Dark Hollow

"What about the kid-Ricky? I get the impression that their eyes met from opposite sides of the track."

Lee didn't seem to know much about Ricky beyond the fact that his mother had left the family when he was three and his father had raised him and his three sisters by holding down two dead-end jobs. He was a scholarship student-a little rough and ready, she admitted, but she didn't believe that there was any malice in him or that he would have been party to some elopement.

"Will you look for her, Bird? I keep thinking that she's in trouble somewhere. Maybe they went hiking and something went wrong, or somebody…" She stopped abruptly and reached out to take my hand. "Will you find her for me?" she repeated.

I thought of Billy Purdue and of the men hunting him, of Rita and Donald, of a hand emerging from a mass of wet, rotting leaves. I felt a duty to the dead, to the troubled young woman who had wanted to create a better life for herself and her child, but she was gone and Billy Purdue was drifting toward some kind of reckoning from which I couldn't save him. Maybe my duty now was to the living, to Ellen, who had looked after my little girl for the brief span of her life.

"I'll look for her," I said. "You want to tell me where she was going when she made the call?"

As she spoke, the world seemed to shift on its axis, throwing strange shadows across familiar scenes, turning everything into an off-kilter version of its former self. And I cursed Billy Purdue because, somehow, in some way that I couldn't yet comprehend, he was responsible for what had happened. In Lee's words, once-distant worlds eclipsed one another and indistinct shapes, like plates moving beneath the earth, came together to form a new, dark continent.

"She said she was heading for a place called Dark Hollow."

I brought her to the Portland Jetport in time to catch her flight to New York, then drove back to the house. Angel and Louis were in the front room, watching a sleazy talk show marathon on cable.

"It's 'I Can't Marry You, You're Not a Virgin,'" said Angel. "At least they're not claiming to be virgins, else it'd be 'I Can't Marry You, You're a Liar.'"

"Or 'I Can't Marry You, You're Ugly,'" offered Louis, sipping a bottle of Katahdin ale, his feet stretched out before him on a chair. "Man, how they get the freaks for this show? They trawl the crowds at truck pulls?" He hit the remote, muting the sound on the TV.

"How's Lee doing?" asked Angel, suddenly serious.

"She's holding together, but only just."

"So what's the deal?"

"I've got to head north again, and I think I'm going to need you two to come with me. Ellen Cole was last heard from on the way to Dark Hollow, the same place Billy Purdue grew up, for a time, and the place I think he's heading back to now."

Louis shrugged. "Then that's where we going,"

I sat down in an easy chair beside him. "There may be a problem."

"Jeez, Bird," said Angel, "we're not exactly starved for problems as it is."

"This problem have a name?" asked Louis.

"Rand Je

"And he would be?"

"Chief of police in Dark Hollow."

"And he doesn't like you because?" said Angel, taking up the baton from Louis.

"I had an affair with his wife."

"You the man," said Louis. "You could fall over and make hitting the ground look complicated."

"It was a long time ago."

"Long enough for Rand Je

"Probably not."

"Maybe you could write him a note," he suggested. "Or send him flowers."

"You're not being helpful."

"I didn't sleep with his wife. In the helpful stakes, that puts me a full length clear of you."

"You see him last time you were up there?" asked Louis.

"No."

"You see the woman?"

"Yes."

Angel laughed. "You're some piece of work, Bird. Any chance you might keep the mouse in its hole while we're up there, or you pla

"We met by accident. It wasn't intentional."

"Uh-huh. Tell that to Rand Je

Louis finished his beer, then lifted his feet from the chair and prepared to follow Angel. "We screwed up tonight," he said.

"Things got screwed up. We did what we could."

"Tony Celli ain't go

"I know."

"You want to tell me what happened on the top floor?"

"I felt him waiting, Louis. I felt him waiting and I knew for sure that if I went in after him, I'd die. Despite evidence to the contrary, I don't have a death wish. I wasn't going to die at his hands, not there, not anywhere."

Louis remained at the door, considering what I had told him. "If you felt it, then that's the way it was," he said at last. "Sometimes, that's all the difference there is between living and dying. But if I see him again, I'm taking him down."

"Not if I see him first." I meant it, regardless of all that had taken place and the fear that I had felt.

His mouth twitched in one of his trademark semismiles.

"Bet you a dollar you don't."

"Fifty cents," I replied. "You've already earned half your fee."

"I guess I have," he said. "I guess I have."

Louis and Angel left early the next morning, Louis for the airport and Angel to scout around Billy Purdue's trailer to see if he could find anything that the cops might have missed. I was about to lock up the house when Ellis Howard's car bumped into my drive and then Ellis himself stepped heavily from the car. He took a look at my bag and gestured at it with a thumb.

"Going somewhere?"

"Yep."

"You mind telling me where?"

"Yep."

He slapped his hand gently on the hood of my Mustang, as if to transfer his frustration into the metal of the car. "Where were you yesterday evening?"

"On my way back from Greenville."

"What time'd you get back into town?"

"About seven. Should I call a lawyer?"

"You come straight home?"

"No, I parked up and met someone in Java Joe's. Like I said: should I call a lawyer?"

"Not unless you want to confess to something. I was going to tell you what happened out at the Portland Company complex last night, but maybe you already know, seeing as how your Mustang was down by the harbor last night."

So that was it. Ellis was fishing. He had nothing, and I wasn't about to break down and beg for mercy.

"I told you: I was meeting someone."

"This person still in town?"

"No."

"And you don't know anything about what happened at the complex last night?"

"I try to avoid the news. It affects my karma."

"If I thought it would help, your karma would be kicking its heels in a cell. We found four bodies in that complex, all of them associates of Tony Celli, plus two dead feds and a mystery caller."

"Mystery caller?" I asked, but I was thinking of something else. By my count, there should have been five bodies in the complex. One of Tony's men had survived and escaped, which meant there was a good chance that Tony Celli knew Louis and I had been in the building.

Ellis looked closely at me, trying to assess how much I knew. As he spoke, he waited for a reaction. He was disappointed.

"We found the Toronto cop, Eldritch, dead. Three bullets, two different guns. The one to the head was an execution shot."

"I'm waiting for the but."

"The but is that this guy wasn't Eldritch. His ID says he was, his prints and his face say he wasn't. Now I've got the Toronto PD howling at me to find their missing man, I've got a bunch of feds who are very interested in the John Doe who killed two of their agents, and I have four members of Boston's finest crew using up morgue space that the morgue can't afford to give them. The ME is considering relocating here permanently, seeing as how we're such good customers and all. Plus Tony Celli hasn't been seen since his night at the Regency."