Mitch. Tammy loves to spread extra butter over the tops and put them back in the oven again.”

“That’s alright by me. God knows I don’t need any of those things lying around here. I didn’t realize you and Tammy were still close.”

“We’re not really. Just drifted apart I guess. But Mitch just came by for some coffee and he seemed kind of stressed out.”

“Well that would be very nice of you to stop by then. You need to spend more time with friends than always worrying about me and the store. Go ahead and start closing up. I’ll call you after I check in with Mrs. Notham.”

In the time it took Ann to balance the till and set the alarms, the storm had blown in off the ocean, causing the lights to flicker. The wind howled down through the wood stove where customers often gathered around in the winter to sip coffee and swap stories. Ann tucked the package of corn starch under her arm and grabbed the bag of cinnamon rolls before she stepped outside and locked the door behind her. She walked quickly around to the back of the store and got into her Volkswagen Bug. The car was cold inside and smelled of dampness. If there was one thing that continued to remind her that she needed to leave Traitor Bay, it was the continual assault of mold and mildew. Even the hottest days of summer were not enough to sear it out, and they’d had some record breaking summer days the last few years.

Mrs. Notham wanted her to come inside and visit of course, but Ann was able to convince her that she needed to get home and make sure the house was secure. The full weight of the storm was set to touch down close to midnight. Ann wanted to be sure to check the flashlights in case they needed fresh batteries, and she knew her aunt would want help corralling the cats. Aunt Kate doted constantly on them, putting out saucers of cream and other vet-forbidden foods. Ann thought the activity was good for her aunt, since the spoiled felines kept her from being too sedentary. Still, her aunt’s recovery was going slowly. Her heart was still very weak. She couldn’t stand for very long and would sometimes experience moments of vertigo or shortness of breath. Ann honestly didn’t believe her aunt would ever be able to run the store on her own like she’d done for the past twenty years. And as much as she knew her aunt would hate the idea, Ann hoped she would decide to hire someone soon.

Plagued by chronic pot holes, the road was a desperate patchwork of asphalt and followed the contours of the bay. It had once been part of the old highway before the new one came through and blasted a straight path through rock and forest. Most locals preferred the quiet of the winding road, with its turn offs and easy access to reliable clam beds. Ann decided to pull over at one of her favorite viewpoints. She had always been fascinated by storms and enjoyed being out in them. When she was a child, her mother often struggled to keep her inside, safe from the snapping trees and downed power lines.

The tide was out, exposing a slate mudflat that stretched to the riffled green water lapping at its dimpled edge. Ancient stumps and logs mired in the bay bottom glistened with shaggy coats of seaweed. Taking in the great breadth of the approaching storm, Ann noticed a hint of blood-orange sunset in a rift of clouds above the horizon and felt a stir of unnamable emotion. For a moment she even saw a sliver of blue, like a shard of stained glass held in a jaw of dark cloud. But soon the jaw closed, erasing what she’d seen much like the fate of dreams when one is suddenly awakened, crumbling back into the indefinite sea of her subconscious. She felt momentarily saddened, but didn’t know why. She usually found that the ever-changing forces of nature brightened her mood, but ever since the discovery of the arm she hadn’t been able to shake off a sense of restless gloom behind everything she saw.

While lost in thought, her eyes landed on something stuffed behind the open ashtray where she kept spare change. She pulled the ashtray all the way out and set it on the passenger seat. Jammed inside was a bent marijuana cigarette. She fished it out with her fingers and straightened it out, slid it next to her nose. Still smelled good, she thought. A little stale maybe, but it reminded her of good times. James must have left it for her when she’d dropped him off at the Greyhound bus station nearly a year ago. He’d tired of commercial fishing and of being bullied by his hard-drinking father, had joined the Navy in order to make a clean break of Traitor Bay. I know it might be a big mistake, he’d told her. But I can’t think of anything else I can do. I didn’t make the kind of grades you did, Ann.

They’d already been broken up for a while when she’d driven him that day, yet they’d remained close. On a whim they’d once moved to Portland and worked hotel jobs and lived in a downtown apartment. Ann had found a job as a hotel operator. For once she wasn’t under pressure to recognize people, and in two weeks she knew everyone by the sounds of their voices. When she worked graveyard shift she would sneak in some precious reading time. James had found a position working as a bellman, and always had a good story for her when he got off shift.

After a year they concluded that the city life wasn’t something they’d ever grow to enjoy. They couldn’t sleep well without the lull of the ocean outside, drank coffee until their hands shook and bit their nails. It was difficult to save money and the air could get so dusty from never-ending construction projects that they developed rattling coughs. But that wasn’t all of it. There were other things in the city that reached into you, gave you chills. To Ann it seemed as if there were an unnatural amount of people loitering on the street at all hours and sometimes they’d stop what they were doing and watch you, as if they were taking notes. Until Ann brought it up, James hadn’t paid them much attention. They live around here, he’d told her-do you think they want to stay inside their crappy apartments all the time? Ann had felt a little foolish when James told her that, back before he’d come around to the idea of scraping up some funds to move to some place on the coast, so long as it wasn’t anywhere near his father.

During their stint in the city Ann had learned to push her fear down, knowing that James would have worried about her if he’d known how terrified she’d felt. She’d been through so much, having to deal with her mother’s disappearance and seeing her stepdad sent to prison for holding up a string of liquor stores and community banks. But on the night James was mugged in front of their apartment, it was Ann who’d quietly packed and loaded up his pickup with only their suitcases while James lay on the bathroom floor moaning. She’d insisted on driving the hundred-some miles west, worried that he might lose an eye if they didn’t get to a hospital soon. They’d arrived at the Buoy City clinic just after the morning shift change. By then he was really out of it and she’d had to half- carry him inside.

He was kept overnight for observation. So out of it that Ann doubted if he’d even heard her talking to him. Her aunt came and took her home, and the next morning James’ mother and younger brother did the same for him. While James recovered, they saw little of one another and soon it felt as if their year in Portland had never happened and they were back in the exact same places they were before they’d left. There were numerous attempts to revive what they’d shared, but it was never the same after that. New tensions never let up and they’d begun to argue. After a while Ann couldn’t help imagining that a foul spirit from the city had followed them back to torment them. James’ mother, who’d always been fond of Ann, had changed the most. She seemed to believe that Ann had been responsible for the idea of moving to the city and almost getting her son killed. As Ann began to feel less welcome in James’ home, she gradually stopped visiting altogether. A few weeks later they found themselves dating other people.

She left the joint untouched, closed the ashtray and started her car. A dark shadow had swallowed the bay. Rain rumbled over the metal above her like a stampede of well-fed mice. The wind reached below her and lifted up the car so that for a second the front wheels spun with no road below them. They weren’t kidding; this is going to be a serious one.

Chapter 5

The 101 cafe was open at all hours and drew a steady flow of long haul truckers and local deliverymen. Town regulars camped in the booths toward the back so they could keep an eye on the action at the counter where unlikely folk were sometimes forced to interact. A trucker who’d been awake for two days straight, for instance, might offer a compliment to a tourist’s wife before realizing he’d crossed a line. And depending on the subjects involved, such collisions of civility or lack thereof were known to restage themselves in the back parking lot. But as each troublemaker who walked into the 101 had gotten an opportunity to spend some time with the sheriff, such excitement was rare anymore. Word had spread quickly. You either agreed to play by Dawkin’s rules or stayed clear of his county. It was that simple.

Ann took a booth near the front where she could keep an eye on people coming in. She rarely went out to places where a lot of people gathered. It was hard to keep track of them all, and sooner or later she’d make a fool of herself. People she was supposed to know would think she was ignoring them. Or worse, she might not recognize some guy she once went out with and begin a conversation with him. Things could get awkward very fast.

When a doctor told Ann she had face-blindness it had made perfect sense. She’d gone through a period of chronic headaches and undergone all kinds of tests. Physically they couldn’t find anything wrong with her, no signs of trauma. She simply couldn’t recognize faces. They all looked the same to her in memory, smudges of skin and tooth and shadow, as differentiated as a beach of gray stones. What Ann did recall were the clothes they wore, how they styled their hair, their hands, whether they carried a certain scent or if they had bucked teeth. Voices were important too. She’d learned to tell people apart this way, and most of the time her system worked.

The waitress poured her another coffee. “Thank you Janet,” Ann said, glancing at the woman’s hands. They’d always seemed aged for someone with such a young voice. Aged by working in restaurants, from scrubbing with chemicals. A silver wedding band sunk as deep as bone, threatening to disappear. Janet took out her green book and tore away a check. She slid it facedown next to the salt and pepper.

“You bet hon. Just let me know if there’s anything else you want. I could swear Tammy was around when you came in.”

Ann looked up and tried to smile. She didn’t recognize Janet at all, had never seen her before. She must have cut her hair, Ann thought. Didn’t she wear it just to her shoulders? It didn’t matter now. Janet was close enough for her to see her hands. That’s all she needed to be sure.

“She must be home by now. I think I’ll stop by her house on the way home. Did Mitch come by?”

“Haven’t seen him. But the sheriff came in for breakfast this morning with some unpleasant company.”

“Oh?”

“Looked like Russians to me. Beefy types in leather jackets and wool turtlenecks. You’ve seen the type around some times. They hated everything I brought them to eat, spat up on their plates like cats. Couldn’t kick them out but I sure wanted to.”

“What was the sheriff doing with them anyway?”

“I’ve got no idea. Other than the complaints about the food, they hushed whenever I came by with coffee. But the sheriff was dressed like he’d been fishing, and later on somebody said they’d seen his truck down at the landing dock really early in the morning.”

A bell rang behind the counter. “Got to run. Charlie’s in a bad mood tonight. Me, I like a good storm.”

“Me too.”

“Take care tonight.” Janet hurried behind the counter to the food lamps. She had on a plain pink dress with matching shoes that looked like they pinched her toes. Ann noticed a man in a dirty apron staring at her and looked away.

Ann took one last warm up of coffee. Business at the 101 was picking up. She guessed the storm was forcing people to take shelter. Rain seeped down the window next to her, distorting the slumped figures of customers headed across the far end of the parking lot. They were soaked through by the time they made it inside, smelling of musty wool jackets, leather, stale tobacco and the sweet inky smell of denim that reminded her of brand new Levis. Ann hadn’t recognized anyone that had come in. Of course faces were of no help, and the extra clothing made things more complicated unless the person wore the same thing often.

“Ann?” said a man’s voice next to her. Ann jumped in her seat, stared at the black tee-shirt with a grinning skull floating in the middle.

“It’s only me,” said the voice.

Has to be Chad Lewis, she thought. Traitor Bay’s death metal freak, worked the crabbing business every winter and took summers off to follow bands. Rumor had it that he still dealt a little pot on the side. Ann had known him since the third grade. Yes she thought, those were Chad’s hands. His nails were so bad from working the traps that he’d started painting them with black polish.

“What are you doing here?” Ann asked.

Chad waved toward the empty seat across from her. “Are you going to ask me to sit first?”

“Sorry. Help yourself.”

She watched Chad slide in, his shoulder-length blond hair flashing, the envy of most school girls. He took out a comb and began to work it down from the top of his head. Chad liked to make people think he surfed but he’d never ridden a wave in his life.

“I should have worn a hairnet,” Chad said. “This wind tonight is a real bitch.”

“I saw boats out.”

“We’d still be there too, but dad got hurt last night and we had to take him to the hospital for emergency surgery. He was mad as hell at us for coming into shore. Even took a couple of swings at us until the meds kicked in and he went to sleep.”

“Is he going to be alright?”

“Hell yeah. He’ll be ready in the morning, with or without the doctor’s permission. I bet as soon as he’s awake they’ll wish they’d never kept him overnight. But since I’ve got some friends working there, I’m going to go back and try to head off any trouble. Last thing we need to happen now is having the cops haul old dad to the police station.”

“That’s nice of you to care.”

“I don’t know about that. I’m just glad dad will be alright. There’s a lot of money to be made this season, and we’re all thinking that we should be out there right now so we can grab our share. So what brings you out to Buoy City on a night like this?”

“I was coming by to see Tammy. I guess I just missed her.”

“I hear she’s expecting.”

“That’s the story.”

“How’s your aunt’s store? We used to live outside that place in the summer, remember?”

“I’ll never forget it. I was popular back then, wasn’t I?”

“Thirteen years old and every boy around here’s dream. Don’t forget that you also had access to the back freezer. God Ann, I wanted to be your boyfriend so bad. We used to watch you take James in there to smooch. Then you’d come back outside all smiling and eating ice cream.”

“Did he tell you that we made out back there?”

“Didn’t have to, Ann. James’ face was always bright pink, and we knew the freezer didn’t do it although he said it had. What about James? Have you heard from him since he left?”

“Only a few letters. He didn’t sound very happy in the last one. I guess he’d hurt his shoulder in an accident, but they weren’t ready to give up on him and send him home right away. There were still more surgeries and painful rehab to look forward to. I didn’t know you guys were close?”

“We weren’t really. As soon as we turned fifteen we kind of split into different directions. His dad kept him busy too, just like mine still does. I was only wondering if he’d been back in town lately.”

“Not that I know of. What have you heard?”

“My brother thought he saw him in a store in Cape Rock the other night. Said if it hadn’t been James then it must have been his twin.”

“He didn’t talk to him?”

“No, by the time he remembered his name, James was leaving. My brother isn’t too quick with faces, but he can do numbers in his head without hardly trying.”

“Sounds like he’s got talent for something then.”

“That’s true — dad put him in charge of the bookkeeping. Hey, after the season’s over, how about we go catch a concert in Portland?”

“Are you asking me out?”

“I guess I might be.”

Two men walked into the restaurant and stopped to talk to Janet. Both had deep blue eyes and freckled noses, shoulder spans that were nearly as wide as the doorway. Janet turned and disappeared into the back kitchen. Ann didn’t know who the strangers were at all but she’d recognized Janet by her dress.

“What are they doing here?” Chad moaned.

“Who?” said Ann.

“You don’t remember them?” Chad lowered his head and looked away. Why did I just say that? I’m going to make her feel stupid. Too late now …

“Sorry Chad. I can’t say I do.”

“They’re my brothers and they can’t stay still for two seconds. They were supposed to wait with dad until I came back with takeout.”

Ann looked at Chad’s face. It was handsome, she thought. More lines than should go with the voice, but that was the price you paid for being a crabber. He’d always been nice to her, even though she hadn’t invited him into the freezer. And now he acts like he’s waited all this time.

“We’ll have to see what’s going on then. But most likely I can” Ann said. “And I hope you’re not embarrassed if I wear earplugs.”

They watched Janet return with several bags of food. The two men took them and the biggest nodded at Chad to follow.

“Wear whatever you like, Ann. I’ll let you know when I score some tickets. It’s going to be fun. Anyway, I should get going.” Chad slid out of the booth and stretched.

“Thanks for stopping by,” Ann said.

Chad leaned over and brushed the top of her hand with his. It was coarse like sandpaper and reddened her skin. He turned and hurried to catch up with his brothers.

Chapter 6

Mitch and Tammy lived in a rustic log cabin that his grandmother had given to Mitch in her will. Mitch’s grandfather had been a well-known lumberman back in the fifties, and he’d built many cabins along the coast. Theirs sat back behind a wall of tall cedars and seemed to be in perpetual shade, yet the house was always cozy with its large fireplace made of smoothed beach cobble and flickering candles set next to the windows. Ann had been inside many times when her mother had stopped to pay the old woman a visit and bring her some blackberry jam. She remembered going inside on hot August afternoons and feeling instantly cooled by the sweet smelling cedar. She often thought about the old woman when she drove by the house, sometimes forgetting that she was now buried next to her husband, thinking for a moment that she needed to stop in and say hello.

When she pulled off the road, she noticed that someone had left the wooden gate open beneath the dripping cedars. She grabbed the sack of cinnamon rolls and got out. The grass was slick underfoot, and she was careful to avoid trampling the crimson toadstools that had sprung up after recent rains. The gate squealed as she swung it aside and headed up the path toward the porch where she heard a steady knocking. She was surprised not to smell smoke coming from the chimney, thinking to herself that a night like this would be perfect for reading a good book next to a blazing fire. Then she saw that the front door was open and swinging back and forth in the wind.

“Tammy?”

As she walked up the porch her pulse began to hum in her throat. This doesn’t feel right, she thought. Mitch and Tammy wouldn’t have been this careless. Some lights were on inside the cabin, but she saw no signs of Tammy. Ann stuck her head through the doorway and called again.

“Tammy?”

She waited to see if she might hear a shower running or someone coming down the stairs. Nothing happened, and after a few minutes she tried to decide what she should do. If she’d had a cell phone, she might have called Mitch and waited until he showed up. Then again, Tammy could be somewhere inside the house. She could be hurt and in need help.

Ann took a couple of steps inside. She set the bag of cinnamon rolls on a table next to the door and bunched up her keys in a fist. Scanning the room on overdrive, she had no idea what signs to be looking for-until she saw the overturned chair lying against the cold hearth of the fireplace, far from its vacant spot next to the redwood dining table Mitch’s grandfather had once carved as a wedding gift. She imagined the chair had been thrown or kicked across the room-unless somebody had carried it over to use as firewood, which made no sense at all.

She checked the kitchen last. There was a pot on the stove with burnt soup in it. Ann touched the pot and it was still warm. She heard water and glanced at the sink. The faucet was still running a thin stream and she instinctively reached out to turn it off when her hand froze just before touching the handle. A large sponge rested on the edge of the white ceramic sink; shiny threads of red had crept out from under it and stretched down to the drain below in a root-like pattern.

Blood…

Chapter 7

“Where are you?” Aunt Kate asked. “I pulled the potatoes out of the oven already. Did Mrs. Notham keep you again?”

“I’m having car trouble,” Ann lied. “And I don’t know if I’ll be able to get home until late.”

“Good lord child. What a night for this to happen.”

“I’ll be fine. Gary’s on his way with his tow truck. He said he’d take a quick look. If he can’t fix it tonight he’ll give me a lift home. Are you going to be okay? Are the cats inside?”

“They all came in when it started to rain. I fed them dinner and now they’re sleeping next to the stove. What a lazy bunch they are.”

“Do you have a flashlight in case we lose power?”

“Yes. I’ve got that little one in my pocket. Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help?”

“I’ve got help on the way auntie. Don’t worry about me.”

“Well be sure to call if something else comes up. Promise me you won’t go out if the wind gets bad. Just stay where you are until it passes over.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t go out. I love you.”

“Love you too dear.”

Ann hung up and dialed 911. She’d talked to the dispatcher at the sheriff’s office. The dispatcher seemed unimpressed by Ann’s story. After making her wait for close to ten minutes in the cold booth, she finally cut in and told Ann that Mitch and the sheriff had their hands full with a jackknifed log truck on the highway near Buoy City. It would be some time before they headed back.

“Who did you talk to?” Ann asked.

“Excuse me?” said dispatcher. Her voice came across surly and cigarette-cured.

“Did you talk to Mitch? Did you tell him about what happened at his house?”

“No, I talked to the sheriff. He said that Mitch was busy. Said he’d pass along the message though.”

“I don’t think you understand how important this is. I asked you to talk to Mitch. I think his wife might be in trouble.”

“Honey I did what I could. Now I’ve got other people to take of. It’s a crazy night out there if you haven’t noticed.”

Ann hung up and returned to her car. The back of her jacket was soaked through and her teeth were chattering by the time the heat came on. She couldn’t go home, not now. If her aunt found out what had happened the strain might be too much on her heart. Ann started the car and headed in the direction of Buoy. Rain was coming down so hard that it no longer seemed like rain but heavy wet fists falling from the sky. The wipers fought to keep the highway from being obliterated. It was stupid of her to be out on the road during a storm like this. A rock slide or a downed tree could take her out in a flash, not to mention a tourist unfamiliar with the road. But if they can’t come to me, I’ll go to them. Mitch needs to know what I saw.

Chapter 8

James stood shivering inside the leaky fishing shack, a leaning structure his father had built mostly from the scraps his brother-in-law had given him from construction sites. He still owned a key to the gate, had driven down the washboard road where blackberry bushes scratched the sides of his car. Other than a sorry excuse for a light that still hummed from a termite-eaten post in the driveway, the place seemed to hover in the surrounding darkness.

His blistered hands were still wet from washing them in the rusted sink. Dried mud droplets were everywhere-on his clothes and in his hair-but the rain had washed most of it away. Shoveling the heavy wet earth had been agonizing work. His shoulder throbbed as if it were infected and wouldn’t let up. When he’d come up empty, he’d swung the spade out over a cliff and the pounding surf below had drowned out his screams. He’d lain down and listened to his heart beating into the earth until he heard it echo back. When he’d awakened, his fingers were dug deep into the ground and his head had felt as if it was going to split open. He had no idea how long he’d been out except that it was almost night and he could see the thrashing arms of a red sun drowning behind a dark band of clouds.

He’d already sorted through the cobwebbed pile of wood stacked in the corner. It turned out to be mostly dry rotted, and produced more smoke than anything else. After relighting it several times, he finally coaxed the iron belly to accept the offering he’d stuffed inside and the damp cold air of the shack began to reluctantly warm. He whispered thanks to his father, took another drink of Johnnie Walker and returned the bottle to its hiding place below a loose floorboard.

He worried if he should have tried to find a better spot to park the rusted muscle car, some place he could be sure it wouldn’t be spotted from the road. He’d covered the top with a threadbare tarp, wasn’t sure if it would hold in the wind although he’d taken the time to weight it down with plenty of rocks.

It had been almost two months since he’d been discharged on a medical. The Navy doctors had tried everything and his right shoulder was still a terrible mess, his arm almost useless. He’d had no idea what he’d do the day he left the base in San Diego. He was in no rush to tell anyone at home. There was some money in his bank account, enough so that if he was careful he could buy himself some time to think.

He’d decided to walk across the border into Mexico, where he’d taken a bus to Ensenada and settled into a cheap hotel. The time he’d spent there had been lonely, the ever-revolving company of smooth talking rip-off artists tiresome. When James had returned to San Diego, a tweaker beach bum sold him the muscle car for a few hundred bucks. James suspected it might have been stolen, but he’d already made up his mind that he wouldn’t return to Traitor Bay by bus. Besides the fact that the tight confines of a Greyhound would play hell on his shoulder, he didn’t want to be seen stepping off in town with a duffle bag and slept-in clothes like a failure slinking back home. Instead he’d stayed sober and driven mostly at night, careful not to draw the attention of the highway patrol. The longest break he took was in the Northern Redwoods, where he’d hiked in as far as it took until he no longer heard the highway.

There wasn’t a window in the fishing shack, hadn’t been since he and his dad had an argument years earlier. No electricity came into the shack either, not since water found its way into the fuse box and rusted it out. James leaned against the peeling sill and watched the wind push dark, foam-netted swells inland until they broke against the bank. He’d wanted to go to Ann, but something had stopped him. Watching her reading at the counter in the store had been just about all he could handle in a day. At first he hadn’t even recognized her, wondered if she was someone new her aunt had hired. It wasn’t until she looked out at his car that he’d finally seen her face, knew for certain it was her. Even through a fogged windshield he could tell she had changed, that she’d grown into a woman who barely resembled the image he’d kept in his head.

He was unsure if he was going to remain in Traitor Bay. Other than possibly paying his parents a visit, the idea of no longer being incognito made him feel nervous. Maybe he just wasn’t ready to embrace the town or talk to Ann. Being a ghost had given him a perspective that would be hard to give up, and going public now would only deprive him of learning about other things. Things like what the sheriff was doing down on the docks this morning, pleading with a couple of Russians like they had him by the cajones.

At mid-morning James had awakened to their voices screaming obscenities at the sheriff, who did nothing but look down and clench his jaw. As far as James could figure out, the two men standing in the boat were searching for something of great importance. At dawn he’d seen them prodding the shallower edges of the bay with long poles with hooks mounted on the ends. They wore black leather jackets and no hats. James could see the rain pelting the tops of their shaved heads. It seemed as if they had no awareness of the cold. Yet it wasn’t the presence of these strange men that had stirred James’ attention-he’d seen his fair share of unusual tourists-but the way in which Dawkins seemed to be cowering before them. At that moment James had felt the world shift a little. Was the town set off plumb because he’d arrived, or had it only taken a while for him to notice that it always had been? James didn’t know anyone in town who hated outsiders more than Dawkins and it surprised him to see the sheriff accept the abuse. Dawkins was a hard ass and liar and was known to get rough sometimes. He’d done what he’d could to make James’ life miserable, was in fact near the top of his list for reasons to leave town and become a sailor.

He lowered the wooden shutter and bolted it in place, lit candle wicks sunken so deep into tin cans that he singed his fingers. Although it cut down the roar of the surf, having the window blocked did little to stop an icy wind from worming through the cracks. It was going to be a long night waiting for the storm to pass, and James hoped he could get a few hours of sleep before morning. He’d spent much of his boyhood in this place before going out to sea, thought about all the times he’d been still asleep when his father carried him down the dock-how it felt to wake up in the morning miles away from land, listening to his father laughing above, catching fish and working through the day’s first six pack.

On top of an overturned giant cable spool he spread out a Traitor Bay weekly before unwrapping a soggy turkey sandwich he’d bought at a deli that morning. The paper was the same old rag it had always been, brimming with the latest gossip, death notices and marriages. Not a lot had changed. Things happened much like the tides-cycling around again and biting you on the ass if you weren’t watching the signs. A fat developer they’d run out of town the year James had left was reported to be seen lurking around again. Eye witnesses claimed that he was riding in a car with his new brother-in- law, a state senator with a lot of pull. The only newsworthy story that caught James’ attention discussed the skeletal wood frame of a ship exposed on Last Hope point. It got James thinking about the Russians again, if their presence had any connection to the low tides. What could they be looking for?

After taking some pills for his shoulder, he unrolled his sleeping bag and lay down on top still fully dressed, let his thoughts run their course until they seemed to blend into the sound of the current next to the shack. Being alone in this place had always brought peace. When his parents were fighting a lot he’d come down here to get away. Sometimes his father would come down and see him in the morning still half drunk and apologize and James would insist on taking the keys and driving them to the 101 for coffee and breakfast. As things got worse he came down rarely, and if he did so it was to pick another fight with James.

Despite all their troubled times, James knew that his father still loved his family. But the commercial fishing business was a cruel one and only the truly lucky were ever spared. Some years the salmon runs were heavy and during others there was hardly anything, yet the one thing you could always count on were the mounting debts. During the recent drought years James had begun to feel like just another mouth to feed. He couldn’t contribute as much as he wanted to. His stomach was tricky and often betrayed him when his father needed him working on deck. Why he decided to join the Navy was beyond anyone’s guess, but it had cured him of seasickness and ruined his shoulder in return.

He didn’t know if he’d fallen asleep or not when he heard the engine idling up above the private drive. Doors opened, followed by voices blended in the static whisper of rain. He sat up and listened. The doors shut again. An engine revved, and he smelled oil smoke drift down the drive before he heard the gate squeal and crash. James grabbed a two-foot piece of pipe in his left hand and edged toward the door. He watched a dark blue van roar up next to his tarp-covered car and stop. Two men dressed in black got out the front, one holding a sawed-off and the other gripping a revolver. They looked like the same men he’d seen with the sheriff on the bay. James heard the one with the shotgun jack a round in the chamber. The man stepped next to the post with the light, swung up the rifle and smashed it. There was an explosion, followed by a brief shower of sparks that hung in the air before bits of glass tinkled to the ground like frozen rain.

Chapter 9

Chad stood around and watched his brothers eat a greasy dinner with their father. He was vaguely hungry but didn’t see any reason to punish himself with a 101 gut bomb. Normally the aromas of charred burgers made him salivate, but the astringent smell of hospitals always caused his stomach to go watery.

Old dad had only eaten a few bites of his cheeseburger before an angry nurse came in and took it away. Why, he’d asked in disbelief, and she reminded him again that he was supposed to fast before surgery. His sun damaged face had crinkled up like a paper sack as he watched her plop his prize in the trash. At that point Chad’s brothers were coughing into their shirts to hide their laughter, but old dad knew better and his face grew long and ashen and they saw a man terrified of hospitals and after the nurse left the room, his sons offered up bites from their own dripping sandwiches. When everyone finished eating, a pint was hastily passed around until it was empty and they made Chad take the bottle so he could dump it into another garbage can.

There was no reason to stick around after he disposed of the bottle, Chad decided. Old dad was drifting in and out anyway, was more cooperative now than he’d been since he’d fallen onto the deck clutching at his side and screaming curses at them. The brothers had known right away what had to be done. It wasn’t the first time they’d seen the old bull taken down a few notches in the last few years. The time before it had been a kidney stone and they’d acted too late. There’d been a high price tag for all the damage he’d caused to hospital property, not to mention the doctor who’d had his nosed stitched after making the mistake of thinking old dad was too sedated to hear him bad mouthing his family.

Chad loved his family but there were times when they seemed like they were from a completely different pack. His brothers were several years older, and Chad’s earliest memories were mostly images of their ruddy hands reaching down to pick him up, wild drunken Christmas gatherings and sunny days out on the boats. Ever since he was a young boy he’d wondered about the time his brothers had spent with their father before he was born, and even then he’d sensed that he’d reached a new state of awareness from which he couldn’t return. It had always struck him as strange when he overheard them talking about events he remembered nothing of, and if he ventured to ask too many questions they’d usually take turns responding with such an ill conceived piece of fiction that it crashed before barely getting off the runway. For Chad it wasn’t ever his brothers’ awful storytelling that bothered him, but the underlying feeling they weren’t telling him everything-secrets to an impenetrable fortress he’d never see the keys to.

