Peake was amazed by the tremendously increased sensitivity of his crap detector. Only yesterday, when he had been in awe of every superior agent, he might not have perceived the pure, unadulterated stink of Sharp’s smooth line, but now the stench was overwhelming.
“But sir,” Peake said, “if they surrender, give up their guns? We still terminate . . . with prejudice?”
“Yes.”
“We’re judge, jury, and executioner?”
A note of impatience entered Sharp’s voice. “Jerry, damn it all, do you think I
like
this? I killed in the war, in Vietnam, when my country told me killing was necessary, and I didn’t like that much, not even when it was a certifiable enemy, so I’m not exactly jumping with joy over the prospect of killing Shadway and Mrs. Leben, who on the surface would appear to deserve killing a whole hell of a lot less than the Vietcong did. However, I am privy to top-secret information that’s convinced me they’re a terrible threat to my country, and I am in receipt of orders
from the highest authority
to terminate them. If you want to know the truth, it makes me a little sick. Nobody likes to face the fact that sometimes an immoral act is the only right thing to be done, that the world is a place of moral grays, not just black and white. I don’t like it, but I know my duty.”
Oh, you like it well enough, Peake thought. You like it so much that the mere prospect of blowing them away has you so excited you’re ready to piss in your pants.
“Jerry? Do you know your duty, too? Can I count on you?”
In the living room of the cabin, Ben found something that he and Rachael had not noticed before: a pair of binoculars on the far side of the armchair near the window. Putting them to his eyes and looking out the window, he could clearly see the bend in the dirt road where he and Rachael had crouched to study the cabin. Had Eric been in the chair, watching them with the binoculars?
In less than fifteen minutes, Ben finished searching the living room and the three bedrooms. It was at the window of the last of these chambers that he saw the broken brush at the far edge of the lawn, at a point well removed from that place where he and Rachael had come out of the forest on their initial approach to the cabin. That was, he suspected, where Eric had gone into the woods just after spotting them with the binoculars. Increasingly, it appeared that the noises they heard in the forest had been the sounds of Eric stalking them.
Very likely Leben was still out there, watching.
The time had come to go after him.
Benny left the bedroom, crossed the living room. In the kitchen, as he pushed open the rear screen door, he saw the ax out of the corner of his eye: It was leaning against the side of the refrigerator.
Ax?
Turning away from the door, frowning, puzzled, he looked down at the sharp blade. He was certain it had not been there when he and Rachael had entered the cabin through the same door.
Something cold crawled through the hollow of his spine.
After he and Rachael had made the first circuit of the house, they had wound up in the garage, where they had discussed what they must do next. Then they had come back inside and had gone straight through the kitchen to the living room to gather up the Wildcard file. That done, they had returned to the garage, gotten into the Mercedes, and driven down to the gate. Neither time had they passed
this
side of the refrigerator. Had the ax been here then?
The icy entity inside Ben’s spine had crept all the way up to the base of his skull.
Ben saw two explanations for the ax—only two. First, perhaps Eric had been in the kitchen while they’d been in the adjacent garage planning their next move. He could have been holding the weapon, waiting for them to return to the house, intending to catch them by surprise. They had been only feet away from Eric without realizing it, only moments away from the quick, biting agony of the ax. Then, for some reason, as Eric listened to them discuss strategy, he had decided against attacking, opted for some other course of action, and had put down the ax.
Or . . .
Or Eric had not been in the cabin then, had only entered later, after he saw them drive away in the Mercedes. He had discarded the ax, thinking they were gone for good, then had fled without it when he heard Benny returning in the Ford.
One or the other.
Which? The need to answer that question seemed urgent and all-important. Which?
If Eric had been here earlier, when Rachael and Ben were in the garage, why hadn’t he attacked? What had changed his mind?
The cabin was almost as empty of sound as a vacuum. Listening, Ben tried to determine if the silence was one of expectation, shared by him and one other lurking presence, or a silence of solitude.
