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"Give me some good news."
"Still trying to track somebody down. Instead of holding, want me to call you back?"
Ski impressed upon him the urgency of the situation.
"I hear ya."
His friend clicked off. "He has to call us back," Ski told Dodge, who'd had all of Ray Van Mercury-like-the-car he could stomach and had moved several yards away to smoke.
"Every minute we waste standing here, Starks is getting farther away," Dodge grumbled.
"Not if he's in there."
Ski looked into the forest. Footprints of athletic shoes, like the ones that Starks had bought at Walmart and that had been described by Mrs. Mittmayer as the kind of footwear he'd been wearing, led from the elderly couple's abandoned compact car into the densest part of the Big Thicket. No-man's-land.
The Big Thicket National Preserve had countless legends and mysteries associated with it, everything from a resident Sasquatch to capricious lights with no traceable source. Famous outlaws of Texas lore had eluded capture in its endless bogs and dense forests.
It was a popular destination for outdoor activities. There were campgrounds, marked trails, and waterways navigable by fishing boats and canoes, but many of the preserve's vast, off-limits acreage was composed of twisting bayous, monotonous swamps, and forests too dense for a gnat to wiggle through, much less a human being. It was a teeming habitat for poisonous snakes and other reptiles, biting insects, and carnivorous predators.
Dodge said, "I don't see why we can't just--"
"I've told you why," Ski snapped. "You don't know what it's like in there. We'd lose his tracks, and then I'd have men going in circles, getting lost, getting tangled up in brambles, getting bogged down--literally--looking for a needle in a haystack. Worse than that, actually."
Ray Van Mercury piped up. "Lucky for y'all I found the car. Or he'd've got clean away."
He was a tough, spry old man. Ski estimated he weighed no more than 130. He had a greasy gray braid that hung down his back to his waist. His lined skin was as brown and wrinkled as a walnut shell, and a lot of it was exposed because all he had on was a pair of grimy jeans unevenly cut off at his knobby knees.
"Yep, lucky for y'all I decided to go fishing this morning. You know," he said, lowering his voice to a confidential pitch, "you ain't s'pposed to go wandering off the trails in the Thicket. You ain't s'pposed to fish 'cept in designated areas. Them park rangers'll get you good, they catch you at it. But I ain't never got caught and I ain't gonna. I've been in the Thicket all my life. I've slithered through parts of it a pissant couldn't get through.
"My mama was one of the Alabama-Coushatta tribe. I know, I know, I don't look like one of them people. I took after my daddy. So Mama said. I never laid eyes on the man myself. He was an oil man. Weren't no good at it. Dry holes was all he ever drilled. Got on the fightin' side of some of his investors. One night under cover of darkness, he took off, leavin' my mama with me still in her belly. So anyhow..." He paused to spit some brown stringy stuff into the underbrush, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Where was I?"
"At the part where I'm gonna kill you if you don't shut the hell up," Dodge growled.
Mercury tilted his head at Ski like an inquisitive bird. "What's the matter with him?"
"He's worried that our fugitive will escape capture. Why don't you wait over there, Mr. Mercury, so you'll be handy if we need any further information."
"Over there?" he asked, pointing to the row of official vehicles parked along the ditch.
"Way over there," Dodge said.
"My daughter give you our ph
one number, right? So's you can call and let me know where I can pick up the re-ward?"
Ski patted his shirt pocket. "Right here."
He grinned at them again and set off in a bowlegged trot.
"Oil man, my ass," Dodge said. "His mama screwed her brother."
Ski's phone rang. He answered it, listened, then said, "I owe you one," and immediately hung up. "He's got a trainer on the way. Twenty minutes at the outside. I'll let the others know."
At the RV park, a deputy had been assigned to follow Caroline and Berry to the lake house and to see them safely inside, where the female deputy waited. In the meantime, Ski and Dodge had clambered into Ski's SUV and sped to the spot several miles away where Ray Van Mercury had found the abandoned car.
Mercury-like-the-car lived with his daughter and her three children in a mobile home less than a quarter mile outside the perimeter of the Thicket.
He'd been on his way to his favorite fishing hole when he discovered the car. Had his eye not been so keen and familiar with the Thicket, he might have walked right past without seeing it. It had been left in a jumble of brambles and dense foliage. Not one to interfere in other people's business, Mr. Mercury had continued on, fished until he had a plentiful catch strung onto his rope belt, then returned to the trailer, where he'd mentioned the car to his daughter as she was gutting the fish.
