Devil Creek Page 2

  She'd had mixed feelings when the boys had started playing with paintball guns, but if the events of two years ago had taught her anything about survival, it was the importance of being self-reliant in matters of self-defense. Mike had helped her to understand that boys running through the woods, "shooting" each other, was part of the developing "male thing" and really nothing more than the twenty-first century equivalent of cowboys and Indians.

  And yet her "little boy" was shifting in his physique and features, and she could see the first glimmerings of the man he would become. Shifting. Changes, physical and in other ways. Paul was a good kid, but he was strong-willed. It was inevitable that his restless, rebellious nature would assert itself on occasion and so it did, but only occasionally and never in anything approaching the surly or belligerent attitudes that some of her friends were dealing with from their children at that age.

  She was proud of the upbringing she'd given Paul, and she was proud of him for being a good kid. Mike played a big part in that, of course. In providing from the male side what Robin had always tried to provide as a mother: parenting and friendship. But one of the tricky parts of that approach was when the child tried to exploit those formed bonds of "friendship," the way Paul had just done.

  She said, in a measured tone, "Paul, who was that woman you were talking to?"

  The stoplight changed. They started across the street.

  "She was just some lady. I never saw her before." They reached the opposite curb. He was studying her. "Mom, why are you so touchy? What's wrong?"

  She felt a pang of guilt. But, she told herself, she owed something to that subconscious quiver.

  "Nothing's wrong. I just . . . I don't know. I've never seen her before, either, but she seemed so . . . I don't know, perky and friendly when she was talking to you; then she saw me coming and she left in a hurry."

  "Mom, I think you're exaggerating."

  "And she touched you."

  There, she'd said it. She said no more. She heard her words and they did sound petty and abrasive. Paranoid.

  She thought, I wonder why.

  "Mom," said Paul, "she was just a friendly person. Yeah, she touched me but you saw it; just lightly, the way some people do, when she walked away. That's all."

  "What were you talking about?" She thought, I sound like a cop on TV.

  Paul was still frowning. "She asked me if I lived here and I said yes, and she asked me how I liked it. She said she had a son my age and she was thinking about moving here and she was wondering if he would like it."

  "And what did you say?"

  "Mom." He stretched out the word into a whine.

  "Paul." She mimicked his tone.

  He sighed. "I told her I liked it here okay. I told her I played soccer and that me and my friends liked it. And that was all. She asked for directions up to the site."

  Now it was Robin's turn to frown. "Site?"

  "You know, the construction site where Mike went to investigate."

  "And you told her how to get there?"

  "Well, what's wrong with that? Everyone around here knows where they're building that resort. She'd have found out from someone else."

  "Okay, Paul. I'm sorry."

  "I told her it was up the highway, and I guess that's where she was going when she pulled out of the parking lot."

  "Yes, just as I was walking up with my groceries."

  "Mom." His tone grew exasperated. "I told you—"

  "I'm not talking about anything you did," she said. "You didn't do anything wrong, Paul. I just wonder why she wanted to speak with you about living in Devil Creek, but not with me."

  "Mom, I think you're making a big deal out of nothing."

  His expression was set in earnest lines.

  She thought, Still so young. So much a boy. Just beginning his journey into adolescence.

  He was in the top ten percent of his freshman class. She was proud of that, and of what a good athlete he had become. That was one of the changes in her son from two years ago. In Chicago, Paul had played traditional sports—baseball, football, shooting hoops—as the season dictated. He had never played soccer in Illinois. He took up the sport overnight with a passion soon after those happenings two years ago, as if he needed to stake a claim that made this town his in a way different from his past, with something new. That's what soccer provided. It was only natural then, given the drive and focus he had always exhibited, that he should excel at it to the extent that he had realistic hopes of playing soccer in Europe.

  And here she was, interrogating him as if he was guilty of a crime. No wonder he was frowning. Robin told herself that she would feel the same way.

  Why was she acting like this?

