Nelson DeMille - Spencerville

"Nope. I like the rifle. How about you?"

"Same." Despite all his exotic training, he'd never been introduced to bows and arrows, blowguns, slings, spears, or boomerangs. The only silent way of killing he'd been taught was by knife and garrote, which wouldn't work on a dog, and he didn't have a silencer for his M-16, and Billy didn't have a crossbow. But he'd worry about that later.

Billy said, "Varmint's a real hard shot with a longbow. Seen it done with a crossbow."

"Right. Okay, thanks. I'll get the truck back to you tomorrow or the next day."

"Hey, Keith, I may be a fucked-up juicehead, but I'm sober now."

Keith looked at Billy Marlon, and they made eye contact. Keith said, "The less you know, the better." Keith moved to the door, but Marlon held his arm.

Marlon said, "I remember some of that night at John's Place and in the park and you drivin' me home."

"I have to go, Billy."

"He did fuck my wife... my second wife. I loved her... and she loved me, and we was doin' okay, but that bastard got between us, and after what happened, we tried to get it back together again... you know? But I couldn't deal with what happened and I started to drink, and I got like real mean with her. She left, but... she said she still loved me, but she'd done somethin' wrong and she could understand why I couldn't forgive her." Billy suddenly spun around and kicked the closet door, splintering the plywood panel. "Ah, shit!"

Keith took a deep breath and said, "It's okay." It was amazing, he thought, how much wreckage Cliff Baxter had left behind as he indulged himself in his carnal gratifications and moral corruption. Keith asked Billy, "What was her name?"

His back still to Keith, Billy replied, "Beth."

"Where is Beth now?"

He shrugged. "I don't know... Columbus, I think." Billy turned around and looked at Keith. "I know where you're goin'. I'm goin' with you. I have to go with you."

"No. I don't need help."

"Not for you. For me. Please."

"It's dangerous."

"Hey, I'm dead already. I won't even notice the difference."

Keith looked at Billy Marlon and nodded.

Keith went into the cowshed, and, with an ax that Marlon had given him, he sliced a few air vents in the trunk lid of the police car. He said to Ward through the slits, "Be thankful it's a Fairlane and not an Escort."

"Fuck you, Landry."

Keith drove the police car out of the shed and headed back on Route 8 the way he'd come. He didn't want to leave any evidence of an association between himself and Billy Marlon and Marlon's pickup truck.

Keith swung off the road onto the shoulder, then cut the car hard right over a drainage culvert and onto a tractor path between two fields of corn. Fifty yards into the corn, hidden from the road, he stopped and shut off the ignition.

He got out of the car and said to Ward, "I'll call from Daytona and tell them where you are. It'll be a while, so relax. Think about early retirement."

"Hey! Wait! Where am I?"

"In the trunk."

Keith jogged back to the road and met Billy Marlon, who was waiting for him in the pickup truck.

Billy drove the pickup, a ten-year-old blue Ford Ranger, and Keith sat in the passenger seat, a dirty bush hat pulled low on his head.

In the storage space behind the seat was the hunting gear, canvas ponchos for the Michigan cold, his M-16 rifle and scope, the Spencerville police shotgun, Officer Ward's service revolver, and Billy Marlon's hunting rifle, an Army surplus M-14 with a four-power scope. He'd also taken his briefcase, which held his passport, important papers, some money, and other odds and ends. It occurred to him that this was about all he owned in the world, which was actually not much more or less than he'd owned when he left Spencerville for the Army half a lifetime ago.

As they drove, Keith said to Billy, "Baxter has three hunting dogs with him."

"Shit."

"Think about it."

"I will." Billy asked, "Where we going?"

"Michigan. Northern part."

"Yeah? I do most of my hunting up that way. There's some good maps in the glove compartment."

Keith found the maps and located Grey Lake at the northern end of the peninsula. It was nearly one P.M., and they should be in Atlanta about seven and, with luck, be able to find Baxter's lodge at Grey Lake within an hour.

As they drove, Keith spotted two Spencerville police cars, saw another troop of mounted posse, and a Spencer County sheriff's car. He slid down in the seat each time, and no one seemed to pay any attention to the old pickup truck. Billy was wearing a John Deere cap pulled low over his eyes, and Keith instructed him not to make eye contact with any cops, since they all knew him from his frequent nights in the drunk tank.

Keith asked him, "Do they know this truck?"

"Nah... I never got a DUI or nothin'. I drink and walk. Hardly use the truck to get to town."

"Okay... if they want to pull us over, you do what they say. We can't run the police in this thing."

Billy replied, "Fuck them. I'm not gonna lay down for those assholes anymore."

"They'll shoot. I know this bunch."

"Fuck 'em. They'll shoot you anyway. Hey, those assholes drive regular Fairlanes. When I get into the corn with this thing, there ain't gonna be no fuzz on our tail."

"Okay. It's your call." Keith regarded Billy a moment. Apparently, there was more to the man than Keith had been able to determine when Billy was drunk. Billy was on a mission now, too, and though Billy Marlon and Keith Landry had traveled different roads since high school and Vietnam, they now found themselves on the same road and with the same thing in mind.

In fact, Billy said, "I'm gonna get us to northern Michigan, Lieutenant — hey, you signed that note 'Colonel.' You a colonel now?"

"Sometimes."

Marlon laughed. "Yeah? I'm a sergeant. I made three stripes before I got out. Ain't that somethin'?"

"You must have been a good soldier."

"I was... I was."

They drove a few more minutes, and Keith said to Marlon, "They might have roadblocks at the county line."

"Yeah, I know. But there's got to be fifty, sixty farm roads that leave this county. They can't put a roadblock at each of them."

"Right. Let's pick one."

"I know the one. Town Road 18 — mostly dirt and most of the time mud because of the bad drainage. Lots of cars get stuck, and Baxter's bozos got to keep their Baxter Motors lease cars lookin' good." He laughed. "Assholes."

Marlon turned west onto a paved farm road, then a minute later turned right and headed north on a rutted gravel road, Town Road 18.

Ten minutes later, the corn ended and they were in a low-lying area of marsh grass, a vestige of the ancient Black Swamp. The road became muddy, and the truck splattered through the black silty muck.

Five minutes later, Billy said, "We're out of Spencer County."

Keith hadn't seen a sign, but he figured that Billy was familiar with the area. He took an Ohio map out of the glove compartment and said, "Let's take back roads up to the Maumee, then maybe we'll pick up Route 127 to Michigan."

"Yeah, that's the way to go."

They continued on, heading west and north on a series of intersecting town and county roads, through the rich autumn farm country, the endless fields of corn and hay, the pastures and meadows. Now that he was leaving and perhaps never coming back, he made certain he noticed everything: the road signs, the family names on the barns and the mailboxes, the crops and the animals, the people, and the vehicles, and the houses, and the whole sense and feel of this land whose whole was indeed far greater than the sum of its parts... And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.