“It’s Billy Bob. Call me at the office or home. Everything is okay,” the recorded voice said. Then the transmission broke up.
There were three other messages with the same callback number on them, each of them impossible to understand. She rushed out the back of the cabin and climbed up the gulch until she was out of the timber, standing on a crag that overlooked a long, sloping mountainside covered with Douglas fir. She hit the dialback key on the cell and waited, her heart beating, her breath fogging in the cold.
THE PHONE RANG in my kitchen while Temple and I were eating breakfast.
“Amber?” I said.
“Tell it to me fast. My batteries are almost dead,” she said.
“Where are you?”
“Tell it to me, Billy Bob. Hurry!”
“You and Johnny are free.”
“Free?”
“Darrel McComb caught some of Karsten Mabus’s thugs on tape. Johnny’s clear on the homicides.”
“Why didn’t Darrel tell us?”
“Darrel is dead.”
“Dead?”
“One thing at a time. How could Darrel know where you are?” I said.
“He brought antibiotics to Johnny’s cabin. He’d followed me there once during his”—she hesitated—“during his voyeur stage. He figured that’s where we were hiding. I can’t think through this. How did Darrel die?”
“Mabus’s men tortured him to death. Darrel had taped a recorder to his leg. He wouldn’t give Johnny up.”
“Oh, Billy Bob,” she said.
“What?” I couldn’t tell if she was expressing grief over Darrel McComb’s death or at something she hadn’t told me about yet.
“Johnny left before dawn with a gun. He believes the Feds have found us.”
The cell phone made a crackling sound, then went dead.
IN THE PREDAWN darkness Johnny had heard the thropping sounds of a helicopter and for a moment he did not know if they came from his dreams or somewhere above the gulch. He lay awake as the grayness of the dawn grew inside the trees, then sat straight up in bed when he heard, this time for sure, a motorized vehicle working its way up the log road.
He dressed and slipped the sling of the Lee-Enfield over his shoulder, put on a slouch hat, and without a coat walked out into the cold, up the hill into woods that were speckled with frost. He followed a deer trail to the top of the gulch, then entered a long, flat area where the trees were widely spaced and he could make out the log road that accessed his cabin.
He heard the helicopter again, but the wind was behind him and he couldn’t be sure of the helicopter’s location. Then he saw electric lights flashing below the rim of a mountain across the valley.
Could a logging crew be working there? The big companies were logging old-growth timber now, lifting out three-hundred-year-old trees by helicopter in the early morning and late evening hours so the companies’ handiwork would not be seen in broad daylight.
But would they be logging when there was still fire danger in the woods, when a spark from an engine exhaust or even a chain-saw blade could set the undergrowth ablaze?
He dismissed the possibility of a logging crew. Someone else was out there. But so what? Hokay hey, he thought. They were dealing the play. Maybe they’d get a surprise about the hand they’d just dealt themselves.
The Everywhere Spirit and the grandfathers who lived with the four points of the wind would not fail him, he told himself. And with a renewed confidence in his vision of this world and the next, he rested behind a tree and watched the broken contours of the log road turn buff-colored and purple under the paling of the sky.
It did not take long for his worst fears to be confirmed. In the distance he saw government vehicles park on the log road and men file into the shadows of the trees, working their way up the slope in what would be a wide semicircle, sealing off any escape from his cabin.
Darrel McComb had turned out to be a rat after all, he thought.
He waited in the coolness of the trees, the Lee-Enfield’s leather sling wrapped loosely around his left forearm, his left knee resting comfortably on a bed of pine needles. He watched the wind puff the mist out of the trees on the valley floor, then the sky became as light-colored and textured as weathered bone, stained at the bottom by the radiance of a red sun.