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Vague motion, nearby, startled her. The shell of the large tortoise jerked again as the ungainly creature lumbered toward the lake. Fiercely intent on its goal, the animal scuttled over rocks and roots too high for its reptilian feet, slipping often. Why the urgency? Lis wondered. Was some eerie premonition about the storm prompting the thing to seek the safety of the lake? But what would a tortoise have to fear from the rain? With a loud splash the animal caromed off a willow root and sliced into the water. There, it became a perfect airfoil and cruised eloquently just beneath the surface for a short distance then dove out of sight. Lis watched its wake vanish and the water turn once again to rippling black silk.
She strolled back toward the house, through wide, trellis-covered patches of overturned dirt-her formal garden. She paused before the one rosebush that still retained a number of petals. When she was young, Lis had plotted to dye her hair the copper color of a plant this shade-an Arizona grandiflora-and paid for it with a whipping when her father, in one of his Saturday-morning raids on the girls’ room, discovered the Clairol, hidden beneath her mattress.
She clicked a brittle thorn with her nail then lifted away a few dead petals. She rubbed them against her cheek.
The horizon in the west flared brilliantly with a broad gray-green flash. It had vanished by the time her eyes flicked to that portion of the sky.
The petals fell from Lis’s hands.
She heard the kitchen door opening then closing. “I’m ready,” Portia called. “You have your suitcase?”
Lis walked to the house. Gazing at the yellow windows she said, “Listen, I have to tell you-I’ve changed my mind.”
“You what?”
Lis set her suitcase inside the kitchen door. “I’m going to finish the sandbagging. Taping the greenhouse. It could take an hour or so. I’d really like you to stay too but if you want to leave, I understand. I’ll call you a cab.”
Emil was sorely tempted by the aroma of grilling burgers and onions but he knew his job and kept his butt planted on the ground.
Trenton Heck himself cast a longing eye toward the truck-stop diner but at the moment the reward money was his main thought and he too ignored the smell of a much-desired cheeseburger. He continued his discussion with the Highway Patrol trooper.
“And he really seemed set on Boston, did he?” Heck asked.
“That’s what the driver said. He was babbling about it being the home of our country or something.”
Fe
Heck looked up in surprise.
“Yup. That’s what I heard.”
“He went to college?” This made Trenton Heck, with only eleven hours of credits toward an associate degree, feel very bad.
“One year only, before he started to go wacko. But he got himself some A’s.”
“Well. A’s. Damn.” Heck pushed aside his personal chagrin and asked the HP trooper if he’d have the truck driver step outside for a minute.
“Uhm, he’s gone.”
“He’s gone? Didn’t you tell him to wait?”
The trooper shrugged, looking placidly into the civilian’s eyes. “It’s an escape situation, not an arrest situation. I got his name and address. Figured he didn’t need to stay around to be a witness or anything.”
Heck muttered to Fe
The trooper said, “I asked him a bunch of stuff.”
Heck slipped the harness off Emil. The trooper looked even younger than the Boy and would have no seniority over anybody. The Highway Patrol had a separate budget for salaries and they hardly ever fired anybody. Heck’d had the chance to put in for Highway Patrol when he first joined. But, no, he wanted to fight real crime.
“What was he wearing?”
“Overalls. Boots. Work shirt. Tweed cap.”
“No jacket?”
“Didn’t seem to be.”
“Was he drinking?”
“Well, the driver didn’t say. I didn’t exactly ask that. Didn’t see any need to.”
Heck continued, “Was he carrying anything? Bag or weapon? Walking stick?”
The trooper looked uneasily at his notes then at Fe
“Was he threatening?”
“No. Just kind of goofy, the driver said.”
Heck grunted in frustration. Then he asked, “Oh, one more thing. Just how big is he?”
“The driver said about six five, six six. Three fifty, if he’s a pound. WWF wrestler, you know. Legs like a side of beef.”
“Side of beef.” Heck gazed into the blackness in the east.
Fe
“It’s not bad. But I wish it’d rain.” Nothing brought out a latent scent better than a gentle mist.
“To hear the weatherman tell it, you’re going to get that wish in spades.”
Heck hooked up Emil again and refreshed the scent memories of the dogs with Hrubek’s shorts. “Find, find!”
Emil took off down the shoulder of the road, Heck paying out the dark-red rope until he felt the twenty-foot knot. Then he followed. Fe
“Think he’s in there?” The Boy uncomfortably eyed the black windows.
“Hard to say. All that animal work’d confuse even Emil.”
Heck and Fe
“ Trent, you don’t have to do this.”
“From the sound of this guy, you need everybody you’ve got.”
Conceding, Fe
Fe
“Goddamn,” Heck said reverently. “Son of a bitch, I nearly dampened my pants there.”
Fe
“He’s telling everybody he’s going away? Don’t this fellow know about burglaries?”
“He’s got himself a watch-bear.”
Heck studied the creature with admiration. “That’d be the first thing I’d steal.”
Then they found the door that Hrubek had kicked in. The men entered cautiously, covering each other. They found the traces of the madman’s shopping spree but it was clear he was no longer here. They reholstered their guns and returned outside. Fe
They were about to continue up the highway when the Boy called, “Hold up a minute, Charlie. There’s something here you ought to see.”
Heck and Fe
“Jesus.” Out came the Walther again. The safety clicked off.
Heck eased into the shed. The place was chockablock with a thousand odds and ends: hoses, boxes, animal skulls, bones, broken furniture, rusted tools, auto parts.