When the Killing Starts (16 page)

Michaels was young enough that he wolfed his meat down and sat looking enviously as I made a meal out of my bit, doing the best I could to let it fill me up. When I'd finished, he swallowed hungrily and asked, "Is that all we've got with us?"

"For today," George said. "I wasn't counting on feeding a crowd."

Michaels swore but did it under his breath, a sulky sound that made it seem to be our fault he was hungry. A rich kid's trick. I ignored it. "Why would your father's girlfriend want you brought back?" I asked, more to take his mind off his hunger than to know the answer. I hadn't examined the check very closely but figured it wouldn't bounce whatever happened.

"I turn twenty-one the day after tomorrow," he said.

"And they want you home for milk and cookies, what?"

"They want me home to sign the papers that make the old man my heir if I get blown away."

George frowned, his legal training showing through the burned face and the bushwise confidence. "Sounds like an unusual setup, him inheriting from you."

Michaels laughed shortly, then caught a mouthful of smoke and coughed, spoiling the impression. "Not really. But I wouldn't expect you to understand."

"Listen, kid," I told him. "George saved your ass this morning and just fed you. On top of which he's got a better education than you have, so watch your mouth and answer the question."

Michaels looked at me quickly, surprised, then away. "Sorry," he mumbled. "It's kind of complicated, that's all."

"Make it simple for us," I suggested.

"Yeah, well, my grandfather, that's mom's dad, he didn't like my father, so in his will he left money to me when I'm twenty-one. The old man's got business problems, and he wants my money as collateral for some deal he's cooking. He's been squeezing me ever since I turned twenty. Finally I'd had enough of it, and I figured I'd scare him, so I heard about the colonel, and I thought I'd go along with him for a while, just to make the old man sweat."

"And your mother?" It sounded as if he was short on affection of any kind, but you expect a boy of twenty to respect at least one member of his family. That's the way it happens in working families, anyway. Maybe the rules don't apply to the rich. Most rules don't.

"She's a wimp. He's been screwing that bitch for years, and she just does nothing."

"But you phoned this girlfriend before you flew out. Why?"

"I didn't. I phoned my mother," he said and clamped his mouth shut.

"Yeah. You've thrown a scare into all of them," I said. "They didn't think you had the guts to do what you did. You've shown them."

"Yeah." He was bitter. "That's fine, only now they're going to say that I didn't have the guts to stay there."

"Those guys would have killed you," George said softly. Like most Indians, he didn't waste words, but he could see where they were needed.

Michaels spluttered with anger. "That's your fault," he said. "I saw you shooting at them. I saw them fall. You killed a couple of them."

"Winged 'em," George said carefully. "Just winged a couple. One in the leg, another one in the arm."

"That's illegal." Michaels was shouting now, and I looked at him, and he dropped his voice. "You can't go around shooting people."

"That's what you signed up to do for a living," I reminded him. "Or don't foreigners count?"

George laughed. He knew what he'd done, and as a law student it frightened him, but this wasn't the place to show fear. "Cowboys 'n' Indians, right?"

"How hard did you hit those guys?" I asked.

"One in the hip. One in the upper arm. They're down."

"Which means they would need a couple of the others to go back to base with them. Good. That leaves them with no boat to spare."

George shook his head. "What I've seen, they won't use the boat; they'll walk 'em back to the shore and keep 'em there. It might give us an extra hour, but that's all."

"We've already had that. As soon as the fire burns down, they'll be onto this lake and looking for us. We're going to have to move at night, head south all the way down to a highway. I didn't see anything within a hundred miles when I flew in, did you?"

"There's nothing," he said. "I figure we'll take four nights at least, longer if we hit any long portages. Check the map?"

I pulled it out and looked. We were almost at the south end of it already. It stopped at the north end of the lake below us. Before I could show it to George, Michaels interrupted. "You mean we've gotta go four days and nights with nothing to eat?"

"See any pizza parlors around?" George grinned.

Michaels swore. "I'm not going." Hunger was stiffening his backbone. "I'll take my chances with the guys. I was getting on fine with most of them."