Of course he was wise to keep his suspicions to himself. He didn’t want his brothers to have another tool in their arsenal to tease him about, because nothing was off limits except for what had happened to their mother, what she was doing these days watching over them and their boat, speaking to them through the voice of water.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Ann. She’d been the last person he’d expect to see. He hated to admit it, but Ann still held the same magic over him that he’d been unable to escape since he’d ridden his gold Stingray and fished trickle creeks for rainbow trout. Back then if she’d asked him a question he’d forget how to talk, so there had been marked improvement since then.

After leaving her a voicemail, Chad found himself driving around Buoy City for no reason other than the fact that he didn’t want to go back to his apartment and watch the storm cause more water damage. The place was a mildewed dump and he was embarrassed. No one came by except local stoners wanting to see if he had anything to sell, but most of the time he’d just end up smoking with them and watching crappy shows on television until all hours.

Unless he was busy working the family crab business, Chad never had much ambition other than catching up on sleep and going to concerts. He had money to spend-sometimes more than he should have-and there were always women in Portland who knew how to have a good time if he wanted to. Lately he’d grown tired of the city women and their insatiable hunger for cocaine and overall hostility toward daylight and fresh ocean air. They weren’t vampires, but they were damn close to it. And that thought would be all it took for him to roll out of a dirty motel room with a bitchy strung-out chick who’d just locked herself in the bathroom and drive back home to Buoy City where he could clear his head with a long walk on the shore, lie on the sand and listen to the concert of waves that seemed to know what he needed to ease his unhappiness.

Most people Chad knew enjoyed wallowing in their misery, just scraping by somehow and spending their lives haunting the local bars. Chad didn’t want to end up like them and if it wasn’t for old dad and the family business his brothers might already be there. All three of them were divorced now, paying child support and living together in the same house they grew up in where over the years broken windows had been replaced with plywood and the yard had turned into a jungle littered with broken cars. No, the life he’d born into was going to get harder and harder, and if he didn’t wake up, he too was going to wind up moving into the house with the old man.

It was dumb idea to be out driving during the storm, but he’d decided to head out to Traitor Bay anyway. Maybe he’d get a chance to talk to Ann again without his brothers showing up and telling him he had to go.

Chapter 10

She realized she was close when she saw flares guttering along the shoulder of the highway. Ann slowed the car down to a crawl. After each long bend in the road, she expected to come upon the jackknifed truck splashed in flecks of blue and red light. But no truck materialized, nor did the patrol car with Mitch and Sheriff Dawkins. Ann found it hard to believe they’d finished up so fast. Cops were usually the last to leave an accident scene, having to take measurements and write up notes for their reports. Something must have happened to pull them away. Maybe there were extra victims that needed to be transported to the hospital in Buoy City, or another emergency call? If they’d returned to Traitor Bay they would have had to pass her on the road. There was no other route except for a treacherous thirty-mile detour up through the mountains and she couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to try and drive up there now with its potential for flash floods and landslides. Hunters were known to get lost up there during unexpected storms-she’d known a boy in school who’d never been found.

Her headlights began to pick out a sheen of oil and ground glass, the epicenter of the crash. Road flares had burned down to cylinders of ash, reminding her of her grandfather’s cigars when he’d leave them to smolder on the porch. Since a logging truck had been supposedly involved, she was surprised by the lack of bark chips and clumps of moss scattered along the edges of the road. The only sign an accident had happened recently was a burnt rubber smell, and as far as she could tell it might have been coming from the chronic overheating problems of her own car.

As Ann crept up the road she noticed the rain had stopped, and when she looked up she could see that the sky had cleared. A white moon stuck to the ridge above like a downed hot air balloon, dragging shreds of light between the trees as if it had been torn open from below. This has to be the center of the storm, she thought. I’ve got to go back and take a closer look at that accident site. There won’t be a lot of time. Once the eye moves off, the wind and rain will be back in full force. And it might be a whole lot worse than when the storm first hit.

She turned onto an overgrown logging road and parked her car behind a stand of trees. As she walked back to the highway, she was surprised by how rank the smell of brine was coming off the ocean-a dark roiling cove far below, sparsely littered by the amber lamps of crabbing boats. Her upper chest had stung at first, as if it were sewn up tight with stitches. But soon the warm moist air worked its way down, melted away the stitches so she could breathe. Stress, she told herself. That and my stupid allergies. But you can try and push it out with your lungs. She turned on her flashlight and walked back to the place she’d determined was the accident scene, safety glass crunching beneath each step. She hadn’t seen another car since she’d decided to go to Buoy City. Other than the steady rustle of branches in the wind and the gurgle of water finding its way down, the highway up here was quiet.

Walking along the edge of the road, she aimed her flashlight at a silver stream of rainwater cutting into the ditch, watched as a convoy of plastic bottles and beer cans floated past. Beyond the ditch were fallen pines covered with moss. Some of the badly weathered trees tilted up at her with manes of fern, like startled creatures with gaping sockets eaten away by rot. Tracing the woods with her light, Ann noticed something in the shadows beyond the decaying logs that took her breath away. Sword ferns, glistening wet with something dark. Holding her breath she ushered the beam back, following the flattened salal and bracken on the slopes of the ditch to were she stood and let the light pool around her feet, saw the mirror of blood and the drop of oil in the shape of an eye.

Something’s dragged itself into the woods, she thought. Or was dragged.

Chapter 11

Ann slipped and fell in the wet underbrush. Blackberry and wild strawberry vine snared her feet and she nearly lost a boot. A dead branch tore through her jeans and scratched her thigh. It stung but didn’t bleed much. When she got to the downed trees she had something to hold onto, but climbing over them was another matter. Sometimes the damp bark would give way and she’d slide off, skinning the log down to the bare soft wood beneath where fat, yellow-bodied insects scrambled for deeper cover. It was safer to go slow, to saddle herself over the logs instead of trying to walk on top of them. Her jeans were soaking wet now and she was starting to chill. When she stopped to catch her breath she thought she smelled smoke coming from the darker forest before her. Wood smoke and the faint aroma of cooking meat.

The bleeding elk was lying on a bed of fern, dead. She bent down and stroked its fur, felt her eyes well with tears. The body was still warm, and in the flashlight she could see a thin vapor rising, first in the shape of the elk and then dispersing into the trees. Taking note of its injuries-the broken antler and protruding leg bone, embedded glass-she was surprised by the wound to its belly-a deep cut leaking blood-but assumed that as the elk had staggered into the woods it had impaled itself on something sharp. However, nothing she could find explained the smell of roasting meat. She’d searched the area around the elk for evidence of fire but had found nothing. Poor thing must have caught on fire, she thought. Fell down on its burnt side to cool it against the ground. If I could only lift eight hundred pounds I’d know for sure. But this is no time for wildlife forensics. You’ve got to find Mitch before it’s too late-if it isn’t already. So where in the hell did they go?

She felt raindrops and glanced up, saw an advancing arm of cloud coming from the west, a dark amoebae stretching across the sky to catch the moon. Before heading back she decided to keep the elk company a while longer, remembering all the other animals she’d found perished along the highway, their varieties of fatal injuries. She felt better for the ones that were able to retreat into the woods to die, that weren’t scraped from the road by someone working for the county and dumped god knows where. She’d known for a long time that the woods next to the highway were littered with salt-bleached bones, from her days of hunting mushrooms and collecting baby ferns. She’d even seen some remains that had escaped the destruction of scavengers. Complete skeletons that had come to rest in steaming hollows, where the sun’s rays were weakened by a thick canopy of leaves and an eerie green light settled over everything dreamlike and primeval.

People thought Ann’s interest in roadkill was weird, but that had never stopped her from pulling over to investigate, to acknowledge the animals in the state they were before the earth took them back. She’d always been drawn to animals, maybe because she didn’t have the same problem with recalling their faces as she did with people. She didn’t recognize this elk, however, although she was familiar with the several herds that wandered in and out of town, was used to them stealing from her garden. When hunting season arrived the elk would wander from yard to yard, eating whatever delicacies they could find while gunfire thundered from neighboring forests. Ann had always thought of the elk as royalty, that if she stared into their dark eyes long enough she could see some ancient spirit looking back at her across thousands of years, from a world she’d never know. But in those lucky moments when she became so closely connected that she lost all sense of self and time, the effect of standing before an elk or kayaking on the bay with the crimson sockeye salmon passing below would last for days, dwarfing troubling thoughts so she could see them as the ephemeral debris they were.

In Buoy City the traffic lights were swinging above the intersections in high arcs, many pulsing red. For the most part, the storm had driven people inside for the night. And yet there were others like Ann who enjoyed storms, who couldn’t resist walking on the beach or spending the time in a cozy bar with friends. As she drove through town she noticed shadows darting in and out of doorways, blurred faces haloed by neon and the glowing ends of cigarettes. Various trash moved along the sidewalks as if the storm had bestowed it consciousness-a broken umbrella cart-wheeled in circles, a newspaper leapt from one shop window to the next like a desperate voyeur. At the north end of town she pulled into the hospital parking lot and drove around. Other than a darkened ambulance jostling in the wind, the place was vacant. Mitch and Sheriff Dawkins were nowhere to be found.

Chapter 12

A bit of onion and pepper, he thought. And a fry pan. No need for grease-he could’ve gotten that easily enough from the elk’s belly. Still, the liver itself was delicious, roasted on a sharpened stick over a small fire. He picked his teeth with the tip of his knife, felt the wildness warm his belly. It had been weeks since he’d eaten anything this fresh.

He decided to cut his picnic short and not cook the heart. He wrapped the dripping organ in a plastic grocery bag and stuck it into his long coat. It’ll hold up for at least another day, he thought.

The woods were dense and in no time he was soaked to the bone. But walking the highway was risky. Some small town deputy was bound to stop him just because he didn’t look right. And then he’d have to make a decision, his life or the deputy’s? He wondered how far he’d have to go before he would encounter more railroad tracks. It was hard to be away from them for very long. Since he only rode trains, being too far from the iron veins that reached across the country set him on edge, gave him a vulnerable feeling that he could only tolerate for so long.

Thanks to the heavy rain, his wet clothes became too cumbersome and he was forced to walk up on the road. It was either that or strip naked and carry them in a bundle. But it wasn’t warm enough for that. Not like last week, with the Arizona sun baking his bare shoulders as he hiked the tracks, rattlesnakes sometimes stretched lengthwise on the heated rails, sliding off only after detecting the vibrations of oncoming trains or his approaching shadow. At least tonight’s storm helped keep the usual stream of traffic to a minimum, he thought. If he listened carefully for cars, he could easily slip back into the screen of dense underbrush only a few hops off the blacktop.

The young woman had been a complete surprise. He hadn’t heard her car-only the snapping branches as she made her way down to the elk-and leaving him barely enough time to kick some dirt over the coals. Hiding in the shadow of a large cedar trunk, he was surprised to see her gently stroking the elk’s side. She’d also talked to it, but too faintly for him to hear, like his mother did when he’d gone with her to church. What was the woman doing here? Was she a cultist, like some of his mother’s family back in Russia? Americans these days never ceased to puzzle him-so many were soft and pliable and anxious to put their lives into the hands of others, to believe in something.

The last time he’d heard his name was when he’d left his mother. “Mikhail,” she’d pleaded, “Don’t leave with those men.”

That had been over twenty years ago.

No one was allowed to call him by his name anymore, not even the one he’d been given on a fake passport long ago. To speak his name now was forbidden even within his innermost circles. There were ears everywhere, he’d warned. That bottle fly on the windowsill could be a microphone, that innocent looking child riding a bicycle an accomplished spy. The only way to refer to him in conversation was to place your hand on the tattoo, as if you were making a pledge to the crude image of the Goyaesque Cyclops he’d ordered needled into your arm.

He feared the lawmen would come again someday. Life had taught him that a secret could only stay buried for so long. They were like stones the earth worked to the surface, the cobble he’d helped clear from his family’s field every year. On moonlit nights he used to watch them push upward from the dark loosened soil, as if they were the tops of skulls. No matter how many you stacked in a pile every year, there were always more coming, and he used to imagine they might have been troops that had once frozen to death there, only they weren’t aware of it, had believed they’d only just awakened from a long night’s sleep in their earthen cribs.

Shortly after his release from prison, a rumor had spread that he’d been killed by an old enemy. Over time even the lawmen began to accept it. In five years there hadn’t been a single confirmed sighting of the one-eyed, longhaired con that some newspapers once called the mad monk. Still, Cyclops had known better than to get too comfortable. A cop only had to suspect you were up to no good to take you in and feed you through his national computer system, a giant brain Cyclops hated the most in the world because it didn’t bleed as a man did.

The second thing in the world Cyclops hated most was the pursuit of money-it drained him, made him feel like a dog rather than a man. For many years it stole from his proud, fiery inner core and forced it into prostitution, sent it drifting through dark alleyways until he found his way out and on top. But even having the hard work done by others didn’t matter much. You still had the worries, the heavy tax on a fertile imagination that should have been reserved for higher pursuits.

It wasn’t necessarily the money itself that he had a problem with. Cyclops never harbored any illusions that he could live without it. He’d chosen to live frugally, as years of riding the rails had taught him. He’d learned early on that no one was immune to robbery, and he’d quietly taken his money and converted it into silver and gold, buried Coleman coolers full of it across the country in a pattern he’d once drawn on a map during one of his frequent visions. But there was more than enough now in his “constellation of hoards” that Cyclops would never have to worry for money again, and yet he could no longer stop himself from wanting to accumulate more. What was once a need to make a living had somehow transformed into an obsession and he loathed himself for it.

Chapter 13

Under normal circumstances his people rarely asked for his help, but the situation in Traitor Bay was bigger than they could handle and they feared the rot had spread much too deep. Word came to him while he dozed in a boxcar near Tucson by a boy with large terrified eyes. The boy leaned his head inside the darkness and his voice trembled. Children were fast and light. They made good messengers, could out run the railroad cops who came at you with their clubs. Cyclops cursed the child anyway. He’d been approaching the end of an important dream, anticipating a vital teaching. Cyclops had a lot of dreams of this nature, visions that would forewarn him with signs. He’d started having them at the age of ten, had seen his father drown in the icy river days before leaving for St. Petersburg on a business trip. It was reported as an accident after it happened, but later his mother told him it wasn’t true, that the other driver who’d caused his father’s death had been an assassin. Cyclops father, an intelligence officer in the KGB, had a lot of enemies.

In this boxcar dream he was back at the moldy plankboard house of his childhood, watching his mother in her dusty black dress with the lace trim. She’d reminded him of a crow standing in front of the roaring fireplace, her glassy eyes lifted toward something above his head. When he’d turned to look up, he heard the boy’s voice, and when he sat up in the semidarkness, his face was struck by a square of yellow light beaming from a rusted rivet hole in the ceiling of the boxcar. His hair was kept parted above his good eye, so that it appeared to be staring out from the center of his forehead. When the boy saw him, he screamed and ran off, and when Cyclops thought he heard the boy’s father calling, he smiled and knew the boy would one day be fine. Not right away, of course, for a strong impression was like a sliver lodged into the flesh. And not unlike the body, the boy’s mind would need time to build up enough puss before it could expel it.

He was making far better progress now walking down the highway, listening to the surf hiss against the cliffs far below, feeling its tendrils of mist. If he had the time he would have liked to have climbed down to the water and rinse his face in it. It had been years since he’d ventured this far off the edge of the railway network, his iron web. The ocean brought back memories of when he first saw America from the deck of a merchant ship, drenched in icy spray, drinking vodka to stay warm and singing with the men his mother had begged him not to leave with. What a different person he’d been back then, still more a boy than a man, wide-eyed and dream-led and utterly oblivious to what was in store for him.

He was hit by a sudden wave of nausea that made him stumble to the side of the highway. A tide of hot bile rose up to the roof of his mouth and caused him to choke. He hadn’t felt this alive for months, with the elk he’d already eaten deep inside him and its timeless wild soul struggling against the coiling snake of his guts. This is turning out to be a better trip than I imagined, he thought, wiping the acid from his mouth.

Having been distracted by his digestive Chernobyl, he’d failed to notice the headlights coming from behind and he knew it was too late to try and hide in the undergrowth. When the Volkswagen slowed, he saw the face of the elk-worshipping woman inside. She pulled onto a shoulder several yards ahead and waited for him to approach, but he crossed the road to give her a wide berth.

“Are you okay mister?” she asked.

Pretending he hadn’t heard her, Cyclops kept moving through the silver light coming from her car. He briefly turned his head so that she could get a glimpse of his face. Usually that’s all it took to get people to leave him alone and let him be on his way. He was shocked to see her standing outside of her car watching, her hands thrust into the deep pockets of her jacket.

“I’m only asking because of that accident up the road. Thought maybe you were in it. Are you hurt?”

Cyclops raised his hand and waved. He didn’t slow his pace. He heard the woman get into her car and turn around. Was she brave or was she soft and too trusting? He wondered. Maybe he should have helped her join her friend the elk in the afterlife. An image of her running naked through the forest made him laugh.

Chapter 14

A terrible feeling had come over Ann, that she’d missed something important back at the accident scene. It was true that once she’d come upon the dead elk she’d been too absorbed to think of anything else.

She had no idea of what to do except to turn around and keep driving. If Mitch and the sheriff had gone to Buoy City, then no one had seen them. She’d stopped in at the town’s only filling station and minimart, which was doing a brisk business in spite of the storm, had in fact sold out most of its cold beer. The boy working the counter had recognized her, didn’t charge her for the cup of coffee she took to go. He was good looking she’d thought at the time, talked to her as if they’d known each other. Certain that she had never seen him before in her life, she’d played along to spare them both any embarrassment.

The sky had started to clear again and the moon, now bone white and granular, drifted over the iron water like a discarded shell. Few people were out driving yet, probably too drunk by now to even attempt it. A couple of semi trucks she’d recognized from the 101 parking lot passed her, going fast to make up for lost time.

The road flares were all burned out and the powder they’d left behind had been washed away by the rain. Ann missed the spot the first time and had to go several miles ahead before finding a safe place to turn around. That’s when she’d seen the strange man walking down the highway, dressed in a long overcoat and black combat boots. Something had compelled her to stop-the crazy notion that maybe he’d seen something that could help her. When she’d gotten out of her car to talk to him she’d held firmly to the.38 in her jacket pocket, a birthday gift from her grandfather.

Living on the coast, Ann had encountered hundreds drifter types making their journeys up and down the highway. Many didn’t stay put for long out of fear. Some claimed to be in search of a truth or a place to call home while others told her they were motivated by sheer wanderlust. Ann wondered how many found what they were looking for, if the ones who had been at it for years would ever be able to live a normal existence. The man she’d seen tonight fell into the late stage category-too crazy and too filthy to ever have any success at hitch hiking although it didn’t stop them from trying. What made this one stand out in Ann’s mind was his purposeful stride and erect head. He reminded her of an old story, a tale about a king in disguise, wandering to the ends of his kingdom to find an important truth. When he’d turned to her it was as if the single eye shining between the curtains of his collarbone-length hair was as large and knowing as an elk’s. Ann knew then she should have been scared-that even having a gun was no guarantee she’d be able to stop an attack. But the man had kept moving, seemingly uninterested in her or the prospect of getting a ride.

She walked down to place where she’d imagined the crash site to be and stayed on the side opposite of where the elk lay. With her flashlight she followed the sloping hill of undergrowth that led down to a row of trees standing on the edge of the cliff as if they were night divers waiting their turn. That’s when she saw the glimmer of a taillight in the thick salal, felt her chest sting while she held on to a small pine to catch her breath. After she got off the road she came upon a set of tire tracks, obvious scars of orange clay. She ran down with them until she reached the trees lined along the top of the cornice.

When she pulled away the undergrowth the trunk of the patrol car began to appear, a smooth polished hump of black. Sticky vines clung to her legs as she worked her way around to the front. If the trees hadn’t been here to stop it, the car would have easily gone into the sea. The right door was wedged open, its hinge twisted in the opposite direction by a violent force. But the inside of the car was empty. Ann noticed the coffee cup Mitch had bought from her earlier lying on the floor, the banana slugs moving across the windshield.

You’re too late.

She sat down next to the car and cried, imagining what Tammy must have gone through, wondering if she was even still alive. She had no doubts that what she’d seen in Tammy’s house was real-the signs of a struggle, the blood on the sink. She was jolted by a disturbing idea. Could the attacker have been Mitch? The pieces fell together so readily-the bruises on his face, his bandaged hand. The story about falling on the jetty could have been made up for all she knew. But would Mitch hurt Tammy? The more she thought about it the more she tried to push the idea away. It was too easy. A question worth asking, but impossible to fathom. She’d known them both for too long. And why would he have suggested that she visit Tammy at the 101 if he’d had something to hide? Tammy wasn’t the kind of person to keep her mouth shut. If she’d had problems with Mitch the whole town would have known about it.

There wasn’t anything else to do but to head back to Traitor Bay and hope someone had shown. She climbed back up to the highway and turned around to see if she could still see the patrol car but even the blinking taillight was easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it. A fog was creeping up from the cliff and pooling in the hollow depressions left by landslides.

She didn’t pass the man again, wondered if he’d set up camp back in the woods or if he’d broken into one of the darkened cabins that remained vacant most of the winter. An escape from the rain and cold. Steaks in the freezer, electric heat and a comfortable bed. Dressers and closets with clothes that might fit. Cable tv. Yet for some reason he didn’t seem like the type to take risks unless they were absolutely essential. He traveled light and after dark and, she imagined, no matter how crazy his thoughts would make him he knew that he had to keep his head below the radar.

Chapter 15

The cats greeted Ann at the door, excited to see her back home. She immediately opened a can of cat food and gave them each a spoonful, listened to them purr. Careful not to wake her aunt, Ann crept up to her bedroom door and pulled it shut. The cats would want to return to their places on her aunt’s bed as soon as they were finished licking their bowls, so she knew she didn’t have much time.

She stripped off her wet clothes and climbed into the shower. The hot water soon quieted her shivering and the steam seemed to clear her head. As she worked the soapy washcloth over dried mud, the bruises and scratches hidden beneath began to sing with pain. She closed her eyes and let the water massage the back of her neck until she felt the cords of muscle begin to unwind and the headache they’d caused to gradually recede. Ann wondered if she should wake her aunt and let her know what was happening. She’d always been good at keeping her from having to worry, especially after her mother was gone and it was just the two of them. But the fact was it would take up too much valuable time-time that Tammy might not have. And what good would it do? She didn’t know what was happening other than the fact that people were disappearing. It was best to wait, she thought. Let Kate enjoy her rest for now. No sense in waking her up and putting her through this. If I’m not back by mid-morning I’ll call her. She’ll see the empty cat can in the kitchen sink and think that I’ve left early to check out the minus tide. She won’t know that I was only home long enough to shower and change.

The towel irritated the scratches more and caused some to bleed again. When she was finished drying, she took a moment to dab them with antibiotic ointment. She tied her hair back and brushed her teeth before tiptoeing naked back to her bedroom. The cats followed her inside and watched as she got dressed. They were no longer purring but looked concerned that she was preparing to leave. Winter, the oldest of the pride, jumped on the bed and forced Ann to look her in the eyes. Ann briefly hugged her and whispered that she’d be back. Her clock said it was 2:30 in the morning. The gutter outside her bedroom was overflowing, hissing like a slit windpipe.

She found her cell phone on her dresser and slipped it into the front pocket of her jeans, gathered up a pair of dry socks and boots and carried them with her through the house. Her aunt was still sleeping when she looked in on her and listened to her steady breathing. Must have finally taken a sleeping pill, Ann thought. The cats brushed past her legs in a rush to claim the best place on the bed. Aunt Kate did not stir, not even when Winter tapped her on the shoulder with her paw in an attempt to wake her and let her know what was going on. Ann motioned to the cat to be quiet, but she only stared back at her defiantly. You always have to be the boss, don’t you, she thought. And I’ll probably get a dead mouse left in my bed for this, won’t I?

She sat in the car, trying to settle her mind and think. There was little evidence of the storm except for some thin strands of white cloud still snagged on the rocky peaks looming above town. Ann noticed fresh pools of rain glittering in the yard. They always caught her off guard, made her think there was something there that wasn’t, something living, especially after the sky mostly cleared and they filled with stars and face-shaped clouds. The pools also made sounds like slow draining bathtubs-the water gurgling as it sought passage through the hard outer layer of earth that could dull a new shovel in a day.

She wondered what she should do next. In the shower she’d thought about what Janet had said about the sheriff and the strange company he’d been seen with at the 101. What kind of business would he have with people like that? The sheriff wasn’t much for socializing except with the girls, and it was common knowledge that he usually fished alone unless his brother was down from Seattle for a visit. It was difficult to imagine him with those men unless they had some type of connection with the police. Could they have been investigating a case together?

She recalled an article she’d read in the paper about criminal activity on America’s waterways, how smuggling and piracy were on the rise and what to do if you saw anything suspicious. In the past year a river patrol boat had been torched and some fishermen had reported being shot at after dark. Tensions were running high in certain parts of the country, but as far as she knew none of these problems had yet come to Traitor Bay. She wondered if the arm she’d found on the beach had been an omen of trouble to come.

Her thoughts kept drifting back to the loading dock where the sheriff had been seen early in the morning by a passerby. If anything, it would be a new place for her to start looking. She checked her.38 again, laid it on the seat next to her under a towel she kept for wiping the windows when they fogged. When she drove away she hoped that her aunt was still sleeping.

Chapter 16

He sensed the cats hiding below the bed, opened mouthed and drawing in sips of stale air from the old woman’s bedroom. She had not awakened and he wasn’t surprised after reading the labels on the bottles of pills that stood on a shelf above the sink, a partial set of dentures resting in the bottom of a glass of water next to them. At first glance he’d thought there was something alive, and it had startled him until he’d realized the teeth and pink gum-flesh distorted by the glass had fooled him into imagining a carnivorous worm staring out at him.

He watched her from the side of the bed and listened deeply to her breathing. We all speak through our sleeping-breath, his mother had taught him at an early age. With enough practice it was the same as listening to someone talking to you while they were awake, and sometimes you’ll even see their dreams as if they’re reading from pages of a book. But don’t take this lightly, his mother had warned. You might be told something you aren’t prepared to hear. A person asleep cannot lie to you, they only report what they see from a place that neither exists nor not exists, where birth and death mean nothing. And although he never saw her again after the day he’d left, he’d listened to his mother’s sleep-breath in his dreams. He watched her lying alone in the same old plankboard house he’d grown up in, and every time he awoke he’d be soaked in tears.

The woman below him wasn’t dreaming-the pills she’d taken before going to bed had killed any chance of it. Instead he listened to her sleep-breath tell him about her heart, of the pain and the bouts of dizziness. She sang of her raggedness of spirit and it reminded him of an old war song being sung by marchers sinking into the distance. Her song told him of how close she’d come to letting whatever wanted to take her to hurry up and do it and get it over with. Is this why I am here now? he asked himself. He decided to come back to her later, after he explored the rest of the house.

He stood in Ann’s room and examined the framed pictures on her dresser. He recognized her face in the pictures he’d been shown once by Duane. Was this child the elk worshiper he’d met earlier? Look how much she’s changed, he thought. As striking now as her mother standing next to her in the older pictures. And yet he could sense a sadness behind her eyes in the most recent picture, an imprint that gave her beauty a sharper edge than that of her mother’s. He picked up the photo of her mother and held it close to his eye, felt memory stir sluggishly like a fish below a frozen pond.

Before he left the house he visited the old woman one last time. Her sleep-breath was troubled, as if she’d become aware of his presence in the room. She needs my help, he thought. He glanced around and found a firm pillow. He picked it up in both hands and moved closer.

Chapter 17

They’d been shoved inside with their wrists cuffed. One of the men cut up pieces of electrical cord and together they set to work tying ankles. Someone had been in the shack before they’d arrived, and when the men were finished they emptied a duffle bag and turned over a table with lit candles looking for clues. Tammy watched as the candles guttered in their tin cans and went out. Soon the only light remaining in the room was the glow of the iron stove. She couldn’t believe how dark the shack had become. It made her feel like how she imagined a ghost would feel, floating around like a tuft of cottonwood down through a starless night. But she also felt the little life in her belly, and its insistent movements eventually pulled her back.

In her mind she kept reliving what had happened to her while she’d been heating up soup on the stove, feeling tired from working her shift and still worrying why Mitch hadn’t slept for two days. She’d tried to fight them off-got punched in the mouth and bled on the linoleum before they’d dragged her out of the house kicking. She thought the gap in her mouth had finally stopped bleeding. A tooth had been jarred loose, held only by a strand of roots. The raw nerve pain had been excruciating up until she’d decided to pull it herself. When they’d cuffed her she’d managed to keep the tooth hidden and now she rubbed it between her fingers as if it were a talisman meant to somehow protect her from further harm. An old fishy smell coming from the rusted sink made her feel like gagging. She recalled being in the shack years ago, when James took her and Mitch and Ann for a day of sipping beer and crabbing on the bay.

She assumed the men had gone outside to see if they could find who’d been staying in the shack, and after walking around the area with their flashlights they came back and stood outside their van. Before they left she could hear them talking in what she imagined was Russian, and when they lit cigarettes she could see their woodcut faces through a gap in the wall. They reminded her of the two men she’d seen sitting with the sheriff at the 101. But she’d been too busy to get a close look at them, had mostly heard Janet back in the kitchen, cursing and letting off steam.

“Why is this happening?” she asked again.

“Not now Tammy.” Mitch said. Although their bodies touched, his voice sounded much farther away. He still saw red pinwheels in his head, hadn’t told her that he’d been knocked unconscious after the patrol car had been plowed off the highway and crashed. He remembered shooting toward the edge of a cliff, of turning to see the sheriff unfastening his seatbelt and opening his door and then a curtain of blackness dropping down on the whole thing, certain that when he came to he’d be hitched with death.

“Then tell me one thing, Mitch. Did you think of your family before you started messing with those guys?”