  She had picked up some sort vibe from that woman in the parking lot, she wasn't sure why. And then to learn that she had been asking Paul for directions to where Mike had been spending so much time recently. . . .

  Stop, she told herself.

  She gave Paul a hug. "Baby, I'm sorry."

  Paul's face reddened and he shook loose of her embrace as gracefully as a fourteen-year-old boy could, but doing so as quickly as he could, with a concerned look up and down the sidewalk.

  No one was in sight to have seen the display of maternal affection.

  "Mom! 'Baby' is worse than 'honey'!"

  She tousled his hair. He wasn't crazy about that, but he accepted it without protest over another hug.

  They proceeded along the sidewalk toward Donna's Café.

  Robin said, "Very well, master Paul. Let us pick up our cake and get ourselves home. Michael should be waiting for us, and we can have our party. How does that sound?"

  "Better than getting hugged by my mom on Main Street."

  They laughed together. Paul's laughter was a sound that she always loved to hear. They continued on into the restaurant.

  She'd ordered the cake earlier in the week, after they'd decided to celebrate with only a small celebration at home, just the three of them. It seemed the only way to celebrate the little unit, which they comprised, that had been forged on that night of horror two years past, and which had been sanctified by law one year ago on this date.

  This was Michael's and her first wedding anniversary.

  Wedding anniversaries mark time in life as much as Christmas or birthdays, times every year when you can't help but take stock of the progress, or lack thereof, being made in your life. If thoughts of two years ago had momentarily brought back the despair and anxiety of that time, a look back on these past twelve months since marrying Michael affirmed in her heart that she had made the right decision in giving her heart to this man. The bonds made legal this date, one year ago, had grown stronger and deeper as their life together had settled into a comfortable normalcy.

  But yes, anniversaries brought remembrance of times and happenings beyond what was being celebrated, so she could not help but remember the bad times gone by.

  And that vaporized quiver in her subconscious had formed a notion that would not stop buzzing through her conscious thought like an irritating gnat.

  The woman in the parking lot.

  I've seen that face before.

  But she was unable to remember where, or under what circumstances, and this made her first wedding anniversary no longer as fun and carefree as it had been.

  Chapter Four

  The informer was late.

  Mike glanced at his wristwatch.

  Damn.

  If Muskie didn't show up soon, Mike would be late getting home. And there was no way he wanted that to happen, not on this, his first wedding anniversary.

  He leaned against the large boulder Muskie had specified as their rendezvous point when Mike had agreed to this meet that morning.

  Behind him, undulating ridges of pine climbed to become craggy peaks far above. A well-maintained gravel path ran past this stand of aspen. The aspen leaves showed a gilding of gold and in another three weeks, this mountain slope would be a spectacular tapestry of brilliant reds,
golds, greens and yellows, drawing seasonal visitors from as far away as Albuquerque and El Paso. The earth dropped off beyond the gravel and provided a panorama of Devil Creek, cleanly laid out far below like a toy town on a child's train set. Although he was in the shade of the mountain, the town glistened in radiant sunshine that made Devil Creek look brand new and shiny.

  He had parked his Jeep several hundred yards behind him, on lower ground, well concealed from here. The Jeep's four-wheel drive had struggled to get him this high, off-road. He had been to Sunrise Ridge several times, visiting the site openly. But this meeting with Muskie was different.

  He decided to give the mousy little man another fifteen minutes. Dammit, he had no choice.

  For more than a month, he'd been blindly fishing, pursuing some sort of lead, any sort of lead, that could contribute to his Sunrise Ridge investigation. His instinct and his stubbornness and his dumb luck had finally dropped into his lap the innocuous little guy who drove the lunch wagon up to the construction site everyday from Donna's in town, to bring meals to the construction crew that comprised a significant percentage of the able-bodied men in Devil Creek.