Solitude, he soon decided. The dead, hollow, empty stillness that you experienced only when you were utterly and unquestionably alone. Eric was not in the house.
Ben looked through the screen door at the woods that lay beyond the brown lawn. The forest appeared still, as well, and he had the unsettling feeling that Eric was not out there, either, that he would have the woods to himself if he searched for his prey among the trees.
“Eric?” he said softly but aloud, expecting and receiving no answer. “Where the hell have you gone, Eric?”
He lowered the shotgun, no longer bothering to hold it at the ready because he knew in his bones that he would not encounter Eric on this mountain.
More silence.
Heavy, oppressive, profound silence.
He sensed that he was teetering precariously on the edge of a horrible revelation. He had made a mistake. A deadly mistake. One that he could not correct. But what was it? What mistake? Where had he gone wrong? He looked hard at the discarded ax, desperately seeking understanding.
Then his breath caught in his throat.
“My God,” he whispered. “Rachael.”
LAKE ARROWHEAD—3 MILES.
Peake got behind a slow-moving camper in a no-passing zone, but Sharp did not seem bothered by the delay because he was busy seeking Peake’s agreement to the double murder of Shadway and Mrs. Leben.
“Of course, Jerry, if you have the slightest qualms at all about participating, then you leave it to me. Naturally, I expect you to back me up in a pinch—that’s part of your job, after all—but if we can disarm Shadway and the woman without trouble, then I’ll handle the terminations myself.”
I’ll still be an accessory to murder, Peake thought.
But he said, “Well, sir, I don’t want to let you down.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that, Jerry. I would be disappointed if you didn’t have the right stuff. I mean, I was so sure of your commitment and courage when I decided to bring you along on this assignment. And I can’t stress strongly enough how grateful your country and the agency will be for your wholehearted cooperation.”
You psycho creep, you lying sack of shit, Peake thought.
But he said, “Sir, I don’t want to do anything that would be opposed to the best interests of my country— or that would leave a black mark of any kind on my agency record.”
Sharp smiled, reading total capitulation in that statement.
Ben moved slowly around the kitchen, peering closely at the floor, where traces of broth from the discarded soup and stew cans glistened on the tile. He and Rachael had taken care to step over and around the spills when they had gone through the kitchen, and Ben had not previously noticed any of Eric’s footprints in the mess, which was something he was certain he would have seen.
Now he found what had not been there earlier: almost a full footprint in a patch of thick gravy from the Dinty Moore can, and a heelprint in a gob of peanut butter. A man’s boots, large ones, by the look of the tread.
Two more prints shone dully on the tile near the refrigerator, where Eric had tracked the gravy and peanut butter when he had gone over there to put down the ax and, of course, to hide. To hide. Jesus. When Ben and Rachael had entered the kitchen from the garage and had stepped into the living room to gather up the scattered pages of the Wildcard file, Eric had been crouched at the far side of the refrigerator, hiding.
Heart racing, Ben turned away from the prints and hurried to the door that connected with the garage.
LAKE ARROWHEAD.
They had arrived.
The slow-moving camper pulled into the parking lot of a sporting-goods store, getting out of their way, and Peake accelerated.
Having consulted the directions that The Stone had written on a slip of paper, Sharp said, “You’re headed the right way. Just follow the state route north around the lake. In four miles or so, look for a branch road on the right, with a cluster of ten mailboxes, one of them with a big red-and-white iron rooster on top of it.”
As Peake drove, he saw Sharp lift a black attaché case onto his lap and open it. Inside were two thirty-eight pistols. He put one on the seat between them.
Peake said, “What’s that?”
“Your gun for this operation.”
“I’ve got my service revolver.”
“It’s not hunting season. Can’t have a lot of noisy gunfire, Jerry. That might bring neighbors poking around or even alert some sheriff’s deputy who just happens to be in the area.” Sharp withdrew a silencer from the attaché case and began to screw it onto his own pistol. “You can’t use a silencer on a revolver, and we sure don’t want anybody interrupting us until it’s over and we’ve had plenty of time to adjust the bodies to fit our scenario.”