“You need to kindly shut up now so I can think,” the sheriff said. He could no longer feel his hands. They’d cuffed them with those plastic things he’d seen used during riots-what you’d use to tie an end of a garbage bag, he thought. Damn if I could only get to my smokes.

“Kind of late for thinking, isn’t it?” Tammy said. “Seems to me like you’ve run out of options. And I hope you weren’t lying to them this time.”

Mitch felt his stomach spinning and sat up. “Tammy. My head is killing me.”

“How could you do this Mitch?

“I’m sorry. I did it for us. I wanted out but the sheriff wouldn’t let me.”

“You did it for us?”

“I wanted you to be able to quit the 101 and stay home with the baby.”

“Well look where your good intentions got us now. Our house has been ransacked and who knows what they’ll do to us if they come back again. I thought you were smarter than this, Mitch.”

“It’s not his fault,” the sheriff said. “Mitch just did what any man would do if he had a baby on the way and money was tight. He’d find a means to supplement his income.”

“Well I hope you go to hell Sheriff. He was good before he started working with you. You should be ashamed but I know you don’t give a shit.”

The sheriff stared at the wood stove and sighed. The glow was already fading. Was he going to be able to move? His back was killing him. Whiplash for sure, no hope of sliding his hands under his legs so he could get them in front. He was just too fat and out of shape for that. And she was right about Mitch. He’d been as squeaky clean as they come. Always was a good kid. Never got mixed up with a bad crowd or caused him any trouble. Back then he sometimes wished he’d had an excuse to stop by Mitch’s house to have a talk with his folks, just so he could’ve gotten a glimpse of the boy’s older sister. Linda was captain of the cheerleader team and oh man did she have some curves on her.

“Hate me all you want Tammy. But you’re going to have to forgive that boy one of these days. I also know it wasn’t his idea to start a family this soon. Hell, I worked with him the same day you’d shoved that dripping home pregnancy test under his nose. Poor kid was shock. I had to pull over twice just so he wouldn’t puke in the patrol car. But you just couldn’t wait get that noose around him good and tight, could you girl? So let’s just cut the crap now and talk about how we’re going to get out of here before they come back.”

Chapter 18

Gradually Tammy’s crying began to mingle with the sibilant chorus of water being pulled from the bay. Mitch imagined fish being drawn out to the dark mouth and the crowd of lurking sea lions, the exposed sandbars loaded with clams. If you didn’t mind taking the risk of getting grounded until the tide turned, you could land a small boat on one of those sandy islands and go home with more clams than you could possibly eat.

He hadn’t wanted to go out with the sheriff that night. It was too windy and the waves at the bar were bigger than he’d seen in a while. He’d once capsized in similar weather, but it had been in the daylight and some other fishermen were quick to pull him out before hypothermia set in and the current pulled him under. On that night with the sheriff the bay had been empty and other than a watery moon far to the south, he remembered it mostly by the shapes of black waves and their echoing thunder between the rocky sphinx-arms of the jetties. He’d begun to feel uncertain that he would make it home alive, that the sheriff was having second thoughts about allowing him into his private world of traffickers and pirates. The sheriff had been acting restless, and more often then usual Mitch had smelled alcohol on his breath while they were on duty.

The sheriff promised a smooth transaction, that they’d be returning to shore before he knew it. We make the buy and then drive the stuff to a guy waiting in a Portland motel, he’d said. As simple as visiting grandma on a Sunday afternoon. We’ll take the patrol car so it’ll look like official business and I’ll have you’ll back home in time for dinner with the little wife.

There were two of them. The captain steering the boat and a bald beefy guy with a backpack. They’d seemed mildly hostile and appeared to be heavily armed. As soon as they’d gotten within hearing distance they began to shout “No Luce, no Luce!” The sheriff didn’t understand what they saying, and the engines of both boats drowned out Mitch’s translation. When Mitch was about to toss over the duffel bag of cash as planned, one of the traffickers did something that made the sheriff panic, and before Mitch even realized what was happening, shots were fired and the large tattooed man was clinging to their starboard bow with blood spraying from his chest and the boat he’d come from began to rapidly zigzag back out to sea. Mitch was sure its captain had been hit too, had heard the man’s screams above the thundering motor and waves.

He’d slipped on the trafficker’s blood and fallen, bashed his knee against a crate. Writhing in pain, Mitch had watched the sheriff holster his gun and then attempt to pry the pack from the smuggler’s hand. But when he’d let go to find a better grip, the stiffening hand suddenly sprang open and the pack had splashed into the dark bay. Enraged by the corpse’s final jest, the sheriff had punched the grinning face until his fists were soaked in blood. Mitch had closed his eyes when he felt his dinner coming up. Dawkins had shouted at him to get up and find the aluminum pole he kept stowed while he struggled to detach the man from the boat. The trafficker had wrapped a muscular arm around the steel rail and refused to let go. Mitch had vomited before pulling himself to his feet, and while he’d stumbled to the front of the boat he’d heard the sheriff shouting and the sharp thwack of metal biting metal. When he’d found the pole and returned to the back again, the sheriff was rinsing an axe in a bucket of water. His hands were clean of blood, but his white shirt had turned pink as if it had been accidently laundered with something red. The trafficker was gone. Mitch hadn’t bothered to ask where.

They’d searched for hours, but the current had pulled the trafficker’s pack under and they’d had no luck finding it. When it was almost dawn the sheriff decided they should head back. Mitch had wanted to go straight home, but the sheriff insisted they go to his house to settle down. Mitch was frozen to the core and couldn’t stop shaking. The sheriff built a fire and had Mitch sit near it while he went into another room to make some calls. A half hour later he reappeared with a bottle of Jim Beam and began pouring them drinks, talked loudly about fishing with his old man and how he’d once beat the crap out of a bunch of hippies and run them out of town. He’d confiscated their dope and then ended trying some of it and spent the night laughing his ass off. Changing the subject, however, did no good. Mitch had been scared shitless. As for Dawkins, the more he drank the higher his bravado had climbed.

It wasn’t until the fourth glass that Mitch had felt anything like real consciousness begin to rise above the buzzing hive of nerves of his thawing body. His voice had remained shaky and thin.

“What’s going to happen when that guy from the other boat tells his people what you did?” Mitch said.

Dawkins downed his glass and quickly refilled it. His face reddened. “Well with any luck he won’t make it back to tell anybody, will he Mitch? Seemed to me he wasn’t doing so hot.”

“But what if he does make it back? His guys are going to be coming here to find out what happened.”

“It won’t be just them,” the sheriff said. “Everyone’s going to be paying a visit.”

“But you’re going to give the money back to that guy in Portland, right?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Jesus Sheriff, what are you talking about?”

“We could have been killed out there, Mitch. I want my hazard pay, and I know you do too. It’s not my problem they picked unreliable people.”

“You didn’t have to shoot them. They weren’t going to do anything.”

“They were going to rip us off, Mitch. Couldn’t you tell? Yelling at us like that in Mexican. I’m no racist, but I do like to do business with people that can speak our goddamn language.”

“I think they were just afraid of the light. Your lights were too bright and they must have thought that it would attract attention.”

The sheriff picked up the whiskey and drank straight from the bottle. “Whose side are you on anyways?”

“I’m just saying they weren’t going to rip us off. In fact I don’t recall either one of them drawing a weapon.”

“Well I saw what I saw too. And that really ugly one at the helm was going for a shotgun.”

Mitch had stood up and swayed. “Listen, if you’re not going to give that guy in Portland his money back, then I don’t want anything to do with this. It’s suicide and you know it.”

“Well guess what Mitch. We’re in this together, remember? And when they come, you better be standing with your partner or else things will get kind of dicey between us real fast.”

At that moment Mitch made up his mind to get Tammy and run. The next day he would go to the bank and close their savings account. He wasn’t going to tell her about what happened until everything was set. Then they’d pack up and leave in the middle of the night and if the sheriff didn’t catch them first they would go somewhere else far away and start over. But how far would they get? After having the transmission in the truck fixed last month and paying medical bills, they’d hardly have enough gas money to even get them across the state line.

When the sheriff went off into a back room again, Mitch believed that if he stayed any longer he’d be killed. But just as he managed to get to his feet the sheriff was there again. In his hand was a thick stack of money, more than enough to get set up in a new town and raise baby.

“Here’s your cut. Now go home before I change my mind,” the sheriff said.

Mitch hadn’t wanted to take it. But not to take it would have been stupid. He’d put it in his jacket without saying a word, had rinsed his face and used the sheriff’s mouthwash before driving home. Tammy had awakened when he’d crawled into bed and he told her a lie about working a burglary scene and then going to the sheriff’s house after their shift to drink a beer and watch some boxing. As he tried to fall asleep he listed more details to support his story should she ask him later. She didn’t seem angry at him for being so late and went back to sleep before he did and it had felt good having her warm body next to his.

Except he didn’t sleep at all. He kept waking up, thinking the trafficker was standing at the foot of their bed dripping blood on the floor, asking him if he knew what happened to his arm. Mitch had slipped out of bed and put a towel under the dripping faucet in the bathtub. He had to remember to stop in at the hardware store for some new washers.

Back in bed, he began to think about the money the sheriff had given him. What was happening to his life? Had the sheriff gone insane? He hadn’t always been this way, only since his dog died. When Butch was alive the sheriff seemed to have something to live for. Now it seemed like he didn’t care.

He’d decided the money was only going to bring him bad luck. And before Tammy awoke he drove back to the sheriff’s house and shoved the money through the mail slot in the front door. The sheriff was still awake and had opened the door as he fed the last wad through. He just stood there in his underwear with the near-empty bottle of Jim Beam and told Mitch that giving the money back wasn’t ever going to make his troubles go away.

Chapter 19

When the Russians went back to the sheriff’s house to search for money and drugs they found Cyclops sitting naked on the floor eating frozen peas out of a box while clothes kicked around inside a dryer in the next room. The sight of his blackened, hoof-like feet shocked them-more satyr than human-and they could do nothing but stand quietly and stare. Cyclops hadn’t looked up when they came in, but continued to chew loudly behind a curtain of greasy hair flecked with twigs and moss. After a few minutes he asked if Dawkins and the others had been harmed and they assured him that they’d received only minor injuries during their capture. Cyclops threw the box of peas at them and warned them that if they were lying there’d be serious consequences. He told them they were fools and couldn’t be trusted with feeding chickens…

Chapter 20

Other than anxious fishermen hoping to make the first cast of salmon season, it was that hour in the morning when it was rare to see anyone up. The storm had stirred some inhabitants of Traitor Bay from their beds while others slept on. Generators seldom used spat to life and burned off dirty smoke. The quiet vacuum left behind by the storm was slowly being filled with the pulsating grind of machines, the smell of propane and gasoline, of modern civilization kicking back to life. Ann saw a handful of homes with their lights on inside and out, people walking around checking for storm damage or sitting in their kitchens thinking about starting coffee. The dogs seemed to be busy patrolling their yards, catching the scents of distant things carried by the wind on dead leaves, twigs and trash. She scanned the roof of the store as she approached it, didn’t notice any missing shingles or damage to the chimney. She’d been worried about it for a few years now, had found bits of mortar when she cleaned the rain gutters every spring. There’d been a house down on the bay that had its chimney knocked over during a storm, and it had slid down to the edge and hung there until someone could figure out what to do about it. She’d have to call someone to come out and take a look soon. Don’t want bricks falling down on our customers.

Ann noticed all the windows looked undamaged and the lights of the Coke coolers still glowed in the back, reassuring her that the backup generators were doing their job. She stepped on the accelerator and sped past the rest of town, which on the outer edges appeared to be blacked out. When she got over the top of a big hill she was startled by bright lights shining on the road. It was as if she’d accidently driven onto a movie set. She soon drove by a repair crew setting up cones next to a crane with a cherry picker, while others worked at a downed fir with chainsaws and she could smell the tang of freshly cut wood even with the windows rolled up.

As she turned off the highway into the boat ramp parking lot, she noticed that the lights there had also been knocked out by the storm. The place was definitely showing its years of neglect. The small concrete building that used to cater to the salmon fishermen and anyone else passing by on the highway when she was a kid, was all boarded up. The old man who’d run it had died years ago and no one had wanted to take over after he was gone. Ann still remembered the perpetual tang of propane, the big steaming pots he’d cook crabs in and the smoke of hotdogs barbequing. Practically every inch of the structure was covered now with anti-cop graffiti, and only just before salmon season came would the city pay someone to come out and give it a hasty whitewash.

She hadn’t gone fishing since high school, never cared for the crowds that turned the bay into something resembling city gridlock. Late on Friday and Saturday nights she and James would sometimes go to the boat ramp to party with friends. Nothing too serious. Someone with a pickup rigged with stereo speakers blasting from the tailgate, a pony keg hidden under tarp. Everyone seemed to get along, even with the visitors from Buoy City who occasionally got swept up in a migrating party of their own. Then Sheriff Dawkins began to crack down, made some minor-in-possession arrests and got everyone too paranoid to do much of anything on weekend nights except hang out at the 101 or go to the movies in Buoy City.

Ann parked next to the staircase that led down from the top of the bank to a floating wooden dock below. She put the gun in her pocket and grabbed the flashlight from the glove box before she got out of her car. Stopping for a moment to look out over the bay, she saw that the dark mouths of small streams she used to explore in her kayak during high tide now stood above the bay like drained aqueducts. There was a network of these canals that led through the tall grass, secret places where Ann often found solitude. Now hours before dawn, the water seemed heavier than usual as it returned to the sea. She recalled it was that time of the year when it filled up with plankton and in the sunlight looked as if it had been silted with copper dust.

When she got down the two flights of wooden staircase, she noticed a small boat tied up next to the dock. There was no sign of anyone around. The parking lot above had been empty. She drew her gun and stepped closer to the boat, wondering if someone might be lying inside, but all she saw were some life preservers and a ragged crab ring. She smelled gasoline coming from the boat, felt a puff of warmth that had drifted from its motor.

“Ann?” said a voice from behind her.

She spun around, aimed her flashlight up into a face and made sure it saw the gun in her hand.

“Don’t come any closer.”

Chapter 21

“It’s me Ann. It’s James.” The figure backed beneath the ridge of concrete seawall and was swallowed by thicker shadow. His voice had sounded familiar.

“Let me see your hands,” Ann ordered. As James raised them into the beam of her flashlight she began to recognize them. He’d always bitten his nails down to the quick. And there were the same chicken-scratch scars where he’d accidently cut himself while fishing. It occurred to Ann that something was missing.

“James wears a class ring. I don’t see one on your left hand.”

“I traded it for two bottles of tequila,” James said.

“You traded it for booze?”

“It’s a long story. Jesus Ann, it’s me. Put the gun down before something happens.”

Ann brought the flashlight up into his face again and made him squint. She took a few steps forward and noticed the pale welt next to the corner of his right eye, the scar he’d received back when they’d lived in Portland. It has to be him, she thought. Already feels like another lifetime ago. When she shoved the pistol into her coat pocket she could hear him sigh deeply.

“What are you doing here?” Ann said. She felt short of breath, floaty. For a few moments she wondered if she were talking to a ghost, if she’d truly begun to lose her mind. He seemed to sway a little, as if he’d been drinking.

James relaxed and moved closer. “I got your letter that Duane was dead… The navy finally forwarded it to me.”

Before she had time to resist, he opened his arms and Ann fell into them. Once they touched she felt herself wrapping up close. It was like her body was rushing ahead of her, anxious to return to a place it had been to hundreds of times. She buried her face under his chin and smelled his neck, the whiskey coming from his breath. It was him. The last person in the world I’d expected to see tonight. They held each other on the creaking dock, listened to the roar of a semi truck as it vanished around each new bend in the highway like a dying tuning fork.

“God I’ve missed you Ann,” James said. “I thought this day would never come.”

“What happened to you?”

“I was discharged. They couldn’t get my shoulder fixed so they cut me loose. I get a small disability check and a chance to go back to school.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Back in March.”

“You’ve been out since March? Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

“I was feeling sorry for myself and needed time to think. So I went to Mexico and stayed drunk until I almost ran out of money.”

“Did you figure things out?” Ann said. She felt tears trickling down her cheek, and when James discovered them under his palm he smoothed them away.

“Some of it I guess. I decided I needed to come back home and face a few things, that if I didn’t do something about it now they’d be pulling me down forever. Then when I got your letter, it all seemed to come together, that the time was right. I thought I was coming back to something I knew. But I was wrong. Everything here is totally screwed up.”

“Tell me about it,” Ann said. She took his hands in hers and they both sat down on a bench. The wood was cold and sparkled with fish scales. It reminded her of the sequined dress she’d worn to her senior prom, of James introducing her to cocaine.

James was shivering. He hadn’t had time to grab his jacket, was lucky he’d slept with his shoes on.

“You’re freezing,” Ann said.

“I’m okay,” James said.

Ann took her jacket off and threw it around them both like a shawl. She rubbed his arms with her hands, kneaded his tight muscles to bring the blood back.

“Where have you been staying?”

“Over at dad’s fishing shack. Until tonight that is. A van showed up with a hanging front bumper and crushed headlight. It looked like it had been in an accident. I could see where a tree limb had gouged the side. Some guys with guns got out and one of them smashed the bulb above the shack. I was barely out the window before they kicked in the door.”

“Who were they?”

“I wasn’t sure at first. All I knew was they weren’t a bunch of kids looking for a place to party. Luckily dad still keeps this boat stashed under the dock. I would have started the motor but I was afraid of drawing attention. Later on they walked out on the bank looking for me, but by then I’d already paddled too far out on the bay for them to see me. I just drifted in the dark for a long time afraid of making too much noise. Then I saw them get into the van and drive away. When it got quiet again I started to hear other voices coming from the shack. Unless I’ve gone completely crazy I’m sure it was Tammy, Mitch and the sheriff. And it didn’t sound like they were just getting ready for a fun day of fishing either.”

Ann felt an icy chill spread up the back of her neck and into her scalp. “Are you sure it was them?”

“It had to be, Ann. You don’t forget people you’ve grown up around that fast. Now tell me what’s going on.”

“All I know is that I’ve been up all night looking for them, ever since I went by to visit Tammy after closing the store. From what I could tell there’d been a struggle, and some blood was left on the sink. But no Tammy. And then later when I tried to find Mitch and the sheriff I found their wrecked patrol at the edge of Dead Man’s Point. Something horrible has happened, James. Now after what you’ve said I think they could have been kidnapped. If it’s really them, then we need to go help.”

“Are you sure we should get involved?”

“What are you talking about? Tammy and Mitch are my friends, our friends.”

“All I’m saying is it’s not safe. Those guys could come back any time and then we might become their prisoners-hostages or whatever. Haven’t you tried calling anyone else for help?”

“There’s no way to reach anyone. The storm even knocked out cell phones. A guy working for the power company told me a landslide has closed 101 above Buoy, and just south of Traitor Bay it’s buried by downed trees. He said no one is going to be able to get through until late this afternoon, and that’s only if another crew can make it over the old road.”

“Then I guess we don’t have much of a choice,” James said, lighting a cigarette. “I just hope we have time.”

They climbed into the boat and James started the motor. Ann leaned in close so she could keep him warm with her body heat. She wanted to ask him when he’d taken up smoking but she didn’t want him to think she was a nag.

“What do you think this is all about?” Ann said. “No one who lives here is rich.”

“I couldn’t imagine there’d be a ransom involved. But it wouldn’t surprise me if this was somehow Dawkins fault.”

“I know he’s weird, but why would he be behind something like this?”

“I think you know-just like the whole town has always has known for years. And it’s not because I’ve never liked him. This town has cut him too much slack and now the birds are finally coming home to roost. I saw him out here this morning with some scary Russian dudes. He looked really nervous too, like maybe he was in way over his head.”

“Did you say the sheriff was looking in the bay for something?”

“Who told you that?”

“Janet at the 101. She knows about everything that goes on.”

“Did she know I was back too?”

“I don’t think so. But I saw Chad and he said that one of his brothers might have spotted you a few days ago.”

James shook his head. “And I thought I was being so careful. It’s amazing Ann. Nothing like being in a place like San Diego where you can disappear, where your only connection to the past becomes a post office box that’s empty most of the time.”

As the boat glided across the bay the outline of the shack began to slowly take shape, the scent of wood smoke its only hint of life inside.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” James said.

“We can’t just leave them there.”

“Then I guess what we have to talk about will have to wait until later. You do remember, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. And we will… I promise.”

“That’s good,” James said, lowering his eyes to the gun back in Ann’s hand. “Have you been practicing with that thing much?”

“Enough,” Ann said.

Chapter 22

Before water struck his face, Sheriff Dawkins was thinking about when he’d bought his first car. The cold briny water only brought him back long enough to hear a strange whisper near his face, a man’s voice, with burned vocal chords that hissed out after each word. The man’s breath was foul, stung his eyes like mace. He could feel the light beam sweep across the surface of his burning retinas, watched the show of tracers with disinterest. All he wanted to do was go back to before the water had hit. Was it too much to ask?

“Wake up, Sheriff.”

It had happened so fast. Overnight he’d gone from a shy kid with an acne problem to the summer-date guy. While most boys had to work hard in the summer tarring roofs or pumping gas for the tourists, Dawkins only worked three ten hour shifts a week at the mill and then he’d have the rest of the week to play. It had helped that his uncle was higher up in the union, and Dawkins often repaid the favor by helping him with construction projects or driving to Portland to pick up supplies. It hadn’t concerned him when he’d found out his uncle was screwing his mother. Dawkin’s father had been dead for years and Aunt Polly was always running off with some guy she’d met at her AA meetings.

Now that he could finally get them to go out with him, Dawkins quickly tired of the available high school girls and their teasing ways. As soon as he saw that the chance of sex was clearly off the table he’d move on to another, until he ran low on who he could ask out and his reputation got routed through the bubblegum grapevine. After he’d tapped out Traitor Bay girls, he began driving over to Buoy City, but the girls there seemed to always be semi-involved with some guy who’d dropped out of high school to chase down big money cutting trees or catching salmon and such young men were likely to be ill-tempered and well known by the police.

By the end of July Dawkin’s fortunes changed and he’d lost his virginity and taken up smoking all in the same night. He’d been seeing an older woman from Phoenix who he’d picked up in Portland during one of his uncle’s errands. It had been late at night and she’d been running from somebody on the street and Dawkin’s had opened the door for her and told her to get in. She’d cried for awhile and Dawkins turned on the heat when he saw she was shaking. She hardly had on any clothes. What am I doing he’d thought, nervously checking the rearview mirror for any signs of police. Did I just pick up a hooker?

Keri was trouble and everyone in Traitor Bay had sensed it, but she’d managed to take up residence above the local tavern where she’d found a job cocktailing. To this day Dawkins associated her with the August heat wave which caused raging forest fires and burned homes. It was as if she’d drifted into his life on an ember from one of those glowing mountains he’d watched in the distance every night after his shift-some spirit that had chosen to inhabit the talented body of a strangely beautiful woman who wrapped herself around him in ways he could have never imagined. He couldn’t believe she’d wanted anything to do with him after the night he’d driven her home and let her sleep on the couch. His mother hadn’t said a word against it either, was mostly out with his uncle somewhere anyway. Dawkins assumed Keri would hook up with some older guy out of his league and he’d never see her again. But to his surprise she said she only wanted to be with him, that she’d never met such a sweet boy before and couldn’t imagine anyone nicer. She then went on to explain what she was up against while her hand somehow ended up pressing his thigh. There were people back in Portland who’d be looking for her, she’d said. And they won’t stop until they have proof I’m dead or they get their money. The next morning he lent her two thousand dollars from his savings account.

They’d spent as many nights as they could up in the remote cabin that Dawkin’s father and uncle had built during their elk hunting days. For the first time in his life Dawkins found himself truly giddy in love. He could think of nothing else except when he’d see Keri again, what new lessons he might receive or be tested on. Would she like the cheerleader outfit he’d bought for her at the secondhand shop? It was practically brand new. His friends had tried to warn him that she might break his heart but he just wouldn’t listen, and yet on a crisp October night it happened without warning. Keri had been last seen hitching a ride with a trucker she’d met at the 101, a parking lot heavyweight named Skunk who was well known for his golden vocal chords and big hands. She needed to get back to the desert, Keri had said in a note he’d found left in his truck. She needed to get back to the sun.

He couldn’t let her go so easily. At first he’d holed up in his room and cried himself dry. When he knew his mom wasn’t coming home for the night, he got up and dressed, took his father’s hunting rifle and headed for the highway.

It had turned out to be easier to find them than he’d thought.

He’d only had to drive seventy miles south before he’d spotted Skunk’s semi outside a sagging motel in Colton. He’d pressed his ear to their room door and listened to the mattress music until he could no longer stand it before going back into the trees and shooting out Skunk’s tires. Skunk had come running naked at him and he’d shot him in the knee and the big man just crumbled to the ground with a sharp yelp. Sing me a song now you asshole, he’d said as the man quickly triaged his skinned penis before sliding under his truck like a translucent grub. Keri emerged from the doorway shrieking and for a few seconds Dawkins put her face in the cross-hairs before lights from other units began to flicker on and he had to turn and run for the truck before he got caught.

“Sheriff. I know you can hear me.”

Another wave of water sloshed against his face and this time some got up his nose and caused him to sneeze. “Are you trying to blind me?” he asked the flashlight bearer.

“Sorry,” said the voice of the man who’d been trying to wake him. The beam moved away from his eyes and resettled somewhere on his forehead. He realized then how bad of a headache he had, that he could taste blood. His hands were still bound behind his back-at least he thought he still had hands. He couldn’t feel a damn thing.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“You’re still in the shack where the others left you. You have a wound to your head-a big bump. Do you remember anything about what happened?”

“Yeah. Bitch kicked me in the head.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the man said.

Dawkins listened to the man laughing softly and he felt his anger rise. “I really need a cigarette. Unless you’re planning to free me you’ll find them in my front pocket.”

“Fair enough, Sheriff. But I think we should leave your hands as they are for now.”

Rough fingers that smelled of liver found his pack and lighter and fumbled a cigarette into his mouth. When it thumbed the lighter he saw the face of Cyclops flash before him and his heart skipped. What the hell is happening? I know I was hard on those hippies I caught sleeping on the beach, but I never thought it would come to this. Whatever you do, don’t show this one-eyed Manson wannabe you’re afraid.

“Who are you?” the sheriff asked. He was distracted by music lifting out from somewhere deep inside his head, as if coming from a radio lying at the sticky bottom of a drying well. For a moment he dared himself to bring the sound into focus, and to his surprise he heard a scrotum-tightening chorus of all the women who’d ever told him to go to hell.

This was not the end Dawkins had repeatedly dreamed of. He’d dreamt of being ambushed by men totting AK47’s — assault rifles that the Mexican cartels fondly called their ‘goat horns’. The dream played out like an action sequence from a 1970’s grind house film, the kind his older brother would sometimes take him to see at a rundown theater in Portland instead of the latest Disney flick their parents had given them money for. A prickly keyboard and a creeping bass guitar provided the tension as the assassins moved in closer. Filmed behind a smoked lens. . you were supposed to believe that it was night although moonlight would never ping off gunmetal that brightly. When the muzzles began to explode he’d sit up in his bed and scream, reach out to a bottle for a couple of hits.

“My name is of no matter, Sheriff.”

“Have we met?”

“Not in person, no. But I know all about you.”

“And how’s that?”

“You helped with my business. That is until you decided to steal from me.”

“I’m sorry but you’ve got the wrong person. It was some other guy that ran off with your love beads, man.”

“I don’t have all morning, Sheriff. There are a couple of men waiting outside that you’ve come to know. Please don’t make me have them come in here. I’d hate to let it come to that, I really would. I just need you to answer a few questions. Once I have what I need, we’ll leave you and your sleepy little town be.”

“What do you want to know?” the sheriff asked. It finally dawned on him that the man was another Russian. He’d thought the guy’s accent sounded off. He wished now that he were dealing with a pissed off hippie. At least we’d still have music in common. Skynyrd. Creedence. Eddie Van Halen. And if they wanted some pot he still had some stashed in a footlocker back at the station. But these Russians-they’re from another world. He’d smoked the cigarette down to the butt and it was burning his lips. Cyclops gently took it from his mouth and crushed it out between his fingers.

“I’m only trying to clear up a little misunderstanding, Sheriff. If it hadn’t been for Duane Campbel, we probably wouldn’t even be talking right now. But now that he’s dead you’ve mistakenly come to the conclusion that your contract with me and my people in Portland has changed. Is that right Sheriff?”

“I guess so.”

“And instead of talking to me about renegotiating our contract, you chose to steal from me? Why?”

“I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’ve got problems.”

“Do you still have the money?”

“Every bit of it. You’ll find it stashed under the old doghouse in my backyard…”

“And the product? What happened to it?”

“It fell into the bay.”

“And why is that?”

“I shot the trafficker who was carrying it. I thought they were going to try and rip us off.”

“And you’re instincts were right, Sheriff. I apologize. Those two turned out to be nothing but trouble for me. But what can you do? It’s just never enough for some people. They go and ruin a good thing for everyone. I understand an arm washed up on the beach?”

“It’s stashed in the freezer in my garage. Beneath last year’s elk steaks.”

“I’d like to see it before I go.”

“No problem, you can swing by and look after you get the money. I guess this is it then?”

“Pardon me Sheriff?”

“Now that I’ve told you everything, aren’t you going to kill me?”

“Come on, Sheriff. You must not have been listening. You’re too important to me to let go so easily. In the past, of course, it would have been different. Back then I would have had horrible things done to men like you so as to set an example. But it never works in the long term. No matter how many times you try to wipe it out it still comes back, until you learn to live with it, like learning that there will always be mice in the cupboards. The fact is that we all must struggle with temptation, and sometimes we get so intoxicated by it we make serious mistakes. This is the nature of our blood. Am I making myself clear, Sheriff?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good. Now there is just one more thing before I go. Please tell me everything you know about a woman named Ann Foster.”