  Mike Landware was five-foot-ten, edging in on fifty, but he prided himself—not vainly, he hoped—on being in pretty fair shape for a dude his age. He maintained a regimen of exercise on the Nautilus machine they'd bought themselves last Christmas, and in general he lived his life in the outdoors as much as possible. His ebony hair was touched with gray at the temples. There was the shiny sliver of an old, slight scar over his left eye. He wore jeans, hiking boots and a work shirt and jacket.

  He turned up the collar of his light summer jacket against the first trace of a chill that swept across the mountains when the sun dipped down behind a peak to the west. The closer buttes were painted rose by the setting sun, while the carpet of pine across the mountain slopes took on an ominous, dark green that added to the chill he was feeling inside.

  The natural beauty of this country enveloped him and, except for his irritation at Muskie's tardiness, he could not have felt more alive.

  For one fleeting moment, with the scent of the pines so strong his nostrils, and the crisp chill on the breeze that sighed so gently through the pines, he recalled hunting trips with his father, who had taught him all the rudiments of survival in the wilderness. How to stalk and kill painlessly only what you intended to eat. How to move through and exist in rugged feral wilderness that was his natural environment.

  A smile touched the corners of his mouth. Dad had been an independent cuss, and this apple sure hadn't fallen far from that tree. Mom and Dad were gone now, but he hoped they had left their mark.

  Would a woman as good and strong and beautiful and focused as Robin care for a man, the way she loved him, unless she saw something decent in him?

  He'd taken a vow over his parents' graves many years ago, after his discharge from the service, to never again take a human life, as he had so often as a soldier in combat. But two years ago that vow to their sacred memory had become a mockery, obliterated when he took lives, the old ways of survival of the fittest in the jungle of combat surfacing because they had never left him. And a good man died because of his initial refusal to resort to violence as a deterrent.

  When he thought about those things—about the death of a good man, a fellow vet who had been his buddy, his friend—sometimes at times like those, he thought also of the bottle of scotch that still resided in a cupboard of its own in their kitchen, after all these years. Robin didn't think much of the idea, but he insisted on having it there. It was the way he proved to himself, twenty-four/seven, that turning his back on his drinking addiction was a choice which he could make day in and day out, no matter what life pitched his way. After everything he'd been through in his life, he was stronger than any damn bottle. That mattered to a man who had once before slipped into alcoholism, after his first wife met her fate. . . .

  But these were gremlins of the inner man, and when his outer world was of pine and bird calls and the sky turning a colder blue, with some stars already beginning to sparkle, at these times those gremlins almost forgot to exist in him.

  The upper tiers of metal girders, of the structures in progress at the site, were visible less than a quarter mile away, over a ridge to his left. They represented the encroaching edge of industrial construction that was eating up one side of a sloping, one-hundred-acre stretch of Sunrise Ridge like unstoppable vines creeping up a trellis.

  He heard a vehicle approaching, the crunch of tires on gravel and the exertion of an engine negotiating the incline at a moderate, leisurely rate of speed, advancing from the direction of the construction site.

  Withdrawing deeper in the pines that bordered the graveled road, he dropped to one knee and sought cover behind the wide trunk of an old and majestic pine. He peered from around the trunk of the tree. Its sap and fallen pine needles were pleasant scents this close to his nostrils.

  A 2004 white Ford pickup, high off the ground on fat tires, lumbered into view. Even in the shade cast by the looming mountain, its chrome dazzled and its pure whiteness reminded Mike of freshly fallen snow. There were not even mud splashes on the tires or along the lower door panels. The word Security was stenciled across the side door. Two men rode in the cab, looking snappy in their khaki uniforms and reflector sunglasses. There was a double rack attached to the inside rear of the cab, holding their rifles.

  The pickup drove by. They didn't see him.

  Crouched there behind a tree in the wilderness, memories flowed through his mind and he thought about that hellacious week two years ago, a time of stalking through these wooded mountains for a dangerous truth. And it happened less than a mile from here.