"Forget it, Jason," I said. "You've deserted in the field. The penalty is death, and that's the business Dunphy's in."

He stood up and threw up his arms angrily. Sam raised his head and looked at him. I reached out and stroked Sam, feeling the crispness of the burned ends of his hair. "We can do this either of two ways," I said easily. "You come with us of your own free will, or you come with us tied up in the canoe. Either way I can't leave you here to be shot."

He sat down again, his arms folded tightly as if he were in an invisible straitjacket. Maybe he was. I ignored him and spoke to George. "What do you think the fire'll do? Burn right down to the highway?"

He shrugged. "The bush is dry enough, but if the wind changes and it burns back on itself, it'll go out; might take a couple days."

"If it does, we can move by day as well as night, make it that much sooner."

He shrugged. "Robinson's coming back tomorrow. He'll report the fire, and they'll send guys in to fight it. We could join up with them if we're lucky."

"Let's hope they do. Otherwise, Robinson'll never get to us. He's going to think we're dead." I let the thought lie there, and we all sat silently until George cocked his head.

"Plane," he said. "Sounds lower this time."

We all sat and listened carefully, and suddenly the note changed as the pilot cut back on the power. "He's landing," Michaels said quickly. "They've spotted us."

"He's not on this lake," George said. "He's a mile or more off." And then, inexplicably, the power picked up again with a roar, and George laughed out loud. "Hey, you know what that is, don't you?"

I nodded. I knew, but Michaels shook his head. "What, what?" He squawked it in his spoiled-boy voice.

"That's one o' those converted Cansos, flying boats turned into water bombers. They're adapted so they can scoop water from a lake and drop it on a fire," George said. "That means we've got a chance. If he's in the district, we might get his attention."

"How?" Michaels was sneering to cover his anxiety. "What're we gonna do? Light a fire?"

I ignored him. "Let's get back to the water."

George ducked away under the branches, but Michaels hung back. "What if the guys are out there?"

"We'll shoot 'em," George said. I've known him long enough to know he was kidding, but Michaels didn't. He started swearing to himself prayerfully as if George and I didn't exist.

We wrestled the canoe back out to the water's edge. From there, with a clear vista ahead of us, we could see that the smoke was clearing. Visibility was still limited, but I could make out the shape of the next island in the chain, a hundred yards from us.

"Be a while before he can see us," George said. "I figure we should get out in the lake and I'll spread out my sleeping bag."

"What if they come after us before we're seen?" Michaels worried.

"They'll be in that rubber boat. We can sink it," George said. "You worry too much."

Worrying is uncool, so Michaels shut up, concentrating on putting the canoe in the water. I checked the wind and then the map. The wind was northeasterly, and the map showed that the land to the northeast was a narrow band of bush between us and the lake we had left behind. That meant the smoke would clear earliest in that direction. The sun was starting to show, and from the time, I judged it was southeast.

"We head around the island and out about a hundred yards is our best bet," I said.

"Right." George was grinning, his blistered face happy now that there was something definite to do. "Let's hope he overflies this lake."

"Got to," I said. "He's likely trying to douse the fire southwest of us, choke it off between the two lakes. He'll pass over us either coming or going."

George grinned again. "You got it, Pontiac. Let's hope he has."

I put Sam in the canoe; then Michaels sat in the center, and I took the stern. George sat in the bow, facing me, holding his sleeping bag, which was bright orange on one side, green waterproof on the other. "When he flies over, grab the end and spread it," he told Michaels.

Michaels was sulky. "He won't see this."

"Stands out like dog's balls," George said cheerfully. "Jus' do it."

"It won't help. They'll just think we're waving, being friendly."

"Not here they won't," I said. "This isn't Toronto. People help one another. If we can get his attention, he'll land. He'll figure we've got problems."

"And we've got problems to burn," George said. He was opening up, the way he usually did with me, kidding, glad of the chance to exercise his city manners, to show that he had leaped the first hurdle to making it away from his home.