“You just missed her.”

Chapter 23

The warmth of the pineapple express had caused curling trunks of fog to begin lifting off the bay. Ann had always imagined them as phantasms freeing themselves from their watery graves. They were an unlucky confederacy of the drowned, and all they desired was to feel the certainty of earth below their feet, of moving amongst the living again. Most hunched cautiously across the bay in slow frothy masses, while the more daring spirits glided solo, hurrying to reach the shore before the threat of sun burned them away. She noticed a few that had made it as far as the road into town, anxious to return to their homes or back to a favorite bar. Many individuals weren’t so lucky, having burst apart into cotton balls of vapor before they could make it to land while still others were forced to spend precious time tapering around the hulls of boats in the marina.

Electricity had not been restored to Traitor Bay, and only roving fingers of moonlight kept it from appearing totally abandoned. Parked cars glimmered in the distance, wood smoke spooled from rooftops. Even with daylight not far away there would not be a significant change in the level of darkness, as if the night itself had refused eviction. Ann knew today would be such a time, when everything was half-lit and the sun was a drifting sheet of gray steel, a lost wreckage, and many fog specters would visit far up country roads and into forgotten glades where the remains of chimneys stood wrapped in thick-fingered ivy and blackberry vine. It would be the kind of day when your instincts told you to light a fire and stay close to it.

Tammy opened her hand and showed her the bloody tooth. It had taken Ann a moment to realize what it was.

“Do you think they can still save it?” she asked.

“They might,” Ann said, handing her a paper napkin from her jacket. She was always taking the extra ones the waitresses left on the table. “Here, soak this in some water and wrap it up. You can’t let it dry out.”

Tammy did as Ann told her and wetted the napkin in the bay. She spread it out on her knees and set the tooth in the middle, then folded the napkin over and over until it was in the rounded shape of a white stone with threads of red in it. The napkin had left a damp rectangle on her jeans. She touched the tooth to her lips and sobbed.

Ann squeezed Tammy’s hand and watched James at the back of the boat. He lit a cigarette off the dying cherry of another. In the time it had taken for him to smoke five, they’d traveled up from the bay and into the river that fed it. They were relieved to find no lights coming off the dark bridge they had to pass under, no bullets boiling up the water next to them. James thought he’d heard voices, but it turned out to be crows raiding a swallow’s nest beneath the darkened steel beams.

When Mitch’s head dropped forward again, James leaned over to gently shake him awake. Mitch sat up straight again and stared around groggily. His face was pale and he had two developing black eyes.

“Stay awake, bud. You might have a concussion,” James said.

“I don’t have one…” Mitch said.

“Well you still better get an x-ray.”

Mitch leaned over the boat and spat more blood. “And how much will that cost?”

They passed close to some derelict barges and a tugboat covered with flaking patches of paint. A rusted crane loomed above them from one of the barges with a giant hook suspended on the end of a frayed cable. There was no sign of life here on the widest part of the river, which carried enough fresh water to keep the barnacles killed off. James told them he knew of a barn up stream where they could drop off Tammy and Mitch. By land it was hard to get to unless you were familiar with the local roads. The barn was owned by his uncle Lefty, who always kept it stocked in case he needed to pull all nighters during calving season.

Tammy leaned her head against Ann’s shoulder. “I’m worried about what’s going to happen to the baby. Those bastards knocked me around hard.”

“Nothing’s going to happen,” Ann said. And we’re going to get you and Mitch to a safe place.”

“And what about you?”

“Something tells me those guys are going to keep looking for us no matter what. You two are in no condition to keep running but we are. If we split up our chances are going to be a lot better that we come out of this.”

“Right, and then what happens after help comes? I’ll get my ass busted for assaulting a cop… Not that it didn’t feel good at the time.” When Tammy smiled Ann saw the dark gap left by the missing tooth and looked away.

“That bad?” Tammy asked.

“Don’t get mad, but you remind of that year when we dressed up as hillbillies for Halloween.”

Tammy laughed. “That’s just great. Mitch and I must make quite a pair.”

“What you did to the sheriff isn’t going to matter, Tam. After they find out what he’s been up to, he’ll no longer even be a cop.”

“I hope you’re right. I don’t want to have this baby in jail. Are you sure we shouldn’t all stay put somewhere and wait this out together?”

“I think that’s what they’re hoping we’ll do. It would make it a lot easier for them to clean their slate that way.”

“Coming up on our right side,” James announced. The others leaned over to see a wooden dock floating on the river, its wooden railing half twisted off from last year’s storms. Uncle Lefty didn’t do a lot of fishing anymore, the cold was just too much on his arthritis.

Ann took out her cell phone and handed it to Tammy. “Try and call for help. If you reach somebody, make sure they come and get you guys first.”

“And where should I tell them you’re going to be?”

“Don’t worry about us. We’re going to be on the move. And be sure you turn off the phone when you’re not using it. It loses its juice fast.”

James helped Mitch and Tammy out of the boat and onto a small dock. Behind it was a bank of tall yellow grass and the smell of cow manure coming from the field above. Mitch got down on his knees and cupped some water onto his face. Its coldness seemed to revive him. He stood up and wrapped his arm around Tammy’s waist and together they watched as James turned the boat around to head back downstream toward the bay.

“Just follow the path and go through the gate to the left,” James said. “My uncle keeps a key under the plastic dwarf standing guard next to the front door.”

“Thanks,” Mitch said. “You guys be careful now.”

Chapter 24

Worried about how much gas they had left, James cut the motor and let the boat drift for a while. They listened to the water slurp and gurgle, felt the current draw them back as if the river were a retreating appendage of the sea. A raccoon trotted excitedly along the shore, stopping to dip its paws into pools in search of stranded salmon fry. It lifted its head as they glided past, then began to follow them until the cut bank got lost under a tangled shelf of dense tree limbs draped with neon yellow moss. River mud bubbled and belched, filled the predawn air with exhalations of wet clay and old death. Bats darted over the boat-black leathery shapes squiggled traces against the patches of starlit sky.

Ann sat facing the monochrome image of James and the river trailing behind them. He seemed to be absorbed by the river, but she knew he was only brooding over something and not really looking at anything at all. He seemed like more of a stranger now, the person he’d become after leaving Traitor Bay and joining the navy. She could see now that things hadn’t changed for him much. He’d left behind everything to take a different path and was just as unlucky with it as any other he’d tried. Everyone said going away would help him grow into a fuller person, but he’d just been led around in another circle. It seems like he can’t ever catch a break, Ann thought.

“How far do you think we should go?” she asked.

James turned from the river and looked into her eyes. She could see that he was simmering inside, not ready yet to open up. It always took him longer than most people. He’d grown up fearing he’d somehow light his father’s short fuse, until he met Ann and began to stand up for himself. Ann had always thought it was the true reason his mother didn’t like her anymore.

“I was thinking we’d pull off just before the jetty and take the beach back to get help.”

“It will be light before we get into town. They’re going to see us.”

“Look at the fog rolling in, Ann. It’s supposed to stick around all day, thick and soupy.”

“And then what do we do?” Ann said. “If we still can’t call the cops?”

“We find a place to hide for a day or two. I was thinking we could look up Coach, since he’s got a place right on the beach.”

“I didn’t think you liked coach,” Ann said.

“I don’t. But I have to admit he’s honest. Maybe we weren’t on the best of terms when I was in school, but I think he was just worrying about what I was going through with my mom and dad fighting all the time. I was stupid because I couldn’t see until later how much it tore him up inside.”

“Are you planning to see your folks?”

“Not sure if I will yet. Have you seen them around much?”

“Your mom stops in once in a while. She acts like she’s in a hurry to get somewhere. Mostly just pays, nods and leaves. With her it’s like we’re not much more familiar strangers.”

“And my dad?”

“I saw him at the 101 one night last fall and he stopped by my table to say hello. He’d just been elk hunting with some of his buddies and wanted to brag about a ten pointer he’d bagged. He was feeling pretty good and wanted to tease me, knowing how I’d feel about it. When I asked him if he’d heard from you he kind of switched gears and went back to join his friends. I guess it must have been around the time you up and went to Mexico.”

“Did he sell the boat?”

“Not sure.”

James lit another cigarette and stared up at the bridge they’d passed under before. He noticed swallows nests beading the concrete belly-small, upside down jugs of dried mud where black specks darted to and from. The swallows’ pre-dawn chirping was still frenzied despite having driven off the chick-stealing crows. Maybe they were celebrating their victory, he thought. But the crows would be back. He was sure of it.

A dense mountain of fog had begun to devour the bridge a piece at a time. Just great, James thought, we’re heading right into it. Pretty soon we’ll be in the soup too, and I won’t be able to see a damn thing. When he glanced up to watch the last fragment of bridge disappear, he thought he saw three figures peering down at them from the steel railing, their outlines limned by headlights of a vehicle left idling.

“Ann, look,” James said. But when Ann raised her eyes, the men on the bridge were already hidden by a sweeping arm of fog.

“What is it?”

“I think it was them. I’m sure it was them. Who else could it be?”

“What are we going to do?”

“We’ve got no choice but to drift into the fog. They’ll only be able to guess where we’re going after that.”

“But it’ll only be a matter of time before they find us again.”

“Unless we’re able blow town without them catching us first. If we have a decent head start we could get to a bigger city where they’d never find us.”

“I can’t leave. My aunt depends on me. I can’t go anywhere now.”

“It’s up to you what you do. All I’m saying is that since Duane is a pile of stinking ashes…”

“So that’s the real reason you’ve come back?”

“Of course it is. Do you really think I came back to make peace?”

“I don’t know James. A few minutes ago I was feeling sorry for you. But I guess I’ve forgotten how much you hate it here.”

“But you do remember what we agreed on?

“I remember.”

“Then would you please tell me why the money’s not where we left it?”

“You went to get it?”

“How else would I know it got moved?” James said.

Fresh tears burned against Ann’s cheeks, making her conscious of how chilled she was. She wiped her face, fought back the sudden urge to bum a smoke. Her hand drifted down into her pocket. The.38 was cold against her palm.

“I got scared, James. When I didn’t hear from you I thought something might have happened…”

“So you thought you’d move the money just in case someone else came looking for it?”

“Yes.”

“And you expect me to believe you?”

“That’s up to you. All I know is that you’re here to get what’s yours. And even if Duane is sitting in an urn at his crazy mother’s house, he kind of isn’t dead if we’ve still got problems.”

James leaned forward and studied Ann’s face as it was being swallowed by fog. “Well look at you. You haven’t even left town and you’ve grown so smart. I have to believe you, Ann, I’ve got no choice. Now will you to tell me where it is?”

Chapter 25

After her mother was gone he’d started making more trips to Portland. He often brought Ann. She was a good lookout, could tap the horn to let him know when anyone was coming, when anyone looked like they had trouble in mind. And her aunt would go to bed early and had no clue they where leaving town late at night and getting back before sunrise. Duane had told Ann not to say a word to anyone, that it could put a lot of people in danger, including her.

“You did good Ann,” he’d said. “Real good.”

Ann had watched him reach down and nudge the pistol further under the car seat. She didn’t think the cop had bought her act at all. Yet for some reason he hadn’t turned it into a big deal. Maybe he wasn’t expecting to see her when he’d pulled Duane over for speeding so late on a school night, in a town where they didn’t even live. Perhaps he’d just felt sorry for her.

“You said you’d take me to Dairy Queen. And that was two hours ago.”

A smile had ruptured below Duane’s straggly moustache. He’d still had most of his perfect teeth then, was fanatical about flossing. When Duane smiled like that she knew he was thinking about other things. He could talk to her while seeming unaware of her, as if she were as invisible as all the others he’d begun talking to when he thought she wasn’t listening.

They’d watched as the cop came by for a final pass. Ann had reached for the door. She’d made up her mind that she was going to flag him down and confess everything-that she wasn’t sick, that Duane sometimes made her wait in the car all by herself late a night.

“Please darling,” Duane had told her. He’d caught her wrist roughly. His fingers had burned like rope. “You don’t really want that man coming back to talk to me.”

He’d watched the cop cruise by and laughed. Ann’s wrist was reddened after he let it go. She’d slid away from him as far as she could while he started the Camaro, salt worn and more the straw color of piss than the canary yellow it had once been. The ocean air ate away at everything she’d thought, including some people’s minds. She hated the hoarse sound of the engine when he revved it, how he always loved to leave behind a patch of burning rubber as if he was some kind of badass and not a bottom-feeding drug dealer. She could see that he was worried. His face was a sheen of sweat and he stank like fertilizer and it made Ann gag. She’d had to lower her window for some air. I won’t have to fake being sick, I’ll be sick.

“You’ve got to hold it just a little longer, Ann. We need to get on the freeway before that cop comes around again.”

“He’s not coming back. You say that every time.”

“I swear I could almost read what he was thinking when he went past. Couldn’t you?”

“No, Duane.”

“I guess we’ll find out little girl. But I still think there’s something in his gut that isn’t sitting right and I bet you he’s trying to come up with a reason to pop my trunk.”

“He’s gone,” Ann said. “He doesn’t care …”

Duane drove fast when he thought he was being followed, which was usually most of the time. Closer to Traitor Bay he knew the cops and they mostly left him alone. But Portland was always too big for Duane. He felt exposed, couldn’t maintain his 360- degree vision without a couple bumps up the nose to keep him alert. Lately the stuff had started to show its side effects. It made him think he was clairvoyant.

Chapter 26

Sometimes they’d meet people in an all night restaurant or a bowling alley and Duane wouldn’t make her stay in the car. If he was trying to impress, he’d make a show of spoiling her-of buying her all the chocolate shakes or fries she wanted or handing over money for arcade games without complaining. To Duane Ann’s face blindness made her the perfect partner in crime. He took comfort in the fact that if the police ever made Ann stare at a book of mug shots they wouldn’t have much luck.

Before James and Ann moved back from Portland, Duane had sold the house and was living out of a cheap motel along 101 with an addict girlfriend who would one day sell him out. Ann was living with her aunt and helping with the store, trying to bring some stability back to her life. She didn’t have much to do with Duane but it still hadn’t stopped him from coming by the store to try and talk to her. The town was growing weary of him too. He owed a lot of people money and the interest was costing him in teeth.

Despite Ann’s warnings, James began hanging around with Duane and his girlfriend Traci, mostly because he didn’t have many friends left in Traitor Bay and Duane always had plenty of pot to share. Traci was well known by the Traitor police for disorderly conduct but was never charged. They usually drove her back to the motel or called Duane to pick her up. Sheriff Dawkins warned Duane that he didn’t want to see her doing it anymore so on the nights that he went to Portland he made sure he left her heavily sedated.

One afternoon James talked Ann into going trout fishing with him and Duane far up Traitor River. Ann agreed so long as she could drive her own car. She didn’t trust Duane on the hairpin mountain roads, never knew if he’d be too buzzed to drive safely. She could tell she’d hurt Duane’s feelings but he’d said nothing. James rode with her and for several miles they followed the yellow Camaro on roads leading away from the river and cut past empty cow pastures and old barns being torn apart by blackberry vine. Where the sagging barbed wire fences ended the county land began-crisscrossed with forest roads knifed down to the clay substratum that recorded a tapestry of deer and tire tracks. Duane smoked his tires at this point and roared on ahead, passed a camper trailer with two dogs gnashing their teeth and disappeared around a sharp bend in the road where the rocky shoulder was marked by wooden crosses and kitschy shrines of plastic flowers and deflated balloons.

The river reappeared again at the bottom of a steep embankment, narrow now and shimmering like silver coins flowing from an upended sack. Light penetrating through rifts in the thick canopy showed pale green water braided with pearl foam. After the road climbed higher and leveled out, the river spread open again and moved slower. On a treeless acre they saw a cedar shingled building sitting near the edge of the bank, a cloud of wood smoke curling between the vehicles parked in the graveled lot. Two pickup trucks sat with drying crusts of mud, a tan Cadillac with mildew-blackened roof rot they knew belonged to an ex-minister who’d fallen on hard times. Duane’s Camaro was parked there too, fishing rods poking out the backseat window.

Ann had immediately pulled onto the next shoulder and stopped.

“Shit. I didn’t agree to this …”

“It’s going to be okay,” James said. “A couple drinks first isn’t going to hurt nobody.”

“I didn’t want to go fishing with that fool in the first place. I was only trying to be nice. Thought I’d surprise Kate with some rainbows for dinner.”

“You shouldn’t be so hard on him. We’ve all got our problems to deal with.”

“Well I’m glad to see the two of you have grown so close. Maybe he’ll give you a job as his lookout and you’ll actually get paid.”

“I know it was wrong what he did back then. But I think he’s really sorry about it. I know he wants to patch things up with you.”

“Give me a break. Duane is a classic narcissist. In his world we’re nothing but paper cutouts and you know it.”

When they’d walked in he was already holding court. A double shot of Cuervo glittered in front of him while he sucked at a Marlboro. His captive audience pretended to be attentive, on the off chance that Duane was flush and would soon be buying drinks for the privilege. What they didn’t know was that Duane was expecting them to spot him a few. The bartender, a big sullen man whom Ann had seen walking his dog on the beach while she was running, took little effort to hide his wariness. Well informed of his customer’s sketchy behavior, he’d seemed readied at first to punish Duane for the slightest infraction. But it was Sunday night and the bar was dead, would be until ladies night on Tuesday-not that there were a lot of women willing to make the trip out here. So long as he pays his tab, let the guy bullshit as much as he wants.

When it didn’t look like Duane was going to stop drinking, Ann and James left for a well known fishing hole less than a mile away. They’d still managed to catch some plump hatchery trout before it got too dark. Not a lot of flavor, but if you dusted them with enough salt and fried them in butter you could eat them with their crunchy skins on.

Duane had showed up close to sunset, chain smoking and shaky, his right eye swollen shut and a bleeding incisor hanging askew. He’d apologized for not coming with them to fish, but business was business and you couldn’t pass it up when it dared to fall into your lap. As he’d leaned against the Camaro for support he told them he was going to be late for some appointments in Portland if he didn’t leave soon. There’d be no time to go back to the motel to check on Traci and he’d asked Ann if she and James would mind checking on her, it would really help him out. He’d tried to give her some money to go out somewhere nice for dinner and she’d pushed his hand away.

It was after ten when they found Traci running barefoot down the middle of 101, hysterical and soaked to the bone. Somehow they’d talked her into getting into Ann’s car and they’d driven her back to the motel and on the way she’d told them where Duane hid his money, how she’d followed him around the back of his mother’s house to the wooden tool shed where he kept it stashed in empty varnish cans. When they got her back in bed James had rolled her a joint to calm her down, hoping she would fall asleep. But Traci kept talking non-stop as if she were in a trance, telling them secrets about how Duane would sometimes cooperate with the police when he got caught, give up names so he wouldn’t serve any time.

They’d first waited a week to see if Traci would remember what she’d said to them, if she’d told Duane about it-and yet she could only recall running barefoot down 101, how a few cars had slowed next to her and asked if she needed help and when she’d peered inside she’d seen that the cars were packed with the very demons whom she’d heard trolled highways in search of souls. When James arranged to met Duane to buy some pot for a few friends, Duane only thanked him for checking in on Traci and never brought the night up again.

Knowing Duane, it still wasn’t any guarantee that Traci hadn’t said anything to him or that he wasn’t suspicious. James began to imagine it might be a trap or that Duane had simply moved his stash elsewhere and for several weeks they tried to forget about the whole thing until one night Ann had seen Duane and Traci come in to buy snacks at the store, headed to Portland so Traci could see her kid.

They’d waited until his mother was asleep. The shed wasn’t even locked, and the money was exactly where Traci had said it would be.

Chapter 27

Mikhail never rode in cars again after an accident outside of New York City, when his young driver had panicked on black ice and sent them careening down a sharp ravine. The driver had died on impact, and Mikhail had remained trapped until the following morning, held in by his crushed legs. Wedged sideways between granite boulders several feet above ground, the door below him had popped open during their descent, allowing a bone chilling wind to work its way inside. Water leaked from the trunk and turned to icicles. It smelled chlorinated, as if it had come from a swimming pool.

He was certain he’d lost an eye, had detected a narrowing of vision and a stinging wetness, but could lift neither hand to his face since both arms appeared to be shattered at the elbow. Shock must have drawn a protective shroud over his body because he hadn’t felt much pain, was thankful for nature’s mercy. There was nothing to be done but wait for help to arrive, and for several hours he drifted in and out of consciousness-not the same as finding oneself dozing on and off on a warm park bench, but something grander and more terrifying, as if he were on a train traversing a vast night plain and coming to only when he heard the harsh cry of its whistle. He hadn’t known the train was real, not until the hammering light of morning when he was being loaded into an ambulance on the road above and heard it a final time, saw the brown-blur of it passing behind a stand of birches with peeled bark ruffling in the wind like pages of ancient text.

During the night he’d also heard dogs howling in the distance, and when he’d glanced down through the open door he saw an old Russian woman he once knew gazing up from below. She’d died years ago, but Mikhail still had tender memories of her, of when he’d sit next to her in the park, listening to her talk about Russia while she fed pigeons as plump as first year turkeys, some of which wound up in her stew pot when money was tight. While Mikhail waited for help in his leather upholstered cocoon-there was no hope of ever freeing his legs and much less crawling out of the ravine-the old woman built a pillow of dried leaves and got comfortable. Soon a trio of scruffy coyotes appeared at her side and sat also.

He wasn’t surprised to see the coyotes. Half suspended in the cold air, he thought he must have resembled a young elk hanging in a tree, remembering a time when he was a boy and hadn’t awakened to greet his father who’d returned late from hunting. He’d gone outside early in the frosted morning and had played below the tree without noticing the rigid corpse above, hadn’t even thought to look up until the body shifted forward and showered him with cold blood. And yet he’d calmly walked back into his house to run a bath while his mother nearly collapsed in terror, convinced that seeing the boy covered in blood had been an omen, a sign that her beloved Mikhail would one day become a cold killer.

It had begun to snow. The coyotes never broke off eye contact with him, and when they began popping their tongues against the roofs of their mouths, the old woman bent forward and swatted them on their behinds like they were insolent children. The dogs lowered their heads and whined.

“Why aren’t you afraid of them, Misha?”

“Who are you talking about?”

“The wild dogs.”

The old woman laughed. “What’s there to fear? You know them as well as I.”

“What do you mean? Wild dogs all look the same to me. Starved and desperate.”

“Look closer Mikhail. At their faces. You know them better than you think.”

Mikhail worried that the old woman had lost her mind. It saddened him to see her like this. “I don’t understand, Misha… How are you feeling? Are you sure you should be out here in the woods?”

“Don’t be silly, my dear. I go where I want to now. Can you believe my bones no longer hurt me when I walk?

“That’s wonderful, Misha…”

“Yes.”

The coyotes stood up and began to pace around the old woman. It was obvious they were growing impatient. Misha grabbed them by their tails and pulled them toward her. They whimpered but did not struggle to get away.

“Now look closer at their faces and you’ll recognize them. These are the three men that took you away from your mother, from your homeland.”

“But Misha… This is foolishness.”

“Just look.”

Mikhail did as he was told. The longer he stared at the coyote’s upturned faces he realized that the old woman was right and he’d felt his heart race. Gradually their human faces became superimposed over their canine ones, like floating masks, exactly the way he remembered them from years before. Dmitri, Ivan and Viktor-he thought he’d never have to look upon those devils again. Not only had they convinced him to leave behind everything he knew, but they were also responsible for the death of his father.

Misha let the coyotes go and they began pacing around her again, baring greenish teeth. Some pissed dark holes in the fresh snow. The smell wafted up and burned his nostrils.

“What do they want Misha?”

“To tear you to pieces of course. They are still angry for what you did.”

“But they murdered my father. My mother warned me and I didn’t believe her. I thought it was only one of her tricks to get me to stay.”

“I see,” Misha said. “You must tell me what happened.”

Mikhail waited for a wave of dizziness to pass. Was he still losing blood from his right arm? He’d felt it collecting in his sleeve. He thought he could see a scattering of drops on the snow below.

“We’d been celebrating since dawn, when we first caught sight of New York. That night someone would help with our passage onto shore. I wasn’t used to drinking so much and passed out behind some crates. But when I awoke I overheard them talking, saying what an ignorant fool I was and how they were planning to make me do the most dangerous work, that they looked forward to turning my life into a living hell. Who’s going to care if he dies, Dmitri had told them. I hope his KGB dog of a father is watching from hell.

“I was terrified and didn’t know what to do. I lay there and cried while they listened to American music on a portable radio, laughing and drinking bottle after bottle of vodka, bragging about who would become the richest of the three. I was still terribly drunk and before I fell to sleep I prayed to my mother. Begged her forgiveness and asked her what I should do. I had a dream she was standing outside our house. Her eyes were sunken though ringed with silver tears, she’d lost a lot of weight. She refused to speak to me, or maybe she was incapable of speech and I watched as she floated past me to the tree I used to play under, saw her reach up and snap an icicle off a branch and hold it before her. I noticed then that the ice was in the shape of a knife and there was blood frozen in it. Her message was clear. When I awoke I crept out onto the deck and waited, holding the very knife my father had used for cutting deer meat, the one gift she’d carefully wrapped and hid in my pack before I’d left with my father’s killers. She’d made sure I was prepared.”

“And how did it feel to kill them?” Misha asked.

“It was easier than I thought it was going to be. They were too drunk to see it coming. One at a time they stumbled up on deck to urinate in the bay and I let them have it, slit their throats and pushed them overboard while they were still holding themselves. Before the captain came down that night to tell us when we’d have to be ready, I’d had plenty of time to clean up the mess. When he found me I pretended to be dead drunk. He seemed curious about what happened to the others but I acted as if I knew nothing and he wrote me off as a slow-witted boy. Fortunately he’d already been paid for our passage and didn’t make a fuss about it, just took a couple of bottles of vodka for himself and came and got me that night when it was time to jump ship. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t know a single soul in New York.”

“Did anyone ever discover what happened?”

“Yes and no Misha. Since I didn’t weigh them down, the bodies were eventually found floating in the bay. It was in the papers for a couple of weeks. The police were never able to solve what happened. They didn’t have any means of identifying them. We did not officially exist in this country.”

“I think that is why they are mostly angry with you, Mikhail. Even killers want a proper burial, to have their names uttered by the living one last time. You sent them to their graves as ghosts.”

Chapter 28

James grounded the boat onto a pebble beach and they got out. Close to the jetty now, they could have clambered over the stacked boulders to where the tide sucked at the edges of the crusted white, gull-fouled tip. They chose to follow a deer trail that led over a hill of slick dune grass and onto the fog-hidden beach. Not many years ago they’d come here and hid in the clefts of the dunes, away from the prying eyes of town. If it was a warm night, they’d bring sleeping bags and lie on their backs and wait for the Milky Way to appear above them-a ghostly blue peninsula against a sea of dusty black-and think about how all the grains of quartz below them could never equal the swirl of stars.

Ann recalled how in August the sundried seedpods of Scotch Broom would rustle in the breeze like tiny maracas to the distant fluting of a buoy anchored somewhere beyond the jetty. Unaware of how powerful the orbits were that already bound them, their lives back then still felt as vast as deep space, free from the sculpting hand of circumstance. When she was lying next to James, her mind would wander far from Traitor Bay, perhaps even into the future, until the mournful piping of the buoy guided her back to a jealous force that held sway over those born to the salt air.

They headed north, moving parallel to the last high tidal mark-a thick ribbon of torn kelp and jellyfish mixed with smooth-edged pieces of bark and immortal plastic. The fog seemed to be thinning where they walked, but far out on the exposed sand and rock and deep tide pools it remained as thick as paint. Ann knew the area well, the barnacle covered logs and stumps temporarily sunk deep into the sand until the next storm pulled them from their sockets and swept them further south. It was the same beach where she’d found the arm, her first warning that Traitor Bay was in trouble.

This thing that has washed into town is big, and if we don’t take a stand it’s going to pull us out with it.

It was as if they were a pair of strangers who suddenly find themselves forced to work together, like those true life survival shows where people are trying to get out of a collapsed train tunnel or escape from an unstable hostage taker. She’d tried talking to him in the boat, but he hadn’t stopped being angry over the money. It was clear to her that if she hadn’t moved it, James would have taken it all without telling her.

“When are you going to stop sulking?” she asked. “You should be glad I didn’t run off like I’d wanted too.”

James stopped to light a cigarette while fog drew across his forehead. He raised his dark eyes and stared into her face. She’d become someone he did not know and he was angry she’d dared to change. He’d thought she still might be in his back pocket, that he could return some day and they would get together and this time he’d have the experience under his belt and she’d be almost like he’d left her only needing him more. And yet he knew he’d been fooling himself all along, didn’t understand where such a messed up fantasy had come from and why it had turned into a kind of addiction. What Ann said was usually the truth, and to be around her now felt like standing in a center of grass fire hoping that if you are to be consumed that it would be over fast.

“Maybe you should quit the bullshit now, Ann. I know exactly what you would have done as soon as you got the chance.”

“Listen to yourself. That money was never ours to keep in the first place. If you hadn’t spent so much time hiding somewhere and feeling sorry for yourself, you would have found out that the world changed without you…”

“And what do you know about the world, Ann?” James said, his voice rising. “Do you really think I’m the one who’s delusional? Do you?”

“You’re scaring me.”

“Well fuck me.”

He put his lighter away and they resumed walking. They could hear gulls circling around them in the fog, cawing with excitement over the dead or dying snacks left behind the retreating tide. Back when they were dating they would have made a special trip to the beach just to see what might be found. Sometimes people came upon live fish thrashing in the shallow water and they’d carry them home to their kitchens. James uncle had once come home with a thirty-pound steelhead he’d found gasping on the beach. Other than a hook they’d found buried deep in its stomach, it had baked nicely.

