T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

The water Carolee had put on began to boil, a hiss and rattle of the pot on the stove, steam rising, but she ignored it.

“We made contact with him.” He held up a hand to forestall them. “He’s all right, for now. But I make no promises. Because what happened, to my mind, was beyond belief — or in my experience, anyway. He fired on them, Sten, actually opened up from cover. It was lucky nobody was hit. I mean, they were just standing around, getting their gear together, and suddenly they’re taking fire.”

Rob hadn’t been there, hadn’t witnessed it personally, but he’d talked to the men who had and he’d taken the report. Apparently Adam was moving around a lot — there’d been break-ins reported at some of the outlying cabins as well as at the Boy Scout camp and up and down the Skunk Line — and at two-thirty that afternoon he’d been coming up a trail that intersected the road where the staging area was. One of the team, who’d barely had a chance to climb out of his vehicle, spotted him coming toward them and shouted for him to halt and put down his weapon. Adam didn’t halt and he certainly didn’t put down his weapon. Instead, he ducked into the cover of the trees and started firing and that got the whole team down in the dirt and lighting the woods up because whether they were highly trained and disciplined or not, they found themselves taken by surprise and maybe they were spooked. At least initially. But they soon regrouped and established a defensive formation while the K-9 handler set the dog on his scent.

Once the firing stopped, their expectation was that the suspect would have fled at that point and that running him down should have been routine, taking into account the unfamiliar terrain, of course, and the fact that cellphones were useless out there and they had to rely on the more limited range of their radios. That wasn’t what happened. Adam outflanked them. And did it so quickly they were taken by surprise all over again, only now he was firing from their rear. Again, it was a miracle nobody was hurt. And when the firing subsided this time, the suspect did take off and the K-9 unit went after him.

Rob paused at this point. He had a cup of coffee before him now and he was staring down into it, slowly revolving the cup on its saucer. Sten found that he had a cup too, though he didn’t need it and it would just keep him awake. Carolee was standing beside him, leaning into him, all her weight concentrated in one hip, and if he felt that weight as a burden, so be it. This was marriage. This was love. Two bound in one, in the flesh, for better, for worse. Rob looked up. “I don’t know if you realize how good these dogs are,” he said. “They always get their man, I mean, always . I’ve never seen them fail yet, except in the rare case where the suspect shoots the dog—”

Carolee let out a sharp breath. “Not Adam, no—”

He was shaking his head again, whether in wonder or disgust or some combination of the two, Sten couldn’t say. “If he’d fired his weapon, that would have put us onto his location, so he didn’t.” A pause. “He was too smart for that.”

But the dog had contacted him, that was for sure, because the dog came back with his backpack, or a backpack. Which contained Hershey’s Kisses, a whole sixteen-ounce bag of them, a bottle of gin, ammunition for a.22 rifle (strange, because the recovered casings from the initial firefight were from the Norinco), and half a dozen packages of freeze-dried entrées — the imported ones, from Switzerland, that weren’t exactly cheap. They’d sent the backpack to the lab for DNA testing, but really, there wasn’t much point since it was ninety-nine percent certain it was Adam’s. The SWAT team officer had seen him, positive ID, engaged him, and how he’d ever managed to get away from the K-9 unit was just a mystery.

Sten heard himself say, “What if I went out there?”

“You can’t do that. Too risky.”

“What if I, I don’t know, went up the train tracks with a bullhorn or something, and called him to give himself up? Or the train. What if I took the train up there and just kept calling all the way up and back again — it’s better than nothing. I’ll tell you, sitting here is killing me. And Carolee too.”

Carolee had an arm round his shoulder, bracing herself, and he felt her grip tighten now. “I could go too,” she said. “He’d listen to me, I mean, more than—”

“Me? You mean more than me?” He could feel the anger coming up in him, anger at her, anger at Rob, but most of all at Adam, Adam with his thrusts and parries and the way he hid behind his debility, pulled it down like a screen to excuse anything, and so what if he was the principal’s son? Was it really all that much of a burden? They’d tried to send him to another school, any school he wanted, but he wouldn’t go, wouldn’t behave or act normal or even try, wouldn’t do anything anybody wanted except to please himself. “Because I’m shit for a father, right, is that what you mean? Because he hates me?”

“You’d have to wear body armor,” Rob said, giving him a long cool look. “I wouldn’t let you go out there without it.”

Carolee pushed the hair away from her face and leaned in over the table, looking from him to Rob, her eyes fierce. “I’m going too.”

“I can’t allow that,” Rob said.

“Can’t allow it?”

“Too dangerous.”

But she wouldn’t have it. She stood there glaring at the sheriff, the cords of her throat drawn tight. “I can’t believe you,” she said, her voice rising till it broke. “You think my son would ever dream of hurting me? His own mother?”

ON THE MORNING THE sheriff finally called to give his permission, Sten was still in bed. A long stripe of bleached-out sunlight painted the wall over the night table, where the clock radio showed half past ten. Carolee was nowhere to be seen, gone, he remembered, down to Calpurnia to work at the game reserve, Just to get out of the house because I swear I’m going to start screaming any minute now . He’d taken a sleeping pill in the middle of the night after something had awakened him — a random noise, a scurrying in the dark — and he’d lain there for what seemed like hours till he got up, made his way to the bathroom and swallowed an Ambien, dry, and then staggered back to bed. When his cellphone weaned him into consciousness, he didn’t at first know where he was, his head fogged with the residue of his dreams, dreams that bucked and shifted and left his muscles kinked with anxiety till he felt as if he’d been crawling through a series of decreasingly narrow tubes all night long.

He was going to ignore the phone — he was trying to ignore it, two weeks more having dragged by since Rob had stopped by the house to quiz him on the subject of Adam’s military background, the police presence in the hills inflated till there was a virtual army out there and still no news, no hope, no reason to do anything but lie flat out on your back like one of the living dead — but those two sharp bleats, followed by a pause and another pair of bleats and then another, were too much for him. He pushed the talk button and heard the sheriff’s voice coming at him, a morning voice, caffeinated and urgent.

“Sten?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit, I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No, I just — you know how it is.” And now all his fears came to squat on his chest like a flock of carrion birds with their long naked claws. “What’s the news? Tell me quick.”

“No news. Nothing. Zip. No contact. But what I’m calling about is I think it’s a good idea you going out there and see what you can do. We’ve arranged it with the railroad people.”

The railroad people. Sure. Of course they’d be involved. Why not? They wanted this thing over with as much as anybody because they’d been shut down now since Adam started in — and that meant no income, no tourists being hauled up the hill by the hundreds and paying forty-nine bucks apiece for the privilege, which in turn meant that everybody who owned a motel or a restaurant or even a gas station was hurting too. The irony of it. But it was beyond irony — it was like some black-hearted joke the universe was playing on him. If before he couldn’t step in the door of a restaurant or coffee shop for fear of some total stranger sending over martinis or picking up his tab, now he didn’t dare show his face because of Adam, because of what Adam had done to Carey Bachman and Art Tolleson and what he was doing, single-handedly, to the local economy. The forests were closed, off-limits. And if the forests were closed, what was the attraction for the tourists — or anybody else, for that matter? Take Back Our Forests. Right. Take them back from Adam.