Hart said, “Before we go anywhere let’s just make sure.”
Another scowl.
Hart was patient. “A few minutes won’t hurt. Let’s split up. You take the right side of the road, I’ll do the left. If you see anybody, it’s got to be either one of ’em so just draw a target and shoot.”
He was going to remind Lewis not to say anything, just shoot. But the skinny man was already bunching his mouth up into a little pout.
So Hart just said, “Okay?”
A nod. “I’ll just draw my target and shoot. Yes, sir, captain.” And gave a snide salute.
HER CHEEK RESTED
Teeth clicking, breath staccato, cheek swollen. It seemed to push her eye out of the socket. Tears and sour lake water covering her face.
Brynn McKenzie spat blood and oil and gasoline. She shook her head to get the water out of her ears. Had no effect. She felt deaf. Wondered if a piece of buckshot or glass had pierced her eardrum. Then her left ear popped and tickling water flowed out. She heard the lapping of the lake.
After muscling her way out of the car, nestled in twenty feet of opaque water, she’d tried to swim to the surface but couldn’t—too much weight from her clothes and shoes. So she’d clawed her way to the rocks at the shore and scrabbled upward, desperate hands gripping whatever they could find, feet kicking. She’d hit the surface and sucked in air.
Now, she told herself, get out. Move.
Brynn pulled up hard. But got only a few inches. No part of her body was working the way it should and her wet clothes must’ve boosted her weight by fifty pounds. Her hands slipped on the slime and she went under again. Grabbed another rock. Pulled herself up to the surface.
Her vision blurred and she started to lose her grip on a rock. Then forced her muscles to attention. “I’m not dying here.” She believed she actually growled the words aloud. Brynn finally managed to swing her legs up and found a ledge with her left foot. The right one joined in and finally she eased herself onto the shore. She rolled through debris—metal and glass, and red and clear plastic—into a pile of rotting leaves and branches, surrounded by cattails and tall, rustling grasses. The cold air hurt worse than the water.
They’ll be coming. Of course, those two men’ll be coming after her. They wouldn’t know exactly where the car went in but they could find out easily enough.
You have to move.
Brynn climbed to her knees and tried crawling. Too slow. Move! She
stood and immediately fell over. Her legs wouldn’t cooperate. In panic she wondered if she’d broken a bone and couldn’t feel the injury because of the cold. She frisked herself. Nothing seemed shattered. She rose again, steadied herself and staggered in the direction of Lake View Drive.
Her face throbbed. She touched the hole in her cheek, and with her tongue probed the gap where the molar had been. Winced. Spat more blood.
And my jaw. My poor jaw. Thinking of the impact that had cracked it years ago, and later the terrible wire, the liquid meals, the plastic surgery.
Was all that cosmetic work ruined?
Brynn wanted to cry.
The ground here was steep, rocky. Narrow stalks—willow, maple and oak—grew out of the angular ground horizontally but obeying nature turned immediately skyward. Using them as grips, she pulled herself up the hill, toward Lake View Drive. The moon, neatly sliced in half, was casting some light now and she looked behind her for the Glock. But if it had flown from the car before the dive, the weapon, perfectly camouflaged for a dark night, was nowhere to be seen.
She picked up a rock shaped a bit like an ax head. Gazed at the weapon manically.
Then Brynn recalled finding Joey bloody and gasping after eighth-grader Carl Bedermier had challenged him after school. Acting by rote, from her medical training, she’d examined the wounds, pronounced him fine and then said, “Honey, there are times to fight and times to run. Mostly, you run.”
So what the hell are you doing? she now snapped to herself, staring at the chunk of granite in her hand.
Run.
She dropped the rock and continued up the incline to the private road. As she neared the top her foot slipped, dislodging an avalanche of shale and gravel. It fell in a huge clatter. Brynn dropped to her belly, smelling compost and wet rock.
But no one came running. She wondered if the men were deafened themselves from the shooting.
Probably. Guns are much louder than people think.
Move fast while you can still take advantage of it.
