8
Like a quarter horse cutting cattle from a herd, Emil would wheel and swerve, crossing back and forth through brush or over scrub grass until he picked up the scent once more.
The dog found the spot where Hrubek had tangled with the orderlies then returned to the road. Now, he leapt off the asphalt again and charged back into the brush, the Labradors following his lead.
The searchers trotted through this field for a few minutes, heading generally east, away from the hospital, and parallel to Route 236.
At one point as they were making their way through tall, whispering grass, Heck jerked the lead and growled, “Sit!” Emil stopped abruptly. Heck felt him shivering with excitement as if the track line were an electric wire. “Down!” Reluctantly the dog went horizontal. The bitches wouldn’t respond to Charlie Fennel’s similar command; they kept tugging at their lines. He pulled them back once or twice and shouted several times for them to sit but they wouldn’t. Wishing that Fennel, as well as the dogs, would keep quiet, Heck managed to ignore this bad discipline and strode ahead, playing a long black flashlight over the ground.
“Lookit what I turned up,” Heck said. He shone the light on a fresh bare footprint in the earth.
“God double damn,” Fennel whispered. “That’s size thirteen, if it’s an inch.”
“Well, we know he’s big.” Heck touched the deep indentation made by the ball of a huge foot. “What I’m saying is, he’s sprinting.”
“Sure, he’s running. You’re right. That Dr. Adler at the hospital said he’d just be wandering around in a daze.”
“He’s in some damn big hurry. Moving like there’s no tomorrow. Come on, we’ve got a lot of time to make up for. Find, Emil! Find!”
Fennel started the other dogs on the trail, following the footprints, and they ran ahead. But curiously Emil didn’t take the lead. He rose on his muscular legs but stayed put. His nose went into the air and he flared his nostrils, swiveling his head from side to side.
“Come on,” Fennel called.
Heck was silent. He watched Emil gazing right to left and back once more. The hound turned due south and lifted his head. Heck called to Fennel, “Hold up. Shut your light out.”
“What?”
“Just do it!”
With a soft click the two men and three dogs were enveloped in darkness. It occurred to Heck, as it must have to Fennel, that they were totally vulnerable. The madman might be downwind, ten feet away, with a tire iron or broken bottle.
“Come on, Trenton.”
“Let’s don’t be in too big of a hurry here.”
Fifty yards north they could see the slow convoy of the squad car and Heck’s pickup. Emil paced, his head wagging back and forth in the air. Heck studied him intently.
“What’s he doing?” Fennel whispered. “The track’s here. Can’t he tell?”
“He knows that. There’s something else. Airborne scent maybe. It’s not as strong as the track scent but there’s something there.”
It was possible, Heck considered, that Hrubek, huge and sweating, had given off masses of scent, which would eddy and gather here like smoke, remaining for hours on a humid night like this. Emil was probably scenting on the cloud of these molecules. Still, Heck was reluctant to pull the hound away. He had faith in the cleverness of animals. He’d seen raccoons dexterously unscrew the lids of jam jars and had once watched a cumbersome grizzly bear (the same one that had eyed him so voraciously) carefully poke not just one but two delicate claw holes in the top of a 7-Up can then drink down the soda without spilling a drop. And Emil, in his master’s informed opinion, was ten times smarter than any bear.
Heck waited a moment longer but neither heard nor saw anything.
“Come, Emil.” He turned and started away.
But Emil would not come.
Heck squinted into the night. There was a faint glow from the sky but most of the moonlight was now obscured by cloud. Come on, boy, he thought, let’s get back to work. Our reward money’s jogging east at about five miles an hour.
But Emil dropped his nose and pushed into the grass. He quivered. Heck lifted his pistol in front of him and swung aside a thick whip of green and beige shoots. They continued a few feet farther into the maze of grass. It was there that they found what Emil had been seeking.
The dog was no setter but he was as good as pointing at the quarry—a scrap of paper in a plastic Baggie.
Fennel had come up slowly. He put his back to Heck and scanned the grass nervously, his service automatic sweeping left to right. “Bait?”
This had also occurred to Heck. Felons accustomed to being hunted by dogs sometimes leave a pungent article of clothing or spray of urine in a tactical place on the trail. When the tracker and his hound stop to examine the spot, the fugitive attacks from behind. But Heck studied Emil and said, “Don’t think so. He was still around, Emil’d smell more of him.”
