Michael Koryta - So Cold the River

She snorted out a laugh of exasperation. “I didn’t want you to leave, Eric. But you did. So when you talk about making this work, forgive me if I’m a little hesitant.”

“I love you, Claire.”

“I know that,” she said. “The problem is, you’re going to have to figure out how to like Eric a little bit, too. Or at least be at peace with him. Until the two of you can sort that out, I’m afraid I’ll be lost in the middle.”

She fell asleep soon, her head on his chest and her hand curled around his side, and he watched her, feeling a sense of hope and possibility that had been absent for far too long. They would fix this. They would fix it all.

Though she did not yet know it, the water had saved him. It was the water that had returned her to him, that had her at his side right now. Without the water, he’d been alone. With it, here she was. It had revived his marriage and it would revive his career.

The thought returned his mind to Campbell and Lucas and Shadrach, to the story that could lift him to success. He was bothered that the water he’d bottled at the spa had not produced a vision or stopped the withdrawal pains, bothered that he’d required so much from Anne’s last bottle to achieve so little. What he needed was the original. The Bradford bottle. There’d been something different about it, and while the regular Pluto Water had fed the need for a while, it was not doing the job now.

It’s that spring, he thought, the spring that the boy’s uncle used for the moonshine. There was something different about it, and if I could find that spring…

If he could find it, the possibilities were damn near endless. If he could find that spring, the world would just about curl up in his palm.

But he could not find it tonight, and the headache was building and his hands were shaking and he needed to try to hold the dragon at bay if he could. He moved Claire gently, slipped out from beneath her, and went for the plastic bottle he’d filled at the spa. He’d had only a little before falling asleep the first time, and it had not been enough. He’d have to adjust, that was all. A little more, bit by bit, until he found the amount that worked. As the dark hours moved toward the light ones, he drank the water and watched his beautiful wife.

The planning took longer than it should have, wasted more time than Josiah would have liked. But he didn’t know much of the enemy, had only limited information to work with, and that slowed him.

He’d hung up on Danny after instructing him to continue to watch the hotel, and then he returned to pacing the woods around the old timber camp and thinking.

Lucas himself had confirmed that his wife had hired Shaw. Now a woman from Illinois had arrived in the middle of the night, and Lucas had chosen not to send the police after Shaw. Why not? There would be layers to that answer, Josiah was sure, but one of them had just landed at the West Baden Springs Hotel, Carlsbad of North America, Eighth Wonder of the Friggin’ World.

How to leverage that, though? The simple answer was that Josiah needed control of the situation, and that meant he needed control of both Shaw and Lucas’s wife. He went back to the dead detective’s briefcase and riffled through the papers until he came up with a name. Alyssa. Alyssa Bradford. Pretty name. Probably was a pretty girl. According to the detective’s files, she was thirty-six and Lucas was fifty-nine. Trophy wife.

The next step was getting control of Eric Shaw and Alyssa Bradford. It wasn’t something he could accomplish with them in that hotel, but luring them out of that hotel and into a place more suitable for his needs was going to be a difficult task. The only person he knew who had any ties to them was that big black kid.

Wait a second. Wait just one moment, Josiah, use that head on your shoulders.

He called Danny back.

“Anything happening?”

“Nope. Nobody’s come. I wrote down the license plate of that-”

“Great,” Josiah interrupted. “Now tell me, Danny, you said when you followed him earlier today, he went to Anne McKinney’s house. Right?”

“Right. Got out of his car and left the engine running and the door open and…”

Josiah tuned him out, thinking now of the old woman’s house, that lonely, isolated place on the hill outside of town, no neighbors for a half mile in any direction.

“Okay,” he said. “Just needed verification. You stay awake and watching, hear? I’ll be in touch.”

He hung up in the middle of a question from Danny, feeling a tingle in his limbs now, puzzle pieces fitting into place, giving him a sense of the whole. He had the crucial next step, and it was time to get moving. Dawn would be on him soon, and the less of daylight he saw, the better.

It would be a long hike, and there was a temptation to try and avoid that, but in the end Josiah relented. He didn’t want to run the risk of taking his truck out on the roads, not even for a short drive. He filled his pockets with shells and took his shotgun, was just out of the barn when he stopped and went back and opened the door to the truck and tossed the wad of cash he’d stolen from the detective onto the driver’s seat. He’d tell Danny to come get it. Danny’d earned that much, no question. Josiah didn’t feel any great sense of loss, handing the cash over. Funny thing, but the more consumed he became with the concept of debt, the less concerned he was with money itself. Now, what kind of sense did that make?

It was beginning to rain again when he left the timber camp and walked into the woods. Gently so far, but with thick drops and an uncommon humidity for these hours opposite the sun. He hiked up to the highway and then pushed back into the trees, keeping about forty feet from the road. All told, it was probably six miles of solid hiking to Anne McKinney’s, which would take at least two hours going through the brush. If he was at her home by dawn, that would be good enough.

What Josiah wanted out of this was only what was owed to him. There was a dollar figure to it, and he’d settle upon one eventually, but it started with answers. He was damn sure owed some answers, and he had a feeling-no, an assurance by now-that they weren’t the sort of answers got offered up in conversation. They were the sort of answers got offered up when you had a gun barrel to someone’s head.

He worked his tongue around his mouth and spat, that taste of tobacco growing. No cars passed on the dark, empty highway, and though the shotgun was awkward to carry, he was making good enough time, tramping along through the wet underbrush and working up a sweat. He’d spent years bitching about this place, promising himself he’d get out of the town someday and never look back. But out here in the woods, no other people around, no buildings or houses or hotels, he could appreciate what it had. It was beautiful land, really, rich and filled with strange gifts. It was the valley of his birth, the valley of his ancestors. Wouldn’t be so terrible if it ended up being the valley of his death, too. No, that wouldn’t be so bad at all.

The whole place was supposed to be coming alive again, was supposed to be on the threshold of a grand return. There were those who doubted it would happen, but the groundwork had been laid, and those hotels shone beside their casino, and through it all nobody remembered the Bradfords, nobody recalled that Campbell had been the man that made it work for years. Hell with Taggart and Ballard and Sinclair. Some men had visions, others had deeds.

“They forgot you, Campbell,” Josiah whispered as he ducked under a branch and came up into a wind-whipped burst of rain. “You loved this valley more than any of them. Still do.”

He should have felt strange to be talking to his dead ancestor, maybe, but he didn’t. Felt close to him, in fact, felt the meaning of blood kin in a way he never had before. They were shared people, he and Campbell. Different versions of the same blood. Now, that was heavy stuff.