Dead Level (29 page)

Despite the tea Ellie kept making me, my mouth tasted like old blood, and even with so many panes broken out of the windows, the cottage interior still stank of ashes and gasoline.

“I’m sure.” Ellie was on the daybed with my gun in her lap; he’d be coming soon, we thought. For some reason we didn’t know yet, and probably wouldn’t like, he seemed to be waiting for better light.

And now it was here. I sat halfway up, lay back down again fast. Saving my strength, Ellie called it.

I called it nearly fainting, any time I tried raising my head higher than my feet. But my state of consciousness wasn’t the important
thing now, I told myself firmly. Getting away with this was the important thing.

So I was having second thoughts about the completeness of our preparations. “Ellie. Upstairs, there’s a little electric jigsaw.”

I’d put it there when the gas-generator idea was fresh and attractive instead of just something I’d never gotten around to. Besides the vacuuming project, I’d meant to build—if you can believe such a corny notion—a pair of wooden window shutters with the outlines of pine trees jigsawed into them.

Folk art, I’d thought optimistically, ignoring the fact that I am neither folksy nor artistic. Anyway:

“Jake,” Ellie began patiently, “a jigsaw will drain all the power out of the—”

“I know.” The battery wasn’t meant to run tools. But it was all we had, and if we could just get ten minutes out of it …

Blood leaked down the back of my throat again, thin and salt tasting; I spat into a tissue without looking. No sense scaring myself; I was already scared enough.

“But do me a favor and go get the saw anyway, will you?” I asked Ellie. “I’ve just got a bad feeling.”

In fact, if my fears were electricity, I could’ve run that saw for hours, with enough power left over to light Times Square.

Ellie scampered upstairs to the loft; I heard her cross the floor over my head, and moments later she returned with the tool.

“I don’t understand, though, what you think we can—”

“Thanks.” The saw was shaped like a power drill, only with a place to insert a slim cutting blade instead of a drill bit. But there was a problem with it:

No cutting blade. I’d dulled up the last one notching two posts upstairs, I now recalled, so I could set in a shelf for a mirror and a few toiletries. When I was done, I’d taken the old blade out and discarded it, meaning to bring a fresh one the next time I visited.

But I hadn’t. I’d forgotten. A deep, sick thud of fatigue hit me suddenly,
like being smacked upside the head with a two-by-four, as my dad probably would’ve put it.

“Okay,” I said. I put the saw down. Then something else hit me: “Do you smell propane?”

Ellie sniffed. “Uh-huh. Probably from when I was trying to turn the stove on. The last of it, that was in the gas line …”

“Yeah. That’s got to be it, I guess.” Since if the tank was empty, what else could it be?

Moments later she’d fetched me the Very Sharp Knife, the kind the TV ads say easily cuts steel or a tomato. Because the more I thought about a second escape route, the more I wanted one.…

“Great,” I said, trying to sound reasonably confident and cheerful. Although from what I could tell, everything about our situation was about as far from great as it could get, short of vaporization by the explosion of, say, a thermonuclear device.

“The thing is,” I told Ellie as I slid across the linoleum to the spot on the floor that I had in mind, “we think we can lure him into trying to come in here after us.”

Or get him to come as far as the deck platform, anyway. The plan we had so far was that when it got light enough, we’d slip outside, being careful not to dislodge any of those loose deck boards. I’d go down the ladder and hide in the bushes alongside the path, while Ellie perched at the edge of the deck structure.

And then she would
taunt
him, which of course was the most dangerous part. But he’d had chances to shoot us before, and he hadn’t, so we were still betting he wouldn’t this time, either.

Betting our lives, actually, that he still wanted somehow to make our deaths look accidental. And that, we hoped, would quite literally be his downfall:

If we could get him to climb onto the deck, a careless step from him would knock some of its boards off the joists they were perched on. When the boards tumbled, he would, too, down into the enclosure below.

The plan wasn’t perfect; how could it be? If he had that shotgun with him when he fell, for example, we might have to shoot
him
.