Still, as he picked up the bag, Heck kept his eyes not on the plastic but on the wall of grass surrounding him, and there were several pounds of pressure on the stiff German trigger of his gun. He handed Fennel the bag and they stepped into a clearing, where they could read without fear of immediate attack.
“From a newspaper,” the trooper said. “Tore it out. One side’s part of an ad for bras, the other’s a, hey, lookie . . . A map. Downtown Boston. Historical sites, you know.”
“Boston?”
“Yep. We call the highway patrol? Tell ’em to keep the main roads to Massachusetts covered?”
And Heck, who saw his precious ten thousand dollars vanishing before him, said, “Let’s hold off for a bit on that. Maybe he left this here to lead us off.”
“Naw, Trenton. If he’d’ve wanted us to find it, he would’ve left it in the road, not in man-high grass.”
“Maybe,” Heck said, very discouraged. “But I still think—”
Crack . . .
A fierce noise like a gunshot sounded next to Heck’s ear and he swung around, heart pounding, pistol raised. The volume on Charlie Fennel’s walkie-talkie had been full on when he received the transmission. Fennel turned down the squelch and volume knobs and palmed the unit. He spoke softly into it. In the distance, on the road, the red-and-blue roof lights on the Boy’s squad car started spinning.
“Fennel here. Go ahead.” He lowered his head as he listened.
What are they doing? Heck wondered.
Fennel signed off and put the walkie-talkie back on his belt. He said, “Come on. They’ve found him.”
Heck’s heart fell. “They got him? Oh, damn.”
“Well, not quite. He got himself all the way to a truck stop in Watertown—”
“Watertown? That’s seven miles from here.”
“—and tried to hitch a ride up to, guess where, Boston. The truck driver told him no so Hrubek took off on foot heading north. We’ll drive over there and pick up the trail. Man, I hope he’s winded. I myself don’t feel like a half-hour run. Don’t go looking so sorrowful, Trenton, you’ll be a rich man yet. He’s not but a half hour away.”
Fennel and the bitches bounded back toward the road.
“Come, Emil,” Heck called. The hound hesitated just a moment longer and slowly followed his master, clearly reluctant to forsake the grassy fields, damp and cold though they were, for the slippery plastic bench seat of an old, smelly Chevrolet.
 
When she heard the deliberate footfalls coming up from the basement stairs, the heavy steps, the dull clink of metal, Lis Atcheson understood immediately, and the mood of the night at once turned icy.
Owen walked into the doorway of the greenhouse and looked at his wife, who was pulling more burlap bags from the stack near the lath house.
“Oh, no!” Lis whispered. She shook her head and then sat on a bench made of hard cherry wood. Owen paused then sat beside her, smoothing her hair over her ear the way he did when he explained things to her—business things, estate things, legal things. But no explanation was necessary tonight. For Owen was no longer in his work clothes. He wore a dark-green shirt and matching baggy pants—the outfit he wore under a bright-orange slicker when he went hunting. On his feet were his expensive waterproof boots.
And in his hands, a deer rifle and a pistol.
“You can’t do it, Owen.”
He set the guns aside. “I just talked to the sheriff again. They’ve got four men out after him. Only four goddamn men! And he’s already in Watertown.”
“But that’s east of here. He’s going away from us.”
“That doesn’t matter, Lis. Look how far he’s traveled. That’s seven or eight miles from where he escaped. On foot. He’s not wandering around in a daze at all. He’s up to something.”
“I don’t want you to do this.”
“I’m just going to see exactly what they’re doing to catch him.” He spoke in an austere, assured voice. It was her father’s voice. It was a voice that could hypnotize her.
Still, she said, “Don’t lie to me, Owen.”
And like Andrew L’Auberget, Owen’s eyes contracted, hard as a tick’s back. He had a faint smile on his face but she didn’t believe it for a second. She might very well have been speaking to one of the marble-eyed trophies Owen had nailed up on his den wall, for all the effect her words had on him. She touched his arm and let her fingers linger on the thick cloth. He pressed his hand over hers.
“Don’t go,” she said. She pulled him to her. She felt a surge of unfocused ardor. It was more than the memory of their liaison earlier. His strength, his gravity, the hunger in his face—they were all immensely seductive. She kissed him hard, open-mouthed. She wondered if the arousal she felt was truly lust, or was rather an attempt to keep him encircled in her arms all this long night until the danger was past.
Whatever her motives might have been, though, the embrace had no effect. He held her for a moment then stepped to the window. She rose and stood behind him. “Why don’t you say it? You’re going to hunt him down.”