“I wish I knew why you’re acting this way,” Ann said. “I didn’t know a person could change so fast in the wrong direction.”

“You’d be surprised what someone will do if backed into a corner.”

“I’ve been there. Do you really think I planned to still be in Traitor Bay? Maybe I haven’t grown wise to the world like you have, but at least I didn’t throw my conscience down the toilet.”

James shot her a glance but didn’t slow his pace. “Well there’s one thing about you that hasn’t changed, Ann.”

“And what would that be?”

“Your mouth.”

As Ann laughed it off, she felt something inside her break. Before she was aware of what she was doing, she reached out and took hold of his arm and he shrugged her off without looking at her.

“I thought we once loved each other. Doesn’t that still glow in you some place, or has it been completely snuffed it out?”

“It doesn’t matter to me anymore. Nothing does.”

“Seriously? That’s what living on the road did to you?”

“All I know is that when I hit bottom I had to sell everything to get out again. I’ll die before I go back to living that way. As soon as I get my money this place will only be a bad memory and the only hard decision I’ll have to make is deciding what I’m going to drink it off with.”

“And me?”

James stared at maps in the sand, wondering if his life was written there by waves. “It’s what I have to do.”

Ann stopped walking. “Wait.”

“What do you want, Ann? Don’t you understand a thing I’ve said?”

She closed her eyes off from the distraction of the fog. “Stop talking and listen … What do you hear?”

James toed the pulpy remains of a starfish. “I don’t hear anything but the ocean.”

Ann leaned forward. “You’re not listening. It’s a low growl … Like an engine coming closer.”

“There’s no way it could be them.”

Chapter 29

When she opened her eyes she first saw a faint light, a stain on a thick wad of gauze. It reminded of her summers when the fog rolled in unexpectedly and the sun hung in the sky like a red scab. As it floated toward them it intensified and divided into two. A dark shape caused the fog to billow and when it roared closer they saw the chrome bumper of the Russian’s van plowing through.

They ran instinctively for the water, where soft sand would most likely mire tires. Fog still clung to the sentinels of wave-hewn basalt, passable ruins of ancient temples. Although James was breathing hard he didn’t fall far behind, fought back the hot stitching in his torn shoulder and lungs. They slipped on seaweed and struck rock, unable to stop and pick out the barnacles that had cut through their jeans and chipped off into their flesh like small teeth. Only when they reached a series of wide shallow pools did they turn to check on the whereabouts of the van. They could see nothing but blurry gray shapes behind the cottony veil of fog, the sounds of tires spitting sand and men cursing and then suddenly the crackle of gunfire overhead.

“They’re going to kill us.”

“Only if they can get close enough. They don’t know this beach like we do.” Ann took James by the arm and pulled him forward through an icy pool and up onto a shelf of rock, a natural staircase that wrapped around the base of an exposed seamount usually half-covered by deep water. She hadn’t been here since her early teens. It had been that long since the tide was this low.

They paused for a moment and listened to the van’s motor chug to a stop. When they heard the men splashing in the water toward them, they clawed at slick handholds of rock and began to take slow cautious steps around to the other side. The wall of rock was alive next to them as they hugged passed, as soft and swollen as cold alien flesh next to their exposed skin. The air itself was filled with a squelchy static made by barnacles and anemones expelling putrid brine, retreating into holes and cracks bleeding seawater. Ann glanced up and saw the old sheet of steel that was still attached to the rock by rusted, two-foot bolts, its warning message to visitors long eaten away by salt.

On the other side they could no longer hear the Russians shouting curses. Ann climbed down first and showed James where to leap onto a rampart of rock that led further out to sea. James stopped to catch his breath.

“We can’t keep going. We’ll get ourselves trapped and drowned.”

“If you have any better ideas then let me know. Come on, they’re going to be here soon.”

“But this is suicide, Ann.”

He couldn’t stand the sea much anymore, not after spending a night holding onto the outside of an overcrowded life raft, feeling the hot strands in his shoulder begin to slowly tear while waiting for Navy searchers to rescue him and his team from an exercise gone terribly bad. And he hadn’t even thought about the sharks much, although he could sense them circling down below.

The fog had moved out some more, exposing a tide he’d never seen, so dark and full of menace in its almost mirror-like calmness. He sensed they’d crossed into a place where the doors one came through would quietly be locked behind. The tide would begin to come in, at first lapping playfully against your legs until it grew into merciless waves that took you and pulled you under and out to a swaying black forest of kelp where your mind might still sense through clouding eyes the variety of creatures eagerly gathering to disassemble you.

“Come on,” Ann said, grabbing his hand.

Wading through belly-deep water, they came to a three-story wall of steaming rock. Ann stuck her hands under the water and felt for the starfish-rimmed opening she recalled from years before. They could hear the Russians shouting at one another. It sounded as if they’d split up to look for them.

“What are you doing?” James asked.

“Stay still. We have to wait for the water to recede.”

Just as they heard the Russian slapping around the last slimy edge of rock, the water they stood in began to draw back, and the passage Ann remembered from long ago began to appear.

“Quick. Before the water flows back.” Ann bent down and plunged through the hole. James followed, and when he emerged on the other side he climbed after Ann up a ladder of broken rock and mussel outcroppings to a ridged lookout above. By the time he reached the top his shoulder was on fire. Ann pulled him down next to her in a smooth hollow pasted with feathers. The rock was dry and slightly warm, but they would need much more to stop them from shivering in their wet clothes.

“You’re going to die out here,” the Russian shouted from the other side. “Tide is coming back in. Give yourselves up. We won’t hurt you if you give yourselves up.”

They listened to their pursuer slosh through the tide pool. He had no other route to reach them unless he swam around the wall in one of the deeper pools where the risk of a strong undertow was likely. Ann slid on her stomach to the edge of the rock and saw a hand groping the side of the hole they’d climbed through. She took out the.38 and waited for the water to recede again.

“No,” James whispered in her ear. When he tried to put his hand over the.38, she jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow and he rolled away in agony. She turned and set the gun against the rock between her outstretched arms.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Ann said.

“He said he wouldn’t hurt us,” James replied.

“He just tried taking pot shots at us in the fog. Not exactly a friendly gesture.”

“I’m just saying. We should talk to him.”

When Ann looked back down again she saw the bloodshot eyes of a man flicking up at her. Dark stubble covered his face except for the pink welts of old scars creasing his lower jaw and throat. He’d only made it halfway through the hole and looked like a burglar frozen in spotlight. He kept his left arm tucked up beneath his chest and it worried her.

‘It’s not too late.”

“What do you want?”

“Tell me where you’ve hidden the money and I’ll leave.”

“No.”

“Listen up bitch because I’m not going to repeat myself. I know everything. So, no more games, understand? I’m not here on vacation.”

From this angle he can’t tell that I’m armed, she thought. He thinks he’s got the upper hand. “Then maybe you should just swim back to Russia when the tide comes in.”

When the man began to laugh Ann could sense in his seething overconfidence an underfed appetite for sadism. His eyes wandered toward the slate sky, pretending to focus on something behind her and attempting to distract her. But Ann had kept her attention zeroed in on his body language, had watched the subtle stirring of his left shoulder blade below the leather jacket.

When she saw his arm shoot out from under his chest she lifted the.38 above the lip of rock and fired. Fragments of shell and ancient basalt exploded and the man sprang back through the hole, screaming. Ann lay her arms down on the rock and waited, her heart pounding her ribs against the rock below her. She felt faint for a moment, then washed over by cold chill. She heard her grandfather’s voice, warmed by an afternoon of sipping whiskey on the back porch while watching Ann shoot down tin cans set out on old tree stumps. If you have to shoot at somebody don’t shoot to injure, Ann.

They listened as the hurt man splashed across the tide pool, shouting his partner’s name until his voice was drowned out by a surge of larger waves. It wouldn’t be long, Ann knew, before she and James would be completely cut off. She’d spent much of her life watching the sea roll in and roll out. For natives it became something you felt inside, as steady as the ticking of a grandfather clock. People unfamiliar with the tide or the speed in which it moved often made the fatal error of believing they had plenty of time to crawl off an exposed seamount or avoid being trapped in coves carved by waves. But if you sat down next to the water’s edge and really watched, you could actually see it edging toward you.

“They’re going to come back to kill us now for sure,” James said.

Ann sat up and rubbed her throbbing temples. She felt sick to her stomach now, worried she might throw up. “I don’t think so. Unless they plan on swimming.”

James pulled a half wet cigarette from his pack and frowned before tearing it in two. He stuck the dry end in his mouth. “Well you had me worried a second there, Ann. Then the plan is to just wait until we drown?”

“The tide isn’t going to reach us.”

“You’re smoking crack. Have you forgotten where we are?”

“I’m serious. My uncle used to come here to fish.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true. I’m surprised your dad never told you. He and my uncle Jack did a lot of fishing and crabbing together back in the day. But Uncle Jack was a daredevil type, did stuff the other boys shied away from. During low tides he’d come up here alone and fish all day until it went back out and he could walk home with a bundle of perch. Drove my grandmother crazy with worry. In fact one time the tide didn’t go back out far enough and he had to wait through another cycle before he could wade back to shore.”

“So what makes you think the tide today isn’t going to be higher than anything your uncle Jack saw?”

“I looked at the tide table yesterday morning. I was showing a couple who came into the store how to read one.”

James lit his salvaged cigarette and inhaled deeply. He stood up for a moment and stared toward the shore before sitting down next to her.

“Jesus Ann. I can’t believe you shot at him.”

“I was thinking about what he did to Tami and how mad I was. I wanted to take him out, was sure I could do it. Then something made me move at the last second.”

James slid closer. “You’re shivering.”

“I know that.”

“You remember what hypothermia is, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

He slipped a hand inside his jacket and came out with the flask. Ann glanced at it and nodded and he smiled and unscrewed the lid for her. Her hand was shaking as she brought the whiskey to her lips and felt it glide down hot like those unexpected rays that cut through a frigid spring fog and sent steam curling off the sand. The whiskey was a little gritty but not worth spitting it out. James fingers kneaded her shoulder before working their way up to the tense chords of her neck. She closed her eyes and tried imagining his face.

“Have another drink,” he said when she tried to hand the flask back to him.

Chapter 30

“What can I do to help, Sheriff?” Coach Burns asked.

“I need your car. And any guns you’ve got in the house.”

“Whatever for?”

“Because it’s finally happened. God, you remember the movies don’t you? How they’d drop out of the sky like monkeys with machine guns? Blowing away every American they saw until some redneck locals banded together and fought back? I never thought we’d actually see the day…”

The sheriff reached out his glass for another refill. Burns noticed the blistered marks on his wrists. He lifted the bottle from the table and poured Dawkins another sour mash. Part of him was sorry to see the whiskey go so fast. He’d been saving it for St. Paddy’s.

“I still don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about them!”

“Who?”

“The goddamn Russians. They’ve landed here in Traitor!”

Burns took a deep breath and exhaled slowly through his nose. He counted to ten. It didn’t quite take, so he counted again. Retirement had demanded less daily practice. “Cuke Burns” was not known for losing his cool, unless he caught one of his students smoking cigarettes. He searched for tell-tale signs of madness, but nothing had swum to the surface of Dawkin’s lumpy white face. The poor man’s head looked as if it had been used as a soccer ball. Had he been on one of his benders again, got mouthy with some other fellas while off duty? Why didn’t he have his own guns?

It wouldn’t be the first time Cuke had seen Dawkins in trouble. One had to wonder if he went out in search of it sometimes. He was just lucky the county was forgiving, always came through for him during election season. Cuke lifted the bottle halfway to his mouth and glanced down its throat at the golden mash winking back. He changed his mind and set the bottle down.

“Did you just say what I thought you did?” Burns asked.

“I did Cuke. The Reds are here. But they haven’t stormed our beaches like in the movies. They got here by taking the goddamn highway!”

“I’ve got to be honest with you Dawk. You’re not on drugs are you?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why are you telling me the Russian army is invading Traitor?”

Dawkins drained his glass. He glanced around the room at the framed sports photos and shelves of trophies gathering dust. His face was up there on the wall too somewhere. “I’m talking about the mob, Cuke. The Russian mob is here in town and they took Mitch and me hostage along with a couple of kids. They’re looking for some money they say is theirs.”

“How’d you get those marks on your wrists?”

“They cuffed me with a plastic band. There was no other way to free myself. I pressed them against a wood stove until they melted enough to pull apart.”

“Jesus,” coach whispered. “Should I go get my first aid kit?”

“No. I’ll be okay. There’s no time for it anyway.”

“No time for what?”

“To stop them before they leave Traitor.”

Cuke shook his head. “That’s not possible Dawk. All the phones are still out, even the cell phones. They say Traitor is cut off from both sides. There’s an overturned truck on bay bridge and up north of town it’s a total mess. I heard a piece of highway a half block long slid down and almost took a lucky trucker with it. There’s heavy equipment on the way, but it can’t go nowhere until the bridge is cleared.”

Dawkins held out his empty glass. His eyes seemed to be staring inward. “One more hit Cuke and I’ll be on my way. Now please go get me your guns.”

“No one’s asking you to be a hero, Dawk.”

“I know that.”

“You’re serious about this.”

“Look at what they done to me. I’ve got to go see if I can find them.”

Cuke got up from the table and walked stiffly toward the back bedroom. “Son of a bitch.”

“What’s that?”

“You heard me.”

Dawkin’s mind began to drift while he waited. Cuke’s whiskey had warmed him up nicely. The hot anger he’d felt had passed and he was glad for it. If you wanted to do things right you needed to stay focused on what had to be done.And once you get them out of the way you’re going to need to find those kids that left you, kicked you upside the head and left you behind in that stinking shack …

Ten minutes later Cuke returned with a gym bag and set it on the table. He’d gotten dressed. The sheriff noticed he was armed with a.45 in a holster.

“What do you think you’re doing, Cuke?”

“We can get the rifles from the truck. I’ve got two pistols in that bag and plenty of ammo.”

“You’re not coming with me.”

“Like hell I’m not.”

Chapter 31

As soon as he reached town, James headed for a vacation home development he remembered being mostly deserted during the winter. Wealthy city people loved their big trophy summer houses. But when it came to hammering storms and the idea of having to rough it without electricity, most chose to stay close to home where cell phone service and an operating Starbucks were guaranteed.

His clothes were soaked through and his slow-moving limbs had gone numb. It felt as if he were a hundred years old. He was disappointed but not surprised to see that the power was still out, the rows of identical houses all dark and quiet. He’d hoped to find some electric heat to warm his bones for a while. There was no time to build a fire.

In the back of the house he’d lifted a hefty specimen of beach coble and smiled at the flowery, hand-painted “Welcome” before throwing it through the slider window. Instead of rushing inside he stood quietly on the new redwood patio and listened for sounds of neighbors stirring but heard none. He’d been right about no one being around. And even if there was, what would they do, with no cops or phones to call them with?

Wrapping himself in a thick quilt he found draped over a couch, he proceeded to search bedroom closets for dry clothes, found a hoodie and a wool cap to change into, but no pants. Unless he soon found better alternatives, he’d have to wear what he had on for the next several days. His pants had shrunk some and the cold.38 tucked under his waistband dug painfully, but wasn’t going anywhere either.

In the kitchen he threw open cabinets until he found a bag of chocolate bars, presumably leftovers from last Halloween. He immediately unwrapped several and shoved them into his mouth and chased the stale glob down with an orange soda he’d found unopened in the refrigerator. While he finished his drink he looked around the house. He checked the phone but it was dead.

Outside dusk was falling. He found a set of keys near the door to the garage. In the garage he found a car covered by a tarp and whistled at the shining ’63 Skylark sleeping beneath it, all powder blue and silver as if it were meant to be flown across a cloudless sky. He recalled seeing the car before he’d left for the navy, driven around town by a dentist who’d recently bought the place. None of the locals could stand the man who expected to be treated like visiting royalty, who frequently drove intoxicated, but always seemed to be somewhere where the sheriff wasn’t.

Everyone wondered why the dentist had wanted a place in Traitor anyway when they were forced to listen to him brag about his latest golfing trip to Hawaii or drunken gambling junket to Las Vegas. But by the end of the summer the town began to put the pieces together when they started seeing him riding around with a young woman who clearly wasn’t his wife. The tryst didn’t surprise them in the least. For many men like the dentist, Traitor Bay was a convenient place to stash one’s current fleshpot.

James packed the trunk with a shovel and other supplies he thought he might need. He was still cold and anxious to see if the Skylark’s heater worked. As quietly as he could he pulled up the garage door and looked up and down the street. Night had dropped fast. There was still no sign of life in the other houses, but closer to the highway where the locals lived he could hear the grind of gas generators.

The Skylark started right away. James liked the throaty voice of the engine, the smell of the newly upholstered leather seats and the old-time dials and an AM radio with push buttons. He had to remind himself that she wasn’t for keeps, that there’d soon be a time when he’d have to give her up for new wheels. But for now she was all his.

Chapter 32

Have I died? What’s happening to me?

The drugs James had ground up and put into the whiskey flask were not wearing off. Ann imagined she was turning the pages in a child’s picture book and witnessing ink sketches of herself, of helpless Ann drifting through a series of worlds where she became smaller and smaller until night began to seep in from the edges and the pages themselves turned black. By then she was blind and bumping around in the dark, like a glob of oil inside a seafaring tanker’s belly, until at one point she felt herself being lifted up into someone’s arms and carried, recalling that pleasant sensation of being asleep and having her father haul her to the car after a long night of visiting relatives.

The ground below her stilled and Ann thought she was now in one of the secret glades she’d discovered while picking ferns. Lying on her back she stared up at a jade membrane shielding the sky, veined leaves of ancient maples whose lichen-crusted limbs were clothed in loose sweaters of green moss, learned associates of a timeless symposium. After a while she began to hear loud crackling sounds, followed by the smell of wood smoke. The membrane above peeled away and she saw the night sky, the comforting presence of the Big Dipper.

Invisible hands took hold of her body again and rolled her gently to her side and when the warmth came it was like having the sun suddenly pressed against her back. Fingers briefly pried open her eyes but her vision was too blurry to make out anything but a large peeled root sprouting thick hair. And yet if she tried to concentrate, a single eye began to come in and out of focus from the pale flesh half curtained by dark wet roots. The eye had a telescopic intensity, as if it were glassing on her inner landscape from a great distance.

She felt a calloused hand slide across her belly and her ribs. The roughness stung her skin, fired up nerve endings that shot to her brain. She began to shake uncontrollably. She wanted to scream at the person who was touching her to stop.

“You’re alive,” said a man she did not know. She assumed it was the peeled root who was speaking to her, who was now pulling down her shirt. Who the fuck did he think he was? His voice had reminded her of how green logs hissed when you threw them onto a fire. Her pulse raced inside her, a hummingbird trying to find its way back through an open window, the room shrinking fast and a surprised cat waking quickly from its nap to stare. Ann could hear her shuddering breath. An icy fear clamped around her heart. She imagined the severed arm with the Cyclops tattoo, its blue fingers tightening its grip.

Root-face backed into shadow, sensing the stress he was causing her.

“You must rest now and let the fire do its work.”

The man rose up and walked away. She wanted to talk but her mouth failed her as if it had been shot full of Novocain. For a moment she wondered if it was someone else’s mouth she was trying to speak through, that maybe her mind had found its way into a stranger’s body and was slowly wiring itself into its mainframe one nerve at time. She’d just spent hours outside of her body, so why should she believe she even still had one? She had no proof, other than the fact that she now felt pain where she’d been scratched deeply by the tree branch.

It’s going to take time to thaw. Time I don’t have to spare.

Embers shot into the night sky like paper wasps defending their nest, trailing up in dense formations and scattering with the wind. Ann watched them drift down the beach and go out. There was the smell of meat again, of something being roasted over the fire on a stick. The man came back several times to dump armfuls of driftwood on the fire, building up a thick bed of glowing coals. She felt his course fingers touch her shoulder one last time and then he was gone.

Chapter 33

Ann had hidden the money next to the seven buried sailors.

According to town lore, a father and son had gone out clamming at low tide when they found the bodies of the sailors washed up on Traitor’s shore. The dispute over their origin was never resolved but it was agreed that the men were not American, that their remains would not last long. A group of townsfolk loaded them onto a horse-drawn cart and began the task of laying the bodies to rest in a strip of scrub woods near the beach. Hacking out the shallow graves among thick cables of roots and stubborn rock had been time consuming, and as night fell some of the volunteers did shifts guarding the corpses from scavengers. When the last sailor was finally buried, a small ceremony was conducted by a priest who’d ridden in from Buoy City. Afterwards, local children were invited to plant a sapling above each mound, and over a hundred years later the trees had grown into a cathedral of wind-contorted pine.

He found the money where Ann had told him, between the sixth and seventh sailor. When he first tried to pull it from the hole the wet mud had held it possessively. The white leather felt gummy and came off in his hands like an old skin. As soon as he freed the bag from its miserable grave, he dropped it onto dry ground and moved back, reminding himself to breathe. His mind had begun playing tricks on him and for a brief moment he’d imagined the bag was a shrunken torso. When he finally got the courage to see what was inside he found a garbage bag stuffed with bricks of money, many with rubber bands that had almost rotted away.

James was overcome with joy and began to tremble uncontrollably. He couldn’t believe it. He wanted to thank someone but didn’t know who, so he thanked whoever it was that had crushed Duane’s skull in prison because he knew he wouldn’t be holding fat stacks of money in his hands if Duane was still around to do something about it. Sure, it hadn’t been a cakewalk even with Duane out of the way but that was just the sort of luck James was accustomed to. Nothing good ever happened in his life without something coming along to fuck it up.

He transferred the money into a suitcase he’d stolen from the dentist’s house, stood up and tossed the leather bag out into undergrowth. He wanted to shout, even if only to the ghosts of sailors watching him from the dark grove of trees. But he thought better of it.

Remember, you’re only halfway down the mountain now. The rest is going to take everything you’ve got…

He closed his eyes and thought ahead to some nameless motel in Twin Falls Idaho, set back from the dusty interstate. A place far enough away that he could enjoy the luxury of sleep, if sleep would ever come again. He’d studied a map and decided it would be the farthest he’d have to run before he could stop worrying for awhile. Twin Falls. Would he be able to hear them from his bed? Would they drown out the sounds of someone coming? Not now. Don’t think about it yet. This is the time you must run. Nothing else matters now.

While he packed the suitcase in the trunk he heard the moan of the buoy coming from the mouth of the jetty. It made him think about Ann. He could see her as he’d left her on the rock-a dark haired, drugged siren. He recalled a dream she’d once told him about when they were young, a dream about being out on a rock, of losing herself while wandering through rooms full of fascinating objects, of not realizing that the tide had come in and stranded her out at sea. How ironic, he thought. He didn’t know what that word meant exactly, but decided it might be something Ann would understand.

He sat in the Skylark and smoked. Being in the old car relaxed him and that was good because he was going to need to keep his cool for the next few days while he made his escape. He wondered what kind of effect the car had on the dentist, what he got out of it. Did he sometimes wear his old letterman’s jacket when he drove? James smiled. He’d be sad when it came time to dump her. A car like this would just draw to much attention anyway. She’s going to turn heads wherever she goes.

He heard the buoy again and this time it sounded more insistent, like a woman’s muffled scream. I’m officially losing it, he thought. She’s going to be okay. As soon as you’re out of town you’re going to make an anonymous 911 call and tell them she’s on the rock. And then you’re going to forgot you ever had a life here.

Cold sweat trickled down his back and he shivered. He reminded himself that there was money in the trunk and a new life waiting for him. If he didn’t take it now he might as well curl up next to some dead sailors and stop bitching about his messed up life.

He thought he saw a flash of light on the trees, and when he glanced in the rearview mirror he saw headlights coming up the road.

Chapter 34

Cyclops glanced at his pocket watch. He sat on a wooden bench in front of the store that hadn’t opened all day. The snack and beer advertisements taped to the windows were making him hungry. He removed a copy of the local paper from its salt-ravaged steel box and glanced over the pages until a story about Sheriff Dawkins caught his attention. Dripping with praise, the article described how the sheriff’s no bull attitude kept the bad elements from even attempting to spoil his beloved county. He was even presented an award for outstanding service, an idea that set in the Cyclops stomach worse than the half-cooked elk liver. There was a shot of a perky high school girl in a short dress handing him a brass plaque, and while the sheriff kept his eyes humbly lowered, it wasn’t difficult to notice that they were stealing a glance at the girl’s shapely brown thighs.

Cyclops laughed. He dug a hand deep into his overcoat and smiled when he felt the elk heart against his palm, soft and still warm from being cooked over a blazing fire next to where Ann lay. He wrapped the organ with a sheet of newsprint and raised it to his mouth. Taking a deep bite, he felt the blood jam pour into his throat and seek out his soul. The heart made for a good dessert, he decided. There was gentle sweetness in the middle, unlike the liver which seemed to draw up the bile and try to turn the eater’s body against itself. He knew this was how the wildness in things often behaved. It had tricks up its old sleeve that we could only dream of understanding.

He’d never trusted Duane from the moment they’d met. The sheriff had said he was alright, but Mikhail only saw a liability.

“It’s his wife Sarah I’m worried about,” Dawkins had said.

“His wife?”

“She’s unhappy. And she knows too much.”

At the time Mikhail was living in Seattle, in the process of setting up a chain of operations on the west coast. The disfiguring accident wouldn’t happen until he moved back to New York a few years later, but up until then women had found him handsome and exotic, and unlike the men he knew that preferred to pay for their female companionship, Mikhail enjoyed the thrill of the chase, of often topping off his seductions by reading from a slender book of Pushkin’s poems that he kept in his pocket.

He’d stayed in a motel next to the highway while he met with Duane and the sheriff to work over the details. Invariably they would go to the local bar afterwards and drink and later Mikhail would wake up in his cheerless room thinking that Duane was still going to get them all into big trouble some day.

The next night after the bars closed, Duane had no clue he was being followed home. He was too drunk and shouldn’t have been driving, Mikhail thought. It was a bad sign. When he’d driven past Duane’s house he’d seen Sarah in the window. Their eyes had briefly faced and a frame of time seemed as if had been to jarred loose from its river of continuity, her image suspended in a flash of white light that seared itself permanently into his mind and did not weaken with time.

Earlier the following evening he’d walked to the house, while Duane and the sheriff had only begun to work through another round of drinks at the local bar. Mikhail had stood quietly under the trees and watched the woman and her young daughter sitting in front of the blue glow of a television. Her face was much like Ann’s now, reminding him of rare bloodlines and pale flowers up in the alpine slopes of mountains. Yes, he guessed that he was that kind of man when it came to women. He’d watched as they got up to refill glasses and microwave popcorn, let their cat in and out the back door. It wasn’t until they glanced out the window that he began to see their fear, how its weight seemed to pull down whatever happiness they’d allowed themselves to feel. Was it me? Did they sense they were being watched?

His answer came soon after the bars had closed and the girl had been tucked into bed, when Duane had come roaring up to the front of the house, stereo kicking out an ugly bass that shook window panes. Mikhail had watched him stumble from his car, unzip his pants and piss in the flowerbox. Not long after he’d gone inside, all the lights had come on. Shouting followed, and he’d heard sharp thudding sounds like someone punching drywall with their fist. When he’d heard the woman cry out, he’d wanted to go inside and save her.

And you did save her, Cyclops thought. He took another bite of the elk’s heart and chewed slowly, gazed at the wet highway before him, a spooled out reel of film.

After all their arrangements had been made, Mikhail had checked out of his motel and said goodbye to the sheriff. For the next few nights he parked his car in front of Duane’s house and kept watch while bad thoughts charred in his mind. One night before Duane had come home from drinking, Mikhail was surprised to see Sarah emerge from the house carrying a suitcase, a dark bruise smudged across her cheekbone. He followed her from a distance down to the Greyhound bus stop, couldn’t tell if she’d seen him park beneath some trees, and shut the lights.

He’d wanted to talk to her but was afraid he’d only frighten her more. Where is your little girl, he remembered thinking. And then everything that happened next was a blur, Duane’s tires billowing smoke after making a sudden U-turn in the middle of the highway and speeding back toward Sarah who tripped and fell as she tried to get away. Duane wasn’t drunk tonight but wired on something stronger and he’d jumped out of his car and run after the woman whose only place to go was an empty phone booth. When she slammed the door shut in his face he’d started to punch webs into the glass while she tried to find change in her purse with shaking hands.

“You goddamn bitch!” His eyes were dark and pitted and drew the night like iron filaments being pulled toward a magnet. And then Duane was no longer thinking about his current emotional pain, but trying to wrap his mind around why his testicles suddenly felt as if they’d just been crudely wired to an electrical outlet.

After he collapsed to the ground screaming, he’d tried his best to roll over and get a look at his attacker. Mikhail saw it coming and applied the stun gun to the back of Duane’s neck, not caring if he’d gone too far. Duane had writhed some more and pissed himself before his limbs went limp and he lay quietly on the ground with cigarette butts clinging to his face. Mikhail had watched him breathe while he decided what to do next. One idea had been burning a hole through him in the past few days.

When he turned his head toward the phone booth, Sarah was standing frozen behind the cracked glass, her face washed in tears. He looked into her eyes and didn’t see what he’d expected. The animal who had beat her was now lying helpless in front of her, and clutched in Mikhail’s hand glittered the knife his mother had once given him as a young man.

“Don’t you want me to kill him?”

“Go away!” she’d screamed.

She had no reason to trust Mikhail. She didn’t even know him, had only seen him riding around with the sheriff and glimpsed him once when he’d driven by the house. When she’d asked Duane who the man was, he’d just stared ahead and pretended he hadn’t heard her.

