Jeffery Deaver - Twisted - The Collected Stories of Jeffery Deaver

This morning he asked his daughter, “Now, young lady, is it okay for me to go off and catch us dinner?”

“I guess,” the little girl said, though she wrinkled her nose at the thought of actually eating fish. But Alex could see some relief in her blue eyes.

When she’d wandered off to play on the computer Alex helped Sue with the dishes. “She’s fine,” he said. “We’ll just have to be more careful about what she watches. That’s the problem — mixing up make-believe and reality... Hey, what is it?”

For his grim-looking wife continued to dry what was already a very dry plate.

“Oh, nothing. It’s just... I never really thought about you going off to the wilderness alone before. I mean, you always think about somebody getting mugged in the city but at least there’re people around to help. And the cops’re just a few minutes away.”

Alex hugged her. “This isn’t exactly the Outback we’re talking. It’s only a few hours north of here.”

“I know. But I never thought to worry till Jessie said something.”

He stepped back and shook a stern finger at her. “All right, young lady. No more TV for you either.”

She laughed and patted his butt. “Hurry home. And clean the fish before you get back. Remember that mess last time?”

“Yes’m.”

“Hey, hon,” she asked, “were you really in a fight in high school?”

He glanced toward Jessica’s room and whispered, “Those three rounds? They were more like three seconds. I pushed Pat down, he pushed me, and the principal sent us both home with notes to our parents.”

“I didn’t think you and John Wayne had anything in common.” Her smile faded. “Safe home,” she said, her family’s traditional valediction. And kissed him once more.

Alex turned off the highway, snapped the Pathfinder into four-wheel drive and made his way along a dirt road toward Wolf Lake, a large, deep body of water in the Adirondacks. As he progressed farther into the dense woods, Alex decided that he agreed with his daughter: The monotonous countryside needed sunlight. The March sky was gray and windy and the leafless trees were black from an early-morning rain. Fallen branches and logs filled the scruffy forest like petrified bones.

Alex felt the familiar anxiety twisting in his stomach. Tension and stress — the banes of his life. He breathed slowly, forcing himself to think comforting thoughts of his wife and his daughter.

Come on, boy, he told himself, I’m here to relax. That’s the whole point of it. Relax.

He drove another half mile through the thickening woods.

Deserted.

The temperature wasn’t cold but the threat of rain, he supposed, had scared off the weekend fishermen. The only vehicle he’d seen for miles was a beat-up pickup truck, mud-spattered and dented. Alex drove fifty yards farther on, to the point where the road vanished, and parked.

The airy smell of the water drew him forward, his tackle box and spinning rod in one hand, his lunch and thermos in the other. Through the white pine and juniper and hemlock, over small, moss-covered hummocks. He passed a tree with seven huge black crows sitting in it. They seemed to watch him as he walked beneath their skeletal perch. Then he broke from the trees and climbed down a rocky incline to the lake.

Standing on the shore of a narrow cove, Alex looked over the water. Easily a mile wide, the lake was an iridescent gray, choppy toward the middle but smoothing to a linenlike texture closer to shore. The bleakness didn’t make him feel particularly sad but it didn’t help his uneasiness either. He closed his eyes and breathed in the clean air. Rather than calming him, though, he felt a surge race through him — a fear of some sort, raw, electric — and he spun about, certain that he was being watched. He couldn’t see a soul but he wasn’t convinced that he was alone; the woods were too dense, too entangled. Someone could easily have been spying on him from a thousand different nooks.

Re-lax, he told himself, stretching the word out. The city’s behind you, the problems of work, the tensions, the stress. Forget them. You’re here to calm down.

For an hour he fished with a vengeance, casting spoons, then jigs. He switched to a surface popper and had a couple of jumps but the fish never took the hook. Once, just after he launched the green, froglike lure through the air, he heard the snap of a branch behind him. A painful chill shot down his back. He turned quickly and studied the forest. No one.

Selecting a different lure, Alex glanced down at his perfectly ordered and cleaned toolbox he used for tackle. He saw his spotless, honed fishing knife. He had a fleeting memory of his father, years ago, pulling off his belt and wrapping the end around his fist, telling young Alex to pull down his jeans and bend over. “You left that screwdriver outside, boy. How many times I gotta tell you to treat your tools with respect? Oil the ones that rust, dry the ones that warp, and keep your knives sharp as razors. Now, I’m giving you five for ruining that screwdriver. Here it comes. One...”

He’d never known what screwdriver the man had been talking about. Probably there wasn’t one. But afterward, Alex the boy and now Alex the man always oiled, dried and sharpened. Yet he knew that his father’s approach was so wrong. He could teach Jessie-Bessie the right way to live without resorting to losing his temper, without beatings, without screaming — all those traumas whose aftermath lasted forever.

He’d calmed for a while but thinking of his father made him anxious again. He recalled the conversation he’d had with his daughter earlier — about fighting, about school-yard bullies — and that made him anxious too. Alex knew he kept everything bottled up. He wondered if he had actually spoken back to his father, face-to-face, then maybe he wouldn’t feel the tension and stress as painfully as he did now. Alex tended to take the easy way, avoiding confrontations.

Fist fights... a new self-help concept, he laughed to himself.

He halfheartedly cast a few more times then hooked the lure into the bail of his reel and began walking along the shore, heading east. He stepped from rock to rock carefully, looking down the whole time, mindful of the slippery rocks. Once he nearly tumbled into the cold, black water as he stared at the reflections of the fast-moving strips of clouds, gray and grayer, in the oily water near his feet.

Because he was gazing at his footing he didn’t see the man until he was only ten or twelve feet from him. Alex stopped. The driver of the pickup truck, he assumed, crouching at the shore.

He was in his mid-forties, dressed in jeans and a workshirt. Gaunt and wiry, his face was foxlike, an impression accentuated because of a two- or three-day growth of beard. His right hand held a galvanized pipe over his head. His left gripped the tail of a walleye pike, holding the thrashing, shimmering fish against a rock. He glanced at Alex, took in his expensive, designer-label outdoor clothing, and then slammed the pipe down on the fish’s head, killing it instantly. He pitched it into a bucket and picked up his rod and reel.

“How you doing?” Alex asked.

The man nodded.

“Having any luck?”

“Some.” The fellow eyed the clothes again, walked to the shore and began casting.

“Haven’t caught a thing.”

The man said nothing for a minute. He cast, the lure sailing far into the lake. “What’re you using?” he asked finally.

“Poppers. On a twelve-inch leader. Fifteen-pound line.”

“Ah.” As if this explained why he wasn’t catching anything. He said nothing else. Alex felt his anxiety flutter like the crows’ wings. Fishermen were usually among the friendliest of sportsmen, willing to share their intelligence about lures and locations. It wasn’t as if they were competing for the only fish in the whole damn lake, he thought.