  The men in that pickup weren't patrolling the perimeter of a construction site for amusement. These were the ones he must avoid. He wondered how willing they'd be to use those rifles in that gun rack. Those high-powered jobs weren't for decoration, either.

  Yes, there was danger in this, as real as the danger he had faced and taken on two years ago. And while those events were never far from his memory, they had been put on a shelf in his mind for the most part on a day-to-day basis, so that he could move on.

  Right, he thought. In reality, he should be on his way home to celebrate with Robin and Paul. And yet, here he was.

  He never had sold the idea for the novel he'd been writing when he first came to Devil Creek. That manuscript, typed on his favorite old Selectric typewriter, remained in a bottom desk drawer at The Clarion office, to perhaps one day be revived and rewritten and completed. But with marriage, and taking on the role of stepfather to Paul, had come responsibilities. He bought The Clarion, the six-page weekly newspaper that served Devil Creek and its surrounding community.

  True, there was not much at first glance to fill up even a weekly newspaper with, once he accounted for the police report, high school sports, the classifieds and the obituaries. And yet he did manage to track down personality pieces to write about, and forgotten historical facts about the area. There was plenty of that, given the region's several hundred years of recorded history, covering the Spanish Conquistadors, the Indian Wars and the subsequent generations of "taming" this land that was as harsh and unforgiving as it was breathtaking to look at. And he found the region to be rich in human-interest material. And from time to time the county commissioners needed to know they were being watched over, too. Mike had spent more than a year writing about how good or bad the crops were doing, and would the county see its way to add an additional stoplight, even a flashing one, to the downtown intersection at Ocotillo and Fifth, or would some poor soul need to be hit by a car before that intersection got the light it needed? It was engaging work, not challenging but rewarding. And that was exactly the way he preferred it.

  It was exactly the life he wanted for himself, although he wasn't getting much enjoyment out of hiding from armed men on a mountain.

  The memories of two years ago were a constant reminder of what could happen
when there were guns around. His vow over his parents' grave, his heartfelt, well-intentioned commitment to non-violence, had inadvertently led to the death of his best friend in Devil Creek. Joe Youngfeather's blood would forever be on his hands, no matter that Robin and the therapist two years ago in Cruces, and his own reasoning intellect, told him that it was the one who had actually pulled the trigger who was responsible.

  But it had been enough for him to revoke his vow. Yes, he would resort to violence in his own self-defense or defending the life of a loved one or an innocent victim. He had learned during those happenings that the impulse and instincts and abilities to hunt and kill still lived within him.

  He had chosen to live a normal life with beautiful Robin, the loving wife, and Paul, the one-of-a-kind kid, and his penny-ante newspaper, reporting on the non-happenings of a sleepy mountain community.

  Movement across the gravel road caught his attention.

  He eased himself lower behind the tree trunk, in case this was some sort of security foot patrol re-covering the ground.

  A head poked up over the lip of the drop-off on the far side of the gravel, a small head atop a narrow, rubbery neck that bobbed this way and that, reminding Mike of a wary groundhog sniffing the air.

  Mike called to the groundhog head, "It's okay, Del. All clear. You said you had their routine down, right?"

  Muskie scurried up over the edge of the drop-off from where he had been hiding for who knew how long?

  He said, "You're alone, right?"

  "Do I look like I've got company?" Mike saw no reason to conceal his impatience. "I'm here alone. Now get over here, Del. Let's talk."

  Del Muskie was a town character. He was approaching retirement age, but he still wore fatigues and talked in military jargon as if he was a grunt in Vietnam. He was clean-shaven and his haircut was G.I.-style short, but he managed to convey a grizzled impression. His eyes often had a suspicious glaze to them, and he was missing a couple of front teeth. But his manner was to be friendly with everyone. He stayed out of trouble and mostly kept to himself. He was well liked in town, and regarded as a harmless eccentric. He lived on food stamps in a cabin on Missionary Ridge, and drove Donna's lunch wagon up to the construction site to manage the concession she'd arranged with the construction company.