Brian Garfield - Necessity

She’s riding on a big assumption here: that his natural arrogant carelessness toward mechanical details will have extended as far as this gate. Bert’s a good driver but he rarely drives the car himself, especially here in the mountains; he’s usually in the back seat of the limo talking on the phone or hatching plans with whichever of the boys have accompanied him on this weekend’s trip to the cabin. The union bosses or the casino architects or the international bankers or the ones Bert never introduced to her.

So-count on the likelihood that, rapt in scams and schemes, invisible behind the tinted windows of the limousine, he usually can’t be bothered to notice when the car stops for a red light or the opening of an automatic gate.

The key fits in the lock. She turns it against spring pressure. The gate begins silently to slide open.

Blinking with gratitude she climbs back into the Jeep and drives through.

Can’t take the Jeep anywhere near the house; they’d hear it. Got to cut through the woods here. Stay on the downwind side of the house so the noise won’t carry in that direction. Drive tangentially around to the far side of the place-intersect the rough-cut pioneer road back beyond the ridge somewhere.

That’s why the four-wheel-drive vehicle is necessary.

She’s driven these before but nevertheless she has trouble shifting it into the low range and has to break the instruction manual out of the door pocket. After a bit of study and several tries it finally gnashes into gear and to be sure of her bearings she checks the angle of sun shadows on the ground, then tests the wind-a light breeze coming from her left-and goes bucketing to the right across a meadow, crushing flowers and knocking down saplings and trying to avoid the litter of hard New England rocks that could block her passage or puncture an oil pan.

It doesn’t matter about the tracks she’s leaving behind. By the time they’re discovered and followed, either she’ll be long gone with Ellen or it will have failed.

Thank God it isn’t heavy primeval timber. There was a forest fire six years ago in the fall when nobody was in residence; that was during the reign of Bert’s previous wife, Aileen, the one who fell in love with the head-waiter at the Englewood Country Club and eventually married him. She too had been a former model. The house that autumn was scorched but saved by air-dropped firefighters. By the time the fire was contained it had taken out most of the middle-sized trees. What’s left is second growth that has sprouted around the occasional granddaddy tree that survived the blaze.

Mostly she follows game trails through the woods, splashing through puddles left by the hard rain. Where the track squeezes through gaps too narrow for the Jeep she backs up and finds a way around.

It reminds her of treks during hunting season with her father when she was nine or ten or eleven years old and he was trying to teach her to be a boy. He was very serious about knowing how to survive in the wilderness. When they were stationed at Elmendorf he’d been forced down twice by freak weather in the Alaskan wilderness; he came out on foot both times, to the amazement of experts who’d presumed him dead.

Backing up for the third time to find yet another way across a steep-sided creek, she is thinking, I wish I’d paid more attention to what he had to say.

Then she thinks: don’t make a habit of recollecting things like that. You’ll never dare repeat them to anyone.

Not even Ellen?

That’s a question she hasn’t answered: whether it will be safe someday to tell Ellen the truth.

There isn’t much breeze. She’s worried that the sound of the Jeep may be carrying as far as the house-it can’t be much more than three-quarters of a mile off to the left.

Something stirs to her left. It draws her quick alarmed attention. She gets a glimpse of movement-tawny fur bolting into the trees. Doubtless a deer. There are quite a few of them in these woods, trapped on the property by Bert’s brutal fence: they’re born here and they grow up here and they die here, mostly from bullet and shotgun slug wounds inflicted by Bert and his hunting cronies.

It all seems to be taking much longer than it ought to. The boundary fence should have turned up before now. She’s had time to cross the entire property twice over. It’s only 320 acres, for Pete’s sake.

Has she lost her bearings? Running in circles like a fool?

No. She checks tree shadows along the ground; the sun is there-that’s the proper angle; she’s still heading toward the fence. It ought to be right in front of her. She ought to have smashed into it by now.

So where in hell is it?

There. Just up the slope, concealed by brush.

She turns to the left, fighting the wheel, braced against the seat as the tires lurch across rocks and root systems and unexpected holes. The rough pitching flings her against the shoulder belt and at intervals it cuts into the side of her neck; by the end of this ride she’ll have a welt there and a purpling bruise on the side of her elbow where it bangs into the door. Without the belt to hold her down she’d have smashed her skull against the ceiling by now. She feels shaken to pieces.

It isn’t the sort of establishment into which an innocent party would wander by accident. The fence goes all the way around the property. It is nine feet high, a chain link metal barrier topped by an arrowhead pattern of electrified barbed wire strands. Once a week Bert’s man has to walk the length of the fence with a pole cutter to trim back branches and leaves that threaten to drop across the line and short it out.

Be just dandy if he’s making his rounds today …

Now she knows where she is. Anxious about the draining of time she vectors to the left across an open meadow and guns the Jeep to reckless speed.

At the top of the meadow she slaloms amid tree trunks, some of them jagged and blackened. Must be almost there now. Got to be …

Wheels spinning, engine whining, she bursts out of a tangled thicket into the rutted pioneer road. The front wheels plunge down and the Jeep nearly stalls.

Hitting the clutch, gathering breath, she remembers when they bulldozed the road through from the house to the landing strip: a rough pioneer track, unsurfaced, barely graded but sufficient for the Bronco.

Twigs and branches lie askew in the ruts now, some of them crushed. There are a lot of puddles. She sees dark grease stains on the bent weeds that make a spine along the hump of the middle of the track.

It’s been used fairly recently, then.

Of course that doesn’t prove they’re still using the airstrip. It doesn’t prove they haven’t rolled up the steel mesh and taken it away.

If they have-suppose the strip has become boggy from yesterday’s rain: too overgrown for Charlie’s airplane to land?

The worst thing is there’s no time to find out.

She cranks the wheel sharp right and fits the tires into the deep tracks and drives the short distance to the back gate. It is a simple reinforced steel contraption that lacks the formality of the curlicued iron gate at the front entrance but makes up for it in solidity: the gauge of its mesh is such that no wirecutter short of an acetylene torch could breach it.

Holding it shut are two enormous padlocks, top and bottom, their hasps at least half an inch thick.

They gleam in the sunlight-the glint of new metal.

Her keys don’t fit.

She switches off the ignition and stands beside the Jeep staring dismally at the padlocked gate. In the abrupt silence there are sharp pinging sounds-heat contractions in the engine.

Her watch: it’s noon. She feels the terrible pressure of time. Charlie will land at precisely one o’clock but how long will he dare to wait for her if she’s not there to meet him?