Yet he learned that she’d left her child with her sister. That she planned to start a new life in Southern California and would send for her daughter as soon as she could. It wasn’t a very good plan but it was all she had. She feared Duane would kill her if he saw her again. She told him all that she knew about the smuggling operation and who was involved, but she hadn’t figured out how Mikhail fit in, had no idea how much higher up the food chain he was than the sheriff or her husband. She brought up the subject a couple of times and each time he warned her it was a bad idea.

He’d insisted on driving her as far as she wanted, to be sure that Duane didn’t try to follow. Sarah cried off and on until they reached the redwoods. In a small town strip mall she bought new clothes and some hair coloring. When they checked into motels he slept in a chair next to door where he could be ready for trouble. One night they’d stayed up later than usual talking, and before he’d turned off the lights she’d asked him if he would hold her…

Chapter 35

On nights that she couldn’t distract herself by reading, Ann would spend hours listening to the street sounds coming from outside. James thought it was strange when she’d told him about it-of how she’d imagine plotlines based each passersby, see them come to life like films projected in her mind. Sometimes she heard people singing and that always made her think of home, of being down near the docks on a clear dawn where the older fishermen still knew songs from their grandfathers. And then there were nights she wished she could erase from memory-popping gunfire, screaming derelicts and the footfalls of demons scratching the sidewalk as they passed below her apartment window.

Two nights before James had come home bleeding and they’d returned to Traitor, Ann had left work early with a migraine. She’d turned out almost all of the lights to see if she could coax it into backing off. Her neighbors across the hall were having a party and so far their noise hadn’t bothered her. It was the street outside that caused tension the most, but somehow she’d managed to fall asleep despite the random shrieks of police cars and ambulances, people carrying on conversations that she couldn’t hear clearly enough to understand, yet loud enough that her mind would conjure its own interpretations. In the middle of the night she’d awakened to the sound of someone at the door. She’d reached out and turned on the bedside lamp, fully expecting James to moan at her and roll over, except that his side of the bed was empty.

When James didn’t open the door right away, she worried that maybe he’d left his key again in his bellman’s uniform. The hotel was a twenty minute walk away and he probably was in no mood to wade back through the army of crazies that roamed the streets at this hour. Blurry from ineffective migraine pills, Ann got out of bed and half-sleep walked to the door and automatically reached for the chain to unlatch it before her eyes were drawn down toward the doorknob turning back and forth, the tumblers of the old brass mechanism inside grinding like knives being sharpened.

It took her a moment to find her breath again, to direct it through her trembling mouth. She’d asked who it was but got no answer, and when she’d squinted through the peephole, there was a man she didn’t know standing in the yellowed hallway. She didn’t think she’d seen him before, but she was never sure. She did know it wasn’t James because the man had a much more imposing frame, with massive shoulders that stretched to both ends of the fisheye. The doorknob stopped.

“I hear you.”

Ann had held her breath. He’d looked directly at her and she’d seen a cool malevolence she’d never encountered before. Later she would remember the misshapen contours of his face, as if it were a melted mass of cooled steel. When she didn’t say anything, he’d put his ear up against the door and puffed on a cigarette.

“I know you’re there.”

She’d edged back from the door and squeezed the fire in her temples with both palms, willing herself not to cry, feeling the sting start at the corners of her eyes. Cigarette smoke curled up from under the door and invaded her room. Who was he? What did he want?

Her mind flashed on a shoebox were she’d hidden the.38. She hadn’t told James that she’d brought it-he would have thought she was nuts. How would you know who you’re really shooting at-he’d asked her once when she’d taken him outside to target practice at her grandfather’s house-when you don’t remember faces like the rest of us? He was still trying to understand how her system worked, and at the time she wasn’t even sure either until she’d met the specialist in Portland. Later she’d tried to explain her condition to him, of how she’d trained her mind to pick out details most people would miss and how her memory organized them.

The doorknob began to move more frantically. She’d heard a deep grunt, and then the door shuddered as the man threw his weight into it until the wood made cracking sounds.

She was about to get the.38 before the outside hall was suddenly filled with music and drunken laughter. The neighbor’s party was breaking up. She’d looked through the door again and saw that the man was gone. When James got back, she’d told him about what had happened and watched the blood drain from his face. He’d paced the apartment, asking her dozens of questions that she was unable to answer.

When she asked him if he knew who had been at the door he’d switched gears, had told her the guy was probably a drunk from across the hall who thought it would be fun to mess around, that it was only her imagination must have made it seem more than that. She was in no shape to argue. She’d gone back to bed and cried while James sat by the window drinking from a bottle of stolen hotel wine until dawn.

I should have realized how much you and Duane were alike. How selfish you were, how easily you could put me in danger and not seem to care.

And here I am. Alive I guess, only because the throbbing in my leg tells me so. If I was dead I wouldn’t be feeling any pain. Right?

Wrapped in a moth-eaten wool blanket, she spread her hands next to a fire and let the warmth travel up through her fingers and into her core. Except for her bra and panties, her clothes and boots had been set out to dry. She wondered who’d removed them, who’d left a nearly full bottle of mineral water next to her head. She could remember a man’s voice and nothing more.

Other than sporadic flashes of phosphorous in distant waves, the beach was dark. There were no other fires, no vacationers roasting marshmallows. She looked for the glow of town far over the ridge of dunes and saw nothing but a few stars pinned above the contours of Cougar Mountain.

She had no idea what day it was. Judging by the position of the moon, she guessed the night wasn’t more than a few hours old. What was she going to do? James was probably halfway to Portland by now. She no longer cared. He could keep the money so long as he never came back again.

The first thing you need to do is go home and check in on Aunt Kate. She must be worried sick.

She gathered her clothes from the logs and dressed. They were almost dry and felt better than the scratchy blanket that smelled faintly of motor oil. Before she pulled on her jeans, she took a moment to examine her leg. The bandage she’d put on earlier had fallen off and the wound was an angry red at the edges and not even close to scabbing over. She had nothing to protect it with and sliding her jeans over it was torture.

When she stood up to walk her leg screamed and buckled, causing her sit on a log and rest. A few moments later she gathered enough strength to get up again. She forced herself to move past the pain, one wincing step at a time.

This is pathetic. There’s no way you’re going to be able to run if you need to.

She scanned the ground for a piece of driftwood. She picked up various shapes and sizes and tested them in her hand until she found one that felt good. She found a branch leaden with seawater, about the size and shape of a femur bone. She swung it down on a bulb-head of kelp and saw it split open.

As she made her way north she tried to imagine the pain in her leg was an old wasp sting. She’d received plenty of them from her wanderings in the forest during late summer. But it didn’t work. This hurt far worse, like a rusty nail scratch that had gotten infected.

Maybe you should go back the way you came? It’s not as far as this is going to be. If James’ boat is still there you could take it up the bay and get back to your car.

She stopped when she saw the body.

At first she thought it might be a log or a large tangle of kelp. But as she got closer she saw that it was the body of a man. She started to back away.

What if it’s James?

She raised her driftwood club and stepped closer, saw flashes of pale flesh where moonlight broke through the clouds. He was lying on his back, arms and legs splayed open in the shape of an X. His face was turned toward her. When she tapped his chest with the end of her stick, pink sand fleas shot out of his open mouth like a shower of ground glass. Ann’s stomach heaved and she turned away.

It was one of the Russians. Not the one she’d shot at, but the other one. She waited for the nausea to pass before forcing herself to take another look. She’d seen her share of drowning victims-the swollen, bright blue bodies being packed into ambulances. Perhaps the only thing he had in common with them was that his clothes were soaking wet, because when she was close enough to see his neck she knew something was wrong.

Someone had slit it open. Down to the bone.

Chapter 36

Chad had spent the night in his car and his back was sore. He’d been hungry when he awoke, and immediately in need of coffee. Pine needles had glued themselves to his windshield and he’d had to get out and wipe them off. He’d stood for a moment and savored the brine-stripped air, the blue smell of rainwater working its way down the mountain. High, milky clouds dominated the sky. It was at least an intermission from last night’s storm. Hard to tell what’s coming next, he thought.

He was surprised to find Gill’s Cafe open and a full parking lot, even more so by the barbeques sending out smoke signals. He’d sworn that he could smell the cooking meat coming from the highway, drifting off passing cars and trucks.

Chad thought he’d come upon 4th of July in winter. Gill was giving away food to anyone who came by. He’d stuffed himself on cheeseburgers and beans simmered over a smoky fire. He was impressed by the Traitor’s community spirit. Since he was a boy he’d heard how their ways were blamed for seducing folks down darker paths, whatever that was supposed to mean. He’d never seen evidence of this himself, had always laughed it off as the dirty side of healthy town rivalries.

As far as Chad was concerned he was from both towns. His mother was from Traitor and his father had grown up in Buoy and it was said by many that his father had come and stolen her away from Traitor like a jewelry thief in the night. She was that beautiful. Many Traitor fisherman Chad’s father’s age still held a grudge.

A presumptuous old man who claimed to know Chad kept offering him beers and asking him about folks in Buoy and what kinds of trouble they were into now. And just when he’d started to feel hot in the face from the glances of others and the sense that he was going to be the butt of some elaborate joke, a highway repairman announced that the town was still effectively cut off from both sides. Chad and anyone else who’d come down from Buoy or further north might even be stranded for at least another day-unless the next storm being tracked to arrive in a few hours slowed down the road crews even more.

He couldn’t find Ann anywhere. He’d driven by her aunt’s house at least a dozen times hoping that he’d see her car. After breakfast he decided he’d better check on things and ended up spending time with her aunt. Kate was in a mild state of shock when she’d met him at the door. She’d spent the day checking to see if the phone worked, hadn’t heard or seen anyone and had no idea about the damage the storm had caused.

Chad had stayed several hours and tried to help calm her down. He made sure she had enough firewood and anything else she could think of before he left. He’d promised her that he’d keep looking for Ann. If he saw any law enforcement he’d let them know about her disappearance.

After leaving Kate, he’d gone back to the restaurant and had eaten a little and talked. There’d been a setback on the bridge work and fresh landslides on 101. He wondered if his brothers had even noticed he was gone yet. He was concerned about getting an update on how his father was doing.

He’d driven south of Traitor and spotted Ann’s car parked at the old boat ramp. He drove up close and let the headlights bathe it while he looked it over. There were no signs that anything bad had happened, just the fact that Ann was not around. It didn’t make any sense to him. Why would she have gone out in a boat now, when the river was swollen with driftwood and dangerous currents? Did she get into somebody else’s car? It didn’t seem like something she’d do. Unless someone forced her.

His nerves were shot with worry. It had been a long day and he wasn’t looking forward to spending another night in his car. He smoked half a joint and lay back in the seat, thought through the list of possibilities. Although he couldn’t prove anything, he kept circling back to the idea that she was still around somewhere not far away.

But where?

He closed his eyes and drifted off for maybe half an hour. When he heard someone walking across the graveled lot from behind he thought it was her and got out of the car.

“Ann?” He couldn’t see her. Then he saw an explosion of light.

Chapter 37

“Do you really have to point that thing at me?”

“Shut up, James.” The sheriff bit a cigarette with his teeth and walked it to the corner of his mouth. “You got a light?”

“If I talk are you going to shoot me?”

“I will if you don’t hand over your lighter.”

James pulled the lighter from his pants pocket and felt his fingertips ski over the.38. Thank god the stolen hoodie was two sizes larger and hung down to his hips. Was the sheriff forgetting protocol? This was worse somehow.

“Thanks.” The sheriff turned his head sideways so he could keep his good eye on James. He lit his cigarette. “I’ll be borrowing this for awhile.”

“Be my guest. I know what you are, man. I’ve always known what you’re all about.”

“And what’s that wise-blood? You learn something other than sucking dick down in old Mexico?”

“Enjoy your career Sheriff. Soon as those roads are clear the sooner your career ends.”

The muzzle came in fast, pushed up into his ear and exhaling cold nothing, like the spaces between stars. Had James misjudged him? Would his brains soon be dripping off the interior of the car? He wondered if the sheriff would find the money afterwards. James couldn’t think of a better car to die in.

The gun pulled away. James’ ear rang and he put his hand up to it to feel for blood but it came away clean. He was screwed. Being reckless had kept the sheriff from suspecting his was armed but it wouldn’t do any good to have a gun if it was hard to get to fast. If he only arrests me, what will he do about the car? Maybe not a thing. It might be a long time before the dentist ever comes down. He could be in Hawaii playing with his balls.

“Do you want to tell me something now?” the sheriff asked.

James nodded. He dangled a cigarette out of the window and the sheriff lit it for him.

“You caught me Sheriff. I’ve done bad. But I was just going to take her for a ride is all. I would’ve even wiped her down good and clean before I put her away.”

The sheriff threw his smoke on the ground and crushed it out. What’s taking Cuke so fucking long, he wondered.

“I appreciate you trying to be honest with me, James. But it doesn’t suit you. Because you and I both know that you’re just another confused white boy badass wannabe.”

“Do you have to insult me?”

“Yeah. Because it makes me feel good dammit. And I won’t believe a word until I get Cuke to search you and the trunk.”

“Why didn’t you do it in the first place, instead of sending Cuke into the house?”

“I wanted to make sure you hadn’t done anything wrong in there. There’s nobody hurt in there or anything?

“Jesus, Sheriff. You know me better than that. You just said I didn’t have it in me. What’s taking Coach so long? He must be using the can or something. Or making himself a sandwich…”

The sheriff kept silent and lit another cigarette. The thought of food made him feel suddenly starved. How long had it been since he’d eaten? All he’d thought about was Cuke’s whiskey. He hadn’t even asked him for something to eat.

They should’ve just ignored him, not even stopped. Who cares if he steals the dentist’s car? Probably insured the hell out of the thing anyway. If there’s nothing on him or in the trunk, you might as well not waste your time on the punk.

James tilted his head so he could see into the sheriff’s face. “You okay Dawkins?”

“I’d like to know what in the hell is taking Cuke so long. I should have told him that he was too old for this shit.”

“Well it was you who deputized him, wasn’t it?”

“No. I only asked if I could borrow his car. And a few guns.”

It would have been too easy to keep screwing with the Sheriff, but James decided to let it ride. At first he’d wanted to mix it up for old times, that if he was indeed going down he might as well have a good time on the way. But the feeling had passed and he’d lost the taste for it. He saw a shadow move next to the dentist’s house and soon a figure emerged into the moonlight.

Coach Cuke appeared much older than James remembered him. His hips had gone to hell, making it hard for him to walk very fast. He held a rifle James had seen him carrying during elk season.

“Cuke,” said the sheriff, turning. “What the hell happened?

“Nobody in there Sheriff. Doesn’t look like he stole nothing either except some candy bars and a drink. A few clothes maybe.”

The sheriff turned around and brought up the pistol. “Why did you need clothes? What’s wrong with your old ones, James?’

“I told you. I was down near the jetty and got hit by a sneaker wave. I was completely soaked and freezing to death.”

“Or maybe your old clothes got blood on them?”

“Give me a break dude. You think I enjoy wearing his clothes? They smell like booze, man. Booze and ass. Listen, I knew I was doing wrong, but I did it anyway. We’re all in kind of survivor mode right now, aren’t we? And when I saw this car I heard a voice inside that told me I needed to drive this car. It told me it would change my life.”

Cuke stepped up beside the sheriff. He seemed to be enjoying himself. He glanced at the sheriff’s cigarette and shook his head. The sheriff dropped it on the ground and crushed it out with his shoe.

“What do we do next, sheriff? I thought we were going after Russians, not punks like home slice over there.”

“I don’t know what to do. I see a whole lot of things I could nail him for. Breaking and entering, grand larceny. But what if he says he’ll never come back to my county ever again? What if I make him write it in his own blood?”

Cuke’s jaw dropped open in disbelief. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m only joking, Cuke. What do you say James? Let us have a quick look and we’ll be on our way?’

James palmed the.38 through the hoodie. He’d managed to shift it forward. Could he get it out fast? He’d smelled alcohol when the sheriff lit his smoke. All he had to do was watch for those drunken gazes at nothing and he’d have a few seconds or more to make a move.

“Did you hear me James?” Dawkins asked.

“Where do you want to start?”

“You can start by popping the trunk and keeping your hands on the dash where I can see them. Cuke, you go on and check it.”

They all heard it, the van’s engine angry with spit and sand, then a dark form roaring up the tree-lined road like a ghost.

It skidded to a stop and a light came on inside. Cuke and Dawkins backed up next to Cuke’s Mercury in a hurry. James watched the driver’s window move down. As the smoky glass dipped further, he saw that the side of the man’s face was raw and bleeding. It’s from the shrapnel, he thought. When Ann had shot at him, he’d been hit by pieces of exploded mussel shell.

The van’s headlights were off and any red lights that may have existed had been smashed. A clear sign of desperation. James recognized the sound of the engine. It had gone by the dentist’s house several times while he’d been inside.

The Russian got out of the van and walked up to the Skylark, let his eyes drift briefly over it. He raised the sawed-off and smiled.

“Your car?” he asked politely.

Chapter 38

The boat had broken free and drifted into a small cove that lay before the jetty, the last stop before crushing waves spat out whatever escaped to the open sea.

At low tide there was a crescent shaped beach where the sea lions sometimes came to sleep off a successful lunch. Black waves now lapped against a rocky slope. The beach was gone. When Ann was younger she would spend hours watching sea lions slog around on their bellies. Belching and barking, trading stories and frequently acting out slapstick scenes. Like the elk, they also had a presence about them that drew her in, although to entirely different places. She’d decided long ago that they must have given us their sense of humor.

As she got to the end of the bank she noticed the boat was being circled by driftwood and plastic bottles. From a distance it had looked much closer to shore.

You can’t get back in the water again. You just got dry.

She combed the shore for anything that might be useful, couldn’t find any rope or wire to make a catch-line. It was looking hopeless. Either she waded out into the cold water or she walked back the way she’d just come.

What are you going to do now?

She sat on a rock and studied the boat for several minutes, noticing how it had come closer to shore and then circled back around along the edge of a ridge-backed current moving swiftly past. While she watched, several driftwood logs spun off from the boat-nucleus and got swept up by a stronger current, the bay’s conduit to the open sea. It would only be a matter of time, she realized, before the boat would also complete a final circuit in the cove before escaping.

If she made it inside the boat, there wouldn’t be a lot of time for her get the motor started. Assuming that the motor would start. She never trusted gas engines much, had never developed a knack for them.

Because her leg burned so much from the saltwater, she almost welcomed the cold. She waded out toward the boat, afraid the next step could be a drop off into far deeper water. Her breath quickened and she began to shiver. She thought she saw some seals raise their heads to watch her.

This is suicide and you know it.

When the water reached chest height, she could no longer feel her feet, didn’t even know if she was drifting over deeper water or not. Then all of a sudden she felt as if something were pulling her straight out to the main current.

This is it. This is how you’re going to die. You’ll become one of those fog ghosts for sure.

The boat was behind her now, closer to shore than she was. She breast stroked as hard as she could to go back, but her arms went numb. And then she remembered she wasn’t alone, that she was accompanied by an entourage of circling drift wood. When she kicked toward one log to grab hold of it, her eddy sent it out into the main current where it abruptly turned and floated out of sight.

Chapter 39

The shotgun blast had forced Cuke and the sheriff to take cover behind the Mercury.

“Get it now,” the Russian said.

James leaned against the Skylark, gasping for air. The Russian had kicked him in the stomach and he’d felt the stale candy bars rise up his throat. He imagined the bruise that was already beginning to form on his stomach, a blue waffle grid from the sole of the Russian’s running shoe. He wondered if he’d live to see it.

“Drop your weapon,” the sheriff demanded.

The Russian ignored him. He was not to be slowed. He motioned James with a sweep of the sawed-off and bared his big yellow teeth.

James wiped his mouth and staggered toward the back of the Skylark. He popped the trunk open and stared down at the suitcase, waited for the Russian to tell him what to do next. The Russian was no longer beside him, but had slipped back to the van and was standing next to the open door. His eyes were set back deep in their sockets, it was impossible to tell what they were watching.

“Bring it to me.”

“You’re not going to get away with this,” the sheriff said. “I am the law around here.”

The Russian turned his head and spat. “Do yourself a favor and stay out. This business has nothing to do with you anymore. It’s only between me and the boy.”

James stayed frozen next to the car. There were way too many guns waving around. He could see that things weren’t going to end well. And he happened to be in the middle of it.

The Russian must have read his mind. He smiled and beckoned James with his hand as if summoning a child. James obeyed. What else could he do? His gut told him what the Russian had planned. He couldn’t possibly get the.38 out in time. And that left the only alternative. To walk straight through the flames. As soon as he handed him the suitcase there would be a white-hot flash, and that would be the last thing he’d ever know. A change in ownership.

Sweat poured down his forehead and stung his eyes. The suitcase felt heavier than he’d remembered, maybe because he saw his future in it more than ever. Now his future was going to be taken from him either way, with or without the money. There was a stabbing pain in his shoulder as he lifted it out of the trunk. He took a deep breath and tottered toward the Russian.

You got close James. You got close but you still can’t cut it. He’s got a right to be pissed about his face.

He could hear the Russian breathing, like the minute hand of a melting clock. If he didn’t do anything now it would probably be the last thing he’d hear while blood exited his body. A lot of blood.

And then hell broke loose all around him.

Screams coming from the Mercury. Cuke and the sheriff rising from the other side, going balls out. Muzzleflash and the sound of lead splitting the night.

The Russian began to sway back and forth in a lazy dance. He fired the sawed-off and the Mercury sank to the ground on shredded tires. Plumes of safety glass exploded from the windows and rained down on their heads. Choking cordite smoke filled the air.

James crouched next to the suitcase, unable to move. He watched the Russian calmly pause to reload. He hadn’t gone down. The large man had been shot several times but he was still standing. Was he wearing a vest? Then it became more obvious what was happening. The big man’s motor control was going down the tubes. His fingers couldn’t hold onto the shells long enough to drop them into the sawed-off.

Pounding on adrenaline, James reached under the hoodie and pulled the.38 from his waistband. The Russian looked up at him. He’d dropped the sawed-off and was starting to lose consciousness, reached out to catch the door as he fell. James turned and saw Cuke taking aim and he’d fired at him before even knowing what he was doing. Cuke collapsed onto the Mercury’s hood and slid off, leaving a slick dark trail. James felt his insides tumble out.

Oh god no. Not Cuke.

The sheriff returned fire. Bullets pinged off the Skylark, ruining the dreamy paint job. James felt a hot stitch rip across his left ear as he dropped to his knees and shot three rounds through the Mercury’s shattered windows. He heard the sheriff give out a grunt before collapsing to the ground on the other side.

James grabbed the suitcase and ran for the Skylark.

Chapter 40

Ann found the boat cover under the seat and wrapped herself in it. The canvas smelled of mildew but kept the wind off. She couldn’t believe how cold she felt. Somehow she’d been able to start the motor despite the tremors in her hands.

The tide was going out and the swells were heavy. She worried if she had enough gas to make it back. James had emptied the red jug earlier, before they’d seen the men up on the bridge.

For the moment the sky above was finely dusted with stars. But a dense mass of cloud working down from the north announced the arrival of a new storm. She thought she saw flickers of lightning over the horizon, wasn’t certain if she was just imagining it. She hadn’t slept or eaten for over a day. Her mouth felt bone dry and she’d started to have painful coughing fits.

You’ve got water in the car. And food.

It was hard to spot the drifting logs before crashing into them. She couldn’t see very well back next to the motor where she needed to steer. Each time she heard the boat scrape a log she held her breath, waiting for a sharp branch to gore through the aluminum bottom. Sometimes there was so much driftwood that she couldn’t even see the bay and she’d have to look at the dark contours of the shore to remember where she was.

You’re as much to blame as James for all of this, she thought. Don’t pretend you didn’t want the money. You thought you had the right to rip off Duane for what he did to your life.

“Don’t you understand? It’s over James. This has blown up on us. We’re not in control of what’s happening. If we get off this rock alive we’ll have to tell somebody.”

“Of course we will. But that doesn’t mean we have to bring up the money to anyone.”

“They’re going to find out. One way or another.”

“Not if we keep our cool they won’t. Not if we tell the same story every time they ask us.”

“Look what’s happened to us. This isn’t worth it. We’ll be running forever.”

She’d started to feel as if she were drifting off, was surprised how quickly the whiskey carried her away. Time had begun to slow. She’d laid her head in his lap as if it were summertime. Waiting for clouds to pass so the chill would go away one more time. Better than being trapped on a rock by angry men who were trying to kill you over some money you stole from your jail bird piece of shit stepdad.

“Tell me something else I don’t know,” she asked.

“You’ll just get more upset. You should be taking it easy. What’s the point in bringing up the past anymore?”

“Because we could die here. The waves could come in and sweep us off. That’s the point, James. I want to know.”

“Okay. Remember that guy that you said came by the place looking for me? God knows what would have happened to both of us if he’d been able to get in.”

“You said you didn’t know who he was.”

“I lied.”

“Why?”

“Because I could. Because I knew you trusted me.”

“What did you do?”

“I broke a rule Duane hadn’t warned me about. I was new. I got caught selling in this other guy’s territory and he wasn’t happy and he’d sent someone to deliver the message. But it wasn’t until later that I figured out why I’d almost had my head caved in. Duane hadn’t told me anything because he’d wanted to find out what would happen. The bastard was chumming the waters. He was using me to draw out the sharks. He wanted to know where they were.”

“You should have told me. If you’d told me we could’ve run farther away from everything instead of coming back here. I think we’re doomed to die in Traitor.”

“No way. Not if I can help it.”

“It’s already too late, James. This isn’t small time stuff anymore. These guys…”

“What?”

"They’re serious…”

“You’re going to sleep, Ann. I’m sorry about everything. I really am.”

And James was right about her getting sleepy. She felt as if she were falling back onto a cloud of cottonwood down. Sinking further down with every exhale. She thought she was still talking to him but she wasn’t.

Chapter 41

James stomped the gas and headed south down 101. He kept checking the rearview mirror but saw only trees and an occasional house. The power was still out and the windows that weren’t shuttered were all black and reflecting stars. He couldn’t shake off the feeling that the sheriff was going to be coming up behind him some time very soon. It was impossible of course. He’d seen him lying on the ground when he’d driven off, felt like he’d passed through another door that was bolted behind him. There was no returning to the place he knew. Or even a normal life again.

The Skylark purred. It didn’t broadcast itself like the muscle car he’d driven up from San Diego. James allowed himself to marvel over his good luck although the course he’d taken was far from over and was really only beginning. Except for what happened to Cuke, he was having no regrets. Besides, it was the sheriff’s fault for letting the old man come along in the first place. What the hell was the idiot thinking?

As he passed through town he wondered how many times he’d sat next to the highway on his bicycle, watching people come and go, guessing where they might be headed. The tourists weren’t hard to spot and the locals and the truckers he knew by heart. There were others, however, that never seemed to fit. They’d mostly stare ahead as they drove by but sometimes they’d look at him and he’d see something in their eyes that was too much, like having the sun reflected back in your face from a mirror. Their thoughts had been made visible in a flash, yet too fast for him to comprehend. But he understood them now. They were people much like he was. In a hurry to get away from something. Seeing potential terror wherever they turned, even in boys sitting on their Stingrays watching them from the roadside.

Whatever happens you don’t stop. You don’t stop until you’re in Twin Falls. Or even further away than that if you need to.

He came upon some work crews dressed in orange that were cutting up some downed trees with chainsaws. One of them waved at him as he went by. James thought he might have been yelling something about going too fast.

Near the edge of town he looked for his parent’s mailbox. His mom had painted it fire engine red. It wasn’t hard to miss but somehow he had. Then he saw it was on the ground. The post it was attached to had been knocked down by the storm. He turned the car onto the shoulder and slowed up next to where it lay and turned off the car. His parent’s house was up a graveled drive and hidden in trees. No one inside would see him on the road.

The mailbox was twisted some and he imagined his mother throwing a fit and going straight to the hardware store in Buoy to get a new one. She’d bought the first one when the trouble had started with his father. To show a proud family face to the rest of the world. He’d never asked her why she’d painted it red.

The post was not damaged but hard for him to lift. He’d had to lean it on his good shoulder before picking it up and walking with it to the misshapen post hole. It went in and he stepped on the loose earth around the edges until he thought it would hold. He stared at the mailbox one last time. It looked more twisted at this angle than before, like he was looking head on at a fish swimming toward him. He lit a cigarette and inhaled. A smile broke his mouth apart and he laughed until he was overcome by a coughing fit.

He got back into the car and began to drive fast up through a curving section of the highway. The Skylark couldn’t take the curves very well and the tires skidded and he almost went off the road twice before deciding that he was going to have to slow it down until he could trade it out for something that fit his needs. He cursed himself for being seduced.

After he got over the first hill he began to make out the bridge that spanned the bay. Then it struck him. If the power was still out than why was the bridge lit up like a birthday cake?

As he got closer he saw a glowing road sign telling him that the bridge was closed. Orange barrels with reflective tape blocked the entrance. He could see the shiny tops of hardhats and the play of flashlights. The movement of the lights ticking up and down made him think of insect antennae.

He was supposed to have turned around by now. He steered the Skylark around a Dodge pickup parked in the middle of the road. It had a flashing yellow light bubble on top. There was a guy standing next to the truck, and when he saw the Skylark heading toward him he dropped his thermos and dove into the open door of the Dodge.

Chapter 42

Ann watched as Traitor formed itself from the curving outlines of land. Downtown buildings seemed to emerge from the earth like a dark fungi. There still wasn’t any power. She couldn’t remember a time when it took them this long to connect Traitor back onto the grid.

She tried to ignore the pain in her leg. It was swelling and she imagined that when she got to the hospital they’d have to cut off her jeans. The last time she’d looked at her leg she’d seen a pink line moving up from the wound. Aunt Kate said it meant blood poisoning. If you didn’t take care of the infection, the line would keep moving up until it got to your heart and killed you. There was nothing she could do about it now but hope the salt water slowed the line’s progress.

