37

THE WHOLE WAY out of town, Fisher wonders about something: when Lyle slammed the door of the trailer shut and saw the cab parked in the driveway, he let out a roar of laughter and said, “The cab? You’re kidding me. This is too fucking perfect.”

Only it isn’t, is it? The cab’s too conspicuous to be perfect. That’s what bothers Fisher as he takes the highway east with Lyle in the passenger seat and Al following in his truck, too close for comfort, the headlights glazing the inside of the cab and glinting off the rearview mirror so that he curses, quietly, as he drives. It doesn’t help that Lyle lights up and won’t crack his window. He sits with his seatbelt strapped across his chest and a gun in his lap, and every now and then he says something like, “You don’t even drive good. Isn’t there anything you can do right?” or “Don’t try anything clever, Mikey, you’re not up to it.”

It’s hard for Fisher to keep his mind on what he’s doing. Instead of the minivan’s headlights spilling out ahead of the hood, he sees Pax juddering as he died, and his leg with its paw blown away. In a few weeks Pax’d have been dead anyway, but to die like that—into the darkness Fisher says to himself over and over, I’m sorry, Pax, I should’ve saved you. The fact that he didn’t, or couldn’t, stirs up an anger that sticks in his throat, and makes him drive too fast, taking the curves sloppily, making Lyle sway and hold onto his seat until he lifts the gun and pushes it into the soft skin beneath Fisher’s ear. “Cut it out.”

“Or what? How d’you plan on finding the cabin without me?”

Lyle shoves the barrel harder into Fisher’s neck. He cries out and the van swerves. “There’s always your ex. I can have one of our men go pick her up. You want that? Huhn?”

Fisher doesn’t say a word, but slows the van and hunches over the wheel looking as defeated as he can until the cold barrel of the gun lifts away. But he’s thinking, why haven’t the militia picked her up already? What’s to stop them? Then he realizes: Jan said she thought the cops were watching her. A dead cop found on her porch. Hell, yeah, they’d watch her. They’re waiting for Brian to show up, or for her to try and contact him. A cop-killer: they’re going to go all out to find him. But so’s the militia. To turn him in? To get the heat off them? Something about it doesn’t make sense. Gun nuts like Brian’s buddies don’t help the cops, not ever. Besides, why would Brian leave the dead cop on his own deck? Was he planning to dump him after he’d taken care of Bree? But hell, you don’t end up naked in your step-daughter’s bathroom if you’re trying to shut her up for good. Not unless someone is trying to set you up.

Now Fisher wonders: what if Brian didn’t kill the cop? What if one of the other guys did? He remembers Zane sitting beside him in the car—hell, just this morning—the hoops of his earrings catching the light, sucking hard on his cigarette between telling Fisher what he thought had gone down before Bree fled: the militia guys holding a meeting, the cop snooping around. But why leave him on the deck? A warning to the rest of the cops? A warning to Brian? But the Commander, Fisher thinks, sounded pissed, like everything had got fucked up. That voice full of menace. That foot kicking hard into his belly. Anything to get Fisher to spit out what he knew about Brian.

The Commander’s the guy who’s been telling the IRS to go fuck themselves, Fisher realizes, the guy Zane was talking about, the guy that’s been in the news. Getting hauled into court, saying he was a sovereign citizen, pulling all that crap to get out of paying Uncle Sam, and rounding up a bunch of shit-for-brains guys with guns as back-up.

He must have expected things to turn out differently. Only, Brian’s vanished and now the militia are the ones running scared.

Before long there are no headlights coming toward them and no taillights up ahead. The few lit-up signs for bars or small stores have fallen away. The world’s nothing but icy blacktop, an occasional row of mailboxes where a side road branches off, and Al’s headlights shining into the cab.

Lyle’s so close Fisher hears the bright rustle of paper burning whenever he takes a drag on his cigarette. Already his head’s clogged from the smoke, his thoughts slow and awkward. Fucking Lyle, he thinks, fucking little shit that he is. That laugh when he stepped outside and saw the minivan, as though Fisher had obliged him without knowing it. But that doesn’t make sense. Neither does the fact that they didn’t bring sleeping bags or blankets, didn’t stop for supplies at the grocery store, are driving a hundred and fifty miles in the darkness with nothing more than a thermos of coffee.

It’s years since he’s been out to the old place. Fuck Brian, he thinks, buying the place on the sly, like there had to be something dirty about it. He went out there every summer with his dad until his dad ballooned up from sitting around so much at the motel, and eating donuts and candy and chips like he just couldn’t stop himself. Even carrying their supplies the couple of dozen yards from the truck up the path to the cabin got to be too much for his dad and he made excuses for not going out there, and soon Fisher stopped asking.

Ada must have thought the cabin was his dad’s. Maybe his dad let her believe that because, after Fisher got married, after Bree was born and things had started going wrong between him and Jan, somehow it had slipped out that the place was Fisher’s and always had been. Ada worked on Fisher until he sold it. A fresh start for him, she said, a nest egg it was time to hatch out. He thought about going to the community college and getting a diploma—as a mechanic, maybe, because he was handy at fixing things—but that didn’t work out. Besides, Ada had other ideas. A new roof for the motel, and a paint job inside and out, new furniture too, and he spent the whole summer fixing up the place without getting paid a dime. She said it made him a business partner, that he’d get a share of the profits. But when has Ada ever given him any of the profits? The one time he brought it up, she rounded on him with her cigarette held high, asked if he didn’t think she’d done enough for him, buying him books for school, making sure he had clothes and shoes and snowboots, feeding him, and what had she asked for in return? He should have told her: hours of cleaning motel rooms, and picking gum off carpets, and scraping dried puke off bathroom walls. But he didn’t. He knew he’d lost.

And of all things, Brian bought the place and never told him. A sick feeling wells up in Fisher’s gut. Was it Jan who suggested he use Armstrong Realty to sell it? Was she already sleeping with Brian back then? Or did that damned place somehow throw her into Brian’s path?

He wonders, is he cursed? Is he weak? Does he bring bad luck to everyone? To Pax, who should have slipped quietly from this world when his old heart gave out? To Jan, who was easy prey for someone like Brian? To Bree? To Grisby, because what the hell’s become of him? Did they let him go when he told them how to find Fisher? Or has he been dumped like garbage out in the woods and won’t be found until spring?

No wonder this trip feels doomed. It is doomed. Even if they make it out to the cabin, what are Al and Lyle going to do when they find out Brian’s not there? And if Bree’s hiding in the cabin, she’ll be scared out of her mind when she sees two vehicles drive up. But is she there? She doesn’t have her license, she’s never driven anywhere. Why would she drive Brian’s car a hundred and fifty miles through the crushing cold of January just to hide out when she could have taken a plane to Anchorage and vanished?

He hopes she’s there, and dreads it too. One thing’s for sure: he needs a plan, and he drives with his face bunched up, trying to think, as though somehow one will come to him.