He stopped and listened, cocking his head up and back. "Sounds like he's coming back. Yeah!" He pointed up into the smoke. "There. Wave!" He and Michaels opened the sleeping bag; then George closed his end, and Michaels caught on, and they opened and closed it rhythmically, making a splash of orange through the pall of smoke. The plane passed us, a big old white flying boat looking as huge as a flying house. I waved my paddle at it, and George and Michaels tipped their signal toward it, trying to expose the most possible surface to it.

Michaels shouted, "Hey, down here," and George shook his head.

"The only people can hear you are your buddies," he said. "Keep it quiet."

The plane sailed past, about three hundred feet up. Michaels swore. "They haven't seen us."

"Could've," George said. "They've got a ton of lake water on board; they can't stop yet. Maybe they'll come back."

Michaels sat, slumped, his arms between his knees, defeated. "No, they won't," he said. "They've missed us." George laughed. He was just as tense as Michaels, but he said, "You must've been an inspiration to your guys, Jason. Always smilin'."

Michaels swore, but he straightened up, looking around to see if the aircraft was still in sight. It wasn't, but as we waited, the engine note faded, then grew again as it turned back. I held my breath until the white shape loomed through the smoke a hundred yards away, lower now, down to fifty feet over the water and only a few yards to the south of us. The big bomb-bay water doors were hanging open under the hull, but as we watched, they retracted.

George stood up and waved his groundsheet, snatching it out of Michaels's hands. I sat tight, hands on the thwarts, doing my best to damp down the sway George was putting on the canoe, so intent on keeping us afloat that I couldn't even watch the plane. George hooted, "Hey, they've seen us."

"Motion them to land," I said. "And sit down before we're all swimming."

He sat, and as the plane roared past us, waggling its wings, we all three made the instinctive motion of flattening our hands and lowering them toward the water.

The aircraft passed out of our sight into the smoke, flying straight and true. "He's checking his landing run," I said. "He's coming down for us."

"I sure's hell hope so," Michaels said. "I don't need any more of this."

George grinned at me, but we said nothing. We waited, and after a minute the aircraft came back again, lower still but farther to the west. The pilot was waving to us now, pointing back behind him, closer to the north shore. I waved with my paddle and dug in hard, jolting us ahead into the teeth of his slipstream that made the smoke curl around us in a long spiral.

Michaels was laughing now, an excited hee-hee-hee sound, like a teenager responding to his first dirty joke. I had a guy like him in my platoon once. He never stopped giggling until he tripped a booby trap.

About a hundred yards farther the smoke started to thin. And then the visibility cleared right up so we could see the north shore, a rocky section, the narrow area I had noted on the map.

"We're too close to land," Michaels said shakily. "They could see us."

"We won't be here long." George had laid down the sleeping bag and picked up his rifle. He eased the bolt back a quarter inch and checked the chamber, then recocked and pushed the safety on. I did the same with mine. Michaels looked at us both and licked his lips.

I heard the plane reach the end of its southward leg and turn back toward us, the note beginning to rise in pitch as it approached. And then the motors slowed, and the big gull-shaped boat bounced down over the chop on the lake off to the west of us about thirty yards. It slowed at once and bobbed to a stop about fifty yards past us.

"The other side," George shouted. "The door's there." I laid my rifle across my knees and struck out for the rear of the boat, bringing us around the end of the hull, close enough that George had to reach up and push the bow away from it.

There's a big blister on the side, but it was closed, and George reached out his rifle and caught us against the float. "They've gotta cut the motor."

He was right. The port motor stopped, flicking over slower and slower, the tips of the prop blades passing within a foot of the door that clicked open at the bow. George pushed off strongly from the float and grabbed at the opening. Then he ducked out of sight into the hull. Next Michaels pulled us farther ahead and climbed out, shoving off so hard from the canoe that I had to stroke back with the paddle to reach the hull. I got closer to the door and called, "George, get Sam in first."

George's head stuck out of the doorway, and he reached down for Sam's chest as I hissed and Sam straightened and poised to jump in. Sam gave a little kick and disappeared inside, into George's arms. Then I pulled ahead again and held the doorway, walking the canoe backward under me until I could reach George's pack and shove it through the door. I stuck my rifle ahead of me and climbed aboard, pushing the canoe behind us along the hull and clear of the propeller.