The outgoing current had picked up strength and Ann couldn’t believe she was moving at all. It felt as if she were trying to climb up an escalator. Every gain forward against the current was met by several lost. She revved the motor to its highest setting, afraid of how much gas it was eating up. The aluminum boat was no contest to the force of the water. She’d just have to go fast and watch for logs conspiring to sink her.

As she worked her way around an island known for its talkative crows she noticed a glow of light coming from the distant bridge. She wondered if Mitch and Tammy had found help, if they were looking for her in the bay.

The fishing ramp was less than a mile away.

Chapter 43

James screamed as wooden barricades split across the front of the Skylark. I’ve been living under a shadow for too long. Writhing in this molt of dysfunctional everything, waiting for this day. Breaking out. Maybe the moth catches on fire and dies. Maybe it gets through the flame and survives.

The bridge pulsated with moving flashlight beams. Road crew workers dressed in yellow rain gear were running toward the rails. James fed the Skylark another hit of gas and in an instant he saw their frightened faces blur past.

He didn’t see the tractor until it was too late.

Chapter 44

Seeing Elk Woman down on the river reminded him of his mother. Of watching his mother in her black shroud as she paddled the boat onto the icy river so she could be in the exact spot where his father’s car had gone down. Searching for any messages in the water that might have surfaced. His final thoughts scrolled across the brown water where the ice had broken away. Information about his murderers and who the family could trust. And most importantly, if there was money hidden that she needed to know about.

“Get into the boat, Mikhail.”

“No. I don’t want to go near that water.”

“You mustn’t be afraid. There’s much more to learn than being able to understand a person’s sleep-talk. That’s only the beginning. Let me teach you how to find the dead-talk.”

“I don’t want to learn it. I don’t want you to teach me any more of that stuff.”

He knew that she wouldn’t argue with him about it. Nor did she feel hurt. She knew her son needed to take his time going over things. His father was also wired that way. Obsessed with details. Hammering at them to see if they could be broken into smaller pieces.

She’d paid a man to haul the rowboat in his truck, the one Mikhail and his father used for lake fishing. When he was a child and his father was happy and hadn’t started having the severe anxiety attacks that his mother treated with a special tea from the old days. He’d hated to see the boat go out on the dirty river. Was afraid that it would be lost with his father. He’d only wanted it to continue leaning against the back of the house. Taking it away was like taking the best memory of his father away.

But he had, in the end, learned the dead-talk. He still heard his mother’s voice every day.

Chapter 45

When James opened his eyes he thought he was floating between blue clouds. Except they weren’t clouds at all but buckled up metal covered in windshield glass. He heard shouting. Black smoke blew into his face and made him cough. The door shuddered next to him as someone struggled to pull it open. Hands reached inside and pulled him away from the Skylark as the hood caught fire.

They carried him around to the other side of the tractor where someone had parked a Subaru Outback. After he was set on the ground he heard a woman say she was going to get the first aid kit off the back of the caterpillar.

“Did he hit anybody?” someone asked. James opened his eyes and waited for the murkiness to go away. While he lay in partial shock he took inventory of his injuries, was surprised that he’d only had some bloody scratches. His ear still throbbed from when the sheriff jammed him with his pistol barrel.

“No. Just the cat thank god. But Jim Love lost his grip and fell into the bay.”

“Goddamn. Did the fall knock him out?”

“No. They’re talking to him. He’s trying to stay in our lights. Bill is on his way. We’re taking his car down to the marina to get a boat. I told the crew to move the lights over on Jim so we can keep an eye on him. Pete’s going to lower a safety line down. Maybe he can get it tied around him.”

“How’s he keeping from being swept down river?”

“There’s some rungs on the center bridge support. I don’t now how much longer he can hold on, but he’s one strong son of a bitch.”

A tall bearded man approached them. His eyes were pale blue like the car and he stared at James. A woman rushed past him with the first aid kit and sat on her knees next to James. She said her name was Kathy. She had a kind face.

“What are you doing back in Traitor?” Bill said. James pretended not to see him, rolled his eyes up and watched the stars above to think about something else other than Bill Calder standing over him with murder in his eyes. If there wasn’t any dark space between them they wouldn’t even be stars, he thought to himself.

“You know him Bill?” Jeff asked.

“Yeah I know him. We go way back. Last I heard, he’d gone AWOL or something down in Mexico. What we’re doing James? Trying to run down me and my crew?”

“Leave him,” Kathy said. She got the emergency blanket out of its package and unfolded it. Jeff bent down and helped her spread it over James. Kathy grabbed a roll of gauze from the kit and started working on his scratches. James gazed blankly at her.

“You’re going to be okay honey. Help will be on the way.”

James closed his eyes.

“I’d prefer that you left me and him alone for a while,” Bill said.

“I bet you would. He’s in shock, Bill. Might have brain damage. I think he’s got blood coming out of his ear.”

“I’d say the brain damage happened before he tried to kill us.”

Kathy stopped and looked up. She’d always hated it when Bill was in one of his swaggering moods. Talking as if he were some badass. Trying to act like he wasn’t the coward he was.

“I’m not going to sit here and let you do anything. So just forget it.”

“He almost killed us, Kath. He’s probably drunker than a skunk. It’ll be too late for a blood test by the time help comes and he’ll get away with a warning.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?”

“The guys would back me if we said I’d found him that way. Crushed skull and all…”

“I really doubt that would happen,” Kathy said. She finished taping the gauze that held James’ ear.

“Forget him, Bill,” Jeff said. It wouldn’t be worth it. You do something and he’ll never get the fun of going to jail. Come on. Let's go see if we can help Jim.”

“Okay. Have it your way. But if he ends up walking away from this with nothing but probation I’m going to be pissed. This boy is no good.”

“I believe you,” Jeff said. He turned around and walked toward the Subaru. Bill stared down at James a little longer before he followed Jeff.

As soon as both men had their backs facing him, James ripped away the foil blanket and pointed the.38.

“You’re not going anywhere with that car.”

Kathy put her hands to her face and screamed. The men spun around on their heels, startled. James stood up and the foil blanket slid onto the ground and rustled as the wind pushed it away. For the first time all night he realized how much better he was feeling about himself. How the musty stacks of money and Ann’s.38 had cultivated a take-charge attitude in him. That and a real hated of Bill and what he did to his family when he got home from drinking most nights.

I had it lucky if you wanted to make comparisons, James thought. And that’s what made Bill’s kids so mean. He supposed that the way Bill thought was the only way he knew. That you had to make them tough so they’d be ready for a tough world. He’d once stood by idly watching his three boys beat the hell out of James for fishing in what they believed was their polluted trout pond.

“I thought you said he was hurt bad,” Bill said.

Kathy ignored Bill. She turned to James and stared into his eyes. “You don’t want to shoot anyone James.”

“No I don’t, ma’am. I just want the keys to this car.”

“Hell if you do,” Bill shouted. When he took a step forward, James fired the.38 over the man’s shaved head.

He thought of the moth flying through the flame. Saw the sullen face of Bill’s daughter when he’d tried to walk her home one night after school. He’d wanted to take her out to the movies but she kept telling him she couldn’t. And then later she’d fallen during track and when he’d picked her up his eye had caught the bruises on her inner thighs.

“I will put you down, Bill Calder. Watch and see.”

Chapter 46

After Ann tied the boat she pulled herself up the staircase to the parking lot, her leg dragging behind her. Hurt so bad she’d started crying. When she got to the top she saw two cars. Hers and someone else’s. Hers had blown over onto its side. It took her a moment to recognize Chad’s bug. She couldn’t believe he was here. The driver had turned on the lights when she’d come up. She thought she saw him and waved and he waved back.

When she got to Chad’s car she was overcome with the need to get warm again. She opened the passenger door and got in. Right away she asked herself if Chad had grown a beard. Thought it strange that it wasn’t blond. His hands, however, were not the same ones she knew. The nails were not painted black. They looked more like dirty claws.

“Hello Ann,” Cyclops said.

“Who are you?” Ann asked. She reached for the door handle but his hand shot out and stopped her.

“I will tell you.”

“What have you done to Chad?”

“He’s around.”

“Where?”

“I promise you’ll see him. After we talk.”

Ann glanced down and saw the Cyclops’ trench coat piled on the floor. The only person she had seen wear something like that had been the derelict she’d seen on the highway.

Chapter 47

He’d learned early on that you had to complete things. If you let go of stray ends they came back and choked you.

He’d buried her. But he hadn’t killed her.

When they reached San Diego he’d checked them into a quiet motel a few blocks from the beach. He thought he’d only stay with her a couple of nights but it turned into a week. There was plenty of business to be done in Tijuana, people to meet. In the evenings he’d cross back over the border and return to their motel. He often found her inside the room crying and he’d hold her until it got dark and then take her out to the pool and float around in it with her. He could’ve done it then, he remembered thinking later. She was drunk enough most nights. The cops would just think it was an accident.

One night she told him she couldn’t go through with it. That she wouldn’t survive living like fugitive. Without her daughter in her life. She told him she’d rather die.

He didn’t know what to say to that. He’d been alone on his own for so long that he could only imagine how deep the hurt must have gone.

He tried to think of what else they could do. He told her that with his connections he might be able to help her relocate in Mexico. Eventually get the girl down there with her. But it was only an idea. It would take time. A lot of things would have to be arranged. And it would take some money to make it work. Money he didn’t have right now.

It was late one night when he got back to the motel, too late to go out to the pool and drink with her. As soon as he opened the door he realized something was wrong. She was gone. Hadn’t packed anything. He told himself not to panic. Walked around the motel thinking he might see her coming back from the gas station store with cigarettes. An hour later he checked a couple of bars near the motel. Nothing. She’d vanished.

He kept looking but still couldn’t find her. Sat up all night waiting for her to come back. Calling the police was out of the question. By morning he left her a note on the bed and took a drive down to a strip of seedy bars. He went into some and asked around. After midnight he went inside a dive they’d been to a couple of times. Everyone sitting at the bar turned around and stared at him. Old men elbowed one another and laughed, and a big man with tattooed arms sneered. When Mikhail stared back the man paid and left, the geezers turned back to their drinks. He talked to a cocktail waitress who said Ann’s mother had come in the night before. Dressed only in a bathrobe with a bathing suit underneath. She’d ignored the glances of the men sitting around and ordered several drinks. The waitress said she’d catch cold if she wasn’t careful and the woman had laughed. Had told her that where she was planning to swim was always warm.

He went down to the beach to look for her but couldn’t find her. But by the next afternoon surfers reported seeing her body drifting out past the last breakers. She’d looked peaceful, as if she were asleep on her back. Except for the birds having taken her eyes.

Her body was taken to the city morgue. She had no identification. And after her fingerprints and photos were compared with missing persons reports, they’d decided to put her on ice, shoved her into metal-locker limbo. On the chance that something would change. That someone would come forward and claim her.

It took him a few days to get her out of the morgue. The janitor wasn’t cheap, had treated him as if he was just another sick customer. Mikhail made a mental note to come back and kill the man. He’d loaded her body into the trunk of his car and drove several hours into the desert and buried her before sunrise next to a cluster of Joshua trees. He wasn’t going to let her stay in the cold morgue forever. It was the least that he could do.

It had taken him all night to dig a proper burial hole, much longer than he’d imagined it would. He’d found lots of cans and bottles under the sand, tattered newsprint and windshield glass. And bones. Bones of all shapes and sizes. He could hear coyotes in the distance. Knew that the rocks he’d stacked on top of her would not keep them from her for long.

Chapter 48

James took Bill Calder’s keys but he didn’t shoot him like he’d wanted. This was no time to add vigilantism to his resume. He’d shot a cop and a high school football coach and he didn’t know if he’d killed them both. And he knew what they did when someone shot a cop, even if it was someone like Dawkins. If they don’t kill you themselves they’ll catch you and you’ll stand trial. And by the time your chance for parole comes up you’ll no longer see the point in getting out.

As soon as he started the Subaru he was blasted by FM Country. Bill and the others just stood watching him drive away, afraid that if they moved too soon he would turn around and come back. He watched Bill’s face in his rearview mirror until he turned off. Saw the surprise still working his face. Wondered if Bill’s family would be wishing James had gone a little farther off the deep end.

Farther up into the mountains there were downed trees everywhere. James had to lever down the window of the Subaru so he could navigate. The night air was redolent of sawdust. Many of the trees he saw appeared to have been trimmed in a hurry and pulled to the side.

The suitcase of money sat next to him. A bullet had passed through it to the other side and he could see a hint of green at the edges. He wanted to open it but he needed both thumbs to unsnap the locks. When he saw that the highway was going to straighten for a few miles he pulled off the hoodie and draped it over the suitcase. He would have to look at the contents again later. When he checked into a motel or pulled over onto some back road for a few minutes of sleep.

As he drove he struggled to focus. His thoughts kept getting tangled up with Ann and the men he’d shot. He wasn’t any good at turning off the switch. Not like the guys he’d met in Mexico who worked in the drug trade. You didn’t mess around with them, kept your past off limits, didn’t even allow yourself to dream about it because they had people who worked for them who would find out about it. He’d made it clear right away that he had no interest in their business, that he was only living there because he needed a place to be alone and think.

Ann’s going to be fine. It’s not going to matter if she hates you for what you did. She’ll get over it faster that way. Besides, you weren’t even back for very long. You’re never going to see each other again so close the door and move on.

He glanced over at the suitcase to make sure it hadn’t gone anywhere. Like the first night he had his new truck and Ann had sat next to him in the cab. For a moment he’d felt like the luckiest man in the world and he’d kept turning his head to see if she was still there and he would’ve hit a deer had she not seen it and let him know.

It wasn’t easy to imagine what it was going be like. But in a few days he was going to wake up as another person in another town with all the identification to prove it. How long could he go before he had to look for a job, he wondered. People are going to notice eventually. It kind of defeats the purpose then. You have all this money and you’re still not free.

Chapter 49

He’d told her almost all of it except what happened to her mother’s eyes. How it haunted him still. A body that lies out at sea won’t remain beautiful for very long.

“I missed her,” he’d said. “Even if she went to the cops before she died.”

She’d refused to show them any identification. Had spent an hour telling them everything she knew about him and Duane. When her body was found two days later the cops had no idea she was the same person.

He told Ann that as soon as he’d heard about it on the news he’d left town, leaving out the part about stealing her mother’s body from the morgue and burying it in the desert.

At a pay phone in Bakersfield he’d called the sheriff and told him they shouldn’t talk for awhile. He returned to New York and prepared for the worst. Three months went by. Nothing. But after six months he began to have a strong feeling that he was being watched. It was the feds finally. He’d been told that he’d know when they were around. And as far as he knew they weren’t the buyable kind.

It wasn’t until after his car accident that the feds made their move. He was an injured animal and they’d seen their chance to come in for an easy meal. While he was in the hospital having his empty eyehole sewn shut and his limbs set in casts, they arrived at his house with warrants to tear apart everything he had. When the doctors said he was well enough to leave they took him into federal custody.

“So why are you doing this to us?” Ann said. “We had nothing to do with what happened to you. We were only kids.”

“Where’s the money?”

“I don’t have it. James does.”

“Good. Then we’ll soon know who’s lying or not.”

Ann laughed at him and for a moment he was jarred back to a memory of her mother floating in the motel pool with her arms around him, her breath smelling of vodka and lemon.

“You’re not going to catch him. He knows this area better than you. You haven’t got a chance.”

“Why are you defending James? He left you to die didn’t he?’

“I know him. I’m not defending him.”

Cyclops smiled. He replaced the duct table over her mouth and smoothed his thumb over her lips to seal it.

“He can’t run forever. I will find him some day.”

He stood up and walked over to where he’d tied Chad to a post. He took out his knife and tilted it at an angle so he could see stars on its steel surface. Thought about all the throats it had parted so neatly.

The knife came down against Chad’s head. Cyclops brought up the blade as if he were cutting off the feathery tops from a fistful of tall summer grass. Ann screamed when he turned and showed her Chad’s blonde hair.

Chad still lay unconscious, hadn’t even seen him coming.

Cyclops walked back. Ann was crying. He tore away the tape on her mouth and sat down in front of her.

“Please don’t hurt him.”

“It’s only hair. It’s not going to kill him.”

“He doesn’t know anything about the money. He has nothing to do with this at all.”

“You think the money is everything Ann. But it’s not. It’s been about you. I wanted to meet you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a loose end.” He took the handful of Chad’s hair and tossed it into the wind.

“My mother’s been dead for years. This has nothing to do with me.”

“But it does.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You’re free to think that. But let me tell you something. When I got out of prison I was not at all the man that went in. Prison is like a factory that presses coins. They think they’re turning us into something they can dump back into the normal currency some day. But they know it’s not true. That most of us come out ready to put our new education to use.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“I think you do. As well as anyone I know. But other than taking my money you mostly walk the straight and narrow these days don’t you?”

“Duane hoped he could turn me into someone like him but it didn’t take. I knew that I’d never get back those years of my life so I took what I thought was mine. He got what he deserved.”

“Yes he did. But Duane talked a lot too. He didn’t feel sorry for what he’d done. What kind of trouble he could cause you. He blamed you for sending him to prison.”

“I wasn’t going to lie to the cops like he’d wanted me to. I was done with that. I was young and I wanted my life back. I knew I’d never see my mother again.”

“I wanted to kill him. But your mother told me not to. She decided to run instead.”

“But you killed that man on the beach. I saw him.”

“There was no one to ask me to spare his life. You see, I’m not always the cold killer you’d like to believe. Besides, he was halfway to where he was going. Not much good to me if he was found alive by anyone. I only helped him along. I try to run a clean business.”

“Why didn’t you kill me?”

“I thought I would. But your strength surprised me. I wanted to talk to you but you were shivering too badly. You reminded me so much of your mother. For awhile I thought I was saving her from those incoming waves.”

“So you’re the one who built the fire…touched me when I couldn’t move.”

“You would have died if I’d left your clothes on. That cut on your leg…”

“You bastard.”

Cyclops nodded meekly. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have done it. But I couldn’t stop myself. You remind me of your mother.”

He offered her a water bottle and she tore it from his hand. While she drank he stood and walked up the drive to the highway. There was no one coming. Hadn’t been anyone since the blue Skylark had blown past, the driver’s face too deep in shadow. If the bridge was closed, where had he gone?

The town’s asleep again. There won’t be anyone else coming. You can do whatever you want…

He heard the first dogs yipping from a nearby hallow. There were never many at first. Until the others heard them and answered their call. They were on their way. Wanting to be in on the chase. Wanting to be in on the kill.

There were stars visible above the serrated ridge to the north and Cyclops watched them as they were snuffed out by black invisible clouds. It reminded him of a spreading plague, of how quickly the glimmer of our lives can be taken away forever.

After a few minutes he walked back to Ann and leaned against the concrete building where the old man once sold fish bait and steamed crabs. He looked down at his knife. Couldn’t recall how long he’d been holding it in his hand.

“There’s another storm coming,” he told her.

“I’m not going to talk to you about the weather. If you’re going to do it, then get it over with.”

Cyclops folded the knife and put it away. He reached up with both hands and pulled back his filthy hair. A train of high clouds began to haul overhead, passing across the moon. He kept his head tilted upwards, as if he were drawing heat from an invisible sun. His single eye catching the fading moonlight.

“Can we talk about the elk first?”

Chapter 50

Chad opened his eyes and watched what was happening. The pounding in his head felt as if the blood inside had formed a fist. He thought he was going to throw up.

He didn’t recognize the fishing ramp at first. It was mainly a Traitor high school hangout back when he was still in school and he rarely came down to visit. After he graduated and started selling a little pot on the side he’d sometimes cruise through the ramp looking for customers. For several months he got away with it before Sheriff Dawkins caught him one night and searched his car. He’d warned Chad that if he’d ever caught him again he’d personally guarantee that Chad would get to know the walls of county jail better than his own sorry excuse for a dick and Chad had believed him.

A man Chad had never seen before stood staring down at Ann. He’d just taken his hand out of his trench coat when Chad opened his eyes. His hair hung long and greasy and even from where Chad laid the smell reminded him of a roadkill.

Where did thehighway derelict come from? Is he going to horribly murder us both?

Chad hadn’t even seen the man coming. He’d stepped out of his car thinking he’d heard Ann and then there’d been a flash inside his head. He didn’t even have a chance to turn around before he’d felt another blow and this one shot down all the way through to his jaw and made him bite his tongue before he’d passed out.

Wasn’t it things like this that made ghosts of people? You’re on your way to doing something important in your life and then a random freak comes along and ends it for you? Not for any other reason than the fact that he’s bat shit crazy? Just reaches forward and sweeps all your chips off the table because you’re the one who’s unlucky today?

He’d suffered no broken bones that he could tell. But he hadn’t tried to sit up either. Whenever he tried to raise his head the hammering in his skull would grow louder and he’d have to stop and rest. He noticed something on the ground not far from where the man stood. It reminded him of a rope coming apart.

Is that someone’s hair?

“You’re holding back on me. My mother was like you. She knew things that most people didn’t. About other worlds.”

“I’ve told you everything I know.”

“You’re lying.”

“What else do you want from me?”

“What did you learn, Ann? I must know their secrets.”

“It isn’t like that.”

“Then tell me.”

“You’re looking for some kind of magic, some connection beyond this world. And that’s your problem. You’re just like a lot of people. You want to believe there’s something greater hidden inside everything. And all I can tell you is it’s not there. Not at all.”

“You don’t believe in ghosts?”

“Not in the way you do.”

“Then what are they?”

“They’re in the living. The ghosts are in us. You can’t get rid of them. They’re in everything. It’s our past dragging behind us.”

“So why do we fear them?”

“Because when we see them they remind us of ourselves. Most of us pretend they don’t exist because it’s too much to bear. But the truth is that we’re trying to get ourselves used to the idea of looking like that some day, that we’re not permanent. And I’m okay with that. When I see the ghost in the elk, I know there’s nothing to worry about.”

“I see ghosts too. And they should make you worry.”

Chapter 51

The dogs were back. He could sense them closing in. And after tonight three more were going to be added to the pack… the man on the beach. Ann and the boy.

The dogs would not be denied.

He wished he could tell her what he saw when he looked at her. That he saw her mother staring back at him. Sarah’s ghost. Like it was when they drove down 101. Staying in motels tucked beneath looming redwoods. Sitting up late drinking while the radio played. Waiting for the sun to go down before sneaking out to the motel pool, being careful not to make much noise.

He’d hoped the girl would have been able to tell him more. About how to make the ghosts go away. His mother had warned him the night before he left for America, the night she’d secretly packed his father’s hunting knife in his pack. She’d had a dream of him as an older man, surrounded by dogs the color of blood. As soon as the killing started, she warned, the dogs would never let him rest.

And his mother had been right. They hadn’t let him rest. Their hunger kept growing. It didn’t matter if he wanted to kill or not, that he’d lost the taste for it long ago. No matter how much he tried to keep away from people-riding trains and camping on the outskirts of dying towns-they would eventually find him. He could be sharing a few words with another hobo and suddenly he’d hear them howling in the distance and he knew he’d soon be reaching for his knife.

He could see that Ann had no idea the dogs had arrived. Probably just thought a wind had picked up and tugged at his clothes. He could feel them gathering around his legs. Looked down and saw the faces of those he killed. Surprised at how many he no longer recognized.

They rubbed their noses against him, as if asking that he bend down and pat their heads. He stood still. Anticipated the coming tide that would soon flow up through his legs and into his blood, the bodies of the dogs moving faster and faster against his legs until he thought he smelled scorched cloth.

He stared down at Ann as his body shook. Unable to stop the ghosts from moving up his body. Now a cold electric current that made him clench his teeth.

A memory floated back above the waves of pain. The vision of Ann running naked through the dark woods. Of laughing about it then because he hadn’t understood its significance.

The dogs were excited. They wanted to chase the elk woman through the woods. And they wouldn’t denied.

Chapter 52

“Leave her alone,” Chad shouted.

Cyclops turned and stared, his body now charged with the energy of the dog pack. The boy was where he’d left him. His eyes were open and he was struggling to get up. Cyclops drew the knife from his jacket and the dogs barked excitedly.

Ann leaped forward and grabbed his arm. He lifted her up and pitched her against the concrete wall. She struck her head before dropping to the ground. Shards of broken glass bit into her palms. She felt him snatch her by the hair and lift her up against the wall and for a moment she saw silver motes dancing in the corners of her eyes. He leaned in close and waved the knife in front of her face.

“Don’t interfere, elk woman. Unless you want some of this.”

“What are you doing?” she cried.

“I think it’s his time, don’t you?”

“You don’t have to hurt him. He hasn’t done anything.”

“Why should it matter to you what happens to the boy? You just said a moment ago that nothing was permanent.”

“Then take me. I don’t think he’d even be here if it wasn’t for me.”

Cyclops stared at her. His single eye seeming to have filled his entire forehead like that of an insect. Ann gasped and looked away.

“I’ll take care of one thing at a time.”

“You’re crazy!”

“I know. But the dogs always get what they want.”

“The dogs? What dogs?”

“You don’t see them?”

“No. You’re just imagining them.”

Cyclops laughed. “I’m not surprised you’d say that.”

He let her go and started toward the boy, wading through the thick river of dogs that now filled the parking lot. They fought and howled for the best place to watch. He refused to look at them, didn’t want to see their faces anymore.

He heard a familiar sound and stopped. Recognized the growl of an engine. When he looked up toward the highway he saw the lightless van roaring down the empty highway. He looked over his shoulder and saw Chad struggling to sit up.

Not yet boy. Not just yet.

He ran up to the drive and waved. The van skidded to a stop in the middle of the highway. Sat while its engine boiled. It was too dark to see who was inside.

“Joseph,” he shouted.

The door swung open and the sheriff slid out and landed on weak legs. His clothes were covered in blood. His eyes moved slowly, as if he’d been hitting the whiskey. They paused on Ann. What is she doing here?

“He says he’s going to kill us,” Ann screamed.

The sheriff raised Cuke’s.45 and pointed it at the Cyclops’ forehead.

“Toss the knife to me. Slowly.”

Cyclops grinned. He lobbed it toward the sheriff and it landed next to his feet.

“Now get your ass on the ground. Before I blow out that goddamned eye of yours.”

Chapter 53

Ann followed the sheriff’s orders and ran to check on Chad. He didn’t appear to be bleeding anywhere that she could tell. But his face and hands were pale and he was cold to the touch. She noticed deep bruises around his neck. When he’d heard her voice he’d looked up and smiled weakly.

“Can you walk?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where do you hurt?”

“All over…”

She lifted his arm and flung it over her shoulder and helped him to his feet. His legs were wobbly.

“I don’t know about this.”

“You’re going to have to try and help me Chad. We don’t have a lot of time.”

“Where are we going?”

“There’s a boat down below. It still has a little gas left in it.”

“But the sheriff is here.”

“I don’t think we can count on anything.”

Cyclops watched as the sheriff seemed to expand and contract with each wave of pain, the barrel of the.45 still leveled at his face. He noticed the dogs sniffing hungrily at the sheriff’s legs. The blood that had soaked through his pants now trickled across his boots.

He still hadn’t lain on the ground as the sheriff had ordered. He’d seen something in the sheriff’s eyes that gave him hope that he wouldn’t have to. It was obvious the sheriff was teetering on the edge consciousness.

The dogs raised their heads and whined. As loud and piercing as a railcar crying against steel and causing his ears to ring. He looked down and saw their human faces superimposed like bloodless masks. Men and women whose lives he’d taken. Some deserving and others just unlucky.

Many would want to argue with him at first, especially the traitors. They’d say they didn’t deserve what had happened to them, that it was someone else he should have killed. And at first he would argue back, list each offense that may have conveniently slipped their minds, and this seemed to quiet most of them.

It was the others that he felt bad about, the ones the dogs had forced him to claim. They hadn’t deserved the knife, and every time he saw them his heart would ache with guilt until after the years the guilt lifted and he accepted what he had done and what he would do to others in the future.

The sheriff seemed lost in a daze. Each time he closed his eyes Cyclops took a step closer until Cyclops snatched the gun from his hand and whipped him across the face with it until he dropped to the ground.

“You can have him if you want,” Cyclops told the dogs.

He checked the chamber to see if the gun was loaded. It was not.

Chapter 54

Getting down the gangway hadn’t been easy. Chad had stumbled forward several times and almost sent them both over the railing. When they reached the dingy Ann helped him on board before heading to the back. She pulled the rope-starter and the motor kicked to life and began churning up black water. She sat on the cold aluminum bench and saw Cyclops staring down at them from the concrete seawall.

We’re going to make it out of here.

She was about to put the motor in reverse when Chad looked over his shoulder and pointed at the dock.

“Wait… You forgot the rope.”

Ann glanced at the dock and felt her stomach roll over. Sure enough, the boat was still tethered. She’d been in too much of a hurry to untie them from the dock.

Come on. Don’t lose focus now…

She set the motor in neutral and climbed out of the dingy. As she worked to loosen the rope, footfalls began thundering down the long gangway. Cyclops was heading toward them, dragging the edge of his knife along the steel handrail as he went. She could see that Chad was trembling with fear.

“Chad.”

“What happened to the sheriff, Ann? He was supposed to protect us.”

“You’ve got to help me.”

“No. I don’t want him to hurt me again.”

“He won’t Chad. But you have to listen to me. I need you to take over the motor. I might not have time to get back there.”

Her fingers were numb. The rope was sticky with frost and not coming loose easily. She could hear Cyclops getting closer. She turned and saw him grinning at her as he advanced, the knife singing against the steel rail.