Seeming to catch my thought, Ellie spoke up. She still had my gun with her. “Jake? If I get a chance, I’m going to—”

“Shoot him? No.” I’d practiced with targets, but not moving ones, and hitting something that’s sitting still is hard enough. So far he hadn’t shown himself enough to be vulnerable, but even if he did I had no confidence that I’d be able to take him down, especially in the dark.

And for all her admirable determination, Ellie barely knew which end of the weapon to hold. “We don’t want to make him so angry that he forgets what he’s doing and just charges in here, blasting,” I said.

Which for all we knew he might still do anyway, another reason we needed an emergency exit. I gripped the knife, rolled the rug aside, and scored the floor’s elderly brick-patterned linoleum, then tore up a square of the stuff. Underneath was plywood, whose grain goes in lots of different directions due to the way it’s manufactured.

That makes it hard to cut. But the knife—a Miracle Blade, the TV ad had called it, and I hoped to hell the name turned out to be appropriate—was all we had. Also:

I looked at the plywood. A hole for me to slip the blade’s sharp tip into did not obligingly appear. “Hand me the hammer and a big nail, will you?”

Ellie brought them; I slammed a nail into the plywood and pulled it out. Then I did it again, right next to the first hole.

And again. Six holes later, I had a small circle of holes in the plywood. Perforations: I slammed the hammer down hard on the circle’s center. The wood popped out, fell through, down into the blackness under the cabin.

Meanwhile, more ways that our plan could fail kept occurring to me. The deck still lacked stairs, of course, so we’d stationed the stepladder where he could easily use it to get up onto the platform. But what if the stepladder made him feel suspicious, so he didn’t use it? Or …

“What if he tries to force us out without coming in?” I said when Ellie went on looking puzzled.

“Oh. We’re trying to trap
him
, but …”

“Exactly.” I started sawing with the Miracle Knife, which in fact cut so well, I pitied any tomato unlucky enough to come into contact with it. “This is just in case he tries the same.”

The blade was not only better than no tool at all; it was
much
better; sooner than I’d thought, I’d nearly finished cutting a two-foot-square hole in the floor. But by that time my arm was like spaghetti and six or so inches still remained un-Miracled.

Whereupon Ellie
stomped
on it; the wood broke and fell with a clatter to the darkness below. “There,” she said decisively. “Now we’re good if he tries coming in.…”

She turned to the back door. “Or if he doesn’t.”

Suddenly I smelled propane again, stronger now, and glimpsed a brief flicker of orange flame outside the front windows.

And in that flicker, I saw his face.

His hands were shaking. The match went out before he could light the rest of the matchbook and toss it. And she’d seen him.

Damn it, she’d—Dewey tried again, fumbled it, stamped his foot in frustration, nearly weeping. Now they knew something was up; they were moving away from
—damn
it, why couldn’t he make his hands stop shaking?

Back in prison, making his escape plan had been easy. Hell, he’d had nothing else to think about—that’s why his plan had been so good. That plus a helping of the good luck he’d worked so hard to cultivate …

And then, bing-bang-boom and it was done: quick, simple. But this—it wasn’t just the one thing anymore. It was
everything
, all coming at him all at once, every minute. Breathing in ragged gasps, chest thudding as if he was having a heart attack, Dewey cursed his luck—and that, somehow, turned out to be the charm.

The next match flared, igniting the rest of them. As the tiny flare sailed in through the break in the cottage window, he ran, flinging his arms up over his head.

Then from behind him a huge, dull boom full of bluish flame erupted, setting the world afire.

Wade and Sam reached the end of the paved road and started down the dirt portion of it just as the sky changed from black to deepest gray.

Ahead, the truck’s high beams picked out ruts and rocks that Wade steered strenuously to avoid, with only partial success. On either side, evergreen branches scraped the fenders and slapped intermittently at the roof of the cab.

“You think they’re awake yet?”

Sam drank deeply from a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee container and began devouring another glazed cake donut from the box of a dozen they’d bought after leaving the hospital. He hadn’t thought he’d be hungry after the enormous breakfast he’d just eaten back at the hospital. But something about not getting demolished by at least three different possible disasters in the past twenty-four hours had made him ravenous.