What the hell am I going to do? Peake wondered as he piloted the sedan north along the lake, looking for a red-and-white iron rooster.
On another road, State Route 138, Rachael had left Lake Arrowhead behind. She was approaching Silverwood Lake, where the scenery of the high San Bernardinos was even more breathtaking—though she had no eye for scenery in her current state of mind.
From Silverwood, 138 led out of the mountains and almost due west until it connected with Interstate 15. There, she intended to stop for gasoline, then follow 15 north and east, all the way across the desert to Las Vegas. That was a drive of more than two hundred miles over some of the most starkly beautiful and utterly desolate land on the continent, and even under the best of circumstances, it could be a lonely journey.
Benny, she thought, I wish you were here.
She passed a lightning-blasted tree that reached toward the sky with dead black limbs.
The white clouds that had recently appeared were getting thicker. A few of them were not white.
In the empty garage, Ben saw a two-inch-by-four-inch patch of boot-tread pattern imprinted on the concrete floor in some oily fluid that glistened in the beams of intruding sunlight. He knelt and put his nose to the spot. He was certain that the vague smell of beef gravy was not an imaginary scent.
The tread mark must have been here when he and Rachael returned to the car with the Wildcard pages, but he had not noticed it.
He got up and moved farther into the garage, studying the floor closely, and in only a few seconds he saw a small moist brown glob about half the size of a pea. He touched his finger to it, brought the finger to his nose. Peanut butter. Carried here on the sole or heel of one of Eric Leben’s boots while Ben and Rachael were in the living room, busily stuffing the Wildcard file into the garbage bag.
Returning here with Rachael and the file, Ben had been in a hurry because it had seemed to him that the most important thing was to get her out of the cabin and off the mountain before either Eric or the authorities showed up. So he had not looked down and had not noticed the tread mark or the peanut butter. And, of course, he’d seen no reason to search for signs of Eric in places he had searched only minutes earlier. He could not have anticipated this cleverness from a man with devastating brain injuries—a walking dead man who, if he followed at all in the pattern of the lab mice, should be somewhat disoriented, deranged, mentally and emotionally unstable. Therefore, Ben could not blame himself; no, he had done the right thing when he had sent Rachael off in the Mercedes, thinking he was sending her away all by herself, never realizing that she was not alone in the car. How could he have realized? It was the
only
thing he could have done. It was not at all his fault, this unforeseeable development was not his fault, not his fault—but he cursed himself vehemently.
Waiting in the kitchen with the ax, listening to them plan their next moves as they stood in the garage, Eric must have realized that he had a chance of getting Rachael alone, and evidently that prospect appealed to him so much that he was willing to forgo a whack at Ben. He’d hidden beside the refrigerator until they were in the living room, then crept into the garage, took the keys from the ignition, quietly opened the trunk, returned the keys to the ignition, climbed into the trunk, and pulled the lid shut behind himself.
If Rachael had a flat tire and opened the trunk . . .
Or if, on some quiet stretch of desert highway, Eric decided to kick the back seat of the car off its mountings and climb through from the trunk . . .
His heart pounding so hard that it shook him, Ben raced out of the garage toward the rental Ford in front of the cabin.
Jerry Peake spotted the red-and-white iron rooster mounted atop one mailbox of ten. He turned into a narrow branch road that led up a steep slope past widely separated driveways and past houses mostly hidden in the forest that encroached from both sides.
Sharp had finished screwing silencers on both thirty-eights. Now he took two fully loaded spare magazines from the attaché case, kept one for himself, and put the other beside the pistol that he had provided for Peake. “I’m glad you’re with me on this one, Jerry.”
Peake had not actually said that he was with Sharp on this one, and in fact he could not see any way he could participate in cold-blooded murder and still live with himself. For sure, his dream of being a legend would be shattered.