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So Evelyn drove northwest, following Garrett Wallace.
* * *
—
A day later, they were in Ohio, and Evelyn was still on Wallace’s tail. He took I-75 almost all the way, and she followed. When they got close to Toledo, he turned off the interstate and onto increasingly smaller roads, until they reached a woody, sparsely inhabited area on the lakeshore. Wallace turned down a dirt road toward the water, and Evelyn drove past, until she found a place to pull over. About half a mile on she found it, a pull-off screened by trees and brush. She got out and sat on a stump with a sandwich and thermos she’d packed along. If anyone saw her, she was just sitting in the woods having a nice picnic lunch.
But Evelyn didn’t touch the sandwich or the thermos. She was waiting, and while she waited she had some serious thinking to do. She needed to find out who Wallace was seeing and why. That was most important. Unknown variables had a way of biting you in the ass, and Evelyn meant to stay unbitten. Besides, it was clearly some part of Stone’s business, and she needed to know all she could about that and how it might affect her. So she should probably wait for Wallace to finish and then ease up as close as possible to the cabin and find out what she could.
But doing that would take time, and that would risk losing Wallace. Her tracker had a range of only a couple of miles, and the way he drove, he’d be out of range in five minutes. She needed longer than that to find out why he’d stopped here at the cabin on the lake.
On the other hand, she was reasonably sure she could find Wallace again. He was using a passport with his own name, and if he returned to Perth, turned in his rental car, or almost anything else, she could track him on her laptop. And she needed to know who or what was so important, here in the woods, that he’d come all this way for it. Wallace wouldn’t drive all this way and then out into the wilds if it wasn’t crucial to Bailey Stone’s interests. And that made it important to Evelyn.
She made her decision. When Wallace took off in a cloud of dust and burning rubber, Evelyn waited and then carefully made her way through the woods until she saw the cabin he’d visited.
It didn’t look like much. Just a small, simple house beside the lake. But Evelyn had not survived in her profession by assuming things. She waited; she watched. When there was no sign of life in the cabin, Evelyn worked her way closer, slowly and carefully. She approached the cabin from the side, so that the small shed beside the place was between her and the cabin. She paused at the back side of the shed. Then she moved stealthily around the side farthest from the cabin, slowly easing up to the corner and then squatting. Just as slowly and carefully, she peeked around the corner toward the cabin—
And found herself looking directly into the barrel of a rifle.
And a voice that was soft and polite but nonetheless sounded very dangerous said, “How can I help you, ma’am?”
21
I kept her for three days. Stupid, I know. I should have put a slug in her head, right behind the ear, and put her in a nice quiet hole in the woods. I’m not sure why I didn’t. I wasn’t having any attack of morality or anything. I get that it’s not very sporting, but neither am I, so why didn’t I plug her and get on with things? I don’t know. I guess for a start, it’s hard to do that—or at least do it cold—to somebody who looks like everybody’s favorite aunt. Which she did, except for the piercings and the tattoos. And those were a fairly new disguise—I could tell that. The skin around the piercings was still red and a little swollen, and I was pretty sure the tattoos were fake, just ink on the outside of the skin.
So I figured she was running from something recent. Or somebody, more likely. The only real question was why she ran to me. Because I knew she had. “Coincidence” is just a word on a Scrabble board.
But for two days she wouldn’t tell me. She didn’t talk at all. So I kept her chained up in my safe room, a fire- and bombproof twelve-by-twelve-foot room under the floor of the cabin. I gave her food and water and a bucket to pee in, and that’s it. No use getting sentimental or making friends or anything. Because I was pretty sure that sooner or later I would just have to put her in that hole in the woods.
Something told me not to, not just yet. I mean, sure, I wanted to know how she found me and why. Maybe that was important. But more than that, there was just a naggly little voice in my head telling me to be cool and wait it out for a few days, that it might also be worth it.
So I did. And on day three, that paid off.
I was having breakfast, or trying to. Am I the only guy who ever needed to have breakfast and coffee before he’s functional enough to make breakfast and coffee? Because I’m one of them, anyway. I wake up most mornings with my head so full of tofu I can barely remember how to make my legs take me to the kitchen.
This morning was no different. I stumbled to the coffee machine and hit the switch—I always set it up the night before, so all I have to do is remember to turn it on. And then I did something stupid. I tried to make a bowl of cereal before I drank the coffee.
I got out the milk—a brand-new container, so there was a plastic pull tab. You were supposed to just tug on it and it would pop out and you could pour your milk. Great idea. Except when I pulled, it wouldn’t come up. I pulled harder. The plastic snapped in my hand. It also cut my finger, deep enough that blood started to pour out.
“Shit,” I said. “Fucking plastic.”
Everything was made of plastic these days. Oh, they’ll tell you it’s wonderful stuff—you can do absolutely anything with plastic! Even sculptors and so-called painters use it, to make bright-colored lumps of shit that nobody likes but they stare at it anyway because some dickwad said it was art, and nobody had the nerve to say it was shit—sometimes literally.
I remembered a show I’d gone to in Frankfurt a few years ago—the one in Germany, not Kentucky. I’m not sure they even have art in the Kentucky one. But in Germany, they love it, and this show was a big one. Some brain-damaged geek had taken dozens of dog turds and soaked them in some kind of polymer so they looked fresh. He stuck the preserved shit-lumps on all kinds of items—a dining table, a car seat, even in a gold frame on the wall. And everybody crowded around and stared at it and went, “Wunderbar!” and “Himmelfarb!”
Everybody but me. I had a glass of wine, verified that there were no unattached women worth the effort, and left. It was lousy wine, and I refuse to stare at literal shit. It was just another reason not to like modern art. I mean, seriously, it was nothing but shit soaked in plastic. And another reason to hate plastic. Not just because it was choking the ocean, and little kids stick it in their mouths and choke, and seagulls and turtles and who the fuck knows what else strangle to death on the stuff, but because it was everywhere. And it’s not going away anytime soon. Every day some goggle-eyed genius
invents a new kind, and suddenly it’s taking over everything, doing things you never would’ve thought a plastic could ever do.
It can even preserve your shit! And now—plastic makes your shit portable! Why leave it where it is? With plastic—you can take your shit anywhere!
Wonderful stuff, plastic. Especially if you have a death wish.
Which I do not. I plan to live forever. And that plan was in danger of getting derailed, because I was about to bleed to death from cutting my finger on a piece of plastic. Fucking plastic.
I threw it in the trash, and just to make a clean sweep, I threw the carton of milk in there, too. That’ll teach the bastards.
I guess the pain made me wake up a little, because I had just remembered that there were things called Band-Aids, and even that I had some, when something thumped on the floor. I looked around stupidly for a minute, long enough for a drop of blood to fall from my finger onto the floor. And I woke up some more, because when I looked at the floor I remembered who was underneath it.