She got the rope free and tossed it into the boat. Chad was still inching toward the back. There was no way he was going to make it to the motor in time. He stopped and stared up at her with widening eyes.

Ann felt a hand take hold of her collar and lift her into the air. As she swung her fists to free herself, Cyclops dangled her over the swift water of the bay before tossing her onto the dock. She lifted her head and saw that Chad still didn’t have control over the motor. The side of the dingy was still bumping next to the dock.

“Go!” Ann screamed.

“I’m not leaving you, Ann.”

Still lying on her side, she kicked the boat with her foot and sent it moving away from the dock. Chad stared at her one last time before the dingy spun out into the current and was lost in darkness.

“It’s your time,” Cyclops told her.

Ann ducked as he reached down for her again. She got to her feet and ran up the gangway. Cyclops was fast behind her and she heard the snick of his knife as it sliced off hunks of her hair. The fire in her leg was making her cry.

Halfway up the gangway she spun around and kicked Cyclops in the jaw. He hadn’t seen it coming. He stumbled back and caught the railing with his hand. Blood dripped from the corners of his mouth and collected on his filthy beard.

“This is going to be fun, Ann.”

She turned around and ran. When she got to the top landing she noticed an empty steel drum and pulled it over. The drum bounced down the gangway and she heard Cyclops grunt as she cleared the seawall.

She ran across the parking lot in the direction of her car. She thought that if she had enough time she might still be able to get the mace out of the glove compartment but stopped when she realized it wouldn’t work. Her Volkswagen had been flipped over onto the right side. Getting to the glove box would be too time consuming.

Not far from her car she noticed a body lying on the ground. She recognized the uniform and the shape that filled it.

“Sheriff?”

“Help me, Ann…”

When she reached him, his eyes fluttered as if straining to stay open. He was trying to reach for something near his leg but she saw nothing.

“Don’t move. I’m going for help.”

The sheriff shook his head. He raised himself again and stretched his hand toward something near his leg. This time he’d managed to grab his pant cuff and pulled it up far enough so that she could see what he was after.

Strapped to his calf was what looked like a snub-nosed.38 revolver. He nodded at her and she bent down and pulled it free. Just as she was about to stand up she felt his fingers claw into her ankle and she leaped back and briefly pointed the.38 down at him. He stared up at her.

“It’s too late for me, Ann.”

“Don’t say that.”

“He busted me up bad. You’ve got to stop him before he kills anyone else. Before he kills you.”

They both turned to see Cyclops emerging from the opening in the seawall. His face lowered with only his single eye floating behind a greasy curtain of hair. The sheriff began to tremble.

Ann leveled the.38 and fired. A bullet tugged at Cyclops jacket before he dove behind Chad’s car. She was unsure if she’d even hit flesh.

“Run,” the sheriff wheezed.

“No. I’m going to stay here with you. I can keep him away until someone comes.”

“It’s not going to work. Gun’s almost empty…

Ann broke open the chamber and glanced inside. The sheriff was right. There was only one bullet left. How in the hell can I stop him with one bullet?

It made sense that she should leave. If Cyclops followed her, the sheriff might stand a better chance. It was obvious that Cyclops had only gotten started on him.

“I’ll get help…”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m finished.”

She turned and ran toward the highway.

Chapter 55

It was as if a hot coal had been shoved into the flesh of her leg. Ann had run some brutal cross country races in the past, but she’d never felt like she was on the verge of blacking out. She wondered how far the scarlet line of infection had traveled. Did running make it rise faster? Would it reach her heart by the time she got to town? I should be feeling cold but I’m burning up inside.

It wasn’t the actual running that concerned her the most. She could do that, even if her leg went numb and she was forced to drag it along behind her. It was her mind that she was worried about-the thoughts that kept coming and going in her head-some times so real that she wondered if she were already blacking out and didn’t even know it.

It’s because you’ve got a fever from your infection. It’s affecting the way you think, altering your perceptions. That’s what’s happening to you. Now concentrate on getting back to Traitor in the little time you’ve got left.

She gritted her teeth and pushed forward. She could still sense Cyclops behind her, although the last few times she’d risked slowing down to look, all she’d seen was an empty highway.

Swift clouds moved across the night sky like silent boxcars. She could smell the vinegary scent of rain moving off the ocean, feel the drop in air pressure. She thought she heard dogs barking and wondered if she was hallucinating.

Not much further up the highway, she remembered to take a shortcut locals often used to get to Traitor-a series of long and sometimes steep switchbacks that eventually led down to a railroad track far below. There were many drop offs you had to be careful of but once you reached the tracks, the rest was an easy distance into town. When she was younger and a lot more foolish she’d taken the trail many times at night with only the moon lighting her way. Tonight the moon wasn’t going to be much help. Whatever light did make it down to her now was too weak. But she still had the flashlight she’d found on the boat. And the.38 she’d taken from the sheriff.

Stepping cautiously down the slippery trail, she thought about the railroad tracks far below. As kids, she and her friends used them often in the summer to pick blackberries, although their parents warned them to keep away. She’d grown up hearing the same stories as everyone else. Of crazy hobos lurching down the tracks, looking to hurt someone. Neither she nor her friends ever encountered anyone like that but sometimes they’d find empty liquor bottles and once James said he watched a crow fly off with a bloody finger someone must have suffered the loss of while hopping a train or getting into a knife fight.

In the spring she’d come down with her friends and pick wildflowers before the berries ripened, set pennies on the rail to see what the train would do to them. James once put a quarter on the rail and after the train flattened it he took it home and drilled a hole in it and made a necklace. Later his father had found out and given him hell for wasting money so he’d given it to Ann. Her mother had seen her wearing it and asked her about it, teased her about James being sweet on her. It must have been only a few days before she disappeared…

You had me pack my pink suitcase. The one I’d covered with animal stickers. You told me I was just going to have to stay with Aunt Kate for a few days, that you’d be back before I knew it.

But it wasn’t true. You didn’t come back. And if you thought you could keep Duane away from me you were wrong. Duane, before he lost his teeth and the words still slid off his tongue as if they’d been buttered… A year later he’d talked Aunt Kate into letting him take me out for a chocolate shake. And on the drive back I broke down and cried and he’d pulled over and tried to hold me but I could tell it made him uncomfortable. I told him I must have done something wrong to make you go away and he hadn’t said anything or didn’t know what to say and he got out of the car and lit a cigarette and leaned against the door and just stared in at me. I think he was scared and didn’t want me to see it.

“I’m sorry Ann. I really am. But there comes a time when you have to accept things you don’t like. That’s life. I’m trying to move on and you need to start too.”

“Something bad happened to her. I know it. She’d never want to leave me.”

“Of course she didn’t want to leave you. But she did. And her leaving had nothing to do with you so stop torturing yourself.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“What? Are you calling your stepdad a liar?’

“You say whatever you think you need to in order to get your way. Mom told me that once.”

“News flash. We all do that, Ann. I don’t know who doesn’t. But I’ll tell you one thing-and I’m not just spreading icing over bullshit either. Sure, your mom and I had our problems. But I wasn’t the one who just up and left.”

“She was scared of you.”

“No she wasn’t. She was scared she was going to wind up dying in Traitor of old age. That’s what happens to women when they get big ideas in their heads. I hope that someday you’ll understand. And maybe you’ll also learn to listen to people before you start accusing them of things.”

“You hurt her. She tried to hide it from me but I saw it.”

“Look. I did not hurt her. Your mother was in another one of her moods. We’d had an argument and she went on one of her crazy cleaning sprees. She was scrubbing the kitchen when I came in to tell her to stop and she stood up too fast and caught her cheek on a cupboard door she’d forgotten to close.”

“I don’t believe you. I hate you, Duane.”

“I understand, Ann. When people go through bad shit they say a lot of things they don’t mean.”

And Duane was right. He was the closest thing to a father I ever had. When things were good they were really good. Like the time he took us to Seattle and we went to the Space Needle. We were all afraid of the glass elevator and had held hands like a family…

Everything went dark.

Am I blacking out for real this time?

She could still feel her heart thumping in her throat. The ocean hadn’t stopped roaring and her leg felt like a bloody stump, but she knew that by all logically sane accounts it was not.

Check the light.

She knocked the flashlight against her palm. It flickered and went out, then sparked again before finding a steady but yellowish beam that gradually died.

And then she heard the dogs again. Close.

Chapter 56

Until her eyes adjusted, Ann saw nothing but shadow layered over shadow. She stared west, beyond a clearing in the trees. If she concentrated she could see the ocean as a dark band, and above it a faded red thread of sunset.

You can’t out run them. You’re not even halfway down this mountain yet. You’ll break your neck if you’re not careful.

As the dogs howling got louder she stepped off the trail and began pulling herself blindly through the wet undergrowth. She came to a tunnel of salal and passed through it onto a worn deer path of hardened clay that followed a narrow ridge. On either side sharp cliffs plunged down to roaring surf. When she reached the end of the path she recognized an old fire ring and lichen-spotted boulders where she and James would sometimes sit up all night and talk until dawn. If the sky remained clear you could see the faint yellow glow of towns up and down the coast.

How long had it been since she’d come here? After she and James returned from Portland, they’d never made it back. They’d try to make plans but something else would always come up and they continued to put it off until one day it became a kind of cynical joke between them, a sign that their relationship had been forever changed.

Shadows shot from the entrance of the salal tunnel and coalesced in front of her. The dog’s barking deafened her. Cyclops emerged from the tunnel last and unfolded into an impossibly tall and horrifying figure. As he advanced toward her, the dog-shadow spread apart like a pool of crude oil. His gutting knife glowed as if harvest moonlight were striking it.

“I’m running out of time. It’s going to be daylight in a few hours and I’ve got a train to catch… How’s the leg by the way?”

“Go to hell.”

Cyclops laughed. “You’re kind of late to be saying that little girl …”

“What do you want from me?”

“I think it’s pretty clear … And if you think about it you’ve only got two options: The other side of that cliff behind you, or me. But it’s really just an illusion, don’t you think? Ann dead and Ann dead…”

Ann pounded the head of the flashlight against the side of her good leg. It burst on long enough to see that Cyclops was naked down to his waist. His chest was covered by tattoos and wormy white scars. She noticed his arm was bleeding where she’d shot him but it looked like she’d only grazed him and the blood was drying.

The light in her hands died and everything fell back into shadow.

“Why am I hearing dogs but not seeing any?”

“Because they’re ghosts, Ann. My ghosts. People I killed for business and people I killed because they looked tasty to them I guess.”

“I still don’t understand why you want me.”

“I’m just trying to survive the only way I know how.”

“By killing people.”

“It’s not something I enjoy.”

“Yeah. It shows.”

“You don’t understand. I have no choice anymore.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true. I admit that I have killed a lot of people. And they’re angry at me at first. But then most start to accept what’s happened to them and they leave me alone. It wasn’t until I took down the really bad ones that things started happening. Murderers worse than me-rich men who paid big money to satisfy their bloodlust and ruthless drug lords. These dogs-these bad ones got together and decided what the hell, if they could use me as their instrument then they might as well start having fun.”

Ann tried to knock the flashlight back to life again but it refused to come on. She tossed it into the brush and gripped the.38 in both hands. You’ve only got one chance to get this right. One bullet and that’s it. So piss him off and get him in close.

“Sounds like some more of your hobo-psycho bullshit to me.”

“Bullshit?”

“You heard me.”

“I could have left you on that rock to die, Ann. It would have been so easy.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

Cyclops edged forward and so did the pool of shadow.

“Because the dogs weren’t interested. They needed to see your fear and you were only semi-conscious.”

“Drop the knife.”

“Come on Ann…”

“For your information I’m pointing a gun at that big greasy head of yours.”

“You and I can keep debating the truth for a while longer. But why must you insult me?”

“Because you smell bad… Like a vulture just pissed on you.”

“I know what you’re doing, Ann. And it won’t work.”

“Why do you have to do this?”

“I loved your mother. If you must know, this is all her fault.”

“Drop the knife. Now.”

“You must understand. I had to do it. I never planned to let her live the day she left with me to California.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Chapter 57

Other than giving her mother the best few days possible of her life? You drowned her in the motel pool before you left town. But then you began to feel guilty about it. You kept seeing those eyes staring at you, so you invented the story of her drifting out at sea and losing them…adding yet another layer of self delusion that you just kept telling yourself over and over with the hope it would one day make it true.

You only went back to town and stole her from the morgue and buried her in the desert because you thought it would ease your mind. But it never did. She followed you. Left pool water in every car you owned, until you gave up and switched to riding trains. Haunted you day and night. Until you thought the only way she would ever rest was if you gave her what she missed the most-Ann…

Cyclops still hadn’t let go of the knife. She watched him raise the blade and gaze at it in the phantom light. He was still too far away from her. She began to wonder if she would ever be able to find a clean shot at all.

And then something happened she couldn’t explain. The black cloud drifting around Cyclops began to break apart and turn into the shapes of dogs. With human faces.

Ann wanted to scream and run. But there was no where else she could go. He had her backed up against the cliff edge.

She pressed her back against a rock and tried to steady her pounding heart. What was she going to do? He knows you’re losing it, that the fever’s got hold of your mind.

Something moved next to her legs. She knew it was stupid to look away from him but she did anyway. One of the dog-shadows had broken away from the others and was approaching her. She saw a whitish form hovering where its head should have been. A woman’s face framed by a fluid sheet of protoplasm. She smiled when Ann looked at her. Ann thought she was beautiful.

“Who is she?”

“You don’t recognize her?”

“No…”

“It’s your mother Ann.”

“It can’t be. You’re lying.”

“Then take out your locket and you’ll see.”

How did he know I had it with me? And then Ann recalled how she’d awakened on the beach without her clothes.The bastard had had plenty of time to see all that he’d wanted. What else did he have time to do? Thinking about it made her sick to her stomach.

She reached down the neck of her damp sweater and pulled out her mother’s silver locket with a trembling hand. It felt like ice against her palm. She pressed the tiny clasp on the side and it clicked open and she held it up close. Inside she saw a cutout picture of her mother as she remembered her, smiling, with the sea behind her.

Ann looked back at the image floating in the night mist. No, it can’t be.

“What did you do to her?”

Cyclops had moved several steps closer. “I ended her suffering, Ann.”

“No…”

Chapter 58

“She knew she would probably never see you again. That Duane would surely come after her. And then one night I made the decision to go through with it… I came back to the motel to find she’d been drinking again and taking pills. She was angry and talking shit. It was our fault that she couldn’t be with you. She told me everything she knew about the business I had going with the sheriff and Duane-enough, I thought, to get us into some real trouble. Instead of taking them away, I gave her more pills and vodka. And after she calmed down and stopped screaming at me, I waited until it was late and took her down to the pool. We talked and I told her the last week had been one of the happiest in my life. When it was time I asked her to forgive me and she seemed to nod her head as if she wanted me to help her die.”

Ann was crying. “Then why did you lie to me? You said she’d committed suicide.”

Cyclops edged closer, dead branches snapped below him. “Because I wanted to make things easier on you.”

“No. You wanted to protect yourself. You’re a coward. You want to believe it because it makes you feel better.”

“I’m afraid there’s nothing that will make me feel better. Your mother has made that impossible. She’s with me wherever I go. I’ll never be free of her.”

“So what stopped you from killing me before?”

“I came close once a few years ago … I sat in your bedroom and watched you and not a soul in the house even knew I was there except for the cats. But I left you a gift instead. The locket you’re wearing now. I took the picture of your mother that’s in it. She was standing on a cliff in Big Sur.”

“No, that’s impossible. I found it in a box of her things that Aunt Kate kept in a storage shed she rented in Knife Cape. She hoped that some day detectives would go through them and find the piece of evidence they needed to make an arrest…”

“You’re surprising me, Ann. Didn’t you wonder why you hadn’t seen your mother wear it before?”

“At first I thought it was hers. And then I realized Aunt Kate must have done it. She knew I’d sometimes go to the storage shed without telling her. She must have thought it would make me feel better somehow.”

“She was wearing it the night she died. I bought it for her from a silversmith in Tijuana. She had a picture of you in her purse and she cut it out and put it inside. When I brought the necklace back and hid it in the box I put the picture I’d taken of her in it.”

He must be telling the truth, Ann thought. She’d once removed her mother’s picture and had seen her own below it-blurred, she’d thought, from water damage. She remembered the chills it had given her.

Her arms were getting tired. She wouldn’t be able to hold up the.38 much longer. So much for pissing him off. This obviously isn’t going to work.

You still haven’t answered me. Why didn’t you kill me the last time?”

“After I listened to your sleep-talk I couldn’t go through with it. It made me sick.”

“Sleep-talk?”

“A skill my mother taught me long ago.”

“What is it?”

“You wouldn’t understand … It would take too long to explain.”

“Try me.”

“All of us have a voice that talks while we are asleep, one that we are not aware of. It’s another language and takes years of training to understand. But if you do learn it, you’ll find out many things about a person. And it doesn’t stop there. You can also learn things about the future as well as the past.”

“What did my sleep-talk tell you?”

“I heard your mother’s voice coming from your mouth. She was talking from the other side…through you. While you slept.”

“You heard my mother? He’s only trying to scare you, Ann. Trying to get the dogs going. Don’t let him distract you.

“She had already changed so much by then. In fact, I almost smothered you with a pillow to quiet her.”

“What did she say?”

“She told me that the only way she’d ever let me rest is if I killed you, sent you over to her.”

“You’re lying… She’d never say that.”

“You don’t understand. She’s not the same woman that you or I knew before. All your mother wants is to have you back, no matter what the cost. And when I told her I didn’t take children from the world, she became obsessed with making my life a living hell.”

“But now you’ve changed your mind. About killing me.”

“Of course I have. Look at what your mother has turned me into? I live like an animal because of her.”

“You got off easy.”

Ann pulled the trigger and Cyclops finally dropped the knife.

Chapter 59

Ann choked.

He had her throat between his grime-covered hands. He could feel her pulse ride up through his palms, the lifeline he knew he needed to cut off.

Her fists pounded his face and he laughed when he heard the dogs begin to take a greater interest in her fear. He was bringing it up to the level they liked. The dogs surrounded them like an electric field, anticipating a wave of fresh energy to burst from his hands.

But they couldn’t wait. There were so many of them now and they were hungry and fighting for their place at the table. He could feel their icy breaths against his skin as they gnashed their teeth. They clawed up on his back and weighed him down.

Ann’s arms slipped away. His eye was clouded with sweat but he could see her face tighten into the familiar rictus of fear. He still tasted the elk’s heart he’d eaten earlier, knew that its blood-jam was pumping wildly through his veins. You’re closeAnn…so close. While he pressed down he felt the dogs’ mouths crowd in tighter. Until something inside told him to release her…

When he drew away his hands he looked up and saw Ann’s mother.

She reminded him of a demon story he’d heard as a boy. A tale his grandmother once told him. About a beautiful woman who’d died under suspicious circumstances. And when the townsfolk began seeing her ghost, some warned that she could not accept what had happened to her, that eventually a madness would develop and she’d turn into something terrible.

Most of the time Ann’s mother no longer resembled the woman he’d met years before. What Cyclops saw now was the face of a woman who’d been pulled from a shallow desert grave by coyotes, her eyes milky white and her flesh bubbling with sores from the day’s scorching rays.

You must give me my child!

Cyclops staggered to his feet and tried to run. He threw back his head and screamed in agony. The shadow-dogs clung to his body from his neck down. Their electric teeth sinking deep into his flesh. He stretched his arms out to his sides and the dogs wriggling bodies caused him to sway-moving him past Ann and toward the cliff as if he’d become their marionette. They brought him up to the crumbling edge. He spotted an exposed tree root and looped his arm through it.

“Leave me!”

The shadow-dogs pulled him over and he swung above the dark chasm until they tired and let go, dropping from his body toward the rocks and roaring surf, taking Ann’s mother screaming down with them.

When they were all gone, he climbed back up to look at Ann. She lay on her back, coughing. Her chest heaving for fresh air. He pulled off the remains of his shredded jacket and threw it over her before picking her up in his arms.

Chapter 60

Many times after they fought Duane would take off in his car. The screams and shouting beforehand often woke Ann up, and sometimes she’d hear her mother sobbing and go to their room and lie down next to her until the growl of Duane’s Camaro rattled the windows again and she’d slip back to her own bed. If she was lucky enough to fall back to sleep, her dreams would still arrive to scare her and she’d end up lying in bed, staring up at faces in the wood ceiling until the morning half-light came through her window and showed her they were only knotholes. Often her mind was still dreaming when she opened her eyes and the things in the ceiling would whisper too softly for her to understand.

One night she woke up from a bad dream and thought Duane hadn’t come back and she wanted to crawl into bed with her mom because when she did the scary dreams wouldn’t bother her. At the end of the hall, however, she’d seen a strange light coming from the kitchen and decided to see what it was. The side door to the kitchen had been left open and moonlight was pouring inside on the linoleum and she’d gone and stood in it and it made her feel good.

The kitchen door shouldn’t be left open, and she wondered if Duane had just forgotten to close it or if the raccoons were now trying doors in the middle of the night. She heard someone crying, and it sounded a lot like her mother.

She padded into the doorway and saw light coming from the garage door and she went outside to see who was in there. It was a warm night, and the buttons on her pajamas twinkled. She glanced around the yard and didn’t see any raccoons watching her. When she reached the door she could hear Duane and her mother talking, but the window was set too high for her to look through.

She was about to knock but something stopped her hand. Instead she flipped over an old milk crate her mother used to sit on when she was picking peas and set it next to the door. The window was still too high and she’d needed to stand on her tiptoes to be able to see her mother lying back on the old couch and Duane bent over her outstretched arm and giving her a shot like a doctor would do. Her mother’s eyes were glazed and when she looked up and saw Ann’s face floating in the window she began to laugh like she did sometimes when she didn’t think anyone else was around to hear.

Ann suddenly didn’t recognize her and fell off the crate. She hit her head on a stepping stone and lay there until Duane found her and they took her to the hospital. And that’s when the doctor said her trouble with faces may have started, because she’d hurt the place in her brain that did that kind of thing but she’d never told him what she’d seen that night to make her fall.

Chapter 61

After learning that their little brother had been last seen headed for Traitor during the storm the night before, Chad’s brothers had started to worry. The phones were still out and no one they spoke to had any idea what had happened to him. And although a second storm was due to hit, they decided to drive up over the old mountain road in a pickup loaded with chainsaws and extra gas.

Chad hadn’t drifted far out into the bay before deciding he wasn’t going to leave Ann behind. When he got back to shore Ann and the sheriff were nowhere to be found. He’d discovered blood on the ground and tracked it from the boat ramp up to the highway. He was limping down the middle of the highway when his brothers found him, shivering and barely able to speak.

Ann was discovered by the side of the highway-semi-consciousness, talking deliriously about a hobo who was trying to kill her. She was wrapped in a blanket and taken to her aunt’s house where she was set next to a blazing fire. A doctor who happened to be down visiting relatives had come over and treated the infected wound in Ann’s leg. He insisted that she still needed to get to a hospital as soon as possible. If the highway was not passable by morning, some locals planned to take her to the hospital in Buoy City by boat. The sheriff was still missing.

Ann recalled only fragments of what happened after Cyclops left her lying on Raven Point. She remembered how cold she was, of the persistent howling of dogs on the trail above her. The skin of her throat felt as if it had been burned and she probed it with the tips of her fingers, expecting bandages but not finding any. When she looked up she saw Aunt Kate beaming down at her.

“How do you feel now, Ann?”

“Better…I’m really thirsty.”

“I think your fever has finally broken. And they say the highway is going to open up.”

Ann heard some shuffling and pulled back the blanket from her face. Chad and his brothers were sitting around a table playing a quiet game of cards. Chad’s left eye was swollen shut but he looked up and smiled when he saw her face. She recognized his shorter blond hair.

“Hey.”

“Hey Chad."

“Where did you go?” she asked Kate. “Chad said he visited you earlier, then went by again later and you weren’t home. I thought something had happened to you.”

“Mrs. Nathan came by the check on me early in the morning. She’s got a generator, you know, and insisted I go stay at her house for a few hours. Some people went out looking for you. I was worried sick. What happened?”

“You must let her rest,” the doctor said, rising from his chair. He was very tired himself and anxious to go back to bed.

Chapter 62

As they headed east the air became warmer and drier. He could smell dust and dried hay and knew it would only be another hour before the train would stop at a grain silo where they’d get off. He knew from experience there weren’t any railroad bulls to worry about, but if some of the local famers were in a mood, they might get shot at or have dogs set on them for sport.

Cyclops thumbed the cork off a small bottle and drank. The last time he’d crossed this line of his iron web he’d just been freshly robbed and beaten by a group of hobos in Baker City and left to die. He’d come to when the next train came through and managed to haul himself inside a boxcar even with a broken arm and several mashed fingers. And it wasn’t until later that he discovered his attackers had hopped the same train that night instead of taking his money and getting drunk like he’d heard them talking about. Before the train reached Salt Lake he’d killed them all.

Sheriff Dawkins lay on some molding hay, not sleeping but just gazing out of the boxcar at the landscape sliding past. His appearance had already changed a lot, Cyclops noted. In the short time they’d spent on the rails, the sheriff’s clothes were going baggy and his thinning body was becoming brown and muscular and he’d already acquired an impressive collection of recent scars. As the nicotine fits died away he also seemed more relaxed and reflective. His sense of smell had started to return and he’d begun seeing with his nose like Cyclops had taught him.

“What are you going to do to the kid when we find him?” The sheriff asked. But he already knew.

Cyclops pulled his curtain of hair aside and looked at him. “You got something in mind?”

“No.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t think about it too much. If he’s too dumb to know how to disappear then the money he stole shouldn’t be hard to find either. Son of a bitch has got a real pair on him if you want my opinion. Too bad they’ll be the first things he watches me take from him.”

The sheriff sat up and rubbed his face where the flies kept tickling him. “I’ve known that kid since he was young. Other than having a smart mouth he was never really much trouble. I guess I rode him kind of hard though. But I had to do something so I could get up to his house once in a while and talk to his folks. His older sister had some nice curves on her and I’ll be damned if she didn’t know what she was doing to me.”

Cyclops nodded and took another drink. He didn’t offer any to the sheriff. He was beginning to tire of his company, of listening to him talk about his obsession with young women. But that was the way it always went when you joined the life. Some things took longer than others to fade away.

Chapter 63

It had become a hot day after the fog had burned off and Tammy had somehow gotten way ahead of her.

“Hey, what’s the rush!” Ann shouted.

The outgoing tide had really picked up. Ann watched Tammy get smaller in the distance while seals popped up to the surface, their dark heads glimmering in the sun. She’s just anxious to get back to shore, Ann thought. Wants to get in her sunbathing fix while she can.

Well I’m in no rush to get burned.

Ann pulled her paddles into her kayak and lay back while the water below pulled her toward the mouth of the jetty still a mile away. She stared at the green-blue water and watched the patterns of crescent-shaped silver until it made her feel drowsy.

She closed her eyes and allowed herself to drift until she felt she’d become like the light itself.

She still slept better during the daytime when there were fewer shadows for her to worry over. Although her leg had healed, the doctor said the rest would take more time. The sleeping pills he prescribed for her didn’t seem to work more than a few hours, and she often found herself getting up and turning on all the lights in her room and reading until morning.

He promised you she wouldn’t come back.

Ann remembered his arms holding her as he hiked up the switchbacks, watching as his fast stride caused the forest shapes above them to blur. When she’d tried to wriggle free, he’d held her tighter and warned her not to move and she smelled his foul breath and thought she was going to be sick. But she asked him what was happening anyway, and Cyclops told her she had nothing to worry about anymore, that she’d never see him or her mother again.

And yet it didn’t seem to make a difference. She had been scared of the dark, especially on nights when she could hear coyotes up in the woods, until one night the herd of elk came through the neighborhood, eating from the unprotected vegetable gardens. She’d seen their shadows from her window. She hadn’t seen any since the night she’d found the dead one off the highway.

She got dressed and followed them all night as they finished their pillaging and moved back into the woods where she could only keep up with them briefly before losing them in the dense undergrowth but not before they stopped for awhile and watched her and she saw in their eyes the thing that took away the fear.

For a flash second Ann didn’t know where she was. Her kayak wobbled as she found her balance again. She looked around and was surprised to see how far she’d drifted down the bay. On a small sliver of a beach Tammy lay on her back, her blue kayak drying next to her.

Ann dipped her paddles and headed for shore.

Chapter 64

James sat on his bed and cleaned the.38. It was dark out already and he could hear insects outside.

He kept inside the motel during the days. He’d seen the Twin Falls police come by a few times to break up some loud parties but they’d never bothered him. Yet he got the sense that he should think about moving on. He couldn’t escape the feeling that he was being watched.

And then one night while he’d gone out to buy some groceries someone had broken into his room. They hadn’t found the money he’d stashed but they did go through some stuff that would tell them who he was and where he was from and if they wanted to look further they’d find out what he’d done and then make big trouble for him some day.

He left the gun on the bed and went to check on the courtyard. He could see people out in the dark smoking and drinking. It was a warm night and he could hear some kids being told that the pool was going to close in ten minutes. Since the air conditioning didn’t work he left the window open just a crack. It would be impossible to sleep during the night. He usually couldn’t until after he heard the morning cars leave.

When James lay back on the bed he listened to the sounds around him. The couple next door had finally quieted down and the woman had left afterwards and the man was now on the phone talking. Someone had tried his door until they realized their mistake. They hadn’t known that he was standing behind it with his gun ready. When they went away he lay back down again.

Sleep was never a pleasurable thing to James like it was to some people. But when he started to drift off he thought he heard the sound of Shoshone Falls and after a while he imagined the ocean again and wondered how long it would hold him in its grasp.

He heard the train come by. But this time it stopped, and he imagined with it the cargo of his nightmares.

Content

Dennis Yates
Minus Tide

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64