She studied her husband’s back and the reflection of a face that should, she supposed, be vastly troubled. Yet he seemed very much at peace with himself. “I’m not going to do anything illegal.”
“Oh? What do you call murder?”
“Murder?” he whispered harshly, spinning around, and nodding toward the upstairs of the house. “Don’t you ever think about what you’re saying? What if she heard you?”
“Portia isn’t going to turn you in. That’s not the point. The point is you can’t just track somebody down and—”
“You forget what happened at Indian Leap,” he snapped. “I sometimes think I was more upset by it than you were.”
She turned away as if slapped.
“Lis . . .” He calmed quickly, wincing at his own outburst. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. . . . Look, he’s not a human being. He’s an animal. You know what he’s capable of. You more than anybody.”
He continued his argument smoothly: “He escaped this time, he could escape again. He got away long enough to mail that letter to you when he was in Gloucester. Next time he’s there maybe he’ll wander off. And head this way.”
“They’ll catch him tonight. They’ll put him in jail this time.”
“If he’s still mentally incompetent he goes right back into the hospital. That’s the law. Lis, look at the news-casts, they’re emptying the hospitals. You hear about it every day. Maybe next year, the year after, they’ll just turn him out on the street. And we’d never know when he might show up here. In the yard. In the bedroom.”
Then the first tears started and she knew that she’d lost the argument. She had probably known it when she first heard his steps on the basement stairs. Owen was not always right, she reflected, but he was perpetually confident. It seemed wholly natural for him to load up the 4x4 with guns and cruise off into the middle of a stormy night to hunt down a psychopath.
“I want you and Portia to go to the Inn. We’ve done enough sandbagging.”
She was shaking her head.
“I’m insisting.”
“No! Owen, the water’s already up two feet and it hasn’t even started to rain here. The part by the dock? Where the creek flows in? We need another foot or two there.”
“I finished that part. I added plenty of bags. It’s three feet high. If the crest’s higher than that, there’s nothing we could do anyway.”
She spoke coldly. “Fine. Go if you want. Go play soldier. But I’m staying. I still have to tape the greenhouse.”
“Forget the greenhouse. We’re insured against wind damage.”
“I don’t care about the money. For heaven’s sake, those roses are my life. I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to them.” She sat again on the bench. Lis had noticed that she commanded less authority standing beside her husband, with him a foot taller. Seated, though much lower, she paradoxically felt more his equal.
“Nothing’s going to happen. A few broken windows.”
“You heard the report. Eighty-mile-an-hour winds.”
Owen sat beside her and gripped her thigh, pressing hard. His elbow was against her breast. Instead of comfort she felt vulnerability, her defenses breached by his proximity.
“I’m not going to argue this,” he said evenly. “I don’t want to have to worry about you. I want you to go to the Inn. Once they get him—”
“Once you get him, you mean.”
“Once they get him I’ll call you. You two come back to the house and we’ll finish the work together.”
“Owen, he’s going the other way.”
His eyes flashed. “Are you trying to deny it? Lis, he’s run seven miles in forty-five minutes. He’s up to something. Think about it. Why’re you being so damn stubborn? There’s a killer out there. A psychotic killer! He knows your name and address.”
Lis said nothing. She breathed shallowly.
Owen pressed his face against her hair. He whispered, “Don’t you remember him? Don’t you remember the trial?”
Lis happened to glance up and see on the wall a stone bust of a leering gargoyle. She heard in her memory Hrubek chanting, “Lis-bone, Lis-bone, my Eve of betrayal. My pretty Lis-bone.”
A cheerful voice filled the room. “Little late for fishing, isn’t it, Owen?” Portia stood in the doorway, eyeing his outfit. “The party breaking up?”
Owen stepped away from his wife but he kept his eyes on her.
“I’ll pack a few things,” Lis said.
“Going somewhere?” her sister asked.
“The Inn,” Owen said.
“So soon? I thought that was later on the program. When the crazy man showed up to boogie. Oops, sorry. Was that in bad taste?”
“He’s traveled farther than they thought. I’m going to talk to the sheriff about what they’re doing to find him. Lis and you’re going to a bed-and-breakfast up the road.”
“God, he’s not coming this way?” Portia asked.
“No, he’s going east.” Lis looked at her sister. “It’ll just be better to spend the night at the Inn.”
“Okay by me.” Portia shrugged and went to collect her backpack.
Lis rose. Owen squeezed her leg. What, she wondered, does that mean? Thanks? I won? I love you? Hand me my guns, woman?