Another few feet. Then ten. Twenty. The ground leveled some and she could move faster. Eventually she was at Lake View Drive. She saw no
one on it and crossed fast, then rolled into a ditch on the far side, hugging herself and gasping.
No. Don’t stop.
She thought of a high-speed chase last year. Bart Pinchett in his Mustang GT, yellow as yolk.
“Why didn’t you pull over?” she’d muttered, ratcheting the cuffs on. “You knew we’d get you sooner or later.”
He’d lifted a surprised eyebrow. “Well, long as I was moving, I was still a free man.”
Brynn rolled to her knees and stood. She slogged up the hill away from the road and into the trees, plunging into a field of tall yellow and brown grass.
Ahead of her, two or three hundred yards or so, she saw the silhouette of the house at 2 Lake View. As earlier, it was dark. Would the telephone be on? Did they even have a telephone?
Brynn gave a brief prayer that they would. Then she looked around her. No sign of the attackers. She shook her head again, swiveling it from side to side until the second water bead burst.
Which made the sudden sound—footfalls charging through the grass directly toward her—all the more vivid.
Brynn gasped and started to sprint away from Hart or his partner, maybe both, when a forsythia branch caught her foot and she went down hard, breathlessly hard, in a tangle of branches, which were covered with yellow buds bright as you’d see on wallpaper in a baby’s bedroom.
THEY WERE DRIVING
He’d brought Joey along—didn’t want to leave him alone, because of the skateboard injury, even if he was “fine,” and because he’d ditch home
work for video games, instant messaging and MySpace on the computer and texting from his iPhone. The boy wasn’t crazy about picking up his grandmother but he was in pretty good humor as he sat in the backseat and text-messaged a friend—or half the school, to judge from the volume of his keyboarding.
They collected Anna and headed back home. There, Joey charged upstairs, taking the steps several at a time.
“Homework,” Graham called.
“I will.”
The phone rang.
Brynn? he wondered. No. A name he didn’t recognize on caller ID.
“Hello?”
“Hi. This’s Mr. Raditzky, Joey’s central section advisor.”
Middle school was a lot different nowadays, Graham reflected. He’d never had advisors. And “central section” sounded like a communist spy organization.
“Graham Boyd. I’m Brynn’s husband.”
“Sure. How you doing?”
“Good, thanks.”
“Is Ms. McKenzie there?”
“She’s out, I’m afraid. Can I take a message? Or can I help you?”
Graham had always wanted children. He made his living with plants but he had an innate desire to nurture more than that. His first wife had decided against motherhood, suddenly and emphatically—and well into the marriage. Which was a big disappointment to Graham. He believed he had instinctive skills for parenting and his radar was picking up early warning signals from Mr. Raditzky’s tone.
“Well, I want to talk to you about something…. Did you know Joey cut school today? And that he was ’phalting.” Something faintly accusatory in the tone.
“Cut school? No, he was there. I dropped him off myself. Brynn had to be at work early.”
“Well, he did cut, Mr. Boyd.”
Graham fought the urge to deny. “Go on, please.”
“Joey came to central section this morning, gave me a note that he had a doctor’s appointment. And left at ten. It was signed by Ms. McKenzie. But after we heard he hurt himself, I checked in the office. It wasn’t her signature. He forged it.”
Graham now experienced the same unexpected alarm he’d felt last summer while wheeling a plant across a customer’s yard, not realizing he’d rolled it over a yellow jackets nest. Blithe and happy, enjoying the day, unaware that the threat had already been unleashed and dozens of attackers were on their way.
“Oh.” He looked up in the direction of the boy’s bedroom. From it came the muted sounds of a video game.
Homework…
“And what else did you say? ‘Defaulting’?”
“The word is apostrophe
P-H,
’phalting. As in ‘asphalt.’ It’s when kids run up behind a truck at a stoplight with their skateboards and hold on.
That
’s how Joey hurt himself.”
“He wasn’t in your school lot?”
“No, Mr. Boyd. One of our substitutes was on her way home. She saw him on Elden Street.”
“The
highway
?”