Wade shrugged. “Don’t know. They might still be asleep. But your mother wants to win a bet she made with me, though, that she and Ellie could finish the deck on their own this week.”

He slowed for a deer whose eyes glowed eerily in the truck’s headlights. “So I’m guessing they’re up early to get a good start on the job,” Wade finished.

He eased the truck forward again as the young buck stepped deliberately off the dirt road and into the brush. “I’m just glad we can tell them that Bella’s okay, and your granddad, too.”

“Yeah.” A fresh wave of relief hit Sam; funny how you could go along practically dying for something interesting to happen, but what
really
felt good was—

Nothing. No thrills, no drama, just riding down a dirt road in a truck with your stepfather in the new dawn, eating a donut. He rolled the window down, letting in the smell of swamp.

“Listen, Wade,” he began hesitantly. “About that thing we were talking about before.”

“Yeah.” Wade gazed straight ahead, alert for more deer in the road, or maybe a moose. The enormous creatures had no regard at all for vehicles and would step right out in front of you.

“About what you saw. My dad, I mean, at the hospital,” said Sam, but Wade interrupted.

“Twice. I saw him twice.” Wade steered around a puddle the size of a small pond. Surprised into silence, Sam heard the water splash up against the truck’s underside, hissing as steam formed when it hit the hot exhaust system.

“Once outside the hospital. And before that, in my workshop at home.” Wade hit the gas, powering out of the puddle.

“I got the feeling it was your mother he was looking for, not me. Or at least that’s what made sense to me at the time.”

He frowned, calculating the height of a rock sticking up out of the roadbed ahead, and slowed to let the left-hand tires ease up and over the obstacle. “As much as anything did,” he added.

Sam found his voice. “So … what’d you
do
?”

Wade’s lips pursed wryly. “I told him to get lost, that if he wanted to talk, he should talk to her. Maybe apologize for all the BS he put her through when he was alive.”

They jounced over a stretch of rough stones washed out by the recent downpours. Sam held on to his coffee and said nothing for fear of biting his tongue on one of the harder bounces.

“Not,” Wade added, “that I believed what I was seeing. Not really. I figured it was … I don’t know. My subconscious. Or some other mental-hiccup type of thing. But not
real
real, you know?”

The dirt road took a left between two huge granite boulders that stood like sentries guarding the way in. Then it ran sharply uphill and to the right, narrowing. “But now …”

“Yeah,” Sam said again, trying and failing to imagine Wade Sorenson, perhaps the most down-to-earth person that Sam had ever known, sitting in his workshop giving advice to a ghost.

Wade steered around a huge blown-down pine branch that half blocked the road. “I guess now that I know you saw him, too,” Wade went on, “I’ll have to be more open-minded. Or something,” he added, still clearly not liking the idea.

They started downhill toward the culvert and the beaver pond on either side of it. A breeze sent yellow birch leaves twirling past the windshield; a rabbit whose fur was already whitening for winter hopped to the middle of the road, froze alertly for an instant at their approach, then hopped back into the safety of a blackberry-bramble thicket.

Then they heard the boom, a massive thud like a boulder that had fallen from some great height, landing hard very nearby. At the same time they rounded the final curve to where the road went over the culvert.

Or rather what remained of the road, now a complete washout. What had been a dirt track four feet higher than the water level was a carved-out channel, muck-glistening in the early light, littered with beaver-chewed branches and small wet tree trunks.

Wade slowed, easing the truck down toward the scene of the catastrophe. Sam stared, dismayed; the road over the culvert had
always
been drivable.

Always. Once in a while they’d had to get in there in hip boots to unclog the culvert, working with rakes and axes, because the beavers—their dam and the lodge behind it were only fifty feet upstream—kept stuffing it full of twigs. But this …

Wade looked downstream, and his face went suddenly ghastly. In the next moment he was out of the truck and running, toward the wreck of a familiar vehicle on its side in the water on the far side of the demolished roadbed.

Its driver’s-side window was covered completely by debris, and more wet stuff—weeds, branches, thick water plants uprooted by what must’ve been an enormous torrent—half-hid the fender.