“I won’t be long. A few hours, tops. Come lock the door after me.”
They walked into the kitchen and he kissed her for a long moment but she could see that his mind was already in the fields and on the roads where his prey wandered. He pocketed the pistol and slung his deer rifle over his shoulder. He then walked outside.
Lis double-locked the door behind him, watching him climb into the truck. She stepped to the window and looked down at the garage. The black Cherokee backed out and paused for a moment. The interior of the truck was dark and she wondered if he was waving to her. She lifted her own hand.
He pulled into the driveway. Of course Owen was right. He knew more about Hrubek than all of the pros did—the troopers, the sheriffs, the doctors. And, what’s more, Lis knew too. She knew Hrubek wasn’t harmless, that he wasn’t wandering around like a dim animal, that he had something on his mind, damaged though it was. She knew these things not as facts but as messages from her heart.
Her cheek pressed against the window for a moment. She backed away and gazed at the uneven, bubble-flecked glass, realizing something she’d never thought of—that these panes had been made two and a half centuries ago. How, Lis wondered, had the fragile glass survived intact all those turbulent years? When she focused again on the yard, the truck’s taillights were gone. Yet she continued for a long time to gaze at the shadowy driveway down which the truck had vanished.
Here I am, she thought in disbelief, a pioneer wife, staring into the wilderness after my husband, who’s traveling through the night, on his way to kill the man who would kill me.
 
The lingering dust raised by the vehicles settled and their taillights vanished behind a hill far to the east. The night was still again. Overhead the clouds that swept in from the west obscured a sallow moon, which sat over a rock outcropping above the deserted highway.
There was as yet no hint of storm. No breeze at all. And for a moment this portion of highway was absolutely silent.
Then Michael Hrubek, pulling his precious Irish cap down over his head, pushed aside the grass and walked directly into the middle of Route 236. He replaced his pistol in the backpack.
GET TO
These words swam into his mind and floated there for a moment, doing slow loop-the-loops. He knew they were vitally important but their meaning kept evading him. They vanished and he was left with a prickling reminder of their absence.
What do they mean? he wondered. What was he supposed to do with them?
He stood on the asphalt and walked in a circle, searching through his confused mind for the answer. What did GET TO mean? Filled with a churning dread, he knew that they were jamming his thoughts. They: the soldiers who’d just been pursuing him.
Let’s think about this.
GET TO
What could it possibly mean?
Hrubek again looked east down the highway, the direction in which the soldiers had disappeared. Conspirators! With their dogs on ropes, sniffing and growling. Fuckers! One man in gray, one man in blue. One Confederate soldier. And one Union, the man with the limp. He was the one Hrubek hated the most.
That man was a con-spirat-or, a fucking Union soldier.
GET TO
GETTO
Slowly the hatred began to fade as he thought about how he’d fooled them. He’d been only thirty feet away from the soldiers, holding his cocked gun, crouching down in a bowl of dirt high on a ledge of rock above them. They’d eased into the grass and found the bag he’d carefully placed there. Shivering with fear he’d heard their alien voices, heard the wet snorting of the dogs, the rustle of grass.
Hrubek saw the letters again, GETO. They floated past, then vanished.
Hrubek recalled the colored lights on the police car starting to spin. A moment later the soldiers returned to the cars and the one who hated him most, the lean fucker in blue, the one with the limp, got into the truck with his dog. They sped off east.
Hrubek crouched down and put his cheek against the damp road. Then he stood up.
“Good night, ladies . . .”
It was coming back to him. GETO. He squinted down the highway, westward. He was seeing not the black strip of asphalt but rather the letters, which slowly stopped swirling and began to line up for him. Like good little soldier boys.
GETO 4
Hrubek’s mind was filling with thoughts, complicated thoughts, wonderful thoughts. He started walking. “I’m gonna see you cry. . . .”
GETON 4
There!
There it was! He began trotting toward it. The letters were all falling into place.
GETON 47 M
The dogs were gone, the conspirators too. The fucker with the limp, Dr. Richard, the hospital, the orderlies . . . all of his enemies were behind him. He’d fooled them all!
Michael Hrubek searched his soul and found that his fear was under control and that his mission was as lucid as a perfect diamond. He paused and set one of the tiny animal skulls in a nest of grass at the base of the post, muttering a short prayer. He then walked past the green sign that said RIDGETON 47 MILES, turned off the road into the cover of brush and began to hurry due west.