In downtown Humboldt, Elden was a broad commercial strip but once past the town line it returned to its true nature, a truck route between Eau Claire and Green Bay, where the posted limit meant nothing.
“She said the truck was doing probably forty when he fell. He’s only alive because there weren’t any cars close behind him and he veered into a patch of grass. Could’ve been a telephone pole or a building.”
“Jesus.”
“This needs some attention.”
I talked to him….
“It sure does, Mr. Raditzky. I’ll tell Brynn. I know she’ll want to talk to you.”
“Thanks, Mr. Boyd. How’s he doing?”
“Okay. Scraped up a little.”
He’s fine….
“He’s one lucky young man.” Though there was an undercurrent of criticism in the man’s tone. And Graham didn’t blame him.
He was about to say good-bye when something else popped into his head. “Mr. Raditzky.” Graham crafted a credible lie. “We were just talking about something yesterday. Was there any fallout from that scuffle Joey was in?”
A pause. “Well, which one?”
Lord, how many were there? Graham hedged. “I was thinking about the one last fall.”
“Oh, the bad one. In October. The suspension.”
Treading again blithely over a yellow jackets nest…Brynn’d told him there was a pushing match at the school’s Halloween party, nothing serious. Graham recalled Joey had stayed home afterward for a few days—because he hadn’t felt well, Brynn explained. But that was a lie, it seemed. So he’d been suspended.
The teacher said, “Ms. McKenzie told you the parents decided not to sue, didn’t she?”
Lawsuit?…What exactly had Joey done? He said, “Sure. But I was mostly wondering about the other student.”
“Oh, he transferred out. He was a problem, ED.”
“What?”
“Emotionally disturbed. He’d been taunting Joey. But that’s no excuse for nearly breaking his nose.”
“Of course not. I was just curious.”
“You folks dodged a bullet on that one. It could have cost you big.”
More criticism now.
“We were lucky.” Graham felt his gut chill. What else didn’t he know about his family?
A little pushing match. It’s nothing. Joey went to the Halloween party as a Green Bay Packer and this other boy was a Bears’ fan…. Something silly like that. A little rivalry. I’ll keep him out of school for a bit. He’s got the flu anyway.
“Well, thanks again for the heads-up. We’ll have a talk with him.”
When they’d hung up, Graham got another beer. He sipped a bit. Went into the kitchen to do the dishes. He found the task comforting. He hated to vacuum, hated to dust. Set him on edge. He couldn’t say why. But he loved doing the dishes. Water, maybe. The life blood of a landscaper.
As he washed and dried he rehearsed a half dozen speeches to Joey about cutting school and dangerous skateboard practices. He kept refining them. But as he put the dishes away he decided the words were stilted, artificial. They were just that—speeches. It seemed to Graham that you needed conversation, not lectures. He knew instinctively that they’d have no effect on a twelve-year-old boy. He tried to imagine the two of them sitting down and speaking seriously. He couldn’t. He gave up crafting a talk.
Hell, he’d let Brynn handle it. She’d insist on that anyway.
’Phalting…
Graham dried his hands and went into the family room and sat down on the green couch, near Anna’s rocker. She asked, “Was that Brynn?”
“No. The school.”
“Everything okay?”
“Fine.”
“Sorry you missed poker tonight, Graham.”
“No problem.”
Returning to her knitting, Anna said, “Glad I went to Rita’s. She doesn’t have long.” A tsk of her tongue. “And that daughter of hers. Well, you saw, didn’t you?”
Occasionally his soft-spoken mother-in-law surprised him by letting go with a steely judgment like this one. He had no idea what the daughter’s crime was but he knew Anna had considered the offense carefully and come back with a reasonable verdict. “Sure did.”
He flipped a coin for the channel, lost and they put on a sitcom, which was fine with him. His team was toast this season.
THE FRANTIC YOUNG
It had been her panicked footsteps Brynn had heard, not those of an intruder, moving toward her through the brush.
“You’re their friend,” Brynn whispered, feeling huge relief that the woman hadn’t met the Feldmans’ fate. “From Chicago?”